More than 10 years ago, there was a guy who fixed the motor on our front gate. He drove one of those little Suzuki vans known as a half-loaf. But this was no ordinary half-loaf.
He had taken out the engine, put in an electric motor used to drive golf carts and a network of batteries, and he had his own electric car. The only reason we all didn’t drive electric cars, he suggested, was that strong vested interests kept us tied to fossil fuel-powered vehicles.
The recent documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? takes a similar line, suggesting that General Motors conspired with the oil industry to kill the EV, a snappy two-seater that was made available to a limited number of trial customers who loved it. General Motors killed the programme, though, took the still-new vehicles back and scrunched them in those massive machines that take cars and turn them into a block of metal.
But electric cars are showing resilience. The Indian-made Reva, also a two-seater, is selling well in London as the G-Wiz, boosted by a range of incentives that include being able to drive free of charge in the restricted inner city, park in any parking bay for free or park in special bays in parking garages that include facilities for re-charging.
The Reva, which you can buy directly from the company’s website, sells for between R45 000 and R50 000. It has very low running costs but cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered a high-performance car.
The Tesla, though, with South ÂAfrican-born entrepreneur Elon Musk as principal investor, is. This little beast, which uses Lotus’s engineering and styling, can out-Âaccelerate a Ferrari or Porsche and has a range of 200 miles. If you have any doubts about the Tesla’s performance, check it out on YouTube.
You can also place your order on Tesla’s website — but expect delivery only next year. And expect to pay $100 000 for the privilege of being able to leave Porsche or Ferrari in the dust. Less sporty sedan models are in the pipeline, with first deliveries aimed for a few years.
In South Africa there is also an interest in electric cars. The task team set up to look at windfall profits, particularly by the synthetic fuel industry, says, given the country’s relatively low-cost electricity resources, “consideration should be given to the possibility of encouraging greater use of electric vehicles for specific applications, including urban commuting.
“This consideration is particularly pertinent in the context where additional CTL [coal-to-liquid] investments are being considered. The value chain of converting coal to motive (kinetic) energy in internal combustion vehicles is extremely wasteful of domestic energy, given the poor energy efficiency of the CTL process and low efficiencies of internal combustion engines.
“If the same coal was used in modern power stations to generate electricity used for rail or road transport, the same coal could be used to move approximately three times more vehicles, thereby displacing the fuel that would have been used.”
This is a complex issue and deserves further investigation, the task team said.
But Eskom, in fact, has run detailed investigations into the electric car over 10 years. You can even visit a somewhat sad room at the utility’s research and development facility at Rosherville, south of Johannesburg. Here there are five or six electric vehicles that were tested during this period. There is a Honda Civic, which Peter Langley, who headed the programme, used for his daily commute. The car, a conversion from a conventional vehicle imported from the United States, has a range of about 60km, gets to 100kph in 10 seconds and costs just R5 to run for 100km, about a 10th of the cost of running a fuel-powered car.
There is also a Jeep Wrangler, which was locally converted using an imported electric motor, and an Opel Corsa bakkie, into which Langley put an imported motor, the AC Propulsion — the same motor that is understood to power the Tesla.
Langley had to tone down the tuning on this vehicle, though, as the thing was just too fast.
Thinking that I could, perhaps, get the carcass of a Corsa bakkie and fit one of these engines, I clicked over to the AC Propulsion website to see what the motors cost: $25 000. (Langley tells me that the company has indicated costs could fall to as low as $5 000 if you place an order for 1 000 motors.)
The Eskom programme also included putting together two vehicles meant to be somewhere between a golf cart and an entry-level commuter vehicle. These are two-seaters with a bakkie at the rear for transporting goods, to be priced at about R80 000.
But none of these vehicles runs at present. The batteries have gone flat through non-use. The programme ended four years ago. Right now, Eskom is focused on getting its consumers to use electricity more efficiently while it builds new power capacity.
While South Africa is planning and building new public transport systems and already has home-grown, privately owned networks (the miniÂbus taxi industry) that are highly efficient at moving lots of people, one senses that private transport will continue to be the dominant form of commuter mobility.
The electric car, with zero emissions and low maintenance costs, is the perfect urban vehicle in a global warming world. It is true that depending on how the energy is geneÂrated, it might be using fossil fuels, but if it has wind, hydro or nuclear power as its ultimate source, it makes a zero contribution to the build-up of greenhouse gases. If charged at night, it makes a contribution to energy efficiency through more optimal use of existing power infrastructure.
The electric car also needs little in the way of new infrastructure to be charged. Along with a lead, all that is needed is time, and off you can go again.
But it would be wrong to think that
South Africa’s chances of getting its own electric car died with Eskom’s programme.
A Cape Town-based company, Optimal Energy, which is partly funded by the Department of Science and Technology’s Innovation Fund, is working on a prototype of a South African-developed electric car to be unveiled within the next 12 months.
Optimal Energy’s Kobus Meiring says the company intends keeping a low profile until it has something to show the market. He says that electric cars make very little demand on a country’s energy infrastructure. Optimal Energy has calculated that if every car in the country was an electric vehicle only 7% more electrical energy would be needed — only a part of the electric energy that is available off-peak. Combining that with oil closing in on $70/barrel, and batteries getting better, lighter and cheaper, he believes the age of electric cars is dawning.
Meiring is guarded on the car Optimal Energy is producing, but based the experience of electric cars such as General Motor’s EV and Eskom’s programme, I would expect a car that offers both reasonable performance and a range that makes sense to most users. If Tesla can offer 200 miles, Optimal Energy should be able to offer much more distance than the average motorist needs for the daily commute.
Good acceleration is not a problem for electric cars and a cruising speed of say 120km is also easily achievable. The company can also expect consumers to want the car to be acceptably stylish and for it to be affordable.
It will have to find ways of creating sufficient local demand to have economies of scale to drive down the prices of key inputs.
A successful electric car programme also offers the possibility though export orders in the same way that Brazil’s ethanol programme now also potentially sees it as a leading supplier of flex fuel cars to international markets.
Looking ahead, and dreaming just a little, you can see cars across the country charging themselves up at night, during the day selling back their excess needs to the grid. It’s a car, but it’s also a power station.
I tried to contact the guy who had shown me his electric half-loaf to see if he could make one for me. He had passed on. I cannot help thinking, though, that he would be happy at the thought of a myriad cars like his selling power to the electricity grid.