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Ford said its goal was to sell 5000 cars a year. They only produced 1050, all of which were successfully put into service. Ford's Think experience in California and New York only prove it would be easy to sell 5000 cars, probably in California alone.

In short, Ford's claim that the Think City EV has no market is, I repeat, self-serving misinformation.

2. Ford needs to put its effort into fuel cell vehicles (FCV's), not "battery cars".

Anyone who knows anything about fuel cells knows that an FCV IS AN EV. (Those who are familiar with fuel cell technology can skip the following three paragraphs)

Fuel cells produce electricity. FCVs often have a small pack of batteries aboard (to buffer the demand on the fuel cells) and their drive units are electric motors. GM has staved off criticism that they've dumped the EV1 by saying that they are using the platform to develop fuel cell cars. They are doing it because you build an FCV by starting with a good EV.

Ford would have us believe that developing EV's and developing FCV's are mutually exclusive, forcing a choice of how to allot limited resources. Actually, the two complement each other well. Time and effort put into EV development, especially EV experience in the field and with customers, can only be useful for building fuel cell cars. Better drivelines, better batteries, better charge control systems, etc. will only facilitate the FCV.

FCVs are more complex than EVs, since in addition to the electric drivetrain, they have the fuel cell itself and a reformulator, which is a device for generating hydrogen from liquid fuel. Combustion doesn't go away in an FCV. It is just slowed down and made less violent. Thus it is more complete and somewhat cleaner, however, the end products are hydrogen (H2) and carbon dioxide (CO2).

However, Ford and the other car companies are not choosing this path. They say on-board hydrogen storage is too difficult to deal with and they want the convenience that comes from having liquid fuels, which already have existing distribution systems. Substances such as methanol, ethanol and (tah-dah!) our favorite addictive hydrocarbon.... gasoline! Guess which fuel they are choosing to develop. Well, which fuel has the largest distribution system?

So now we see why Ford and other American automakers are so enamored with gasoline FCVs. GFCVs still have to pull up to the pump. They don't challenge the existing order, that which brings riches to few in this world and devastation and war to others.

What are FCVs real advantages? They don't spew out unburned hydrocarbons, carbon particles or nitrous oxide (NOX). They can probably get more mileage per gallon, so a FCV SUV might get 30 or 40 mpg instead of 22.

Wonderful.

However they continue to generate carbon dioxide. In that they are not that different than the ULEV (ultra-low emission vehicle) engines that Honda is already selling.

In addition, FCVs are more complex and will take a longer time to develop, a perfect excuse for delaying their introduction. Perfect. They're a great excuse for canning EVs, they generate a lot of high-tech hype that baffles and narcotizes the public. And they don't challenge the existing system that uses blood to buy oil.

American industry prides itself on saying, if there's a will, there's a way. But we're seeing the flip side. If there ain't no will, baby, there ain't no way.

EVs and true hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles are not only vehicles for transport, they are vehicles for social change. Therein lies the rub for the car industry. If there is real meaningful change, they and their pocketbooks won't be part of it. And that's what really scares them.

In short, the "develop FCVs instead of EVs" gambit doesn't hold up.

3. There are no batteries for the Think City.

Right. And what do you Think the 400 present Thinks are running on? Norwegian gerbils?

Think has a good working battery, the flooded NiCads that Europe has been using for literally decades. Now US drivers are discovering how trouble-free NiCads can be. When a NiCad pack is used, its capacity stretches, like an exercised muscle. Over the 7 to 10 year life of a good NiCad pack is the most economical battery yet developed for a mass-market EV.

Ford doesn't like it. Why? Two reasons, they say. It costs too much up-front, and the EU is going to ban NiCads because they've been dumped in landfills and cadmium is toxic.

First the cost issue.

Ford doesn't want to pay $US5-7,000 for the French SAFT NiCad water-jacketed Think City packs. They'll make the car too expensive to sell for a profit.

Well, to that there are two answers. One is that SAFT is not the only game in town. Ford has never been one to be held hostage by a supplier. With the possible volumes involved, Ford could beat SAFT down on their price. They've done it to many other component suppliers -- that's they way they do business.

The other is to sell the car and LEASE the batteries. Europe has been doing that for years. Peugeot, Renault, Fiat and other EV makers sell their cars with leased batteries. That actually works very well, since it gets rid of the up front battery cost, so it lowers the purchase price of the EV. Second, it provides an easy conduit to recycling the used packs, since the lessees must eventually return them.

Which brings us to the proposed EU ban on NiCads, and Ford's claim that this is forcing them to use the unworkable lead-acids. Actually, no. The upcoming ban is on portable-electronics NiCads, which are being dumped in landfills because there is no good system to ensure that they are returned for recycling. NiCads for EVs are not affected until 2005, and even then, a good case could be made for exempting them, since they ARE usually recycled.

This exemption could, and probably will, be put in place to cover a transition period from NiCad to nickel-metal hydride or lithium ion and other advanced battery technologies. Peugeot, Renault and other European EV builders will face this and will deal with it.

Another point is that there are some lead-acid batteries, such as those from Panasonic, that do work. Monitoring, protection and charge control circuits are being developed to extend the lifetime of sealed Optima lead-acid cells in vehicles such as Sparrow.

Ford created the battery crisis (deliberately?), by forcing Think Nordic to build the new US prototypes with batteries from one of their in-house suppliers. They weren't very good batteries, they didn't have any monitoring or protection circuitry and Think Nordic didn't know how to deal with them, since they're used to NiCads. So they failed.

The battery issue is a straw man. It was created by Ford and can be solved by Ford ... if they want to solve it. But then they wouldn't have had the excuse to dump the EV and tell CARB that their ZEV law is cruel and unusual punishment. And CARB wouldn't have believed them either.

4. Ford says that government incentives are insufficient.

Ford said that it hoped to sell 5000 per year. Had Ford sold as announced the 2003 Think City in California at the sticker price of the leased cars of $26,000, each buyer would have received $9000 over 3 years from the state of California and a $4000 Federal tax credit. The effective cost of the overpriced Think City would have been $13,000. Those 5000 cars would have sold out within months. And Ford knows it.

In toto, these arguments float about as well as a failed Think PbA battery.

Here's the real truth:

Ford and other American automakers can't afford to let the EV cat out of the ICE bag, because they are afraid it will grow into a saber toothed tiger. The decision to kill the Think EV is not mandated by technology or lack of a market. It was done because of short-sighted corporate interest and Ford shouldn't be allowed to get away with it.

(With thanks to Think activists Marc Geller, Elaine Lissner and Josh Landess)

Bay Area transit projects frozen

Federal dollars for Bay Area transportation projects will dry up today for the second time this year as transportation officials struggle with a way to resolve the region's smog problems.

The snag will delay nine road construction projects throughout the Bay Area, including a plan to widen Ygnacio Valley Road in Concord and work in Solano County to improve the Interstate 80/680 interchange.

The damage to the region's highway plans should be limited to just those projects if officials are able to push through an interim plan later this month they believe will be noncontroversial.

At issue is a three-year highway construction and mass transit project list that expires today. A court order has suspended the new list that was to replace it.

The result is that about $642 million worth of highway and road expansion projects statewide will be delayed immediately, but ongoing construction projects in the $9 billion plan should be unaffected.

"It has the potential to be a big thing, but it's not there yet," said Mark DeSaulnier, a Contra Costa County supervisor who sits on the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the agency whose plans are now suspended.

The stoppage in the flow of federal funds is the latest hurdle in the region's effort to reduce smog through better transportation planning.

Bay Area air is among the cleanest of any major metropolitan area nationwide, largely because prevailing winds blow much of the region's pollution inland.

So far this year, the Bay Area's air quality violated the federal smog standard just twice, both times at an air monitoring station in Livermore. Last summer, the region had just one violation, according to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.

But the region remains marginally out of compliance with federal smog standards, and for that reason must address smog reduction in its transportation planning.

In January, regional transportation officials passed their smog-reduction plan to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for approval. The EPA did not act by a key deadline, suspending federal funding for Bay Area transportation projects for four weeks until the federal agency signed off on part of the plan Feb. 21.

Environmentalists and Sacramento area air pollution districts challenged that approval in court. Key among their contentions was that the planning documents came up 26 tons a year short on pollution reductions needed to meet clean air goals.

In July, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed tentatively with those arguments. The appellate court is scheduled to hear arguments on the case again next week.

"We stand by our original decision ... and will work with the Department of Justice to defend our position in court," said Jack Broadbent, the EPA's regional air division director.

As part of the maneuvering that resulted in a new law bringing the more stringent Smog Check II program to the Bay Area, the Sacramento area air districts agreed to drop their lawsuit. Smog Check II is expected to remove 4 tons a year of the 26-ton reduction needed, according to some estimates.

But environmental groups, including the Transportation Solutions Defense and Education Fund, Our Children's Earth and Communities for a Better Environment, continue to press their case.

Later in the month, the MTC plans to adopt an interim transportation plan that includes 87 percent of the transportation projects that were in the proposed plan.

By JEAN O. PASCO and DAN WEIKEL LA TIMES STAFF WRITERS October 4 2002

Clean-fuel buses that make up 40% of the Orange County Transportation Authority's fleet are plagued by mechanical problems, costing the agency nearly $1 million in repair bills and forcing officials to return pollution-spewing diesel buses to the streets.

The OCTA bought 232 of the buses from a Hungarian manufacturer in 1998, when federal rules went into effect banning the purchase of diesel buses and requiring all buses to run on clean fuel by 2010. The cost was $80 million.

But officials said the buses have been in constant need of repair ever since. Most of the defects affect the fuel system, which runs on liquefied natural gas. On Thursday, for example, 33 of the buses were out of service and awaiting repairs.

The authority is withholding a final $1.7 million payment to North American Bus Industries, the manufacturer, until the problems are resolved.

"We paid good money for these buses and we expect them to operate," OCTA Chief Executive Officer Art Leahy said.

Leahy said the repairs were costing the authority at least $900,000 in labor and materials. "They need to assure us that these buses are going to be made ready for service, and we're going to demand it. We'll do what we have to do to be made whole financially."

OCTA is the 19th-largest transit agency in the United States. It handled about 60 million riders last year on 79 routes. The OCTA has 523 buses in its fleet.

OCTA inspectors discovered fuel leaks, faulty valves and rust soon after the LNG buses were delivered, officials said. That led to a series of increasingly terse letters between the agency and the manufacturer about the problems and who was responsible to fix them.

In June, North American President and CEO Patrick N. Z. Rona accused Leahy of illegally withholding the final payment. He said most bus manufacturers aren't profitable because public agencies like OCTA refuse to pay their bills, then use the money to subsidize operating costs.

Rona didn't return a call Thursday to the company's U.S. headquarters in Alabama.

Similar mechanical problems have sidelined LNG buses in Phoenix, the first transit agency in the country to use them. Workers there have fixed fuel leaks and sticking valves on the buses, said Glenn Kelly, an equipment analyst with the city's transit department.

Some of the problems stemmed from equipment that Phoenix asked to be used on the buses; others were design defects, Kelly said. The city has about 300 LNG buses out of 700 total.

"When we first got the buses, they were less than responsive," he said. "Since then, the quality has improved."

Santa Monica's Big Blue Bus system received 37 LNG buses in April. A spokesman said the buses have been running fine.

In March, OCTA formed a technical team to investigate the buses' faulty fuel system. Problems included recurring leaks in fittings and valves, malfunctioning vaporizers that were sending liquid fuel into the engines, failing methane detectors and malfunctioning fuel tanks.

The gas is stored in two, 115-gallon tanks. It is kept at minus-200 degrees Fahrenheit, then heated and vaporized before it flows to the engine.

OCTA officials said they spent $100,000 to replace leaking fuel pipes and had to redesign the fuel-delivery system.

Workers then replaced some of the buses' methane-detection devices. Inspectors recently discovered a new problem: Linings in the double-hulled fuel tanks are failing to keep the fuel properly chilled.

Though the fuel system appears fine on paper, officials said, it simply hasn't held up to the constant jarring, bouncing and vibrations experienced in daily use.

The OCTA used federal grant money to purchase the buses. But the OCTA may be forced to partially reimburse the federal government if the buses don't last 12 years.

"There are certain responsibilities that we feel the manufacturer needs to take," OCTA Vice Chairman Tim Keenan of Cypress said.

"It's particularly aggravating because you expect a product to be delivered and have everything work."

german company getting hydrogen from sludge

BATTERY development may have gotten a boost from an unexpected source. A research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found that adding a pinch of a metal-containing compound to an inexpensive material greatly increases its conductivity.

Rechargeable batteries made with the souped-up material may one day prove useful in hybrid gas-electric vehicles, power tools and other applications in which a lot of relatively inexpensive power is required.

At present, most rechargeable batteries in portable electronics use lithium cobalt oxide for the positive electrode. But cobalt is a relatively expensive metal, so for years researchers have been looking for a replacement that costs less.

Now, Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor of materials science and engineering at M.I.T., and members of his research group there say they have found a way to transform an extremely inexpensive base material, lithium iron phosphate, into one every bit as conductive as its cobalt-based counterpart, at a fraction of cobalt's cost. Details of the experiment are reported in the October issue of the journal Nature Materials.

Lithium iron phosphate has long been of interest to researchers for potential use in batteries because it is inexpensive, nontoxic and stable. But commercial development has been held back by its low conductivity.

In a series of experiments, the M.I.T. group inserted a small amount of a metal doping agent, or additive, to the lithium iron phosphate that markedly improved its conductivity.

Other groups have sought to increase the conductivity of lithium iron phosphate by coating particles of it with carbon. But Dr. Chiang believed that there were advantages to improving the intrinsic properties of the material.

"I did not believe the conventional wisdom in the battery field that the material could not be made inherently conductive," he said. Instead, Dr. Chiang borrowed a page from solid-state physicists, who have long put different elements in materials to make them more conductive.

Dr. Chiang's experiments took about a year. Most of that time, he said, was spent trying to distribute the elemental additive, a metal ion like niobium, uniformly in the crystal lattice of the parent compound, as well as place it at the necessary positions in the crystal to affect conductivity. Along the way, the group synthesized more than 50 experimental samples of the material.

In an accompanying article in Nature Materials, Michael Thackeray, a researcher at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois who specializes in lithium battery materials, wrote that the remarkable increase in the bulk electronic conductivity of lithium iron phosphate had exciting implications for the future use of the material in a new generation of lithium-ion batteries.

"By inducing inherent conductivity by this eight orders of magnitude," he said in an interview, "the group has transformed the electrical properties of the material substantially."

Dr. Thackeray did have one reservation. The materials used for the experiment were synthesized from carbon-containing substances and retained carbon residue. This raises the possibility that the carbon was responsible for the increase in conductivity.

"But the authors address this possibility carefully in the paper," he said, ruling it out on the ground that samples to which no doping agent was added contained similar amounts of carbon and that high-resolution electron microscopy did not reveal any surface carbon. The deep black color of the doped sample, too, was an outward indication of the material's enhanced conductivity.

Dr. Chiang has jointly founded a battery technology company that has licensed the process from M.I.T. and is working on commercializing it. "The raw materials that go into the compound are about a quarter of the cost of those for lithium cobalt oxide," he said.

George E. Blomgren, a consultant in battery technology in Lakewood, Ohio, said that the material's potential to yield very high power made it particularly interesting.

"The power capability Chiang has shown is well beyond that of the current nickel metal hydride batteries used in present hybrid electric vehicles," Dr. Blomgren said. High battery power density is required, for example, in most hybrid electric vehicles for rapid acceleration and to generate electricity for later use when someone slams on the brakes.

Ralph J. Brodd, a battery industry consultant in Henderson, Nev., said that Dr. Chiang's material offered advantages not only in terms of cost and power but in stability as well. "There's less likelihood of its decomposing, liberating oxygen inside the cell and creating safety problems," he said.

But the new material is unlikely to find much use in laptop computers and related applications in which a lot of energy must be supplied in a small space, said M. Stanley Whittingham, a professor of materials and inorganic chemistry and director of the Institute for Materials Research at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

"The energy stored per unit volume in his material is poorer than that in present lithium batteries," he said, "though the material may find a use in large batteries, where cost is very important."

Jeff Dahn, a professor of physics and chemistry at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who sppecializes in new materials for advanced batteries, agreed that materials like Dr. Chiang's might have a home in large batteries, whose developers have to worry about the cost of the cathode material and its stability with respect to other cell components. "It might have a place, for instance, in abusive situations like automobile accidents where the battery is crushed," he said.

Dr. Dahn, meanwhile, has not abandoned the alternative route of coating lithium iron phosphate particles with carbon to increase their conductivity. "Just mixing the substances efficiently with carbon might still do the trick," he said. "In the end, lithium iron phosphate is going to make a big difference to all of us in battery technology."

Congress is often accused, sometimes wrongly, of being a "do-nothing" lawmaking body.

But when it comes to mandating a meaningful improvement in fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks, the "do-nothing" label applies in spades. House and Senate members negotiating a broad energy bill agreed on a proposal Thursday to require that minivans, sport utility vehicles and pickups in model-years 2006 though 2012 use at least 5 billion gallons less gasoline than the 2002 model-year fleet.

Gee, 5 billion gallons is a lot, right?

Quite the contrary. It probably would mean, at best, an improvement of one mile per gallon in fuel economy. And critics say that, as a result of other provisions in the energy bill, fuel consumption actually would increase slightly if the legislation wins final approval.

Under the current Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, each automaker's fleet of new cars must average 27.5 miles per gallon. Light-truck fleets -- minivans, SUVs and pickups -- must average only 20.7 mpg.

President Bush and Congress continually harp on the need to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil. If they really mean it, they should support a substantial improvement in fuel economy standards.

That would curb fuel consumption, which in turn would reduce air pollution, decrease America's dependence on foreign oil and save motorists money at the pump.

The CAFE standards have not been raised for 17 years. In that time, automakers have significantly improved engine efficiency, but those gains have been offset by millions of Americans buying ever-larger, gas-guzzling vehicles.

Some mileage gains probably can be achieved without reducing car size. And many motorists could scale down their vehicle sizes from monstrous to mid-sized without significant personal sacrifice.

But, first and foremost, Congress needs to get out of neutral gear and mandate significantly higher fuel efficiency standards.
http://www.reporter-news.com/1998/2002/texas/texas_State_edi924.html

Sept. 23, 2002

Fort Worth Star-Telegram on new mileage standards:

Congress is often accused, sometimes wrongly, of being a "do-nothing" lawmaking body.

But when it comes to mandating a meaningful improvement in fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks, the "do-nothing" label applies in spades. House and Senate members negotiating a broad energy bill agreed on a proposal Thursday to require that minivans, sport utility vehicles and pickups in model-years 2006 though 2012 use at least 5 billion gallons less gasoline than the 2002 model-year fleet.

Gee, 5 billion gallons is a lot, right?

Quite the contrary. It probably would mean, at best, an improvement of one mile per gallon in fuel economy. And critics say that, as a result of other provisions in the energy bill, fuel consumption actually would increase slightly if the legislation wins final approval.