by Jerry Pohorsky

As a board member of the Electric Auto Association and president of the Silicon Valley chapter, I make it my business to keep up with the latest advancements in electric vehicle technology. The Electric Auto Association is a non-profit public benefit organization whose purpose is the promotion of electric vehicles as a transportation solution. This year we are celebrating our 40th anniversary, but electric cars have been around a lot longer than that.

In fact, I found the following "Real Fact" #304 under the bottle cap of a Snapple 'R' ice tea drink I enjoyed not long ago: "In 1900, 1/3 of all automobiles in New York City were powered by electricity." Back in those days, electric cars had a top speed of about 25 miles per hour and could go about 25 miles on a charge. In some ways, not much has changed. There are thousands of electric cars being sold today that have the same performance as those of the 1900's. They look like golf carts and many of them don't even have doors or side windows.

Unfortunately, that is what many people think of when you mention electric cars. Although these neighborhood electric vehicles (NEVs) are quite popular, they are by no means the answer to most people's transportation needs. Most people drive much faster than 25 miles per hour and to be really useful, an electric car needs to be capable of freeway speeds. While average daily commute is less than 40 miles per day, most drivers would find a car with a driving range of less than 60 miles per charge unacceptable.

Oddly enough, a car that had over 100 miles of driving range per charge was available in dealer show rooms 5 years ago. This car had room for five passengers and their luggage and came equipped with modern features like air conditioning, power steering, heated seats, a stereo with CD player, power windows and door locks, etc. This car was the 2002 Toyota RAV 4 Electric Vehicle. At the time, the list price was $42,500 and there was a $9,000 rebate available from the state of California .

Just over 300 of these electric cars were offered for sale or lease, and by March of 2003 they were all sold or leased. Although the car was completely sold out, Toyota spokespeople would repeatedly complain that they could only sell about 300 of them. You may wonder if the car was sold out, why didn't Toyota make more of them? The simple answer is that they didn't have to and didn't want to.

The only reason Toyota made these cars in the first place was due to the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) Mandate from the California Air Resources Board (CARB). At a hearing in 2003, CARB voted to modify the ZEV mandate so that automakers could meet their requirements by producing a few dozen Fuel Cell cars in 2009 instead of thousands of electric cars in 2003. The day after that decision was rendered, Toyota stopped selling the RAV 4 Electric Vehicle.

Other automakers such as GM, Nissan, Honda, Chrysler and Ford had already stopped production on their electric vehicles long before then. As documented in the film, "Who Killed the Electric Car?" GM and Honda actually crushed and shredded most of their electric cars as soon as the requirement to produce them was lifted. Why would they do this? Although they won’t admit this publicly, the obvious reason is that electric cars threaten the existing business of the automakers and the oil companies.

So we find ourselves in the situation where the car that many people want today, is not available now although it was for a brief and limited period five years ago. Luckily, I was able to find one of these cars for sale used on the Internet for $34,000 and have been driving it for the past two years. The car had 34,000 miles when I bought it and it has over 60,000 miles on it now. The only repairs that I have needed in that time have been tires and brakes.

The average car is driven about 12,000 miles per year and this car has delivered more than that. Not only have I had over 26,000 trouble free miles of driving, I have also saved a bundle on gasoline. My electricity costs are about $50 per month. You can figure out what it would cost to drive your car 1000 miles per month and compare. Of course there are additional savings for things that I don’t need like oil changes, smog checks, mufflers, coolant, air filters, spark plugs, etc.

You may wonder about the batteries. Will I have to replace those soon and if so, how much will it cost? My RAV 4 EV uses Panasonic Nickel Metal Hydride Batteries. Toyota claims that the car will go over 125 miles per charge, but I have never needed to go that far. So far my longest trip has been 90 miles. I could have gone further, but I had already arrived at my destination.

Prior to making the RAV 4 EV available at dealer showrooms in California , Toyota offered them exclusively to private fleets. One of those fleets belongs to an electric utility company - Southern California Edison (SCE). SCE has over 300 RAV 4 EVs in their fleet. The first ones went into service in 1998 and several of those have been driven over 150,000 miles on the original battery pack with no sign of degradation. Based on that experience, I should be in good shape for several years to come.

That's good because Panasonic no longer makes that battery. They were sued by Chevron over royalty payments for the NiMH patents they bought from the Ovonic Battery Company (since renamed to Cobasys) that licenses NiMH technology to other companies. The case was settled out of court and the terms were sealed and not made public. However, after the settlement, the battery disappeared from the Panasonic battery website and they were taken off the market. This is another example where "follow the money" tells the story.

So with the electric cars built to meet the ZEV mandate now out of production and nobody producing large format NiMH batteries, what does that mean for future electric cars? While the major automakers are not making electric cars, several smaller companies have started production using Lithium batteries. These batteries are even more powerful than the NiMH batteries, although special care is needed to avoid safety issues like the laptop computer fires that were in the news recently.

Lithium batteries are more expensive than NiMH batteries, so that will make the newer electric cars that use them expensive also. For example, the Tesla Roadster that will be delivered to customers later this year costs nearly $100,000. Unconfirmed reports claim that my Toyota RAV 4 EV cost over $100,000 to produce although they were sold for less than half of that amount. That would help explain why Toyota was so quick to take them off the market as soon as they could.

Tesla Motors plans to do crash testing on their cars that will cost millions of dollars. This is one of the barriers that keeps other small companies from entering the electric car market. Other companies like AC Propulsion and Phoenix Motorcars are also producing lithium battery powered electric cars this year, although they will use a gasoline powered vehicle as the platform for their electric conversion to avoid the expensive crash testing.

As AC Propulsion CEO Tom Gage has said, "We really don't need any more car companies. We just need more electric cars." Ideally, the major automakers are in the best position to make good electric cars and they have already demonstrated that they can do so.

Ironically, it may be the ZEV mandate that forces them to do so again. The fuel cell cars required in 2009 are still costing about $1 million each to produce. The automakers may find that it is cheaper to produce thousands of electric cars (now that lithium batteries are becoming much less expensive than they were 5 years ago) than to meet their requirements with fuel cell cars whose costs have not come down significantly.

In the meanwhile, there are a couple of alternatives for those who don't want to wait. Companies like KTA Services, Metric Mind and Electro Automotive offer conversion kits that can be used to convert a gasoline car such as a VW Rabbit or Geo Metro into an electric car for a few thousand dollars. Of course you will need to be a skilled do-it-yourselfer to accomplish this successfully. There are one or two companies that offer this type of conversion service for those who want to hire someone to do it for them.

However, there is another alternative that I have used myself on several occasions. In the used car market, there are dozens of NEVs for sale every day. There are also a handful of freeway capable EVs that come up for sale from time to time. Often these electric cars just need a fresh set of batteries. Buying one of these cars is often less expensive that buying one of the conversion kits mentioned in the first alternative. Of course you will need to buy a new set of batteries, as well which raises the cost of the project somewhat.

Typical conversion EVs use the less expensive lead acid batteries. These batteries have less range than the NiMH or Lithium batteries but their low cost makes them attractive for someone who can tolerate the shorter driving range. In my own case, I have a 25 mile commute to my day job and I am able to charge the batteries during the work day. This allowed me to get by with lead acid batteries on the conversion EVs that I drove for several years until I went deeply into debt buying my RAV 4 EV which does not need charging at work.