[Big Dave]

Aptera, Tesla, Chevy Volt. All are floundering and it will take a miracle for any of the three to see a commercial market. For new manufacturers and old, new products are a real bear, but in these three cases there is a common thread.

They are each highly dependent on high-performance battery technology that does not seem to be ready for prime time. For over a century, this has been the bugaboo of electric cars (yeah, I know the Volt is a series hybrid, but its IC performance is no improvement over the stuff on the market). Battery electric vehicles have been around since Billy Durant was building buggies and wagons, but they have always been relegated to niche markets because of battery limitations.

The same is true today. Batteries still are not up to the job of powering automobiles except in severely limited service. That remains the dominant truth until somebody makes a breakthrough in battery technology.

Electric cars have not been held back by some deep, dark conspiracy. They have been held back by the limitations of battery technology.

There is scope for electric ground transportation, but to make it work you’d have to go to the big end of the ground transportation spectrum: freight trains and trucks.

Freight railroad electrification is proven technology. Everything is more or less available off the shelf. With modern variable frequency motor drives we can now use efficient AC induction motors for trains. The only thing holding back railroad electrification is capital cost, but today the total amount of mainline railroad track in the US is down to about where it was in 1880 (about 35,000 miles). At a cost of about $5 million per mile, that would require about 175 billion. Dieselization took about twenty years to accomplish, so using that time frame, the capital rate would be about $9 billion per year to accomplish over a twenty year span.

By comparision, if GM sold a million Chevy Volts a year (a rate that would take about 20 years to displace other vehicles in the fleet) at forty grand a pop, that would require $40 billion per year.

Likewise, we could electrify the truck lanes of our Interstate highways. Trucks would abandon their mechanical transmissions and the engines would drive generators. Big VFD-controlled motors would drive the wheels. Off the Interstate, their engines drive them. On the Interstate, they would raise collectors and run off the catenary and shut down the diesel. A signal wire in the road bed would collect data to bill the operators for electricity used.

Back on the initial topic, I agree with Neil in that CARB’s mindless antipathy to diesels would make a gas version of the Aptera more likely, at least in CA. I could see a 3-cylinder Metro engine/transaxle driving an Aptera.

I could see Honda swoop in and buy Aptera and put a 600 cc motorcycle engine with a Civic transaxle in it. The shape is too stunning to ignore. The problem is that the Aptera is a motorcycle. Driving it in some states requires wearing a helmet.