Goodbye battery, hello fuel cell

As a small pack of battery-powered cars is put to sleep, new fuel cells make possible zero-emissions vehicles that really do hum.

By Spencer Reiss

The battery-powered car has died several deaths in the last 10 months, due to a lack of range, speed and power and an acute sales deficiency. A spokesman for General Motors said the EV1, which was put to sleep this month, had been “a valuable experiment.”

Meanwhile, deep in clean, green British Columbia, Firoz Rasul is revving up the power for a next-generation, environmentally hip automobile. An amiable 47-year-old Kenyan of Persian descent, with an engineering degree from the University of Hertfordshire and a McGill MBA, he’s a walking ad for globalism — and the CEO of Ballard Power Systems, the world’s leading maker of automotive fuel cells. Backed by a stock price that has doubled since Christmas, he’ll happily tell you why the seeming triumph of Titanic SUVs swilling buck-a-gallon gas may not be the final act in the automotive story. “The Stone Age” he reminds us, “didn’t end for a lack of stone.”

Time out for a quick electrochemistry lesson: the fuel cell. Hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O) go in one side; H20 and electric power come out the other. Quiet. Squeaky clean, as long as you don’t mind the odd puff of steam. With a bit more technology, you can even substitute methanol or propane for pure hydrogen. Fuel cells have been a next great thing since a tinkering English judge named William Grove put the first working model together in 1839. You just had to be NASA going to the moon or building a space shuttle to even think about it, because fuel cells were too expensive and heavy.

That was then. Today you can visit a little demo area at Ballard’s suburban Vancouver research lab and flick on a slick little hydrogen generator the size of a shoebox, connected to a high-intensity light; all you hear is the cooling fan. There’s also a portable TV/VCR combo and a nifty home backup generator that, as ideas at least, are pretty high on the coolness scale. And this month Ballard and Coleman Powermate, the Sunbeam subsidiary that makes generators and air compressors, announced that they’re teaming up on 50 different prototypes of portable power products.

But the real thing is 20 minutes away, at the Port Coquitlam municipal bus yard; coolness level: zero. Charlie the driver fires up — if that’s the right phrase — one of the resident Ballard prototypes. It goes. It stops. It runs sleepy commuters into downtown Vancouver every morning. In other words, it’s a bus, albeit one that sounds vaguely like a large refrigerator and has big blue letters reading ZERO EMISSIONS VEHICLE painted along the roof. It’s electric, but there isn’t a nasty, leaden, quick-draining-and-slow-recharging battery in sight.

By 2003, 55 Ballard-powered buses are on contract to be humming around California cities. Other prototypes are already on the road in Stuttgart, Germany; Orlando, Fla.; and Chicago — Mayor Richard Daley celebrated their arrival with the consummate affirmation of greenness: downing a glass of exhaust water. That still leaves what the nice people at Ballard do not like to call the Hindenberg problem. (For the record, compressed hydrogen is not appreciably more hazardous than the propane people routinely use to power outdoor barbecues.) Fortunately, the impressive array of machinery needed to get the H and O feeds just right make enough noise to avert an unintended consequence discovered last year in Portland, Ore., where an ultra-quiet electric-powered light rail system killed four unsuspecting bystanders last year.

It will be a while before fuel cells power your brand-new sport utility vehicle — power-to-weight and cost-efficiency ratios are still a problem. But 2004 is a red-letter year for fuel cells: As the law now stands, that’s when California will begin requiring as much as 10 percent of every major car makers’ sales to be zero emissions. A trendy new crop of electric/gasoline hybrids gets close. But Honda says it will jump the zero-emissions gun with a production fuel-cell car by 2003, by reusing electric drive systems already developed for battery-powered cars. And a full-out, 2008 Mercedes 300 Electro is perfectly plausible. DaimlerChrysler and Ford Motor Co together have $1.25 billion riding on a joint venture with Ballard.

Ballard cut the ribbon last October on Plant One, a pilot assembly line targeted at producing 160,000 commercial units annually. And Ford and Daimler over the past month officially quit the Global Climate Coalition, an industry group that lobbies against environmental restrictions. As Gordon Gecko might have said in “Wall Street,” clean is good.

So hats off to Firoz Rasul and the other innovative geeks who are angling for the 21st century to live up to its advance billing. An economy that runs on photons. The mayor of Chicago drinking water from the exhaust pipe of a bus. Cars that really do hum. The new millennium — gotta love it.

: Spencer Reiss escaped from San Francisco to join the Gilder Technology Group in Massachusetts, where he co-edits New Economy Watch. More Spencer Reiss

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Former gadfly Chris Paine goes inside the car industry for the cutthroat drama of "Revenge of the Electric Car"

By Andrew O'Hehir

Topics:Electric Cars, Auto Industry, Movies, Our Picks, Documentaries, Revenge of the Electric Car

Never let it be said that activist documentaries don’t make a difference, even if the difference they make is never predictable. Filmmaker Chris Paine began as a gadfly outsider to the auto industry, capturing a distinctive strain of eco-grass-roots rage in his 2006 “Who Killed the Electric Car?,” which explored the short and unhappy life of the EV1, General Motors’ late-’90s all-electric vehicle. By 2004, G.M. had reclaimed and destroyed virtually all the EV1′s it had manufactured — they were leased to consumers, rather than sold — and the plug-in automobile, a long-cherished dream of environmentalists, seemed permanently entombed under parking lots full of Hummers and Escalades.

Even in writing about Paine’s first film for Salon five years ago, I got several angry letters from impassioned defenders of the internal combustion engine, who assured me that electric motors were for golf carts, and that the automotive future, like the past, belonged to petroleum. As we now know, the death of the EV1 was hardly the end of the story. Within a few months of releasing “Who Killed the Electric Car?,” Paine found himself watching legendary auto executive Bob Lutz, then G.M.’s vice chairman, drive a prototype of the Chevrolet Volt onto the floor of Detroit’s annual auto show. The widespread electrification of the passenger car, Lutz told him, was “a foregone conclusion.”

A cigar-smoking climate-change denier who’s long been seen as the car enthusiast’s car enthusiast, Lutz was about the last person in the world you expected to start shilling for electric vehicles. Then again, you wouldn’t have expected Chris Paine to make an insider documentary about auto industry competition. His fascinating and highly entertaining new movie, “Revenge of the Electric Car,” is almost like his first one turned upside down, with unprecedented access to the inner workings of G.M., Nissan and Silicon Valley start-up Tesla Motors as they battle to get new electric cars into production. His irresistible cast of characters range from Lutz, the crusty Detroit veteran, to Carlos Ghosn, the globetrotting, ultra-smooth Renault-Nissan CEO, to Tesla co-founder Elon Musk, who burned through his entire PayPal fortune launching his company, to Greg “Gadget” Abbott, a DIY Los Angeles engineer who has rebuilt vintage Porsches and Triumphs as all-electric vehicles.

Visionary entrepreneurs like Musk and Abbott, although they operate on vastly different scales, have been pursuing the electric-car dream for years. But as Wall Street Journal columnist Dan Neil explains in the film, guys like Ghosn and Lutz saw the light very suddenly in the late 2000s, when gas prices began to rise and the global economy slid into the crapper. The business case for building electric cars went from intriguing to compelling to irresistible, and the question rapidly became who was going to get it right and reap the eventual worldwide windfall. Paine seems delighted to root for all three companies and essentially declares a three-way tie, which may be fine for the moment: Both the Chevy Volt — a plug-in hybrid rather than a true electric car — and the all-electric Nissan Leaf have sold encouragingly, although both are very new to the market, and against all odds Musk has kept Tesla alive and hopes to start mass production of his $60,000 Model S sedan next year.

Those who are legitimately concerned about the environmental costs and potential drawbacks of electric vehicles — from the (so far) prohibitive pricing to the dirty electric grid to the limited battery range — will notice that Paine continues to skirt those issues. He’s a crusading journalist when he wants to be, but when it comes to large-scale questions about whether electric cars can really replace the ones we drive today, he’s more like a cheerleader. In “Who Killed the Electric Car?” he suggested that hydrogen-fuel technology, which is also being explored by the auto manufacturers and oil companies, is essentially a scam designed to ensure their long-term supremacy, but he does not revisit any of that here. (My 7-year-old son, who knows more about this issue than I do, forcefully disagrees with Paine on that one.) For whatever it’s worth, Dan Neil, the Journal’s astute (and always entertaining) auto columnist, is on board; he’s been “saying farewell” to a long career of owning and driving gasoline cars over the last few years, he says, and will never buy one again.

“Revenge of the Electric Car” is now playing at the Sunshine Cinema in New York, the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, N.Y., and the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles. It opens Oct. 28 in Nashville; Nov. 4 in Boston, Phoenix, Portland, Ore., San Francisco and Santa Fe, N.M; Nov. 11 in Ann Arbor, Mich., Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Minneapolis, Sacramento, Calif., San Diego, Santa Rosa, Calif., and Seattle; Nov. 18 in Philadelphia; Nov. 23 in St. Louis; Nov. 25 in Denver and Washington; and Dec. 2 in Atlanta, with more cities to follow.

: More Andrew O'Hehir

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As more electric cars fill the roads, cities struggle to provide fast-charging stations with no industry standards

By Michelle Fitzsimmons

Topics:Electric Cars, Alternative Energy

As electric cars zip down America’s roads in record numbers, cities must pick up the task of supplying the fast growing fleet with easy-access charging stations.

In the effort to get 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015, the a lack of industry standards for fast-charging stations — which allow motorists to pull in and power up in about 30 minutes — could be a major glitch. The fast-charge stations in Chicago, for instance, are designed for Japanese model plugs, not for American cars like the Ford Focus or Chevy Volt.

: Michelle Fitzsimmons is an editorial fellow at Salon.com. More Michelle Fitzsimmons

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Built with the help of the U.S. government, Chevy's innovative new vehicle is a glimpse into the future

By Jeff Karoub, Associated Press

General Motors chief executive officer Dan Akerson raises his arms next to the Chevrolet Volt with the first vehicle identification number at the General Motors Hamtramck assembly plant in Hamtramck, Mich., Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2010. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya) (Credit: AP)

Topics:Electric Cars

The 2011 Chevrolet Volt got another marketing jolt Monday, when it received the North American Car of the Year.

The car that runs on electricity for 40 miles before a backup gas engine kicks in beat out the Nissan Leaf, another electric, and Hyundai Sonata in the annual ceremony on the first day of media previews for the Detroit auto show.

The Ford Explorer won the truck of the year, the third year in a row the Dearborn-based automaker nabbed the honor. Truck finalists were the Dodge Durango, the Explorer and Jeep Grand Cherokee.

Forty-nine auto journalists from the U.S. and Canada made the picks. The vehicles are judged on innovation, design, safety, handling, driver satisfaction and value.

It’s the latest in a string of accolades for the Volt, which went on sale in limited markets in December and costs $40,280. It was named the Green Car of the Year at the Los Angeles Auto Show in November and Motor Trend and Automobile Magazine named the Volt the 2011 car of the year the same month.

General Motors Co. Vice Chairman Tom Stephens said the Volt “represents the soul” of the new GM, on the rebound after enduring a government-led bankruptcy in 2009. GM sold between 250 and 350 Chevy Volts in December and Nissan’s sales totaled less than 10 Leaf sedans in the past two weeks. Production for both is slowly ramping up.

It will be well into 2012 before both the Volt and Leaf, which costs $32,780, are available nationwide. Early demand is strong: About 50,000 people already are on waiting lists.

The Volts are being assembled in Detroit. GM predicts it will sell 10,000 of them in 2011 and between 35,000 and 45,000 in 2012. By way of comparison, Chevrolet sold 187,250 Malibu sedans in the first 11 months of 2010 with sticker prices that start at $21,975.

Stephens said the Volt is not a “science experiment” — but “meant to be a high-volume vehicle” as the industry makes early moves beyond petroleum as a primary fuel source.

Mark Fields, Ford’s president of the Americas, said the company reinvented the SUV with the Explorer, basing it on car underpinnings and improving its fuel economy over the old model. Customers, he said, wanted a rugged vehicle that can also handle suburbia.

Awards are often used by automakers in advertising.

Last year’s winners were both Ford vehicles: the Fusion Hybrid midsize sedan and Ford Transit Connect. This is the 18th year for the picks.

——

AP Auto Writer Tom Krisher contributed to this report.

——

Online: The North American Car and Truck of the Year Awards: http://www.northamericancaroftheyear.org/

: More Jeff Karoub

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The automaker will begin selling a hybrid station wagon starting next summer as either a 2011 or 2012 model

By Dan Strumpf, Associated Press

Topics:Toyota, Electric Cars

Toyota plans to roll out two new cars under the Prius name by next year, according to a dealer briefed on the plans, as the automaker seeks to turn its popular hybrid into a family of vehicles.

The Japanese automaker will begin selling a Prius station wagon starting next summer as either a 2011 or 2012 model, said Adam Lee, president of the Lee Auto Malls chain of dealerships in Maine. It will sell a plug-in version of the Prius that can get 30 miles on a charge starting later in the year, he said.

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Party says it lacks the 60 votes to pass measure that would lift cap on oil leak liabilities and push green cars

By Dina Cappiello, Associated Press

Topics:Gulf Oil Spill, Electric Cars, Energy, U.S. Senate

The worst oil spill in U.S. history and a year on track to be the hottest on record were not enough to push an energy bill through the Senate this summer.

Senate Democratic leaders announced Tuesday they don’t have the 60 votes necessary to pass a scaled-back bill that would lift the cap on oil spill liability for energy companies and jump-start electric and natural gas-powered cars.

Majority Leader Harry Reid said he was unable to find a handful of Republicans to vote for a bill.

The delay is the latest setback for Democrats trying to pass energy legislation. Late last month, they were forced to drop a limit on pollution blamed for global warming because there wasn’t enough support for it.