Who is really killing the electric car?

Back in April 2007 Auto IT wrote a short piece about optimistic California-based EV company Zap, and the extravagant claims made for its promised Zap-X electric car, to be based on the Lotus APX (pictured). The company seemed wholly unlikely to deliver on its promises, we felt.

Since 2007 our little Zap post has consistently hovered near the top of Auto IT's traffic figures, revealing a high level of ongoing interest in all things Zap. We hope our scepticism will have gone a little way in steering potential customers or investors in the right direction.

Now Wired Magazine has done a proper investigative job on the company, and published a sorry saga of broken promises, inflated expectations, conflicts of interest and profiteering.

We expect the Wired article will likely finish of Zap in its current form, although such companies can often prove damnably hard to kill.

As the article highlights, fans of electric vehicles have good reason to despise Zap and its executives. The firm serves as a beacon to sensible investors, warning them to steer clear of the whole sector, making it harder for other electric car makers to gain vital financial backing.

As one burned ex-employee laments to Wired: "[Zap's head honchos] have likely done more damage to the EV industry than Detroit and the Japanese combined ... And the failure of this industry to thrive has affected everything from global warming to the war on terror. How do you put a price on that?"

eBay find of the day: Messerschmitt microcar heaven

If we happened to have £10,000 just lying around burning a hole in the table, we would definitely find ourselves bidding for this immaculate 1963 Messerchmitt KR200 three-wheeled microcar, stumbled on today for sale on eBay.

Never mind that it is 45 years old, probably can't carry a toolbox big enough to ensure that it reaches its destination, and would not be very kind on our knees in a crash, we love it.

It's just as well we don't have the cash to buy it.

Think's UK plans in detail

BusinessGreen.com has posted a lengthy interview with Don Cochrane, who is the marketing brains behind Think's impending launch onto the UK market. You can also hear parts of the interview in audio (if you don't mind the background noise - it sounds like it was recorded while the actual plans were still being argued over and scribbled out on a flipchart).

Net-net is that Think still hasn't decided which batteries it will use in production; that the battery pack itself costs £10,000; that as a consequence the first £14,000 Thinks will be sold at a loss (even with the £100-per-month battery lease); and that UK customers won't take delivery of their cars until early 2009.

Cochrane also says that the Ox five-door shown off at Geneva would cost $200m to bring to market, and that Think therefore can't build it on its own. This estimate kind of puts Tesla's WhiteStar electric sedan plans into perspective.

Test drive: Honda Civic IMA hybrid

Honda’s Civic IMA hybrid has been on sale since 2006 but we’ve only just summoned up the enthusiasm to try one. Honda last week put out a press release saying sales are on the up - it sold just 526 examples in the UK in its first year, 2,800 last year, and sales rates are increasing - so we thought we'd see what these buyers were getting.

No doubt more would be sold if the IMA were better suited to its market. Like us, Honda UK reportedly wanted to see the hybrid mechanicals installed in the Euro-spec Civic hatchback bodyshell – the one with the pointy glassed-in nose, rocket-ship door handles and double-decker rear screen that has been selling rather well. Instead the European market has been fobbed off with the three-box Civic as seen, with minor snout surgery, in Japan, America, China and this year in India. It’s a production issue, apparently. All the world’s Civic hybrids are built in Sazuka, whereas Europe’s hatches are built in Swindon. Suffice to say the IMA is not exactly perfectly matched to British buyers’ or Auto IT’s tastes. If we wanted a small, ungainly saloon we’d buy a BMW 3-Series.

So we found ourselves sitting in 2008-spec Civic hybrid. Behind the wheel you can’t see the unexciting exterior, or the smallish boot. Instead you are faced with a large expanse of plastic dashboard and controls that seem to have been arranged not so much ergonomically as haphazardly. We only had the Civic for a couple of days and never quite worked out what was where. Quality feel, for your £17,000 plus, is a bit lacking. The oddment bins are like Tupperware, the switches are all a bit Dixons.

We liked the high-level digital speedometer, low-level tacho and minor instruments. Whereas the Toyota Prius makes quite a visual song and dance of telling the driver where the energy is going, via a big centre screen, the Honda makes do with a simple charge/assist gauge next to the rev counter. Neat, effective and not distracting. You’ll watch it for a while and then ignore it, which is as it should be.

Get going and the IMA feels like a normal, petrol-engined automatic with a continuously variable transmission. Plant your go-faster foot and the engine will sound like a vacuum cleaner – revs kept high for maximum power while the wheels catch up. The little gauge will tell you that the batteries are dutifully assisting by calling up all the electric motor’s torque. And, if you don’t mind the noise, you’ll find you are accelerating at quite a rate.

Brake or slow down and the motor will switch to generator mode, topping the batteries up again.

In our two days’ motoring we lost track of the number of charge/discharge cycles. Suffice to say the IMA’s Ni-MH batteries work hard for a living.

Slow to a stop and the petrol engine will switch off completely – part of a package of economy-boosting tricks that include shutting down fuel supply to the cylinders and closing the valves on the overrun. Closing the valves seems odd – it wastes energy repeatedly compressing (and thus heating) air trapped inside, but this apparently is less wasteful than pumping fresh air in and out of the cylinders.

The Auto-Stop engine is never a bother – the hybrid motor acts as a starter and gets everything going again without perceptible hesitation. It’s a great pleasure to sit, in total silence (if you switch off the aircon) in traffic jams. Well, it’s never a pleasure to sit in a jam, but it’s markedly less frustrating if you feel at least you aren’t pumping money out of the exhaust pipe for the dubious privilege of being instantly ready to creep forward half a car-length every ten minutes.

The motor only stays dead while you have your foot on the brake, however, which can be a pain when stop-start traffic is more stop than start. Releasing the brake is what triggers the engine to fire again – this gives the engine a moment in which to light up while your foot makes its way to the accelerator – so we’re not sure what trigger Honda could use to create a better system.

We measured about 50mpg at the pump – better than we expected but obviously not as good as the official frugality figures. It sits in Group 7 as far as car insurance is concerned - the same as the Toyota Prius - which also helps to keep costs under control.

Overall, we really liked the Civic IMA. It’s rewarding to drive, combines economy, refinement and performance in a persuasive manner, and is let down only by a slightly below-par interior. We’ll even forgive it that awkward boot.

Does the Think City add up?

We’re not sure if the new Think 5-seater, called Ox, is supposed to be pronounced ox, as in oxygen, or whether it’s supposed to be pronounced oh-ecks, as in O2, the oxygen molecule. Either way we think it probably makes more sense if you’re Norwegian. To us it sounds like a dumb name (as in dumb as an ox). Nice looking car though.

Meanwhile, we’ve been pondering the price of the Think City electric 2-door. The price is, well, pricey.

If it’s really going to cost £14,000 to buy plus £100 a month to lease the batteries, that’s going to add up to a lot of money - £20,000 into the pot after five years’ motoring, with who-knows-what in the way of residuals.

Let’s be generous and say the City will retain 60% of its purchase price after three years – the same proportion as a Toyota Prius. And let’s assume it will tend to clock up a low mileage in the region of 5,000 miles per year, which should cost about £50 a year in electricity.

A shiny new City will therefore cost about £5,600 in depreciation, £150 in electricity, and £3,600 in leasing, for a grand total of £9,350 or thereabouts for three years and 15,000 miles of electric motoring.

Over the same period a bought-from-new Prius will cost about £8,000 in depreciation, and about £1,300 in petrol, at current prices and with a real-world fuel economy of about 45mpg, over the same 15,000 miles. For a total of £9,300. Less if you drive with a light foot.

So the only benefit of choosing the Think over the Prius will be relatively small savings on insurance and servicing, plus the feeling that you are actually causing less pollution.

The benefit of choosing the Prius over the Think would be a larger, more flexible vehicle that can take you as far as you want to go and back again.

So it seems to us that the Think City – attractive as it may be – is not going to be what you’d call a rational purchase.

Think launches a blog

Gearing up for its big announcement on Wednesday 5 March at the Geneva show, Norwegian electric car maker Think has created a blog.

There's not much to see at the moment, aside from pictures of a yellow Think City 2-seater on its recent visit to London - for some reason adorned with signatures.

Some people think that Think's big announcement will be a tie-up with General Motors, and that the promised Think four-door will be built on GM's E-Flex platform. That's certainly possible. But we prefer to wait and see. There's no shortage of car companies keen to be seen to be green.

Has Audi lost its halo?

You have probably heard of the “halo” effect and indeed halo cars. The concept has become common enough among auto makers. The notion is that a particularly breathtaking car can burn brightly enough in the minds of buyers that it blinds them to the mundane reality of the rest of the range. The iconic Audi TT, for example, did an outstanding job in helping Audi A3 buyers feel that their pricey hatchbacks might be a cut above the Volkswagen Golf on which they're based.

The TT was apparently not consciously designed as a halo car, but many other showcase models have had their halo buffed and applied from the outset – cars like Ford's resurrected GT40 and Alfa Romeo's 8C Competizione were built almost exclusively with marque polishing in mind.

But just as the right car at the right time can transform a brand, we wonder whether the opposite is true.

Take, for example, the Audi Q7. If the company had set out to deliberately design an anti-TT, this lumbering 4x4 would likely be it.

The original TT was modestly proportioned, restrained, balanced, neat, unfussy and confident. The Q7, by contrast, looks heavy, clumsy, flash, fussy, brash and over-confident. And it sends out the wrong messages at a time when traditional Audi strengths like efficiency and technology are really starting to matter to buyers in general. While there is a certain amount of Vorsprung durch Technic about the Q7, overall it's more Übergroß durch Dummheit.

Driving behind a Q7 this morning it struck us: this car manages to make us feel less warmly disposed towards everything Audi and much less likely to buy a four-ringed car as a result. We don't like it, and the knowledge that it exists taints the rest of the range.

So we wonder, is it just us? Or is the Audi Q7 an anti-halo car? A car with cloven hooves?