The next step may be the plug-in hybrid, which is not the backwards step its name suggests. Unlike the electric cars of the 1990s, none of today's hybrids needs to be plugged in but if plugging were an option it would be a good idea. Andrew Frank and his team at the University of California Davis' Hybrid Electric Vehicle Centre are working exclusively on plug-in hybrids, which can operate as pure-electric vehicles over short distances (up to 60 miles, with a large enough battery pack) but can switch to a hybrid system when needed. Since the average American driver travels about 30 miles a day, plug-in hybrids could be recharged overnight, when electricity is cheaper to produce, and need never use petrol at all, except on longer trips.
Nice hack, but precisely because the cars will work fine if you don't charge it, I wonder how much incentive people will have to incur the (marginal) inconvenience of plugging them in at night.
UPDATE: Paul Hoffman asks in the comments section whether it's desirable to power one's car this way. Here's Phil Karn's analysis of his EV1 versus a conventional car. Karn estimated that the emissions from the EV1 were 3% of those from a conventional car. Now, a real hybrid in electric-only mode is more efficient than an EV1 and has an overall efficiency about 3x the 17mpg that Phil assumed for gasoline mode, but it seems at least plausible that one could obtain a substantial emissions boost, particularly if you use non-emitting electrical generation methods such as nuclear or wind.
I imagine most people would find it more convenient to plug in their car at night than to make a trip to the gas station. There's nothing I hate more than starting the car up in the morning and discovering I probably don't have enough gas to make it to work (necessitating a 15-minute diversion).
I wonder what the weight and volume differences are to go from the current battery pack size to a 30mi size?
Depends on two factors I can see:
1. will it work out cheaper to plug it in at night, for the cost of a week of typical daily commutes, compared to gas? smart shoppers would go to the bother, if so.
2. the UI for "plugging it in" can cause a lot of trouble here. For example, the shortlived EVs, like GM's EV1, had a big problem, according to Doug Korthof -- apparently there was virtually no standardisation on plugs, meaning that to charge up at home and at recharge stations along a route, you had to bring a bag of connector bits along with you! if the "plug-in" connectors are rare, incompatible, fiddly or badly-designed, this could make it effectively unusable.
BTW Kevin -- the EV1 could reportedly do 80 miles on its battery pack, as long as you didn't push it too much.
A bigger question is: do we want people to do this? Is electricity delivered to homes (and then used to move cars) really more efficient that gasoline? Sure, this might be convenient and cut down on gasoline use, but at the expense of using more coal, nuclear, and so on.
Yow. I didn't realize that gasoline was that high a pollutant relative to electricity. Two things, neither of which gets us anywhere close to gasoline being better than electricity for this:
- Other states use much more coal than California does, driving up the country-wide pollutants per mile
- I think the transmission loss is closer to 50%.
Still, electric cars are still way better for low-pollution driving. This was my father's conjecture 35 years ago when he wrote the article in Scientific American on electric cars.