Cleantech

I had a chance to visit with the founders of a new San Francisco Bay Area clean-tech start-up called Barefoot Motors, which is building an all-electric ATV. I think is a great idea for an untapped electric vehicle product.

Think about it: Of all the potential electric vehicles out there, ATVs suck down a comparably large amount of gasoline per mile and are used primarily for short-range transport (range is a longtime achilles heel of electric vehicles). And some riders have a serious problem with the noise and the noxious exhaust fumes.

Add to that the fact that ATV riders want a combination between acceleration and power that electric drive systems are particularly good at doing, and you should be able to get a really great product from an electric all-terrain vehicle. According to barefoot, Jamie Hyneman of Mythbusters fame agrees. He had a big hand in the prototype.

I have followed the Barefoot story for some time, but this week one of the co-founders, Melissa Brandao who was formerly with the electric vehicle company Zap, spared a few minutes on the record to give Cleantech Blog the rundown.

So Melissa, give us the story.

Brandao: Barefoot Motors is proud to be the first company to offer Earth Utility Vehicles. Our first vehicle is called the Model One. It's an all-electric, heavy-duty ATV for primarily agricultural and industrial applications. It has all the power and speed of a conventional heavy-duty ATV with the added benefits of being eco-friendly, with a lower cost of ownership driven by fuel savings, quieter, and more comfortable to ride, along with those expected perks like rebates and other incentives that are likely to be instituted in the coming years to help reduce air quality issues faster. As far as air quality goes, replacing one conventional ATV with the Model One is like taking four cars off the road. There are 1.6 million of these ATVs running around California. But because they are not in plain site they are often overlooked and forgotten by all of those that do not encounter them regularly. ATVs, unlike cars, are not highly regulated, and it will take years to change that.

Why Electric ATVs? What is better about them than electric cars?

Brandao: Electric ATVs are not better than EVs; they're just different, as off-road vehicles are different than on-road vehicles. The premise at Barefoot was to build a comparable vehicle to the heavy-duty ATVs that were currently available knowing that the one area that we would have to address is range. What we discovered is that the principle application for our vehicle did not require an 80-mile range to fit their needs. They simply need a good, reliable, heavy-duty workhorse that will work around their property throughout the day. That is the Model One's sweet spot.

What exactly is your Electric ATV going to look like?

Brandao: That is under discussion as we speak, but fundamentally it will look like an ATV with some design changes based on innovation as well as the distribution of weight and space. In essence, there's less stuff on the Model One, so there is more space to work with.

Melissa, you told me Jamie Hyneman of Mythbusters fame had a big hand in the prototype?

Brandao: Yes, I met him at Maker Faire two years back and we have stayed in touch since then. When I introduced him to the idea of collaborating with Barefoot Motors, a green utility vehicle company, he was keenly interested for two reasons. One, he has been an advocate of alternative-fueled vehicles for a long time. He even rides an electric bicycle back and forth to work. Two, Jamie was raised on a farm and he rode his grandfather's three-wheel ATV on the property, so he understands the importance of a good utility vehicle for agriculture. In essence, this project hit home. As a prototype builder, Jamie can create elegant solutions that are simple and functional, he is the holder of several patents and he has a deep knowledge of electronics, robotics, and rapid development. In building the Model One, Jamie has been the driver behind the choice of technologies and packaging. He has kept us focused on that same principle of simple but elegant design. The proof of concept, Model One, achieves our initial performance requirements. In fact, it has exceeded expectations and it's so fun to ride, as you can see from the video of Jamie riding it. When are we going to get you on it?? (Soon Melissa, very soon).

Will it have more or less pulling power than a conventional one?

Brandao: In towing capacity we can handle 1,000 lbs. That is our baseline performance, which is on par with a conventional heavy-duty ATV.

What about range?

Brandao: Our prototype is getting about 30 to 40 miles on a charge. The big difference when you talk range is that an ATV encounters many variations in the off-road terrain, mud, sand, gravel, dirt, steeper slopes, which can skew the range figures more than it would on a standard car that drives almost entirely on asphalt.

Is there a list I can get on to buy one?

Brandao: First, check out the video clip. Then yes, please contact melissab@barefootmotors.com if you are interested in purchasing one. We are building about 150 next year. We are asking for deposits of roughly 10 percent which we will apply to the price of the vehicle. It is fully refundable at any time.

Are your battery needs much different than from cars?

Brandao: Our choice is lithium ion batteries. We feel the density and efficiency you gain is significant enough that it only makes sense in this application.

Are we going to have a naming contest for your Electric ATV? Do we need a new acronym? EATV sounds dull. How about Electric Warthog?

Brandao: Sorry, we got the name already, but I like the idea of customer interaction so you will see some clever ideas from Barefoot in the coming months!

Thanks Melissa, great story.

As consumers, we generally like choices. In the world of cleaner cars, those choices have been few and far between, but slowly that is changing.

I had a chance recently to test drive two of the cars whose creators are bent on changing the way we view transportation, a converted all electric Scion eBox by Silicon Valley startup AC Propulsion, and a Saturn Vue Greenline hybrid. Both were highly enjoyable. The first, with a $70,000 price tag and a $10,000 deposit, is clearly an EV targeted at Conspicuous Sustainability consumers. I guess then, that the Saturn Vue Greenline with a $24,000 price tag, is perhaps the hybrid for the rest of us.

One of my friends, who was considering buying an eBox invited me to take it for a spin up and down some of the San Francisco hills with him while he was test driving. I have to admit, coming down California Street into downtown, one of the City's steeper hills, is an entertaining way to get used to the feel of regenerative braking on a true EV. I highly recommend it. For most of the drive I never touched the brakes. To stop you simply take your foot off the accelerator. And for those who have not driven an EV before the acceleration itself is phenomenal. Touch, and Go. Of course, with a $55,000 price tag for the EV conversion (you provide the Scion), limited range, and few electric charging stations, a purchase would be a hard call for me to make. The payback on fuel savings, many times the useful life of the car.

In contrast, General Motors (NYSE:GM) had given me a 2007 Saturn Vue to drive around for a week, to get the feel of it. If anything, GM is not known as an innovator of clean technologies. They are still tarred with the who killed the electric car brush by many environmentalists. That has only made it harder for GM to get out the message on things like its massive R&D effort in fuel cell cars, its push into flex fuel and ethanol with the Live Green Go Yellow campaign, and now hybrids. Having been to a number of their press luncheons on some of the new technologies they have been developing, I had some idea what to expect, but had not written about it before. The Vue is what is known as a mild hybrid, and its lack of bleeding edge, ultra green technology compared to a Prius had a few of my greener friends turning their noses up at it. But this didn't really phase me after I drove it. As a car and SUV, I found it quite impressive. It handled wonderfully, was extremely quiet, and quite comfortable. You can feel the regenerative braking, but only as a slight tug, so besides the lack of noise, it is like driving any other SUV. Saturn bills it as getting the best highway gas mileage of any SUV, and the cheapest hybrid SUV on the market (not to mention a little quicker than the conventional Vue). Like all hybrids today, the payback is real, but not so great. At the average miles driven per year for most Americans we are talking 9 to 11 years or so compared to the standard Vue, according to my conversation with the Saturn people. If you happen to a real heavy commuter 25,000 to 30,000 miles per year type of thing, the payback may be down towards 5 or 6 years. In short, despite the c. 20 percent fuel savings, a consumer is looking at 120,000 to 150,000 plus miles before reaching a payback, depending on your assumptions, for this or almost any hybrid. The real payback, as always, comes from just buying a smaller car, hybrid or not.

What I love is that the Vue Greenline is really just the first in the Saturn line of hybrids and cleaner fueled cars. GM is basically planning on making virtually the entire Saturn line as green as can be. It is rolling out something like 8 new hybrids or hybrid versions of existing Saturn makes as we speak over the next couple of years. And at a $24,000 price tag, I could actually see buying one of these.

So whether you have the pocket books to look for full EV conversion or just a mild hybrid to make a small difference like the rest of us, the choice is there.

As with most things, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about electric vehicles. Last Friday, Ian Wright and I spent a couple of hours around my conference table discussing our philosophies on electric cars. Wright knows something about this topic, as he was formerly an executive at EV start-up Tesla Motors, and is now the founder and CEO of Wrightspeed, a Silicon Valley-based start-up whose first car is going to be a high-performance electric supercar, price tag just shy of $200,000. And as it's electric, Wright expects it should out-start, outrun, out-turn, and generally outperform anything in its class.

Cleantech Blog has written extensively about EVs. I am known among my friends as being a real skeptic when it comes to EVs, but behind Wright's business plan he got my attention with two ideas that are worth repeating: payback and plug-ins.

First, Wright doesn't care about gas mileage per se; he cares about performance, power, and most importantly, payback. Focus on the vehicles actually burning the most gas, irrespective of fuel efficiency. That is, instead of making tiny, compact, fuel-efficient target cars more efficient with EV and hybrid technology--focus on the gas guzzlers. Wright's point is well taken. A small, fuel-efficient car that gets 35 mpg and drives a typical 12,500 miles per year only uses about 350 gallons per year. A large pickup truck that gets 12 miles to the gallon uses over 1,000 gallons for the same mileage--nearly 3 times as much. And if that truck is a work truck driven 25,000 miles per year, it would use over 2,000 gallons of fuel per year, nearly 6 times the little car. That truck owner may spend upwards of $50,000 in fuel over its life, where the commuter car owner may spend a small fraction of that.

When I asked him for comments on my example, Wright added: "The special case of congested city driving might be worth mentioning, since everyone thinks a lot of fuel is wasted there. But if you drive a Prius 10 hours per week in congested city traffic, it's only about 150 gallons per year! Not much point in trying to improve on the Prius for that use. (The arithmetic: Congested traffic is defined as 12 mph average; 10 hours per week would be 120 miles per week, or 6,240 miles per year. The Prius shines in this application, getting maybe 40 mpg, so 156 gallons per year.)"

Putting expensive hybrid and EV technology in the small car not only has a worse financial payback--compounding the perennial problem of EVs being too costly, but the same 20 percent efficiency improvement does very little to reduce overall fuel consumption for society compared to the same efficiency gains in a big truck that drives a heck of lot of miles.

So Wright asks, if we want to both find a way to save car owners money, and save the world--wouldn't we focus on applying technology to where the problem is the worst and the returns are the best?

When Wright looked at the automotive landscape and asked the question, where is the most fuel being burned, and how do we reduce that with technology? The answer? Performance cars and big work trucks. Not surprisingly, these are his target markets.

And why are high-performance vehicles like sports cars and Ford F350s so fuel-inefficient anyway? Take this as an example answer. If you need a big truck to have lots of power for short periods of time (for instance, in towing), then the truck engine and systems have to be sized to deliver the maximum power. But anytime you're not using all that power (i.e., most of the time), the truck is usually running well below its optimum--and burning lots of fuel for no extra gain. It's the same rationale for a sports car designed to run optimally at 90 mph, which performs worse at the average driver's speed of 50 mph to 60 mph.

Wright's more detailed explanation to me put it very elegantly: "Roughly speaking gasoline engines are most efficient at wide open throttle and the rpm that gives max torque. If you try to operate a supercar at wide open throttle, it will be doing 200 mph, and of course you'll be losing most of the energy to aero drag. The engine will be operating efficiently...but if you operate the car down where aero drag is reasonable--50 mph--then the engine will be operating at a few percent of rated power, and very inefficient. Why is it inefficient? The simple answer is that since the throttle is almost closed, there is almost a vacuum in the intake manifold, and the effective compression ratio is very low. You are trying to compress a vacuum. Engine efficiency is very dependent on compression ratio.

"Eighty years ago, there were cars that could transport a family of four at 50 mpg. The Austin 7 comes to mind. Engine technology has improved dramatically since the '30s, yet the best modern cars don't do any better than the Austin 7. Why is that? One big reason is that the Austin 7 had, well, 7 horsepower (actually about 10 hp--the "7" was "RAC hp"). So it was working hard most of the time. The family car that my wife drives makes 250 hp, and that's just an average family car these days.

"So if you displace the Prius with an EV, you can get maybe a 2x efficiency gain. But if you displace a high-performance vehicle that operates most of the time at low power settings, you can get a 10x efficiency gain. That's the main reason that 18 wheelers aren't a good target. They have powerful engines, but their power/weight ratio is very low (when fully loaded) and the engines work pretty hard. So in fuel per pound mile, they are pretty good already."

To deal with this issue, Wright isn't all about the all electric. He's pushing plug-in electric hybrids, PHEVs, aka gridable hybrids. Electric motors powered off of batteries charged from the wall or with an onboard diesel generator. The generator also acts as a booster for those times when extra power is required. Hybrids are really good at solving these power versus efficiency problems, since you can essentially design a system that can optimize for either performance or efficiency much easier than a straight gas or electric engine could.

Wright's vision also addresses one of the long-running Achilles' heels of electric cars--the lack of fueling infrastructure. Regardless of your feelings on the matter, it's generally bad business to try to bet on an expensive infrastructure rollout. And if it means slower and lower uptake of fuel-efficient vehicles, then calling for infrastructure change that's not going to happen is bad for the environment, too.

That's why I've been such a big fan of plug-in hybrids. We can have our cake and eat it too. It's all about payback and plug-ins. And it's good to see electric car gurus finally getting this message.

The electric vehicle (and challenging Detroit by building a specialty vehicle company) has always been an alluring idea - and despite Detroit spending massive amounts of money on unsuccessful or marginal launches a decade ago (including GM's EV1, Toyota's RAV4 EV and Ford's Think), the dream does not die easily.

A whole new crop of startups are busy living that dream, especially in Silicon Valley - and tons of money is flowing in to fund them.

EVs, Plug-in hybrids and next generation batteries and electric drive systems are exciting Silicon Valley to invest - and 2007 and 2008 are targeted as breakout years. Here's a taste.

AC Propulsion - 15 year old startup developing an all-electric drive train technology, currently providing all electric conversions of Toyota Scions using Li Ion batteries. Their technology is in the Wrightspeed prototypes. I had a chance to drive one of their vehicles not too long ago on the hills of San Francisco - delightfully fun. For $55K (you provide the car) you can get one now.

Wrightspeed - Another Silicon Valley startup - from their website "The X1 prototype is just the beginning. It meets its design specs of 0-60 in 3 seconds, 170 mpg equivalent; and at 1536 lbs, is only 36 lbs over the design target of 1500."

Visionary Vehicles - (Malcom Brickland the back for another try after the the Bricklin SV-1 of 30 years ago) - the story here is low cost (<$20K) plug-in hybrids made in China for the US market. (Plug-ins are electric hybrids with extra batteries that you can charge from a wall socket device.)

Tesla Motors - The highflying Silicon Valley electric car startup is making lots of headlines and has raised oodles of money (the Chairman Elon Musk is another one of the Greentech bloggers so don't take my word for it). The target car is a $92K all electric two seat roadster. As of a few days ago, Tesla is in the battery business as well, having announced a $43 mm deal with Think to sell lithium ion batteries. They were targeting '07 for product deliveries. I'm not sure what the latest is.

Phoenix Motor Cars - Canadian based, building EV fleet cars, with a Altairnano battery and UQM propulsion system. Targeting all electric trucks for the fleet market. Targeted early releases in late '07/'08.

Zenn Cars - Another Canadian based community EV startup - partnered with EEStor for the ultracapacitor technology.

So, regardless of where you come down on electric vehicles - it is pretty clear the independents are looking to challenge Detroit - banking on recent advances in battery technology and the rush for plug-in hybrids to let them make a dent in a market that has proven an unbelievably tough nut to crack. One of my colleagues was involved with Zebra Motors 10 years ago - another San Francisco Bay Area EV sports car startup that made cool prototypes but never got off the ground. Perhaps it was just too early.

Are electric vehicles really back? That's a hard prediction to make. EV technology has proven to be brutally hard over the years to get right. And even if you can, challenging Detroit and Japanese automakers has not exactly been a money making strategy either. The car business is hard. Yes, battery technology has improved and costs have come down - but just how much? Yes, plug-in hybrids offer a new way to get EV technology into fleets and mainstream (I'm a very big fan) - but cost is still a factor. And while Silicon Valley has lots of money to invest - so do the major automakers. When it comes to EITHER vehicles or EVs, $100 million in capital is not a marker of success, it's the ante up to play the game.

It's all exciting to watch in any case.