electric cars

Electric cars: all systems go

January 26, 2010

Despite the disappointments of Copenhagen, despite the inaction on climate-change regulation in Congress, despite the global recession, the momentum behind electric cars keeps building.

Yesterday, Better Place, the Silicon Valley-based electric car startup, raised $350 million in financing—the biggest clean tech investment ever, the company said, and a validation of a business model that has been scoffed at by the auto industry. The investment round, led by HSBC, values Better Place, which has yet to put a car on the road, at $1.25 billion.

“Electric vehicles are, at this point, inevitable,” said Jason Wolf, vice president of Better Place. “We’ve broken through, and there’s no turning back.”

Big automakers, meanwhile, are pushing forward with their electric offerings, as executives from Nissan and Ford affirmed yesterday during a “Green Car Summit” held at the U.S. Capitol.

Nissan Leaf

Nissan Leaf

Nissan has been taking its all-electric Leaf, which will be introduced next fall, on a 24-city U.S. tour.  “The market is ready,” said Scott Becker, senior vice president of Nissan North America. “We’ve had an incredible reaction from consumers.” He said more than 38,000 people have signed up to get more information about the car.

“This is going to be a vehicle designed and made for the mass market,” Becker said. The car will have a range of about 100 miles before needing a new charge, good enough to meet the needs of 90% of U.S. drivers.

Lots of forces will bring an array of new electric cars to market in 2010 and 2011–technological improvements in batteries, concerns about climate change (despite legislative foot-dragging), worries about the U.S.’s dependence on imported oil and, most of all, the increasingly attractive economics around electric cars, which we’ll get to in a moment.

Having said that,  significant disagreements remain even among electric-car advocates about how fast the new technology will be adopted, and what form it will take. Will gas-electric hybrids like the Toyota Prius or Ford Fusion dominate, or will the market shift to plug-in hybrids like the Chevy Volt or all-electrics like the Leaf? Will electric cars be a niche business, a mainstream product or–maybe, just maybe–will they come to dominate? Or are they being overhyped? Certainly, there’s no shortage of skepticism out there, particularly from auto-industry incumbents.

“Yes, you will have the intellectual guys who drive electric vehicles,” scoffed Stefan Jacoby, CEO of Volkswagen Group of America, who spoke at the “green car” event. But, he argued, mass-market consumers won’t pay a premium for electric cars and they don’t want to deal with the hassle of charging their car batteries.

When Jason Wolf of Better Place opined that 50% of new car sales could be electric by 2020, Jacoby shot back: “That’s totally impossible. We need to be realistic.”

Still, Better Place has made more progress in the last couple of years–during a global economic meltdown–than most people would have expected. It’s got the support of the governments of Israel and Denmark for widespread rollouts, which require

Renault Fluence ZE

Renault Fluence ZE

building charging stations as well as battery-switching operations throughout those two countries. (The Better Place model envisions battery switches for long trips.) It’s got a commitment from Renault build 100,000 electric cars, a new model known as the Fluence ZE (for zero emissions, a car that I wrote about here.) And yesterday’s round of Series B funding brings in new investors including HSBC, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, and Lazard Asset Management. Charles Stonehill, Better Place’s CFO, wrote on the company’s blog:

Our investors represent some of the largest financial institutions in the world, employing exceptionally thorough due diligence processes that are commensurate with the size of investment.

Given Renault’s commitment and the infusion of equity, don’t be surprised if the next country where Better Place rolls out its cars and its unique business model is France. Higher gasoline prices in Europe make Better Place a better business there.

Which brings us to the economics. While you’ll get arguments about the specific numbers, most people who have looked at electric cars will tell you that as battery costs come down, electric-powered engines are more efficient and less expensive to operate that gas-powered ones. Better Place’s Wolf says the cost per mile of fueling an electric car is two to three cents for the electricity, plus another five to six cents for the battery when amortized over the life of the car. Figure a dime a mile. In the U.S., with gasoline priced at $3, powering a car with gas costs 12-14 cents a mile. In Europe, where drivers pay $6 to $8 per gallon of gas, you can double that. The point is, there’s enough money to be made so that carmakers and consumers can both do well as electrics roll out, even though the upfront costs of an electric car are higher.

Not surprisingly, the start-up companies who are building only electric cars expect the technology to be embraced relatively quickly and widely. Established automakers, even those committed to electrics, are more cautious.

“We view this as a revolutionary journey,” said Nancy Gioia, director of global electrification at Ford Motor. Evolution might be more like it: By 2020, she said, Ford expects that between 10 and 25% of its new car sales will be electric. The bulk of those, she added, will be hybrids like the Fusion. With a hybrid, a gasoline engine can be used to overcome what the industry calls “range anxiety”–the driver’s worry that a battery could run out on long trips.

But Kevin Czinger, the dynamic CEO of CODA Automotive (who will be speaking at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green), proudly says that his company will be “100 percent independent of the oil industry.” CODA intends to start small, selling cars only in California beginning later this year, but Czinger is counting on market dynamics to both improve the product and drive sales.

“Do I think I can sell 1,000 high quality electric cars in California? Absolutely,” he said. That will signal markets that the business is real. “Do I know what the market will do with that signal? No. But market forces should work to drive down costs and drive up performance.”

He’s got a point. You never know what will happen with a disruptive technology comes along. When is the last time you bought a CD? Or a a new landline phone?

Says Czinger: “We envision an affordable electric car in every American garage.”

{ 3 comments }

My five New Year’s wishes

January 3, 2010

HAPPY NEW YEAR 189Corporate America: Making the world a better place…or not.

That used to be the tagline of this blog, and it remains the standard I use to judge companies.

Are the jobs they create enabling their employees to flourish? Are their products and services improving lives? Are their shareholders earning good returns? Are they making their communities better?

Put simply, how well are they serving workers, customers, shareholders and communities?

Most companies, it seems to me, would like to serve better. To do so, they need better incentives. These incentives can take the form of government regulations (sometimes needed, but rarely optimal, because regulators often become captives of the industries they are supposed to oversee), industry standards (like sustainable forestry standards or Hollywood movie ratings, which general work well) or social expectations (like the growing desire of customers to patronize “good” businesses or avoid “bad” ones).

That brings me to my 2010 wish list. Each creates an incentive for companies to do business better.

Climate change regulation: Until Congress passes a law making it more expensive to burn fossil fuels, there’s no hope of solving the global climate crisis. This could be a simple carbon tax, the complex and pork-laden Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill passed by the House or the promising cap-and-dividend proposal from Senators Cantwell and Collins. Each approach has benefits and flaws, which we’ll get into some other day, but the best thing that could happen to business (and the planet) in the 12 months ahead is for the U.S., at long last, to stop allowing companies and the rest of us to pollute the atmosphere at will.

Corporate governance reform: What will it take for Congress, the SEC and America’s shareholders to recognize that so many boards of directors are failing at their job? You would think the near-collapse of the banking system would do it. Or the yawning gap between CEO pay and performance. Or the fact that so many corporate mergers end badly. The breakdown of corporate governance isn’t an easy problem to solve, but there are plenty of good ideas out there, ranging from requiring directors to win a majority of shareholder votes to finding ways to give activist shareholders more power to recall underperforming boards. The best boards will encourage companies to take a long-term and expansive view of their role in society. My friends Nell Minow (of The Corporate Library) and Bob Monks have been working heroically on these issues for decades. Reform is long overdue.

Sustainability ratings: How do the cleaning products of Seventh Generation, Method, Clorox and Tide compare? What’s the carbon footprint of a plastic bottle of Dasani, versus Aquafina or Poland Spring? Measuring the environmental impact of consumer products is a gargantuan task, and assessing the social impact is even harder. These aren’t jobs for the government. But a consortium of academics pulled together by Wal-Mart is trying to develop a sustainability index, as is a division of Underwriters Laboratory (which I wrote about here). It will take years to finish the job, but I’m hoping that Wal-Mart and UL they make real progress in the year ahead.

Human rights in China: As the economies of China and the U.S. become more intertwined, it’s incumbent on global corporations to use what clout they have to make clear that they disapprove of the way basic human rights are routinely violated in China. Companies that fear speaking out on their own should organize their peers to do so as a group. They could voice their support for political dissidents and environmental advocates, provide funding to human rights organizations and aggressively monitor the workplace and environmental practices of their suppliers. China shouldn’t be too big to fault.

Electric cars: Lots of forces have to come together for the electric car business to take off this year—a price on carbon would help, as would tax incentives for buyers and support for an infrastructure of charging stations. Most of all, consumers need to embrace electric cars—neither the automakers nor the government can force them on people, needless to say. But the environmental and national-security benefits of electric cars are so compelling that it’s my wish that 2010 become the year when electric cars move from talk to reality.

Happy New Year, blogreaders! Let’s hope 2010 is a good one for business, and for the rest of us.

{ 4 comments }

My favorite green technology

December 23, 2009

No offense to those working hard to bring wind, solar or geothermal energy to scale, or to people who are jazzed about energy efficiency, but I’m going to end my blogging for 2009 by saying that I am really excited about electric cars. It’s my favorite green technology, and one that’s on the verge of a breakthrough.

Recently, I’ve had a chance to ride (briefly) in the Coda and in the Renault Fluence EV, part of Better Place‘s Denmark rollout. I’ve written at length about BYD, the Chinese electric-car company owned in part by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. And next year I am hoping to check out the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf, as well as the Aptera from entrepreneur Bill Gross and the Tesla if the price comes down.

The electric car could bring about the biggest transformation of the auto industry since its invention. If  all goes well, we will be seeing many more of them on the roads in 2010 and especially 2011.

With thanks to Plug In America, a nonprofit group that promotes plug-in vehicles, which put this list together, here are12 myths about electric cars that, just in time for the 12 days of Christmas. Plug In America began as a group of electric vehicle (EV) drivers, so its members are speaking from experience.

I’m now going to do my best to slow down and stay away from my laptop between Christmas and New Year’s Day–so enjoy your holidays, happy new year and I’ll be back in 2010.

Aptera

Aptera

1. MYTH: EVs don’t have enough range. You’ll be stranded when you run out of electricity

FACT: Americans drive an average of 40 miles per day, according to the U.S. Dept. of Transportation. Most new BEVs have a range of at least double that and can be charged at any ordinary electrical outlet (120V) or publicly accessible station with a faster charger. The latter, already in use, will proliferate as the plug-in infrastructure is built out. At present, all it takes is planning for EV owners, who can travel up to 120 miles on a single charge, to use their cars on heavy travel days. Alternatively, a PHEV goes at least 300 miles on a combination of electricity and gasoline.

2. Myth: EVs are good for short city trips only

FACT: Consumers have owned and driven EVs for seven years or more and regularly use them for trips of up to 120 miles. [click to continue…]

{ 4 comments }

COP15: Nothing shy about Shai

December 16, 2009

Shai Agassi has a deal for you.

Shai is the founder and CEO of Better Place, the audacious electric car startup based in Palo Alto, CA, that not only wants to change the way cars are powered but the way they are sold.

Here’s his offer: Pay about $12,000 for a family-sized all-electric sedan made by Renault, known as the Fluence EV. Drive as much as you want. Pay $300 a month for all the electricity you need (or less if you drive fewer miles). Emit no CO2 or other pollutants. And help the world break its addiction to oil.

Sounds  good, doesn’t it?

There’s just one catch: To get the deal, at least anytime soon, you’ll have to move to Denmark or Israel–where Better Place plans to launch in 2011.

The all-electric Renault Valence

The all-electric Renault Fluence EV

Yesterday afternoon, I took a ride in the Renault Fluence EV and sat down with Shai in Copenhagen, where Renault and Better Place have teamed up to offer test drives for the first time. Since Shai unveiled Better Place early in 2007, auto industry insiders have scoffed at his plans. He’s a Silicon Valley guy, a former hotshot at software giant SAP, with no auto industry experience. A 41-year-old Israel-born enterpreneur, he has a lot of chutzpah and he can come across as glib. Skeptics say Better Place, like much of the electric car industry, is deliver more talk than action.

But guess what? Better Place is starting to look very real. It’s also starting to look like a  big missed opportunity for the American automakers.

Better Place has already placed an order for 100,000 cars with Renault. Agassi plans to order another 100,000 cars in the first half of 2012.

I won’t explain the Better Place business model here except to say that the company is a service provider, akin to a mobile phone company. Just as mobile phone companies discount their hardware and make money by selling minutes after building a network of towers, Better Place will build out a network infrastructure of charging stations and battery-switching facilities for its cars, sell the cars at or below cost and then make money by selling electricity. You will own the car, they will own and maintain the battery. Watch the video below if this is the first time you are reading about the company.

The economic model works, at least in theory, because electric cars are fundamentally more efficient and cheaper to operate than gas-powered ones. It works especially well in Europe where gas is heavily taxed and costs at least $7 a gallon. And it works best of all in Denmark, which imposes a whopping 200% taxes on new cars–so a car that retails for $20,000 sells for $60,000—that is waived for electric cars.

Denmark is also a good match for electric cars because so much of its electricity comes from renewable sources. As The New York Times recently reported:

Dong Energy, Better Place’s partner and the biggest utility in Denmark, wants to power the anticipated fleet of electric cars with wind energy, which already supplies nearly 20 percent of the country’s power.

With Better Place and the smart grid working together, cars would charge up as the winds blow at night, when power demand is lowest. Charging would soak up the utility’s extra power and sharply shrink the carbon footprint of electric vehicles.

Better Place is also rolling out rapidly in Israel — which wants to get its economy off oil for obvious reasons, and would love to see the rest of the world do the same. Agassi has agreements with governments to roll out Better Place in northern California, in the urban regions of Australia and in Hawaii. France, too, has made a major commitment to electric vehicles, one reason why Renault says it will launch four electric car models in the next several years.

Shai Agassi

Shai Agassi

Government backing for electric cars is crucial, just as government policy was needed to unleash private capital to create the Internet industry and mobile telephony. Today, Israeli President Shimon Peres was scheduled to hold a news conference today in Copenhagen to promote Better Place.

“What we’ve seen in Israel is that the president of the country wanted to get it done,” Agassi said. “In Denmark, the minister of climate, Connie Hedegaard, said let’s move forward, and they did.”

By contrast, Agassi has run into dead ends in Detroit and Washington.

“Most car companies looked at us an anomaly,” he says. “Not a competitor. Nor an ally. Because we’re not a car company and we’re not a supplier. In the car industry you’re either a supplier or competitor. We’re an enabler, but it’s an industry that did not have enablers.”

Besides, automakers had other things to worry about. “Most of these companies have gone through a massive, massive change,” Agassi says. “Some of them have changed CEOs. Some of them have changed CEOs twice. Most of them have government cash infusions.”

Still, he notes that Chrysler dropped its plans for an electric when it restructured after getting government aid. “How is that good for the taxpayer,” he asks.

Agassi says the cost of building a network of charging stations and battery-switching facilities comes to no more than between $40 and $75 a car.

“At a cost of $40 per car in our country, we can get off oil,” he says. “It’s a crime not to do it.”

Below are photos from Renault of the Fluence and the Kangoo, an electric van, as well as a couple of photos I took of a cute little single-seat EV for urban driving called the Twizy. Below the photos is the explanatory video about Better Place.

Renault Fluence EV

Renault Fluence EV

Renault Kangoo EV

Renault Kangoo EV

Renault Twizy concept car

Renault Twizy concept car

Renault Twizy concept car

Renault Twizy concept car

{ 0 comments }

An automaker’s bizarre lament

August 27, 2009

Crazy but true: A California-based electric car company that wants to make inflatable cars, using pressure membrane technology developed by the aerospace industry, is indignant because the government won’t give it money to do so.

This is what our Bailout Nation is coming to: XP Vehicles, whose website won’t say who is running the company because “it is too easy for our competitors to poach them,” is calling upon supporters to write to Congress because the U.S. Department of Energy rejected its application form for an Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan.

The company says:

The DOE reviewers, mostly from “Detroit”, have turned down XP’s loan application in favor of “Detroit” players. Are we a national where innovation and great ideas win support or where great influence buyers win the support? If you want an XP Vehicle, call Congress now and ask for action!

Now it’s true that Ford ($5.9 billion), Nissan ($1.6 billion) and Tesla ($465 million) were awarded loans under the $25-billion federal program in June. They’ll use the money to build or rebuild plants in Michigan, Tennessee and California, the interest rate is a very low 5% and they’ve got 25 years to pay the money back. If you don’t think politics comes into play when that kind of money is doled out, you’ve not spent much time in Washington.

A car you'll likely never see

A car you'll likely never see

[click to continue…]

{ 0 comments }

Obama’s dumb $8-billion car loans

July 15, 2009

Yesterday I blogged about economist Steve Fazzari and his arguments on behalf of the Obama administration’s $8 billion in loans to automakers Ford, Nissan and Tesla to make electric and fuel-efficient cars. Today, an opposing view comes from Russ Roberts, a libertarian economist who is a professor at George Mason University, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, the host of the excellent podcast EconTalk and a blogger at www.cafehayek.com.

Steve, Russ and I spent time together recently at a retreat for journalists and economists organized by the Murray Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis.  What struck me was how smart, thoughtful economists can see the world so differently. If you’d like to delve further into these issues, you can listen to my podcasts with Steve and Russ at The Energy Collective, or listen to an in-depth conversation about Keynesian economics between Russ and Steve here at EconTalk. A correction to my podcast: Although I say that the administration is giving loan guarantees to the automakers, the government in fact is making low-interest loans directly to Ford, Nissan and Tesla—a concept that Russ finds troubling, and not just because Tesla builds $100,000 sports cars for millionaires.

Tesla roadster

Tesla roadster

The economy’s a mess, Russ Roberts says, in part because the government promoted cheap credit and fueled a housing bubble. The Fed kept interest rates too low for too long, while government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac poured money into risky mortgages. So, he goes on, “it’s kind of ironic that, as we try to cope with that mess, we continue with the same fundamental idea–let’s try to artificially alter the rate at which people can borrow so they can do more of what appear to be good things.”

“In the past, it was home ownership,” he says. “Now it’s manufacturing and green technology.”

[click to continue…]

{ 5 comments }

Obama’s smart $8-billion jolt for electric cars

July 14, 2009

I’m trying something different this week on the blog, in part because I’m on vacation. Recently, I had the great pleasure of attending a retreat for journalists organized by the Murray Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis. The event was held on Cape Cod, at the lovely Wianno Club in Osterville, Mass., and while time was set aside for golf, tennis or sightseeing, we engaged in a lot of  learning, discussion and debate with economists and political scientists from the Weidenbaum Center and elsewhere.

I spent time there with a bunch of smart, interesting and lively people, including two economists, Steven Fazzari, who teaches at Wash U.,  and Russ Roberts, who teaches at George Mason and hosts one of my favorite podcasts, EconTalk. Steve is a Keynesian and Russ is a libertarian, so I thought it would he interesting to talk to them about the Obama administration’s aggressive efforts to promote clean energy and create green jobs. We discussed the U.S. Department of Energy’s recent decision to make $8 billion in loans to Ford, Nissan and Tesla “for the development of innovative, advanced vehicle technologies that will create thousands of green jobs while helping reduce the nation’s dangerous dependence on foreign oil.”

Today’s blogpost explains why Steve Fazzari thinks this is a good idea. Tomorrow, we’ll hear from Russ, is pretty sure that it isn’t.

CapeCodSky

Cape Cod sky photographed by Russ Roberts

Ask Steve Fazzari what he thinks about the government loan program for electric and fuel-efficient cars, and he says:

[click to continue…]

{ 3 comments }

Buffett’s Chinese electric car company

April 13, 2009

If you think the American auto industry is in trouble now, just wait until the Chinese learn how to make great cars. And if you doubt that they will learn, check out my cover story about BYD in the new issue of FORTUNE, headed to subscribers and newsstands this week.
warren_buffett_bydhome
BYD is an amazing company. It was started by a chemist and government researcher named Wang Chuan-Fu in 1995 (same year as Yahoo) to make rechargeable batteries, which it learned to do very well. Within a few years, BYD’s batteries were cheaper and just as reliable as those made by industry giants ony and Sanyo. Then Mr. Wang, as he’s known, got into the automobile business by buying a failing state-owned carmaker. BYD’s conventional gas-powered cars are selling well these days in China, and his electric plug-in electric model looks like it will come to market with a longer range and a lower sticker price than the new Toyota Prius much-hyped Chevy Volt. As if that were not enough, I’m hearing now that BYD is on the verge of a breakthrough in the solar power business and that the company has big plans to make rechargeable batteries at a utility scale to store energy from intermittent, renewable sources like wind and solar. Today, BYD employes 130,000 people in 11 factories, either in China and one each in India, Hungary and Rumania.

That track record—and that potential—is what persuaded Warren Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, to buy 10% of BYD last fall for $230 million. This could turn out to be one of Buffett’s very best deals. Here’s what Charlie Munger, Buffett’s longtime friend and the vice chairman of Berkshire, told me about Mr. Wang:

This guy is a com-bination of Thomas Edison and Jack Welch—something like Edison in solving technical problems, and something like Welch in getting done what he needs to do. I’ve never seen anything like it.

wang_chuan_fu03
Munger, by the way, is a famous curmudgeon, who usually comes up with all kinds of reasons why Buffett’s latest investment idea won’t pan out. Not so this time around.

The other key player in the Berkshire-BYD deal is David Sokol, the chairman of MidAmerican Energy, a utility company owned by Berkshire and an interesting guy in his own right. (I’m going to blog about Sokol later this week—he is a big believer in renewable energy.) Sokol did most of the due diligence on BYD for Berkshire, and he now sits on the BYD board. He, too, was very impressed with Mr. Wang.

Here are three reasons why I think BYD will become an important company in the not too distant future.

1. BYD’s engineering prowess. Depending on whether or not you count trainees, BYD employs between 10,000 and 17,000 engineers and it’s constantly recruiting the best graduates from China’s engineering and technical schools. The Shenzhen manufacturing region, where the company is headquartered, is known for cheap unskilled labor, but BYD’s competitive advantage derives from its cheap skilled labor. “They are the top of the top,” Mr. Wang told me, when I visited BYD last year. This is a company that has already invented new processes (the way it makes batteries) and products (the battery in its electric car) and it is focused on innovation. Innovation appears to be Mr. Wang’s personal passion.

2. BYD’s forward-thinking management. David Sokol is a student of management—he wrote a little book on the subject called “Pleased But Not Satisfied”—and he was impressed with Mr. Wang’s thoughtful and purposeful approach to building his company. So was I. Not many entrepreneurs evolve into effective leaders of global companies with 100,000 or more employees. This fact didn’t make the story, but I was interested to learn that BYD is working with the Hong Kong outpost of Business for Social Responsibility. Unlike some of its domestic competitors, BYD wants to adopt best practices in health and safety as well as find ways to empower its people to improve the company. Jeremy Prepscius, the Asia director for BSR, told me: “What makes them unique is that you have a Chinese company, a big one, that recognizes the value of continuing to evolve its internal culture, and recognizes that it is not just a top-down command-and-control culture…They are somewhere between an old state-owned Chinese enterprise and a modern Japanese company like Toyota.” Sokol told me that Mr. Wang seeks his ideas and criticism whenever they meet. Perhaps surprisingly, many CEOs have the confidence to act that way. On the downside, it’s hard to know whether BYD has a strong bench of managers behind Mr. Wang.

3. China’s commitment to clean energy. Much as I admire the Obama administration’s energy and environment team, there’s no way that the U.S. government is going to help U.S. car companies and battery makers as much as the Chinese government is going to help BYD. As Keith Bradsher of The New York Times reported in a page-one story earlier this month:

Chinese leaders have adopted a plan aimed at turning the country into one of the leading producers of hybrid and all-electric vehicles within three years, and making it the world leader in electric cars and buses after that.

The government will make direct grants to automakers (as we do, of course) and also provide “subsidies of up to $8,800 are being offered to taxi fleets and local government agencies in 13 Chinese cities for each hybrid or all-electric vehicle they purchase.”

Finally, there’s a fascinating footnote to this story, and it involves a man named Li Lu, who was born in China in 1966, the same year as Mr. Wang. When I began reporting the story, I wondered how Buffett and Charlie Munger had become aware of BYD. That question led me to Li Lu, who runs an investment firm, in which Munger is an investor, based in Pasadena that owns about 2.5% of BYD. He was the link between Berkshire and BYD.

Li Lu, it turns out, also was a leader of the pro-democracy movement that organized the mass student protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989—20 years ago next month. He fled China after hundreds of demonstrators were killed and appeared on China’s “Twenty-one Most Wanted List.”

Escaping to New York, Li Lu was embraced by the human rights community and wrote a memoir called Moving the Mountain that reads like a movie. His well-educated parents were forced into labor camps during the Cultural Revolution and, as a 10-year-old-boy, he barely survived an earthquake that killed 250,000 in the city of Tangshin.

During the 1990s, Li Lu earned three degrees in six years from Columbia—a B.A. in economics, a law degree and an M.B.A. He worked for Allen & Co. and at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette before starting his investment fund. When David Sokol first flew to China to visit BYD, he stopped at LAX to have dinner with Li Lu, after which they traveled together to Hong Kong. Li Lu is still not permitted to travel freely to China.

Li Lu politely declined to speak with me for my story, telling me that some people in China are still unhappy about his role in the Tianenmen protests. Mr. Wang is not among them. “That’s past history,” he said. “Today, Mr Li and I share the belief that the best way to help China move forward is to make BYD a world-class company.”

Li Lu has agreed to come to FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference next week to talk about BYD. I’m eager to meet him and learn more about this remarkable company. You can read my BYD story here.

{ 4 comments }

Charging ahead with electric cars

November 16, 2008

As the electric car is business gets more and more crowded, it feels like we are approaching a breakthrough. It could come from a U.S. automaker like GM with its Volt, from a European company like Renault (and its partner Nissan) which are committed to electric cars through an alliance with Better Place, from a Japanese firm like Toyota which has led the way with hybrid cars like the Prius, from a Chinese or Indian carmaker, or from one of the many startups—Tesla, Think, Fisker, ZENN—that are hurrying to market.

I’m fascinated by electric cars, so I went to a panel on “Bringing Electric Cars to the Mass Market” at the Net Impact conference at Wharton. They had great people—Michael Granoff of Better Place who has the title, “head of oil independence policies;” Charles Gassenheimer who is CEO of Ener1, a startup company that makes lithium-ion batteries for electric cars; Vicki Northrup, an industry veteran who has worked for Think, Zen and is back at Think, and moderator Bill Moore, who runs a terrific website, EV World, and knows the business inside and out.

Of course, it’s not much of a business yet. Sure, Toyota has sold more than 1 million hybrids, but most everyone agrees that today’s hybrids (which recharge their batteries from the braking power of the car) are an interim technology, a bridge to the future. They are likely to give way, first, to plug-in electric hybrids (where the battery can be recharged by plugging in the car) and then to pure electrics. After all, it doesn’t make a lot of sense of build a car with both an internal combustion engine and an electric engine—that’s one reason the Prius and other hybrids are pricey. Besides that, the Prius battery technology will soon be surpassed by lithium-ion batteries, the kind used in laptops and cell phones, most experts think. They are more efficient, lighter weight and more powerful. Gassenheimer said a government energy lab tested a Prius with one of his company’s lithium-ion batteries and found that it delivered 77 miles per gallon, even before the software was optimized for the new battery.

Batteries are the key to the electric car business. The trouble is, lithium ion batteries that are powerful enough to provide a reasonable range—say, 60 to 100 miles on a single charge—and long-lasting enough so that they can be charged and discharged year after year are frightfully expensive. They can easily cost $15,000 to $20,000, the panelists said, accounting for as much as 50% of the cost of a plug-in electric hybrid or an all electric car.

So how do you get costs to come down? Several ways, it turns out.

First, obviously, is by improving the technology. Lots of big and small companies are working on that—Panasonic, Toyota, Sanyo, BYD, startups Ener1 and A123 and a venture-backed firm called eeStor.

Economies of scale will surely help. “Getting the battery into volume production is the best way to drive down costs,” Gassenheimer said. Ener1 has a deal to make batteries for the Think cars, which should ramp down their costs; they are building a production line now in Indianapolis.

Another approach: Radically transform the automobile business model, as Better Place wants to do. Their plan is to own the batteries and charging stations, and recharge and replace them when needed. This should assure wary buyers, if they believe in Better Place. “You subscribe to Better Place for your energy,” Granoff says. “You pay for the miles that you drive.” Better Place has struck deals to build out electric-car infrastructure in Israel, Denmark and Australia, with more to come, I’m told. You can watch this video of Shai Agassi, Better Place’s charismatic CEO, at the EV World website.

Still another approach is to lease the batteries. Think is thinking about this idea, according to Northrup, but is wary of trying to introduce a new technology and a new business model at the same time. “We’re not sure Americans will go for it,” she says.

One thing I learned from the panel: Batteries, when they are no longer powerful enough to drive a car motor, can still hold enough charge so that they could be resold to electric utilities that want to store intermittent renewable energy from the wind or the sun.

Finally, the government can and probably will play a role in driving the adoption of electric cars. The $700-billion financial rescue bill included $7,500 tax credits for the first 250,000 buyers of plug-in electrics, which could help the Chevy Volt and the Prius plug-in if they come to market, as expected, by 2010.

Gassenheimer says: “The only way to encourage penetration at this early stage ,when the prices are higher than consumers are willing to pay, is government intervention.”

I’ve come to believe that plug-in hybrids and then all-electric cars will reach the mass market in the next three to five years, although I can’t tell you how we will get from here to there. The fundamental reason is that electric car engines are more efficient than gasoline engines, although there’s debate about how big the efficiency advantage turns out to be. Besides that, electric cars are cleaner, they will help wean us from imported oil and they are quieter than gas-powered cars.

As Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Nissan and Renault, said last month, when Nissan and France’s biggest utility announced plans to roll out an electric-car network in France:

We have decided to introduce zero-emission vehicles as quickly as possible in order to ensure individual mobility against the background of high oil prices and better environmental protection.

{ 9 comments }

Next Entries →

Coupons
Coupon Forum
Trompi.ro