The unnatural rush to market electric cars

Mark Richardson

WHEELS EDITOR

It seems that every auto publication these days has headlines that scream: "Exclusive! First drive of the Chevy Volt!" This is because General Motors appears to be dutifully trotting out its mule test cars for auto writers every time the glove box is redesigned, which is probably about every couple of months.

But the Volt is still more than a year from production. It's a great concept, but it's not ready yet. Our own most recent drive of the Volt, in which Jil McIntosh took it for a sedate cruise around Vancouver's Stanley Park, showed that it's close but was far from a real test. The public wants a production electric car, though, and GM needs to keep fanning the flames of interest.

Peter Gorrie: Plug-in Prius a careful step forward for Toyota

This is because Nissan is breathing down its corporate neck to produce the very first mass production, all-electric sedan. The Nissan Leaf is expected to enter showrooms late this year or early next year, and Nissan, too, has been hyping its little car enough to make even the Balloon Boy's parents blush.

Last year, Wheels accepted an invitation to go to Los Angeles, meet Nissan president Carlos Ghosn and "be one of the first Canadians to see the Nissan LEAF and experience the cutting-edge technology on which this revolutionary vehicle will be built." Jim Kenzie flew out there and was allowed to drive a mocked-up, battery powered Versa around some cones in a parking lot for a couple of minutes. Other publications ran headlines that shouted "First drive of the Nissan Leaf!" but I told him not to bother filing a story. There was nothing that couldn't be reported in a single short sentence.

Early this year, Wheels' Peter Gorrie flew out to British Columbia to get behind the wheel of the new Leaf; he drove it in a parking lot for 90 seconds. He wrote a column at the time that explained what a waste the whole event had been.

But people see electric cars as the salvation for motorists – a new, renewable fuel source, comparatively clean if the power doesn't come from coal-fired plants – and we want to believe they're about to happen, so the makers feed our appetite while it's there. And these cars are close. There are already some 1,200 electric Mitsubishi iMiEVs on fleets in Japan, and electric-powered Minis are being tested on British roads; electric Smarts are just about ready to go in France, and the electric Zero motorcycle is already being sold in North America.

Do you see the common denominator here? All these vehicles are small and very light, so that the stored-up power in the battery can move them the greatest distance at the greatest speed for a fraction of the juice that's needed for a heavier vehicle. And as Robert Herjavec writes today, electric power is really still just a novelty until it can be used more practically for vehicles that the majority of people actually want to drive.

Which brings me to the Tesla. This costly roadster is remarkable in that it's been in production for close to two years now and has already sold a thousand cars. It will drive more than 300 km on a single charge. It just recently passed the stringent testing for legal importation into Canada, and if you have somewhere north of a hundred thousand dollars, you can buy one right now.

Herjavec's waiting for a bigger model. If I had his money, I think I'd buy one now – there won't be any competition for at least a couple of years yet. Yes, it's cramped, but I don't mind that squeezed-in MG approach, and when it comes with Porsche 911 power, it's easy to forgive the rattly carbon fibre.

Is the Tesla an "environmentally-friendly" vehicle? I'm not sure. Its expensive battery needs rare earths that are in short supply, and despite promises of recycling the materials at the end of their use, I'm still not sure that the most toxic of them won't just be buried in a Chinese landfill.

But I do know that when I drove it home last week, and back the next day along the crowded Gardiner Expressway, I didn't use a drop of gas and I didn't spit a single flake of smog out of the tailpipe, because it has no tailpipe.

And all the time, I was imagining how it would be with the top down on a warm day, able to hear the singing of birds over the whoosh of the slipstream.

Yes, it's expensive, prohibitively so. But so were the first computers and pocket calculators just 30 years ago, and look how far we've come since then. No wonder readers are excited about electric cars – vehicles like the Tesla are moving proof that anything really is possible, and they're getting closer all the time.

mrichardson@thestar.ca

Peter Gorrie: Plug-in Prius a careful step forward for Toyota

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