Waiting for a plug-in car

It’s funny about gas. I used to pump it, as a summer job at the White Rose service station in Wolfville. The smell of gas and oil around a service station is familiar to everyone who ever got into a car, and when I filled tanks for 50 cents a gallon it never occurred to me that gasoline might eventually run out.

Now we know that there is enough left for a few years, but the reserves are dwindling and alternate sources of energy must be found. Much of the money being invested in new energy is going into wind power to produce electricity and into hydrogen fuel cells to run vehicles. Hydrogen-powered cars are a long way off – one target date is 2020 – and the cost is prohibitive, but some foresee a day when hydrogen cars will eliminate our need for internal combustion engines.

As far back as the 1830s it was known that if you sent electricity through water you could split it into hydrogen and oxygen. It’s one thing to know that, and another to do it for a mass market. Fuel cells carry the burden of high production costs, problems with storing hydrogen, lack of a complex infrastructure for fueling cars, and the fact that it takes a lot of electricity to produce hydrogen, making the fuel expensive.

Why not just use electricity, which can be produced from a variety of sources, including the sun, wind and water?

We caught a screening of Who Killed the Electric Car? the other night. In the 1990s, General Motors successfully built a quiet, attractive, clean, efficient electric car that could go about 100 miles (160 km) on a single charge – and with improvements in battery technology, could reach 300 miles (480 km). The company built the cars partly because the state of California passed a law mandating that 10 per cent of all cars sold by the year 2003 had to be zero emission vehicles.

By 1997, GM had built more than 600 battery-powered cars, which they called the EV1. They wouldn’t sell them to consumers, but they would lease them with GM retaining ownership. The next year, GM built 400 more vehicles, with better batteries and design improvements, finding people willing to lease every single one.

They were quiet and peppy, with fast acceleration. More to the point, they had few moving parts, so there was little to repair, and they used no gasoline, running on a 137 horsepower alternating current induction motor. They had as standard features power windows, power steering, keyless entry, power mirrors, a sound system, cruise control, air conditioning, air bags, daytime running lights, forward and reverse horns, and more.

They were designed to be charged in the evening to be ready by morning, but improvements were being made quickly. Where the original recharge time was three hours, developments were reducing that to 45 minutes for an 80 per cent recharge. They could be topped up at any time without harming the battery.

You could imagine a shift in the way people thought about fueling their cars. People would get used to the idea of plugging in whenever they stopped somewhere. Trips would be planned so that the car would recharge at meal times. Social centres like restaurants and clubs could spring up beside charging centres (and the newer charging systems could be plugged into ordinary household outlets). The ideas were endless.

As the film shows painfully clearly, however, these ideas never had a chance. There was too much money to lose, particularly by the oil industry. The auto industry and the Bush administration were against battery cars, pressuring California to relax its zero emissions mandate. As soon as that was done, in March 2003, GM sent out trucks to pick up all of the EV1 cars.

The people who leased them were outraged and demonstrations sprang up to persuade GM to return them, but to no avail. The cars were taken to the desert and destroyed. The company said there was no demand for the cars, even though all that had been produced had been snapped up.

The only EV1s left are a handful, in museums, disabled. Meantime, while the North American industry pins its hopes on hydrogen, a safely distant technology, we wait for companies like Honda and Toyota to bring us a plug-in car with no reliance on fossil fuels. — Tom Sheppard can be reached at tsheppard@tdcmail.ca