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By Jim Motavalli | June 2nd, 2009 @ 4:28 pm
NEW YORK CITY—The “Meeting of the Minds,” an international city planning conference held in the most urban of settings (the 60th floor of a JP Morgan Chase office tower) was perhaps an unlikely setting for a tutorial on the inherent problems of plug-in hybrid (PHEV) cars, but Toyota was the main sponsor and it had a point to get across.
The PHEV question was addressed both by Irv Miller, Toyota’s group vice president of environmental and public affairs; and Bill Reinert, the company’s national manager of advanced technology. Although Toyota will roll out its own leased fleet of 500 Prius-based PHEVs in what it calls a marketing experiment, their main point was that PHEVS cost too much for too little environmental benefit.
Instead of the 100 miles per gallon equivalent that some proponents claim, the plug-in reality is between 50 and 55 mpg, they said—not better than the third generation Prius that the company is not coincidentally just rolling out.
Miller said that the promise of the lithium-ion battery pack—used in both PHEVs and pure battery EVs—has led to “inflated expectations beyond the technical realities.” As evidence of irrational exuberance, he cited both San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s declaration that traditional hybrids are “yesterday’s technology” and President Barack Obama’s pledge to have a million PHEVs on the road by 2015.
For Miller, it’s not altogether clear that consumers are willing to pay a premium for the extra miles of all-electric range that PHEVs offer. “Judgment Day is just around the corner,” he said. “And the challenge here is that after the charge runs down you’re carrying around 300 pounds of dead batteries. The dog doesn’t hunt.”
Reinert cited studies from both Carnegie Mellon and Duke Universities that are skeptical of PHEV claims. In a chart-heavy presentation, he said that carrying around extra battery weight means increased diameter steel for subframes, bigger brake size and larger springs. “There’s a big weight penalty, and you’re always paying it,” he said. “There are diminishing returns when you keep increasing the size of the battery pack.”
Reinert says PHEV buyers will be trading in Priuses and other hybrids, not Hummers (further diminishing the green advantage). Of course, battery advances could considerably reduce the size, cost and complexity of larger-output packs, but Miller said that battery technology has lagged behind that of hydrogen fuel cells.
Toyota is scheduled to introduce an urban electric car (based on the tiny iQ) with a range of 50 miles in 2012, and a hydrogen fuel-cell car in late 2014 or 2015. But Reinert bemoaned the difficulties of urban EV charging, and Miller questioned Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s $100 million cut in 2010 hydrogen funding. The federal government, he said, “should not be playing technology favorites for political expediency.”
Tags: Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle, Battery, Plug-in, Toyota Motor Corp., Engineering…
Jim Motavalli is the author of Forward Drive: The Race to Build Clean Cars for the Future, among other books. He has been covering the environmental side of the auto industry for more than a decade, and writes regularly on those topics for the New York Times.
Source: http://industry.bnet.com/auto/10001607/toyotas-problem-with-plug-in-hybrids/
By Jim Motavalli | April 3rd, 2009 @ 8:48 am
Dumping on General Motors is a popular spectator sport, but if we’re going to kick the once-mighty industrial giant while it’s down low, let’s at least get our stories straight. I have long had problems with the popular documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? GM didn’t just “kill” its EV-1 battery car—the public in California and Arizona chose not to lease them. Only 600 found customers.
I covered the industry closely at that time, and wrote the book Forward Drive: The Race to Build Clean Cars for the Future (2000) about GM and other green vehicle players. GM was big enough at the time to have one arm sincerely pushing the EV-1 and another arm actively sabotaging the California emission laws that gave it a ready market. And the documentary plays down the role of Honda and Toyota, both of which marketed battery cars at the same time (the EVPlus and RAV-4) with no better results than GM’s.
With GM inches away from bankruptcy, it presents a rich target. Did the auto giant dig its own grave by ignoring the clear imperative to abandon SUVs and build small cars and EVs? That’s indeed part of it. But I was struck by a commentary I heard from Bill Georgevich on “The Renewable Minute” green energy radio show. “Electric car killer General Motors,” he said, showcased the new Chevy Volt hybrid electric car and then “shut down the plant producing it in January 09, despite showcasing the hybrid with much fanfare at the Detroit Auto Show after receiving billions from taxpayers.”
Georgevich snarled, “After finally receiving their federal billions, they shut down production of the only 100-mpg vehicle they had in development.”
Now GM can be accused of many things, but shutting down the Volt plant is not one of them. Here’s what the commentary might have been referencing: In December 2008, the carmaker was anxiously awaiting a government loan, and announced it was temporarily stopping production of a Flint, Michigan factory that would make 1.4-liter engines for the Volt and the Chevy Cruze. But the Associated Press story reporting this at the time also noted, “But [the] Volt and Cruze development will continue as scheduled and the company still plans to bring them to showrooms in 2010. The construction delay may be temporary until the company figures out its cash situation.”
At this point, there is no “Volt plant.” The car won’t even be built until the end of next year, as a 2011 model. GM assures me that, despite the company’s very real woes, the Volt program is still on track. “It’s the number one program at GM,” spokesman Dave Darovitz told me.
C’mon, let’s be fair. The last thing the deeply troubled auto industry needs right now is to be accused of something it didn’t even do. Especially when it actually did do so many things wrong.
Here’s how Sony promotes Who Killed the Electric Car? (now available on DVD):
Tags: Car, Electric Car, General Motors Corp., Jim Motavalli
Jim Motavalli is the author of Forward Drive: The Race to Build Clean Cars for the Future, among other books. He has been covering the environmental side of the auto industry for more than a decade, and writes regularly on those topics for the New York Times.
Source: http://industry.bnet.com/auto/10001098/who-killed-the-chevy-volt-not-gm/
By Jim Motavalli | April 10th, 2009 @ 9:38 am
Sure, the German company is best known for relieving headaches—its chemist Max Hoffman synthesized aspirin in 1897—but the $12 billion (2008) Bayer AG is also in the material science business, and makes high-performance plastics that have long been used to make lightweight car bodies.
In 1967, Bayer joined with BMW to build what it says was the world’s first all-plastic concept vehicle—only the engine and transmission were metal. Bayer also joined with BMW to make the energy-absorbing foam-covered roof frame for the C1, a semi-enclosed motorcycle (with seatbelts!) that the automaker offered in 2001 and 2002.
With Rinspeed, Bayer has worked on the Senso, zaZen and eXasis concept cars (the odd capitalization is accurate). The roof of the current Smart car is made of Bayer’s polycarbonate glazing—it offers a 50 percent mass reduction over glass, which is obviously important in electric cars, plug-in hybrids and other green vehicles.
According to David Loren, market lead for Bayer MaterialScience’s polycarbonates group, “Yes, we are the aspirin guys, but we’ve been promoting light-weighting and mass reduction to the auto companies for years, but the market hasn’t screamed for these technologies—until now!”
Now Bayer is going into the car business directly. Bayer’s automotive partner is Los Angeles-based Velozzi, which is planning to build not only a 770-horsepower battery supercar capable of zero to 60 in three seconds but a very fuel-efficient plug-in hybrid crossover SUV capable of 100 mpg and winning the $10 million Progressive Auto X Prize. According to Loren, the SUV is targeted at the mainstream market, and Velozzi is also looking at a Chevy Volt-type series hybrid system, using a small gasoline engine as a generator to provide electricity for the electric motors that drive the wheels.
Reached in Los Angeles, Roberto Vellozi said his work on fuel cells for NASA (and also on one-off show cars) had led to his current automotive projects. “We’re assembling team members to assist in using advanced technologies to go into limited production on the supercar and mass production on the crossover SUV,” Velozzi said. “We’re trying to use NASA technology to develop software that will allow us to work in a more efficient way.”
“Vellozi is assembling a good team with good technology,” said Loren, “and he appears to have a good plan to get his vehicles to commercialization.” Production is scheduled to begin in 2011.
Jim Motavalli is the author of Forward Drive: The Race to Build Clean Cars for the Future, among other books. He has been covering the environmental side of the auto industry for more than a decade, and writes regularly on those topics for the New York Times.
Source: http://industry.bnet.com/auto/10001159/aspirin-maker-bayer-gets-into-the-supercar-business/
By Jim Motavalli | July 30th, 2009 @ 2:56 pm
Can you start an EV company with 10 people and $5 million in private investor funding? Dan Russo thinks so. The 30-year veteran of auto suppliers has done just that as CEO of Green Go Tek, based in Milford, Michigan. It doesn’t quite operate out of a garage, but its headquarters is 3,300 square feet, and its tech center, where pilot testing is done, is 7,500 square feet. It would fit into a back alley of GM’s Tech Center.
Several of the GGT people are refugees from the defunct American Electric Vehicle Company, which produced the Kurrent a few years ago, before consumers were ready for EVs.
But GGT also has outposts in China, Italy and Mexico, and it leverages the outstanding array of Michigan-based auto talent turned loose by the recession. “We are blessed with having any kind of resource we need on the outside,” Russo said. “We outsource a lot of the engineering and manufacturing, and due to the downturn there are many capable small industries and individuals within 100 miles.”
Despite its tiny size, GGT wants to be a “full-line” car company, and, although it has only been in business since September, is indeed fielding a varied product line, including small cars, work trucks, minivans and more. The catch here—and there had to be one—is that many of the company vehicles are low-speed vehicles (LSVs), meaning not only that they’re speed-limited to 25 mph but that they can escape many of the expensive and onerous federal testing that highway-capable vehicles go through.
The tiny 1,100-pound Cozmo has three doors, two seats and a 65-mile range, Russo said. Like many emerging EVs, its body is built in China (suppliers include LBC, Wuling and others) and shipped to the U.S., where the electric drivetrain is installed. “We have an office and design studio in Shanghai, so we can control quality at the source,” Russo said. You can’t take the Cozmo on the highway, but prices begin at $17,900 (plus $2,500 if you want air).
The company also has the E-Dyne, which comes in both mini-truck and minivan versions. “The bed is larger than the Ford F-150,” Russo boasts. Some larger trucks are also available, as well as 9-18-passenger transporters sold to resorts in the U.S. and the Caribbean.
A lucrative market for GGT is electric conversions of highway-capable commercial vehicles, including so far a Dodge Dakota, Ford Transit and Chevy Colorado (how did the Mini Cooper get in there)? Russo says he’s had interest in fleet conversions from several cities, including New York, Chicago and Pasadena. Since hanging out its shingle on July 15, the company has taken orders for 20 Cozmos, 39 trucks and, from Puerto Rico, six of the resort-oriented people transporters. It’s a start.
Jim Motavalli is the author of Forward Drive: The Race to Build Clean Cars for the Future, among other books. He has been covering the environmental side of the auto industry for more than a decade, and writes regularly on those topics for the New York Times.
Source: http://industry.bnet.com/auto/10002041/starting-an-ev-company-with-10-people-5-million-and-chinese-suppliers/
By Richard Seireeni, Chelsea Green Publishing. Posted July 27, 2009.
The historic company was founded by “the godfather of today’s green brands.” Will his grandsons keep the vision alive?
You can use it in a river. You can use it in the shower. You can lather up outside, and it doesn’t hurt a flower! Yes, you got it. It’s Dr. Bronner’s magical soap.
Started by Emmanuel Bronner, a third-generation soap maker, rabbi, and wacky spiritual guru, Dr. Bronner’s soap has been hot since the 60s and is still going strong. Mr. Bronner rejected the use of industrial chemicals way ahead of his time, and now, more than forty years later, his grandsons run the business. So with a mega-historic company whose founder is called “the godfather of today’s green brands,” how will his grandsons keep the vision alive?
The following is an excerpt from The Gort Cloud: The Invisible Force Powering Today’s Most Visible Green Brands by Richard Seireeni.
Emanuel Bronner was on a lifelong spiritual mission (his Hebrew name means “search for truth”). He espoused the view that a prophet arrives on earth every seventy-six years, inspired by Halley’s comet, to bring man back to God. These prophets, to name a few, are thought to have included Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Hillel, Lao-tzu, and Gautama, the Buddha.
The doctor’s obsessive passion was sometimes mistaken for mental illness, due in part to his tendency to rant about his opinions. “He was often yelling,” says Michael Bronner.
In 1947, while giving a talk on the importance of free speech at the University of Chicago, Bronner was detained by authorities, who eventually contacted his sister, then living in Rhode Island. She agreed to commit her brother to the Illinois State Asylum in Elgin. There he underwent shock treatments, says Michael, for what they saw as his “crazy beliefs that we’re all children of one divine source, and we will destroy ourselves if we don’t realize this.”
Bronner ultimately escaped the asylum after stealing twenty dollars out of his sister’s purse when she was visiting. He headed west, thereafter referring to the mental institution as the time he spent in a “concentration camp.” “I think he did have some slight schizophrenic tendencies that were exacerbated by the asylum’s persecutory environment,” says David.
Michael adds, “He ended up setting up shop in Pershing Square in Los Angeles, which was a hotbed of political activity at the time. He was a very passionate speaker. People would come and listen to him.”
Product storytelling with a spiritual message
As the company’s Web site states, “Bronner’s essential vision and philosophy were born out of the fate of his family and the Holocaust, and are emphatic that we are all children of the same divine source: People must realize that we are ‘All-One!’ and that the prophets and spiritual giants of the world’s various faith traditions all realized and said this.”
“Constructive capitalism is where you share the profit with the workers and the earth from which you made it,” the site continues in its summary of Bronner’s teachings. “We are all brothers and sisters, and we should take care of each other and spaceship earth!”
Following his speeches in Pershing Square, Bronner would hand out a bottle of peppermint soap made with his family’s secret formula.
“People would come for the soap because it was so darn good, and then leave and not always listen to him,” Michael says.
It wasn’t long before Dr. Bronner was putting his “Moral ABC” message on the bottle labels. “Whereas no 6 year old can get by without learning the ABC’s, no 12 year old can get by without learning the moral ABC’s,” he was fond of saying. He didn’t waste any space, squeezing in as much text as possible, eventually adding well over two thousand words per bottle. To this day, approximately thirty thousand words of the doctor’s teachings are spread across the range of the company’s products.
A hit with hippies
When the late 1960s hit and a new counterculture erupted, Dr. Bronner’s eco-friendly soaps and his peace-loving message found their audience.
The product “became successful for all the reasons that it wasn’t successful before,” says Michael Bronner. “The quality was always good, but you had this packaging that included my grandfather’s spiritual message that was completely anti-corporate.”
The soap “was never advertised, yet everybody seemed to know about it . . . like it arrived on the scene by magic, appearing in backpack after backpack,” Michael continues. In addition, “it was a soap that could be used for anything . . . It was biodegradable, good for the earth . . . you could jump into a nearby lake and use it,” which is what I used it for back then. We always had a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s in our packs when we went hiking in the Pacific Northwest.
Dr. Bronner’s 18-in-1 Pure-Castile Soap, as it was called back then, became a sought-after product for those in the know, spreading to hippie communes across the United States. “If you were a part of that world, you knew Dr. Bronner’s soaps,” David Bronner explains. “It was like a club. The fact that it wasn’t advertised was a big advantage.”
Whether consciously or unconsciously, Dr. Emanuel Bronner knew his nonconformist, antiestablishment target audience well enough to understand that using conventional channels to reach them would not work. That is still largely the company’s understanding now.
Keeping a loyal customer base happy
As the members of the counterculture have grown up and aged, many have stayed loyal to the Dr. Bronner’s product. David and Michael Bronner, who were not alive in the 1960s, do their best to keep this market segment satisfied.
“Making our soaps is similar to making wine — you can have the same ingredients, but it’ll turn out a little bit differently depending on where those ingredients come from, where they’re grown, such as the peppermint coming from a different field. Especially with a natural product, there can be variation,” Mike Bronner explains. “People will call us up and ask about it because they want to know what’s going on. They’ll say, ‘What did you do with my soap?’ So while you’re always supposed to improve a product, no one lets you change it.”
Because they’re not of the ’60s generation, the brothers are also fighting the perception that “we’re trying to milk the product and the profits out of our grandfather’s legacy,” Michael explains. “If we raise our prices, no one understands that our materials cost twice as much as they did before — they just think that we’ve gone for a cheaper grade, that we’re selling out in some way. I get pretty strongly worded e-mails calling us out, saying, ‘You’ve lost a customer forever!’ or ‘You sold out!’ exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point.”
“All you can really do,” he continues, “is write these people back and say something like, ‘Our peppermint oil did change a little bit when we went organic. It now comes from India so it has a little bit more of an edge.’ And sometimes they’ll e-mail back and they’ll say, ‘Wow, keep up the good doctor’s work.’”
Keeping the legacy alive
David and Michael Bronner attempt to keep their grandfather’s spiritual message alive while at the same time relegating it to the background. They work to keep the brand associated with truth and goodness and respect for the planet but attempt to stay away from promoting a religious- sounding message.
“I very much respect my grandfather for his beliefs and for the cosmic vision he had . . . his urging people to break free of whatever barriers confine them . . . to reach out to others [who] may not share our same cultural or religious perspective on things . . . to be mindful of the environment,” explains Michael Bronner. “But that is not part of how we brand ourselves these days. We’re a secular company. We don’t get into religious discussion.” The company does send out a booklet on Emanuel Bronner’s philosophy, The Moral ABC’s, to customers who ask for it.
The Bronner brothers believe they are keeping their grandfather’s social mission alive, albeit in a different way than he did. “What the whole thing meant to him was very much what he put on the label,” explains Michael. “He wanted those words to find their way into everybody’s mind on Planet Earth so that they could interpret them and come together.”
“The ideas behind that label are very sound,” Michael continues. “And those ideas are ones of environmental sustainability and of social accountability and responsibility. By going organic, we’ve achieved the environmental aspect of my grandfather’s mission. And by going Fair Trade, we’re on our way to fulfilling his social mission.”
Source: http://www.alternet.org/environment/141592/will_dr._bronner%27s_magic_soap_continue_to_defy_selling_out_to_corporate_culture/
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