Why Hybrids and Electric Cars are Currently Pointless Purchases

Have you ever noticed an ongoing trend occurring in the motoring world today? Right now car manufacturers around the world seem to be pretty worked up about trying to save planet Earth by producing electric cars and hybrids. Even sports cars like the Tesla Roadster pictured above have started to make themselves known and have found buyers. I suppose this is what happens when they get caught up in the hype caused by concepts like global warming, the supposedly shrinking supply of oil worldwide and people suddenly thinking that they are actually contributing to the facts stated before this. I personally have no interest in hybrids and electric powered vehicles and I would like to tell you why.

Let's start with those pesky hybrids first. So you're running a Toyota Prius, a Honda Civic Hybrid or that new Honda CRZ hybrid coupe (MUGEN CRZ pictured above) that isn't really fast in the first place. Why do you need to buy a car with two engines in the first place? While it is possible to get 50mpg out of a Prius it is also very possible to get the same mileage from a Honda Jazz VTEC, a Suzuki Swift 1.3-litre or a Volkswagen Polo Bluemotion 1.2. In fact you can get more mileage from those cars than you can get in the Prius. So why bother with the extra weight of the electric motor and heavy as heck batteries in the first place?

Car manufacturers aren't thinking straight. They should just manage packaging of the cars and make them as efficient as possible instead of coming up with solutions that have actually the same impact and outcome as a properly and thoroughly engineered econo-mobile. Instead of the easy way out, they should be pumping their R&D fund into researching lean burn technology and other ways to make the internal combustion engine cleaner and more powerful. This isn't something new but it is possible to make a 1.2-litre petrol engine make over 70 miles per gallon if they tried hard enough.

All this hybrid stuff does not really work as the petrol powered engine still has to kick in at speeds above 40km/h and who actually drives at 40km/h on the highway? It is pretty pointless as no one actually drives 40km/h anywhere except in a basement car park or when they are in a traffic crawl.

Okay. They may be in traffic jams most of the time and this is when the electric motor takes over. But when the traffic clears, its petrol power all the way, most of the time. I also recently bumped into a Prius driven by someone who must have been heavy footed as he was flinging it into a corner and then gunning it out of the corner. How can you save the world with a hybrid if its driven like a pizza delivery boy trying to make the delivery on time? A re-education on how to drive is necessary to make high mileage in a hybrid. And actually driving like Mr Goodie Two Shoes isn't too much fun (even though it's right). You can get similar or better fuel efficiency in any BlueMotion Volkswagen. Ergo, the hybrid is a pointless piece of engineering.

Now most of you out there think that by running an electric vehicle like the sporty Tesla above, you actually cut down of emissions, toxic gases and as a result you are saving the world. But this isn't true as you are still using electricity to charge those heavy and bulky batteries that are used to power the electric motors in the electric cars. Now the power supply that you use comes mainly from power producing stations that generate electricity from diesel, gas and coal. Which is actually worse than any petrol or diesel powered new car sold on the market nowadays.

The thing is that the coal, gas or diesel power plants do not have any overly stringent pollution control systems like those you find in any modern car today. In a car you may have up to two catalytic convertors that clean up the air and in a large power plant I don't suppose they have a 'EURO V' compliant system in place. So when you plug in your electric vehicle to the power grid, you add to the demand of power. If there are 1,000 electric vehicles in use that plug into the power grid at night, imagine a jump in power consumption. Such a jump will cause the electric company to ensure more power is being produced and this would increase the use of gas, coal and diesel at the power plants to ensure there is enough power supplied in the grid. This increases the amount of emissions released by power plants.

Now some of you may think that not all power plants are polluting. Of course if you 100% know that your electric car was powered by a hydro-electric dam or by wind generators or by solar power then you're right, but I have to say that more than 80% of the power you get comes from the traditional gas, coal and diesel generators. For example, 40% of the pollutant emissions in the United States come from power generation. This is followed by transport emissions, of which airlines contribute even more than motoring. So if you plug in your car to the power grid, you just transfer the emissions to the power plants.

So the only thing you are helping is that you are centralizing all the emissions and pollutions to an area where the power is made. But the outcome is still the same. Imagine if last time your car made 5% of the pollution in your area and 95% is made by the power station in your area. Now with your electric car you don't make the 5% worth of pollution as it is now transferred to the power plant. It still comes up to 100% although it is further away from you. This doesn't solve the problem. It just transfers the problem elsewhere. Like sweeping stuff under the carpet.

Then you get to the batteries used by these hybrid and electric cars. Most are nickel-based and there are only a few locations worldwide that nickel is mined from. Most of the nickel comes from Canada, Russia, South America and China. As mentioned by that pretty famous motoring journalist Jeremy Clarkson and a fact that is able to be confirmed by you readers out there if you do a search on the internet, is that the nickel is sourced from Russia or Canada, shipped to China, processed there and then sent to Japan to be packaged as batteries. In Japan, the batteries are then sent to the car manufacturing factory which may be another hundred or so miles away from the battery plant. The car is then shipped to car markets all around the world. So imagine the carbon footprint of these batteries even before they end up in your car that you bought in say, Austin, Texas.

Speaking of batteries, they are not cheap and do not last a lifetime. It has been said that these batteries (like the lithium ion battery pack pictured above) has an operating lifespan of around five years. If you intend to run your electric car for more than that you may have to change the batteries. Or if you're unlucky it may last less than that. According to some it may cost $5,000 or more for a set of batteries.

Then you have to consider the cost of disposing the old batteries. Is it non-polluting? How are old batteries disposed off? Do you really know? If old batteries end up in India where it gets pulled apart by teenage boys trying to earn a Rupee is that environmentally friendly?

Even if the batteries last over five years will it hold a charge efficiently or do you need to charge more often? Is this an efficient thing to do? And if it does cost $5,000 to change a battery the cost is prohibitive to most people. Who would want to spend that much money on a 5 year old car especially if the market value of that car may be as much as the cost of the batteries? This would actually make owning an electric car even worse than owning a petrol powered car.

Now couple the facts above with the point that electric cars, while efficient in producing power with its linear power curve and instantaneous torque, have a ridiculously low range of travel. It truly is useless unless you are a person that works within five to twenty miles from your office. An electric vehicle has only a useful range of about 100miles or 160km. How little is this? Actually very little. In fact if you want to drive enthusiastically, and it is pedal to the metal most of the time your range actually drops dramatically. I know some of us commute more than 20 miles a day and having the range and speed limited to increase the range does not help at all.

Now you add the fact of refueling to the picture. One of the most tedious things in motoring is going to a petrol station, getting out and refueling your car. If you had a 20 mile commute, your full tank in a Honda Civic or even a gas guzzling Corvette ZR1 may last you a whole week but in a electric car you may need to charge every day or every two days depending on whether you drive like Mother Teresa or Michael Schumacher. It is going to be tedious to park at your garage, get out, pull out a cord from either the car or from the charging station, open up the car's charging port, plug it in and wait for about six hours for the car to have a decent charge.

It is this point that actually makes me dislike electric cars. The thing about cars using petrol or diesel powered engines that I like is that refueling takes less than 5 minutes. It is tedious and boring but you get it done in an instant. With an electric car even a booster charge takes one to two hours. This makes waiting even worse if you have to get somewhere soon and if you're out of your garage, it's not as if cities around the world already have charging stations laid out for you to plug in your electric car. (The picture below is part of the 'Better Place' electric vehicle network in Israel. It is still limited to some cities worldwide and not something readily available as yet.)

I have recently witnessed an electric Lotus Elise running at the Sepang International Circuit. This car has a range of around 200km and the thing is that if I bought it, it wouldn't be enough for me to go to a track day with its own power, run at least 20 laps flat out and then head for home. In fact you would have to charge it overnight, rent a flat bed to bring it to the track and back and in between runs hook it up to a power supply unit to try keep a charge trickling into its batteries.

I saw it accelerating. It was fast, linear and accelerates as fast as any petrol powered Elise out there. The noise it makes is similar to an battery powered electric R/C toy car. It sounded totally different when going fast. In that it was pretty silent with the exception of a slight 'whirrrrr' sound.  But with its current (no pun intended) range, there still is a long way to go. It is okay if you've got a manufacturer team and a flatbed waiting to bring it to the track and back. But if you're an individual you would have to do all of this yourself, it just doesn't work. And if you look at the picture above, you can see everyone crowding around that electric car (the grey Lotus that attracted the most attention in the picture). You don't see as much attention being paid to the other Lotuses do you? Those are the normal just start and drive kind of cars, not wait and charge.

And folks, what I've mentioned above are the biggest obstacles in owning a hybrid or an electric car right now. They do not really offer any solid solutions to the actual problem(s) at this moment in time. We should all wait and see if the technology evolves until the batteries last as long as our hand held cellular phones or when hydrogen powered cars become cheap and feasible enough to build.