Electric shock
Those dreams of the e-car refuelling our economy? Not if they’re China-made.
By Andrew Cash

I admit I’m not really a car guy. When I rent a car, the conversation at the rental desk goes like this: Clerk: “We’ve got a blah blah or a blah blah..,” to which I reply, “Oh, just give me the cheapest one.”

But this time, for a trip to Pennsylvania to visit relatives, I’m handed the keys – well, there are no keys really – to a Prius, Toyota’s smash hit hybrid. Wow, this car I know about, since it’s the kind of vehicle that’s carrying the hopes of the folks who make cars, the environment that chokes on them and the taxpayer who seems increasingly on the hook for producing them.

But are all those billions we’re lending Big Auto really going to produce enough of the pollution-?free wheels greens are dreaming of?

In Pennsylvania, in the belly of car culture, green cars, electric or otherwise, seem so far way. Still, at one point, our 80-year-old uncle saunters around behind the rental. I’m thinking, “Okay, I’m going to get it for renting an import.”

Instead, he looks up with a huge approving smile. “You got one of those hybrids,” he says. “You know, I blame the oil companies for this mess.”

Even in mainstream America, you can sense the shift. But while some enviros are ready to back auto subsidies if the Detroit Three promise eco-cars, all the signs say the bailed-?out big ones will not be the companies to supply this new market.

Already far behind Japanese and South Korean carmakers in new tech, GM and its Volt e-?car project got a dash of cold water from the Obama admin recently. The White House’s determination of viability report on GM put it baldly: “While the Chevy Volt holds promise, it will likely be too expensive to be commercially successful in the short term.”

“[E-?cars] will be an important niche, but we’re 20 or 30 years away from overcoming serious shortcomings,” says auto consultant Dennis DesRosiers, addressing the capabilities of the Big Three. He rhymes off the problems: battery weight, distance on a charge, reliability and cost ($40,000 is the Volt’s rumoured market price when it appears in 2011).

Compounding DesRosiers’s underwhelming assessment is the distance North American car companies need to travel to catch up to foreign competitors. And now that U.S. billionaire Warren Buffett has bought a 10 per cent stake in Chinese electric carmaker BYD, there’s even more heat fuelling rumours that GM will scrap the Volt altogether.

“If GM survives, it will make the Volt,” says Paul Scott, VP of Plug In America, a California-based electric car advocacy org. “If it doesn’t survive and the company gets sold off in bits and pieces, someone else will make it. He disagrees with Desrosiers’s assessment of the e-car’s range, pointing out that the Volt, for example, can go beyond its battery time by switching to gas. “In 20 or 30 years, you’ll be hard pressed to find a conventional gas-powered car.”

That’s the spirit, but will our tax dollars here and in the U.S. fund projects that will end up creating demand for the next generation of plug-?ins made by China or Korea?

The Ontario government is partnering with a California company to build plug-in/battery-exchange depots across the province, but are we simply building public infrastructure to subsidize the Chinese car industry? And does this matter?

“Look, I’d rather be driving a foreign car using domestic energy than a domestic car using foreign energy,” says Scott.

Back to my Prius on Pennsylvania’s mountain highways: sure, it’s a joy to drive, and the new model to come, a plug-?in, will be even better. Yet I have a recurrent memory: in the haze of summer, I’m weaving between sizzling-hot bumper-?to-?bumper cars along the Danforth on my bike. It sort of feels like there are enough cars on the planet already – of whatever variety.

Canada alone has about 20 million for a population of 33 million. It’s easy to argue that we shouldn’t really be trying to induce (bribe) people to buy more.

“We can’t take cars out of the transportation mix immediately, so the electric car is a good transition strategy,” says Keith Stewart of the World Wildlife Fund. “Even if the electricity comes from coal plants, you still emit fewer greenhouse gases than liquid fuels, including biofuels.”

The consensus among enviros is not unanimous, however. Greenpeace campaigns director Yossi Cadan says all cars are a dead end.

“I can see some short-term sense, but stimulus money should be put into the industries of the future, and that is public transit,” he says. “Governments are blowing a huge opportunity.”

news@nowtoronto.com
NOW | April 14-21, 2009 | VOL 28 NO 33

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