European Capital for Electric Cars - 8/9/08

The prime minister of Britain has pledged 90 million pounds to help make Britain “the European capital for electric cars.”  This has sparked interest by big automakers like GM.

Gordon Brown made this announcement at the British International Motor Show last week.  He said the money would be available over five years to support electric and hybrid car projects.

There were numerous environmentally friendly cars at the motor show.  Most were small cars, but there were also high performance models like the Tesla, a U.S. company and the Lightning, a British company.
 
The two leading manufactures that are committed to the development of electric cars were General Motors and Renault-Nissan. 

GM previewed its Flexstream concept car which is a hybrid that is part of the E-Flex program.  This program should hopefully start by the end of 2010.  The car will be cheap to run, but comes with a high purchase price.

All automakers will be faced with the high cost of reducing fuel consumption as well as carbon dioxide emissions and meeting the coming European rules requiring a fleet average of 130 g/km carbon dioxide.

If Britain goes through with this pledge and the EU follows GM would consider making its electric vehicles at the Ellesmere Port plant.

GM anticipates first year production of the E-Flex to be 30,000 for Europe. 

Unlike Renault-Nissan GM does not believe in a pure electric car.  The E-Flex models are plug in hybrids driven by an electric motor.  It would have a gasoline engine that would recharge the batteries when driving goes further than 50 miles.  This plug in hybrid setup is similar to the GM Volt planned for production in the U.S. around 2010. 

Batteries are GM’s biggest hurdle for its electric cars.  The advanced lithium-ion battery will play a large part in the future of GM’s electric cars.

Renault-Nissan has partnered with Project Better Place which is to develop an electric car infrastructure in Israel and Denmark.  It is a network of service stations which swap depleted batteries with fully charged ones. 

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