The 100-mile-per-gallon car has arrived but it?s still a niche product
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June 11, 2013
EDMONTON, AB, Jun 11, 2013/ Troy Media/ ? Glitzy graphics, a booming sound system and a fancy curtain drop reveal. This was the big media event that we had been invited to at the Edmonton Auto Show. Alas, we weren?t there to ogle the latest concept truck from Ford.
No, this auto show gave us the opportunity to see how North America?s big auto manufacturers are approaching the marketing and sales of their fuel-efficient electric vehicles and hybrids.
Electric vehicles, or EVs, are still in their early stages of development. The product line is young and growing and, in jurisdictions like Alberta where there are no government incentives or charging stations like there are in Quebec, Ontario and B.C., sales are flat.
While there are five full-on battery electric vehicles for sale in Canada right now, only three were on display; the Ford Focus Electric, the Nissan Leaf and the Mitsubishi i-MiEV.
Perhaps the cutest electric car is the i-MiEV, (pronounced ?eye-meev?). It?s the most fuel-efficient sub-compact production vehicle on the road today according to NRCan. While it is a full electric car, it gets the equivalent of 149 miles per gallon in the city and has a range of about 120 km per charge.
While not technically a full-on EV (it?s considered an extended range hybrid), the Chevy Volt was one of the highest profile cars in this next generation of vehicles. While sales have plateaued recently, 26,500 of them have been sold and the GM?s CEO predicts a bright future for the Volt. ?This next generation, we think we can decrease the price on the order of $7,000 to $10,000,? Daniel Akerson recently told Fortune magazine.
While Ford does offer an EV, the Focus Electric, they?re much more focused on marketing their hybrids.
?It is really the most innovative product we have on the market right now ? we have two plug-in hybrids. We have a plug-in C-MAX plug-in hybrid and a Fusion plug-in hybrid and basically what that is, is it has the best of both worlds,? says Scott Kuzma, a marketing manager with Ford Canada.
A hybrid combines an internal combustion engine with an electric motor and batteries. The internal combustion engine charges the batteries when running. A plug-in hybrid adds a larger battery pack and depends more on the electric drive system.? A plug-in hybrid gets far better fuel economy than a regular hybrid and far better range than a conventional EV.
When you compare a C-Max plug-in hybrid to the conventional C-Max hybrid the differences are easy to spot. You get far better fuel economy ? 150 mpg for the plug-in, 69 mpg for the hybrid ? but pay almost $10,000 more up-front for the plug-in hybrid.
?When you think of where most of Canada?s population is based, it?s in urban centres. That means we drive to work, that means we drive to see our families. That means we drive to do our errands and do our shopping. Those trips tend to be less than 30 kilometers at a time,? says John Arnone, manager of public affairs at Mitsubishi Canada.
In fact the median distance travelled by Canadian workers to get to work was 7.6 km in 2006.
Cold temperatures will negatively affect range as more energy is used to heat the interior of the car as opposed to moving the vehicle. But a Manitoba i-MiEV user tracked his use in those cold Manitoba winters and still averaged more than 100 km per charge.
Cold weather progressively reduced the range of Ross Redman?s Mitsubishi i-MiEV this winter, from 129km at 0 C to 76 km at -25 C.
While it looks like the auto industry will have a strong 2013 in Canada, the overall trends don?t look good. Fewer young Canadians are getting driver licenses and a new report from US Public Interest Research Group finds that millennials are simply driving less.
While driving less, possibly in response to higher gas prices, drivers are still buying record numbers of trucks and SUVs. This all seems a little out of sync with the goal of reducing soaring greenhouse gas emissions that have precipitously reached 400 ppm for the first time since the Pleistocene Era when there were forests in Greenland.
The 100-mile-per-gallon car has arrived but it?s still a niche item. Change on a grand scale will only come when we get beyond the early adopters and that will happen when either the price of battery technology comes way down or the price of gas goes way up.
Troy Media columnist Duncan Kinney is editor and production manager of Green Energy Futures, a multi-media series presented at www.greenenergyfutures.ca. The series is supported by Suncor Energy, TD, Shell Canada and the Pembina Institute. He is taking over The Green Revolution while David Dodge runs? for City Council in Edmonton.
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