Start-up Bright Automotive is designing a line of plug-in electric vehicles that get a 100 miles per gallon by combining a bag full of fuel-efficiency tricks with an electric motor.
The Anderson, Ind.-based company is planning on showing off a prototype vehicle in May at the Electric Vehicle Symposium in Norway, according to CEO John Waters. The company raised $17 million in series A funding at the end of last year and intends to secure more money later this year, he said.
About a year ago, Bright Automotive was spun out of sustainability and energy consulting firm Rocky Mountain Institute, bringing in Waters, who invented the battery pack for GM's EV1 electric vehicle, and employees from Alcoa, Duke Energy, Google.org, Johnson Controls, and the Turner Foundation
(Credit:
Bright Automotive)
Bright Automotive is cagey about its product plans, except to say that it is building gas-electric vehicles in the light-duty category covering pick-up trucks, SUVs, and sedans. Its target is to release a vehicle with the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon in the fourth quarter of 2012, Waters said.
What sets the company apart from many other electric-vehicle makers is that its design team is able to start from scratch, according to Waters. That "clean-sheet" approach will let the company build a vehicle that is 60 percent to 65 percent the weight of competing vehicles. Designers plan to use alternative materials, such as aluminum and composites, and save weight by making components smaller and integrating subsystems.
"The auto industry has not changed a whole lot in the last 100 years. It's still heavily steel-based and based on the same welding techniques," Waters said. "When you look at starting over, it's a breath of fresh air to have some constraints removed."
Making vehicles lighter should not compromise safety, Waters added. "We'll be going after a five-star crash rating to take that issue on. (Safety) is much more about materials and design than about mass, as exemplified in the racing industry," he said.
The technique of "light weighting," combined with aerodynamics, is allowing Bright Automotive to use a smaller battery, which is normally a very expensive component of electric cars. GM executives, for example, have said that the high costs of introducing new technology means they expect to lose money on the Chevy Volt, its gas-electric car due out in late 2010.
Bright Automotive's design will allow it to use a battery that's smaller than the Volt battery and designed for a larger vehicle, Waters said. The company expects to use lithium ion batteries and make its own battery packs, he added. Vehicles will use regenerative braking to add charge to the battery.
Bright Automotive intends to make a vehicle that can go 30 miles on a full battery. For trips beyond that distance, an internal combustion engine, capable of getting 40 miles per gallon, will charge the battery. By contrast, Waters said that competing gas-electric vehicles will only be able to get 10 to 20 miles per gallon on their gas engines.
Because it's a combined gas-electric vehicle, Bright Automotive estimates that drivers will get 100 miles per gallon for 50 miles trips. Fuel efficiency improves when the battery is used more.
The road to passenger cars
To finance its operations and manufacturing, the company is looking to raise money by the middle of this year, Waters said. It is both exploring private equity and applying for a Department of Energy loan to promote auto battery manufacturing.
If it successful in raising capital, the plan is to start manufacturing at a rate of 30,000 cars in the first year and ramp up to 50,000 after that.
Waters hinted that the first vehicle from the company will not be a passenger sedan. The company has gotten interest from customers in specific markets. Introducing a car in particular niche, like the military or corporate fleets, can lead to more mainstream vehicles, he said.
"The Humvee gave the military exactly what it needed. Then we saw that vehicle morph into a consumer market play," he said, noting the same scenario for Jeeps.
Likewise, he said, the Tesla Roadster is an all-electric sports car but Tesla intends to eventually build a sedan with the same technology.
In addition to making its own vehicles, Bright Automotive is developing business in providing power electronics and electric-vehicle conversions.
One of the main challenges to electric-vehicle adoption is lowering the cost, which is why Bright Automotive has focused on working with a scaled-down battery.
"If you can get the battery to (an attractive) price point, then you have market demand," he said. "Shoving a bunch of batteries on a heavy frame means (it's) not affordable."
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Amory Lovins, a renowned author and big thinker on energy, specializes in making the impossible real.
His 4,000-square-foot Colorado home has no furnace, uses a few dollars' worth of electricity a month, and features an indoor tropical garden with banana trees and papaya plants. In conversation, he's quick to pull out his iPhone to show a car prototype inspired by the Hypercar, which is three to five times more efficient than conventional cars.
He's the chief scientist and co-founder of nonprofit advisory firm Rocky Mountain Institute, which develops environmentally friendly solutions using business as a lever. Among the organizations it advises are Ford Motor, Wal-Mart, and the Pentagon.
On Tuesday, Lovins spoke to investors and entrepreneurs at a forum on clean tech organized by Xconomy, where he was interviewed by venture capitalist Paul Maeder about energy and the environment. (On Wednesday, he spoke at Harvard University.)
Rocky Mountain Institute chief scientist Amory Lovins.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)With the U.S. automakers' financial woes and an incoming president high on everyone's minds, Lovins offered his trademark unconventional thinking bolstered by a blizzard of data.
The biggest danger to cash-strapped U.S. auto companies is making incremental changes to their product lines, he argued. Instead, they need to make radically more efficient cars by adopting several technologies aimed at efficiency. (Lovins coined the term "negawatts," which refers to watts that are not used.)
"Right now they view accelerated transformation as a risk and a distraction. I think it's actually a low-risk strategy. When your competitors new and old all around the world are coming up with radically more efficient, safe, (and) durable cars, you can't afford incrementalism," Lovins said in an interview after his talk.
"It would be tragic to bail out the industry now and see it go under in another five years as competitors' faster innovation takes hold," he said.
Pinning incumbent automakers' turnaround on electric powertrains through plug-in electric cars is a myopic view of the available technologies.
Cars can be made half as heavy as they are today by using composite materials such as light but strong carbon fiber, a choice that gives manufacturers more flexibility and reduces costs in production. "Lightweighting" lowers the engineering bar for alternative powertrain technologies as well, he argues. With less weight to haul around, expensive batteries can be smaller and fuel cell vehicles become feasible.
The other technology changes required to set automakers on the right path are aerodynamics and software for remote diagnostics and other tasks.
"Whatever your advanced powertrain is, especially if it's all-electric, it will be a great deal smaller and cheaper and lighter if you first get the platform physics right--making the car light and slippery," he said. "If you don't do that and your competitors do, you're toast."
Many businesses fail to make high-performing products because they don't practice what he calls "integrative design," or making design choices to optimize the entire vehicle rather than individual components. In the case of U.S. auto companies, there's a cultural bias toward powertrain engineering.
Carbon pricing or negawatts?
In buildings, too, existing practices and delay-ridden business processes slow down adoption of efficient home energy systems.
In its projects, the Rocky Mountain Institute has found that building owners can get energy savings of 60 percent with a three-year payback for energy-efficiency retrofits. The group found that new green building constructions can be done for lower capital costs than traditional methods, contrary to the prevailing view.
When asked what words of advice he offers President-elect Barack Obama, Lovins said the new administration needs to coordinate efforts between the Department of Energy and any climate initiatives.
Many investors and consumers expect that putting a price on carbon emissions--through a cap-and-trade system or tax--will make many clean technologies more economical. Lovins thinks carbon pricing is a good idea but it's not essential.
"You could make lots of money off of efficiency with zero carbon price. We know how to save half the oil and gas and three quarters of the electricity in this country," he said. There are, however, "institutional barriers" that block adoption of energy efficiency practices, he said, apparently referring to incumbent fuel and energy companies.
Longer term, he said it's not clear that carbon prices will remain high enough to drive emissions reductions as intended.
Policy and geoengineering
On specific policy levers, he offered two ideas: "decoupling" in the electric utility industry and a "feebate" structure in transportation, even if they are both implemented first at the state level.
Regulations in about 40 states are structured so that utilities make more money by selling more electricity to consumers. With decoupling, utilities are incented to introduce more efficiency.
The per-capita electricity usage in the state of California, for example, has held steady since the 1970s, while its economy has grown, he noted.
The goal of a feebate--combining the words "fee" and "rebate"--is to incent consumers and automakers to value efficient vehicles.
When consumers purchase cars, there is a sliding scale where they receive a rebate for purchasing the most-efficient vehicles and a fee for the least-efficient.
"It widens the price spread between the most- and least-efficient models and...automakers can make more money because there is more technology content in the cars."
With his emphasis on energy efficiency and practical solutions, it's probably not surprising that he, like many other scientists, are wary of geoengineering ideas, such as putting sulfur particles in the air to cool the earth or seed the ocean with iron to stimulate carbon-sequestering algae blooms.
"Geoengineering is pretty scary. We really don't know what we are doing," Lovins said. "On climate science, there's a whole lot we don't know and most of the surprises are bad surprises...When you've got one planet and you've got to keep living there, you don't want to try anything irreversible."
- prev
- 1
- next
