Ready to race, part 2

Maybe the idea of G-Wiz racing is not so far fetched as it seemed back in March, when Auto IT first spotted one of the cramped electric city cars decked out in GT40 stripes. Now another one has surfaced, spotted just around the corner from where the first has since regularly lurked.

So if there are two ready-to-race G-Wizzes in London, that’s enough for a race! Or, given that this one has a number 3 decal, and the first one we spotted was emblazoned with the number 2, maybe there’s at least a number 1 out there somewhere as well to make up the starting grid?

A three-way bout would be worth watching. In much the same way that cricket is worth watching. Well, it’s never going to be touring cars, is it?

Watch out for the quiet ones

Back in June the European Commission set out plans to force car makers to cut their emissions over the next five years - proposals that may end up capping average CO2 emissions at 130g/km by 2012. That’s average across all the cars that leave the factory gates. Of course the precise rules are yet to be set – and indeed reports suggest that the gravy-train-riding eurocrats may yet yield to lobbying pressure from the big German auto makers (who build a large percentage of the world’s CO2 spewing luxo-barges) by creating variable limits according to vehicle weight. This would, of course, largely defeat the object.

Whatever the emissions targets end up being, meeting them will probably prove more difficult for some makers than others. If you’re Fiat, for example, it’s probably going to be a lot easier to become a CO2 miser than if you’re, say, Rolls-Royce. According to figures in The Telegraph, Fiat’s fleet average is currently 146g/km. At the other end of the scale the Porsche fleet, no doubt bloated somewhat by all those lumbering, ugly-butt Cayennes, puffs out 297g/km on average. Cough.

This probably partly explains why lots of top-end brands are up for sale. Ford, for example, will find it a lot easier to meet a low average emissions level across its entire output once it no longer has to drag along the gas-gargling boat-anchors made by its Jaguar and Land Rover units. The similarly unthrifty Aston Martin has already been heaved overboard.

Talking of Rolls-Royce, current owner BMW (average output 190g/km) may have its work cut out to meet whatever emissions targets emerge. It currently builds a range that’s big on high-performance, luxury sports saloons and low on lightweight city runabouts. It’s slimmest model, the petrol Mini, weighs 1065kg. The Fiat Panda weighs 20 per cent less. And weight is to reduced CO2 what cheeseburgers are to reduced waistlines.

One way BMW hopes to limbo under the limit without having to resurrect its old bubble-car sideline is to nip away at the problem a little at a time. To this end its 1-series and Mini models are gaining a clever start-stop system developed by the spectacle-wearing boffins at Bosch.

Start-stop systems switch off the engine when it would otherwise be idling, halting the burning of fuel altogether when it is serving no purpose in getting from A to B.

Obviously the real trick is getting the engine to start reliably and quickly when you want to move off again – nobody wants to sit immobile at a green light in their shiny new BMW as the engine makes impotent revolving noises under the bonnet.

To this end Bosch supplies the full set of clever bits to make it all work: a special starter motor, a sensor to detect battery charge levels and ensure there’s enough oomph to get going again, and additional software for the black-box engine control unit.

And it makes a difference. According to Bosch, fuel savings can be as much as eight percent in city driving - a figure that arises from the ECE15 urban component of the New European Driving Cycle (NEDC) assessment. ECE15 simulates a typical cross-town journey of 7km interrupted by twelve 15-second stops. No doubt fuel savings will be better still in chronically clogged cities like London – where you’d be lucky to travel 700m without stopping 12 times.

The result is an impressive 118 g/km official score for the Mini Cooper D - well below any limit the EC might impose in 2012, and so helping to counter a few 7-series behemoths.

Halting an idling engine to save fuel is not a new trick, of course. Volkswagen’s 1985 Polo Formel E model was a pioneer, albeit one that faced a lot of consumer resistance. Maybe now, 22 years later, an overheating world is finally ready to hear the engine die every time the car comes to a halt.

A new EV - but has it missed the boat?

Today Auto IT stumbled across yet another electric car heading for UK roads: the Elettrica. It will be available shortly within the M25 from Future Vehicles and outside London from TravelElectric.co.uk

Where to start? Looks? On the challenging side. The Elettrica somewhat resembles a barber’s chair crossed with a greenhouse. Its very upright stance suggests that windcheating was not high among the design goals. Looking quirky clearly was.

Price? On the high side. Make that very high. Its £12,750 price tag would happily buy a new Mini. And perhaps be better spent on one.

Safety? The story starts to make some sort of sense. The thing has been designed with a strong safety cell and has been tested to standards beyond the overripe-tomato strength required of quadricycles. Makers rightly need to go beyond the law. Even if the makers of the infamously destructible G-Wiz insist that quadricycle resilience is good enough, most people will attach a higher value to retaining their legs after a 30mph impact.

Technology? Again, a bit of a tick here. Apparently the body hails from Italy, and the electrics from the UK. This is the preferable way around. The batteries are Lithium Cobalt, as used in aircraft apparently, making for lighter weight, better charging profiles and superior energy densities when compared with bad old lead-acid lumps. They also last up to five years, allegedly. Distributors quote speeds of “up to 45mph” and “up to 70 miles” on a five-hour charge, but no doubt these figures require careful driving on downhill roads.

Interesting stuff all told, but there is a big question mark hanging over this car. And over the G-Wiz, Th!nk, Mega City, Maranello4, and every other chassis with a battery. Almost all of the electric noddy cars currently prowling London’s thoroughfares are there because of the Congestion Charge, and that’s about to change. As early as 4 February 2008, any ordinary petrol or diesel car emitting less than 120g/km could slip into the C-Zone free of charge. And plenty of cars that fall under that threshold look, drive, and feel - well - normal. Some even look a bit attractive. Most seat four without contortion. All crash without folding up like a deckchair.

The question is, do the remaining benefits of an electric tiddler add up? Or are these innovative cars just too crude to make sense in the absence of an £8-a-day incentive scheme?

Motoring's bygone radio days

Plugging an iPod containing tens of thousands of tracks into the car has become an unremarkable experience these days, but music on the move was not always taken for granted. Auto IT’s first car, a 1978 Ford Fiesta, came without a radio. It also arrived without electric window-washers for that matter.

(Today’s youth would no doubt boggle at Ford’s foot-operated rubber-bulb method of getting a dribble of liquid to splosh onto the windscreen. A contemporary Chrysler Avenger, meanwhile, expected drivers to pump a big plastic button set into the steering column shroud, which made window washing and steering in a straight line two mutually exclusive tasks)

In-car audio can trace its roots back to the Große Deutsche Funkausstellung (Grand German Radio Exhibition) of 1932, at which a Blaupunkt forerunner called Ideal-Werke of Berlin exhibited the Autosuper 5. This was a 10kg wireless set, built on vacuum-tube valve technology. Too big to fit in the dashboard, it instead took up 10 litres of under-bonnet volume. In place of a glove compartment were the five user-replaceable glass valves. And it cost about a third the price of a new car.

We might all chuckle at the crude efforts of the day, but consider this. The radio came with remote controls fixed to the steering column. It only took modern transistorised car radios about 80 years to catch up with that ancient mobile wireless set, and put their controls within easy reach of the driver.

Trouble at Tesla?

Matt Nauman, motoring editor at silicon valley newspaper the San Jose Mercury News, reports in his blog that electric sports car maker Tesla Motors will announced a new chief executive tomorrow. Co-founder and current CEO Martin Eberhard will become "president of technology" to make way for Michael Marks - the former chief of electronic component maker Flextronics and an early investor in Tesla.

There aren't that many reasons why CEOs get replaced. The individual involved might genuinely want to spend more time with their family - true in about 0.001% of cases. It may be that some indiscretion either financial or personal has taken place, but there's no sniff of that here as Eberhard is to remain with the company. The firm might want to portray to investors that a safer pair of hands is at the tiller, particularly at a delicate juncture - and that's possible in this case, given that the firm is poised to move from its research to its retail phase. But the most likely reason is that the old CEO simply failed to deliver on some key aspect of the business plan.

If that last reason is genuinely the case, then we can expect more bad news from Tesla tomorrow, or shortly after. At a guess, deliveries of the first vehicles will be significantly delayed.

Tomorrow's press release will make for interesting reading. Whatever it says won't necessarily be true, of course, but it'll be interesting nonetheless.

Update, Monday 13 August: Tesla's press release says Marks' "depth of experience in manufacturing, operations and logistics will be invaluable to Tesla as we prepare to start production of the Tesla Roadster". This indicates that the firm is looking for the safe pair of hands to handle the transition. This is just PR, mind, so there may still be climbdowns on past predictions to come...

2nd update, Monday 13 August: Various sources are today quoting an email, apparently sent by Eberhard to customers, and drawing the conclusion that delays are the unpleasant order of the day: "We are still planning to start production of the Roadster by the end of next month and deliver the first cars to customers this fall. We have a good chance of meeting this goal, but to be fully transparent, I want you to know that while it is within our reach, it is not yet fully within our grasp." That's CEO-speak for, "Er, it's gonna be late. Sorry."

Ken does something sensible, at last

Ken Livingstone, London’s very own Captain Mainwaring, is going to revamp the London Congestion Charge yet again, as you may have heard. Today, Friday 10 August 2007, sees the start of a consultation period that ends on Friday 19 October 2007.

Consulting doesn’t, of course, equal listening. Livingstone has demonstrated a well-developed disregard for the results of such exercises in the past, insisting that he has a larger mandate from Londoners to crack down on the fringe minority known in the press as motorists.

The proposals, which will likely go through largely unchanged, would hit owners of 4x4s and other large vehicles with a wallet-numbing £25 a day fee, even if owners live inside the congestion charge zone. That’s more than £6,000 per year. At present the rate is a flat £8 a day, with residents benefiting from a 90 percent discount.

Also under the proposals, cars that cough out fewer than 120 grams of CO2 per km crawled, and which are EuroIV compliant, will be able to dance freely in and out of the capital free of charge and without a care. Well, apart from the atrocious traffic on the boundaries of the charging zone of course.

At Auto IT we applaud these measures. Not only will they encourage manufacturers to improve the overall efficiency of their vehicles, which is very definitely a good thing, they will also soften the most obnoxious aspect of the old system - the process by which poorer people were taxed off the road. The threshold for a new but exempt vehicle will be much lower, with cars like the tiny Citroen C1 limboing easily under the 120g/km limit. That doesn’t mean we have to start liking Ken, mind.

Petrolheaded pundits, even the cerebral variety to be found over at Car Magazine, generally don’t like the proposals. “Where a Citroen C1 carrying just one person would enter the zone for free, a full seven-seat SUV (carrying more people to the benefit of emissions and, lest we forget, space in the city centre) is heavily penalised,” writes staffer Ben Barry.

This would be a fine, logical argument were it not for one tiny detail. It’s bollocks. Anyone with an eye in their head standing in Picadilly Circus can see that most SUVs in the city carry just one well-heeled person almost all of the time.

Fledgling EVs feed off the congestion zone

The London congestion charge turns out not just to be an incentive scheme to put more Toyota and Lexus hybrids on London’s streets. A variety of electric vehicles from small, independent producers are starting to spring up, driven in part by a need not to fork out a crippling £8 for putting a tyre in the wrong part of town.

In recent weeks and months Auto IT has spotted a Modec electric van trundling slowly along with all the other traffic trapped on approach to the shirt-button-sized Trafalgar Square roundabout, giving plenty of time to inspect its stuff. (For those who don’t regularly travel by road in London, this roundabout is approached in five different directions, each of which gets precisely eight seconds of green light, which means that the traffic barely gets to move before the red light shows again. Which is great if you have nowhere pressing to get to.)

The Modec is bigger than pictures suggest and looks very well put together (although the innovation is all under the skin, obviously).

Modec sells its electric trucks from £31,000 and then leases the battery packs at around £400 per month, depending on mileage. Take more out of the batteries by deploying a lead foot and you’ll pay more. The company says its business model makes the van basically price competitive with a diesel equivalent, but customers then gain through zero road tax, zero operator licence and, in the capital, zero congestion charge.

An option for smaller loads is the Aixam Mega van, as used by upmarket sandwich chain Pret A Manger. It is running 11 of the older Aixam model, and the newer version – which looks to have more of a crumple zone up front – can be got from the Nice Car Company from £8,761 plus VAT. It looks cute in a kind of boiled-sweet way.

Finally, we’ve also finally spotted a Nice Mega City electric car, moving under its own power in the capital. True, it was parking outside the offices of a PR company in Soho, but everything has to start somewhere.