115-year-old electric car gets same 40 miles to the charge as Chevy Volt

Meet the Roberts electric car. Built in 1896, it gets a solid 40 miles to the charge — exactly the mileage Chevrolet advertises for the Volt, the highly touted $31,645 electric car General Motors CEO Dan Akerson called “not a step forward, but a leap forward.”

The executives at Chevrolet can rest easy for now. Since the Roberts was constructed in an age before Henry Ford’s mass production, the 115-year-old electric car is one of a kind.

But don’t let the car’s advanced age let you think it isn’t tough: Its present-day owner, who prefers not to be named, told The Daily Caller it still runs like a charm, and has even completed the roughly 60-mile London to Brighton Vintage Car Race.

If you didn’t know there are electric cars as old as the Roberts, you aren’t alone. Prior to today’s electric v. gas skirmishes, there was another battle: electric v. gas v. steam. This contest was fought in the market place, and history shows gas gave electric and steam an even more thorough whooping than Coca-Cola gave Moxie.

But while the Roberts electric car clearly lacked GPS, power steering and, yes, air bags, the distance it could achieve on a charge, when compared with its modern equivalent, provides a telling example of the slow pace of the electric car.

Driven by a tiller instead of a wheel, the Roberts car was built seven years before the Wright brothers’ first flight, 12 years before the Ford Model T, 16 years before Chevrolet was founded and 114 years before the first Chevy Volt was delivered to a customer.

As the New York Times reported September 5, “For General Motors and the Obama administration, the new Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid represents the automotive future, the culmination of decades of high-tech research financed partly with federal dollars.”

Like “green technology’s” most powerful proponent, President Barack Obama, the 1896 Roberts was made in Chicago. Obama, who supports the $7,500 tax credit for the Volt, is not fazed by its 40-mile electric limit — he only drove the car 10 feet.

Apples and Oranges. The Volt is a PHEV. It is designed to run in electric mode for 40 miles as that is the average daily commute for an American. Anything over the electric range is supplemented by the ICE generating power for the batteries running the electric motor. This keeps the price of the batteries lower than a pure EV with a 100 or 150 mile range. They are still very expensive. Turning a $15k car into a $35-40k car. But a pure EV with a 150-200 mile range would be upward of $100k for the batteries.

Also the Volt can make the trip from NOLA to Atlanta without stopping to recharge the batteries; as someone else pointed out above. The EV1 probably could not make that trip.

One thing the author doesn’t consider in the “Why Tesla investors should be worried” article is that even after EV batteries reach the point where they aren’t fit for continued EV use, they would still have years of usable life left for other less demanding applications. I have read that experts anticipate a considerable industrial market for used EV batteries. Still it is a legitimate concern and that is one reason, I haven’t signed up for a Tesla yet. However, it appears that battery technology could be on the cusp of a considerable breakthrough in terms of price and energy storage capacity. If this pans out, it could change the equation dramatically.

The result is a battery that stores 400 watt-hours of electricity per kilogram, compared to the 100-200 watt-hours/kilogram for todays lithium-ion batteries. Envia says its battery cell costs could be as low as $125 per kilowatt-hour. It’s difficult to get accurate prices automakers pay for batteries, but it’s thought to be in the neighborhood of $5-600 per kilowatt-hour. Together this means Envia has achieved a breakthrough of over twice the energy density of todays batteries, at 1/4 or less the cost.

If Envia’s battery development works out, and is commercialized, the dramatically higher energy density would mean a dramatic jump in electric car range without sacrificing vehicle weight, size or cargo capacity. It would also represent a dramatic decrease in battery pack cost, letting automakers reduce vehicle prices. However it’s not quite as dramatic a jump in energy density as the 1000 watt-hours/kilogram announced hoped for by PolyPlus.

“Envia’s cells have undergone Verification & Validation testing by the Naval Service Warfare Center, Crane Division (NSWC Crane) under the ARPA-E program. According to a summary released on Envia’s website, the NSWC was able to verify the cells have a capacity of 46 amp-hours and an energy density of 400 watt-hours/Kilogram.”

This would represent a 2X increase in power and the company is anticipating a 3/4 reduction in current prices per kilowatt/hour.

Big problem for steam is the amount of time it takes to warm it up and the energy lost after walking away from a warmed up engine. Parking lots in strip malls would have to be twice as large, since customers would take as much time warming up their engines as they do shopping (unless they left them running while making purchases.)

Do you really want to warm up your engine for 15 minutes to pick up a pizza?

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