I still do not get the electric hype...there are so many arguments against their viability that nobody ever brings up and the moment someone does, they are battered with criticism for challenging the EV cult. Maybe this question/answer with Bill Reinert, one of the chief developers on the Prius will shed some light...
K.M.: Today, manufacturers are going multiple directions in methods to power cars. You spent your career studying the pros and cons of the advanced technologies used in cars and in trying to foresee which ones made the most sense. Many people, including Elon Musk, expect that electric cars can solve our transportation problems. You saw through that pipe dream long ago and maintain your position that electric cars are not the best answer, and time has proven you right so far from the demand side. What are your current thoughts about electric cars?
Reinert: Essentially my position on electric cars hasn’t changed. There’s nothing promising beyond the lithium battery on the battery horizon. The lithium battery has tremendous shortcomings for cars, for example, it doesn’t maintain a full charge in hot weather which creates a battery degradation cycle. Some Leaf owners are only getting 50 miles per charge, now, following the Leaf’s battery life degradation. Even the Tesla’s Model S, with its biggest battery, when driven like a normal car can’t always deliver 200 miles of range and the superchargers are currently 200 miles away from each other. To get from one supercharger to another you have to hyper mile that car. That means you have to drive around 50 miles an hour because wind resistance increases at the cube of speed, and you have to keep your air conditioner and other accessories off.
To give a Tesla much extra driving range, the battery weight required would greatly decrease the distance it could travel per kilowatt and also greatly increase its cost. In comparison, by adding just a little weight in the way of a few extra gallons of gas to a 50 mile-per-gallon hybrid car, there can be a big extension of the hybrid’s driving range. While I don’t expect the battery car to get dramatically better, the internal combustion engine is getting phenomenally better, like the great little Ford Ecoboost three cylinder engine.
But I will say there is a worthwhile role for electrification in the car and that’s in the high performance hybrid. To illustrate this we can look at racing. Racing development was what used to help engineers develop better cars for the road. Then, it got to the point where road cars became way more sophisticated than racing cars. But now if you look at Formula One, they don’t talk about hybrids, they talk about energy harvesting, so that anytime you let up on the gas, energy gets stored. By storing massive amounts of energy into a battery or ultra capacitor, the cars are fast, and, they get great fuel economy.
Given that the bar gets raised all the time, it’s hard to see where the case for an electric car really comes in. Is it for carbon reduction? No, you’d have to decarbonize the whole grid to make that case, and that’s not likely to happen. I don’t know the case for the electric car. There’s going to continue to be a market for them but it’s going to be a very small market, not a captive market.