[Chrysler300] FW: Circuits: The Rebirth of the Electric Car

["elmer tuuri" <eltuuri@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bob Lutz was Pres. of Chrysler -untill Daimler took over-----they really 
screwed Mopar
>From: NYTimes.com <nytdirect@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>Reply-To: nytdirect@xxxxxxxxxxx
>To: eltuuri@xxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: Circuits: The Rebirth of the Electric Car
>Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:40:54 -0400
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>	Circuits: The Rebirth of the Electric Car
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>		If you have trouble reading this e-mail, go to: 
>http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2007/09/20/technology/circuitsemail/index.html
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>					September 20, 2007
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>						Circuits
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>		The Rebirth of the Electric Car
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>			By DAVID POGUE
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>This past Sunday, my report on the rebirth of the electric car aired on 
>"CBS News Sunday Morning." You can see it  here.
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>
>CBS gave me a juicy long time for the segment--but the truth is, there was 
>enough good material to fill a miniseries. Like the interview with 
>auto-industry superstar Bob Lutz, now a top executive at General Motors 
>(vice chairman, global of product development), and the driving force 
>between the upcoming Volt electric car. He's a funny, smart, engaging guy, 
>although he's certainly got GM's interests at heart.
>
>Continue reading...ADVERTISEMENT
>
>
>
>But since I now have the luxury of an e-newsletter, and you have the luxury 
>of a scroll bar, here it is: is a longer chunk of that interview.
>
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>DAVID POGUE:    The Volt, as I understand it, has both a gas and engine and 
>electric motor. But it's not a Prius, right?
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>BOB LUTZ:    No. What happens is in conventional hybrids is, there are very 
>few batteries and they're just designed to give an electric assist. It's 
>this constant interplay between gasoline and battery.
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>The Volt is is basically an electric vehicle. With a range of--we're 
>shooting for a minimum of 40 miles. And then, so that people don't get 
>caught out, when the battery reaches a certain minimum state of charge, 
>there is a very small internal-combustion engine, four-cylinder engine, 
>that kicks in.
>
>
>It could be a small diesel. It could run on ethanol. Could run on 
>compressed natural gas. It could be anything. But that engine never drives 
>the car. It's not hooked up to the wheels. Think of it as a portable 
>generator that gets your battery back up.
>
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>Now, if you want to make a big, long trip, like from New York to Chicago, 
>you can do it. But once you're beyond the range of the batteries, then the 
>small piston engine is probably going to be working most of the time, and 
>your mileage will drop.
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>But we have impeccable data that show that 82 percent of the daily trips in 
>the United States are 40 miles or less. So, I think there's going to be a 
>lot of people who find that throughout a month, they'll never burn a drop 
>of fuel.
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>DP:    Got it. Now [walking over to a skeletal model of the Volt], we have 
>this cool, uh--
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>BL:    Cutaway.
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>DP:    --cutaway. Hey, I don't know where you got this invisible chassis 
>material, but it's great. Give me a quick tour of the--
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>BL:    Yeah, okay. This is the small gasoline engine. These things that 
>look like a big stack of blue CDs are to simulate the lithium-ion 
>batteries.
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>Now, as we are now working with the lithium ion suppliers, the batteries 
>may or may not have exactly that shape. In fact, one of suppliers is even 
>looking at doing them in little foil bags, like those airline toilettes. 
>Except you'd accordion the whole batch of them--
>
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>DP:    --And they're not as useful in wiping your face.
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>BL:    No, you would not wan to wipe your face. Although lithium... you 
>know, if you're bipolar, you can eat your battery. (LAUGHTER)
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>DP:    So, what about torque and RPM? Is it all measured differently?
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>BL:    Yeah, batteries have tremendous performance and torque. Our 
>performance targets for the Volt are 0 to 60 in around five or six seconds. 
>Top speed of 120 miles an hour for a limited time. A hundred miles an hour 
>is sustainable.
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>DP:    And how about the mileage?
>
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>BL:    If the electricity is produced by renewable means and non-fossil 
>fuels, the mileage is infinite. By our calculation, if a person does a 
>60-mile trip, so that the internal combustion engine has to help for the 
>last 20, we figure the equivalent mileage would be about 150 miles per 
>gallon.
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>DP:    And, ah, I heard you have a special program for journalists to get a 
>free Volt?
>
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>BL:    Yeah. (LAUGHS) Actually, what's planned for journalists is... We've 
>run into a great deal of skepticism on this program. There are cynics, and 
>some of them are our competitors, who say, "Don't be fooled by what General 
>Motors is showing you. They have no intention of building this thing. This 
>is just smoke and mirrors to take everybody's mind off their sport 
>utilities," and so forth.
>
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>And in order to allay that, at various stages of the program, we are going 
>to bring in members of the media. I'm hoping that as early as spring of 
>'08, we will have the first rough prototypes running, which will permit 
>members of the media to drive 30 or 40 miles purely on batteries and listen 
>to the internal combustion engine kick in.
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>DP:    But you understand why people are skeptical. I mean, you're still 
>lobbying to keep the Federal mileage requirements from going up, and so on.
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>BL:    Well, we and Toyota! And Honda. And everybody.
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>You know, the media likes to say, "The Detroit Big Three are fighting the 
>fuel economic proposals." No, no, no--the whole automotive industry is 
>fighting! Why? Because they're impossible.
>
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>I mean, it's easy for the Senate to say, "You know what? 35 miles per 
>gallon sounds like a good number." And then somebody else says, "Oh, why 
>don't we say 40?" I mean, these are crazy numbers.
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>They never talk to us and actually ask us, "What are you capable of doing 
>without having to raise the price of cars by six or seven or eight thousand 
>dollars?" So unfortunately, logic doesn't always prevail.
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>What if Congress passes a law that says, to preserve the nation's highway 
>infrastructure, starting 2017, cars are no longer allowed to touch the 
>road? They must levitate two inches above the road! It's our duty to say, 
>"Hey, folks. It ain't going to work."
>
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>DP:    Actually, I heard Toyota has a prototype. (LAUGHTER) OK, let's get 
>back to the Volt real quick. Are you still hoping for 2010 for the release?
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>BL:    It'll either be late '10 or early '11, but we're still holding 
>everybody's feet to the fire for 2010.
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>DP:    And what are the technical roadblocks?
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>BL:    Well, the problem is nobody has done a lithium ion battery pack this 
>big. But our battery suppliers say, "Hey. Stop saying that. We're telling 
>you the battery's going to be OK." We get the first experimental packs from 
>our two developmental suppliers in October. And then we can start bench 
>testing.
>
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>DP:    And are you saying, as the cameras roll, that at this moment, you 
>firmly believe that this puppy will see the light of day?
>
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>BL:    Yeah, I firmly believe it. A lot of us see it as the most 
>interesting and most fascinating technical challenge of our whole careers. 
>I mean, this car means more to me than anything else I've had anything to 
>do with in the 42 years that I've been in the business. I think this is 
>because it's transformational.
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>Everything else has been a better version of what somebody else has already 
>done. Dodge Viper, very exciting, but it targeted the Chevy Corvette. Chevy 
>ZO6, we said, "Well, we're going to do better than that." You're always 
>benchmarking something that already exists.
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>This...it doesn't exist. It's all new, which is why it just truly excites 
>us.
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>DP:    And the price?
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>BL:    My personal target still is to bring this car into the market at, 
>you know, nicely below $30,000. And if we achieve that, it will really 
>become a viable solution. If we have to charge 60 or 70 or 80, then it'll 
>be bought by Hollywood celebrities and other entertainment figures, and the 
>odd politician for going to rallies, and that'll be it.
>
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>DP:    How much of this prototype is what it's really going to look like?
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>BL:    A lot. Obviously, it's not going to have, like, 22- or 23-inch 
>wheels. But you always do that with show cars. You have way bigger wheels 
>than you put in production.
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>It's going to be close enough to the show car to where, when people see one 
>on the road for the first time, they're going to say, "That's the Chevrolet 
>Volt." And it'll be totally different from any other General Motors car, 
>which I think is part of the secret of the Prius. By driving a Prius, 
>everybody knows, "Oh, that person is concerned with the environment." Being 
>noticed for what you're driving is very powerful motivation for what you 
>drive.
>
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>DP:   OK, one last question. In the big picture, looking decades out, of 
>all these contenders?you know, biofuel and hydrogen and electric?what do 
>you see?
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>BL:    Well, I have to separate my personal view from the official 
>corporate view. And they're not that inconsistent.
>
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>The corporate view is, we think ethanol is best, and we think that is going 
>to grow. Perhaps not as fast as we would like it to.
>
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>There's certainly a place for diesels, for certain applications. But it's 
>not a cheap and easy solution.
>
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>I think there will be a lot of play on conventional hybrids, gas electric 
>hybrids, which we're doing in our full-size sport utilities and pickup 
>trucks and a lot of other vehicles. Again, unfortunately, a fairly 
>expensive system.
>
>
>And then I think, in many cases, the conventional gasoline engine will 
>continue to exist, albeit in more complex and much more sophisticated form, 
>with a lot of devices and mechanical sophistication built in to squeeze out 
>more fuel economy. Of course, that isn't free either.
>
>
>Fuel cells probably will play some role, although that is somewhat 
>dependent on how fast the fuel-cell refueling infrastructure gets 
>propagated. So--
>
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>DP:    But you didn't mention electric in all that.
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>BL:    Well, that's because I was saving the best for last.
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>DP:    Oh. (LAUGHTER)
>
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>BL:    Electric is going to play a big role. A lot of the answer to your 
>question depends on how good a job do we do commercializing the Volt. Will 
>it live up to its promise of 40 plus mile electric range? Will the battery 
>last ten years? Can we bring it in at a price that most people could 
>afford? If the answer is yes to all that, then I think the future for 
>electrics is absolutely unlimited.
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>						Visit David Pogue on the Web at DavidPogue.com »
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>						Circuits
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>		Basics
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>		What?s the Setting for a Snowy Beach at Dusk?
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>			By IVAN BERGER
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>			The computing power inside even the cheapest digital cameras allows a 
>photographer to get even better pictures ? if they can decipher the myriad 
>shooting modes built into the devices.
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>		State of the Art
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>		Beware the Tapeless Camcorder
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>			By DAVID POGUE
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>			Tapeless camcorders have arrived, but be aware of price, capacity and 
>picture quality.
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>		Selecting (or Not) Songs to Shuffle
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>			By J.  D. BIERSDORFER
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>			I often set my iTunes program to shuffle all the songs, but find it 
>jarring when Christmas music pops into the mix. Is there a way to make 
>iTunes skip these holiday albums when it randomly shuffles my music?
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>		A Golden Hard Drive, to Jazz Up a Desktop
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>			By JOHN BIGGS
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>			Auric Goldfinger, the James Bond villain, would love the LaCie Golden 
>Disk, a 500-gigabyte external hard drive.
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>		More Memory and Quicker Loading in a Thinner and Lighter PlayStation 
>Portable
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>
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>			By JOE HUTSKO
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>			Within that trimmer shell, Sony has doubled the built-in memory to 64 
>megabytes, which results in noticeably faster-loading games displayed on 
>its bright 4.3-inch screen.
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>		Your Pet?s Essential Information, Compactly Stored
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>			By ROY FURCHGOTT
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>			KoogaPet can store an animal?s personal information and medical records 
>on a U.S.B. drive that measures less than 1 by 1 ½ inches.
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>		Children?s Cellphone, Once Oh So Simple, Is Growing Up
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>			By JOHN BIGGS
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>			Firefly Mobile?s $125 flyPhone has a completely black face that lights 
>up in different ways depending on what the child is doing.
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>			All Cellphones Coverage
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>					Go to Circuits »
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>		Stop-Motion Video
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>			An encore presentation.
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>		nytimes.com/business
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>		How are local restaurants attracting new customers at airports?
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>Also in Business:
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>					A resource center even a Microsoft hater can love
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>					How to avoid a cash crunch
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>					How to pay less for rent for your office space
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