Small Electric Car May Usher In Big Changes

An anonymous reader sends us to a profile in CNNMoney.com on a Norwegian car company that is building a compact, plug-in electric car, the Think City, that will go on sale in Europe early next year. It could hit US markets in 2009. The CEO is working with Silicon Valley VCs and with Google, Tesla Motors, PG&E, and Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway. Plans are to sell the car only on the Web. No dealers, cheap manufacturing plants, and a battery pack that you lease, not buy — there's potential here for shaking up the auto industry the way Dell did PCs.

Comments

Big Changes, huh?

[ExploHD]

Are those "big changes" similar to Segway's "Big Changes"?

Re:Big Changes, huh?

[hey!]

You don't want to own the battery. Why in the world would you?

I suppose you own the gasoline that goes into your car, but your relationship to it is transitory. It is consumable.

Your relationship with your car battery is somewhat more enduring, but it still is a consumable, what's more it is a consumable that presents you with a disposal problem at the end. Leasing the battery saves you this trouble, and makes it much easier and more efficient for the manufacturer to recycle it -- into more batteries.

I think the magic number here isn't $5000, it's more like $20,000. You would not want such a small car with a 112 mile range to be your only car, but most households have two, and increasingly often three or even more cars. If you could buy it at the same price as your next ICE car, it'd be more than viable, and help alleviate the parking problem in many households. There are four people in the house next to me, and there are four SUVs and a motorcycle. One or two of these could easily be a car like this, especially if the Stirling engine was an option that could be bought for, say $5000.

Come to think of it, one of the cool things about the Stirling engine is that you could share it, or you could keep it when you traded in your old car. It'd be much more like a one time investment.

The main obstacle to this car in this country is that Americans have become such friggen stick in the muds. We've been top dog for so many years we've gotten allergic to change. I don't know if many people noticed, but the most significant thing in this article for me was how close this thing was to production, then was dropped by Ford when the CA regulations were dropped. Our big companies, it seems, only innovate when there's a regulatory gun to their head.

If a significant number of second household cars, and most if not all third household cars were like this, we'd take a pretty big bite out of our foreign oil dependency problem for no real practical inconvenience.

Re:ummm, no.

[evilviper]

It's not like people in the US are jumping to replace their SUVs and trucks with little electric cars.

Almost...

Several years ago, when gasoline prices doubled, I noticed a hell of a lot more old and small cars on the road... Cars that you could barely sell months before, seemed to be at every stop light. Their only possible positive attribute being their 35MPG fuel economy.

Hybrids have been a huge hit over the past couple years. So, given the lack of any fully electric cars, that's about as close an equivalent as you can get. I'd say people are at least clamoring for SOMETHING different. The rich aren't going to toss their leather-clad Hummers, and those that need trucks will continue to buy them, but I expect there's a whole lot of demand in the market for some, ANYTHING that doesn't use up lots of gasoline.

Nuclear + Wind

[Nicolas MONNET]

Current technologies exist to generate electricity carbon free.

Nuclear (70%+ of all electricity around here)

Wind is already competitive price-wise with coal. Its main problems are that they require massive initial investment, and that it takes A LOT of time to get over all the Nimbys. Wind also happens to be unpredictable, but that's a non issue as far as battery charging is concerned. All that's required is a broadcast flag to tell the charger to stop sucking current when not enough power is available.

Still the wrong battery model

[frisket]

Lease or buy isn't important. What's important is that batteries become standardized. Recharge at home by all means, but when your car is running out of juice on a trip, you pull into a juice station, slide out the battery, slide in a recharged one, and slide your discharged one into a rack for recharging. You pay for your "refill" like you pay for a tank of gas, and drive out.

OK, so maybe we need small, medium, and large batteries, plus a couple of bigger sizes for trucks, buses, RVs, and those 4x4s needed for all that rugged terrain around the suburban malls :-) but the last thing we need is some dipshit marketing droid inventing new and proprietary batteries that you have to get from the manufacturer. Suppose you bought a Toyota but you had to go to a Toyota garage to get your gas...

Re:Your all MORONS!!!

[Paulrothrock]

I don't drive up mountains with deer in the back. I do, however, drive about six miles each way for work, and short grocery runs during the week. I bought a scooter that gets 80mpg, but I'm definitely interested in something that can get the same or better mileage but keep me out of the elements.

Just because you don't think something is useful doesn't mean other people don't.

praise be, /.ers are back to shooting down ideas

[avi33]

It's funny, every time details about some "cutting edge" idea or business model surface, this forum (which used to be populated with physicists, engineers, and geeks of all stripes) piles on with their own particular angle on why it won't work.

Good thing slashdot isn't a frickin' VC company...I can just imagine the comments:

• Are you kidding, no one will pay half a billion dollars for a site that just has free web-based email. I could knock that out in a weekend with perl...
• No way anyone will pay two billion dollars for a video sharing site...I could knock that out in perl in a week
• What? *Another* search company? Who needs that? We already have Lycos and yahoo, and their results are pretty good...besides, I could knock one out in perl if I really needed to...
• An overpriced mp3 player with 5 buttons and a scroll dial? L4m3.

No, instead, we have the run of the mill peanut gallery, with their particularly ignorant insights. Don't get me wrong, a strong dose of skepticism is a healthy thing to have, but do you really think that Sergey and his band of PhD.s are not quite as clever as you when it comes to spotting and growing ideas? I'm no fan of the Segway, but you have to admit, much of the pesky unwanted energy in our machines shows its face in the form of heat, and if you can find a *relatively* cheap way to convert it to some other form, well, that seems like a pretty handy little model...

But slashdot has all the answers...it's too small, too expensive, the batteries should be $free, it's failed x times before, it's a toy, it's not safe, Joe sixpack wants a hummer, ponzi!, l4m3, FUD, w00t...whereas a couple of commenters actually get it: this could work in x conditions, but not in y, for z reasons...at least there are still a couple people left around here that haven't grown up thinking a forum is a place to pile on, the snarkier, the better.

I'm not saying it will succeed just because some heavy duty investors are behind it; plenty of ideas that fit that bill haven't made it. The point is, it could, and maybe one day something will happen that might cause people to think about energy differently, and this model will be ahead of its time, or at least some lessons will have been learned. Like a HOWTO on overclocking your chip with a stirling engine that charges your iPod...

Instead of analysis, we have negative comments modded as insightful. I suppose it's true what The Onion says, it turns out that a majority of Americans are actually NOT entitled to have their own opinions...