The 21st Century Car Industry: Why Plug-in and Electric Car Conversions Could Fix it
Entrepreneurs have begun to retrofit ordinary combustion vehicles into all-electrics or plug-in hybrids. Here’s why this could be the “big fix” that the auto-industry needs.
Are we stuck with our oil addiction? What if millions of our middle-aged vehicles could be reincarnated as superior versions of their youthful selves, while developing new revenue streams for Detroit? What if that “fix” could start reducing the billion a day we spend on imported oil, while creating tens of thousands of local jobs in communities and cutting greenhouse gases from fossil fuels?
Automakers could do all this—by thinking of vehicles as upgradable high-tech products. For example: A pioneering Chicago startup makes a prototype Ford F-150 pickup with an all-electric range of 30 miles per charge. After that it’s a hybrid, boosting the best-selling truck’s 15 city miles per gallon to 21.
- » See also: Colorado will offer $6,000 Tax Credit for Plug-in Hybrid Conversions
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In volume, this conversion could sell for $10-15,000. Converting school and transit buses could cost $35,000, with three- to five-year paybacks and reduced diesel fumes. And delivery vans that stay on the road up to 300,000 miles, with engines replaced every 100,000, could instead get partly electrified. Solutions starting in under 10-MPG niches could then spread to gas-guzzling vans, SUVs, and large passenger vehicles.
Cash for Clunkers vs Cash for Conversions
As “Cash for Clunkers” proves the pent-up demand for new vehicles, it also reveals another significant lesson: what old products are worth. Why not monetize aging assets while retaining the energy and materials used to build them? Amidst the auto crisis, it’s a transformational opportunity to create a new future-facing business model for the industry.
Today’s auto companies are like parents launching their millions of offspring, saying, “Bye…we don’t expect to hear from you again unless something fails under warranty.” Their dealers hope for service revenue and repeat sales. Except for occasional annoying recalls, they have no way to add improved technologies to vehicles that suffer from unplanned obsolescence.
Other industries create products as platforms. Some software firms make more from upgrades than from original sales. Computer companies shift from selling hardware to providing information technology systems and services. Automobiles are our longest-lifetime technology product. Why shouldn’t OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), integrators, suppliers, and dealers acquire a lifetime interest in them?
1. One does not boost a vehicle’s MPG by converting it to a plug-in hybrid. The extra miles you perceive are in reality purchased from your utility company, instead of the corner gas station. If cap-and-trade (HR2454) becomes law, not only will gasoline and diesel increase in price, but so will one’s utilities. Equivalent mileage is a myth.
2. Why would anyone want to put a $15,000 conversion on a $20,000 pick-up truck when said conversion adds no value to the truck? The school bus conversion makes sense in that it begins indoctrinating the children at a young age.
3. Cash for clunkers swapped fewer than 200,000 old vehicles for new vehicles. A drop in the bucket for an industry that averages 18 million units per year (icmarc.org/xp/rc/marketview/chart/2009/20090626TotalVehicleSales.html). Plus, according to Edmunds, the clunkers were not traded for hybrids (money.cnn.com/2009/08/07/autos/cash_for_clunkers_sales/).
Best wishes.
Conversions and maintenance are way too pricey at the moment to encourage enough people to do it.
Currently, electric miles cost about 2-4 cents compared to 8-40 cents for gasoline miles (depending on many assumptions). With cap-and-trade, the price disparity between the highest-carbon fuels and increasingly low-carbon electricity will increase.
The conversions we anticipate are for used vehicles rather than brand-new trucks, thereby giving them many more years of life as cleaner vehicles with lower operating costs.
Of course, conversions are way too expensive until they scale at levels that can come only with cooperation from automakers for validated designs. We’re just beginning that journey.
– Felix Kramer, Founder, CalCars.org
I can’t even justify paying 5k for a used car, let alone investing 10 to 15k in one.
Bobby B.
Trade and Cap dose pose a problem, but when Solar Panels hit $1 a watt, I will have to ask so what?
As to cash for clunkers. Small Steps, as much as I would like to see everything happen overnight myself. I know it won’t happen.
@Mamoru: It was a small step that yielded very little. I do think that it was cool that recipients found a loophole with which to buy what they wanted and not something that was mandated. I am not a big fan of hybrids.
I think it’s really lame that gas2.org is creating multiple pages for a single article - attempting to create a false sense of growing page views for the sake of advertising dollars. I never click to the second page + when websites get petty like this. I will stop visiting this site if they continue to slow down my web surfing experience.
@ Bobby P:
1. Nobody cares about MPG. Electric motors are close to 80% efficient, you’re using less energy PERIOD.
mpg and horsepower ratings for ICE vehicles don’t apply, its idiotic. (And yeah, I live somewhere sunny, so Solar FTMFW.)
2. Why would anyone want the government subsidizing car purchases that only net a new ICE vehicle a minimum of 4mpg better ? Its like digging to get out of a hole. Why not subsidize new companies with new, cleaner solutions and help them get a head start, rather than help to “stay the course”.
3. Agreed C4C is absolute bunk and is not really encouraging people to buy more fuel efficient cars let alone hybrids. The restrictions should be tougher and vouchers much greater to encourage hybrid purchases.
Best wishes.
@dave:
1. Just because the motors that drive the wheels are 80% efficient doesn’t mean that you are necessarily using less energy.
A utility burns fuel to generate power. Most utilities convert 30% to 50% of the fuel into usable electricity. The remainder is heat loss. Some of the newer combined-cycle plants are approaching 80% total efficiency, but that assumes that the end user has a use for the by-products of the waste heat (i.e. steam, hot water, flue gas, etc.). So, for the sake of this discussion, let’s be generous and assume an electric generating efficiency of 50%. Transmission and distribution of electricity (i.e. the grid) eats up another 7% of the efficiency between the generator and the user. So, now you are left with 43% of the fuel’s original energy content available at your household electric socket. If your car is a plug-in with electric motors that are 80% efficient under load (which they aren’t), then 20% of the of the energy stored in the batteries gets lost to heat, friction, etc. The bottom line is that total efficiency of the concept comes in under 23%. Operating costs may be lower since gasoline costs per kW-hr are a bit higher than what utilities charge per kW-hr. However, claims of higher efficiency and lower emissions have to be restricted to the electric-car-battery-to-wheels-on-the-road paradigm with total disregard for what happens upstream of the electric wall socket. Since the average automobile utilizes 25% to 30% of its fuel’s energy to push it down the road, run its creature comfort features and recharge its battery, the comparison becomes a wash.
Hybrids do have a little more going for them. The concept of using the automobile’s wasted energy to charge a large battery is already proving to outperform conventionals. Unfortunately, those big batteries are energy intensive and expensive to produce and costly to replace. You may not know this, but all modern railroad locomotives are hybrids without batteries. Diesel engines are coupled to a generators to produce electricity for immediate use by the motors that drive the wheels.
I will not even start one of my rants about the shortcomings of hydrogen vehicles.
2. Agreed.
3. Agreed.
Take care.
The main advantage of electric cars, IMHO, is that it will make coal a much more valuable resource (and America is awash in coal) and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.