Nissan is determined to sell electric cars in the US beginning in 2012, but the problem of building a charging infrastructure continues to bedevil product planners. Charging stations must be plentiful, convenient, and most importantly EV owners must be willing to wait there at least half an hour to complete a fast-charge of their EV’s batteries. Having added it all up and thrown in just a dash of condecension towards American culture (or lack thereof), Nissan’s boffins reckon that fast food joints are the perfect location for EV charging station, reports Automotive News [sub]. Of course the idea of sitting around a fast food joint for a half-hour while your car recharges for another 80 miles of driving kind of defeats the idea of fast food, but no matter.
Maybe we can see this as an excuse to bring back drive-ins with roller skating waitresses. Just imagine sipping a malt and putting the moves on Peggy Sue all while recharging your EV. The future is now! All kidding aside, Nissan is actually just desperate to get anyone to install EV charging stations for free. They’re asking dealerships to to install recharging stations as a “courtesy” to drivers who pass through town, and are talking to every government, utility, business and parking garage that will listen. Maybe they figure if Micky D’s went for that $1 DVD rental idea, they might spring for EV charging too.
Would the “fillup” be too cheap to meter?
I wouldn’t worry about it. By 2012 there won’t be a Nissan automotive company anymore.
This is why pure EV’s are going to take a while. I think the PHEV is much better near-term strategy.
I don’t know why every company is so crazed to jump the gun here. It’s not as if the market is saturated with PHEV’s and you need to be really radical to get attention!
Time to buy stock in Sonic?
I frequently drive by the drive-in in the photo on errands. The sign is a Lexington icon. Unfortunately, the food at said drive-in has never been good enough to really keep the place going.
This is why pure EV’s are going to take a while. I think the PHEV is much better near-term strategy.
Exactly.
There’s enough knee-jerk complaints about PHEV ranges, but realistically, batteries are the limiting technology. Build a PHEV that will handle the commute of 90% of American car-buyers with gasoline backup, and you have a car that works without having to rely on battery technology that just isn’t here yet.
Once the battery tech is there, EVs will dominate the landscape, but until then, PHEVs are a reasonable compromise.
This is a Starbucks op if there ever was one.
Pay $5 to charge up, get a Latte for free!
I thought we were supposed to be recharging our plug-in EVs during the night to avoid overloading the electric distribution system? Last time I checked, California barely had enough electricity to run all the lights, air conditioning, computers – let alone millions of plug-in cars during the day.
I thought Nissan partnered with New World Something or Other. The concept is to exchange a discharged battery pack for a charged one at a “filling station.” Five minutes, tops, and no VOCs.
When the time comes, I’m going to park my 2012 Nissan electric car in my garage right next to my 1956 Tucker, my 1966 Chrysler Turbine car, and my 1996 Studebaker Astral atomic flying car.
All of which I still have orders in for and I’m still waiting on.
Hopefully the dealers will deliver soon.
I also think that this plan will only work if the EV makers standardize their batteries somewhat, and basically have battery replacement stations instead of charging stations. Right now, I think that I’d be willing to wait for a charge about as long as it takes me to fill up my gasoline car. Certainly not a half hour or more.
This and the idea of swappable battery packs are both not going to happen. Millions might be spent trying to push this noodle, but it just ain’t gonna work. Like it or not, human beings are convenience obsessed. The whole point of a personal vehicle is convenience, otherwise we would use more mass transit.
@Jeff Puthuff: Nissan is partnering with A Better Place in certain locales (Israel, Denmark, etc), but Nissan is also going to sell pure EV’s separately from that; EV’s that don’t have the swap capability. As recharge time decreases, at least for a partial charge, the battery swap concept may become obsolete.
lowinor writes:
“…Once the battery tech is there, EVs will dominate the landscape…”
How is that different from what the makers of the Detroit Electric probably thought in 1909? At that time, their automobiles filled a niche not entirely different from the Prius today.
In the early 1900’s before they built the road system between cities electric cars were popular. They didn’t have the range to travel between cities. Ferdinand Porche’s first car was electric, and he soon saw the error of his ways.
This idea beautifully points up the shortcomings of electric cars. Add to that the fact that the kinds of people who frequent fast food joints are probably NOT going to be EV early adopters.
The first places to put the charging stations are universities, coffee houses (especially independents), Cambridge, Berkeley, Austin, Madison, Portland OR, Eugene OR, the five college area, western MA, Seattle, and Hollywood.
Nissan obviously doesn’t have a clue about its US market.
How is that different from what the makers of the Detroit Electric probably thought in 1909? At that time, their automobiles filled a niche not entirely different from the Prius today.
There’s a world of difference between a circa 1900 electric car and a Prius.
A Prius is, fundamentally, an efficient gas-powered car. Electric car production in the US peaked in 1912; for many years, electric cars outsold gasoline-fueled cars. It was hardly a niche market — the combination of a wider network of navigable roads (thus giving the gas vehicle’s greater range more applicability), Ford’s increases in efficiencies building gasoline engines, and the falling price of gas killed the electric car the first time around.
But it wasn’t a niche; it was a solid competitor to internal combustion. It became a niche, though, due to the overwhelming success of the internal combustion engine.
However, now we’re looking at extreme volatility in gas prices, and a lot of investment in battery technology. Overcome the range limitation, and it’s a whole new market.
Now, I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon, but the PHEV provides a useful stopgap. And a market for not-fully-ready-for-pure-EV technology, which is more important than the fuel savings from the upcoming generation of PHEVs — PHEVs on the market directly reward advancement of battery technology without requiring the developer to hit the “viable pure electric vehicle” threshold.
@Jeff Puthuff
Here’s more about Better Place. You’ll notice that one observer was a bit skeptical that the battery switchout capability would be 100% reliable.
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/does-better-place-have-a-better-plan/
@tced2
Most of the charging would indeed take place at night. But some people would undoubtedly need some extra charging in the daytime. (I’m not holding my breath for EVs to become common anytime soon, but I don’t think that overtaxing the grid during the daytime is going to be one of the early problems.)
Re-charge in half an hour? Not bloody likely! The Volt is reported to have a 40 mile range and a 16kW-hr battery. So to charge it in 1/2 hour requires a 32kW electrical outlet. At 220 volts, 32kW means 145 amps. Have you seen a 145 amp outlet lately? And can we expect the local Sonic’s to have a few of these monster outlets available for their customers?
Ah, but will Oregon require that your EVs be plugged in by recharging station employees rather than the car owners, as a “safety” measure? At least if they did pass such a law, the poor employees wouldn’t have to chance an early death from all those fumes (though I imagine there could be a marginal electrocution risk).
Some kind of self charging is needed, as is a backup battery pack.
While one pack is powering the car, the other would be getting recharged by the smallest engine that could do the job. Perhaps a 250cc single cylinder?
Add roof mounted solar panels, wind resistance turbines and a passenger mounted bicycle crank for emergencies. :)
Nissan is missing the point. EVs are for people like me who live 6 miles from work and rarely go anywhere after work – and even then don’t exceed the range of the car. There are millions and millions of us, and most of us know full well we won’t wake up in the middle of the night with an irresistible urge to do a Cannonball run before going to work the next day.
There is no need for recharging stations. If an EV doesn’t fit your lifestyle get a HEV or a PHEV. Or a pure IC.
1KWH=3.6 Megajoules = Approx 13 cents (Ontario)
1 liter of regular gas = 36 Megajoules = 75 cents
10 KWH = 36 Megajoules =$1.30 for 1 liter equiv.
$4.92 per American Gallon
Sounds like subsidized dream (nightmare).
Get the highest efficiency single rpm motor for your generator. What about a gas turbine powered generator to charge the batteries?
Interesting math, cmcmail. But another thing we need to figure in is the tax taken by the second law of thermodynamics. The gasoline still has to go through a heat engine, which will take at least 50% of its energy in waste heat.
The electricity has already paid that tax. So we might get double the useful energy from it. Maybe more.
Tesla,
We must also include the energy lost during the battery charge, no where near as much as an IC engine, but it is app. 20% lost as heat etc. If the electricity was generated by coal or oil etc there is loss of energy converting it into electricity in the first place.Changing forms of energy always has a premium, regardless of the Thermodynamic laws involved. And the grid isn’t exactly bursting with extra electricity. There certainly applications for PHEV’s, but they will not replace liquid fuels for some time. Batteries today are very similar to Edison’s. We have been working on them for 100 years, but no energy dense solution is on the horizon (that doesn’t require subsidies). Another consideration is the production of heat,required in the northern climates, it is a useful bonus with IC motors, it will cut into range significantly as will air conditioning.
Love the photo. Parkette Drive-In on New Circle Road in Lexington, Kentucky. That place is the real deal – period food and waitresses (rot-gut and rotten teeth, respectively) and a pretty good old-car night.
-lowinor Ford’s increases in efficiencies building gasoline engines, and the falling price of gas killed the electric car the first time around.
It was the introduction of the electric starter motor after 1912 which got gasoline cars seriously mainstream. Manual cranking was beyond the physical capability of a lot of people and fraught with danger if you were too timid in the follow through. I’ll always remember in the fifties, my father pre heating spark plugs on the gas range before going out to crank his ’53 Ford Thames 5cwt van.
We discussed ‘range anxiety ‘ with EVs earlier, well LOL there was also ‘crank handle anxiety ‘ back then. When my father moved up to his first car – a Hillman Super Minx – he expressed concerns that he better not have trouble starting it in the cold since there was no provision for a starting handle. Yep, that hole below the radiator was ominously missing.
T2