Volts Wagon Does It, Again

Electric cars look sharp, run cheap, but will they sell?

When Walter Reuther, the late president of the United Auto Workers, spoke of the automobile as the "Fifth Freedom," he was not referring to the electric car. Dowdy, slow, limited in range and sometimes adorned--in its first incarnation around the turn of the century--with crystal vases and plush cushions, Grandma's old electric had all the sex appeal of a limp handshake. Henry Ford's flivvers and gushers of cheap Texas oil eventually drove electric vehicles off the American road and onto the American golf course, where most of them are now.

But wait. What was that bright yellow contraption whining softly on New York City's streets last week? It was a Volkswagen Rabbit powered not by a gasoline-drinking internal-combustion engine, but by a zinc-chloride "Electric Engine" developed by Gulf & Western Industries. The G & W power system, unveiled with much fanfare, is the latest step toward the return of the volts wagon. With gasoline heading toward $1.50 per gal., with the nation bent on reducing imports of OPEC oil, and with cleaner air high on Washington's list of priorities, the electric vehicle, or EV for short, is the focus of increasing scientific and marketing attention. The EVs reincarnation could profoundly affect how Americans get around in the next century. David N. ("Jim") Judelson, G & W's president, is positively electrified by the potential. Says he: "We have an alternative here that's viable. We don't have to keep burning our resources into the air, and we don't have to keep paying the Arabs $31 a barrel."

Well, maybe. Though there are an estimated 3,200 EVs of one kind or another in use today in the U.S., a number of problems remain. Not the least is that the electric car's image is still an ancient sepia-tint photograph, a little mildewed and smelling of old lace. To hot young engineers in Detroit--where the action nowadays is in computerized fuel injection, stratified charge engines and other technologies for saving gasoline--electrics are a scientific diversion. Wall Street's auto-industry analysts reflect that mood. Says Maryann Keller, a vice president of Paine Webber: "We think of them as these wonderful little things."

A lot of time and money is being spent on these things. Electrics are no longer dowdy, at least in appearance. Experimental models are sculptured, sleek and glistening with brushed aluminum and chrome. More than two dozen of them were on display last month in St. Louis at the Third International Electric Vehicle Exposition and Conference. One of the new cars--made under U.S. Department of Energy auspices by General Electric, Chrysler and Globe-Union, a major battery manufacturer--was low slung and wedgelike, with the sexy space-age acronymic designation ETV-1 (for electric test vehicle). The car has lightweight alloy wheels and plastic windows, and runs on modified lead-acid batteries. It is, however, slow as molasses: 0 to 30 m.p.h. in 8.8 sec., 25 to 55 in an interminable 17.6 sec. It can go only 123 miles at 35 m.p.h. before it must be recharged. The ETV-l's development cost: $6 million.

Altogether, 46 companies, state and local governments, federal agencies and universities have entered into cost-sharing arrangements with the Department of Energy for the demonstration of electric vehicles. DOE, which will dole out $40 million for its EV program this year, is aiming for 10,000 demonstrators by 1986. So far only 500 have been put on the road under the plan.

The number of electric cars could increase dramatically if Detroit's carmakers ever decide to start building them. Closest is General Motors, which has produced a prototype, the Electro Vette (a Chevette with lead-acid batteries). Last winter GM set up an electric car "project center," where it is working on an advanced zinc-nickel oxide battery with a range of 100 miles. GM EVs could be rolling off assembly lines as soon as the fall of 1983. Ford Motor Co. is working on a sodium-sulfur battery scheduled for lab tests in 1982.

The biggest stimulus for Detroit, oddly enough, may come from a little-known rider attached to the Chrysler financial bailout bill passed by Congress last December. The measure, sponsored by Idaho Republican Senator James A. McClure, allows carmakers to include electrics in meeting their federally mandated 1985 corporate average fuel-efficiency rating of 27.5 rn.p.g. Since the electrics use no gasoline, Detroit, to the extent its output includes EVs, will be able to turn out larger, less efficient--and thus more profitable--gasoline-powered cars. That was a clever political end run, yet no one is complaining. Says Paul Brown, who heads the EV program at DOE: "It was just good, practical politics."

Meanwhile, like electrons to a cathode, a raft of smaller companies and entrepreneurs are being attracted to the EV market. Sir Jon Samuel, a transplanted Briton, has set up Electric Auto Corp. in Troy, Mich., to produce the Silver Volt, scheduled for production next year at a cost to buyers of $16,000 each. The car runs on fast-charge, lead-acid batteries, but has a small rotary gasoline engine to boost power for passing and to rescue drivers from battery failure. Jet Industries of Austin, Texas, takes Ford, Chrysler and Fuji cars and trucks from the factory, installs lead-acid batteries and resells the vehicles to fleet owners for $10,000 to $14,000 each.

Will people buy electric cars? They should, according to U.S. Department of Transportation statistics. Ninety percent of all car trips in America are for 20 miles or less, and 99% are for 100 miles or less. Thus, at least in theory, the electric car's short range should not be a drawback. But Americans do not see their cars in such practical, unromantic terms. They tend to buy autos for peak use, for that annual trip to visit a distant relative. They want fast acceleration and a lot of miles between stops. To change all that, as Analyst Keller says with considerable understatement, "will require some adjustment in terms of how people think of their vehicle."

Technically, the biggest obstacle to an EV that can meet those demands is developing a cheap, lightweight, powerful, long-lasting battery. Nearly all EVs now on the road use some variation of the familiar lead-acid battery, which produces power by the reaction of lead with watered-down sulfuric acid. But even the best lead-acid batteries deteriorate in time and must be replaced at a jolting cost, up to $3,000 for the size and output required for an electric car. Other combinations of metals, electrolytes and oxidizing agents are being tried in batteries, and though they are generally more efficient and last longer, they often have unpleasant operating quirks. Sodium-sulfur and lithium-iron sulfide batteries, for instance, must function at dangerously high temperatures--up to 450DEG C (840DEG F).

Gulf & Western believes it has solved, or is on the verge of solving, most of the problems of the electric car. The company demonstrated three EVs near its Manhattan headquarters last week: the VW Rabbit and two Japanese-made vans, all powered by zinc-chloride Electric Engines. Range: an impressive 150 miles at 55 m.p.h., carrying a family of four. In its publicity, G&W assiduously avoids use of the word battery, partly to get away from the image of Grandma's old electric and also because its Electric Engine is unlike any battery ever made.

In simplest terms, the system makes electricity when chlorine gas reacts with zinc to produce zinc chloride (see diagram). The principle was discovered by Sir Humphry Davy in 1811, but no way was known to harness the powerful reaction before a G & W subsidiary in Detroit, Energy Development Associates, started working on it in 1972. Aided by several grants, including one for $11 million from DOE, G & W devised a system of pumps, valves, a refrigerator and a minicomputer that can produce a steady flow of power. G& W has spent $16 million of its own money on the zinc-chloride system thus far, including a pilot production plant.

The secret of the system is that its "stack" of 4,002 graphite plates is "passive"--that is, it does not shed particles in the electricity-making process. Thus it does not deteriorate, as do the metal plates in a conventional battery. The graphite plates also appear to be almost infinitely rechargeable: G&W says that a system like the ones in vehicles it demonstrated has been recharged 1,400 times, in four years of daily testing. The charging is done at a 220-volt A.C. outlet and typically takes six to eight hours.

The zinc-chloride system was first considered by G & W as a giant-size load leveler for electric utilities, a way of storing unused electricity during hours of light demand, then tapping it during heavy load periods. But G & W engineers realized that the system could be shaped to fit into a car's chassis. Instead of gradually weakening, as most other batteries do, the G & W device maintains full power for 95% of a charge. It is, asserts G & W's Judelson, totally safe, despite chlorine's image of hazardous railroad tank-car wrecks and World War I trench warfare. If the Electric Engine is cracked in a collision, insists the company, a harmless amount of chlorine will escape into the air, producing only the distinctive odor of a swimming pool.

G&W has high hopes for the zinc-chloride system. "Its importance may well be equal to the development of the internal-combustion engine as it replaced the horse and buggy," says Judelson. In about nine months, G&W plans to have two prototype cars built, each with a range of 200 miles between charges. Fiddling with the chemistry could increase the range even more, he adds, with no increase in the system's weight of 544 kg (1,200 Ibs.). G&W calculates operating costs at 2.3-c- a mile for its Electric Engine, vs. 6.5-c- for a gasoline-powered equivalent. The firm says its system will cost less in the long run to operate, even though it would jack up the price of a car by $3,000.

Though it will require a major--some would say monumental--change in Americans' attitudes about their automobiles, Judelson foresees a vast potential market for EVs, especially as second, essentially commuting, cars. By the turn of the century, Judelson projects electric-car production of 6.6 million vehicles a year, about 40% of the total. If so, then EVs would regain the prominence they had at the turn of the century, when nearly 40% of all cars were electric. Detroit's experienced carmakers, on the other hand, obviously do not think the market is that big, but Detroit has been wrong before. If the EV renaissance that G&W is talking about comes to pass, it could save 225 million bbl. of oil a year, even allowing for some oil-generated electricity to charge the cars' batteries. In current dollars, that could slash the U.S. trade deficit by 30%.

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