Cleantech

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.

It's been said before, but can't be said enough. This is not a technology problem. When it comes to fighting global warming, it's the little things we do that will make the difference.

The average American consumer is responsible for about 9-10 tons of carbon emissions per year.

The big three culprits for us consumers: 1) Car miles driven and car size; 2) Power used; 3) Airline miles flown

Here are my favorite little things:

1) When you have the option, drive the family car with the best gas mileage and drive together--no more three-car families driving to church in three separate cars. And my favorite, which I will harp on until the consumer gets it: when you buy that next car, don't worry about the hybrid or no-hybrid decision, just buy one size smaller than you were planning. It IS all about the size.

2) Look to your AC and heating bill--whether it's electric or gas, this is a biggie. Shorter (or colder) showers, adjusting the thermostat (or off during the day while you're gone), washing half your laundry in cold water, and for the love of grief, close the blinds during the day in the summer, and open them in the winter. We can make a difference.

The general rule of thumb is that if you just pay attention to your power bills, you can make small changes that save 10-20 percent.

And 3) When planning who's going where for Christmas and vacation, we now generally factor in price. Why not compare all the trips on carbon, too? Shorter is better, and the fewer of us who have to travel, the better off the planet is.

So why not do it? It's not just energy bills anymore; now it's all about the carbon.

In 1899 economist/sociologist Thorstein Veblen introduced the term Conspicuous Consumption to describe what he believed to be the evils of wealth accumulation in the nouveau riche upper class of the Gilded Age (Veblen was not exactly a "right wing" economist). You can best think of Conspicuous Consumption today as the notion that consumerism and "keeping up with the Joneses" drives economics.

One of my friends, Helen Priest from Meridian Energy, coined a new version of the term this week--conspicuous sustainability. She is here from New Zealand's largest (and all green) power company visiting Silicon Valley, and she's watching the torrent of activity around everything green and clean. It struck her that we are reinventing Conspicuous Consumption--keeping up with the Joneses in all things green. You have to wonder if solar panels or a LEEDs rating on a McMansion somehow doesn't miss the point.

So let's think: Al Gore's son gets arrested for doing 100 mph with marijuana in the car--in a Prius! (As I told one my friends, I didn't know they could go that fast.) Nouveau riche tech execs out here in Silicon Valley put ultraclean, and even more, ultraexpensive, solar power on their roofs. Buckingham Palace offsets the carbon footprint of the Queen's recent trip to the United States. Dell has Plant a Tree for Me Program, which I used when I bought a new Dell last month. There is an exponentially increasing number of examples of consumerism driving green.

But to be fair--conspicuous sustainability is pushing everything from the rapid growth in solar to the greening of corporate strategies like General Electric's Ecomagination, BP's Beyond Petroleum and General Motor's Live Green, Go Yellow. It's pushing hybrid electric sales, fuel cells to power our PDAs and carbon offsets--all good things for the environment.

I put the term to my friend, green business guru Joel Makower, and he quickly agreed that conspicuous sustainability is exactly the term for our age (We didn't discuss whether it was good or bad). Joel's response was, "I think the quintessential symbol for the conspicuous sustainability age would be the carbon-neutral Hummer." Or maybe Gore's carbon-neutral 10,000 (square foot) San Francisco home. He also said "And then there's Moskito, Richard Branson's privately owned Caribbean island, which he wants to be carbon neutral..."

In Veblen's mind, Conspicuous Consumption was a very bad thing, but for green tech and the environmental movement, is conspicuous sustainability a good one?

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.

Where in the world is the global warming solution? Well, as usual, it still rests with us, the consumer.

When we care enough to vote with our ballot AND our wallet, industry and government follow.

Food for thought:

On us -

Cars - I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we have oodles of pretty hybrids on the road. But the payback on a hybrid is about 9 to 11 years for the average diver (longer than the automakers say the "rated life" of the car is). Not a pretty picture. But if we all simply bought our next car 1 car size smaller (a Civic instead of an Accord) - we'd save thousands up front AND hundreds per year on our gas bill. Which sounds smarter and greener?

Houses - It's 90 degrees outside today. I came home at 4 pm. I had mistakenly left all my curtains open. The house was 92 F. I promptly closed them - and have been running my AC for the last hour and half, just to knock 8 degrees off in one room. Generally 10-20% of our utility bill can be cut, not by technology, but just by paying attention. Are we?

On industry -

- Pepsi just recently announced they were taking their US operations green and carbon free - and bought enough green power to back that up.

- General Motors is in the process of rolling out a hybrid version of every Saturn make they have.

- Dell has launched a campaign to let consumers plant a tree to offset the carbon emissions from a computer they buy.

- BP, one of the world's largest energy companies, had a higher market share in world solar production than it does in world oil production.

Why? Because they think we, their customer, cares.

Global warming solutions are not an area where our traditional environmental model - having regulators beat up on companies whom we blame for selling us the products we ask for - will work. We as consumers need to be a part of this solution. Stop complaining it's industry's fault. It's not. Vote with your wallets, and your feet.

Next week, why China and the US hold the future of global warming in our hands.