Coming Soon: Plug-in Wars
By John O'Dell September 11, 2007We've seen VHS vs. Betamax, Mac vs. PC and, most recently, Blue Ray vs. HD-DVD.
Now gird your loins for Parallel vs. Series: The Plug-in Wars.
Whether consumers win or lose when the marketing battles end can be debated, but one thing is clear, there typically is only one survivor when two new technologies clash.
The latest battleground is in the automotive arena, as automaking giants General Motors and Toyota duke it out over whose strategy for a plug-in hybrid is best.
Things heated up Monday as Toyota took on GM in a blog posting, GM’s outspoken vice chairman, Bob Lutz, took a swing at Toyota in a Frankfurt auto show interview, and two top Ford hybrid program executives suggested in interviews with Green Car Advisor that they favor the Toyota approach.
A hybrid, of course, is a vehicle that uses two power plants, typically an electric drive motor and an internal combustion engine, with a battery pack that stores and dispenses energy to the electric motor.
A plug-in hybrid -- and several under development by automakers including Ford, GM and Toyota -- would add a more powerful electric motor and more battery capacity. The batteries would be chargeable from the commercial power grid, via a conventional 110- or 220-volt wall outlet.
Toyota has been the acknowledged hybrid leader on the strength of the system it developed for its popular Prius. And the company has said it intends to use that system as the basis for a plug-in hybrid in the near future.
GM, however, wowed 'em at the Detroit auto show in January when it unveiled its concept Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid. Company officials said they intended to bring it to market for under $30,000 and as early as 2010.
Ford Motor Co. also showed a plug-in system at the show, the HySeries Drive concept, using an architecture that is similar to GM's.
But in interviews this week in Dearborn, Ford's top hybrid program officials seemed to be coming down in favor of the Toyota approach.
GM’s plug-in is a so-called series hybrid that uses an onboard generator to produce electricity to run the electric drive system when the onboard batteries are discharged. The generator -- which was shown as a small, gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine but could just as easily be a small diesel, a flex- or biofuel engine or even a hydrogen fuel cell -- never provides direct power for the wheels, only to the electric drive motor.
GM officials said the Volt system could easily travel 40 to 60 miles on its charged batteries before reverting to the onboard generator.
Toyota’s system uses a gas engine and electric motor that help each other out, running together, or in parallel, at times.
GM says its system is best because it will give most people the ability to drive in all-electric mode with its grid-charged batteries providing power full-time when commuting or running errands.
But Nancy Gioia, Ford's hybrid program director, and Susan Cischke, said in separate interviews Monday that they prefer a different approach.
Most drivers don't have 40-mile commutes, said Gioia, and GM's system would require consumers to buy more batteries and bigger electric motors than they really needed.
"It might make more sense to always have a blended hybrid rather than an X-miles-on-electric" hybrid, she said. A system with capacity to run 10 or 20 miles on all-electric power from the grid and then revert to conventional hybrid performance would "optimize overall energy use."
Coincidentally (?), it was also on Monday that Toyota spokesman Irv Miller penned his company's argument for short-range plug-in hybrid in the Toyota Open Road blog.
The type of extended range series system GM is touting, he said, would require such a large battery pack that its weight and the amount of time it would take to recharge would impede performance.
Toyota, once expected to field a plug-in version of the Prius in 2009, has postponed the launch, saying the lithium-ion batteries needed to reduce weight and boost power still have a heat build-up problem that needs to be solved.
Meantime, GM's Lutz told the Wall Street Journal that he believes his company will beat Toyota to market with a plug-in hybrid by as much as a year. GM's engineers, he said, are "100 percent confident" the heat problem with lithium-ion has been overcome.
We don't have a favorite in this technology race; perhaps both approaches can coexist. But we are happy to see several of the world's biggest automakers arguing over the best way to do something that can help improve the environment.
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Lutz can blog all he wants, but in the end they have to put up, or shut up.
Check out Edmunds' hybrid comparo, the Aura Greenline simply didn't impress when it came to fuel economy. GM has the distinction of selling the lamest hybrid on the market, essentially (including the Vue Greenline).
It's all talk until the product is here.
If GM is advocating a series hybrid it's because the parallel hybrid technology's development costs are is too expensive for their account department to swallow and the technology is too complicated for their engineering department to get right.
GM has since the 1960s been run by their accounting and -- to a lesser degree -- marketing divisions. The next time GM comes out with a standard-setting innovation will be the first time in the past 40 years that they have done so.
But, as always, the executives will delude themselves into thinking that they've really got it right this time, and will be stunned when Toyota and Honda leave them in the dust.
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