Electric VehiclesMay 17, 2009

Explore the evolution of electric cars from their early 1900s cost challenges to today's affordability. Discover why electric vehicles are now simpler, cleaner, and more cost-effective than ever.

And we can talk a little bit about that and some costs. One of the other questions that comes up quite a bit is how much does it cost to charge the car. That really is a function of how much you drive it, of course, and how much you pay for electricity.

Here in Missouri we had one of the last nuclear power plants to come online and as a result our electricity rates are extraordinarily low. We pay 7.2 cents a kilowatt hour in the summer, 5.2 in the winter, and at 7.2 cents the higher value, if I drive the full 75 miles it's about 75 cents to charge the car. That's a penny a mile.

Almost an inconsequential expense when you think most people spend three or four hundred dollars a month on gasoline and would be down in the 20, 22 dollars and 50 cents a month with electricity. You can see that there's some money to play with there in acquiring a car. The question that isn't asked so much and should be is why isn't everybody driving electric cars? And part of it is simply familiarity, but part of it's historical.

A hundred years ago would you believe that most of the cars were electric electric drive instead of petroleum and in fact our first cars were driven by electricity. I went back and took a look at the costs of operating those cars in 1906 and I found a remarkable thing. Gasoline was 20 cents a gallon in 1906.

You could get some of it for 15, but they were kind of variously graded. It wasn't simply regular and premium. There was a lot of quality differences in gasoline and good quality gasoline was about 20 cents a gallon and you could drive about 20 miles, which is very similar to today.

Our national fleet average is 21 and a half miles per gallon right now. The electricity was remarkably similar. It was 20 cents a kilowatt hour.

Unfortunately you could only go about four miles on a kilowatt hour and so you were looking at a dollar in electricity to go the same distance that you went for 20 cents in gasoline. So gasoline had a huge advantage in cost in 1906. Things have changed.

In 2007 dollars that 20 cents is four dollars and 56 cents and gasoline has actually gone down in price since in the last hundred years to the point now where it's between a dollar seventy five and two dollars as we film this. Now it was four dollars a gallon last summer and it may get back there, but it's actually less cost than it was in 1906. Electricity is much less cost than it was in 1906.

Again that kilowatt hour in 1906 would have been today's equivalent of four dollars and 56 cents. At four dollars and 56 cents it would cost me 107 dollars to charge this car and I probably wouldn't have any interest in an electric car at all. But today the national average cost for electricity across the country is 11 and three quarters cents per kilowatt hour.

A tiny fraction by several orders of magnitude from the cost of it in 1906 and much more widely available. Electricity was available some places and not others in 1906. Today every home is part of a distribution system that stretches across the land and everyone has access to electricity.

You may have to make a few changes in your garage wiring to accommodate higher current levels and 240 volt service. They're relatively trivial. A couple hundred dollars for a licensed electrician to run you a 30 amp or 240 volt circuit to any place in the garage you want it.

And so things have changed a great deal in the last hundred years to the point now that it's pennies to drive an electric car and frankly a pain to deal with gasoline and petroleum products. Another advantage of the electric car is it's simply a simpler and more elegant device. We get rid of a lot of the systems that come with an internal combustion engine such as the cooling system and the radiator and the antifreeze and the water pump and the belt that drives the water pump.

We get rid of the fuel system with the fuel tank and the fuel pump and the fuel filter and the injectors or the carburetor. We don't have the same issues with exhaust. So we don't have an exhaust system, a platinum containing catalytic converter, a smog check to see how much we're putting out.

It's simply not in the car and the weight of it and the expense of it and the complication of it is similarly missing. So you wind up with a much simpler system. You have a battery system, you have a controller that applies the power to the motor in response to your input on the accelerator.

You usually have a little auxiliary 12 volt system that works off your main pack to convert that down to 12 volt to run all the things that you run anyway, the headlights and the taillights and the air conditioner and so forth. So it's a much simpler car and it's a much cleaner car. By cleaner I mean, you know, environmentally of course it's a lot cleaner.

It's cleaner on your hands. You're not getting the oil and the grease and the brake fluid and all the stuff with the dust and the road dirt that clings to all that doesn't happen in your car. You can work on your car, your hands are relatively clean.

You don't have that grime and the mountain of consumables that you have to purchase each year to maintain an internal combustion engine car. It's simply not part of an electric car any more than it would be for a golf cart. Your brakes and tires are the same basic issues.

We've converted this car and all LED lights and high intensity discharge xenon, so I don't really expect to have to change the light bulb for the life of the car. In addition, they use less current and have less effect on the range of the car in that manner. So bottom line is life of an electric car is pretty good and you're pretty much in control and it all comes from your ability to plug in the plug.

So now that you've seen a little bit about the technology in the car, the real proof is in the driving of it. So come on, let's go take a drive in the electric Porsche Beck 356 Speedster baby on board. Starting an electric car offers somewhat less drama than an internal combustion engine vehicle.

When I was a kid, you'd turn the key and pray you had enough battery to start the engine. In an electric car, you always have enough battery, but there's not a lot of drama even then. You turn the key and we're running.

It started. I know that because I've got a light lit here and that tells me that our contactors have closed. We've got power to the controller and we're ready to apply it to the motor.

I've got a little bit of electric electronic instrumentation here with our E-vision instrumentation system from Metric Mind. This gives me my voltage current, the voltage of my 12-volt auxiliary system, how many watt-hours per mile, how many amp-hours per mile, and a little bit of a battery fuel gauge indication. It's actually got 21 pages of information I can change with this little knob between the seats.

That just changes what these two digital displays, numeric displays, and this bar graph tell me. Our speedometer works as normal. That always came off a geared detector on a wheel.

Our tachometer is actually tied to a magnetic pickup on the rear shaft of our electric motor. As it turns out, the Netgame Mortmont 9 has a 5,500 rpm limitation, which is precisely the same that our CB Performance VW engine that we took out of the car had. So we got lucky there.

So our tachometer works as normal.