IDTechEx attended the Plug In 2011 event in Raleigh North Carolina last week. In contrast to the recent, successful IDTechEx event Electric Vehicles Land Sea Air in Stuttgart Germany, this had the more typical focus of cars and almost nothing else. Organised by the Electric Power Research Institute and with many prestigious sponsors, it was a great success with over 600 attending on a given day excluding the public opening. The usual vehicles were on display such as the Chevrolet Volt, the Nissan Leaf and outselling them because they were earlier, the Toyota Prius and the Mitsubishi MiEV.
We were told that Mitsubishi Motors has delayed, not abandoned, introduction of its in-wheel motors in order to get the total system cost down. Word was that Michelin is still five years to rollout of its car in-wheel system. Protean of the UK exhibited its in-wheel permanent magnet AC motors with their damage tolerant design. Indeed, there is a huge amount of work on in-wheel motors in both Europe and East Asia. Meanwhile, for commercial success with in-wheel motors you have to turn to e-bikes not in this show.
Charging station producers were well represented. Here the trends are very interesting with Siemens claiming to waste only 5% of power with its inductive chargers when the popular understanding is that you need resonant transfer to get better than 7-25% wastage, 3% being quoted for resonant transfer. However, inductive transfer is not near to giving the fastest charging, with proposed Level 3 standards for contacted charging up to 240kW. At present we see about 5kW with the prospect of 11 kW with contactless. Nonetheless, the rapidly increasing number of suppliers of the much more convenient and safer contactless inductive option probably presages an increase in market share. Evatran also exhibited contactless charging. See our new report, Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure .
Charging stations are now being deployed in tens of thousands across the USA, mainly in coastal regions. Few are Level 1 overnight chargers because these are incorporated in almost all plug-in cars. Trends are now becoming clearer. For example, exhibitor Green Charge Networks (Prosser and ConEdison) finds that a remarkable 7-12% of installations need local grid upgrade so they have a transportable, dedicated transportable substation for this purpose which contains a 26 kWh lithium-ion battery roughly equivalent to that in a Nissan Leaf, and appropriate contacted outlets, including for Level 3 fastest charging. The total grid upgrade unit costs only $2500/kWh and, being transportable, it will also be useful at events.
Another clear trend is that the Japanese CHAdeMO interface is now very ubiquitous. We even see it is France and Portugal but in the USA it is even more common. EATON told us that it will win "at least for AC" and others had it for both AC and DC charging.
Some nuggets from the cars themselves and the presentations were that permanent magnet synchronous motors are preferred in the PMAC format, cited reasons including that the AC asynchronous motors are still larger (eg tough for in-wheel use even though performance is now much improved) and they use more copper, the most expensive non-precious metal, and expensive electronics, there is less fear over expensive neodymium for magnets now that vast reserves have been found on the floor of the Pacific and PMAC synchronous performance is often better. It would have been nice to talk to more motor manufacturers rather than users with sometimes outdated ideas and old products to sell. Asynchronous motors are certainly gaining market share, being in most forklifts now. Exhibitor ZAPI Inc suoports both types with its controllers and, although they bet on PMAC to be dominant in on-road vehicles for now, they told us the jury is out for the future. The long term winner is not certain.
The exhibits and presentation by Ford were revealing. This company is not taking Volkswagen's avowed intention to become the world's largest car company lying down. It has declared that its EV range will be central in beating the competition and certainly it is well ahead of Volkswagen and indeed the whole of the German motor industry in pure and hybrid EVs so far, being number three to Toyota and Honda in sales of electric cars. Its pure electric Focus rolls out in the USA this year for example and Ford will launch no less than five electric vehicles in the next two years.
Nevertheless, we were concerned to see a Ford projection showing that in ten years only a minority of their hybrid range will be plug-in as hybrid options appear across most Ford models. Their competition does not see it that way. Plug-in is where the battle for ascendancy will be fought.
Ford has pioneered selling one mild hybrid model at the same price as the better performing, gas guzzling conventional version. This is a very powerful marketing tool and it has nothing to do with relative costs. Market share shot upwards.
We expect many other car companies to do the same even with plug-in hybrids and without a performance penalty. It is just like the Japanese offering all those extras for free in conventional cars in the 1970s. It helped power Toyota to number one car manufacturer in the world. Indeed, Nissan and Toyota with their many other EVs such as forklifts and buses are going to be tough for the Americans to beat and Toyota and Honda remain well ahead of Ford in electric car sales and, for Toyota at least, technology. Daimler AG is organising to compete with them all on a broad front unders its Mercedes, Smart and Orion brands in particular.
Will the USA match the German and Korean intention to each have 500,000 fuel cell EVs on their roads in ten years, with Mercedes about to launch the first mass-produced fuel cell car? What have Ford or GM to offer against what will soon be one million a year production capacity for the Prius alone? Announcing 100,000 a year capacity for all Ford electric cars in two years is only a small step in that direction. It will be interesting to watch these impressive companies and indeed the real battle which is across all EVs from military to commercial, with most planning a fuel cell vehicle launch within five years. See the IDTechEx report, Electric Vehicles 2011-2021 . For more attend Electric Vehicles Land Sea Air USA 2012 in San Jose, California, 27-28 March 2012.
