Range Extension
The Volt has one other advantage over the Tesla: range. The Tesla can get away with limited range since it is not intended to be a long distance driving car; it is a fun sports car. To appeal to the mass market though, the Volt will need to be able to drive further than the 50-100 mile range typical of pure electric cars when necessary.

The Volt solves this by being a serial hybrid; different from today’s hybrids, like the Toyota Prius, in two ways: firstly, it can be plugged in to recharge the batteries while parked (although plugin Prius conversions do exist, they are not factory fitted just yet); secondly, the gasoline engine is not use to drive the wheels ever – instead it is use to generate electricity for the electric motor, and recharge the batteries.

While the Volt is not the only serial hybrid design out there (see our earlier post about the Fisker cars), it is the only serial hybrid design announced by a major car manufacturer.

Electric Driving
The estimated fuel economy of 50mpg is a little misleading, and unfair to the Volt. While that is the kind of fuel economy you can expect on long drives, for most people’s daily commutes the Volt will never use a drop of fuel, relying instead on its fully charged batteries to get you to the office and home. As plugin hybrids, and pure electrics, become more common, we can expect to be able to plug in our cars when we get to the office too, making that pure electric commute even more likely.

Clean Electricity
Some are critical of the cleanliness of electric cars. The argument is that most of the electricity is generated using fossil fuels (mostly coal). While that is true today in many places, there are already some communities where the electricity is cleaner, and with all the plans to increase solar and wind power in the US that can only improve.

The Volt’s engine is also able to use E85 instead of gasoline, making even that aspect of it greener than today’s hybrids.

First up is Shai Agassi’s Project Better Place, which is trying to solve the problem by means of pure electric cars with exchangeable battery packs for range extension. Basically, for typical daily driving you run off the battery which you recharge at night. When you need to drive further, you can pull into a battery changing station and they’ll swap out your flat battery for a newly charged pack. Even better, the car is free (in the same way that your cell phone is free, when you sign a two year contract). Just pay a monthly contract that is similar to the monthly fuel bill you’re paying and they’ll lend you the car for free.

The Pickens Plan on the other hand is promoting the use of natural gas for vehicle power, and wind power for electricity. Natural gas solves the range problem in pretty much the same way as gasoline does today – you pull into a gas station and simply refill. CNG is already in use for vehicles in the US, so this is a well known technology; many taxis servicing the airport here in San Francisco are already CNG fueled, as are some of the buses and even some garbage trucks.

Convincing Pickens
Katie’s question ended up being “Agassi, can you convince Pickens that electric vehicles are a better plan?” While she lauds Pickens for his wind farm work, and wanting to kick the oil habit, she feels that electricity is a better option for vehicular power long term.

Here at Vertography we’d love to be able to drive an electric car (a Tesla roadster would be great, hint, hint), but we’re also somewhat pragmatic. They’re great for short journeys like our daily commute, but it doesn’t help when I want to visit my favourite aquarium down in Monterey as the batteries just don’t last long enough.

Extending Range
Agassi’s scheme for changing the batteries on the fly as a range extension mechanism seems to be a little too out there for us. We’re not talking swapping a few AA batteries here; electric car batteries are large, complex and expensive systems in their own right. I’m not convinced that this is really the solution for extending the range of vehicles, especially not in a country the size of the US where it would take a massive investment in infrastructure, not to mention the little detail that each battery station needs to keep a number of charged batteries in stock at all times for this to be practical. This plan would be analogous to swapping your empty gas tank for a full one when you stop at the gas station, rather than just refilling it.

The Pickens Plan is very much a plan for the US (the main motivation seems to be to keep the $700M spent each year on foreign oil in the US), so it is perhaps not surprising that his strategy for solving the range problem is natural gas. The infrastructure might not be there today, but at least it is similar to the existing gasoline infrastructure in concept. And it doesn’t require fuel tanks to be swapped – you just refill them, the same as you do today with gasoline.

The Vertography Plan
We don’t think that Agassi should be convincing Pickens to switch to electric vehicles. We also don’t think that Pickens is right to go with pure CNG cars. Instead, we’d like to propose that both men are partially right. The Vertography Plan proposes producing a CNG plugin serial hybrid?

Plugin hybrids have the advantage of keeping those short journeys on battery power, and charging points in parking lots at offices and shopping malls can top up the battery for the journey home too. Using CNG to power a small in-car generator means that when the battery does run down, the car can switch on the CNG generator and keep running (as well as charging the battery).

Why not use the CNG to power the car directly? Well, using the CNG to power a generator means that the engine can be smaller, and can be set to run at the optimum operating speed for efficiency. There’s also no need for gearboxes, clutches etc, and no need to handle the transfer from electric transmission to CNG. While we love the Tesla, we do think that for the US market where people frequently drive further than today’s battery packs allow, a serial hybrid might be the best choice, and why not CNG instead of gasoline? Or how about a bio-diesel version too?