Turning over a New Leaf:
The Start of an Electric
Vehicle Revolution
MTI Report S- 09- 08
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MTI REPORT S- 09- 08
Turning Over a New Leaf: The start
of an electric vehicle revolution
may 18, 2010
November 2010
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Mineta Transportation Institute
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Turning Over a New Leaf: The start of an electric vehicle revolution
Norman Y. Mineta National Transportation Policy Summit
November 2010
MTI MTI Report S- 09- 08
Environmental legislation and public interest in reducing automobile emissions have generated increased efforts to
develop and market electrically powered vehicles. But long- distance driving and limited infrastructure for recharging
pose serious challenges. What is the industry doing to overcome these limitations? Are electric vehicles a viable
solution?
On May 18, 2010, the Mineta Transportation Institute ( MTI), along with the the U. S. Department of Transportation,
Caltrans, and other sponsors and co- sponsors, hosted a panel of experts to address the environmental impact,
engineering, and market acceptance of electric vehicles, and the infrastructure needed to keep them viable.
Discussion centered around the need for additional infrastructure, consumer requirements, costs, and environmental
sustainability.
This e- book is an edited version of the program.
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Acknowledgments
The Mineta Transportation Institute ( MTI) thanks the following organizations for sponsoring, co- sponsoring
and participating in “ Turning Over a New Leaf: The Start of an Electric Vehicle Revolution.”
Sponsors include The Commonwealth Club of California, the United States Department of Transportation,
Caltrans and the Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission ( MTC). Co- sponsor is AAA of
Northern California, Nevada, Utah.
This program, addressing the technology, infrastructure and future possibilities for electric vehicles,
was moderated by Kerry Curtis, chair of The Commonwealth Club Environment & Natural Resources
member- led forum and member of The Commonwealth Club Board of Governors. Panelists included
Mark Duvall, Director of Electric Transportation, Electric Power Research Institute; Tony Posawatz,
Vehicle Line Director, Chevy Volt, General Motors; Jit Bhattacharya, CEO, Mission Motors; and Richard
Lowenthal, CEO, Coulomb Technologies, Inc. The program was recorded and later broadcast on
National Public Radio ( NPR).
MTI staff instrumental in making this e- book available include MTI Director of Communications and
ITT, Donna Maurillo; Student Graphic Artist, Vincent Alindogan; Student Publications Assistant, Sahil
Rahimi; and Student Webmaster and Technical Assistant, Ruchi Arya.
Transcription services were provided by The Commonwealth Club of California, with editing and
production services by Frances Cherman.
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Contents
FOREWORD1
EXECUTIVE SUMARY3
Turning Over a New Leaf: The start of an
electric vehicle revolution 7
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES31
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List of Figures
1. Expert panel discusses electric vehicles at The Commonwealth Club in San Francis-co,
May 18, 2010. Left to right: Kerry Curtis ( moderator); Mark Duvall, Electric Power
Research Institute ( EPRI); Tony Posawatz, General Motors; Jit Bhattacharya, Mission
Motors; and Richard Lowenthal, Coulomb Technologies.
2. Mark Duvall, director of electric transportation, Electric Power Research Institute
( EPRI).
3. Jit Bhattacharya, CEO, Mission Motors.
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FOREWORD
With hybrid and natural gas vehicles having achieved mainstream success, manufacturers
are in a race to introduce vehicles powered entirely, or almost entirely, by electricity. But,
while these vehicles can provide “ cleaner” transportation, the question of wether they
can also provide consumers with the convenience, mobility and affordability they require
remains unanswered. Can technology and marketing overcome the real and perceived
limitations of electric vehicles? Will the infrastructure be sufficient to attract a critical mass
of early adopters?
On May 18, 2010, the Mineta Transportation Institute ( MTI), hosted an expert panel at The
Commonwealth Club in San Francisco to facilitate discussion of these important issues.
The panel addressed the environmental impact, engineering, market acceptance, and
other issues surrounding electric vehicles, and the infrastructure necessary to keep them
viable.
Moderated by Kerry Curtis, chair of The Commonwealth Club Environment & Natural
Resources member- led forum and member of The Commonwealth Club Board of Governors,
the panel included experts Mark Duvall, Director of Electric Transportation, Electric Power
Research Institute; Tony Posawatz, Vehicle Line Director, Chevy Volt, General Motors; Jit
Bhattacharya, CEO, Mission Motors; and Richard Lowenthal, CEO, Coulomb Technologies,
Inc.
Sponsors included The Commonwealth Club of California, the United States Department
of Transportation, Caltrans, and the Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission
( MTC). AAA of Northern California, Nevada, Utah, was co- sponsor.
The program was recorded for broadcast on National Public Radio ( NPR). This e- book is
an edited version of the proceedings.
Rod Diridon, Sr.
Executive Director, MTI
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EXECUTIVE SUMARY
Demands for mobility are increasing at the same time climate change and legislation require
cleaner vehicles. Electric vehicles hold promise for satisfying both needs, but current
models pose limitations. Can electric vehicles overcome their current shortcomings? Do
the advantages outweigh the drawbacks? What is the industry doing to help overcome
public resistance?
On May 18, 2010, at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco, the Mineta
Transportation Institute ( MTI) hosted a panel of experts to address the environmental
impact, engineering, and market acceptance of electric vehicles, and the infrastructure
needed to keep them viable.
Sponsored by the U. S. Department of Transportation, Caltrans, and the Bay Area Metropolitan
Transportation Commission ( MTC), and co- sponsored by AAA of Northern California,
Nevada, Utah, the panel was moderated by Kerry Curtis, chair of The Commonwealth Club
Environment & Natural Resources member- led forum. The event was recorded for future
broadcast on National Public Radio.
Discussion centered around four issues: the capacity of the power grid to meet the increased
demands of electric vehicles, electric vehicles’ ability to meet consumer needs, the short-and
long- term costs of electric vehicles, and the environmental sustainability of battery-powered
transportation.
Mark Duvall, director of electric transportation at the Electric Power Research Institute
( EPRI), acknowledged that electric vehicles place a strain on the power grid and cited
strategies to reduce the stress, including a “ smart grid” that allows intelligent appliances
and electric meters to communicate and automatically shift loads to off- peak hours as
needed.
Richard Lowenthal, founder and CEO of Coulomb Technologies, Inc., said his company’s
charging stations can be programmed to take advantage of the lowest rates. Tony
Posawatz, vehicle line director for the Chevy Volt, cited OnStar technology built into the
Volt that potentially could receive and execute requests from a utility to temporarily suspend
charging due to unusually high demand.
Jit Bhattacharya, CEO of Mission Motors, said the key to mass acceptance of electric
vehicles is the widespread availability of charging stations. Mr. Lowenthal said his company
aims to place charging stations at key locations where vehicles sit idle, such as residences,
workplaces, and travel stops. He said several Silicon Valley companies have installed
charging stations for employees, and stations also are currently being installed at hotels
and McDonalds restaurants. He said most of these businesses plan to provide the service
for free as a customer incentive.
Mr. Lowenthal acknowledged a fully depleted battery can take eight or nine hours to charge
but said charging can take place when owners are sleeping or working. Mr. Duvall mentioned
growing interest in “ fast charging” stations— large stations that direct- charge batteries in as
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little as 30 minutes. Mr. Posawatz said the Chevy Volt doesn’t require a charging station
and can be charged overnight from a standard 120V outlet.
To the issue of sustainability, Mr. Duvall acknowledged that, although electric vehicles
don’t produce greenhouse gases, the electricity that powers them is generated primarily
by fossil fuels, which do. His agency participated in research that found if renewable
resources were used to generate that power, electric cars could reduce CO 2 emissions by
50 to 60 percent. Even with renewable and fossil fuel resources combined, the net result
is a reduction of emissions.
Mr. Bhattacharya said research is underway to find secondary uses for lithium- ion
batteries when they have exhausted their usefulness in cars. Mr. Posawatz explained
that an electric vehicle battery still retains 70 percent of its capacity at the end of its useful
life. General Motors expects the battery pack on the Chevy Volt to last for a minimum
of ten years, or 150,000 miles, after which he believes it may be possible to recapture
the lithium. Mr. Bhattacharya and Mr. Lowenthal also discussed the benefits of electric
vehicles beyond environmental advantages, including fast acceleration without shifting, a
unique, stimulating driving experience, and reduced cost of operation.
Addressing the cost issue, Mr. Posawatz said when the industry achieves an economy
of scale in its production, the purchase price of all- electric vehicles will likely drop below
that of gasoline- powered vehicles. Mr. Duvall said consumers should consider the lifetime
costs of a vehicle to appreciate the cost savings of electric vehicles. Mr. Lowenthal said
electric cars cost approximately two cents per mile to operate versus approximately 14
cents per mile for gasoline- fueled cars.
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Turning Over a New Leaf: The start
of an electric vehicle revolution
KERY CURTIS
Today’s program is being underwritten by the Mineta Transportation Institute.
Our focus today is on electric vehicles. Even as the demands of climate change compel
manufacturers to innovate with cleaner vehicles, the world’s demand for mobility is
increasing. We appear to be on the cusp of an unprecedented rise to prosperity of billions
of people, most of whom will want the same benefits that we in this country have enjoyed
for decades— most notably, automobiles. So, how well can electric cars help to meet the
combined challenge of plentiful vehicles while also reducing greenhouse gases? Can
the advantages of electric vehicles outweigh their shortcomings, and will they eventually
become the vehicles of choice?
Today, we are fortunate to have a panel of experts who will discuss not only the environmental
aspects, but also the engineering, market acceptance and other issues regarding electric
cars and motorcycles possibly becoming the vehicles of the future:
Mark Duvall is director of electric transportation at the Electric Power Research Institute,
also known as EPRI. EPRI is an independent, nonprofit center for public interest in energy
and environmental collaborative research. EPRI does receive funding from its member
organizations, many of which are electric power companies. Dr. Duvall is responsible for
EPRI’s research and development program for electric transportation, including electric plug-in
hybrid and fuel- cell vehicle programs, and related advanced infrastructure. He oversees
a number of partnerships and collaborations between EPRI and electric utilities, automotive
companies, local and federal state agencies, national laboratories, and academic research
institutions. Mark’s work currently is focused on plug- in hybrid electric vehicle research,
development and demonstrations in collaboration with major automotive manufacturers,
such as the EPRI Daimler- Chrysler PHEV Sprinter Van Program— advanced battery system
development and testing, electric charging infrastructure, and environmental analysis of air
quality and greenhouse gas emissions and characteristics of plug- in hybrids and other
electric transportation technologies.
Prior to joining EPRI, Dr. Duvall held the position of principal development engineer at the
Hybrid Electric Vehicle Center of the University of California at Davis. He holds B. S. and
M. S. degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Davis and a
Ph. D. in mechanical engineering from Purdue.
Tony Posawatz is vehicle line director of General Motors new Chevy Volt. Mr. Posawatz
has led the development of the much- anticipated Volt and continues to help lead the
development of the 2011 production vehicle. He says that this morning, he drove one,
so it actually exists. He has served as a GM vehicle line director for the past 11 years.
In this capacity, Tony and his product development teams have compiled an impressive
record of successful, award- winning and innovative products. Mr. Posawatz’s teams have
amassed seven General Motors Chairman’s Honors Awards for excellence and have
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overseen the development of cars and trucks, from concept initiation to production and
market launch, in four different countries. Mr. Posawatz is also co- chairman of the Electric
Drive Transportation Association.
Jit Bhattacharya is CEO of Mission Motors, whose new Mission One motorcycle is being
promoted as the fastest production electric motorcycle in the world. Mr. Bhattacharya
started as COO of the company in 2008. ( For those of you who aren’t into corporate-speak,
that means chief operating officer.) He has an engineering background including
experience from the product design firm Ideo and he also holds an MBA from my alma
mater, the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Mr. Bhattacharya has been involved
with energy and clean tech for over five years, most recently as co- president of the Berkeley
Energy and Resources Collaborative, where he helped lead the launch of UC Berkeley’s
new Center for Energy and Environmental Innovation. He is taking on the leadership role
at Mission Motors at a pivotal moment in the company’s history as it prepares to bring the
Mission One to market and looks to announce new products in its pipeline.
Richard Lowenthal is the founder and CEO of Coulomb Technologies, Inc., widely
acknowledged as a leader in electric vehicle charging station infrastructure worldwide.
Mr. Lowenthal started the company in 2007. From 1998 until 2007, he was instrumental in
starting several companies, including Lightera, Pipal Systems and Procket Networks. From
1996 to 1997, Mr. Lowenthal was vice president and general manager of Cisco Wide Area
Network Access Products division. Prior to that, Mr. Lowenthal worked in the computer
industry. He was co- founder and vice president of engineering for Stardent Computers
and served as vice president of engineering for Conversion Technologies. Mr. Lowenthal
is also a former mayor of Cupertino and has been heavily involved in the nonprofit world.
He holds a B. S. degree in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley.
My first question is for Mark Duvall of the Electric Power Research Institute. Looking
ahead for ten or 15 or 20 years, as electric cars become much more common, will the
demands that they make on the electrical grid be something that we can cope with?
MARK DUVA LL
The quick answer is yes. Electric vehicles do place stress on the grid. A typical home in
San Francisco in the summertime draws about three kilowatts, and if you take that home
and you put it in Arizona, it could be seven or eight kilowatts. Well, that’s right around the
charging range of electric vehicles. However, the industry and the electric utilities have an
obligation to serve reliable, safe electricity to homes and businesses and it’s their job to
overcome that; it’s their job to deal with it.
On the positive side, almost complete electrification of the light- duty passenger car fleet
in the United States, however long it might take, would really amount to maybe less than
ten percent of the electricity that we use in the United States. So, on a system level,
it’s really a very small amount. There are a number of things that you can do that can
dramatically reduce that, such as charging vehicles off- peak, timing when they charge,
and giving utilities the option to work with vehicle owners to turn vehicles off during times
of really high stress in the afternoon on really hot summer days. So the overall effect
is really not something that anyone who wants to go buy an electric vehicle should be
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concerned about.. The utilities have coped with residential air- conditioning, plasma screen
TVs, computers in every home. All of these things place stress on the grid, and they deal
with it, but the goal here with electric vehicles is to integrate them into the system to a
level where it’s a much smoother transition, where we don’t see any stress and where the
investment required to provide electricity to the vehicles is really very small.
KERY CURTIS
Thanks, Mark. And my question for Tony Posawatz is, I’ve been hearing about the Chevy
Volt for— it seems like my whole life. Maybe not, but for a long time. And so the question
is, does it really exist and when will it be available for sale? And I was told not to ask him
how much it will cost.
TONY POSAWA TZ
I won’t answer that question. First, thanks very much for joining us today and having us
here with you. I do see some familiar faces in the audience, because this morning a few
people in your audience actually drove the Chevy Volt. It was an engineering test vehicle,
probably a vehicle that was developed at the end of last year, that was something we used
to make sure that we can validate this product, to bring this electrified car to the market.
Your real question is, “ Are electric vehicles coming?” The answer is the Chevy Volt will be
in California in a retail environment for sale before the end of this calendar year. We are
finishing the final testing and preparation to build said cars in quantities of thousands of
vehicles the first model year, beginning in 2011, in November, and by the middle of calendar
year 2011 for the 2012 model year. We’d like to be in a position to build tens of thousands
of electrically driven vehicles and really introduce the first mass- market electrically driven
vehicle to the United States and hopefully export this leading- edge technology abroad, as
well.
Figure 1 Expert panel discusses electric vehicles at The Commonwealth Club in
San Francisco, May 18, 2010. Left to right: Kerry Curtis ( moderator); Mark Duvall,
Electric Power Research Institute ( EPRI); Tony Posawatz, General Motors; Jit
Bhattacharya, Mission Motors; and Richard Lowenthal, Coulomb Technologies.
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KERY CURTIS
Thank you, Tony. Jit, you’re the motorcycle guy on the panel, and when I think about
electric vehicles, I just think about cars. Your company is developing an electric motorcycle.
What’s the potential for electric motorcycles compared to the potential for electric cars?
JIT BHATTACHARYA
Well, thanks. Yeah, I am the motorcycle guy, and I think what’s really compelling about
an electric motorcycle is that there are a number of benefits to electric drive beyond the
fact that it doesn’t produce any emissions at the tailpipe. These are benefits such as
instantaneous torque, the ability to drive to incredible speeds and accelerate so quickly
without needing to shift. These are tangible benefits that a motorcycle rider understands
in a very visceral way. What we’re doing here at Mission Motors in trying to create the
fastest production electric motorcycle in the world is take those benefits, package it into
a vehicle that riders can get on, that they can actually buy, that is reliable, that they can
take to the track and enjoy, because a motorcycle, especially here in America, is really a
recreational vehicle. It’s one that you have to connect to the riding experience in order to
justify the purchase. At Mission, what we’re trying to do is create a new riding experience
unlike anything you can get on gasoline.
KERY CURTIS
And Richard, you’re the charging- station guy. Tell us how that works and why you need a
network of charging stations.
RICHARD LOWENTHAL
You’re going to need a new way to fuel your vehicle when you buy one of Tony’s or maybe
one of Jit’s vehicles, and that’s our role. We want to be sure that when you’re in the
showroom and you’re considering buying electric or buying gas, you don’t worry about the
need to charge your car; we’ll take care of that for you. These vehicles are a little different.
The first ones coming out will take hours to charge, and the way that works is that you
park them 23 hours a day. Generally speaking, when you’re sleeping and when you’re
working, the car is sitting for long periods of time and you need one of our stations there.
We provide charging stations for those environments.
Our company is a little different from what you might expect. Most of our engineers are
software engineers because we spend our time doing business software for our charging
station infrastructure. These are things to replace what is familiar at a gas station but
for example, some of the owners of our stations want the drivers to pay for charging
their vehicles, so we have a billing system that our station owners can use and we have
applications. For example, when I came up here today, I used an application on my
Blackberry, also available on the iPhone, where you put in an address and it will navigate
you to the closest station to your destination that is not currently in use so you have a place
to charge your vehicle when you’re visiting here at the Commonwealth Club. Mostly what
we do is try to provide you the tools so that you’re comfortable buying electric vehicles.
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KERY CURTIS
Thanks. The big thing that I hear about the concern about electric vehicles is what you
touched on, Richard, which is the anxiety about running out of electricity. You can run out
of gas, obviously, but there are gas stations are all over the place. What do you do when
your Tesla is out of electricity in Buttonwillow, California? What is the outlook for actually
being able to address that anxiety on the part of electric vehicle drivers?
RICHARD LOWENTHAL
It’s a very good question. We have several answers for that. There are two different kinds
of situations. One is the commute. I commute in a BMW MINI electric vehicle, and my
commute is about 15 miles. The car has a range of about 100 miles, so I charge in my home
garage or at work and I never have any issue at all. But there is that time when you want to
go farther than the battery will carry you, and then there are a number of solutions.
There’s one that Chevy has, with the Chevy Volt, which is called an extended- range electric
vehicle that, once the battery is depleted, it has a generator that keeps the car going for
hundreds of miles. So, it’s something familiar to all of you, and basically what happens is
you switch from my infrastructure to the gasoline infrastructure for the extended road trip.
The Tesla Roadster is another model; their approach is to put a big battery in there— a
battery big enough so that the car will go farther than you want to go in a day— and have
one of our stations where you sleep at night, and have one of our stations at hotels, and
you’re done, because you only need to charge that vehicle when you’re sleeping.
So there are a few different answers for that problem, but rest assured, we work on it all
the time. One of the situations that we have that’s a little different is the one here in San
Francisco where there are six times as many cars as garages, so most residents here in
San Francisco won’t have the ability to charge in the home garage. Instead, you’ll see our
stations, for instance, down at City Hall, at the Civic Plaza, so you can charge while you’re
working. Primarily, people living in this urban environment will charge in an apartment lot,
or a condominium lot, or while they’re working, so we have answers for all the situations
you may encounter with your electric vehicle.
TONY POSAWA TZ
Richard’s spot- on relative to the data that exists how often you really are driving your
car and how often the car is sitting. Typically we’d like to charge the car or any electric
vehicle overnight when you’re sleeping, take advantage of when the grid usage is low. As
a matter of fact, the utilities love us to use that capacity; the rates are usually very low. The
interesting opportunity is rather than necessarily putting in more and more battery in the
car, which is expensive, increases charge time, increases mass, and increases associated
packaging issues with the car, to instead provide a secondary charging opportunity when
one is at work— for some of us that’s 12 hours, and for others it’s less than that. So that’s
another one of the challenges we collectively can work on together when we think about
Mark representing the utilities, Richard with the charging stations, and Jit and I as the
vehicle providers. I think that’s a very, very elegant solution and then with appropriate grid
management, it’s something that could again take this technology and begin to usher in
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this new era of electrified transportation.
KERY CURTIS
Thank you, Tony. The big benefit of electric vehicles is in reducing the emission of
greenhouse gases, at least in my view, and so if you look down the road 10, 20, 30 years,
you can envision an electrical grid that’s powered by renewable sources, wind, solar, and
so forth, primarily that electricity is brought to your home where you charge your electric
car and then you drive that during the day, and so the greenhouse gas contribution of
your driving is really close to zero. But in today’s real world, the electricity is generated in
the U. S. largely through fossil fuels. So my question for Mark Duvall of the Electric Power
Research Institute is, in today’s world, what is the real benefit of powering a vehicle with
electricity instead of fuel?
MARK DUVA LL
Well, I spent about two years of my life trying to answer this question, and obviously
we do work for the electric utility industry.
Our partner with this was the Natural
Resources Defense Council, which
is just downtown in San Francisco, to
represent the environmental community.
We kept each other honest, and one of
the things that we found during this is
that yes, renewable energy is a very good
transportation source, and would result in
CO 2 emissions of a plug- in vehicle being
as much as 50 or 60 percent lower than
even the best hybrid vehicle— very low.
However, taken as a whole, even with all of
the coal and natural gas and other sources
of electricity, there are still some plants
that burn oil as a fuel source to create
electricity— not very many, but there are a
few. If you take all of that in total, along
with the wind and the solar and all the
other sources of energy, it’s a significant
reduction in CO 2 emissions, regardless.
So we don’t have to sit here and think we
have to do this vast modernization to the
grid. That’s actually already taking place
independent of whether electric vehicles
are here or not. The grid will get cleaner, that electricity will get cleaner, but today, as the
first vehicles roll out at the end of this year and plug in, they’re going to be significantly
cleaner than either hybrid, gasoline, or diesel vehicles.
Figure 2 Mark Duvall, director of electric
transportation, Electric Power Research
Institute ( EPRI).
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RICHARD LOWENTHAL
Kerry, I’d like to give a little counterpoint if I could. Besides the environmental benefits,
there are a lot of other reasons people want these vehicles, and I’m going to let Jit talk
about the fun of driving an electric vehicle, because he knows all about that, but there
are still people who don’t believe in the carbon equation and what it means to us and the
vehicle’s role in that, even. But if nothing else, the importation of oil into the United States
is a problem. Last year was a half- a- trillion dollar trade deficit that we imported so much oil,
so EVs help there too. They’re also considerably lower cost to fuel. Driving on electricity
costs you about two cents a mile, and driving on gasoline’s more like 14 cents a mile, so
it’s got a consumer benefit. But the real reason, if you drive one— I drive an EV and if you
drive Tony’s car, or especially if you drive Jit’s vehicle— is that they’re tremendously fun to
drive. You want one of these things. This is not a compromise situation. You’re not doing
this necessarily to save the planet. You like it, and I’ll let Jit take it from there.
JIT BHATTACHARYA
Thanks, Richard. For those of you who ride motorcycles, the Mission motorcycle will be the
most fun vehicle you have ever driven, but I will actually add one other point to this, and
that’s a perspective from another country: China. Mission Motors is right now exploring a
partnership with one of the largest manufacturers of gasoline motorcycles in China. This is
a manufacturer that makes a million motorcycles a year, and many more millions of gasoline
engines every single year, so why are they interested in electric? Well, we’re here in the
U. S. talking about the coming electric revolution. In reality, the electric revolution began a
while ago. It began on two wheels in China. There are over 100 million e- bikes— electric
powered, electric- assist bicycles— on the road in China. There are over 20 million electric
scooters already on the road in China. Cities all over the country are banning the use of
gasoline motorcycles and scooters because these two- stroke engines are so polluting, and
now we’re talking about air pollutants that cause smog in the air, that cause asthma. This is
a very real environmental concern today, so the need for electric is more than just reducing
greenhouse gases or reducing dependence on foreign oil. It actually helps, in China, solve
a very real environmental problem. If we all remember the concerns that were launched
during the Olympics, I think it was two years ago now.
KERY CURTIS
Yes, 2008. It’s interesting that your company, Mission Motors, has chosen to enter the
electric motorcycle market at the very high end, much like Tesla did with their high- end,
$ 100,000 sports car, rather than coming in at the low end. But in other countries, it seems
like the electric motorcycle is much more of a mass- market phenomenon. What’s it going
to take for the electric motorcycle business to get hot in the U. S.?
JIT BHATTACHARYA
That’s a very good question, and it goes a lot to what Tony was talking about: Are electric
vehicles coming? Are they here? Where do we really stand in this industry? We’ve been
talking about it for so long. I look at the battery pack and the electric power train, which
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is really what Mission Motors is focused on. I look at that power train, and I compare it
to where we were 15 years ago. The battery pack in the Mission One Motorcycle, which
is actually very similar to the one in the Chevy Volt, would have cost over $ 25,000 back
in 1995. We’re not even talking about packaging or anything else, just looking at the cell
technology. Now we can do it for under $ 6,000 with technology that exists. That battery
pack in 1995 would’ve taken up 15 gallons worth of space. Today, it takes less than six.
That battery pack would’ve weighed over 270 pounds, and now, it weighs less than 140.
That’s at the cell level, just talking about the batteries.
The technology is improving every single day. Basically, what we see when looking at
that comparison to 1995 is the electric motorcycle that we’re building was not possible a
decade ago. It could not exist and still be realistically called a motorcycle. But, that being
said, in actual answer to your question, Kerry, we still have a long way to go. The cost is still
too high, and the focus of our business is, how do we take that leading- edge technology,
the supply chain that we’re working with, and continuously optimize the performance of
these vehicles, improve the range, get more value out of every dollar that is going into the
vehicle and improve the performance for the driver or the rider?
KERY CURTIS
Thank you, Jit. Here’s a question that’s directly relevant to that point from one of our
audience members who says, “ I rode here on an electric bicycle, less than one cent a
mile, parked right outside, and I made BART’s inadequate network usable.” A little editorial
comment there from someone about BART. Why aren’t we also talking about electric
bicycles? Of the five of us, you’re probably the one that knows the most about electric
bicycles. Is that a feasible concept and how do I get one?
JIT Bhattacharya
It is very much a feasible concept, and there are companies here in the Bay Area that are
producing some really fun- to- ride, very functional, will- get- you- to- work- and- back electric
bicycles. And for those people who are interested, I highly recommend them. They’re
a lot of fun to ride. I think what we have to do is appreciate the reality of the American
driver context. Once again, our focus as a motorcycle company is the riding experience.
We want to create a riding experience that is different from everybody else, but to solve
the problem as a whole we need what Tony is doing. We need what Richard is doing in
terms of the infrastructure, in terms of producing that mass- market car that everybody can
drive and not just to work and back, but also on the weekends— that can actually begin to
displace the gasoline vehicles on the road. So here what I think you’re going to see: you’ll
see more adoption of things like electric scooters and e- bikes. They are here and they are
present— they’re available— but in terms of solving the problem in the United States as a
country, we do need to solve the problem of the car.
TONY POSAWA TZ
If I could just piggyback a little bit on one of Jit’s comments, and this concerns taking the
technology to scale, so you get cycles of learning, more competition, more commercial
money, more venture capital, more innovation. This is where I think the industries play
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together. Jit said it very well: The cell technology and the way that batteries are constructed
are not too different. Certainly the duty cycles are a little different— environmental conditions,
some of the regulations and standards are different.
One of the things that the Chevrolet Volt is designed to do is to find a solution with its
extended- range capability to make this a mass- market car. I did some calculations, and
I can’t quote the exact value number, but it’s not too far off of where our target is, where
General Motors could literally be the single largest procurer or purchaser of active lithium-ion
materials, exceeding all the PC companies, and the like. It gets back to Jit’s comment
as to the different levels of costs as we’re seeing them come down. So I think there’s a
tremendous synergistic effect if we look at this technology, as Richard stated. You know,
there’s really some interesting energy diversity in the security aspects of it. So I think, if
you may pardon the pun, that we on this panel are quite charged up to see it happen, and
we’ve seen the future— driven the future a little bit— and we think it’s very, very possible.
Very possible.
RICHARD LOWENTHAL
One more word to that, which is the infrastructure that we’re putting in— the charging
stations in downtown San Francisco, for instance: All have provisions for lower- speed
vehicles. Every one of ours has two different ports on it, one for the vehicle connector,
and another one that is basically the household connector for the electric motor scooter,
the low- speed vehicles, and the electric bike. So we are putting this infrastructure in. We
expect our stations to stay in the ground for 25 years because we know this is going to
evolve. And, yes, at the leading edge are some high- end products like Jit and Tony have,
but this will be a pervasive change in transportation.
KERY CURTIS
One of the things that I keep hearing about electric vehicles is that they are inherently
simpler and should be cheaper to manufacture, and yet what I’ve noticed is that the electric
cars seem to have a price premium on them. So my question for Tony Posawatz is, when
will the electric vehicle cost equation drop below that of the internal combustion engine,
and how cheap could it get, really?
TONY POSAWA TZ
That’s one of the million- dollar questions, obviously. I think one of my previous comments
related to when we have some scale— when there’s commercial activity, when some of
the brightest and smartest individuals from research institutions, companies and R& D
departments focus on this, we think you’ll see some significant improvement. For example,
let’s focus just on the battery technology: Many of the white papers have quoted the going
rate is about a thousand dollars per kilowatt- hour ( the energy unit of a lithium ion battery). I
know, and many of my other manufacturing brethren who are introducing vehicles know, that
rate has already been bested by a significant factor— by almost a factor of two. Technology
in general— whether you use the examples of memory storage for computers, cellular phone
technology, etc.— usually takes a couple of generations to drive down. With a Chevy Volt,
because we still have an ongoing extended- range feature— a generator set on board— the
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absolute cost of that type of vehicle probably won’t get below a conventional vehicle, but,
as stated before by Jit, Richard, and others, the benefits, we think, far outweigh the costs.
But I think we’ll see a lot of interesting inventions. I think by GEM e2, you’ll see an ability
for manufacturers to break even on this technology, and not too far after that you’ll see us
making money, and then a lot of good things will happen relative to future innovations and
cost reductions.
MARK DUVA LL
I’d like to add something to that. This is something that has to happen in the mind of the
vehicle purchaser before electric vehicles can truly be successful, and that is if you go
out and buy any mid- size car today and you keep it over its reasonably useful life, you’re
probably going to buy a minimum of $ 15,000 in gasoline for that vehicle. That factors into
the price.
In many cases, you could literally pay for the car again in gasoline, and we really have
to understand when we go to make those kinds of purchases that you’re weighing a
little bit more expensive vehicle, and I would dispute that electric vehicles are simpler. All
modern vehicles are incredibly technologically sophisticated, so just because you don’t
have a gasoline engine, or you have a smaller gasoline engine, doesn’t mean that your
vehicle is simpler, it just means that it has some extra things and doesn’t have a few other
things. So I think, ultimately, you can’t really understand what the vehicles are going to
cost until they’re made at high volumes— minimum of about 50,000 to 100,000 vehicles
per manufacturer in a calendar year. We’re a ways out from understanding that, so in
the mid- term, what we need is rapid adoption of the vehicles that are available, and then
everyone try and really understand what all of the benefits are, not just cost. Leather seats
and DVD players for the kids in the back row, those things don’t pay back over time either,
but we get them because we want them. So really understanding what the benefits are,
the technology, is extremely important. There’s probably, as an individual, few decisions
you can make more fundamental than what care you purchase in terms of environmental
impact, so if you switch from a gasoline vehicle to an electric vehicle or a plug- in hybrid
vehicle, it really can have a very strong impact on your own environmental signature.
KERY CURTIS
Here’s a question from the audience that I’ll direct to Tony Posawatz. Which technology
will be the mainstream for the future vehicle: the plug- in hybrid or the pure electric?
TONY POSAWA TZ
I think the future will be blended, in that it will be good for all of us to see these competing
technologies. One comment I’d like to make in reference to our discussion about where
the energy comes from to fuel the electric grid: the beauty of the electric grid is there are
so many different pathways, from renewable sources, natural gas, nuclear, geothermal,
water, etc., and this creates some interesting competitive situations.
The Chevy Volt was constructed in a manner to help people make that leap to a mass-market
electrically driven vehicle. We’ve called it an extended- range electric vehicle, or
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electric vehicle with extended- range capabilities. It is quite modular in the respect that if
technology in battery cells improves— in other words, if power and energy density improves
or costs come down and we can get more and more range, and we can make this car more
and more affordable— it’s quite conceivable that the Volt could morph into a battery- only
vehicle. Or the modularity associated with how big the battery is, what size gas tank, and
what liquid fuels you use to support your extended- range feature, allows the model to
evolve. In the future, the Volt will also have an extended- range capability to use biofuels
and flex fuels, so it’s hard to say which one will win. I think allowing them all to compete and
doing enabling technologies like General Motors is doing— we are building our own battery
packs— will give us some very specific knowledge and expertise, to hopefully someday
do another battery electrical vehicle. We think the Volt, for the near- term, to drive a mass-market
revolution, is a vehicle that it is not only for the enthusiasts, it is not only for the early
adopters, we think it is a car that everyone could grow to love.
KERY CURTIS
Thank you. A follow- up question for you from the audience, Tony: Do you envision a future
where the car itself, via advanced photovoltaic materials, charges its battery from solar
power?
TONY POSAWA TZ
Very good question. Full disclosure: We studied that in the Volt, did a very, very detailed
study. And there are a few manufacturers that a have an optional photovoltaic roof on the
car. We came to the conclusion, based on the prevailing technology— the alleged high cost
of the car, which we didn’t want to increase any further— that the best place for capturing
solar would be in a position like a home or another installation that would be able to get
solar all the time. I’m not sure how much solar we’d get when the car is garaged, I’m not
sure how much solar we’d get when the car is under a shady tree, and, again, the extra
cost in mass. We are absolutely in favor of, and supportive of, and taking a lot of initiatives
on, to make certain that the charging that will help facilitate driving electrically in a Volt will
come from green electricity and there’s a bunch of initiatives we can talk about at a future
date, but we really think that the best position of photovoltaics is to be part of a larger
installation, whether a home installation or some other more significant installation, and the
Volt will gladly capture and store in its battery that green electricity.
KERY CURTIS
Thank you.
RICHARD LOWENTHAL
If I could just add a little bit to that. We have stations in Chicago that are all solar powered,
and basically there are solar panels out there all day. There’s a battery underground that’s
being charged off those panels, and when it comes time to charge a vehicle, we discharge
those batteries into the vehicle. Similarly, in Hawaii we have stations that are completely
wind- powered, that have no grid tie at all, because they have such consistent wind power
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there, so we do still have ways of getting entirely locally generated clean energy into the
vehicles.
MARK DUVA LL
I would like to add quickly to that is that those are really two separate issues. The roof of
a car is really small, so unless someone comes up with a really, really good solar panel, it
only collects so much sunlight— there’s only so much surface area there to capture it— so
it’s really too small. But a lot of folks who have electric vehicles today power them with solar
panels, and that’s great, but those are two individual choices: If you decide you want a solar
panel, you buy a solar panel; if you decide you want a car, you buy a car. You shouldn’t
predicate buying an electric car, saying, “ No, I’ve got to go get my renewable energy from
somewhere.” California has an amazingly aggressive and ambitious renewable portfolio
standard for the electric utilities in California, so the utilities here are doing everything
they can to get more and more renewables into the grid as fast, or faster, than they can
reasonably do, so the renewables are a lot different than just buying the car. You should
be able to buy the car without feeling you have to go out and do this other thing. If you
want to do that, that’s great.
KERY CURTIS
At one point, I was thinking of buying an electric motorcycle. I was in the process of having
photovoltaic panels put on my roof, and my vision was photovoltaic panels on the roof that
are going to charge my electric motorcycle which I can ride to BART. But then I studied the
math: I applied my MBA skills and discovered that I was a lot better off selling that peak-time
energy to PG& E at the top- tier rate than I was using it to charge my bike. So I wound
up with the solar panels but not the bike.
JIT BHATTACHARYA
The bike would’ve been more fun than the solar panels.
KERY CURTIS
You’re right. I never even see those things. A question for Richard Lowenthal of Coulomb
Technologies— this is from the audience, and I know you’ve answered some aspects of
this already: What does the infrastructure look like today across the country for recharging
e- vehicles? Where would I go today to recharge if I were in Denver, for example? How
would I recharge my e- vehicle?
RICHARD LOWENTHAL
It’s interesting; the early adopters we think will probably be the type who want to hide their
car away in the home garage, and so most of the charging I think for the early adopter
will be in the home garage. I’m kind of an exception, I primarily do my charging at work,
and my landlord has two charging stations in our lot; they’re becoming a normal piece of
parking lot furniture. Several of the high- tech companies in Silicon Valley are putting in
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charging stations as a normal course of business, and Dell Computer made a big splash by
putting in both solar panels and charging stations together to encourage their employees
and visitors to use clean transportation, but we see it throughout the valley now in the high-tech
firms.
We see hotels have them, McDonalds restaurants have our stations, so they’re beginning
to spring up. The federal government is trying to get this kick- started by using stimulus
money this way. They’ve already awarded about $ 130 million in the last six months to help
get this started, the reason being that, in a place like San Francisco where there are so
few home garages, you might not think you have the opportunity to buy the Chevy Volt and
use it So they want to get it kick- started here because, without any of Tony’s cars, people
won’t put in the infrastructure, and without the infrastructure, you can’t buy his car, so we
are getting a little boost from the federal government. Fortunately, when you buy a charging
station, it puts three people to work for a day, so the federal government is interested in
using stimulus money in that way.
KERY CURTIS
Thanks, Richard. I’d like to address this audience question to Jit. You have spoken of the
technological advances in batteries, in terms of cost, weight, and so forth. Can you speak
to the recyclability and the toxicity of the batteries, as they get more and more powerful?
JIT BHATTACHARYA
Sure, and this is a really important
question, because it’s speaking to
the broader issue of sustainability.
When we talk about renewable
energy, when we talk about vehicle
electrification, we need to start
thinking about the entire cycle, the
full system, what’s going to happen
to these batteries at their end of life.
There’s going to be a lot of batteries
if the electric vehicle revolution takes
off the way that all of us are talking
about. The one thing about lithium-ion
that is a benefit, compared to the
incumbent technology which is really
nickel- metal- hydride— that’s the style
of battery that you see in the Toyota
Prius— is that lithium- ion is less toxic.
It is easier to recycle. That being said,
large- scale recycling of lithium- ion
batteries is still something that is in
development. Now, there is a lot of
research going on— and a lot of this is
happening through the government labs I know about, but then you also have companies
Figure 3 Jit Bhattacharya, CEO, Mission
Motors.
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that are starting to look into it— as to whether we can take these batteries at the end of
their life and potentially use them in other applications. Can we use them to do renewables
firming for the grid? Can we use them as ancillary services for the grid, and what are
the possibilities around that? There are a lot of hurdles, a lot of challenges, but it’s an
interesting opportunity for how we can actually take the lithium- ion batteries at the end of
their life, when they’re no longer useful for the car, and still get a lot more value for them
down the road. It will help for renewable energy at the grid level. It will also help reduce
the up- front cost of the batteries for the car.
TONY POSAWA TZ
As I stated earlier, General Motors also is manufacturing and assembling battery packs,
so we too have pondered this very important topic that Jit raises. One of the expectations
we have with the Chevy Volt is that the battery will be in the car ten- plus years, 150,000-
plus miles. What that indicates is, in order to have a sustainable system for this new
technology, you want to make its life in its primary application as long as possible and
then take care of that product, that battery, so that it does have a secondary use as Jit
indicated.
The interesting point of note: the end- of- life for a battery in a vehicular application is when
it reaches 70 percent of its capacity. Well, that’s kind of interesting; there are very few
things that I throw away when I still have 70 percent of its use available. In the case of the
Chevy Volt, I’ve liquid- cooled the battery to temperatures that people like— I condition it
to the degree that we condition people in a passenger compartment, if you will, so I think
that supports the point that Jit raised; I think it’s something that we have to collaborate on,
look at those secondary uses, work with Mark and the team at EPRI, and then, obviously,
as the costs and the weight come down, and the applications come down, I think the basic
fundamental science and physics around the way the battery packs are comprised make
them quite good candidates for recycling, for recapturing the lithium. Lithium is quite easy
to recapture: It’s generally in the form of a lithium carbonate, so it can be separated. But
to Jit’s point also, there aren’t a lot of commercial applications because there are not a
lot of batteries that are at the point that they need to be recycled. We are working on it,
along with Jit and others and the battery manufacturers; I think you’ll see more on that in
the future. But I think the key point is the longer you can extend the life of the battery and
ready it for a secondary use, the recycling issue becomes very much pushed out into the
future and planned for.
KERY CURTIS
Thanks, Tony. A question from the audience about the smart grid— I’m going to address
this to Mark Duvall, because that seems to be more of an EPRI question: In 25 words or
less, what is the smart grid and how does it relate to electric cars?
MARK DUVA LL
If I could say that in 25 words or less they would promote me.
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KERY CURTIS
I’ll give you 50.
MARK DUVA LL
The smart grid looks exactly like the electric grid serving your home or your business now,
except that it consists of a bunch of devices that can talk to each other, and when I mean
talk to each other that doesn’t mean measure what’s going on and feed it back to a central
computer. It means that they talk to each other. It means that the meter at your house
knows the cost of electricity. It can talk to your refrigerator, talk to your dryer, it can send
you messages on your iPhone, it can help you manage your electricity.
A trivial fact about electricity and not the smart grid— so it doesn’t count against my words—
is that electricity as a commodity has gotten cheaper every year since the inception of the
electric industry, until last year. Last year it went up for the first time. And that is because
we have a lot more investment needed to modernize the grid, to meet new environmental
requirements, to plan for a future where carbon emissions are limited. Electricity will get
gradually more expensive, not like we’re used to seeing with gasoline and oil prices spiking
up and down, so it will be key for the users to be able to manage their electricity, and the
smart grid helps you do that, and it helps the electric utilities run a much more efficient
system. And the more efficiently they operate, the lower all our rates are, so that’s something
very important to note about it.
RICHARD LOWENTHAL
Could I just relate smart grid to just this application, because I think it’s vivid to see how
it can affect cars? In most of the utilities we have in the U. S., there’s some time where
there’s a peak load of energy that drives the size of the generation and the capacity that
the grid has. California is one of the best examples of that: we all turn our air conditioners
and pool pumps on in the afternoon in the summer when its hot, and we nearly run out of
electricity. So what the utilities will do is to inspire all electric vehicle drivers to charge their
car at night when they have plenty of capacity. They’ll have a differentiated rate, so it will
be cheaper to charge your vehicle at night than either using smart features in Tony’s car
or using our infrastructure. You can tell the vehicle or the charging station, “ Get me the
cheapest energy; I just need the car at 7: 00 in the morning, get me the cheapest energy,”
and then I’ll take care of it, or Tony will take care of it, and it’ll save the driver as much as
$ 800 a year in energy costs. It’s just incentive pricing provided by the utilities because they
want us to charge off- peak.
KERY CURTIS
Thank you, Richard. Here’s a sort- of- related question from the audience, related to the
challenge a homeowner would have in getting a charging station put into his home: “ How
is the permitting system changing to allow for suitable charging units in the home?”
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RICHARD LOWENTHAL
There’s a lot of work to be done, and I think Tony or Mark will weigh on this too, but
the situation now is not so good. When I bought my Mini, it took a month for me to get
a charging station in the home, but we see how to get it done in four days in a pretty
straightforward fashion, and we’re working on getting that down to one day. The situation
now is you need to get a site inspection to see how difficult your home might be, then you
need to get a building permit, then you need the station put in place, and then you need
an inspection, but those things can really be all done in one day, and we’re working hard.
It’s one of the issues we need to solve so that the day after you buy your car you’ll get a
call from one of our installers saying when can we put a station in your home and then they
can do it on one visit, so that’s the goal. We’re far from it today, but we can get there.
MARK DUVA LL
It’s important not to be too afraid of installing the charge station. It’s an appliance; it’s like
a clothes dryer or like a spa. Some homes it will go in easily, because you have space
in your electrical power and you have a conveniently located garage – modern homes,
generally, new homes. Some houses, older houses, you have to do a lot more work and
so the expense can vary considerably, and it’s important. Cars are parked at home two-thirds
of the time, so this whole industry depends on mastering residential charging.
TONY POSAWA TZ
It’s interesting, and one of the reasons why the Chevy Volt will come standard with a
120V cord set for what we call an EVSC, electric vehicle supply equipment unit, is so
you can in fact take advantage of the grid as it stands today, the size of the Volt battery,
and the smarts we have in the car. So literally when you take a Volt home, you can plug
it in and charge it, overnight, eight, nine hours, using 120V, because you have the range
extender.
To Richard’s point, we’re working together, because if we can solve the delicacies and
detail associated with developing lithium manganese cell chemistry and packaging it up
into a battery that started one day as a cell phone power cell, if we can make that work in
a harsh environment like an automobile where there are temperature changes, humidity,
dust, debris— it’s really a violent environment. If we can make that work, I think we can
work on the permitting, too.
KERY CURTIS
One of the things that’s been talked about, the upside potential for electric cars in the
homes and everywhere, is the idea of supplying electricity from the vehicles to the grid
through this so- called smart grid and so forth. So the question is how far away are we
from that and each of you can take a crack at that. Is it reasonable anytime in the future
to expect that a homeowner could wind up getting paid for supplying power to PG& E
overnight or during the day if his car’s sitting there?
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RICHARD LOWENTHAL
Everyone’s probably going to want to say something about this. Our charging stations will
do that. We design our stations so they’re bidirectional; every one of ours has a meter
in it, so we’ll know if you put energy into the grid or take it out. So all those things you
can do with a solar panel about measuring and doing net metering and seeing whether
you’re providing energy to the grid or vice versa, you can do with our stations. But the real
question is, do you want to use that asset— the battery in your car— that way? Because
there is some life left in it. Tony talked about what happens in ten years or 150,000 miles
or sol, when the battery doesn’t have the capacity it used to have. The question for the
homeowner is, what’s that worth? Is it worth enough to use your battery in that way? I think
we’re a ways off from that and we really want to use that battery to fuel the vehicle and get
you to work and back. So let’s look at that a little bit later.
JIT BHATTACHARYA
I’ll speak about this a little bit more from the technology side of things. Richard really
touched on the question, do you want to be using your battery in that way? As a vehicle
manufacturer, when we’re looking at these electric vehicles, knowing that these batteries
have a finite cycle life, that’s a big question we’re trying to answer, and it’s going to take a
lot more data, a lot more understanding. More than anything else, it’s going to take vehicles
in the field, and that’s something that a lot of manufacturers are working toward. The one
thing that goes without saying: The more data that we have— the more intelligence we
have around these systems— the more we are going to be able to optimize, and create
that bidirectional system of communicating with the grid, of communicating with the home.
Those are critical features in order for us to optimize the use of electric vehicles and make
them really functional the way a driver is dealing with them.
TONY POSAWA TZ
Let me try a different perspective representing the Chevrolet Volt team and how we’re
looking at this thing. First and foremost, to make this new electrified vehicle era work, we
have to make the cars work; we have to make the batteries last. To the points that Richard
and Jit made, those are the first priorities, and if that doesn’t work, then much of the long-term
vision that we seek won’t happen.
But let me share with you a couple of quick stories here that relate our focus in this regard.
We think there’s tremendous value to providing the capability to load- manage, load- shed,
peak- shave— whatever terminology you want to use— electric vehicles when they are
taxing the grid during the day, as we talked about. Mark said it very well: You’d want to
charge these cars overnight when the grid is not being utilized, when you’re sleeping,
when the car’s not driving. That’s the primary charging episode and situation. But if you
were charging during the day, wouldn’t it be nice, then, to offer that capability to the grid
and perhaps even create some value and monetize that capability? We have an interesting
technology on the Volt called OnStar, it’s something that we’ve developed for 14 years at
General Motors, and it’s a huge enabler for us to create a smart car to talk to the smart grid
to talk to the smart appliances.
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Let me cite a quick example, and then we’ll let Mark close this out because he’s the most
qualified to talk on this subject. Today our OnStar telemetric wireless platform can send
a signal to assist authorities in a stolen vehicle high- speed chase and literally depower
the car to avoid a high- speed chase and apprehend the criminal. I recently saw a video
that showcased a police trooper pulling up behind a car. He had his video camera on,
and it caught the guy try to scramble through the sunroof, and we sent a command to
lock the sunroof so the trooper could apprehend the crook. Given the capability we have
today, I think in a stationary vehicle, if a utility asks us to stop a charging event because
it’s the middle of August and three in the afternoon, that’s something that we would gladly
afford and provide that technology for, because the health of the grid depends on it. This
relationship we’re forming with our new fueling partner is very, very important.
MARK DUVA LL
I think everyone that works in the electric vehicle industry, whether you’re on the utilities
side or the vehicle side, would say that it’s important that the batteries first run the wheels,
drive the wheels, and that we then look at more advanced things. So I think the first step is
really to establish what we would call smart charging; it’s kind of a corny name, but you’ll
hear it again and again and again. It means that we will synchronize how these vehicles
work with the electric system so that we’ll be charging off- peak. Utilities will be designing
low rates to encourage drivers to charge off- peak. Today, if you are a PG& E customer, you
can get an off- peak rate for your electric vehicle at six cents per kilowatt- hour. That’s like
buying gas at about 50 cents a gallon, or less, so that is really as close as you will ever
come again to driving that inexpensively.
These are really good steps, and they set us off to do something in the future. Solar
energy at the home— residential solar energy— was very good at allowing people to start
to become power generators. You use the grid to store your electricity because at noon,
when your solar panel’s at its highest output, chances are you’re at work, so you don’t
really need that energy. You put it out on the grid, and then you ask for it back later that
day, and you pay the difference. With electric vehicles, there could be something like that
in the future, but first let’s get as many out on the road as possible and get the cost down
and really understand what makes this industry go, and by then we’ll understand if that
makes economic sense. It’s still not clear that you can sell power back to the grid through
your car, pay for the equipment, liability, and still have it be profitable.
KERY CURTIS
Thank you, Mark Duvall, of the Electric Power Research Institute. Here’s a somewhat
challenging question from an audience member, specifically for Tony: Tony, if we look at
the specifications of the Volt, it is obviously overbuilt: more battery capacity than it will use,
larger electric motor than it needs to power an average sedan, etc. Does this mean that
we may have seen this platform used in other vehicle applications? Is it valid, what the
questioner is saying?
TONY POSAWA TZ
Certainly the Volt is built with a lot of capability. We put a lot of our most precious talent
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and treasure into the Volt program, and it’s really built on the shoulders of many of our other
efforts. We could have not done the Volt program, if we had not done an EV1, if we had not
done a fuel cell, if we had not done the hybrid program General Motors had done, if we had
not taken the initiative to look at the various biofuel options, and the like. We feel that the
Volt is a very, very capably engineered product.
To Jit’s point, I’m going to punctuate a very important point that the fun- to- drive element of
this car is incredible. There are a few people in the room smiling at me right now who drove
the car this morning. When I talk about instantaneous torque, no transmission shifts, the
eerie quiet of a car— that just gives you a whole different peaceful experience. In a Volt, we
have set this thing up to have a wider track. The center of the gravity of the battery makes
the riding and handling experience even more incredible. But back to the question, the
Volt is not a singular play for General Motors. We chose an existing vehicle platform, our
architectural parent vehicle, so that we could perhaps build other models on it, and if they
happen to be a bigger model, a crossover SUV or whatever, the capability that exists in the
propulsion system has to be able to propel a vehicle like that, a bigger vehicle.
So these are things that we’re studying in the future. We haven’t finalized what happens
after Volt, but General Motors is sincerely and absolutely committed to create products
that are electrically driven, that build off the learnings from the Volt. But everything has
to be built on a successful Volt, and that’s why the Volt really has specifications that will
delight customers— such as driving from zero to 60 in eight seconds. If you get more than
one charge a day, you may be able to avoid using any fuel on an annual basis. And we’ve
talked about the cost benefits. We think there are a lot of opportunities in the future, so stay
tuned.
KERY CURTIS
I have three interrelated questions from the audience, all for Richard. I’m going to give you
all three at once: How do people pay to charge at one of your stations? Are there different
requirements— do some vehicles need a different kind of charging than others, and how do
you handle that? And, finally, how long does it take to charge the car at a public charging
station, and does it make sense if you’re shopping or something?
RICHARD LOWENTHAL
Good questions. First of all, how do you pay? Our stations have the ability for you to pay
with a credit card, and you can either use a loyalty card, like FastTrak, where it takes
money periodically out of your credit card, or you can use a credit card by calling a toll- free
number, or you can use the wireless credit cards, but it’s a little bit unusual. Most of the
owners of the stations won’t ask us to collect money, so most of the stations you’re going
to encounter will actually be free. These are people incentivizing you to use their parking
lot, or maybe it’s your employer or maybe it’s your local grocery store that wants you to
come and stay for a long time while you charge your vehicle. So we’re going to see a lot
of free stations. We leave that up to the station owner, whether they want to charge or not.
If they do, it goes by credit card, and you swipe this little ID tag at the station and it knows
who you are.
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The U. S., fortunately, has standardized on a connector for the vehicles, so the vehicles
you’ll see from the major manufacturers will have the same connector on them, which
allows you to use a public infrastructure. If you were a driver like I was ten years ago in
the trial in California, there were really four different standards out there, which led to
some difficulties, but, fortunately, we don’t have that case now. There’s a standardized
connector in the U. S., so that’s good; we’re not quite there in the rest of the world. Our
shipments are only 50 percent in the U. S., and, for example, in Italy, as you might expect,
they have six different connectors, which are all quite elegant, but they haven’t quite licked
that problem, but it’s good in the U. S. You won’t have a problem with that.
With regard to charge time, the cars generally, on average, if you put them in a pool, they
take about four hours to charge from completely depleted to completely full, but you tend
not to do that. In an average day you drive 29 miles, and so that takes much less time.
You’re talking now more about charging for an hour per day. You won’t even notice because
it will be where you park anyway. And will it help to charge while you’re at Costco? Well,
it’ll help Costco because you’ll linger longer, but it does help the car, too. These batteries
have no memory, so everything you can do to keep the batteries up is good. I always leave
my car plugged in when I’m at work; that way I’ve got the full range of the vehicle any time
I want to go somewhere during the day. So those of us who drive electric cars now tend
to think of charging as part of the parking experience. If you’re going to park, you charge,
and that way, you’ve given up the pleasure of going to the gas station. You need to park
anyway, so it’s just a part of parking.
KERY CURTIS
Thank you, Richard.
MARK DUVA LL
We did a survey several years ago about how people would view charging, because, at that
time, the common wisdom in the auto- industry was that it was seen as an inconvenience:
Oh, I’ve got to plug this car in every day. And out of that survey, seven out of ten people
said that they would strongly prefer to charge at home rather than go to the gas station.
One in ten people did say they would prefer to go to the gas station, so it takes all kinds.
KERY CURTIS
Weirdos, obviously. Here’s a question from the audience. Looking down the road a few
decades, the question is, are there limits to electricity becoming the solution to greenhouse
gas emissions from the transportation sector as a whole? Are there any parts of the system
where it might not work?
RICHARD LOWENTHAL
Well, let me tackle one piece of that, which is the limit on the vehicle end. One of the nice
things about electric motors is they’re about 90 percent efficient, compared to a gasoline
engine, which is about 20 percent efficient. So your gasoline car has a radiator, and most
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of the gasoline you put in the car goes up as heat out of the radiator. You’ll notice EVs
don’t have a radiator. That’s because most of the energy that goes in the EV spins the
wheels, so this is a very, very efficient way to move the vehicle. There still is, as Mark
said, a lot of work to be done on generation, but as far a vehicle goes, this is a great way
to move you around.
KERY CURTIS
Thank you. One of the things that keep coming up when you’re talking about electric
vehicles is battery swapping. So you’re driving along, and you run out of juice in your
battery, and you pull into a station, and the gas station or the service station person
will take your battery out and put another one in, and then you can go on your way. I’m
paraphrasing this audience member’s question, so I’ll just keep doing that: What does it
take to make that kind of a network of battery- swapping stations work?
RICHARD LOWENTHAL
I’ll talk at the risk of talking about one of my competitors. The biggest challenge, first, is
the interchangeable battery, and as much as Jit and Tony love each other here, there’s
a five- foot long T- shaped battery in the Volt. It’s not going to fit in Jit’s motorcycle. The
interchangeability of batteries hasn’t really been worked out, and so far there’s just one
manufacturer that wants to have this swappable battery, so you’ve got to get the auto
makers to agree on the new “ D” cell, which we haven’t quite gotten to. The second piece of
that is the big challenge in converting to another fuel— and we’ve seen it with hydrogen—
building up an acceptable infrastructure so you can go anywhere you want. The reason
electricity is nice is that Mark has already made it so that we have electricity everywhere,
and the reason that gasoline, or the other fuels that Tony’s vehicle uses, is good as a fuel
for the long- range trip is that we’ve got gasoline everywhere. To get these battery- swap
stations everywhere is very, very difficult. We expect to be able to refuel every 30 miles.
That’s a lot of those things to get built out there, so it’s just a tough challenge to deploy in
the U. S.
MARK DUVA LL
I think you’ll hear more about this; there’s a company in Silicon Valley working on this. You’ll
hear more about two things: one is battery exchange; the other is called fast charging.
Fast charging is, instead of pulling into one of Richard’s stations and charging for a few
hours, you would pull into a much larger station and it would pump DC energy directly
into your battery. You could charge in maybe 30 minutes. If you just needed to get home,
maybe five minutes, so sometimes it’s called quick charging.
These are ways to make electric vehicles more usable. They both have some merits;
however, they are expensive— very expensive— technology, and they force you to create
an infrastructure that looks more like a grid, evenly spaced on a map, so that I can drive
anywhere between all these different points and have a charger somewhere, whereas if
you want to pump the most electricity into vehicles, you look at clustering, so the chargers
are located where people are parking, which means at home, at work, at shopping malls,
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in dense urban areas. No guy wants to own the charger that’s halfway between LA and
Barstow and try and make money off that, because only one electric vehicle passes there
every couple of weeks, so the challenges of making that grid— we would have to figure it
out, because I doubt you can do even one of them fully, let alone both types of technologies.
But you’ll hear much more about it; it’s not a settled debate.
TONY POSAWA TZ
Or you can have an extended- range feature on your vehicle and utilize one of the 170,000
existing refueling stations until better technology and infrastructure are in place.
KERY CURTIS
Why am I not surprised that Tony Posawatz would make that comment?
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SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES
Mark Duvall, Ph. D.
Mark Duvall is director of electric transportation at the Electric Power Research Institute,
also known as EPRI. EPRI is an independent, nonprofit center for public interest in energy
and environmental collaborative research. Dr. Duvall is responsible for EPRI’s research
and development program for electric transportation, including electric plug- in hybrid and
fuel- cell vehicle programs, and related advanced infrastructure. He oversees a number of
partnerships and collaborations between EPRI and electric utilities, automotive companies,
local and federal state agencies, national laboratories, and academic research institutions.
His work currently is focused on plug- in hybrid electric vehicle research, development and
demonstrations in collaboration with major automotive manufacturers, such as the EPRI
Daimler- Chrysler PHEV Sprinter Van Program— advanced battery system development
and testing, electric charging infrastructure, and environmental analysis of air quality
and greenhouse gas emissions and characteristics of plug- in hybrids and other electric
transportation technologies. Prior to joining EPRI, Dr. Duvall was principal development
engineer at the Hybrid Electric Vehicle Center of the University of California at Davis. He
holds B. S. and M. S. degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of California at
Davis and a Ph. D. in mechanical engineering from Purdue University.
Tony posawatz
Tony Posawatz is vehicle line director of General Motors new Chevy Volt. Mr. Posawatz
has led the development of the Volt and continues to help lead the development of the
2011 production vehicle. He has served as a GM vehicle line director for the past 11
years. He and his development teams have received seven General Motors Chairman’s
Honors Awards for excellence and have overseen the development of cars and trucks,
from concept initiation to production and market launch, in four different countries. Mr.
Posawatz is also co- chairman of the Electric Drive Transportation Association.
Jit Bhattacharya
Jit Bhattacharya is CEO of Mission Motors, creators of the Mission One electric motorcycle.
He began as COO in 2008 and assumes the leadership role as the company prepares to
bring the Mission One to market. His engineering background includes experience with
the product design firm Ideo. He also holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at
University of California at Berkeley. Mr. Bhattacharya has been involved with energy and
clean tech for over five years, most recently as co- president of the Berkeley Energy and
Resources Collaborative, where he helped lead the launch of UC Berkeley’s new Center
for Energy and Environmental Innovation.
Richard lowenthal
Richard Lowenthal is founder and CEO of Coulomb Technologies, Inc., developers of electric
vehicle charging station infrastructure. He was instrumental in starting several companies,
including Lightera, Pipal Systems and Procket Networks. He has served as vice president
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and general manager of Cisco Wide Area Network Access Products division and was co-founder
and vice president of engineering for Stardent Computers and vice president of
engineering for Conversion Technologies. He is also a former mayor of Cupertino and is
deeply involved in the nonprofit world. He holds a B. S. degree in electrical engineering
from University of California at Berkeley.
Kerry Curtis ( moderato r)
Kerry Curtis chairs The Commonwealth Club Environment & Natural Resources member-led
forum and is a member of The Commonwealth Club Board of Governors
MTI FOUNDER
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