plug-in hybrids

Sitting in a Connecticut warehouse, the very first Poulsen Hybrid looks like a standard Honda Civic with immobilizer boots attached to its rear wheels. It is, one would have to say, not the most visually elegant of solutions to the pressing problem of using electric power to extend the range of the internal-combustion automobile. But it's also both practical and affordable.

Ulrik Poulsen and his converted Honda Civic.

Ulrik Poulsen is a mechanical engineer and Danish immigrant whose Shelton, Connecticut-based Bridgeport Magnetics Group makes a range of transformers, power supplies, magnetic cores, audio cables and other products. One new product for Con Edison is an isolation transformer designed to prevent people from getting electric shocks from defective streetlights. But Poulsen is branching out with a bolt-on kit that, he says, can transform ordinary cars into a form of plug-in hybrid. And he's entered his invention as a contestant in the Progressive Auto X Prize, which carries a $10 million purse.

The concept is relatively simple: Two of the company's seven-horsepower (five kilowatt) disc-shaped DC electric motors are bolted onto the rear wheels of the host car, connected by cables to a controller, battery charger and 4.5-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack in the trunk. The system, adding approximately 200 pounds to the car and taking up 20 percent of trunk space, acts as range extender. The motors do not drive the car, but kick in to provide a power boost between 15 and 60 miles per hour. Regenerative braking helps keep the batteries charged.

There are several companies converting Priuses and other hybrids to plug-in status, but Poulsen may be the only contender starting with ordinary gasoline cars. For $10,000, for instance, HyMotion will turn your ordinary Prius into a 100-mpg plug-in with a five-kilowatt-hour battery pack.

Poulsen installation is not a do-it-yourself operation, but an authorized dealer can accomplish it in as little as four hours. If the system works as advertised, a 30-mile-per-gallon car will be raised to 55 mpg.

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President-elect Barack Obama went into the Motor City's lion's den last year, speaking before a sold-out audience convened by the Detroit Economic Club. He told the assembled business and political leaders not what they wanted to hear, but what they needed to hear.

"'For years," he said, "while foreign competitors were investing in more fuel-efficient technology for their vehicles, American automakers were spending their time investing in bigger, faster cars....Here in Detroit, three giants of American industry are hemorrhaging jobs and profits as foreign competitors answer the rising global demand for fuel-efficient cars....The need to drastically change our energy policy is no longer a debatable proposition. It is not a question of whether, but how; not a question of if, but when. For the sake of our security, our economy, our jobs and our planet, the age of oil must end in our time."

Obama then described a plan to subsidize 10 percent of the Big Three's retiree health care costs (as much as $7 billion) if the companies would invest half of that savings in fuel-efficiency research. His alternative idea was $3 billion over 10 years to remake auto plants for a new generation of clean cars.

Obama wants a million plug-in hybrids on the road by 2015, a plan that could be derailed by insufficient lithium-ion battery capacity by then. He has a 10-year, $150 billion renewable energy plan.

Felix Kramer of CalCars.org, an early and consistent voice for plug-in hybrids, thinks the Obama plan is achievable. "Scaling up to produce a million plug-in vehicles in six years is far less challenging than what auto industry achieved after Pearl Harbor, switching in a year from cars and trucks to tanks and planes," he said. "And supplying batteries for those vehicles is attainable, especially since we have good enough technology to get started now."

Kramer also likes Obama's plan to have half of all new federal new car purchases by 2012 all-electric or plug-in. "That firm commitment to purchase 30,000 or more vehicles annually will be welcome to carmakers gearing up to produce plug-ins. It won't be hard to deliver," he said.

All well and good. But none of the proposals Obama has put on the table so far, by themselves, will turn around the increasingly dire situation for American automakers, which have indeed let foreign companies take the lead in fuel efficiency. The automakers need immediate and concentrated help, and they need clear direction. It's hard to see how a GM/Chrysler merger--bringing together two companies with SUV-heavy product lines--is a clear answer.

It's a cliche to say that Obama has a lot on his plate. But he can't defer action on the auto industry for long. He clearly understands the issues, and the imperatives of a quick turnaround. The Senator from Illinois is proving adept at getting his transition team in place. Let's hope that putting the ailing automakers on a green path is a day one priority.

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Can you feel the electricity? There's a growing consensus that the next generation of automobiles will, to one degree or another, be powered by batteries. The most likely scenario is that a fling with plug-in hybrids will lead to a serious romance and eventually marriage to pure battery electrics. Yes, to make this sustainable we'll have to shift some of our electric grid from its current 50 percent dependence on coal power, but that is an achievable goal.

It may be that the batteries themselves will be harder. The marketplace has arrived at a consensus that the lithium-ion (li-ion) battery is the only real choice for the coming electric cars. But li-ion is also kind of problematic. Sony commercialized lightweight lithium-ion batteries for electronics in 1991; since then, most of us use them every day in laptops, mobile phones and other devices.

The Th!nk City: a 110-mile range.

The great advantage of li-ion (aside from the fact that it's relatively non-toxic) is that it has twice the energy density of, say, nickel-cadmium batteries. But what works great in your relatively coddled cellphone is a challenge in the automotive environment, where the batteries will have to withstand extremes of temperatures and go through really fast charging cycles. Li-ion has also had stability issues -- remember those Sony laptop fires? Well, that company just recalled 100,000 more laptop li-ions because of fire hazards.

I hear that some of the most interesting approaches to li-ion car batteries increase energy storage using the controversial engineering of tiny materials known as nanotechnology.

The li-ion contenders are mostly small companies contracting with automakers. Johnson Controls/Saft has worked on batteries for the Saturn Vue plug-in hybrid. A123 had been a frontrunner to deliver batteries for the forthcoming Chevrolet Volt plug-in, but it now appears that the contract is going to the South Korea-based LG Chem.

A bit of a wild card is Ener1, whose subsidiary EnerDel builds li-ions in a factory in Indiana using technology developed at the Argonne National Labs. "The company's new, highly reliable and safe batteries are designed to be lighter in weight, occupy less space, provide more power, more energy, and have a longer life than the nickel-metal-hydride batteries found in today's hybrid vehicles," Ener1 says. But it would say that, wouldn't it?

Since Korean technology is key here, Ener1 just bought a controlling interest in one of that country's biggest li-ion producers, Enertech International. In announcing the deal, CEO Charles Gassenheimer says he sees a potential market for automotive li-ion batteries at $20 to 30 billion, dwarfing the $7 billion spent annually on consumer electronics.

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When the automobile was new in 1900, there was no clear consensus which technology would triumph. Would it be gasoline, steam or electricity? The smart money was on electricity, which shows that the smart money can be wrong.

We're in a similar period now, trying to find what comes after the straightforward, gas-burning internal-combustion engine. There's still a lot of fog, and it's unlikely to clear soon. But from where I sit today, here are eight leading technologies, listed in priority order from most-likely to could-be-a-contender:

1. Plug-In Hybrids. There's no question that plug-in hybrids, with 40-mile all-electric range and the ability to recharge from standard house current, will be on the market in the next two or three years. The leading (and only) mainstream players are General Motors (which plans on introducing a Saturn Vue plug-in hybrid) and Toyota (with an adapted Prius). Ambitious startups (Fisker, BYD) are also planning to field plug-in hybrids. The big challenge for all of them is developing a lithium-ion battery pack that can stand up to repeated discharge and recharge cycles and still demonstrate the longevity that today's nickel-metal-hydride hybrid battery packs have had. GM and Toyota talk about 2010 introductions, but battery development headaches could delay that.

2. Battery Electrics. Again, it's all about the batteries. Lithium-ion is the current leader, but is it ready to carry four passengers in a fully featured, crashworthy sedan more than 200 miles? It's time to be cautiously optimistic. Nissan has plans to bring an electric car to the U.S. by 2010. Chrysler, which has been lagging in green technology, surprised the world by suddenly announcing a concept car known as the Dodge EV, a sports car with a lithium-ion battery pack. It claimed 150-mile range and blistering acceleration of zero to 60 in less than five seconds. Some Chrysler electric is to be on the market by 2010. The sports car was clearly aimed at the Tesla Roadster, a California-built $100,000 exotic which (like the Chrysler) sports a Lotus-designed body.

3. Range Extenders. General Motors is making a big, bold step forward by building the Chevrolet Volt, with production slated for the end of 2010 (as a 2011 model). The Volt is something new: an electric car with a gas motor whose only function (it's not connected to the wheels) is to keep the electric motor spinning after the batteries are depleted. GM had this field (also known as "series hybrids") to itself, but Chrysler has jumped into the fray with range-extender versions of the Town and Country minivan and Jeep Wrangler. As with plug-in hybrids, 40 miles can be enjoyed in battery-only mode, but the gas engine extends that to 400 miles or more.

4. Very Small Cars. It doesn't have to be a hybrid; in fact, some of our current hybrids, based on SUVs, are actually gas guzzlers. High fuel prices have created a strong American market for very small cars, and carmakers such as Ford have been emboldened to start selling in the U.S. tiny, fuel- and space-efficient cars once relegated only to Europe or Asia. Consider the Toyota iQ. The minuscule car is just 118 inches long, but can carry three adults (plus a child)! It reportedly achieves 60/51 mpg fuel economy. The Toyota of 10 years ago would never have contemplated selling iQs in the U.S., but now it is definitely being considered.

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Though he didn't have much to say about it at the just-concluded Republican National Convention, where most of the energy talk concerned offshore drilling, John McCain went on record last June as favoring a $300 million federal prize to deliver an automotive battery with "the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrid or electric cars."

The constantly evolving Chevrolet Volt: Whose batteries will it use? (General Motors photo)

McCain also said he would stiffen fines on automakers that play fast and loose with Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, and pump up incentives for developing alternative fuels.

Remember, he said all this back in June when prices were over $4 a gallon. With the tiny easing of prices since then, perhaps the McCain campaign has back-burnered this bright idea. Besides, he makes more headlines when he talked about offshore drilling.

But, wow, $300 million, that's a lot of money! I agree with McCain that this kind of competition can foster a lot of useful innovation. But I'd have to be convinced we could quickly develop technology to "leapfrog" what is going into prototype electric cars and trucks right now. And the fast-moving global race to develop clean cars may be all the incentive cutting-edge companies need.

The state of the art for batteries today is lithium-ion. And a leading player is Massachusetts-based A123 Systems, which the Department of Energy (presumed host of McCain's contest) would not have to go far to find -- they're already working together. A123 is well connected both at DOE and the auto companies with batteries for the next generation of hybrids, as well as plug-in hybrids.

A123's battery technology is being considered for what I would call General Motors' most important project: The Chevrolet Volt, which is tentatively scheduled for showrooms in 2010. The Volt is a new kind of hybrid, with a gasoline motor that's not connected to the wheels -- instead, it's there to keep the batteries charged and provide much greater range than is possible today with conventional electric cars.

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