Is it really worth going Electric?
Electric cars might be clean, but are they truly commendable?
By Shahzad Sheikh
You’d think electric cars were the future. Just about every manufacturer either has or is threatening to put an electric vehicle on sale, and most are also showcasing sporty electric concepts, just to spark (pun intended) an interest in this allegedly fuel-free, emissions-free and guilt-free transport technology.
How it works is simple: if you’ve ever played with a Remote-Controlled car, the principles are exactly the same. Electric motors drive the wheels, taking power from rechargeable batteries. Admittedly when you upscale everything to human size, things do get a little more complicated. The batteries are bigger and heavier and the cost of buying an electric car is higher because the batteries are also considerably more expensive to produce.
Whilst electric vehicles may seem to be all the rage now, they’re not entirely new. In the early 1900s most cars were powered by volts until the advent of lighter and more powerful combustion engines. And more recently electric milk floats were widely used in Britain in the 1960s and 70s. Tellingly though, most of those have now been replaced with diesel vans.
Back to today though and at the Dubai International Motor Show a few months back, both Chevrolet with the Volt and Nissan with the Leaf were showcasing their electric cars that are now on sale in other parts of the world. Prior to that Rolls-Royce was touring the region with its electric Phantom 102EX – click here to read our story and watch a vid.
Meanwhile Toyota is setting lap records around the tortuous Nurburgring-Nordschleife in an electric car, Mercedes is whetting our appetites with an electric version of the SLS gullwing sports car, and every other day someone, somewhere announces a new electric ‘supercar’.
So the momentum has definitely built in the last few years and it’s easy to see why. Fuel costs are rising, and you don’t have to put any petrol or diesel whatsoever in a pure electric car. And with governments and environment pressure groups tightening the laws on emissions from combustion engines, another plus is that there are no emissions at all from electric vehicles (EVs).
It is also entirely understandable why such enterprising engineers are going down the sporty route. Think back to the aforementioned R/C toy car, when you press ‘go’ it just shoots off the line making use of an instant supply of all the available torque in one go. In fact when I drove the Phantom 102EX, the engineers described how initial tests forced them to actually detune it, because the first time they gave it full throttle it ripped the rubber right off the tyres.
Having driven them, I can confirm that apart from being eerily quiet, when set up properly, electric cars are fast, responsive, and behave just you’d expect a normal car to do – but silently.
So why do you detect some hesitation in my tone? Well the Rolls-Royce, in real world conditions would have been able to go 200km before needing a recharge – which would take 20 hours off a wall socket, eight even through a high-speed port.
A Nissan Leaf will give you about 150km. The lightweight Tesla sports car manages over 300km, but still needs nearly four hours to charge. Last year Nissan Middle East managed to drive a V8 petrol-engined Patrol from Abu Dhabi to Riyadh, just short of a 1000km on a single tank of fuel, and when they did run out, it probably took all of five minutes to fill up again. Hmm…
Even if you could charge electric cars quicker somehow, where and how would you do it? Do you have to carry an extension lead? Would you have to stop outside peoples’ homes and ask to drain their electricity?
One suggestion is to have a replacement pack of batteries available at fuel stops that could simply be slotted in place of the old ones. That’s actually pretty clever – but it requires a whole new infrastructure involving a network of stations charging potentially hundreds of battery packs (which will take a lot of space) constantly – and hence potentially draining the national grid.
So this whole thing about zero-emissions is not entirely true. Yes the pure electric car doesn’t emit anything, but you’re simply transferring the problem. Imagine hundreds of thousands of electric cars plugged in, along with millions of battery packs all quietly, cleanly charging. Then take a look at the power stations belching out smog working at full tilt. And most of those generally run on good old fashioned fossil fuel! And Nuclear power brings its own controversies.
I’ve also got little faith in the concept of ‘range extender’ units – where an actual combustion engine is also installed which runs on fuel and is merely used to charged the batteries once they drain. So there’s an engine in the car that doesn’t actually drive the wheels?! Weight is a problem with electric cars – how does adding and fuel and an engine help?
So how about hybrids? They also employ a regular engine that both powers the car and charges the battery. And frankly they’re they most realistic option going at the moment.
The only other alternatives are still some way off. Fuel cell technology would be able to convert chemical energy from hydrogen into electricity and emits only water. But it’s proven difficult to make them work cost-effectively. Much more exciting though is ‘turbine/electric generator system that is powered by an accelerator-driven thorium-based laser’. Thorium is a mildly radioactive substance, so the car would run forever and never emit anything.
Three best electric cars
1. The Tesla Roadster is based on a lightweight Lotus Elise and the engine has been replaced with a 56kWh lithium cobalt battery. It’ll go 350km (some have been reported to go even further) and takes 3.5 hours to recharge.
2. MINI E gets a 35kWh battery and can go as far as 250km on a recharge which takes about 4.5 hours on a fast connection. It’s available on lease in Los Angeles and New York/New Jersey.
3. Mercedes is planning to put the SLS AMG E-Cell gullwing sportscar into production in 2013. It has four electric motors (one for each wheel) producing the equivalent of 525bhp and a massive 650lb ft of torque. It will be fitted with a 60kWh battery that should have a range of over 200km.
