Range Anxiety

I haven’t really be following the growing competition in hybrid and plug-in hybrid car systems, since at the moment I don’t need a new car, and even if I did I’m a graduate student, which means no one is going to give me a car loan anyway. I believe that there is a great deal of potential in this product category, especially if some of the new technologies to provide electricity generation at home pan out. Imagine having a bank of solar cells on the roof of your garage to charge up your car, which you then use to commute. Once you’ve paid for the basic systems (possibly including a battery in the garage to store energy gathered when you’re not home), your fuel costs would be effectively zero for however long the car lasted, and your carbon footprint would be effectively zero also. But for the moment, hybrids are expensive, and the plug-in hybrids are even more so, while the pure electric vehicles have issues of their own…

Consider the case of the new Nissan Leaf, as profiled by The New York Times website. The Leaf is a pure electric vehicle, which means it does not have a gasoline motor and has no emissions whatsoever. There’s some debate as to how much it would actually cost to operate, but the EPA lists the Leaf’s annual energy costs as being about $561, which is less than the Toyota Prius and less than one-third what it would cost to buy gas for a conventional mid-sized car. Unfortunately, the EPA also lists the Leaf’s range as being just 73 miles – much less than the 100 claimed by Nissan, and significantly worse than the Prius (which can, theoretically, reach 600 miles on a full tank under optimal conditions). Even more to the point, recharging stations can be hard to come by on the open road, which means that you probably shouldn’t ever go more than 35 miles from home unless you know ahead of time where you can plug in the car…

This particular worry is known as “range anxiety” to the industry writers, and it has always been a major drawback to electric cars. If you use them exclusively for short trips – such as a short-range commute like mine, or running errands around a small town – they’re reasonably effective, but once you consider a road trip to anywhere you start having problems. In my case, even the run to Detroit to see a baseball game is out of range, and going to Ann Arbor would be impossible unless there was a public charging station I could use there – assuming I’d be there long enough for the Leaf’s battery to charge back up. This limits the utility, and therefore the desirability, of the product, and removes a significant number of customers from the potential market for this vehicle, and who’s even mentioned long-term issues like figuring out how to dispose of the car’s battery yet?

Of course, similar objections apply to bio-fuels, ethanol, hydrogen fuel cells and even “clean” diesel engines (you can’t get low-sulfur diesel fuel in many larger cities), while hybrid vehicles (including the so-called “plug-in hybrids”) have the drawback of still using gasoline for fuel, albeit in smaller quantities. It’s possible that one of the various technological fixes, such as a network of public charging stations, recharging facilities at existing gas stations, larger storage cells for electric car batteries, or portable solar power panels will solve the problem, and in a few years you’ll see pure electric cars on the road the way we’re starting to see hybrids. On the other hand, it’s possible that some other new development is coming, and all of these alternative power sources will someday seem as quaint as the steam-powered cars of the late 19th Century…

I’m just grateful that for the moment, at least, my commute is only eight minutes each way…