Is Israel Making the Electric Car Work?
On a winter day of pounding rain, quite uncharacteristic for Israel, a convoy of 80 completely electric, battery-powered cars drove from Rosh Ha’ayin on Israel’s eastern border through Tel Aviv. On the outside, the autos are perfectly normal Renault sedans built in Turkey. Yet they don’t require a drop of gasoline pumped by countries that hate the Jewish state.
The cars run on an air-cooled 230 kilogram (500 pound) lithium ion battery, an electric motor, and a sophisticated electronic control system. Where Israeli ingenuity comes in: these “Better Place” cars differ from electric vehicles like the Chevy Volt or Nissan Leaf — a depleted battery can be swapped for a full one in about four minutes. The Renault ZE is also larger than the Nissan or the Chevy, sized more like a Honda Accord — a real, practical family car.
Personally, I reject the anthropogenic global warming theory. Nevertheless, I’m interested in driving an electric car for two reasons. First: Western dependence on largely Middle East-produced oil is insecure in strategic terms, and helps fuel the forces of jihad and radicalism. Second: if a truly free market can produce a more inexpensive, efficient alternative to petroleum-run transport that benefits the consumer, it makes sense to use it. The price of gasoline is steadily rising, and recall that it is far more expensive in Europe and Israel than in North America.
Last week, I test drove one of these electric cars, convinced that it would have all the driver appeal of a trip across Los Angeles during rush hour. It came as a complete revelation to me when the Renault Better Place accelerated like a rocket and kept going. I was so impressed that I followed up my brief drive at Better Place’s demonstration site in Tel Aviv with a much longer test drive on Israeli roads. I’ve driven the gasoline version of the Renault — it is underpowered and doesn’t handle well. This electric version is much quicker, as silent as a Mercedes, and super-smooth, especially since there are no gear changes. It feels like a 2.5 liter V6 engine in a car often sold with a 1.8 liter four-cylinder one.
The car is competitively priced, and this is only partly because the Israeli government taxes all new imported cars with an 89% tax followed by a 16% VAT. Cars in Israel are sometimes 50% higher in price than similar models in Europe, and are typically twice the price of U.S. cars. The Better Place car, because it is domestically produced, is taxed at 10 percent plus the VAT.
At around $32,000 — though it’s possible to haggle; it’s the Middle East after all — the Better Place is a good buy in Israeli terms.
That deal is even better than it sounds for several reasons. You don’t actually buy the very expensive battery, but only lease it along with all the electricity you’ll ever use. Any time that it becomes empty, you can swap it at no additional charge.
By June, all of Israel will be serviced by a network of battery swap stations. You drive in to what resembles a car wash, sit in your car for 4 minutes, and the automatic system swaps your battery for a full one. The robotic station than recharges the old battery overnight for another vehicle. The battery has at least a 100-mile range — a huge headache in the United States, but far less daunting in a small country like Israel. About the longest drive you’d ever take, the 220 miles from Tel Aviv to Eilat, can be accomplished with two quick battery swaps.
Or — and this also goes with the purchase price — you can recharge the battery yourself. Included in the purchase price, the company installs a charging point at your home with the electricity provided on a separate circuit and bought centrally by Better Place. There will also be top up charging points at public parking spots. If you sign up for higher millage, you can have an extra spot put in at your office, too.
This is, of course, subsidized by the American taxpayer. Neocons quietly plug their ears when they hear of protectionism leading to prosperity, and free trade causing ruin.
Free trade causes social degeneracy, aids the rivals and enemies of the nation, harms the middle class, chokes technological development in favor of quantity, and spoils the underclass with short term cheap imports. It will KILL America if it isn’t stopped!
How do you work out that it’s subsidised by US Tax Payers? Perhaps some of the bank bail out money went to financial institutions who then backed this through VC funds but direct US taxpayer involvement seems hard to find.
Hi, Brian!
You noticed that the writer assumed the country stops at Tel Aviv? Sheesh!
Oops! Looks like I complained to you abotu your own column.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with his writing, Brian is a stand-up guy who really respects his readers.
It isn’t subsidized by any government. This is exactly the opposite. Private enterprise funded by investors who hope to make a profit.
I have been following this for a few years now. It is a risky venture because of the large startup costs involved. Still I think it is an exciting concept and if it were a public stock I would buy some.
If I were the CEO of a big car manufacturer I would be watching this company carefully with an eye to buying them out. The idea solves a lot of problems with electric cars. In the US the decreasing cost of natural gas which can be used to generate electricity and we have in abundance vs uncertainty in the cost of gasoline makes the idea more attractive.
For consumers you are also shielded from gas price fluctuations. You pay a susbscription similar to a cell phone plan.
The writer of this post is either 1. A progressive propagandist 2. An intellectual derelict who does not comprehend the history of tariff (they do not work) 3. Somebody posting nonsense in order to create controversy.
In any case, the message can clearly be proven as claptrap, flapdoodle, and gobbledeegook. False in all respects and to be disregarded.
“1. A progressive propagandist 2. An intellectual derelict who does not comprehend the history of tariff (they do not work) 3. Somebody posting nonsense in order to create controversy.”
OR
4. dime a dozen internet troll
This is, of course, NOT subsidized by the American taxpayer.
First, the American taxpayer’s aid to Israel is about 2-3 billion a year — which means that it would take it about 400 years to reach the amount Obama pissed away on the useless “stimulus”, or perhaps enough money to make 2000 government-sponsored jobs at the $1,000,000-per-job cost the “stimulus” package creatred.
Second, the US aid is about 1%-2% of Israel’s GDP, and Israel repeatedly offered to reduce it over time. What’s more, this is a PRIVATE company which received NO US funding. It might work or it might fail. But if it work, it will work because people want to buy the product — not because government keeps it in business to look “green” (e.g., the Chevy Volt). Frankly, Israel hasn’t got the money to afford luxury of pissing away tons of money on products nobody wants just to massage its chattering classes’ ego.
Third, the folks who go on and on about how Israel is “financed by the American taxpayer” @ 2 billion a year and then enthusiastically support $800 billion “stimulus” and raising the debt ceiling by trillions don’t seem to me to be too worried about fiscal responsiblity of the US taxpater; it’s just one of their hypocritical ways of
P.S.
I am an Israeli and, if it were up to me, Israel would give up ALL US aid tomorrow. The US aid is well-meant, and Israel, on the whole, uses it wisely (a lot of the money, by law, has to be spent buying US military products, for example), but it’s just not worth the dependency. I am sure the Israel-haters will find another excuse to hate it in a millisecond, or less, but that has nothing to do with them; it has to do with national pride.
This makes so much more sense than the West Coast Green Highway (http://westcoastgreenhighway.com/electrichighways.htm) now being developed here in the US to charge batteries in electric cars. (There’s a 30 minute wait for your car to get charged every 100 miles or so.)
You did omit one thing from your article: the participation of the Israeli government. (See http://www.ecogeek.org/automobiles/1325)
“Israel is investing heavily in the infrastructure, as well as reducing their (extremely high) automobile tax to only 10% for electric vehicles.”
Similarly, here in the US the Dept of Energy has invested in bringing the Better Place technology to Hawaii. http://www.betterplace.com/the-company-pressroom-pressreleases-detail/index/id/better-place-begins-installing-hawaii-s-first-electric-car-charging-network
Let’s hope for a similar investment in other states.
I am all for innovation, but it is fair to ask what happens if you run out of charge on a trip? Does the company send out a fully charged battery? Does it send out a generator to recharge overnight? Or, does it tow for free?
The subscription package does include full breakdown cover all over Israel. I haven’t read the fine print about what happens if you use it too often (there’s probably some limit per year) but yes, there is help at hand.
It should also be stressed that the GPS system in the car also predicts what battery level you’ll have left at the end of any planned trip and, if necessary, recommends to take you via a battery swap station.
Which is no different from here in MA when my car battery fails in my gasoline-powered car. I call AAA and they send out a replacement.
The big obstacle to electric cars for those of us who live in apartments and apartment-style condos has been that we don’t typically have garages to recharge the electric cars overnight. Also those of us who travel on business and have to stay in motels overnight which typically have no charging stations either.
Automated battery swap stations would eliminate that problem, and (once they’re all over the country) would make electric cars truly convenient.
That’s indeed a major problem for many people. My neighbourhood e.g. noone has a garage, all but a very few cars are parked curbside (the last few park it in their garden, maybe under an overhang).
I’ve had my tyres slashed 3 times in a week recently, wonder what’d happen if there’d also been a high voltage cable running from my front door to the car…
And if a hundred such cables were running across the curb and along the street to charge all those cars (there’s no guaranteed spots in front of your own house, so you might end up parking a few streets away) it’d be a nightmare of people trying to find their own cables, and people stumbling and falling over them.
Only in areas where every house has enough garages to park all the electric cars owned by the occupants can it work, and of course there has to be a worldwide standard for sockets and power levels for the chargers as well (afaik that doesn’t exist, every brand having its own system).
What happens when you run out of gas on a trip?
With the battery swapping model all they have to do is send a new battery to your location. Yes a 100 mile range is less then the range on gasoline powered cars but the logistics for both the driver and the breakdown service are basically the same.
The battery swap can’t be done on the side of the road as far as I know. This is a 500lbs item, not a laptop battery! I suspect the only remedy for a completely flat battery on a trip is a tow to a battery swap station. If you head over to Israellycool you can see some videos of the battery swap process.
http://www.israellycool.com/2012/01/12/i-went-to-a-better-place-and-returned-a-changed-man/
500 lbs isn’t that much. A tow truck with a hoist can easily handle a swap.
Watch the battery swap video. You’ll understand that this isn’t going to be something done by the side of the road. That’s not a big deal: by my estimation in Israel you’re never going to be more than 60 KMs from a battery swap station so a tow is the best bet. It’s exactly the same as running out of gas in a regular car but without all the hassle of cleaning out all the crap that gets stuck in the fuel lines!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=S3Os25gP4yA
9 years ago at an SAP conference I sat next to a man who it turns out was Shai Agassi who went on to start A Better Place, the company in Israel making these battery swap stations. After listening for a while, I remember thinking how simple it was – in order to succeed broadly, the EV industry must start thinking of the batteries as part of the fuel delivery system, not as part of the car itself. I have been saying that to anyone who will listen ever since and have been really confused at the contortions the US government and GM go through to sell you on the idea that 50-100 miles is enough range. Doesn’t matter if I only needed more once in a year – it’s still a non-starter for me.
Actually what is supposed to happen will be very similar to what happens if your battery dies in an ICE car. A service truck will give you some extra “juice” enabling your car to reach the nearest Battery Switching Station (BSS)for a fully charged battery and continue your journey. However, in my opinion, if you allow this to happen more than once or twice, they need to take your car away, because you are an irresponsible driver. The OSCAR (Car Operating System)provides you with enough information along the way that only by ignoring the warning signs will you get stuck on the road without the ability to drive. Some people might be tempted to do this just the same way they were tempted to drive a full tank of gasoline (petrol)to see how far they could get in one tank of gas; I would hope they won’t make it a habit. Any way the company to which this service has been outsourced claims it will reach any driver in Israel within 90 minutes from the initial service call.
*IF* it will work, it will work in a place like Israel — a tiny country, where breakdowns can be arrived at quickly and running out of gas cannot be “a hundred miles from nowhere” since the county is too small to HAVE 100 mile from nowhere for you to break down in. Again, it might fail. But *if* it works, it won’t be because the government throws money at them to feel “green”.
I’m confused, at the beginning of the article, you say the car is domestically produced (and therefore avoids the 100% tariff) and at the end you say it’s a pity it wasn’t made in Israel. Which is true?
It’s interesting that the governmental fees associated with buying a regular car and gas are so high in Israel that you don’t need to subsidize an electric car to make it work. Certainly I don’t like the idea of buying a car for $32k and then having to pay a monthly fee for it. It’s not as odd as it sounds, though, since the energy used to propel the car is included. Right now my Mercedes E320 (a car which seems at least somewhat comparable in weight and roominess) costs me about $160 a month in fuel to drive maybe 800 miles a month. (I work at home so I drive much less than the average person.) I pay about $3.90 a gallon (the Benz takes premium fuel), so I would pay about 1.86 times more for my fuel. This amounts to $298 a month for gas if I lived in Israel, which is more than Better Place’s monthly fee.
So it’s pretty fair – but only because Israeli fuel taxes are so high. So the fuel taxes are an inherent subsidy for the electric car. Once enough electric cars are sold, Israel will probably slap a tax on the leases and we will be back where we started
.
D
The monthly fee works out way less than the fuel. I work out that the break even on a 20,000 Kms per year, is around $3.83 which is about what you quote. I’m impressed you’re getting 800 miles on $160 fuel in an E320. Just FYI such a car in Israel would not be less than double the price of this car.
For the last 3 years I’ve had a device installed in my car that makes filling up and paying for gas very easy: I just drive in, pump gas (an RFID chip in my fuel filler cap is registered by the pump) and then drive off. Because of this I have every fill up for 3 years recorded so it’s easy for me to compare.
And the bet, which I’m taking, is that at present fuel prices I save money, at the fuel prices that could be around the corner I’ll save a lot more.
On the domestic production: the car is built in Turkey but enough of the design and some of the customisation has been done in Israel such that the government classes it as semi-domestic. In reality there’s hardly any real domestic auto industry in Israel (some military jeeps I think) so it wasn’t hard for them to find a loophole to do this. As far as I know this is the most significant Government largesse this project gets.
“This is, of course, subsidized by the American taxpayer.”
Tell me how does 3 billion dollar of aid make a 250 billion economy, the 24th largest of the world, the property of the American taxpayer?
He does not understand. Israeli government isnt paying for this either, other than import tax breaks. In Denmark the local governments have entered into joint venture agreements with Better Place to build the infrastructure. In Hawaii there is a small pilot project partly funded by a DOE grant to study the cost/benefits under actual driving conditions. However this is very much a for profit enterprise funded by venture capitol.
Maybe people just assume something else because when they hear about electric cars they assume it is a government green energy boondoggle since we have had so many of those.
In the USA, most families have two or more cars (we have three — for two people), so optimizing an auto for its type of usage is common. For example, we have a truck, a 4-door sedan, and a 2-door sporty coupe. It would certainly make sense to make the daily driver (generally the 2-door sporty coupe), which rarely is driven 100 miles, an electric car. Premium gas where we live in NJ is $3.50 a gallon; an electric car costs $0.025 a mile which works out to $0.50 a gallon. I haven’t seen such prices since I was a kid.
Get that range up to 300- 400 miles and gas-powered (and Diesel) cars will be as extinct as Stanley Steamers.
In 20 years, I predict most cars (not trucks) will be all-electric, with power comparable or better than the internal combustion engine in our automobiles – a 2011 BMW 535i and a 2004 BMW 330 coupe, and range of 400 miles — about what I get with my Beemers. Hopefully in 2032 I’ll still be around and driving my all-electric 5-series, which I’ll dub (unoriginally) a 535e.
Here’s a non battery swap electric 5 series Beemer charging from a Better Place charge spot in NYC this morning: http://yfrog.com/h7bfroij
I also have a back up Jeep Patriot (which uses an obscene amount of fuel) and via my own company I can borrow other cars if they’re more suitable. But I know from my last two years of use this car will fit my driving.
I’m most interested to see what happens on a trip to Jerusalem. That’s a big climb and the KMs are usually about 140 there and back. It will be interesting to see if that’s comfortable or I’ll need to stop on the way home and swap battery for safety.
I also didn’t go into driving style: it makes a huge difference I suspect. I used to play a game when I was young of seeing if I could drive home late at night without using the brake peddle: 30 minutes across west London. What that forces you to do is not accelerate to excess because you have to read the road ahead to try and slow naturally for red lights etc. I could make this mixed road trip about 70% of the time with no or just one use of the brake.
Translate that to electric, which uses regenerative charging when you lift off the accelerator but don’t hit the brakes and it may well be that I can get good distance from this thing. But, having said that, when I’m just driving 20km in a day I can drive like a lunatic because it really doesn’t make much difference if I get home with 70% battery or 80%!
A very good point. Think how many 2-car families there are in this country. Any of them could use one vehicle for the daily commute to work, and one for long trips. Think how much less oil we would have to import, if every family that COULD, had one electric car.
I’d like to have one if I could get one cheap — lower fuel costs.
ANY electrical car could work as long as we are talking about short distances like cars for city use, or for countries like Israel. As soon as we start talking about serious distances (e.g. to run along the Italic peninsula or, even worse: America) electric cars are not the best.
Exactly, most alternative energy advocates forget about scaling problems. Building enough swap stations and spare battery packs to make this system feasible would require a prohibitive amount of capital. There’s also the fact that these cars do enjoy a healthy subsidy, albeit an indirect one.
As for comparing the cost of electricity to gas, remember that both Otto and Diesel designed their engines to run off of refinery wastes, precisely because they were cheap. High fuel prices today are due entirely to high demand. Replace a significant number of internal combustion vehicles with electric and you’ll see the price difference disappear.
Bingo. The number of stations required goes up at something more than a linear rate, but not quite a geometric rate.
And your comment on the price issues is dead on target.
The use of batteries in cars does NOTHING to solve any energy problems. It merely shifts them to a different location.
Mark V, you are wrong. The reason is that electric motors are 80% – 90% efficient, whereas gasoline engines are doing extremely well to reach 30% efficiency (most are no more than 25% efficient). Most of the power generated by an internal combustion engine is wasted as heat.
Thus, in theory at least, a 300 HP electric motor will get 3x the equivalent gas mileage as the 300 HP turbocharged engine in my 5-Series, which has one of the most efficient internal combustion engines made. As my car gets 24 mpg, that’s the equivalent of 72 mpg with electricity. Plus: Natural gas is currently under $3 per thousand cubic feet. The rule of thumb is that a barrel of oil should be 6x the price of 1000 cubic feet of gas, meaning that if the ratio held, and it hasn’t since 2007, oil would sell for $17 a barrel. It hasn’t been that cheap since late 2001, if then.
Imagine a car getting 72 mpg, and gas selling for a buck. That’s what you’re looking at.
Dan,
You are forgetting that while electric motors may be 80% efficient, electric generation and transmission efficiencies are only in the range of 40%. That brings the competing technologies much closer in total efficiency. Also, most cost equations ignore the current disparity in taxes between motor fuel and electricity. Batteries may be improving, but so is internal combustion engine technology. I am not ready to dismiss the ingenuity of auto engine designers, and their ability to keep their technology competitive. On the other hand, unless battery engineers come up with an entirely new technology, there is simply not enough lithium and other rare earths to make enough batteries to topple the dominance of ICE technology.
Based on the selling price of $32,000 in Israel and working backwards with a 25% margin, 16% VAT and a 10% versus an 89% import tax on the amount paid by the car importer we get the following:
Tax collected by Govt for
Normal car: $10,392
Better Place car: $2,006
So the Government “subsidy” is worth a whopping $8,000. Now consider this: Better Place is not just another car importer with a few show rooms and service centres. They actually design, build and market world wide the cars from a base here in Israel. They employ many, many times more people than an importer and so their contribution to the economy is far greater than a typical car importer.
I’m sure its easy to find that Better Place either is already, or will in the future, contribute way more to the economy than $8,000 per car sold in Israel.
As an aside, a subsidised car for a new immigrant would give tax to the government of $7,356. New Immigrants for up to three years can buy a new car at a discount price: I am in this category until March but it doesn’t help me with the Better Place car because the reduction in tax is from the 89% to 50% and as the BP car is at 10%, I get nothing more). So the tax break to owners of Better Place cars is only $5,000 more than all new immigrants to Israel could get on a similarly priced car.
Youre using the wrong metric. The question isn’t if the $8000 (which isn’t exactly chump change) generates more than $8000 in economic activity. The question that needs to be asked is if this is the most efficient use of the $8000. Generally, when there are subsidies involved the answer is no. If the answer were yes the activity in question would already be occurring.
I am a small government, hands off the market kind of guy but the fact is that in a country like Israel the government is in and off everything already. VAT at 16% (don’t get me started on the evils of VAT, I own a small business and 16% of all my working capital is tied up in an interest free loan to my government) is on everything. Cars, and everything associated with them, cost a fortune which makes all business in this country more expensive. I have a delivery van and my sales guys have cars: the costs are huge.
If the Better Place car cost an extra ₪30,000 ($8,000) I estimate that would just make the car similarly priced to petrol models that feel the same to drive. I still think that the running costs would be considerably lower. That’s not a deal breaker but it would dramatically slow the uptake.
As you can tell I want this to succeed, I’m not a dispassionate observer any more because if it fails I’ll own a turkey! But nevertheless, we have to know that no industry is more distorted already than big oil (save perhaps pharmaceuticals) and so the playing field is not level to start with.
We don’t see the truly astonishing capital investment in oil all around us because it’s just always been there. There are so many filling stations it’s unbelievable that the model makes money but it does: hand over foot!
Better Place will launch in June officially with only 60 swap stations in Israel. I’ve looked at the map and they’re in every place they should be. There must be thousands of petrol stations and when every petrol powered car and truck can travel 3 times further than an electric car one has to wonder why!
The founder of Better Place says that one week’s worth of US Oil imports would pay for all the capital investment necessary to build the system in the US. It’s not that it can’t be done, it’s not that it won’t make money, it’s just that it won’t make money for the present Oil billionaires, the recipients of the greatest unearned fortune and transfer of wealth in the history of man and the puppets that they’ve bought in political systems around the world.
And if it one of the inventions that helps destroy this system can be an Israeli one so much the better.
Yes, there are billions, if not trillions, of dollars invested in oil infrastructure. But this is one of those times where tense is important. That infrastructure is a sunk cost and so is irrelevant to the discussion.
I estimate weekly US oil imports to be somewhere around $5-10 billion, which strikes me as low for the entire US.
There are other, more subtle, issues. One is throughput (that’s why there are so many gas stations in the US). One of these stations can handle around 15 cars per hour, about the same as one has pump. The problem is that the swap tunnel looks to take up about as much room as 4 pumps. The other is station capacity. A gas station can serve hundreds of cars, and that can be replenished in a few hours, less if the owner is paying attention. A swap station is going to need a lot of real estate to store and charge hundreds of batteries, and when all the charged batteries are swapped out that station is out of service until the batteries are recharged.
I agree about sunk versus new costs, of course, but if you’d have stood next to Henry Ford’s production line and said, you know, 100 years from now we’re going to have spent a few trillion dollars keeping these things running, people would have stuck to their horses.
I believe Better Place estimate the cost of kitting out the whole US at around the number you quote.
Agreed about gas station throughput but you’re missing the main point: the model works when most people, most of the time drive under the single range of the car and can thus avoid battery swaps altogether. Based on my real world driving I believe I took 15 trips in the last year that would have needed one or more swaps. The rest of the time I would be fine topping up at home, at night. And I can already see many public parking places at shopping centres and other public places putting in charge spots. Even an hour or two can significantly extend daily range without taxing the battery swap network.
And I think this range can only improve: who knows maybe a fuel cell will become practical and fit in the same package shape as the battery: suddenly I’ll own a fuel cell car!
Israel is about as short on real estate as it’s possible to be, but we’ve still got enough, outside the urban centres there is usually land adjacent to existing gas stations partly because nobody wants to spend time in these places!
I also agree that the US is not the place to start this project and, clearly, Better Place agree. And if it is just suitable for urban yuppies, so be it, if it can switch down the use of crude by a few percent its good. If the question is which alternative to Arab dominated crude oil should we use for personal transport, my answer is anything and everything!
If you are concerned that this may only work in a small country keep your eye on Australia as it will be implementing the Better Place solution in 2013.
The key sentence is the longest drive in Israel is 220 miles. That would get me from Cleveland to Dayton with a batter swap somewhere north of Columbus…yep, that’ll work well here…
Haha, I’ve made that run many a time. So where would we swap, somewhere the north side of Delaware?
And what about a run up to Chicago? That’s seven hours.
I’d be losin’ count of batteries.
But what about winter? Ohio is a good bit colder, I’d hazard a guess, than Israel. Cleveland and Toledo colder than Columbus, and so on. Electric cars might work for localized runs in Florida, I’d guess. But even for localized runs, how good would they be in Michigan or Minnesota?
Really, how many years are we away from serious battery improvement? I suspect we’ll be running on ‘Mr. Fusion’ before the current type of battery-powered electric car becomes the norm for the world.
But hopefully some brilliant entrepreneur like the folks described in this article will surprise us before then.
An Préachán
I drove from Atlanta to Connecticut over 3 days last summer in a very comfortable Nissan Maxima. I can’t remember how many fill ups we made but I know this drive would have been impossible in an all electric car. Petrol is clearly the best for this.
Yes, in Israel the electricity comes from coal and natural gas.
In the U.S., the electricity will come from oil.
Hardly an improvement.
Also, because of losses in converting energy, it will require more coal, natural gas, or oil to generate the electricity to run the car than it will gasoline.
Perhaps if there were enough nuclear power plants it would really be worthwhile, otherwise it will place even greater strain on the power grid by adding cars to what have to be supported by it.
It is a nice theory, but at present it is still just a theory, particularly for the U.S.
Almost no electricity in the United States is generated from oil and that has been the case since the 1970s. Where do you get this inaccurate view of the world?
About half of our electricity is generated by coal fired power plants. These cannot be shut down at night even though the demand for electricity drops off enormously after 11 PM. That means that if you charge up batteries over night, you are doing it with electricity which would just be going to waste.
Sam, I have to disagree. We generate virtually no power in the US from oil. It comes from coal (declining), nat gas ( increasing) and nuclear ( stable) with small contributions from hydro and renewables. Even if we shifted natural gas price to $6/mmbtu from its current level of sub $3, this would be the equivalent of sub $40/barrel crude oil. An economic savings but more importantly a strategic shift as it takes revenues away from unfriendly oil producing countries (I omit Canada and Mexico from that category). The price of gas and coal may rise, but oil price would likely come down as oil finally faces economic competition finally from other hydrocarbons and even perhaps renewables some day.
The brilliance in this model is separating the car from the battery. The advantage is that improvements in battery technology can be incorporated into the system without having to change any cars. Just configure new designs into the same form factor. Very clever. Hope it works…
There are serious cost problems associated with electric cars. They were used at the end of the 19th century and lost, in a free market, to hydrocarbon fuels. The technical problem remains energy density, both mass (weight) and volume. The battery is a large percentage of the vehicle; it requires a factory not a gas station to replace.
The article and comments are interesting because the direct cost is morphed by taxes, imposed final costs. The power to tax is the power to destroy, and that is what is ongoing for the bad gas, or diesel engine technologies. As noted, the electric’s vehicular energy is an added load on America’s decrepit electric grid. The proponents statement that this new technology shields the owner from ever increasing hydrocarbon prices is nonsense. This car type runs on coal fired power plants, and nukes. It just uses a very expensive energy transducer. And the battery requires a rare earth which comes few sources, mostly from foreign lands.
Either private or public money will back the enormous infrastructure which will be necessary to sustain this technology. I can not comprehend an acceptable ROI for a system with a travel range 1/3 of competing vehicles which cost 1/2 as much. The market for this car are rich urban, or stay at home people who have strong feelings about climate change. That is a microdot.
From my readings, the internal combustion energy, fueled by hydrocarbon fuels, will remain the prime source of our mobile fleet for most of this century. I wish the proponents luck, on a level playing field. I demand that the government keep their fat thumb off the scales of commerce.
At the turn of the 20th century, yes, lead acid powered electric vehicles lost. While batteries haven’t advanced as other things like microprocessors or hard disks, their huge use in computers and gadgets has driven innovation and they are way better than before.
Cost is an issue but we’re just at the start of the widespread use of batteries in cars so costs are bound to come down. At 300kg out of a more than 1100kg car the battery is not such a huge proportion of the car. The electric motor is also way simpler, smaller and lighter than a corresponding petrol unit and of course there is no fuel tank, another 80 kg of weight for say a 60 litre tank. All in all the Better Place car is not a huge compromise. Again, because I don’t buy the battery now, as the costs come down over the next 4 years, I don’t care because I didn’t buy an expensive one at the start. Better Place gets to gain from that again making it more likely to succeed without government help.
The Better Place car and system is unique because it can swap the battery in 4 minutes: that’s sort of analogous to adding hydrocarbon fuel to a present car. That also means that this car, uniquely, can swap to a completely new battery technology without changing the rest of the car. These advances will come if this technology starts to get a fair shake and stops being suppressed by oil interests.
Not all of the difference between Israeli gas prices and US gas prices is tax. Israel has unique problems buying gasoline locally so the market is not comparable. Israel’s astonishing economic strength, given it’s size, is based on the use of it’s peoples’ minds. The Better Place car has the potential to generate way more for Israel than the lost tax revenue that others here have tried to tally up.
Also note that a large proportion of EV charging can happen at night when most western nations have excess energy that is dumped. These batteries have a tremendous potential to soak up this excess power and, because Better Place can centrally manage the charging to a much greater degree than possible before, take good advantage of this.
Another point is the economics of re-using the batteries for other lower power uses once their performance has dropped off. Because they are centrally owned by Better Place as opposed to being the possession of the car’s owner, the asset of the fleet of batteries can be much more carefully used and re-used which again lowers it’s full life costs of the batteries.
I have engineered 68 US power plants, pieces of the grid, some $2.5 billion in investments, and spent a decade assessing advanced technologies. There are many reasons to purchase a car as noted here: art, styling, save-the-world, novelty, prestige, etc, but I focus on costs and technology. I would never purchase a vehicle from such a monopoly, without written guarantees for continuous energy supply (the batteries); technical interface, geographic, and cost. All market risk should be on The Better Place side of the table, which Brian of London states in minimal. I do not believe future energy costs will drop or be risk free.
Battery technology is perhaps the most studied mature technology known to man. Mature technologies work at the margin, unlike the break through revolution we now know, imperfectly, as the computer age. Battery unit costs may drop, but again that should benefit experts, not car owners. Who knows the value of a million tenth generation lithium batteries? (There are ongoing break throughs in ultracapcitors, superconductivity, silicon carbide switching, and some fuel cells which will interact with coming electric supply and costs.)
It is true that the US grid energy supply reduces at night and mild weather, and could carry a small fleet of electric vehicles. My concern is grid continuous reliability, measured in capacity and availability factors. When you have to get your sick kid to the hospital on a bitter January night, will you get a busy signal from your power panel, and car? This is where America is headed. A fat thumb is skyrocketing American energy costs.
I wish electric cars proponents well, they will find a market niche, but judge their costs will be higher due to inherent technical reasons.
May Israel have peace.
I really appreciate your experience and comments R.L.H.
I’ve got the paper guarantees but I don’t believe them. We all know that legal agreements are bunk and if this thing collapses I’m out of luck.
I’m also not a greenie so I’m not doing this based on a belief in man made global warming fraud. I’ve given my reasons and they’re mostly rational with a little emotion thrown in. This car has easily enough range to drive to Itamar (40 mins or less) where a family like mine was slaughtered as they slept last year. I personally think Islam was a spent force till we gave it all our money and as soon as possible we have to stop giving it our money, this is the one small action I can take to do this.
I’m actually a PhD Physicist (way way back) so I try to keep up: ultra-capacitors are fascinating. If that breakthrough came, Better Place could fold it into their cars in months rather than years probably without changing existing cars.
You touch on an extremely important issue, unrelated to electric cars, America’s national interests in energy. North America has more high grade prime fuels than any other continent. Yet, it has been our policy, for two generations, to destroy our coal and uranium based energy industries. They supply 2/3 of our juice. As a result we have poured our wealth over illiterate Arabs, turned Bedouins into billionaires. Since Nam, we have tied our security to the most savage, unstable, region on earth. Why? Their crude is cheaper than ours.
There are sane reasons to trade with all people; it promotes peaceful relationships. But to rely on foreign powers for our survival, since the 1973 oil crisis, is lethally insane. Killers have us over a barrel. This is the de facto energy policy of the USA. The people who did this to world peace sat in that Chamber and listened to the SOTU.
RLH, I don’t disagree with you philosophically or technically. But when you consider how much we spend as a nation to keep the Middle East somewhat stable for commerce, the big fat thumb is already on the scale. Recognizing that it is a slippery slope that here, I would suggest that a nominal amount of subsidization is an interesting investment if it could allow us to avoid perpetual military expense in a part of the world that yields no other value than its supply of oil. All that we have to do is reduce our oil demand by 10% and the US is totally off of Mid East oil.
I concur, but now it is now a survival issue. The history of prime fuel extraction is a history of fat thumbs. The weird results have grossly distorted our economy and weakened our society. Government expenditures must go under the knife. We must amputate or die.
We could end all involvement in oil land and rely totally on North American prime fuel supply, but it would take a new Congress, and destruction of Potomac Maryland (the homes of the rich leeches). Energy cost distortions are almost totally due to government intrusion; regs, subsidies, loop holes, taxes. Example: crude should cost about $35/ barrel. Ergo gas should cost $1 gallon, or less. If this is true, bright kids should study fracking, or nuclear engineering, or high temperature combustion chemistry, but not advanced electric batteries.
This is a key election issue: For a very long time, China has produced eight engineers for one American engineer. 51% of the PhD candidates in Nuclear Physics, in US universities, are natives of China. What will be our energy policy for the next generation? Electric cars are not viable due to cost, without a fat thumb on the scales, fat cats having the power, and fat heads making technical decisions.
Hey, my sister lives in Potomac! I’m sure she would be happy to see the US free of ME oil. What’s your problem with it?
I’ve pointed this out to people here in Israel; the US does not need ME oil. The idiotic greenies and luddites and NIMBY’s (worse problem here in Israel, thus the housing shortage), especially Ralph Nader who single-handedly destroyed the US Nuclear industry, have put the US in this mess. During the cold war there was a point as cheap Suadi oil helped bankrupt the USSR, but those days are long gone. That the US depends on one of the world’s last true monarchies is an insult to the Founders; not to mention that Saudi Arabia (and Iraq!) is still in a legal state of war with Israel.
The one thing that is uppermost in Israeli’s minds is that just about every drop of oil it has to buy comes from their enemies. That changes most cost/benefit calculations. Since the US does not seem to want to buy from their friends they may so have to enter into those calculations themselves.
For your information:
I drive a 2006 Prius to which I added a plug-in battery pack in 2009. I commute 28 miles per day, which almost exactly equals the range of the battery pack. (After the battery runs out the car reverts to an ordinary Prius.) In summer I average over 100 mpg and in winter 75 mpg. The engine rarely runs except on warm-up. The car requires little maintenance. After 70,000 miles there is little wear and tear — even the brakes are pristine (because the car slows using its generator.) There were no government incentives applicable (largely because I am subject to the AMT.) The plug-in system consumes 1.8 megawatts of energy per year.
Not long after I added solar panels to my home. The panels produce 4.1 megawatts of electrical energy per year. There were tax and generation incentives. Without the incentives, the panels cost 25 cents per kilowatt hour over their expected lifetime. (MUCH lower, of course, with the incentives.) I live in the Pacific Northwest which is cloudy and rainy for more than half the year, by the way.
At 25 cents per kwh (my “no-incentives” cost) my daily commute costs me 4 cents per mile in electricity generated by my panels. (Because my gas engine runs a bit during warmup there are gasoline costs as well, but marginal.)
By comparison, the total cost of my 2006 car, add-on battery and solar panel system is slightly less than the MSRP of the lowest-priced 2011 Cadillac Escapade SUV — estimated 15 mpg in city driving (23 cents per mile at $3.50. ) My solar system contributes the leftover 2.3 megawatt hours per year to my home use; the Cadillac Escalade would contribute nothing.
By my standards, this pencils out BIG TIME. That’s without any tax or other incentives whatsoever.
There are more than enough reasons to abhor President Obama — there is no need to become overly ideological and rigid about green energy just because Obama happens to advocate it and go about it in a bad way. Being so is just a form of ad hominem.
That’s quite a way you’ve built to beat Jihad there!
I have to say, however, that if the car had driven like a Prius I would have ignored it. It matters greatly to me that this car is quick. I didn’t want anything slower than my present Honda Civic (which is pretty good) and was in the market for a more comfortable, bigger salon.
I can foresee that in a year of integrated use here in Israel, people will just stop regarding this as anything different: I don’t want, expect or need for 80% of cars to be electric anytime soon, but if we hit 10 or 20% it makes a huge overall difference to the country.
Especially when you have to outrun the stone-throwers! (No joke.)
Bad economic analysis here. This plan requires huge subsidies by the government (i.e. taxpayers) as each electric car sold reduces government tax collections by $8,000 plus the lost tax revenue on each gallon of fuel (about $4 per gallon). So assuming 25mpg and 15 year vehicle life at 10K miles per year for a conventional equivalent, the government will lose $32,000 in tax revenue for each electric car sold during its life. This money will need to be made up somewhere by other taxpayers. Assuming this program is popular you can bet the government will find someway to take away these tax advantages. Furthermore, if you want to be highly optimistic that this idea will take off internationally, what does economic theory predict about the price of oil when demand is reduced? The answer is that oil prices will drop, which will make electric cars even less competitive unless they continue to be heavily subsidized. Sorry – there is no free lunch here.
Ole has not clearly thought through the matter of lost revenue to the government . If the Israeli government loses $32,000 in taxes, each electric car driver gains $32,000 for spending on something else. Since there is a VAT tax in Israel, the government will regain some of that $32,000, but the economy will have more money spread about the population for discretionary spending. People most often spend their own money more judiciously than governments. It is a full win-win for everyone if transportation costs drop, but miles-traveled remains the same. You cannot beat the laws of thermodynamics, but the direct production of electricity in Israel by thermo-solar systems that are being developed will allow for much cheaper electricity because there are only two conversions – photonic to electrical to mechanical. Some loses in power through long transmission lines and resistive losses in converting DC to AC and back to DC. That’s it.
Also remember, as I’ve noted at Israellycool ( http://www.israellycool.com/2011/06/01/not-sunny-enough-in-west-dunbartonshire/ ) Israel has one of the highest proportions of solar heated domestic hot water in the world. Simple heaters, without electric cells that are cheap and work well enough to give most homes completely free hot water for 9 or 10 months of the year.
This was achieved decades ago with simple cheap technology and it’s barely spoken off today.
Sorry Jerry, you clearly do not understand the economics of this situation. The electric car buyer does not have $32,000 dollars extra to spend, because the total ownership costs for an electric car are going to be similar or higher to a conventional car. The only difference is that much of the costs of owning a conventional car are the high taxes on the car and fuel purchases, which are reduced for the electric car to offset its higher costs elsewhere. If electric cars were truly competitive in their total ownership costs with conventional cars, they would not need to be subsidized by taxpayers. Furthermore, when you consider that most “green” car buyers are wealthy people (avg. income of Chevy Volt buyer is $175,000), then it also means that taxpayers are subsidizing the people least in need of them. Since all governments have limited budgets, subsidizing wealthy electric car owners will mean less money for other programs such as helping the poor.
The reason electric cars fell out of favor the first time was the electric infrastructure wasn’t capable of supporting the fleet.
The same thing would happen today if you tried to electrify the fleet of any industrial nation, the electric infrastructure isn’t capable of supporting a huge fleet of cars.
a reason for electric cars? – Art
this may seem odd, and – useless – but such is Art
some background – you are all probably familiar with the Mexican Jumping Cars – wherein, mainly in the barrios of South California – peepicans equip their cars with powerful hydraulic pumps, which can make the front / rear / presumably whole car, jump off the ground -
you are all presumably familiar with the curious ‘black stripes’ of various configurations, the result of powerful cars – ‘burn-outs’ – i.e. causing their tires to spin beyond traction, and thus leaving black burnt / melted / abraded – rubber on the pavement -
well – combine those two talents , with 4 wheel individually programable / controllable electric hub drives, and the hydraulic pumps –
viola – a car that can – tap dance – now, a smart man would patent this idea, and reap untold millions – I, being generous and selfless – throw it out to the general public.
I volunteer to help a bunch of retired American intelligence types with IQ’s above 160. After the fall of communism, my American spy friends were smart enough to hire unemployed geniuses from the former Soviet states. These ex-Soviet scientists recently invented an “optical furnace heated with light” process to purify copper to 99.999999999 per cent. (That’s nine “nines” after the decimal point). Ultra-pure copper can multiply conventional battery life several times, making electrical cars capable of running 2-500 hundred miles per charge.
This amazing light furnace process uses light to melt metal without any significant heat, just as Einstein predicted. The same light furnace process can make ultra-powerful indium gallium nitride solar cells to recharge electric cars while they just sit there parked in the sun.
Oh yeah, these InGaN solar cells are super cheap when made in a light furnace, 3 cents per kilowatt vs a dollar per kilowatt for existing solar cells, and three times more powerful. You could make them into roof shingles and put an end to Arab oil imports.
But because we use ex-commie scientists, we cannot get a western investor to save our souls. What a shame. The Chinese have already burglarized our factory trying to steal the optical furnace formula. Maybe we should just sell out to them and save ourselves the hassle.
For a lousy ten million, you can buy a majority of our Liquid Light company and move the commie scientists to America. Then we can qualify for government research grants. If you want to help, contact liquidlightlabs.com in Seattle. I am not holding my breath. I am studying Chinese. After watching the debates, I am starting to think that most Americans are pretty stupid.
John, send me some details! bol at snnsite dot com
Reading this article makes me realize that it is only a matter of time before the electric car becomes a serious alternative to the gas guzzlers.
Remember that Israel is the same country that invented the cell phone and the pentium computer.
After they make this technology available to everyone the middle east oil wealth will dry up real fast and so will the threat from jihad.
Go Israel!!
I beg your pardon? The longest trip you’d ever take is Tel Aviv to Eilat. Shows you the Tel Aviv mentality, even worse than the Manhattan mentality. It’s not even our largest city.
Written from my apartment in Haifa, another hour – a long way in this country – further north.
Not that the car is a bad idea. Of course, the electricity has to come from somewhere….
I know… sorry, I knew I’d get grief for that line. I’ve driven up to Ramat ha Golan and Naharia and yes, people from Haifa drive to Eilat too. And while a trip from Ramat ha Golan to Eilat is possible, I can’t imagine anyone is doing it very often! And if you are, you need to get a light pilot’s license.
Anyway, welcome to PJMedia! As the people here can see, you are extremely responsive and respect your readers, a quantity not always found in columnists.
I am glad to hear electric-powered cars are advancing in terms of convenience and practicality. Great!
That it might work in Israel is due to the small country — you won’t be stuck “100 miles from nowere” because you ain’t *got* 100 miles to be nowhere from… (I am exagerrating, but not by much). Still doesn’t mean it will work in the USA, but still, just because it doesn’t work in *all* situations hardly means the electric car won’t work in *any* situation.
Replacing a fuel tank with 500 pounds of lithium is pure stupidity for several reasons.
1. There is no need for CO2 reduction. CO2 is not a climate driver and it isn’t a poisonous gas.
2. Charging batteries will require additional power plants and an expansion of the grid.
3. There is no net CO2 reduction achieved when the entire manufacturing cycle of the cars and the battery is included into the calculation. (the same goes for wind and solar)
4. There is no peak oil. Oil, gas and shale gas reserves will last for centuries to come. Time enough to find real alternatives.
5. electric propulsion will never compete with gasoline, diesel, natural gas or Liquid Petrol Gas (LPG) even if gasoline and diesel is produced from gas to liquid or coal to liquid conversion.
Besides that there are significant problems with the batteries that still haven’t been solved, see the problems with the Chevy Volt, the Nissan Leaf, and the Honda series.
Only those who believe the promises of the “Green Utopia” will buy an electric car.
But their number are in decline.
Israel is sitting on a huge stock of natural gas. Forget electric.
R de Haan,
I’ll answer your specific points below, but there is one point you miss and Israel is a perfect place to prove it. We are all so used to fume emitting cars that we ignore them. Forget global warming accused CO2: plenty of real poisons do come out petroleum powered cars. Try sitting in your garage with the engine running for 20 minutes: on second thoughts, don’t! I don’t wish you or anyone else any harm.
Every year on one day virtually all motor transport stops in Israel. It’s Yom Kippur and I’ve written about it at Israellycool ( http://www.israellycool.com/2010/09/17/being-jewish-is-easy-in-israel-even-on-yom-kippur/ ) By the evening of the day on which very few cars, trucks, buses, trains or even planes have moved, you can see and smell how much nicer it is in Tel Aviv. The difference is astonishing and any Israeli city dweller will confirm this without scientific instruments: a working nose can tell. I’ll also add that, while I barely notice it, I can hear the noise from the Ayalon freeway when I’m on my balcony (1km away and I’m on the 7th floor): on Yom Kippur the absence of this sound is startlingly obvious. I agree, the big coal burning and gas burning power stations didn’t stop pumping out fumes, but as very few people live next to those, that’s a different class of pollution.
We’ve become desensitised to polluted air. City dwellers have forgotten what it is to breath clean air and this pointless obsession with one of the least dangerous emissions from cars (CO2) is a huge problem in this. I know that an electric car shifts the problem, but in this case I’m much more willing to believe that centrally produced electricity in bulk, away from where my kids live, is better than locally produced kinetic energy spraying carbon monoxide and a dozen other toxins into my kids’ faces.
1. I also don’t think man made CO2 is poisonous or responsible for climate change.
2. Shifting from petrol cars to grid powered cars is gradual and can be accommodated but will need investment.
3. See point 1, I don’t care about CO2.
4. I agree, but with big oil’s grip on politics all over the world, exploiting all these other forms of oil has been hampered by false political imperatives like over zealous conservationism and basic protection for Arab oil sheiks wealth and interests.
5. LPG and Coal to liquid fuel (as Sasol in South Africa pioneered during the sanctions era) are all viable and my approach is yes to all of them. I like Robert Zubrin’s Open Fuel Standard approach too and that may well be much better suited to the US’s big distances than electric cars in the short to medium term.
Well, a quick & easy battery change-out will remove a lot of the liabilities in owning an electric.
Once (if) the infrastructure is in place to service them, then it will no more onerous than stopping to fill the tank, even though obviously it is done more often.
And that’s the misconception: charge station at home and less than 160km per day means that I’ll only need to swap battery for long trips. For me that is 1 or 2 max per month. That’s about as often as I fill up my Honda now and probably less often.
Brian, Do you have the map with the 60 switch stations installed in Israel youv’e mentioned? I’m considering the issue, but trying to manage the risks…
Better Place haven’t publicly released the map of switch stations yet. I’ve seen it on screen at the visitor centre and they’re in most of the major junctions and on all the major highways you can think of. Give them a call if you can.
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