Rick Nelson

What’s the holdup on the plug-in car?
August 6, 2007

What’s easier, building a prototype, or cranking out production quantities? In the semiconductor industry, it’s getting the first few wafer that’s the killer—requiring months of effort and millions of dollars. The cost of subsequent wafers plummets, and chip makers pump out product as fast as they can to recoup their original investments.

Something altogether seems to happen at the system level. A case in point is the effort to manufacture plug-in hybrid vehicles. Prototypes have been available for more than a decade—GM introduced its ill-fated EV1 in 1996. The holdup in getting production-worthy versions to market seems to be as much political as technological.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Joseph B. White writes another chapter in the plug-in-vehicle saga: “I drove to work one day last week in a prototype car that is either a harbinger of a far more fuel-efficient future, or another in a long line of technological insurgencies that will fail in the end to crack the auto industry's century-old status quo.” The prototype in question was a Prius carrying a 160-lb. lithium-ion battery pack, from A123 Systems, which has sufficient capacity to power the car for a quiet, emissions-free 40-mile stint at about a cent and a half per mile.

White’s reaction: "Wow! Who wouldn't want this?" The auto makers, mostly, he writes, who are concerned about reliability, cost, and safety issues.

So where does the plug-in car stand now? More prototypes—such as the Chevy Volt—but nothing but the century-old status quo when it comes to getting into production.

Posted by Rick Nelson on August 6, 2007 | Comments (1)