| By Neil Briscoe.
As any fan of the original series of The X-Files will remember, taciturn FBI paranormal investigator Fox Mulder kept a poster in is office with a photo of a supposed UFO on it and the legend 'I Want To Believe.'
It was a perfect little indicator of the character's state of mind. Caught between the rationality of science and childish enthusiasms for the fantastic. Mulder wanted to believe that the aliens were out there, but just wasn't quite sure that he did.
I can sympathise, because I feel just the same about electric cars. If you read the papers or watch the news, it won't have escaped your attention that electric cars are coming, and in a pretty big way. The Nissan-Renault alliance has signed agreements with the government to supply cars, the government has agreed to waive VRT on them and give buyers a €5,000 kickback to keep the prices to a sane, realistic level, and the ESB is beavering away installing the on-street and in-home charging points that we'll need to keep our all-battery cars topped up with juice.
So this is it then. The Kubrickian future we have been promised since I were a lad has finally arrived and, amazingly, Ireland is at the cutting edge of it thanks to our small size, mild climate and the efforts of a few far-sighters in government and the ESB. By the end of next year, we'll all be swooshing silently around in our zero-emissions electric cars. The eco-mentalists will have to go an start bothering others about their emissions and we motorists can just get back to enjoying our traffic jams.
Right?
Well, this is where the I-want-to-believe-but-I'm-not-sure-I-can thing comes in. I've just had a spin in the prototype of the new Nissan Leaf, a five-door family hatchback which goes on sale next year. It's a Golf-sized car, with a gorgeous cabin, lets of space and a decent boot. And it's electric. Its motive power comes from 42 lithium-ion battery packs which, when fully charged, give the Leaf a roughly 160km touring range. If you're a lead-foot, you'll get less, if you're feather-toed, you'll get a bit more.
We'll come to the how-do-I-keep-mobile bit in a minute, but for now, let's just take the Leaf as an individual car and ignore the range anxiety stuff. The car I drove was not, strictly, a Leaf. It was actually a Tiida hatchback mule, with a full set of Leaf batteries, motors and chassis underneath. And I'm afraid this was not a full, rigorous, road test but a quick spin around some cones in a car park. Journalists are, I suppose quite rightly, not to be trusted with multi-million Euro prototypes on the public road.
And how does it drive? Very nicely thanks. There's a lot of guff about the fact the electric motors give you all their torque, all of it, in one lump as soon as you press the go pedal, but the Tiida/Leaf performed really rather conventionally, and I mean that in the nicest way possible. Performance is brisk off the line (I'd take a rough guess at a 13-sec 0-100kmh time) and feels about as strong as a 1.4-litre turbo diesel. Of course, it's silent, bar a slight electric motor hum as you pull away, and there's absolutely zero vibration. Wind and tyre noise appeared exactly as they would on a petrol or diesel car.
Through the 180-deg coned-out 'corner' the Leaf/Tiida felt secure, steered accurately and was only mildly perturbed by a thoughtlessly-placed pile of loose gravel on the apex. And this is, of course, the trump card of electric cars. They feel utterly conventional to drive, so early adopters won;t be scared off by some kind of weird-o sci-fi driving experience. The final production Leaf will reflect that in its styling too. It looks a touch futuristic and show-car-ish but it's actually a pretty conventional shape and many of the styling elements (the rise and fall of the wheel arch lines, the rake of the rear screen) are actually lifted straight from the Qashqai. So the Leaf will look and feel very familiar to its first buyers.
But then we come to the big question. Just how are these first buyers going to, you know, get around? 160Km isn't that far. You won't be able to drive from Dublin to Galway or Cork on a single charge. Even getting to Athlone might be a bit of a challenge. And given the fact that, thanks to decades of thoughtless planning, many of us cover well over 100km a day on our commutes, even daily driving might start to look a bit daunting.
Thankfully, the ESB is riding to the rescue of the prospective electric car owner. There are, at the moment of writing, three on-street electric car charging points. 1,500 are slated to follow, across the country (not just in individual cities as is happening on the continent and elsewhere) within the next 12-18 months. And, for the first 2,000 electric car buyers, the ESB will come to their house and fit, gratis, a home charging point. And, incidentally, a full charge will add only about €2 to your electricity bill. For those worrying about juicing up your Leaf from electricity produced in a coal or oil-fired power station, the ESB claims that by 2012 it will have enough wind energy to charge a fleet of 250,000 electric cars. And on the cheap rate at that.
So, to refuel your Leaf, you plug in. And you wait. From a normal domestic socket you will be waiting roughly 7-8 hours for a full charge. From a heavier-duty three-phase power source, you can 'quick charge' to 80% of a full battery in about 25mins (or, logically, 96% in 30mins). The on-street chargers will probably be able to give you a full charge in 1-2 hours. So the first thing you're going to have to learn to do as an electric car driver is kill time.
And that, sadly, will rule ownership of a Leaf out for more than a few people. We've gotten so used to the instant-on convenience of internal combustion engined cars that re-thinking your schedule around an electric car isn't, at first, going to be easy. And educating potential buyers about just that is going to be no easier.
Tom Smith, one of Nissan Europe's senior Electric Vehicle marketeers knows and accepts that. “People are smart enough to know, pretty quickly, whether or not the Leaf is the right car for their lifestyles, and that's fine. This is not intended as a replacement for our internal combustion engined cars; far from it. We're still working flat-out on developing new conventional engines, hybrids and fuel cells. The electric car is, if you like, another string to our bow.”
But why, I asked him, not go for the range-extender concept, where the electric car carries its own on-board engine to keep the charge topped up when you're on a longer drive?
“We felt that it was too much complication and weight in having both drivetrains in the same car. The all-electric concept is a more elegant one.”
Besides which, Nissan is working closely with Japanese electronic giant NEC to improve the performance of the batteries, and the all-electric car with a full-charge range of up to 350km isn't far away.
The final, crucial, piece of the puzzle is the price and that will be entirely critical. The government's purchase grant and waiving of VRT will help, but the Leaf will have cost Nissan billions in development, and that will not make it any easier for it to compete with its petrol, diesel and hybrid rivals. Nonetheless, Nissan is promising that the Leaf will compete with its major rivals (the Golf, the Focus and the Auris) on price and that its incredibly low running costs (cheap electricity, low maintenance costs because of the lack of moving parts compared to internal combustion engines) will help defray any price premium for Ireland's first all-electric family hatch. From the few pricing details that we have seen, we'd reckon that the Leaf will cost about the same as a Toyota Prius (circa €25-26k) once the VRT reduction and purchase grant are taken into account.
So now, many of our questions have been answered. Are electric cars coming? Yup, and not in some distant future, but probably before your next birthday. Will they be affordable? Looks like. Practical? Certainly. Can I replace my conventional petrol car with one?
Ah. There is, as they say, the rub. For now, for the majority of us, that answer has to be no. If you live in town, use your car only for short, intra-urban hops and are keen to be an early adopter, then yes, you can and we salute you.
For the rest of us, with long commutes from outlying towns, children to pick up, drop off and make emergency sprints to the doctor's with and who want to visit relatives in Waterford, or West Cork then no, not yet. We, the masses, if we want an electric car, will probably have to wait for another few years before the battery technology catches up with our range expectations.
But when that does happen, things are going to change utterly. At that point, and it's within half a decade from now, when the electric car becomes nominally practical to a majority of us, then the whole world changes. No more worrying about polluting or about rising oil prices. No more noisy city streets or choking fumes. Tesla has demonstrated that the electric car can be sporty and fun and now Nissan has demonstrated that it can be conventional and practical. And the gap between the technology, the reality and the price is narrowing every day. This is fabulous, heady, game-changing stuff and it'll be in a Nissan dealer near you from next year.
So go ahead. Believe. This time, I think, you really can. |
