Plugging Into Old Concept for the Electric Automobile
As Los Angeles swelters as usual in July, with pollution levels to match, Monty Hempel thinks it’s time to take a new look at an old concept--the electric car.
“People tend to think of it as resembling a golf cart,” he said, “and you don’t drive a golf cart on the freeway.”
Hempel, on the other hand, can envision whole fleets of electric cars on the Los Angeles freeways--delivery vans, rental cars and commuter sedans--all bigger than golf carts, all battery powered, and none polluting the air.
An energetic academic who’s associate director of the Center for Politics and Policy of the Claremont Graduate School, Hempel is just completing an extensive study of the electric car’s potential for curbing air pollution in the four-county South Coast Air Basin by the year 2010. His conclusions might be summarized as “cautious optimism.”
“We have found out enough about electric vehicles to think they should be part of the public debate on transportation alternatives,” he said last week.
That would be a major shift. Although the electric car has been promoted fitfully as an energy-saver since the energy crises of the 1970s, it has seemed to languish in the category of “an idea whose time hasn’t yet come.”
In fact, Hempel says, the timing has been off in several ways. When Congress in 1976 authorized $160 million for electrical vehicle research, resulting in several experimental models, “the technology just wasn’t ready to be mass-produced,” he said. “Expectations were raised unrealistically.”
Its 1970s revival was plagued by a major stumbling block--developing a battery that could carry enough charge to move the car long distances between recharges. (Hempel is familiar with the jokes about an electric car needing a 360-mile extension cord.)
That technology, he notes, is “only now becoming attractive . . . new batteries are available on a demonstration basis that offer up to 122 miles on a single charge.”
Possible Scenario
And, looking down the road, Hempel is optimistic that the electric car can be sold to consumers--even Californians devoted to the twin ideas of horsepower and pickup. He offers this scenario:
“Right now, for the first time, General Motors is getting ready to produce the G-Van, then Chrysler will offer an electric van in 1990 or 199l, which will be smaller and with a greater range in speed. That will appeal to people beyond the fleet owners and the van pool folks and bring us to the 1990s with a commuter car that would capture the second-car market perhaps.” That market, Hempel envisions, would be composed of people who say “What I really want is something reliable that we can use around town but we won’t take it on vacation.”
And not a minute too soon. In his 100-page report, which is funded in part by Southern California Edison, Hempel concludes that, with 12 million people currently operating 8 million cars, and with population in the Los Angeles metropolitan region expected to reach 18 million by the year 2010, “We’re playing with our health, unless we change the driving patterns.”
With a doctorate in American government, Hempel, 38, sees public policy as offering “statements about the future” and likes to think of Claremont’s year-old Center for Politics and Policy as a “future-oriented learning environment.”
‘Clarifying Options’
“I see the role of the academic public policy person to be that of clarifying options,” he said. “For instance, if we went to an electric vehicle, what would the society look like in terms of air pollution? Then we go the next step and say what government would have to do to make this possible.”
His report--which started last September as an air pollution environmental clinic with a team of students--stresses alternatives, trade-offs and obstacles, as well as a need for reshaping old attitudes.
Says Hempel: “I think a big obstacle in the near future is our insistence on letting gasoline vehicles set the standard for measurement. Electric vehicles won’t measure up in terms of speed and power. Gas cars are powerful, complicated, fast, and capable of long-distance runs.”
But there are other approaches to evaluating transportation, he continued. In terms of air pollution control, his report explains, the electric vehicle not only changes the location of the pollution source--from the tailpipes to the smokestack of power plants used in the recharging of EV batteries--it also reduces pollution because the power plants are essentially burning cleaner fuels than gasoline.
On Two Levels
“I will argue principally that the electric vehicle offers air pollution control advantages on two levels,” said Hempel.
--First, the local level. “The economic costs of air pollution in the region have been estimated to be as high as $12 billion a year. This can reflect everything from premature deaths from lung disease to the cost of replacement of your draperies, your clothing, even your windshield wipers, from air pollutants.”
--Second is the global level. There is an increasing concern about carbon dioxide concentrations contributing to the so-called Greenhouse Effect, an alarming global warming trend. “There was evidence in the 1970s to see the problem coming, but it wasn’t consistent enough to be translated by Congress into policy. Now it is being discussed again,” he said.
If the electric car of tomorrow does become a reality, what can the consumer expect to see? Something very conventional, suggests Hempel. “Recognizing that the public perception has to be brought from positive to negative, a strange new look wouldn’t help at all.” In the beginning, at least, Hempel expects “manufacturers would simply substitute a battery-powered energy system for a gasoline-powered one. Actually, Ford made one about four years ago--the ETX I. It was one of their standard designs that happened to have electric components.”
Another plus will be simplified maintenance. The electric vehicle has no radiator to overheat, no oil and no spark plugs to change, no transmission, exhaust pipes or mufflers to worry with.
“I know lots of people who give priority to reliability in a car,” said Hempel, “and because there are so many fewer parts to be repaired, reliability and repair will be a plus.”
All this, he thinks, could lead to a change in driver attitude. “I don’t want them to think of electric cars as golf carts. I want them to think of a conventional automobile, with most of the usual features but lacking certain performance characteristics that they are not allowed to exploit anyway.”
Electric cars won’t “in the foreseeable future match the performance of a 500-horsepower car with a speedometer that registers up to 160 m.p.h.” But, Hempel points out, “the average speed during rush hour is 31 m.p.h. today and expected to decline to 11 m.p.h. by 2010.”
In the long run, though, he thinks it will take more than technical breakthroughs to produce a market for a new kind of car.
“I think it requires a change in consciousness--for people to understand that we face, perhaps for the first time in this country, an era where the lives of our children are not going to be as good as the lives of their parents. We need to re-think how we value energy, and transportation and air quality.
“I am hoping that this kind of concern will drive people to re-evaluate the consequences of how they make decisions.”
