Industry has been trying to build a good electric car since their invention in the 1830’s. In the early 1900’s a basic electric car was around $1,000 and was built like a horse carriage. The majority sold in the United States were designed for the upper classes at a cost of around $3,000. Compared to steam and gasoline-powered cars, they were clean and delightfully convenient. What fueled their popularity? The steam cars needed water more frequently than the electric cars needed to re-charge. The gasoline cars required hand-cranking to start, manipulation of the gear shift and clutch and expelled foul odors and fumes.
Of course, when oil was discovered in Texas, this dropped the price of gasoline low enough so it became accessible to more people. It may surprise you to know that during 1899 and 1900, electric vehicles were the most popular car in America. Their peak production coincided in 1912 with the invention of the electric starter which replaced the cumbersome handcrank on the gasoline models. By this time electric cars were almost double the price of gasoline-powered options. Their popularity faded and they were off the scene for about forty years.
However, in the 1960’s and 1970’s, concerns about foreign oil dependence and national security spurred the return of the EV. The cars were really only suitable for inner-city or neighborhood driving, but they were popular for a time. The Department of Energy (DOE) offers this glimpse into that era from their website:
“Two companies were leaders in electric car production during this time. Sebring-Vanguard produced over 2,000 CitiCars. These cars had a top speed of 44 mph, a normal cruise speed of 38 mph and a range of 50 to 60 miles. The other company was Elcar Corporation which produced the Elcar. The Elcar had a top speed of 45 mph, a range of 60 miles and cost between $4,000 and $4,500.”
Fast forward to 1984 as that is the year I recall meeting with the principals of an electric car company in Southern California. The inventors were struggling with the same types of battery issues we have today. They optimistically estimated it would take another $500,000 to solve the problem. From today’s perspective, it seems they left off several decimal points.
Unfortunately, our big gas tanks and the loosening of supply spoiled us and we kept driving. Americans’ false sense of entitlement kept big American cars as sacred as big American breasts. We wanted freedom, status, cheap operation, total access and we expected value and long life.
What Americans do not want is a dead battery. With our new found global consciousness, we may tolerate slow speeds, simplistic looks and expensive list prices, but only if EV manufacturers give us a comfort level with these new-fangled energy storage containers. As EV batteries average around $15,000 and their life is about 5 years (lithium-ion batteries can reach 10 years), consumers have a solid basis for concern.
On the other hand, cars have lots of body surface, or ’skin’ which presents new opportunities. I have wondered why inventors can make a baseball hat powered by a solar-fan or take pictures of far off galaxies - equally cool in my estimation - yet no one had mounted or built solar panels onto car rooftops. I also imagined solar panels would add weight, making EVs less efficient but then I decided this was merely an engineering problem. Surprisingly, while I’d been drinking lattes and pondering the mysteries of EVs and solar tech, other people have actually been doing something.
Before I go on, I will warn you I will be talking about nanotechnology. If you think its too far in the future to matter, please email Josh Chamot. Josh is the media contact for the National Science Foundation and recently blogged that $80 billion dollars of commerce in 2010 will be enabled in the United States through Nanotechnology. Of course, he also talked about Disneyland’s nanotech adventure in their amusement parks, but entertainment can be educational. (It also sounds pretty cool.)
Nanotech is so out of our realm of experience that the way nanoparticles react is impossible for humans to predict. Even scientists who work with this stuff every day warn there is no point in trying to use our intuition about ‘how things work’ in the nanosphere. From our perspective, nanoparticles do crazy, unimaginable things.
To begin to understand nanotech, try to grasp the notion that light is ‘big’ and ‘heavy’ in the nanotech world. As a matter of fact, nanoparticles are so small that the photons of light that illuminate objects (so that we can photograph them) are bigger than they are. I am going to stop here, but if you are interested in the subject, NPR will link you to some beautiful images (renderings) and a new book, No Small Matter: Science on the Nanoscale. The book is supposed to help it all make sense for the layperson. If you read it and it does make sense to you, please let us know so we can all read it.
So what has this got to do with the subject of EVs? In early February 2010 Impactlab.com reported that researchers from Imperial College (IC)London, UK., and Volvo Car Corporation, had partnered. Using the IC’s nanotechnology patented as ‘Buckypaper’, they intend to develop a prototype material that will become the electric car’s bodywork and double as its battery. Buckypaper is a thin sheet made from an aggregate of 500 carbon nanotubes. A human hair is 50,000 times thicker than a carbon nanotube, by the way, so this visual may be a difficult one to conjure. Here’s a cocktail party opener: Buckypaper was named for Richard “Bucky” Buckminster, by all accounts a nice fellow from Milton, Massachusetts and a visionary American architect and futurist. For the greenies reading this, he popularized terms like ’synergetics’.
Anyway, to summarize Buckypaper’s most stunning characteristics, this IC product is 10 times lighter and 500 times stronger than steel. So if the weight of the batteries could be removed and an EV is 1000 pounds lighter and its shell 500 times stronger, that generation of electric vehicles might last for someone’s entire lifetime and beyond.
Megan Treacy reported on this technology in a post this week on EcoGeeks.org. She described Buckypaper’s fantastic possibilities as follows:
The advantages of the material are pretty exciting. Lithium-ion batteries are heavy and generate electricity through chemical reactions, which eventually wear down the batteries. The [Buckypaper] carbon-polymer material is lightweight and doesn’t require chemical reactions, meaning both a longer life and quicker charge.
If used in the body of an EV, like the roof, door panels or trunk, in place of a lithium-ion battery, an EV could lose 990 pounds and travel faster and farther. The more surface of the car the material covered, the more charge it could store.
The Volvo/Imperial College partnership hopes to replace batteries in the next ten years through this material, although it would seem that an EV would still need some way to store energy for its operation. The partnership is scheduled to invest 3.4 million Euros (US$4.614 million) in their effort to revolutionize the electric vehicle industry. I do have the utmost confidence they’ll figure it out. After all, Imperial College has some of the greatest scientific minds in the world and Volvo has the profit incentive.
Photos courtesy of the Department of Energy.
If you enjoyed this article, you may want to read the rest of the series:
