Th!nk City is ready to roll

There may only be 6 hours of daylight in Oslo at the moment, but that hasn’t stopped electric car maker Think from getting busy with spanners during the working day. On 28 November the first production examples of the Th!nk City rolled off its assembly line.

Things at Think have changed a bit since Auto IT last looked. The much-reported deal with Tesla, which in May had agreed to supply battery packs, was called off in October as Tesla refocused on coaxing its own reluctant Roadster out of the prototype phase. Instead Think will get its advanced lithium-ion guts from Florida-based EnerDel.

The company makes much of the fact that Porsche has helped set up the production processes, but we doubt that means the Th!nk will be quite as quick as a Stuttgart’s finest. The City is a lot prettier than a Cayenne, however.

The first production models will be used for shakedown purposes, with customer deliveries starting in earnest in the new year.

No word yet on when the little tykes will be coming to the UK. Soon, no doubt.

G-Wiz beefed up for 2008

It’s extremely good to see that the deny-the-problem attitude adopted by the purveyors of the G-Wiz electric car, in the aftermath of Top Gear’s lethal-looking crash tests earlier this year, were nothing more than iffy crisis-management public relations. Behind the scenes a very sensible thing was done: Lotus was called in to make the tent-pole framework holding the body together a bit more rigid.

The G-Wiz i, available from February 2008, offers “increased front and side impact protection, a strengthened space frame, a collapsible steering column, a hill rolling restraint feature, plus new front disc brakes that deliver a 30% improvement in performance”.

The i also has a curved front windscreen. Which probably doesn’t aid safety but should make the G-Wiz look less like something built by a bloke in a shed. And lithium-ion batteries will be an option, which should allow the G-Wiz to go further, or faster, or both, (and inevitably cost more as well)

The GoinGreen web site includes a reassuring pic of a relatively unharmed G-Wiz, decked out in crash-test roundels, in broken-nose posture up against a wall. It doesn’t say how far through the test the image was snapped, mind – the crumpled car might still be moving forward...

Judging from the sticker on the car door the test was carried out in India (where the G-Wiz is assembled) at the facilities of the Automotive Research Association of India (ARAI).

The GoinGreen site does come clean and admit that the test was staged at 25mph (40km/h), and looks to be against a full-width barrier, whereas the modern Euro NCAP frontal test that car buyers are familiar with involves a much sterner test of a 40mph (64km/h) impact with a partial-width barrier. The legal standard test for full-size cars, which the G-Wiz is not obliged to pass, is carried out at 35mph.

Still, any improvement is, well, an improvement.

We applaud these voluntary measures and may now even consider climbing into a G-Wiz to take a test drive.

Is Telsa on the slab?

Darryl Siry, top bod for marketing, sales and service at electric car maker Tesla Motors, has written an interesting article for VentureBeat - a publication read by investors and venture capitalist. It offers lots of sensible advice for people looking to invest in alternative transport technologies but, reading between the lines, does it also have a hidden message? Does it spell "INVEST in TESLA!", suggesting that the firm might be running short of capital? Or, indeed, does it whisper, "Tesla is for sale"?

Will car makers meet Euro CO2 goals?

The European Commission keeps moving the goalposts for what manufacturers are supposed to achieve - targets that are supposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from car exhausts in Europe. When you see a graph of the manufacturers' progress, projected future improvements based on past performance, and how the successive EC targets have moved, it's easy to see that (a) the EC keeps making the targets easier to hit and (b) the makers have never looked like hitting any of them. Korean and Japanese manufacturers have caught up with the Europeans since 1995, but the future trend suggests that no group is making enough progress to achieve a 130g/km fleet average by 2012, which is the level widely tipped to become policy when the EC's current cogitations have concluded. Individual marques may do better, of course - Toyota is currently moving in the right direction, for example, while Suzuki is going backwards, harming the Japanese average.

This aggregate data comes courtesy of environmental lobby group the European Federation of Transport and Environment.

Will Lexus be crushed by its own promo site?

The Hybrid Debate is a web site sponsored by Lexus, purveyor of high-priced hybrids, so we weren’t expecting to find much genuine discussion – more a series of puff pieces and sage agreement that hybrids are a jolly good idea. It was a pleasant surprise, therefore, to find that the invited bloggers who are populating the site with content are actually debating the merits of hybridisation by pointing out some genuine pluses and minuses.

For example professor Roger Kemp, a specialist in energy and engineering from the University of Lancaster, has some top tips on where it’s a waste of time to buy a hybrid:

“Mountainous areas like Norway or Switzerland may be the best places, as hybrids can use their electric power to drive up mountains and reclaim it, through regenerative braking, on the way down,” he says, “[but] flat sparsely-populated areas, like Wyoming or central Australia, are fundamentally bad places to introduce hybrids.” [He does concede that gridlocked urban areas are also ideal.]

He also has some pertinent ideas about where it’s best to put a hybrid powerplant:

“Hybrids offer the greatest benefits when they are used in vehicles with a low average power demand and frequent bursts of high power ... a dust cart is a particularly good candidate for conversion to a series hybrid as it operates on a stop-start duty cycle and has high and ‘peaky’ auxiliary loads of crushers, conveyors and lifting jacks.”

We somehow doubt that Lexus has this branch of the automotive world in its sights.

Maranello4 is mean and moody in black

Today, in the rain, we finally spotted a Maranello4 in Central London. In the metal (sorry, plastic) it looks marginally better than in pictures on the web site. In particular, gloss black paint seems to suit the narrow, bolt-upright stance rather better than the two-tone scheme that is no-doubt meant to disguise the car’s height, but actually ends up reinforcing the resemblance to an overgrown mobility scooter.

With its blacked-out rear windows this car looked cool. Almost.

Back to the future

It might not look like it, but this is the future: as exhibited by Porsche at this week’s LA Auto Show. It’s a 1900 Lohner-Porsche, and the German maker of sportscars and lumbering 4x4s wheeled it out to demonstrate that it has a longer pedigree in green vehicles than Toyota. So there.

The big drums on the front wheels were not brakes but hub-mounted electric motors. And in another echo of modern developments, the batteries weren’t much cop. A year later the Paris Auto Show witnessed a workaround: “The addition of a petrol combustion engine directly connected to an 80 volt dynamo – providing power for the electric drive system in the front wheels – created what is acknowledged as the first car with hybrid drive,” Porsche says.

What a shame that Porsche squandered this head start and concentrated instead on making sports cars with the engine in the least wise place possible for most of the subsequent century. (Perhaps at next year’s LA Auto Show Porsche could arrange a demonstration of how to successfully throw a hammer handle-first?) Had it evolved the Lohner-Porsche into something better instead of the Beetle into the 911, maybe the world would be a better place. A world without Cayennes, say. Hybrid or otherwise.

Something old, something new

While car designer Boris Jacob was pointing out the various clever bits of the Opel Flextreme concept car last week, Auto IT couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for him and others of his profession. They spend their lives dreaming up beautiful one-offs, replete with clever flourishes, and most never subsequently reach the road. We asked if this was ever a bit depressing.

Jacob insisted that it never was - mainly because all the really elegant and clever bits of work aren’t forgotten, but are patented, and appear eventually. And we could tell he was being honest, rather than trying to look on the bright side, because he’s evidently not a very good liar. Earlier we’d asked him what he thought of the Vauxhall brand and logo compared to the Opel marque and insignia, which produced a frown, some non-committal noises, and then an awkward silence. Another GMer stepped in to say that every designer has their favourite brand and that the Vauxhall griffin looked really good on the Speedster (or VX220, in Vauxhall-speak).

This patenting of concept cleverness no doubt goes way back, and patents tend to last a long time - 20 years in the US or Europe. Which no doubt means that all the carmakers have arsenals of extant patents.

Critics of the patent system argue that this kind of build-up simply raises the bar for new entrants, making it harder to enter a market. Established firms tend to amass lots of patents covering technologies that all their rivals need to use, so cross-licensing agreements are common. In effect, everyone ends up swapping intellectual property rather than paying each other royalties that would sum more or less to zero. New entrants, by contrast, tend to have few patents, so they end up paying licensing fees to everyone for everything.

Auto IT wonders whether this patent problem will bite Shai Agassi’s Better Place startup, which has plans for electric cars that hinge around replaceable battery packs.

When I asked Jacob if he thought it would be feasible to design a car with a replaceable electric heart, he thought for a moment and recalled that his firm had done something similar before, in the shape of a concept car called the Opel Twin.

Shown off at Geneva in 1992, the Twin had not just a swappable battery, but a swappable drivetrain. Designed to run on either electric power or a petrol engine, the Twin featured a removable pod at the rear housing all the oily bits as well as the rear wheels and suspension. The idea was to accommodate zero-emissions motoring around town, with longer-range ability when required.

It never made production, obviously, but did Opel patent the technology? And will it be sticking its hand out for royalties if Agassi's plan takes off?

GM's vision for a flexible, sustainable future

Auto IT spent an hour on Friday talking to Andrew Marshall and Boris Jacob, who work for car maker General Motors (or GM - otherwise known in Europe by its brand names Vauxhall, Chevrolet and Opel).

Marshall is the Director of Technology Communications for GM Europe, and Jacob is the Chief Designer in GM Europe’s Advanced Design department. They were in the UK to talk about GM’s plans to reduce the carbon impact of its vehicles in the future, and to let Auto IT prod and poke the Opel Flextreme concept car, which debuted at the recent Frankfurt show. This car uses the “E-Flex” architecture that underpins the Chevrolet Volt concept, and is essentially the European equivalent of the Volt.

Volt and Flextreme are concept demonstrators for what GM calls the range-extended electric car. The car is propelled entirely by an electric motor, but there is also a conventional liquid-fuelled engine under the bonnet to supplement the batteries. Unlike Toyota’s Prius hybrid, the engine never directly drives the wheels but is on board solely to run a generator for when the batteries run flat. Using an engine to generate electrical power locally may sound inefficient, but it’s actually a well-proven technique used, for example, in diesel-electric trains.

For journeys of less than 55km, the Flextreme’s 1.3 diesel engine will remain redundant, with the batteries being recharged by plugging the car in at its destination.

GM hopes that the combination of electric drive and on-board generation will provide the best of several worlds - zero tailpipe pollution for urban commutes, and the low-CO2 benefits of electric vehicles, combined with the long range capability of a conventionally fuelled car. Detractors will point out the drawbacks: an engine plus electrics equals redundant weight; when running the generator emissions are not much different from an ordinary car; if you habitually use it on battery alone, the pack will probably need replacing every few years due to cycle degradation; and servicing costs may rise due to the extra complexity of the overall system.

Marshall, in turn, argues that the Flextreme has reduced the number of moving parts required because it has no gearbox, and that wear and tear on the engine will be reduced. “Some trips you won’t use it at all, others it will run only some of the time. It also operates in its ideal window,” he adds, meaning that the engine will always run at its peak efficiency, rather than running up and down its rev range in response to the driver’s right foot.

To an extent these plus and minus arguments are academic, because you can’t yet buy a Volt or a Flextreme. The car Auto IT sat in is a demonstration of theory, not current practice. “Nobody really knows how well Lithium-Ion cells will work in a vehicle application,” said Marshall. “The key to all this is the battery, so GM has got involved in the development of the battery itself - not just farmed it out.”

GM has established partnerships with battery makers CPI and LG Chem, celebrated US startup A123 Systems, and top-tier parts supplier Continental.

The Flextreme may be a hybrid but it doesn’t look very green. Its body is light and stiff carbon fibre, but its body language suggests aggression, speed and solidity, rather than tree-hugging. Auto IT suggested to Jacob that it might be sending out mixed messages. “It can be green and still have conventional automotive aesthetic values,” he said, suggesting that buyers would reject a car that made too much of a statement of intent. “Taste doesn’t change as quickly as the technology can.”

Some aspects of the design are more slippery than they appear - the spoked alloy wheels are covered with transparent discs - combining aggressive looks with aerodynamic smoothness. The chevron grille is also smoothly glassed in; rear-facing cameras replace door mirrors to cut drag; and touch-sensitive buttons stand in for protruding door handles. Fuel saving is in the details, not in your face, in other words. “You can go too far with the eco thing,” Jacob said. “You can’t force people to eat muesli.”

As well as “the eco thing”, Flextreme is intended to highlight clever doors: its vertically split side-access hatchbacks would be useful in urban parking situations, but they seem unlikely to make production. Rear-hinged rear doors, meanwhile, are destined to appear for real, according to Marshall. He wouldn’t name the model, but his description of their utility - “great for when you’re strapping-in the kids” - suggests the next Zafira.

The interior also features three LCD screens about six centimetres deep, just beneath the windscreen and running the full width of the dashboard, for displaying images from the three rear-facing cameras and satellite navigation systems. From the driving seat it feels reasonably natural to check out the nearside and central rear view in this way, but the offside view - dead ahead of the driver rather than lurking on the door - would take some getting used to.

Jacob said cost should not prevent this wide information screen entering production: “These are all off the shelf components,” he said.

Although GM has said it will put the Volt on sale in the US by late 2010, it hasn’t yet committed to building the Flextreme, or putting any of the E-Flex technology into future Vauxhall Astras. However, Marshall firmly rejected suggestions that GM is engaged in empty PR exercises. “E-Flex is not just a concept,” said Marshall. In any case, Marshall added, even hybrid leader Toyota still builds big 4x4s. “You could just as easily accuse Toyota of window dressing,” he argued.

Jacob said car makers have to take one step at a time, explaining that consumers may want low-CO2 cars but they will still demand a safe, comfortable car with air conditioning.

To make real inroads into CO2 emissions, therefore, makers can’t simply build stripped-out cars made of soya curd and canvas and wait for the buyers to come. They need to gradually change perceptions about more efficient cars. “The trick is to move smaller cars into the premium segment,” Jacob said, noting that small is preferable in many other markets - a bigger, fatter phone is not a better phone. BMW’s Mini has shown that a compact car can have premium appeal, and GM would like to follow suit.

GM is not alone in that aim, of course. Creating high-value small cars will be vital for makers to meet upcoming EU average emissions rules without splattering their bottom line in red ink.

And that is the bottom line. Experiments like the Flextreme are just the tip of the iceberg for a giant firm like GM. As Marshall pointed out, developing the coming generation of lower CO2 cars requires significant financial investment. And as he acknowledged, “It’s a huge risk if we get it wrong.”

A tale of two city cars

Not everyone shares the same view on what constitutes suitable transport for the inner city. Fortunately this G-Wiz electric car needs only half a parking space, given that the gargantuan Rolls-Royce Phantom next to it evidently wants one and a bit.

Shai Agassi: electric entrepreneur

Shai Agassi has big plans for his electric car startup, Project Better Place. Not for him the bottom-up, Tesla Motors route – building a fleet one battery car at a time. The ex-SAP executive wants his new firm to be “the Google of batteries”, as he puts it. Just as Google has become virtually synonymous with the web by serving as the default gateway to the network, so Agassi wants to be at the centre of a future, battery-electric transport infrastructure.

Agassi has dissected that imagined infrastructure and studied the gaps that need to be filled. Where some – like Tesla's founders – have tackled the lack of convincing electric cars, Agassi has alighted on a different void: the absence of a recharging network, the paucity of places to top up a Tesla. Comparing the problem to creating a mobile phone network, Agassi says, “You don't start by building the handsets and then hope someone will build the network.” It's a mistake, he argues, to build the cars first without thinking about the network - like providing a handset with no network to make the calls.

With missionary zeal he argues that all of the necessary technologies are already proven. “You don't have to wait for the magical 400-mile battery,” he says. What you need instead is a 100-mile battery, perfectly possible as Tesla has shown, combined with somewhere to plug it in if you need to drive further. Better Place, it seems, will aim to provide lots of somewheres to plug in – in homes, streets and car-parks around the world.

In the past this blog has seen fur fly between people who think it's feasible to drive a pure electric car for hundreds of miles on a 10-minute charge, and those who think that's a bit, well, over optimistic. Auto IT is in the latter camp, as is Agassi. Rapid recharging is unwise for practical reasons but it's also muddle-headed: it tries to shoehorn the electric car into the same box in which combustion-engine vehicles fit. It's like a 19th Century pundit insisting that horseless carriages will only catch on if they can refuel themselves when parked on the grass.

Given current limitations, not just in battery chemistry but in the power generation and distribution grid, it's a lot more sensible to capitalise on the fact that most cars spend more than half their lives standing still. This is the time to send electrons into their innards – preferably whenever and wherever they're parked. Or at least wherever they're left parked overnight, when electricity is cheap.

But not everyone wants to cool their heels for hours while their battery sips current. So, if a 10-minute recharge is science fiction, why not swap a depleted set of cells for one that was charged earlier? Better Place plans to build “switch stations” to allow owners to rapidly and safely swap batteries as easily as they currently fill up the tank with unleaded, allowing the completion of long-distance journeys.

Agassi is evidently very serious in all this. He has secured $200 million in funding to establish a network of charging points and switch stations. While $200m sounds like a lot it won't be nearly enough. The investors chuckle as they describe the huge sum as seed capital. The plan will also call for electric cars to be built with Agassi's switch stations in mind. He's already talking to unnamed manufacturers, hinting at big-name makers rather than small fry like Tesla, Reva or Th!nk. And the cars will not be “souped up golf carts”, he says, but “full blown” cars of all shapes and designs. “We believe that many manufacturers will offer them,” he adds.

Some obvious problems with the plan have been elegantly side-stepped. What if I arrive at a switch station and want to swap my five-year-old, last-legs battery pack and drive off with a new one? Not a problem, because Agassi calls the battery pack “part of the energy infrastructure”. The cells are not sold with the cars, but continue to belong to Better Place. Scrap packs are not the end user's problem.

Agassi says he has run the numbers and that an electric car bought and charged in his way will be cheaper than a petrol equivalent. He is even planning to borrow a bit of business model from the mobile phone companies, where initial hardware purchase is subsidised for customers who commit to a long-term subscription.

Of course the phone companies recoup their hardware losses through call charges, so presumably Better Place will need to levy a surcharge on the pure cost of the electricity during every recharge. No doubt the surcharge will need to apply even when the recharging is done at home, a step which may meet some resistance from customers who don't quite get the business model.

Surprisingly, Agassi also talks of “flattening demand” for electricity, by centrally controlling the load imposed by tens of thousands of recharging automobiles. He also alludes to the switch stations and car batteries being used as a distributed storage system to help the utility companies meet peaks in demand. This will be another surprising thing to explain to consumers – that their car might be feeding power back into the grid in the afternoon, when one might reasonably assume that it is trickle charging.

Better Place may sound far-off, but apparently the company will begin large-scale testing next year. For its first foray into selling the idea, Agassi says he is looking for sweet spots where there is the right taxation policy, the right electrical infrastructure, and a growing green sensibility. London surely has to be near the top of his list.

Agassi tries to play down the scale of the challenge that lies ahead, saying it's “not a science project, it's really an integration project”. He means, of course, that all the technological pieces are available and proven. The business model, however, is another kettle of kippers. It may not be a science project, but it is a case of driving in the dark. Auto IT, for one, hopes Agassi succeeds in turning on the lights.

Clean and green but a bit over-keen

The Clean Green Cars web site is worth a look for people interested in, as the name suggests, cleaner, greener cars. This week it has come up with a couple of very interesting stories.

First, it has published tables combining figures for CO2 emissions with UK sales figures, giving averages across ranges – presumably the kind of calculation that will be deployed by government regulators as they push for lower fleet averages.

The European Commission has pondered imposing an average of 130g/km, and CGC's data reveals exactly how many manufacturers would limbo under this limit today. In short, none.

Top of the table is Fiat with an average of about 142g/km, marginally worse than last year's 140g/km. Makers known for small cars – Peugeot, Daihatsu and Citroen – follow, with Toyota next, boasting an impressive 149g/km, down from 155g/km in 2006. The decision to split Lexus into a separate brand helps of course, with its hybrid models only managing to trim emissions down to 197g/km, from 207g/km last year.

Unsurprisingly the bottom of the table is home to luxury and sports marques Porsche, Aston Martin, Maserati, Rolls-Royce, Maybach and Bentley, with Lamborghini bringing up the rear with a fleet average of 430g/km. Oddly, Ferrari is missing from the list, but evidently it hasn't been lumped under the Fiat total.

Meanwhile CGC has uncovered a loophole in the London Congestion Charge rules. Rules that are, of course, a little odd in places. Apparently anyone can register their car as a private hire vehicle (or minicab), and with a relatively small outlay and inconvenience (about £150 per year and MoTs at six-monthly intervals) you can duck the £8 daily charge (amounting to more than £2,000 per annum for daily London drivers).

Obviously the rich like to stay rich by watching the pennies, judging from some of the vehicles that are currently registered as minicabs: an Aston Martin DB7, eight Mercedes-Benz SL sports cars, and a Jaguar XK, among others – which are not exactly ideal wheels for making money on the meter.

Not that the Clean Green Cars investigative journalists are all that and a bag of chips. (Nor are the BBC's for that matter.) They seem to think it's remarkable that 31 Bentleys and 52 Range Rovers have been registered as vehicles for hire, suggesting that this cannot possibly be pukka. To which Auto IT can only say, hang around streets near Leicester Square next time there's a big-name Hollywood première, and count the luxo limos delivering celebs – each with a dayglo minicab badge in the window. There's plenty of excess in evidence but not necessarily any Congestion Charge cheating.

“A Maybach costs £5 per mile in depreciation before you factor in fuel (around 10 mpg in central London) and servicing,” CGC wails, adding, “How exactly do you run a Maybach as a private hire car when a London taxi charges less than £3 per mile?” Well, the maths is quite simple really. You charge £300 an hour with a minimum fee of £1,200.

And while we're poking CGC with a stick, don't bother checking out its car reviews. There's not much green about the judgements on offer – in fact you'll find exactly the same write-ups over at the petrol-headed Fifth Gear web site. Both sites have been put together by the same contract publishing company.

Passing off something for other than what it really is? Pot, go give the kettle a scrub.