Electric Car Revolution Remains a Distant Prospect






Ambitious Goals



Automotive Irrational Exuberance





Finding the Sweet Spot

Rudolf Krebs draws a pentagon as he sits in his office in Wolfsburg, home to the headquarters of Volkswagen. The 54-year-old is convinced that his background as a trained electrician and holder of a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering makes him particularly qualified for his new assignment.

Krebs leads the team at Volkswagen responsible for developing electric drive systems. Europe's largest carmaker won't have an electric car on the market until 2013. The miniature "Up!" car already on display at the IAA is a version outfitted with a combustion engine.

"In this case, we don't have a problem not being the very first," Krebs says. "It doesn't make sense to prematurely put a car on the market that doesn't offer any convincing benefit in terms of its usefulness."

Krebs writes a different term at each corner of his pentagon: energy content, performance, costs, safety and life span. Developers are trapped in this structure, he explains. An improvement in one aspect comes at the cost of another. If performance or energy content increases, life span decreases. Offering more range means a bigger price tag. Indeed, as he sees it, the greatest challenge is designing an electric car that hits the sweet spot where the levels of all these aspects are acceptable.

The Battery Bottleneck











Renault Fails to Live Up to Its Own Hype




2011 was supposed to be year of Renault's major offensive. But so far the only thing the company has to offer is a flashy website devoted to electric cars. The site has links to Facebook and Twitter and a short video in which someone playing an instructor dressed in a white lab coat tries to dispel the "myths" about battery capacities and ranges while using incorrect scientific terms (such as "kilowatt per hour" instead of "kilowatt hour") and divining that the Renault Fluence Z.E. will be able to drive 185 kilometers on a single charge.

The car that is supposed to keep this promise looks like the makeshift conversion of an ordinary sedan. The battery is housed vertically behind the back seats and can store 22 kilowatt hours of energy. It is only expected to have a range of 100 kilometers at best.

For the time being, Renault's only contribution to electric mobility is a car that costs a lot but can do little. The electric version of the Fluence is expected to have a sticker price of €26,180 -- but that's without the battery, which will remain the manufacturer's property and will be leased to the car owner for €79 a month. Consumers can already get their hands on a version of the Fluence that comes with a combustion engine for almost €8,000 less -- including a gas tank.

Tempering Ambition This product will not clear the way to the mass-marketing Ghosn proclaimed, but there might be some comfort in the fact that, when it comes to the environment, its arrival isn't really all that urgent. Environmental analysts already determined a while back that an electric vehicle that gets its power from Germany's current energy mix does only slightly less damage than a conventional car with good mileage.


Even the idea of the Electric Grand Prix floated by the FIA would hardly be a good advertisement for this new type of drive system. In fact, it would only illustrate its weaknesses, because the race would only last 15 minutes. The batteries wouldn't last any longer than that.

Translated from the German by Josh Ward