Estudo: Portugueses querem carro eléctrico

O inquérito realizado pelo Jornal de Negócios, Inteli e CEIIA revela que mais de metade dos inquiridos já pondera adquirir um carro eléctrico. De um universo de pouco mais de duas mil pessoas, 55,4% mostra intenção de comprar um automóvel movido exclusivamente a energia eléctrica. Isto, apesar de 76,2% dos inquiridos considerar que ainda não existe informação suficiente sobre este tipo de veículos.

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Deloitte: Mass adoption of EVs still far away

Despite rising fuel prices, the mass adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is still some distance away, is the finding of a new study by Deloitte, the business advisory firm.

According to the survey of 4,760 European consumers, only 16% see themselves as potential first movers to buy or lease an electric vehicle, while 53% say they might be willing to consider it, and 31 percent say they are not likely to consider purchasing or leasing an EV.

David Raistrick, automotive partner and head of manufacturing at Deloitte UK, commented: "There is no doubt that electric vehicles are the future of the automotive industry. However, while interest in electric vehicles is growing, with 69% of respondents willing to consider an EV today, current market offerings generally fall far short of consumers' expectations for driving range, charging time, and purchase price.

More than 80% of European consumers surveyed said that convenience to charge, range, and the cost to charge were all key considerations when buying or leasing an EV.

David Raistrick added: "Range, price and charging concerns need to be addressed. Our research shows that there are specific design targets that manufacturers must reach in order to entice car buyers.

"Three-quarters of European consumers surveyed (74%) said that before they would consider purchasing an EV, they would expect it to be able to travel 300 miles between charges - much higher than what is currently available - and 67% said the battery must take no longer than two hours to charge.

"In the UK, however, consumers consider the ability to travel at least 200 miles between charges to be the tipping point, especially in London and the South East."

"The automotive industry continues to invest in high end R&D to devise the cutting edge technology required for electric vehicles. It is clear that this innovation is a priority for car manufacturers. I believe there is potential for green vehicles to represent 10% of the new car market within 10 years, although the road to get there will be bumpy. Manufacturers face many challenges, both in terms of actual design elements, as well as changing the mindset of consumers toward electric vehicles."

The majority (57%) of respondents who say they may be willing to consider an Electric vehicle expect to pay the same or less for an EV than they do for a regular car. Only 24% of the same group say they would be willing to pay a premium. Currently, hybrids and battery electric vehicles represent a tiny fraction of total cars on the road. The adoption of all forms of green vehicles will be significantly influenced by government policies.

David Raistrick added: "For mass adoption, manufacturers will need to meet the challenge of pricing electric vehicles in line with consumer expectations, while still maximising their margins. Consumers are not likely to want to pay a high price premium for EVs. This means that incentives such as tax reductions and exemptions will be very important to the purchase decision. Just like the Government supported the highly successful car scrappage scheme, they should now be turning their attention to electric vehicles.

"However, a bright note for the UK is that it appears from our research that UK consumers are more willing to pay a premium for electric vehicles than their counterparts in other European countries."

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Civic, Leaf named greenest cars of 2011

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) has ranked the natural gas-burning Honda Civic GX as the greenest vehicle, for the second year. The battery-powered Nissan Leaf scored as high as the Civic GX on the green chart (click the image for full size), but the Honda took the first place on environmental items.

However, the Smart Fortwo Electric Drive is the greenest vehicle. According to the ACEEE, the Fortwo scored 60 (the Civic and the Leaf scored 54), but was not eligible for the greenest list due to low sales volume. Only 250 units of the 2011 Smart Fortwo EV will be available on a trial basis in the U.S., the ACEEE states.

The plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt ranked twelfth overall due to its comparatively poor fuel economy.

For more, visit the ACEEE website

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Einstein and car batteries: Without the magic of relativity, a car’s starter motor would not turn

From The Economist: Albert Einstein never learned to drive. He thought it too complicated and in any case he preferred walking. What he did not know—indeed, what no one knew until now—is that most cars would not work without the intervention of one of his most famous discoveries, the special theory of relativity.

Special relativity deals with physical extremes. It governs the behaviour of subatomic particles zipping around powerful accelerators at close to the speed of light and its equations foresaw the conversion of mass into energy in nuclear bombs. A paper in Physical Review Letters, however, reports a more prosaic application. According to the calculations of Pekka Pyykko of the University of Helsinki and his colleagues, the familiar lead-acid battery that sits under a car’s bonnet and provides the oomph to get the engine turning owes its ability to do so to special relativity.

Relative values

The lead-acid battery is one of the triumphs of 19th-century technology. It was invented in 1860 and is still going strong. Superficially, its mechanism is well understood. Indeed, it is the stuff of high-school chemistry books. But Dr Pyykko realised that there was a problem. In his view, when you dug deeply enough into the battery’s physical chemistry, that chemistry did not explain how it worked.

A lead-acid battery is a collection of cells, each of which contains two electrodes immersed in a strong solution of sulphuric acid. One of the electrodes is composed of metallic lead, the other of porous lead dioxide. In the parlance of chemists, metallic lead is electropositive. This means that when it reacts with the acid, it tends to lose some of its electrons. Lead dioxide, on the other hand, is highly electronegative, preferring to absorb electrons in chemical reactions. If a conductive wire is run between the two, electrons released by the lead will run through it towards the lead dioxide, generating an electrical current as they do so. The bigger the difference in the electropositivity and electronegativity of the materials that make up a battery’s electrodes, the bigger the voltage it can deliver. In the case of lead and lead dioxide, this potential difference is just over two volts per cell.

That much has been known since the lead-acid battery was invented. However, although the properties of these basic chemical reactions have been measured and understood to the nth degree, no one has been able to show from first principles exactly why lead and lead dioxide tend to be so electropositive and electronegative. This is a particular mystery because tin, which shares many of the features of lead, makes lousy batteries. Metallic tin is not electropositive enough compared with the electronegativity of its oxide to deliver a useful potential difference.

This is partly explained because the bigger an atom is, the more weakly its outer electrons are bound to it (and hence the further those electrons are from the nucleus). In all groups of chemically similar elements the heaviest are the most electropositive. However, this is not enough to account for the difference between lead and tin. To put it bluntly, classical chemical theory predicts that cars should not start in the morning.

Which is where Einstein comes in. For, according to Dr Pyykko’s calculations, relativity explains why tin batteries do not work, but lead ones do.

His chain of reasoning goes like this. Lead, being heavier than tin, has more protons in its nucleus (82, against tin’s 50). That means its nucleus has a stronger positive charge and that, in turn, means the electrons orbiting the nucleus are more attracted to it and travel faster, at roughly 60% of the speed of light, compared with 35% for the electrons orbiting a tin atom. As the one Einsteinian equation everybody can quote, E=mc2, predicts, the kinetic energy of this extra velocity (ie, a higher E) makes lead’s electrons more massive than tin’s (increasing m)—and heavy electrons tend to fall in and circle the nucleus in more tightly bound orbitals.

That has the effect of making metallic lead less electropositive (ie, more electronegative) than classical theory indicates it should be—which would tend to make the battery worse. But this tendency is more than counterbalanced by an increase in the electronegativity of lead dioxide. In this compound, the tightly bound orbitals act like wells into which free electrons can fall, allowing the material to capture them more easily. That makes lead dioxide much more electronegative than classical theory would predict.

And so it turned out. Dr Pyykko and his colleagues made two versions of a computer model of how lead-acid batteries work. One incorporated their newly hypothesised relativistic effects while the other did not. The relativistic simulations predicted the voltages measured in real lead-acid batteries with great precision. When relativity was excluded, roughly 80% of that voltage disappeared.

That is an extraordinary finding, and it prompts the question of whether previously unsuspected battery materials might be lurking at the heavier end of the periodic table. Ironically, today’s most fashionable battery material, lithium, is the third-lightest element in that table—and therefore one for which no such relativistic effects can be expected. And lead is about as heavy as it gets before elements become routinely radioactive and thus inappropriate for all but specialised applications. Still, the search for better batteries is an endless one, and Dr Pyykko’s discovery might prompt some new thinking about what is possible in this and other areas of heavy-element chemistry.

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One-fifth of drivers likely to consider buying an electric vehicle

IBM's Institute for Business Value research on electric cars and a recent study of auto industry executives suggest eager drivers: Many automobile industry executives believe that sales of traditional vehicles will peak before 2020 and are looking to electric-only vehicles (EVs) as one of the next hot products, but they will first have to address stringent consumer requirements about EV performance, recharging, and convenience.

Taken together, the two studies uncover significant differences between the automobile industry executives IBM spoke to and consumers on the factors motivating consumers to purchase electric vehicles, with auto execs placing greater emphasis than consumers on government incentives and oil prices. The executives were also skeptical of consumers’ willingness to pay a premium for green vehicles.


Why Buy an Electric Vehicle

The insights, from IBM’s Institute for Business Value (IBV), are derived from a new survey of 1,716 U.S. drivers (1) and interviews with 123 auto industry executives (2). The study indicates that, even in these early days, there is a potentially large market for EVs. Nineteen percent of drivers surveyed said that they were either “very likely” or “likely” to consider purchasing an electric-only vehicle when shopping for a new car. This is notable, given that 42 percent of drivers know only “a little” about EVs or have “only heard of them,” suggesting that automakers could increase the pool of potential buyers with sustained educational campaigns.

Thirty percent of drivers surveyed said that they would consider switching to an EV that got 100 miles or less per charge. Current EVs get about 50 to 100 miles per charge.

And 40 percent of drivers said they would pay up to 20 percent more for an electric-only vehicle compared with a similarly-featured gas-, diesel, or hybrid-powered vehicle, with 27 percent saying they would pay 10 percent more and 13 percent saying they would pay 20 percent more.

To drive the price of electric vehicles into this more affordable zone, the IBV research indicates that automakers should initially focus on sales to both consumers and commercial fleets, building scale and creating economic efficiencies in production. Automakers may also need to develop new business models for electric vehicles to overcome the higher initial price.


Home charging: a sticking point

Nevertheless, price of the home charging installation often required to support an EV could pose an obstacle to EV adoption. Only 13 percent of drivers said they would consider spending more than $1,000 to retrofit their residence to support recharging of an electric vehicle. According to industry estimates, retrofitting to a 240 volt outlet accessible to vehicles averages between $1,000 and $2,000.

In addition, two-thirds of consumers expect a price discount on their electricity for charging at home overnight. This expectation could place increasing focus on utilities for time-based pricing to encourage home charging, or more public charging will be required if an electricity discount is not available.

Home charging is considered important to the success of EVs. Of the drivers surveyed, 83 percent said they park their primary vehicle in the driveway or garage of their private residence, as opposed to in a parking lot, on the street, in a shared garage or some other location.

“Even under optimal circumstances, fully recharging an electric-only vehicle takes hours,” said Kal Gyimesi, IBV automotive lead and co-author of the IBV study. “So, it is crucially important that we build an infrastructure that can charge vehicles where their owners park them for extended periods of time – whether that is at home or at work, school, or the store.”


Where to put those charging stations?

Perhaps a reflection of America’s consumer culture, 62 percent of drivers surveyed said they most often parked in a mall or store parking lot when not at home or work. That’s substantially higher than any other location – “on the street” was number two at 17 percent.

“When deciding where to put charging stations, retail hubs like malls and shopping centers are good locations,” Gyimesi said. “It’s easy to envision charging stations in these commercial locations coupled with an advertising and promotion-based business model for local stores – which will help make the economics more feasible.”

Partnering with large employers in target regions to create charging infrastructure in the workplace also makes sense, Gyimesi added.

Consumers were asked what would motivate them to switch from using a vehicle that currently runs on gasoline, diesel or hybrid to an electric-only vehicle. The same question was posed to automobile industry executives, who were asked to rate the importance consumers place on each choice.

Both consumers (71%) and auto execs (81%) rank 'innovative pricing models or lower price overall' first. Auto execs (73%) quote 'significantly higher oil prices' as a major reason behind considering electric cars. Only 51% of consumers quoted the same reason. 'Green image or sustainability concerns' are important for only 48% of consumers and 33% of auto execs. Availability of charging infrastructure is crucial for 62% of consumers and 65% of execs.

The answers illustrate that the automobile industry executives IBM interviewed for this study place far greater weight than consumers on government incentives/regulations (73 percent to 41 percent).

According to the IBV study, when asked executives how automakers could develop mobility solutions, 83 percent said that the best direction would be to shift their product portfolio from conventional vehicles to electrified vehicles (EVs). About half said they expect the annual sales of conventional vehicles to have begun to decline by 2020.


Urban/Suburban/Rural Divide?

Responses for the driver survey were similar across urban, suburban and rural areas -- with some notable exceptions. For example, rural respondents were the most likely (59 percent) to say they would pay nothing more for an electric-only vehicle compared with a similarly-featured gas-, diesel, or hybrid-powered vehicle.

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