GM-VOLT : Chevy Volt Electric Car Site

Most people believe oil will some day run out. It’s less a question of “if,” and more one of “when” it will be before western society and its cultures will be made to fully adopt to its realities.

According to a televised report from the UK last week, a senior global economist for HSBC bank has pinned a round number on it: 49 years remaining, assuming no increased demand – which given that is not happening, could mean a shorter time frame than that.

“Energy resources are scarce,” said Karen Ward. “Even if demand doesn’t increase, there could be as little as 49 years of oil left.”

Ward’s comments came on behalf of an international, London-based, multi-billion dollar financial institution with a dedicated Web page describing its expertise on the topics of which she spoke.

“As a leading international and emerging markets bank,” says its Web site, “sustainability for HSBC means managing our business across the world for the long term.”

The Chevrolet Volt is not yet available in the UK where the interview took place. The world energy situation described nonetheless make it look smarter by the minute.

But the predictions HSBC’s representative gave in congenial and benign terms spoke of a relatively short term before the upheaval of life as we know it – as Ward has done before.

While in the video (not above url, but see below) she alternated to the round number “50” years, she also conceded estimates allow for more time or less.

A “confident” estimate, she said, is right around that number, assuming the world stays busy looking for ways to curtail consumption.

The picture for natural gas availability is not as severe, she said, “but transporting it and using it to meet transport demand is a major issue.”

Time left for coal could be a rather-lengthy 176 years, she said, but it is the “worst carbon culprit.”

Thus, worldwide energy security “will be an increasing concern,” she said. “Diversifying to natural gas to ease the pressure on the oil market won’t overcome it since its supply is as geographically dense as oil.”

As things are, some individuals, corporations and government bodies are adapting in various regions, but in others too little is being done, as demand for more oil still surges.

Over the next 40 years, she said, if supplies are not restricted, demand in emerging markets could surge to 190 million barrels per day.

China alone could account for the majority of new fuel-requiring vehicles by 2050.

“We’ve got another one billion cars coming on the road from 700 million today,” she said, “half of which are going to be in China.”

The present demand for fuel, in that and other economically growing nations, will be impossible to fill in the absence of major new oil reserve discoveries, Ward said.

Ward said the more energy insecure regions are Europe, Latin America and India, with Europe looking the most dire.

“Europe is the big loser with many countries falling down or out of the league table of economic size,” she said. “They could be losing their influence on the world stage just at the time when they are most vulnerable.”

Actually, the scenario Ward portrayed falls neatly into justifying a recent EU initiative attempting to make all gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles illegal in city centers by 2050.

Those proposed “draconian” measures, as opponents have described them, quickly caught criticism from some in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere, however, with the UK being particularly outspoken.

This not being the first time it has stood up to the EU, British Transport Minister Norman Baker said these kinds of decisions should not over-ride local autonomy, nor be thrust upon a whole society as a collective mandate.

“We will not be banning cars from city centers anymore than we will be having rectangular bananas,” Baker said.

As for Ward’s predictions about the world’s energy future, her outlook also falls generally in line with some here at GM-Volt.com. Of the transportation sector, she said it is actually the “lowest hanging fruit” to find solutions for.

From where she sits, the answer for the escalating pressure to find energy solutions requires increased energy efficiency from a mixture of sources.

Natural candidates that can now supplement oil include the usual assortment of wind, solar, hydro-electric, new-generation biofuels from waste oil, and other perceptibly less harmful and sustainable alternatives.

Ward spoke for a bank concerned with “sustainability,” and has warned before of chaos in the developed world, but did not discuss this “alternative” energy source.

In the “interim” period where oil is getting painfully expensive, but not costly enough to fully justify wider-spread use of alternatives, she said it will be awkward and difficult. As oil prices rise higher still, she predicted the alternatives will start to look more cost effective.

And whether it is potentially “safe” or not, the court of public opinion says the jury is out on nuclear power at the moment in the aftermath of Japan’s Fukushima plant crisis.

Ward also touched on Global Warming, and said “carbon capture” technology should be used for damage control on the world’s still-dominant energy source: fossil fuels.

Assuming fossil fuels used for transportation needs, Ward advocated “smaller, more efficient cars will get you from A to B, just not as quickly.”

Aside from one brief joke by the male moderator about the tiny G-Wiz cars in London, electric-powered cars and trucks were not even mentioned in the UK news interview.

Source:
CNBC

In honor of Women’s History Month, the female engineers responsible for some of the Chevrolet Volt’s systems will be participating in a live web chat today at 3 P.M. EST

Joining the chat will be;

• Pamela Fletcher, Chief Engineer for Volt and Plug-In Hybrid Propulsion Systems
• Teri Quigley, Plant Manager at Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly
• Britta Gross, Director of Global Energy Systems and Infrastructure Commercialization
• Cristi Landy, Product Marketing Manager

Anyone wishing to participate can hit the jump and be instantly taken to the chat window, where staffers will answer questions and comments regarding the car. The chat can also be accessed at ChevroletVoltAge.com

N.B  - Due to formatting issues the chat window is not visible, but there is a clickable link available in the white space.

 More 

The Obama administration has been highly supportive of electrification of the automobile.

In 2008 Obama stated it was his goal to achieve 1 million plugin cars on US roads by 2015. A major factor in spurring that adoption rate has been the Federal tax credit applied to EVs. That credit for $7500 currently only applies to the first 200,000 electric cars sold by each automotive company. It can also only be obtained as a tax credit after filing the following year’s taxes after purchase and only will be provided if the buyer has sufficient tax liability.

Earlier this week in his State of the Union address, President Obama reiterated his commitment to electrification of the automobile for the purpose of reducing the nation’s oil dependence.

He announced his next budget would include 8 billion in annual government aid to help develop advanced batteries and for communities to develop charging infrastructure.

“With more research and incentives, we can break our dependence on oil with biofuels, and become the first country to have a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015,” said Obama.

In addition to those announcements, soon after the address Vice President Biden called on congress to expand the current $7500 tax credit such that it could be used at time of purchase.

“Just like the Cash for Clunkers program,” Biden said. “You won’t have to wait.”

Furthermore Democratic congressmen Sander and Carl Levin have now introduced new legislation in congress that would expand the federal tax credit incentive to the first 500,000 electric vehicles made by each manufacturer, up from the current 200,000 cap.

Source (Detroit News)

In 2001, I never expected when I started thinking about better cars that I’d devote a decade to a quest that began as quixotic and ended up as the best work experience of my life. I’ve met amazing people, and joined with them to start to turn around one of the world’s biggest and hardest-to-change industries.

Along the way, we’ve formed a coalition that inspires people to look for –and find! — points of leverage to move mountains. Our success shows what we need to solve two huge global problems — our dependence on fossil fuels and our uncontrolled experiment with our planet’s air and water .

That’s fortunate, since we have just a few decades to transform almost everything. We can succeed only by finding a path that unites unlikely allies around common goals — and shows entrenched interests how they can profit from disruptive change.

I’ll highlight some of my peak experiences, then consider the implications of the plug-in campaign for the giant challenges ahead.

IN 2001, having just sold a small Internet company, I was blown away by the Rocky Mountain Institute’s vision of 99MPG vehicles. I went to Aspen and began discussions about new ways to advance that project. On my way back, I found out I’d need surgery for a benign brain tumor. That summer, things could have gone many ways. I ended up with just one of two balance systems, no hearing on one side and poor hearing on the other. At 52, I could have thought my life had peaked. But this decade’s been my most productive and satisfying. I’m so fortunate to have had a chance to make a difference in as I’d always hoped to do.

In 2002, RMI’s Hypercar, Inc. co-sponsored the founding meeting of what became the California Cars Initiative (CalCars.org) in Palo Alto. There I first met many of the entrepreneurs, environmentalists, engineers, and EV advocates who’ve helped us immeasurably ever since. We started with a basic idea: Let’s figure out what cars we need, then round up tens of thousands of people to say to carmakers, “Here’s what we want, build it for us.” That’s how I described CalCars’ strategy the first time I testified as an unknown newcomer at the California Air Resources Board at the end of 2002.

Back then, I was still thinking about futuristic solutions that could be ten years away. But that same year, when I saw my first plug-in hybrid (PHEV) at the Electric Power Research Institute, after I recovered from the shock of an epiphany, I realized today’s technology could get us started. That’s where I met some of the visionaries in the utility and car worlds who’d been trying to get plug-in hybrids out of the ivory towers of theoretical designs and academic modeling.

Then I met Prof. Andy Frank of UC Davis, who had been converting vehicles to PHEVs for years and needed some outside evangelists. He’s been an inspiration to us all. Thanks, Andy, for NEVER giving up. PHEV fans had the great hope that the cars Andy has been dreaming of since before many of us were born would be in showrooms before he retired. Our wishes and his dream come true today!

How did this happen? We knew we needed to show people something real, and it wasn’t long after I got one of the first Prius hybrids in late 2003 that we realized we could start by adding batteries and charging to that car to make it a prototype. Fortunately, Ron Gremban was thinking along the same lines. He became CalCars’ Technology Lead, and we formed the

http://www.eaa-phev.org/.

Putting that car together in Ron’s Marin garage felt like setting sail for a new world. I have no technical background but I soon got pretty good at banging and bending copper. And Ron and I became great partners, each doing what the other couldn’t. It’s been amazingly virtual. Since April 2004, over 300 weeks, I bet we’ve been face to face less than 50 times.

We worked like crazy and agreed to a tough trip to Michigan to meet the chief auto reporter at The New York Times. When we’d unveiled the first PRIUS+ to the world, we got a giant wave of publicity. That started us on a media rollercoaster with journalists from around the world, and geostrategists like Fareed Zakaria and Thomas Friedman, who repeatedly put PHEVs in his columns, book and documentaries. Dozens of international delegations came to see our cars. I went to Iceland and Ron to Belgium to talk about PHEVs. Now dozens of books feature substantial sections on PHEVs.

By 2007, conversions (for us a strategy to build awareness and support) became the rage, first in California and then all over, as utilities, elected officials and people who wanted to be first to have the “world’s cleanest extended range vehicle” paid lots of money to retrofit their hybrids. They provided battery companies platforms to test their components. Government labs got to document PHEVs’ benefits. It all led Austin Energy to launch Plug-In Partners to expand our “buyer pull” strategy with a national “soft buy order” fleet campaign.

Our open source approach meant we gave everything away. That included advice, plans, and techniques for physical installations and electronic solutions. Companies sprang up to install conversions. And government agencies began to think about how they were going to certify new and converted PHEVs.

That’s when our high-tech roots kicked in. Since 2006, we organized open-to-the-public conversion events by volunteer teams at five Maker Faires. That helped bring in high-power advocates like Silicon Valley Leadership Group. And we got more attention from Google, which supported us and other groups, assembled the first employee PHEV fleet, and brought in Enterprise Car Rental.

Along the way I got educated about climate change. It became so clear that electrifying transportation and cleaning the power grid were an essential and complementary global strategy. Then scientists like James Hansen and Joe Romm of Climate Progress began talking about PHEVs as a “core climate change solution“. By the time Step It Up (precursor of 350.org) started organizing global events to advocate for a rapid transition to a low-carbon future, our cars had become stars of the show.

Environmentalists were slow to embrace PHEVs and EVs. They bet on hybrids. When I went to back to testify in Sacramento in 2004, I said PHEVs were the “elephant in the room” when people were talking about increasing fuel economy by 20-30%.

Some were still hypnotized by hydrogen. Those who worried about coal-fueled electricity didn’t get that electric motors are four times more efficient than gasoline engines. When they noticed plug-in owners who had rooftop solar systems, they began to understand, as EV advocates have been saying for years, that “plug-in cars are the only cars that get cleaner as they get older, because the grid gets cleaner.

Soon media and experts started picking up on it. It was a thrill to join entrepreneurs and environmentalists in mid-2006 to help nail down legislative support for California’s global warming bill, and along the way to successfully pitch the importance of plug-in cars to thought-leaders like venture capitalist John Doerr, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Maria Shriver, and scores of others.

Once we had a car, we had a potent symbol. We also had a lot of fun finding ways to explain PHEVs and their benefits to people. Some things worked and some didn’t. We never came up with a better name than plug-in hybrid — which describes the design of the car, not why it’s a good idea. We found the slogan, “99MPG” didn’t work, but “100+MPG + a penny a mile of electricity” caught on. We got a screenshot from my dashboard to prove it: 124 MPG plus 123 watt/hours/mile for 50.8 miles.

Soon we boiled down our benefits statement to “cleaner, cheaper, domestic.” Then we tied each word to a constituency: plug-ins “tackle global warming, save money and revive the auto industry, and build energy security, all at the same time.”

We began invoking the idea that we were at a Pearl Harbor moment. In 1942, in one year, a giant American industry went from making cars and trucks to producing planes and tanks at a rate several times faster than they’d told FDR was impossible. Now, three score and ten years later, were fighting for the life of our planet, and to win, we need to rally like that again — at that speed and at that scale.

The fact that people could want this car for any of these reasons — or just to save money — helped spark an inconceivably broad, bipartisan coalition. Former CIA director James Woolsey said it best when he called it “a coalition of tree huggers, do-gooders, sod busters, cheap hawks, evangelicals — and Willie Nelson.”

We saw that coalition in all its glory in 2006 after we flew my just-converted Prius a to Washington DC to show members of Congress the opportunities from existing technology. That’s when we realized that the short “dongle” cable that linked a car and an extension cord could be a powerful symbol of one of PHEVs’ biggest selling points: their ability to plug in anywhere without additional infrastructure or new technology. The legislators who left their offices to see the car acted like the dongle was a sacred object, passing it from person to person as they addressed the audience and the cameras. We’ve presented dongles to dozens of new PHEV advocates as placeholders for a charged-up future.

The press relied on our analyses of every statement by each automaker about PHEVs. We tracked their advances in fits and starts, from denial to put-down to cautious interest, and eventually to acceptance, advocacy, and now, advertisements!

Back in 2004, we told Toyota, “Watch what we’re going to do to improve your hybrid; we’re not asking your permission.” In 2006, architect/designer Bill McDonough brought us to Ford’s Dearborn headquarters, and we tried to get them to be first with a production PHEV. Then when GM announced the Volt as a concept car in early 2007, we switched gears. We began to cheer on all the carmakers and spread the idea, which journalists enthusiastically picked up, of a new race in the auto industry.

GM came out swinging, determined to do things differently. The company embraced transparency. GM opened its labs and welcomed tough questions at press conferences. It recognized plug-in advocates as its allies, and encouraged amazing new communications channels like GM-Volt.com, which never misses a nuance. We kept up the pressure, reassuring those who’d been most bruised by the death of the last wave of electric cars that strong advocates throughout the auto industry were now coming into their own.

One of my favorite afternoons came in August 2008, when the Volt’s Vehicle Line Director, Tony Posawatz, came out to San Francisco and met with a dozen plug-in advocates and drivers to brainstorm and see our cars. We loved exchanging ideas that day. And 28 months later, it looks like some of our suggestions are in this great new car.

In 2006-09 we had the pleasure of seeing two Presidents and legions of candidates and elected officials jump to get photographed in and around PHEVs. It often felt unreal, as did the $7,500 buyer incentives and large loan manufacturing loan and research programs begun under the previous administration and since expanded. And ove time, people stopped separating PHEVs and EVs, and talked instead of plug-ins — the goal being to displace as much petroleum with electricity as possible.

Today we begin a new journey. We new owners and continuing advocates have our work cut out for us, showing off the new plug-in cars, telling everyone what we like about them and what could be improved, combatting misinformation, and working in every way to accelerate their arrival at scale.

In October, 2009 we declared victory on our first goal: getting mass-produced PHEVs. It’s really great to win! We owe it to so many people everywhere.

Now we’re starting all over on a new goal: retrofitting tens of millions of vehicles already on the road. We need to do this because putting a few million new plug-in cars on the road in the next few years — or 10 or 20 million in a decade — while absolutely essential, will make little more than a ripple within the 250 million vehicles in the US and 900 million in the world today.

Cars are part of the built environment. They stay on the road for decades. Just as we need to retrofit our homes, offices and factories, we need to “fix” lots of gas-guzzlers. CalCars and Andy Frank have a few allies like Intel founder Andy Grove who “get” the importance of this approach. We’re demonstrating there are technical solutions and a business case to do it. We promote startup conversion companies, but it’s happening too slowly. We need entrepreneurs and advocates to make the cause their own urgent priority.

We’re calling this “The Big Fix” campaign. Eventually, converters will need to partner withautomakers. Without them, the volume of conversions can’t get big fast enough.

In this and every case, scale and finding new ways to solve our problems together is the whole game. Change agents need to find points of leverage among the richest and most powerful institutions throughout the world, to peel off those that are at all receptive and find ways to make it worth their while to abandon business as usual. That’s what happened when Liggett & Myers broke ranks with the tobacco industry in 1996, and it’s already starting to happen among coal-based utilities.

In October 2010, I spoke to top officials in the oil industry. I said we had to find some way to work together. Because sooner or later they’ll notice that though they’re making tons of money, our country is going broke paying for oil. (Recessions follow every major oil price rise.) And the U.S. military will show them it’s starting to get off oil that costs $400 a gallon — and the lives of many in convoys — to deliver to the battlefield. And their families will tell them that our extreme weather is increasingly unprecedented and deadly. They’ll accept we already have millions of climate refugees from New Orleans to Pakistan, and they’ll understand how millions more will become desperate for water as the Himalayan and other icepacks melt.

This fall, fresh from the BP catastrophe, I urged industry leaders to truly go beyond petroleum, to find business opportunities locking up hydrocarbons in plastic, fibers and building materials, drill for geothermal energy, and invest in biofuels from algae. They have billions to invest and giant business profit and job creation opportunities.

The free market is a myth that hides massive subsidies and decisions. We’ve always picked economic and technology winners — in Silicon Valley, the radio, aerospace, semiconductor and internet industries all thrived because we knew we needed them. It will take a combination of regulations and incentives, just like it always has. If we can’t find a way in Washington, on Wall Street, at many international institutions, to get oil and other key sectors to change course, as we’re now doing in the auto industry, we will all lose. We need to make them an offer they can’t refuse: evolve and make money in new ways instead of pulling down the walls around us all.

The other side of picking winners is that coal is a sure loser. Even if there’s a way to get “clean coal’ (meaning CO2, not other emissions), it can’t scale in time. We need to find ways to close coal plants globally as soon as that doesn’t result in blackouts. Once again, it will take a combination of regulations and incentives — and in this case, as Google puts it, making RERenewable Energy Cheaper than Coal.

That’s the challenge. I’ve talked since 2005 about how to raise awareness about the climate crisis. We’d understand it if we could envision it as a giant asteroid heading towards the earth. We could unite against such a clear external threat. But climate change is too slow and too abstract — until it isn’t. People who are now calling themselves “climate hawks,” who won’t settle for powerlessness, need to be joined by everyone who wants a livable world.

I’ve given recruitment talks about the plug-in campaign and The Big Fix to smart people trying to figure out what to do with their lives at business and engineering schools at Harvard, Stanford and Berkeley, at middle schools and high schools, at Earth Day events and large and small green and energy security strategy sessions. I can imagine no more satisfying or useful activity, no better career to pursue, than advocacy for renewable energy and cleantech solutions to rescue our planet.

Here are the quotes that have sustained and inspire me, in the order they were first said:

* “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” — Mahatma Gandhi
* “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead
* “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” — Alan Kay
* [When we say throw away,] there is no ‘away’–everything is part of a cycle — Bill McDonough
* “Reinvent fire” — Amory Lovins

And I thank all of you who care enough to have wanted to read this for all you’ve done and will go out and do.

Felix Kramer is the Founder of CalCars.org. His family’s two cars will soon be a Chevy Volt and a Nissan LEAF.

I had the chance to interview Jim Woolsey, the former CIA Director, who has long been an active proponent of reducing US oil dependence.  He is also one of the 17 members of the Chevrolet Volt advisory board, who along with me has been living with a captured test fleet Chevrolet Volt.

What is your present occupation and activities?
I’m a venture capital partner in a venture capital fund in Silicon Valley, Vantage Point, and I look into start up companies for them in the clean-tech space which is renewable energy and energy security and water purification.

I look for startups that are particularly creative even if they don’t meet all the criteria one would look for in a sound investment, looking especially for ones with creative technology. I found Tesla for them back five six years ago when it was about eight to ten people in a garage.

I found them through a friend who is one of my co-authors, Chelsea Sexton. She and her husband met me at a speech I gave in Southern California back then and I said something about batteries not quite being ready for electric vehicles. She said ‘you’re wrong about the batteries’, and took me a month or so later to Tesla. You can’t always come up with investments through those sorts of contacts but that’s one in which the electric vehicle community actually introduces an EV company to the venture capital world. Once we looked into it Vantage Point decided to invest in it.

Are you one of the founders of the firm?
No. Vantage Point has been around for years. I am a part-time partner for about three and a half years.

But you’ve been particularly interested in this space for much longer than a few years?
Oh Yeah. Ive been interested in doing something about oil since October 1973 when I was general counsel of the Senate Armed Services Committee and I was late to run an important hearing because it was the middle of the Yom Kippur war and the Saudi’s had cut off our oil and I got stuck in a gas line at a gas station for several hours. I remember sitting there seething about it then and I’ve been interested in this space in one way or another; biofuel, electricity, efficiency of engines since then.

I understand you were the director of the CIA for several years; would you say that work opened your eyes to more concerns about energy security and energy dependence than other things you’ve done?
Well I was in the government five times and four of them Presidential appointments in the executive branch, two Republican, and two Democratic administrations and all of it related to national security. I’ve been thinking that our oil dependence is a serious security problem since 73. I wrote a piece called ‘New Petroleum’ about moving towards biofuels, to a Senator Richard Luger back in 1999 in foreign affairs. So this has been a subject that I am especially concerned about but I think it’s fair to say that beginning with the Iranian revolution in 1979 and with each terrorist attack or incident whether its hostage seizing or 9-11 or anything else that has come out of the Middle East, it just doubly underlines how important it is that we not be dependent on oil for transportation. You do not deal with this by just buying less foreign oil.

The only thing you do by drilling more domestically is you help to balance the payments, and that’s not negligible. We borrow a billion dollars a day to import oil and if we cut our imports by ten percent, through efficiency or biofuels or electricity, the Saudis and their colleagues in OPEC will just pump a million barrels of oil a day less to keep the price jacked up. They already are pumping slightly less per day than they did in the early 1970s. World demand for oil has certainly gone up but during that time they got close to 80 percent of the world’s reserves and they (OPEC) are only producing about 40 percent of the world’s oil each day, and the reason they withhold so much from the market is to keep the price up and keep control of the market.

We’re not going to change the dominance that they can create with several dollars barrel oil that they sell for eighty. By us being able to produce oil for about 50 to 60 dollars per barrel, we’re not in any terms going to halt or to interfere with their cartel operation just by making moderate reduction in the amount of oil we use. If we try to do it regionally if we buy less from the Saudis and more from Norway then somebody else will just buy less form Norway and more from the Saudis.

So an awful lot of the solutions that people come up with have almost nothing to do with the problem of oil dependence.

Cap and trade may be a reasonable way to eliminate emissions from power plants but it has virtually nothing to do with oil because a dollar a ton of CO2 price is a penny a gallon at the pump.
A lot of people get enthusiastic about nuclear power or wind and cleaning up our emissions from power plants and that’s important, those are some of the way to do it, but they don’t have anything to do with oil dependence. Since only about 1 percent of our electricity comes from oil you can switch around between coal and nuclear as much as you want and not do anything about our oil dependence.

So the public debate insofar as it’s been focused on ‘drill baby drill’, cap and trade, and so forth has virtually nothing to do with oil dependence.

We got to go right at it, and I think electrification is an important way to go right at it. Biofuels and efficiency of internal combustion engine are important too.

Besides the financial and national security consequences of oil dependence how to you feel about the concept of peak oil, and do you think the oil supply will become very tight over the next 10 or 20 years especially with China and Indian demand growing?
You’ve got several things going on, one is increasing Indian and Chinese and other demand as a result of those countries getting more prosperous and buying more and more cars. There’s also the possibility of peak oil. The range of disagreement about that is not huge. It’s between whether it’s occurring around now or will occur within the next ten or twenty years. It will be different times in different fields but if you talk about net overall based on what we know, most people think even if we’re not in peak oil now it will be another twenty years max.

That will put pressure on the price, because it doesn’t mean you run out right away but it means that an oil field like the big one in Mexico is past its peak it means cost of production goes up and cost goes up and that looks like its happening in more than a few oil fields round the world.

Looking at the EV early adopters its seems like national security is the main interest but marketing people talk about environmental impact and global warming as motivators. What’s your feeling on that?
I think CO2 is part of the story and quite probably an important part of the story of the risk of producing anthropogenic climate changes, and there are a lot of other things going on as well, it’s a very complex subject. There are very complex models dealing with it, but I don’t think one has to believe that CO2 emissions from largely oil and coal are the entire story in order to be concerned about the amount of CO2 emissions.

Even if cigarette smoking is 50 or 55% creating the risk of lung cancer, and there are other factors, it doesn’t mean we should dash out and start smoking five packs a day.

I think climate change is part of it but I think because the administration and Congress have emphasized the cap and trade so much they’ve really gotten away from doing anything about emissions from oil. They need to focus more on that. They’ve done some positive things like the tax credit on the batteries and some aspects of R&D on biofuels, but they really need a concerted program to go after oil dependence. I think one important part of that is the so-called aromatics that replaced lead to increase the octane in our engines.

About a quarter of what is in your gasoline tank is benzene, toluene, and xylene and those are highly carcinogenic. If you emitted even tiny bits of those form a chemical plant, you would be in deep trouble with the regulatory system but that junk can come out the tailpipes of every car in substantial quantities and it is not effective regulated under US law. EPA has the authority to regulate the aromatics but they haven’t done it for the forty years of the existence of the Clean Air Act.

So there are a lot of reasons to move off oil, and cancer is one. There’s an added cost of 200 billion per year due to health consequence of the aromatics.

We see GM, Nissan and others are producing electric cars finally. Do you feel these companies’ moves and motivations are going to produce a lasting change or do you think the oil industry will try to limit this to an extent?
I think the big danger is not from the international oil companies, it’s from OPEC. The international oil and gas companies don’t really own the oil they produce and some of them including Exxon are very heavily and increasingly selling natural gas. That’s a whole separate issue. Once you get the cleanup of the hydrofracturing water from the gas shale done right I think there’s at least a reasonable opportunity that we could be relying substantially more on natural gas for electricity generation and for transportation both if you end up with open standard flexible fuel vehicles with methanol made from natural gas that you can make now for about eighty cents per gallon. And also even directly putting CNG into vehicles particularly for interstate trucking, since you don’t need a lot of natural gas pumps to do that. I’m not much of a fan of natural gas for the family car. Because you’d have to have natural gas filling stations all over. But for fleet vehicles like city buses and interstate trucking there’s potentially a lot of utility there. A lot of the big international oil and gas companies are pulling a lot of their exploratory and other interests towards gas. But for OPEC and even those countries that do produce gas going to LNG increases the cost and most of those places don’t have pipelines. And in any case they make more money on oil. They control much more of the market to jack prices up anyway they want. So I think the real folks who are solidly opposed to electrification of transportation, biofuels, and efficiency is OPEC and their national oil companies, not so much the internationals.

Do you think OPEC can possibly influence the growth of the EV industry?
Well they’ll do their darnedest with lobbying. Look up the registered law firms, lobbyists, and advertising agencies for the Saudis alone and those OPEC countries that do nothing but pump oil. If you have some institution directly or indirectly speaking for ARAMCO let’s say, in Washington, that’s OPEC governments at work.

Influencing policy in this country?
Oh sure. Absolutely.

Do you think the current efforts of companies like GM and Nissan as real efforts that will change the nature of our automotive fleet, or do you think this is greenwashing?
I think certainly the hydrogen highway business back at the beginning of the decade was greenwashing. But I think EVs are different because we all have access to electricity and more public charging networks will come in and things will get easier. And if you’ve got a garage you got it already.

I think the existence of the electric infrastructure and I think for the new era of EVs for a lot of people even if they very rarely use a vehicle to go more than 30 to 40 miles per day, the range anxiety is always there. That’s one reason why the plugin hybrids and vehicles like the Volt with extended range are so important because you can have confidence that you can stop by any filling station to extend the range. In a Volt three out of four days for the average drive it’s an all-electric vehicle. To be able to have the liquid fuel in the tank in case you have an emergency and you don’t want to have to worry about stopping for an hour and finding a plug, the extended range from the liquid fuel is I think a very important aspect of bringing about change.

Now in time the batteries may get good enough and cheap enough that it won’t matter, and for people who may only use EVs as a second car, or as fast chargers start appearing, this may all go away in a couple of decades, but initially being able to have the liquid fuel extend the range is a really important aspect of the whole thing.

So I guess on a personal level you had been looking forward to getting your Volt?
Absolutely. I also drive a plugin converted Prius with an A123/Hymotion batter and it’s got a bumper sticker on it that has a picture of Bin Laden and it says Bin Laden hates this car.
I have one ready to go for the Volt, and will be even more deserved for the Volt as 40 miles is certainly better than 10 or 15.

Do you have any comments on your experience so far driving the Volt?
Terrific to drive. The panels, gauges, etc. are easy to read and driver-friendly. The 25-50 mile electric range is just right to let you drive all-electric most days, not need a huge battery, and have no range anxiety (because of the liquid fuel). Really looking forward a lot to Volt ffv’s (I understand 2012-ish) so I can use virtually no petroleum products at all.

According to the Wall Street Journal, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is currently drafting a 10-year plan that has as it’s goal  making the country the world’s leading producer of plugin hybrid cars and technology by 2020.  This news was provided to the Journal from a group of international auto executives.

The policy is being designed to force foreign automakers to share critical EV technology and intellectual property with the Chinese government in exchange for being allowed to sell cars there.  The automakers would be required to enter into joint ventures with Chinese state-run companies, and would only be allowed to take  minority stakes in these ventures.

The rapidly growing Chinese market, and its emphasis on reducing petroleum dependence is extremely important to automakers looking to expand sales and profit, GM included.

Since Chinese car companies have been unable to break into international sales, blackmailing US and other automakers into giving away EV technological secrets is a shortcut to that goal.

Needless to say, foreign automakers are very unhappy and concerned about this developing policy.

The plan is “tantamount to China strong-arming foreign auto makers to give up battery, electric-motor, and control technology in exchange for market access,” a senior executive at one foreign car maker. told the Journal. “We don’t like it.”

US Representative John Dingell, a Michigan democrat, became outraged at the idea after reading the Journal article and has written a letter to China’s ambassador to the US Zhang Yesui.  Dingell said the Chinese plan would violate “the sanctity of the intellectual property laws we hold so dear in the United States.”

In the letter he said China should not “require foreign automakers to hand over electric vehicle technology to their Chinese competitors in exchange for market access in China.”

“China generally blocks U.S. companies from holding majority stakes in ventures and requires them to get Chinese partner, he added. “The U.S. has no such requirements for Chinese companies to acquire U.S. firms.”

Dingell and Senator Carl Levin also of Michigan (D) are urging a congressional committee to examine China’s actions. “We should all be alarmed by China’s attempts to dominate the renewable energy industry through measures that discriminate against foreign manufacturers,” Levin said.

GM has a large sales volume in China, even greater than its US volume.  It also plans to sell the Volt there, and is already in a joint venture with Chinese company SAIC to develop the pure electric Chevrolet New Sale for the Chinese market.  The SAIC-GM-Wuling  joint venture has been successful in selling cars in China since it was formed in 1998

There are reports that the Chinese government via SAIC is eying the upcoming GM IPO closely, and is considering buying a stake in GM from the US government, currently a 61% owner.  In fact,  the U.S. Treasury Department has conceded GM investors would be sought from “multiple geographies.”

“Shanghai Automotive is watching GM’s progress closely,” wote SAIC staff in an email to the AP. “As a strategic partner of GM, SAIC-GM hopes for a successful IPO.”

If you think you have a problem with “Government Motors,” how do you feel about “Chinese Government Motors”?

Food for thought.

Source (WSJ), (AP), (Bloomberg), and (Detroit News)