e-car-Electric cars

Electric cars may be coming, but they will come much more slowly than you might expect from all the publicity. The price is one problem. It's the batteries. To get an e-car with more range, you need more batteries.

The battery companies don't hand out the price list to me, and the carmakers keep it a secret, too. But we're taking about lithium ion batteries of some type, and from what I've heard, the batteries needed to give a car a 40-mile range cost around US$10,000. Batteries for a 100-mile range may run US$25,000 or more.

There's the legend that with mass production the cost will go down. Maybe, but that's bunk when it comes to certain materials. Take oil. Production is way up from the old days, and so is the price -- I remember US$3 a barrel, but now it's around US$70 today. Indeed, OPEC might be a model for LIEC, a lithium ion producers' cartel, when they realize how important it is.

Here's what we know.

Mitsubishi is making a little e-car in Japan, something like the small Smart -- and the price is around US$48,000. We have Tesla making a few e-cars in this country, and the price is US$125,000.

Nissan says it will build an e-car soon. It's called the Leaf, and will be built first in Japan. Nissan will get our government's money to help set up production here. The Leaf is 175 inches long, a couple inches shorter than a Honda Civic, with batteries under the seat and floor giving a 90-miles-per-hour speed and a 100-mile range, Nissan says.

Nissan wants to put 5,000 Leafs on the road here starting late next year. That's a big test.

Price or cost: Company executives have said the Leaf -- without the batteries -- could be priced close to what a regular car of that size would cost. That's without the batteries. They are thinking -- thinking, nothing is definite -- of leasing the batteries -- on top of the price of the car. If my estimate of US$25,000 is correct for the batteries that's a hefty lease--hundreds of dollars a month. This estimate seems in line with that US$48,000 price on the Mitsubishi car in Japan.

The third model coming is General Motor's Chevrolet Volt, to be introduced at the end of next year, and maybe 10,000 or so built in 2011. No price has been given -- but from what GM officials have said the price would be between US$40,000 and US$45,000, depending on how much loss GM is willing to take.

The Volt is more of a hybrid -- it's got a gasoline engine that takes over when the batteries run down after 40 miles. But the engine powers a generator that creates electricity that turns the wheels, so it's an e-car in its way.

These prices seem high, but then new technology doesn't come cheap. The e-car problems go beyond price -- indeed, price may be the lesser problem.

These companies, Mitsubishi, Nissan, GM are pushing the edges. Toyota, for example, says frankly that it doesn't think the batteries are ready yet -- and successful e-cars are years away. Toyota may be wrong, of course, but they are still the No. 1 carmaker in the world with the best reputation for knowing the business.

The two major problems have always been range and recharging. We do seem to be getting a handle on range. Even 200 miles or 300 miles seems possible for cars with enough batteries.

Recharging is still the problem. It can take 8 hours or four hours or maybe 2 hours or maybe half an hour. Companies talk of quick charging -- quick meaning half an hour or so. But some engineers say this can hurt the life of the batteries. Again, some say not so. We don't know yet until cars are on the road. And you need a long cord to charge the battery, and you must do this at your house or garage. There are next to no public charging posts.

What's likely to happen over the next few years is this:

Some electric cars will be built. They will be expensive because of the batteries. Recharging will remain a major problem. The Nissan Leaf and GM Chevy Volt will be less than successful because of this and the high price. But they will push the technology -- the learning experience-forward.

You should understand that everything an auto company announces is not, well, exactly the way it is. There are always announcements of projects that are late, years late, or get killed or just fail. Gosh, I can remember a small car, codenamed Cardinal, that Ford planned to build in this country that was killed just 60 days before the scheduled Job 1.

Yet auto company announcements seem amazingly credible to the press. When I was a boy there were stories about the carburetor that would produce 100 miles to the gallon, or the little pill you could drop in your gas tank, but that was street-corner gossip. We didn't read it in the regular press. Now we read humbug every day.

The advances in electric-car technology have been impressive. We can envision the day when the range issue is solved. Recharging and cost solutions aren't in sight yet.