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These days, first test results for electric cars driven under realistic conditions over relatively long periods have been published. With respect to driving range and energy costs, the results are a bad surprise across the board. Drivers report that under heavy load conditions, the driving range of e-cars melts away like ice in the sun. The nominal driving range is something no driver should rely on; instead, the real driving range is constantly far below the value indicated by the vendors. For instance, a test of BMW's e-Mini revealed real-world driving ranges of some 160 km — the nominal range propagated by the manufacturer is 250 km. On cold days when the test driver used the heater, the range dropped further — as expected — but the effective range of less than 100 km under these conditions is beyond any discussion.
But not only cold days take their toll. On hot summer days, it was the equipment such as pumps and fans necessary to keep electronics and batteries at their operational temperature that consumed extra power, again reducing the driving range.
And while in a normal car with combustion engine the tank can be filled in minutes, owners of e-cars have to be much more patient. The charging process takes as much time as a transatlantic flight, the tester of an Audi R8 e-tron noted. To charge a BMW e-Mini took some 12 hours when connected to a standard power outlet; when a three-phase power outlet was used, charging time was reduced to five hours — still much too long for everyday use.
To complete the negative picture, the energy costs for the electric sets of wheels appear not to be as low as e-car prophets have predicted. For the e-Mini, the electric power consumed burdened the driver's budget not less than a diesel car. While this calculation has been done on the basis of the high fuel prices in Germany, and in other countries the result may look somewhat friendlier, it shows that e-cars are not the economic sister of conventional cars (even if one does not take in account their high price).
So is e-car a dead-end street? Are critics such as Aston-Martin boss Ulrich Bez right who recently dismissed the e-car discussion as insubstantial hype? Wouldn't it make sense to focus R&D budgets on improving the efficiency of conventional drives? After all, there has been remarkable progress in the past years and engineers in tier ones promise to bring down fuel consumption by another 30 percent, so wouldn't it make sense to go this direction?
I don't think so. Indeed, it's the batteries that currently are the weakest part in the e-car concept. However, this is not a new insight; all battery manufacturers and e-car OEMs don't get tired of emphasizing this point. We should not forget that e-cars and the related technology are still in their infancy. It will take a decade or more to bring them to a performance level comparable to what we see in today's conventional cars. This takes a lot of stamina.
Hey, this is like the moon landing project: In the beginning, the goal was so high that many doubted it ever could be achieved. We now know that it paid out not to give up. The same wisdom holds true for alternative drive technologies and concepts — despite these disappointments.
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