Diesels, Not EVs, Are Key to America's Meeting CAFE Standards, Bosch Exec Says
By Scott Doggett May 11, 2010
By Scott Doggett, Contributing Editor
LAS VEGAS -- Robert Bosch GmbH is a 124-year-old German technology-based corporation and the world's largest supplier of automobile components. It has business relationships with virtually every automobile company in the world.
Bosch and Korean tech firm Samsung SDI recently broke ground on an enormous lithium-ion battery cell manufacturing plant, and the two have plans to jointly start producing hybrid vehicles in 2011 and battery-electric vehicles the following year.
In other words, Bosch is making significant investments in electric-drive vehicles. Those vehicles are, in the company's view, the future for passenger cars and trucks of all kinds. Well, most trucks anyway.
But standing before a packed room at the 2010 Alternative Fuels & Vehicles Conference here Monday, Bosch's leading representative to the nation's largest alt-fuels confab did not stress the importance electric-drive vehicles in curbing greenhouse-gas emissions.
No, Dr. Johannes-Joerg Rueger was here to talk about diesels. And that's not simply because he is Bosch's senior vice president of diesel engineering. Rather, for the near-term, electric vehicles make no sense, he said. Diesels, however, do.
While acknowledging that everyone has their own crystal ball, Rueger said Bosch predicts that only 3 percent of vehicles worldwide by 2020 will be electric-drive.
Click on slide to enlarge.
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"That's probably more or less common sense of all people who have a reasonable view of the development," he elaborated in an interview with Green Car Advisor following his well-received speech.
"Three percent is not going to make a big difference," he said. "It makes much more sense to improve the remaining 97 percent, because they are polluting right now. If we improve those 97 percent we can do much more for the environment than we can do with the 3 percent of electric vehicles."
The problem with EVs is the number of hurdles that the technology faces, he said. They include: battery capacity, battery weight and battery cost; the amount of electric energy EVs demand; the lack of recharging infrastructure for EVs; and the lack of a clean electric energy supply.
Yes, many companies -- Bosch included -- are working to overcome those hurdles. But, to expand on just one: "It's not that the industry has been working on batteries since only yesterday. Batteries have been worked on for many, many years on many different kinds of applications -- even in vehicles, people did that a long time ago," he said. So don't expect a breakthrough, game-changing battery development any day now.
That said, Rueger said it clearly makes sense to work on electric vehicles. It clearly makes sense to bring some of the vehicles into the marketplace in order to achieve maturity, in order to improve robustness, in order to improve the technology overall and in order to reduce costs, he said.
In Bosch's opinion, EVs ultimately are the future.
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However, if this leads to the public impression that it's just a matter of a couple of months until you can buy your electric vehicle at exactly the same price as you can buy your 8-cylinder port-fuel-injection automobile right now, people will get a completely wrong picture, Rueger said. This, he said, will definitely not happen in the next 20 years or so.
"It's not a competitive technology from a cost perspective right now, nor will it be cost competitive over the course of the next 10 years, I would say, and beyond that we don't know what kind of breakthroughs we can see. And we cannot bet on a breakthrough that will happen tomorrow and then make batteries at just 10 percent of the cost they are right now. This will not happen from all that we know," Rueger said.
So, if EVs are at least 10 and possible 20 years away from gaining a double-digit percentage of the global vehicle market, what are we to do?
Rueger, who speaks with a German accent, noted that Europe has been working on carbon-dioxide emissions much longer than the U.S. and, due to much higher prices at the pump, has been working on fuel economy much longer as well. Its research has resulted in diesel vehicles satisfying both needs -- lower CO2 emissions, better fuel economy -- and grabbing market share in the Old World.
"So if now the U.S. is heading towards 35.5 miles per gallon famously by 2016 and then beyond for sure, it will require new advanced technologies in order to achieve that and gasoline direct-injection will not be enough," Rueger said. But diesels will do.
As the slide at right shows, gasoline-powered vehicles -- even those with a hybrid system -- aren't able to keep up with the diesels in emissions or fuel economy. As for the "diesel hybrids" category, that's a reference to diesel-hybrids that Peugeot and Mercedes-Benz are working on that will be out in the next couple of years.
Click on slide to enlarge.
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One of the slides that stuck us as particularly impressive is the one we're going to end on. It shows how enormously far diesel-powered vehicles have come in terms of becoming truly clean and it shows where Bosch predicts they are headed.
Looking at the slide one has to ask, "How low can they go?"
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The guy is simply sledging.
I would take his 'concerns' more seriously if they didn't include bogus issues.
Reports indicate that vast numbers of electric cars could be on the roads before any substantial increase in power output is needed at all, just some local strengthening, whilst for infrastructure he doesn't seem to have noticed a cunning little device many houses have, called an electric circuit.
His cost assumptions seem to be based on an infinite supply of oil.
This is a typical 'analysis' from companies which find themselves behind the curve, and an effort to talk up where most of their money has gone, into diesel.
Really?
His concerns of cost and range seem pretty obvious. And most "electric circuits" are 15 amps. So, uh, yeah... 32 hours and it should be ready for another 40 miles.
It is a problem that should be attacked from many angles. How about using that thing that has worked pretty well for us in the past.. uh.. capitalism... and let different groups create different solutions and allow the market to dictate the path?
bepperb,
I did not seek to indicate that there were no real issues, such as range as you correctly say.
He has though dragged in non-issues, which casts doubt on his sincerity.
The electric circuits in the house include higher amps, and I agree it does take some money to make a suitable plug, but it is nothing like as difficult for hydrogen, and I am a fuel cell supporter, I just want to keep it real.
As for your arguments about 'capitalism', that has not existed in virgin form for many decades, including when GM bought up tramways to rip them up and encourage cars.
The argument for diesel is those that do not fit the current EV profile (street parking, >100 miles/day, erratic schedule, single vehicle, high GVW). But diesel has its own downside, especially with those who previously owned one (refuel, slow, smelly, expensive, complex, noisy). Looking forward to the day I have a choice, and can vote with my wallet.
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