Pi-Consulting

Imagine if you can a world in which the automotive industry have not been invented yet.

If we had to start from scratch and invent it today, would we seriously consider basing the motor car’s future on using one of the most volatile fuels known to man? A fuel which, in order to produce propulsion, depends on detonating several fiery explosions per second in a steel box? A fuel which bursts into flames during transportation if exposed to a spark, a match or a collision? A fuel whose unburned residue pollutes our world and endangers global climate patterns? A fuel, moreover, which we in the West have very little of, and have to buy — at volatile and often exorbitant prices — from faraway and frequently uncooperative nations who understand and use the power it gives them over us?

Pi don’t think so.

Nor, it appears, did many of the people who tried to invent and reinvent the car over more than a century. 100 years ago, the internal combustion engine was getting a run for its money from steam-driven and electric designs. The battery-electric cars now being brought to market come from a long line of similar experiments.

In early 1920s America, there were dozens of manufacturers turning out electric cars. They were quiet, efficient and reliable. Above all, their ready-to-go power source avoided all that irksome hand-cranking that petrol cars needed. That all changed with the invention of self-starting ignition.

But the battery power enthusiasts were not finished. Soon after World War II, Kish Industries of Lansing, Mich. developed the Nu Klea Starlite, one variant with a futuristic clear bubble top, which was to run at 40 miles an hour for up to 40 miles on a charge to its lead acid batteries. The world was not set aflame, and the enterprise was abandoned in 1965. People started saying things like “It’s the batteries, stupid”, and Eisenhower’s new highways were colonized exclusively by petrol-engine cars, which to this day represent over 99% of all the cars on America’s roads.

Not to be deterred, the Henney Motor Company introduced its Kilowatt in 1959, based on the body of a Renault Dauphine. Electric Fuel Propulsion in Michigan had the same idea when they launched MARS I and MARS II Renault-based hybrids, and in 1967 gave the world an added incentive to ‘drive electric’ by installing fast-charge recharge stations at Holiday Inns between Chicago and Detroit. The love affair with Renault bodies was continued by Electricar Corporation of Athol, Mass., when they introduced their Lectric Leopard in 1979.

This was soon trumped by the CitiCar, an electric car which Sebring Vanguard of Florida sold quite a few of in 1974-76. Their two-seater was uncharitably described as “a golf cart with horn, lights, turn signals and windshield wipers”. The CitiCar was soon succeeded by the same manufacturer’s ComutaCar. And then, eventually, came General Motors’ EV1, which GM put on the roads of California and Arizona (leased rather than sold) in the latter years of the 1990’s. That bold innovation depended on charging stations in homes, office buildings and shopping centers, and its sad demise was chronicled in the movie “Who Killed The Electric Car?”. For their part, Daimler Chrysler have already sunk $3.6 billion into their Smart car, and have little to show for it but furrowed brows. Now California-based Tesla Motors is to try its hand with an electric-powered two-seater costing $89,000, reports The Economist. The backing comes from PayPal baron Elon Musk and from Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Maybe electrics can make money for them as electrons did.

Yet are all these Quixotic efforts no more than tilting at windmills? Even enthusiasts for battery-powered automotion confess that the driving experience feels “primitive”. One aficionado actually enjoys the startled looks on bystanders’ faces when his electric chariot (he himself says it looks like “a phone box on wheels”) glides past them in almost total silence.

And that’s where consumer insight points up a fundamental problem. People driving cars like the feeling they get from fast acceleration, throbbing motors, and above all vroom vroom noises. The market is addicted to the macho growling sound-effects provided by the internal combustion engine, and feels deep-down that near-silent electric engines sound “alien”.

“Oh, is that all?”, say Tesla’s engineers. “Fine, we’ll program the software with a variety of engine roars, like ringtones on your cellphone!”. Errmmmmm… Guys, don’t call us, we’ll call you.