EVs See Longer Ranges and a Plethora of Business Models
Posted June 8, 2010 at 6:39 am 
Filed in: The modified Daihatsu Mira isn’t big, and it isn’t fast, but it did set a record for distance traveled on a single charge by an electric vehicle: just over 623 miles.
For their test drive last week, the Japanese team used a Sanyo battery system consisting of more than 8,320 lithium-ion laptop batteries.
Modified Daihatsu Mira
Range anxiety is a central problem that has plagued electric vehicles (EVs), especially in the United States where drivers are accustomed to vehicles that easily travel 300 miles on a single tank of gas. Last week this blog reported that BMW’s Mini Cooper pilot vehicles, when in actual driving conditions, only get around 100 miles to the charge, when the EPA had estimated they could in ideal conditions get 150 miles.
Yet even as more and more motorists are recognizing that while a long range is certainly nice to have, in fact only 9.8 percent of all trips by car are in excess of 30 miles, according to DOE’s 2008 Transportation Energy Data Book. Average daily travel per driver is about 33 miles, and around 65 percent of vehicle trips to work are less than 15 miles.
So if electric cars can really get between 100 and 200 miles to the charge (the Nissan LEAF is rated to travel exactly 100 miles on a full charge) it should satisfy the needs of nearly all commuters.
As EV deployment appears increasingly imminent, a more interesting question surrounds the business model. The battery is so critical to the EV, and so fundamentally different from the internal combustion engine (ICE), that battery manufacturers or new automotive companies allied with battery makers may have an advantage over the large OEMs from whom we usually buy our cars in producing EVs.
China’s BYD, for example, is one of the world’s largest battery manufacturers, but it has branched into vehicles and recently began to market the all-electric e6, which can get over 200 miles to the charge and has a maximum speed of 87 mph. BYD has nearly 100 e6 taxis on the road in Shenzhen, and plans to start selling the cars in the U.S. by the end of the year, and in Europe by early 2011.
Another model is for smaller, focused automotive companies to link up with battery producers. Yesterday Navistar announced that A123 Systems would provide the batteries for its eStar electric delivery vehicle. Similarly, Coda Automotive, which describes itself as an “electric car and battery company,” has historically produced batteries in China through a joint venture with Lishen Power Battery. The battery technology, expertise and manufacturing capacity, however, are Lishen’s, which is one of the world’s largest lithium-ion battery producers, supplying companies including Apple, Motorola, and Samsung. Coda announced earlier this month that its joint venture with Lishen, called Lio Energy Systems, will build a an automotive-grade lithium ion battery system manufacturing facility in Ohio. Coda expects to begin selling 14,000 all-electric sedans in the U.S. by the end of 2011.
Coda Sedan
Some large automakers, like Ford, are also buying batteries from other companies. Others, however, are throwing money and scale at the problem in an effort to get ahead of the competition. Nissan has decided to build its own batteries for the LEAF in Smyrna, Tennessee. When it comes online in 2012, the facility will be among the largest vehicle battery manufacturing plants in North America, producing as much as 200,000 batteries annually.
It will be fascinating to watch as these different business models – as well as the various plans for providing compatible charging infrastructure – duke it out. It is clear that building long-range batteries affordably will require scale, but how that at-scale manufacturing interacts with the historically very distinct industries of vehicle and battery production remains to be seen.
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