Problems With Electric Cars

See Charging Ahead: To speed along the success of the electric car, improvements in battery chemistry will matter as much as the price of oil, a book review from the 5-16 WSJ by Ronald Bailey. Excerpts:

"As Mr. Fletcher notes, the next electric-car misfire was GM's EV1, developed in the 1990s in response to California's stringent air-pollution regulations. The EV1, powered by massive lead-acid and nickel-hydride batteries, could go as far as 140 miles on a charge. GM built 800 of the cars, leasing them for $349 a month. But the batteries simply did not store enough energy and cost $40,000 to $50,000. GM lost a billion dollars before canceling the program. The company was excoriated for its decision in the tendentious documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" But that's an easy one: The batteries did it.

As the EV1 was being junked, Toyota launched its Prius hybrid in the U.S. in 2000, a car with a gasoline engine assisted by a nickel-metal-hydride battery. By 2011, Toyota had sold more than a million Priuses in the U.S. In 2003, Silicon Valley mogul Martin Eberhard founded Tesla Motors. His aim: build an all-electric car powered by lithium-ion batteries. Despite the advantages of lithium-ion batteries, Mr. Fletcher observes, car companies had shied away from them because of their tendency to ignite. By 2006, the first Tesla was on the road—without incident. Once lithium-ion batteries had been proved in automobiles, GM launched its own concept car, the Volt.

American drivers suffer from range anxiety—the fear that electric cars will run out of juice and leave them stranded. The Volt was designed to address that concern. It is a hybrid driven by an electric motor, but the batteries can be supplied with electricity from a supplementary gasoline engine. The Volt's all-electric range is about 40 miles, though up to 400 miles using its gasoline engine.

President Barack Obama has set a goal of having a million plug-in hybrids like the Volt on American roads by 2015 and is offering hefty tax credits to buyers. Even more generously, the 2009 stimulus package included $2.4 billion in government subsidies to a plethora of start-up battery companies. We've been here before. Almost every president since Richard Nixon, who launched a program to produce (as he declared) "an unconventionally powered, virtually pollution-free automobile within five years," has tried and failed to spur the development of an alternative-energy car. Will Mr. Obama's push work any better?

Mr. Fletcher does a good job surveying this old-yet-nascent industry in the U.S. But he wonders whether, even with all the federal largess, it will be able to compete with Asian battery giants like Panasonic in Japan, BYD in China and LG Chem in South Korea. Even GM's Volt is powered with batteries built by an LG Chem subsidiary. Some commentators worry that we're going to replace our dependence on foreign oil with a dependence on foreign batteries—and foreign lithium."