Making Drivers Happy
Posted February 22, 2010 at 2:16 pm 
Filed in: Electrification, Energy Security, Legislation, Oil Dependence, Transportation A recent Newsweek article about Toyota’s recalls discussed Toyota’s history in the United States. In describing the history of its sales growth in the 1980s, the article noted that
Toyota’s campaign of campy advertisements, featuring the jingle “I love what you do for me, Toyota!” punctuated by a happy American jumping in the air, were the antithesis of traditional Big Three ads, with their macho men and muscle cars. Toyota went for what really mattered: dependability, with ads featuring moms driving through the rain to pick up their kids from school. That’s all Americans really wanted, a reliable car we felt safe in, that would get us and our family from point A to point B.
As we think about how to get grid-enabled vehicles onto the road, there is a lesson to be learned from Toyota’s experience.
In the energy policy world, we tend to think of the deployment of new technology as a means to reduce carbon emissions, reduce oil consumption, create new jobs or promote some other policy goal. But to the typical American – not the hard core environmentalist, the tech enthusiast, or the early adopter – a car is just a means to get around, reliably and economically, while enjoying the ride and the vehicle’s styling.
Keeping that in mind, a deployment strategy must take into account the typical driver’s need for reliability before committing to invest in a new technology. While GEVs have low operating costs, they require high initial outlays. To the extent that a consumer is unsure about the technology, that outlay, even if cost effective over time, is a real hurdle because if the technology does not work, you have not only paid for the vehicle, but you have effectively prepaid some of the energy costs (in the battery) and cannot recover them. To overcome that problem the government will have to offer fairly large upfront subsidies, which were incorporated in the Electrification Roadmap, a paper recently published by the Electrification Coalition outlining a deployment strategy for GEVs. At the same time, it is critical that there be an overabundance of charging opportunities to respond to “range anxiety,” a concern that a vehicle’s range will be limited by a shortage of available chargers. Although that concern will fade over time as drivers develop a better understanding of how their cars work and when and where they can be charged, chargers will have to be ubiquitous at first.
The real question is what deployment approach maximizes the opportunity to overcome these concerns and get these vehicles to market in large numbers. It seems clear that the best approach is a phased ecosystem approach, in which vehicles are deployed in a small number of cities to take advantage of economies of scale, to allow the industry to learn from deployment in a few places before expanding it nationwide, and to demonstrate that GEVs can really work for the typical driver. Other approaches are less likely to meet these three critical goals, and ultimately, will delay mass scale deployment of these vehicles along with all of their attendant benefits.
This topic will be the subject of a hearing tomorrow in the Energy and Water subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee in which several members of the Electrification Coalition, among others, will testify.
Previous Post
