No more range anxiety

Sunday 15 December 2013 7:45AM (view full episode)

The Chancellor of Monash University, Alan Finkel, loves technology, particularly if it involves electronics. Today he talks about his passion for electric cars and he points out that many people suffer range anxiety, which is the fear of being stuck somewhere with no charge in the battery. However, according to Alan Finkel, with the arrival of the BMW i3 series hybrid electric car, range anxiety may become a thing of the past.


Robyn Williams: Now, without being unkind about Holden and their 140,000 jobs, or is it 200,000 jobs that might go (these figures relate to possible total job losses in the car industry and connected services as referred to by the Australian Bureau of Statistics), isn’t this yet another example of Australia sticking to the 19th century technology? I know the car is early 20th century, but the basic model is late 19th: oil, spark, burn – move. And in this past week we’ve seen countless examples of what might be instead: from 3D printed cars (you may have seen them on 60 Minutes (yes, print your own car and cross Australia), cars that drive themselves and cars made out of carbon fibre, produced in Geelong, Victoria. Yes, it is the 20th century but Australia is still digging coal, dredging ports off the Great Barrier Reef and exploring yet more ways perhaps to go backwards.

So what does Alan Finkel think? He’s our ultimate techo, Chancellor of Monash University, President of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering and someone who’s run his own successful engineering company.

Alan Finkel:


Alan Finkel: I admit it.  I love technology, especially if it involves electronics.


All my life I’ve either been a hobbyist, or a professional electronics engineer.  Even when I shifted disciplines from electronics to neuroscience, it was only because I learned that brain cells act like tiny electronic circuits.


The scale of my activities changed a few years ago when I joined an electric car company as the chief technology officer.  Yes, I was still working with electricity, but instead of dealing with nano amps and micro volts in brain cells, I was dealing with dozens of amps and hundreds of volts to charge electric cars.


I passionately believe in the future of electric cars.  I know that future drivers born today will take them for granted, yet sales so far have been woefully slow.


The truth is, there is a problem.


I used to drive an electric motor bike.  It was terrific, but it only had a 30 kilometre range so I had to monitor the battery gauge all the time.  Most days, I avoided taking it out for fear that I would run out of battery before the end of the day.


Now I own a Nissan Leaf, a fantastic, pure electric car.  But although I can get away without charging it every night, I diligently keep my eye on the remaining range in a way that I never do in a petrol car.


This fear of running out is known as range anxiety, manifesting itself as the panicky concern that you will be stuck on the freeway with zero charge in the battery and no way to get home other than a ride in a tow truck.


However, finally, in August BMW launched the i3, a car that heralds a new era.  It is the first electric car to eliminate range anxiety.


Surprisingly, this epochal significance was lost on most commentators.  It reminds me of the early 1990s when the internet took its first small steps.  In those pioneering days, I didn’t recognize the internet as being transformational.  Silly me.  This time round, my mind is primed and I can immediately see the transformational potential of this new car.


The BMW i3 is an electric car with state of the art specifications:  a 150 kilometre range on a single charge, a 125 kilowatt motor, 0 to 100 kilometres per hour in 7 seconds, comfort, class and safety.


Most of the publicity focuses on this being the first production car in the world with a carbon fibre reinforced polymer body.  This is indeed remarkable, and puts this car into the same category as the world’s most modern aeroplanes.


However, after touching the panels and inhaling that special smell of the interior of a brand new car, you won’t care whether the body is made out of steel, aluminium, carbon fibre or chewing gum.  All you will care about is performance, comfort and ease of mind.


The actual game-changing breakthrough is that the BMW i3 is available with an optional auxiliary power unit that converts it, when needed, from a pure electric car into a series hybrid electric car. 


We’ve all heard of hybrids.  Hybrid vehicles such as the Toyota Prius, the Honda Civic, the Chevy Volt and indeed my previous car, the Lexus GS 450h, are popular.  What distinguishes the BMW i3 from these is that the BMW i3 is a series hybrid whereas the others are parallel hybrids.


In a parallel hybrid the wheels are sometimes powered from the electric motor, sometimes from the petrol engine and sometimes from both.  Each of the electric motor and the petrol engine has to be full strength, and their outputs are blended by sophisticated gearboxes that add to the price, weight and complexity of the vehicle.


For these reasons, good as they are, parallel hybrids are a transitional technology.  Whether it is ten years from now, or twenty years from now, they’ll be phased out of existence.


The series hybrid is much simpler.  Unlike the parallel hybrid, in a series hybrid, the wheels of the car are always driven by the electric motor, nothing else.


The separate auxiliary power unit is a combination of a petrol tank, a small petrol engine and a generator.  When the battery falls below a certain level, the auxiliary power unit automatically kicks in and starts charging the battery.  Now you can finish your journey and get home from wherever you are.


There are other ways that have been developed to overcome range anxiety, but none has been successful.


The first and most basic means is to simply ensure that you don’t drive the electric car beyond its rated range in the first place.  Most production electric cars have a range of about 150 kilometres, which is without doubt enough for normal city driving given that you can plug in every night.  But it’s inadequate for weekend trips to the snow fields or the wineries.


The California car company, Tesla Motors, gives its cars a battery weighing more than half a tonne to provide an incredible 450 kilometre range, but this adds greatly to the price of the vehicle, and even then does not get you from Melbourne to Sydney.


The second solution is to swap the battery.  The principle is that you drive your car into a battery exchange station and three minutes later drive out with a fully charged battery that just happens to be a different one.


Wonderful as this sounds, it’s not commercially practical because car manufacturers regard the battery as a key component of the performance, safety and weight balance of their vehicles.  Therefore, they have no interest in using standard designs upon which a battery exchange station would rely.


A third approach is to use powerful ‘quick charging’ that enables the battery to be recharged in about an hour.  Good, but not nearly as fast as filling up with petrol.


As you can see, these alternatives all have limitations.  In my opinion, the only viable way to eliminate range anxiety is the series hybrid configuration that liberates the BMW i3.


The beauty is the simplicity.  There are no gearboxes, no duplicate engines nor any other mechanical components outside the auxiliary power unit.


The auxiliary power unit itself doesn’t have to be hefty.  Consider that the BMW i3 only needs its peak output power of 125 kilowatts briefly, when it is accelerating rapidly or when climbing a steep mountain road.  The rest of the time it is operating at a tiny fraction of that power, with the average power over the course of a drive being 20 kW or less.


Therefore, if the battery runs low and the auxiliary power unit switches on, it only has to deliver 20 kilowatts of electricity to the battery.


For this reason, the petrol motor inside the auxiliary power unit can be small and extremely efficient because it runs at a constant speed into a constant load.


In normal daily driving, the BMW i3 operates in pure electric mode, topped up each night at home.


The auxiliary power unit lies dormant for weeks or months on end, activating rarely such as during that infrequent trip to Sydney.  But knowing that the auxiliary power unit is there completely eliminates range anxiety.


Consider one last thing – cost of ownership.  Let’s say that like me, you would like to reduce your carbon footprint.  You can invest in solar panels, or you can invest in an electric car.


In the absence of subsidies solar panels would be an expensive purchase that you never planned when you were growing up.  On the other hand, you always hoped to buy a new car every now and then, so why not make it an electric car?  Looked at this way, buying an electric car is a budgeted expense, not an expensive extra.


With time, the price differential between electric cars and conventional cars will become vanishingly small.  So you will be paying no more for your environmentally friendly electric car than for your environmentally unfriendly conventional car.  Some forecasters predict that electric cars will actually become cheaper than their petrol predecessors.


“Wait,” you might say, “what about the resale value of my electric car?”  Good question.  After a few years of ownership the battery is bound to lose some of its driving range, which might discourage the next purchaser.  It would not be much good to eliminate range anxiety only to have it replaced with resale anxiety.


Fortunately, with a series hybrid electric car, that’s not the case.  If the prospective purchaser of your electric car knows that there is an auxiliary power unit installed, a slight reduction in battery range simply doesn’t matter.  Your resale price will be preserved.


Till now, range anxiety counterbalanced the manifest advantages of electric cars, such as responsive performance, smoothness, quietness and low carbon-dioxide emissions.


Now that range anxiety has been eliminated, you can enjoy, without qualification, all of the benefits of electric driving.


The commentators of today have not yet realized it, but historians will mark the BMW i3 series-hybrid electric car as the game-changing breakthrough that heralds the beginning of a new era of electric driving.


Robyn Williams: Bold forecast. Alan Finkel is President of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Chancellor of Monash University and also publisher of Cosmos magazine, in which this month he tackles Moore’s Law and its future, Norman Swan tackles the question of cholesterol and statins and the cover story of Cosmos is all about 3D printing of body parts.

Next week on Ockham’s Razor we celebrate 50 years since Jack Eccles’ Nobel Prize for showing how your brain and nervous system works. That’s with Professor John Carmody.


Dr Alan Finkel
Chancellor of Monash University
President of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering
Publisher of Cosmos magazine


Robyn Williams
Brigitte Seega