Is high-end the high road to cleaner vehicles?

The hot shots of the auto market may be the new leaders in green technologies

May 24, 2009

Special to the Star

Budding greenies can't drive a pure electric auto because nobody has figured out how to make one that actually works in the real world. Little things like range, recharge time, safety standards, maintenance, recycling (irony of ironies) and cost all keep getting in the way.

Nissan has announced that its pure electric vehicle will go on sale late next year or early the year following. The car has not been given a price, so it's impossible to determine the economics of the thing.

Nissan does say, based on assumptions about the cost of both electricity and gasoline, that total cost of ownership will be less than a comparable gasoline-engined car. We'll see.

What if we took cost out of the equation? Is there a chance that high-priced cars could lead the way in environmentally friendly transportation technology, as they have in just about every other automotive field?

Yes, maybe – no amount of money can suspend the laws of physics indefinitely. But there's a chance. A few examples already suggest that high-end might be the high road to a cleaner environment.

In the past, Mercedes-Benz was a leader in diesel-powered cars and it remains at the forefront of that technology, though it now has lots of company in the market. But if you could afford a Mercedes-Benz, you wouldn't think saving money on fuel would be at the top of your budget priority list.

Other high-end cars like the Lexus GS 450h and LS 600h and, in the regular market, the now-defunct Honda Accord V6, have used gasoline-electric hybrid technology not primarily as a fuel-saving strategy, but as a performance-enhancer. BMW has a fleet of 7-series luxury sedans powered by hydrogen on test in various markets around the world.

Whether it's comparable performance from less fuel or more performance from the same amount of fuel, it's still more from less – the engineering definition of greater efficiency.

The poster child for high-end, high-concept vehicles has to be the Tesla Roadster. Conceived by California dot-com billionaires and built by Lotus in England, this two-seater apparently has a waiting list of more than a thousand potential customers who are unfazed by the $109,000 (U.S.) ticket.

The Tesla is essentially a Lotus Elise chassis, clad in a carbon-fibre body and fitted with a 184-kilowatt electric motor motivated by more than 6,000 lithium ion batteries, not unlike those that power my little laptop. They make up nearly a third of the car's 1,130-kilogram overall weight.

Given that an electric motor makes its maximum torque at 0 r.p.m., acceleration is fierce: the factory claims that 0-to-100 km/h takes about four seconds, and this has been corroborated by various published tests. (I have yet to drive a Tesla.) Top speed is said to be about 200 km/h and the range around 400 kilometres. Recharging takes about three hours.

Tesla has also unveiled a prototype of a large sedan, intended for production in early 2011. The announced price will be in the high-$50,000 (U.S.) range. Company founder Elon Musk says a new factory will be built in Southern California to produce up to 20,000 of these per year. It is awaiting a loan of some $350 million from the U.S. Department of Energy. The cynical skeptic in me wonders.

The Fisker Karma, shown at the 2008 Detroit auto show, will use a small gasoline engine spinning a generator, which in turn charges a lithium-ion battery pack that powers the electric motor.

This is identical in concept to General Motors' Chevrolet Volt (coming in 2010), though at a much higher price point.

There was a furor about a year ago when Ferrari's general director, Amedeo Felisa, was quoted in a German magazine saying that a "hybrid" solution would come from Ferrari within five to seven years. Subsequent clarifications suggest he may have been misquoted, if "hybrid" is intended to mean a combination of gasoline and electric power, as in the Toyota Prius, Honda Insight and the like.

Instead, Ferrari is working on an energy recapturing system, as is optional in Formula One racing this year. Whatever form that takes, it will surely trickle down into Ferrari's road-going cars within a few years.

What form might that system take? Ross Brawn, former head of Honda's Formula One team, says Honda has experimented with various concepts, including flywheels to store energy for later use. Brake energy regeneration is also being used by some teams – it is stored in a battery, and released to the car through an electric motor.

Not to (ever) be outdone, Ferrari's archrival, Lamborghini, unveiled the four-door Estoque concept car at last year's Paris auto show. No details were given about the powertrain, but hints were dropped that it could be either a V8 with a hybrid module or a twin-turbo diesel. Lamborghini is owned by Audi, which of course is huge in diesels, having recently dominated long-distance (Le Mans-type) racing with oil-burning cars.

Hey, how about a diesel-electric hybrid? Various companies have bruited that concept too, and it would be a feather in Lamborghini's cap if it could get to production first.

One way or another, it appears that advances in environmental technology might well come from the upper echelons of the car business. The hope is that if high-performance cars can be seen to be green, it might remove some of the hairshirt image environmentally friendly cars now wear.

Will it work? Skeptics who know the history of the Baker Electric and such in the early 1900s abound.

I think high-end cars will lead the way, even if from a pure economic perspective it won't make sense. I guess if consumers want their fuel economy, they're just going to have to pay for it.

Toronto Star