Electrical Vehicle Market

This morning’s Electrical Vehicle Market panel began with Craig Eppling, Regional Communications Manager at General Motors who presented primarily on the Chevy Volt. He explained that much of the motivation behind the Volt comes from GM’s desire to explore energy diversity. Indeed, there are many excellent options for powering alternative fuel vehicles, but today Craig was talking about battery electric vehicles. In fact, he drove a Volt to the conference and it is parked right out front!

While the popularity of the Volt is still ramping up, GM has apparently already been thinking about the next generation. Eppling indicated that fuel cells will be the next big thing; he envisioned a day when residential consumers could use water or natural gas on their own property, in conjunction with a solar panel on the roof, to make their own hydrogen on the spot.

Next up was Mark Perry, Director of Product Planning at Nissan America. In an energetic presentation, Mark began by setting the stage--pointing out that there are 600 million cars on the road today and that there will be 2.5 billion on the road by 2050. Coupled with this growth is the fact that the US spends $1 billion per day on imported oil. The bottom line is that alternatives are needed and they’re needed now. Nissan now has over 20,000 reservations for the Leaf and over 300,000 “hand-raisers”. Perry anticipates that this is a huge growth area, especially in the face of increased public charging stations, of which he estimates there will be 13,000 by this time next year. 

Third to speak was Ali Emadi, Founder and President of Hybrid Electric Vehicle Technologies, Inc. and Harris Perlstein Endowed Chair Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Emadi presented a more academic-oriented talk, discussing the overall needed “paradigm shift” from gasoline vehicles to electric vehicles. He pointed out that there have been many paradigm shifts over the last 100 years, such as mass use of electricity, mass production of cars, aerospace industry, computers and main frames, personal computers, communications and wired phones, cell phones, smart phones, Internet, digital processors, search engines, and social media networks. However, says Emadi, the automotive and electric power industries have operated mainly in evolutionary mode with incremental changes. PHEVs, according to Emadi, are the best solution for transportation and are giving tremendous momentum to a new paradigm shift. 

Last to speak was Rob Ferber, Chief Technology Officer at KLD Energy Technologies. Although the shortest presentation of the bunch, Ferber had an extremely powerful message. KLD Energy Technologies develops a transmissionless, electric drive system that improves the performance of vehicles while substantially decreasing their impact on the environment. Although there are multiple applications for KLD’s technology, a primary application is in electric scooters. Ferber pointed out that there are virtually zero electric scooters in the US. There is, however, one market that dominates in electric vehicle sales: China. And 20 million of the electric vehicles sold in China in 2010 were two-wheel electric vehicles.