Stephen Rees’s blog

Barbara Yaffe, Sun

That is not a name I associate with this kind of opinion piece. I must admit I ignored this story yesterday. It did not seem to me to add anything we did not know already.

But it seems that is not what she has been reading. Instead it is

Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight without Oil, by Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl, is one of the most thought-provoking books to cross my desk in a long while.

And that book was launched some time ago. Now I thought that the key message in that book was that technological change could deal with the problem - it certainly seemed to me to dwell on developments in that area. But Professor Perl was giving it a much more political spin yesterday.

The Pacific Gateway Strategy, Heathrow’s fancy new Terminal 5 and other “boondoggles” demonstrate society’s reluctance to smell the coffee, Perl observed in an interview this week.

“There’s going to be some steep learning curve for political leaders who are largely unprepared to deal with the impending transport revolutions. Techno-fantasies and wishful thinking will have to give way to reality-based planning.”

Ms Yaffe also noticed the electric car commitment in Israel, which so far as I recall has not actually been reported in her paper. Which is not about technology at all, but policy. The real shift is that a known commodity has to be got to market quickly, and that needs a different marketing strategy - and governments can help by using the power of taxation. The Israeli government is going to tax internal combustion engine cars heavily and maintain that over time, while raising all car taxes (including electric vehicles) but keeping the advantage for electric, in order that there is no revenue loss. The clever bit is the response by the people who can make and sell the cars, batteries and battery quick change operations. And I suspect that the Israelis would have done that in any event simply because the oil is still controlled, by and large, by their sworn enemies. Rather in the same way that the old South African government had to develop an oil from coal program.

Of course, if you are ideologically against taxes and intervention in the “free market”, taking effective action this way requires some mental gymnastics which is well beyond the capabilities of the administrations in Ottawa and Washington.

I am going to ask you to sit and watch 20 minutes of video. I have just done that. I am amazed. Electric cars have always been “just around the corner”. But it now appears that things are going to change - because of a man who understands “the social contract” between car drivers and automakers. He has worked out what it would take to wean Israel off oil - and says that he can do the same for the US - for the cost of one year of imported crude.

If you move the slider to 4:25 you can skip the intro

Now what am I, a transit advocate, doing promoting electric cars? I do not believe that it will ever be possible to convert most of the trips in this region to transit trips. I think we can do much better than 11% - which is where we have been stuck for the last ten years - but in order to do that we would need the sort of transformation that Shai Agassi talks about for cars. We do not have anyone trying to do that here. I would love to think that we could have, but I am not going to wait for that moment. IF we can have electric cars and clean power generation, then we will have to deal with the traffic congestion. We cannot wait for the gas prices and taxes to rise enough to do that for us. For as we have seen, it has had very little effect up to now - at least in BC. And as long as transit is in the cold dead hands of the bureaucrats appointed by Victoria, do not expect things to change much.

So I am prepared to see lots of electric cars - and remarkably quickly - because this one man has 1) made it unnecessary to buy the battery and 2) I get a free car if I sign up for a long term contract - just like a cell phone. We will still need a lot more transit. We will still have a congestion problem. But air quality and ghg emissions will have been removed from the equation. That will present the transit system with an even bigger challenge. How can you be better than a zero emission vehicle that is as good as my (EV) car? And I think we can do that. Just the way we could do it now, if we were doing the right things.

(And thank you Erika for sending me this link)

It will at least buy us some time, as adapting the suburbs and the transit system to fit together better will take longer than Mr Agassi says it will take to perform the switch from IC to EV.

I first saw IT on Bowen Island in July of 2002. IT was an electric car - built on Annacis Island. A Low Speed Vehicle with limited range, not suitable for the freeway of course, but it would easily meet the needs of many urban commuters. I did not know the back story - which you can get from the Surrey Leader.

And thanks largely to bureaucratic bumbling it has now been shipped off shore and will be built in Pakistan. At least it has not been killed entirely, but really what is the matter with us? In the US simple ill will from GM will explain most things in the automotive business - and I suppose that could be true here too.

But we have needed electric cars for a while now. And enthusiasts can build them in their driveways. But somehow …

oh I don’t know … I give up

Mike De Souza, Canwest News Service

Transport Canada denies it of course, but Ian Clifford of Zenn Motor Co, is blaming them for the fact that he still cannot sell his electric cars here, even though he has been selling them in the US for quite a while. Something about the definition of low speed vehicles and crash worthiness exemptions or somesuch. Bureaucratic twaddle of course. For most things automotive we just accept the US standards - but add daytime running lights and speedos in km/hr. No doubt the US also had to co-ordinate federal and state requirements, since it is the states that look after the roads - and only the interstates get federal funding. Not that you can take a slow speed vehicle on a freeway of course. So don’t buy a Zenn if your commute takes you across the Port Mann or through the Massey tunnel.

Courier

Lengthy, thorough and highly positive piece on electric vehicles. Basically it takes the line that you either have to build your own car conversion or buy an electric bike. Which must make some local manufacturers a bit miffed.

UPDATE October 25

Watching the CBC News this evening, I learned that the real problem is with Transport Canada who have refused to allow IT or Zenn low speed vehciles on the roads in Canada. IT have given up and will close the Annacis Island manufacturing plant and go off shore, Zenn in Quebec (approved in the US undert the same rules that Canada adopted years ago) is on the point of giving up on Canada. And, of course, I cannot find this story on the CBC web page

But the best bit for my money is the article’s debunking of the nonsense of the “hydrogen highway” that the Province and Arnie are pushing

Unlike fossil fuels, hydrogen is not an energy source. The gas is bound up chemically with other compounds such as oil, gas and water. It needs to be separated from those compounds, which requires more energy than hydrogen provides. Hydrogen is a net energy loser, and the amount of hydrogen needed to power automobiles in North America would be staggering.

Environment Unlimited | Travel and transport |

Important point to note: that the first hundred were sold before they were even built, so that’s the cash flow issue sorted. The big automakers are sniffing around: pray that they don’t succeed in buying the company. They’ll just shut it down like they did the EV1.

I worry about batteries. I now religiously turn off and unplug my wife’s laptop - which she tends to leave running all day, even though it is little used by the kids who both have access to desktops. It was that Dell story about Sony batteries bursting into flames that did it. This story refers to “liquid cooled” batteries like those in laptops. This seems like a waste of energy to me - unless it is being used for heating and/or cooling the car for the occupants, something that other electric vehicles found problematic.

Plus of course the usual issue (not mentioned here) of where the electricity will come from. In California, probably from more remote, oil and coal fired generating stations I’m afraid. Not zero emissions, just elsewhere emissions.

Electric cars : Economist.com
High-tech entrepreneurs unveil a sporty electric car

Timely, given the release of “Who killed the electric car” and certainly not without precedent. “The Economist” fails to mention the legions of enthusiasts who have been building their own electric cars for years. Converting pick-up trucks seemed to be the most common. Then there is that firm on Annacis Island, the Dynasty Electric Car Corp that builds a “low speed vehicle”.

Yes, you need a sports car to get news coverage. The GM electric was very sporty too. But something like the Smart car still seems to me to be the way to go. Better than a golf cart, but ideal for those short trips around town. A vast number of urban trips really are very short - but are a function of the way that land uses are divided into exclusive zones. In the suburbs it is (mostly) too far to walk to the shops. About the only other use accepted in residential zones is a school - or park (usually both). It will take forever to get this changed - so we need some better way of getting about. The bike will do for a lot of journeys, but the rate of adoption is slow. Produce a cheap, no emission urban run about and you can keep your monster as a collector’s item.