The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Electric cars

  • Advantages of electric cars

    Advantages of electric cars

    Besides saving the environment from pollution, electric cars according to research, will be cheaper than the conventional vehicles that run on fossil fuels, an editorial by the New York Times said.

    “There is simply no credible way to address climate change without changing the way we get from here to there, meaning cars, trucks, planes and any other gas-guzzling forms of transportation. That is why it is so heartening to see electric cars, considered curious for the rich or eccentric or both not that long ago, now entering the mainstream.

    “A slew of recent announcements by researchers, auto companies and world leaders offer real promise. First up, a forecast by Bloomberg New Energy Finance said that electric cars would become cheaper than conventional cars without government subsidies between 2025 and 2030.

    “At the same time, auto companies like Tesla, General Motors and Volvo are planning a slate of new models that they say will be not only more affordable but also more practical than earlier versions. And officials in such countries as France, India and Norway have set aggressive targets for putting these vehicles to use and phasing out emission-spewing gasoline and diesel cars.

    “Skeptics may see these announcements as wishful thinking. After all, just 1.1 percent of all cars sold globally in 2016 were electrics or plug-in hybrids. And many popular models still cost much more than comparable fossil-fuel cars. The skeptics, however, have consistently been overly pessimistic about this technology. Electric cars face challenges, yet they have caught on much faster than was thought likely just a few years ago. There were two million of them on the world’s roads last year, up 60 per cent from 2015, according to the International Energy Agency.”

  • ‘Firm to assemble electric cars by 2020’

    Aprivate entity, Nigus, has concluded plans to assemble electric vehicles  in the coun–try by 2020.

    Its Chairman, Prince Malik Ado Ibrahim, who made this known in Abuja at the weekend, said he was pushing this line of investment to save Nigeria from becoming a dumping ground for hydrocarbon vehicles in the future. He said the company would begin with importation of the cars next year, before the eventual manufacturing phase that would follow thereafter.

    Before then, Nigus plans to import the vehicle by the end of next year.

    Ibrahim said there would be two types of electric vehicles – the wholly electric and the hybrid: “High grade versions, which are the engines, gasoline engine and electric which are also phenomenal vehicles to use in case one isn’t available, you could always use the other and switch between both.”

    He said the idea to kickstart the venture, followed from his visit to China, where he found the  opportunity for Nigeria and Africa to start the next frontier, which is electric vehicles.

    “We want to be at that cutting edge. What we want to do is learn about the vehicles, the engineering and be a manufacturer by 2040 when everybody else is now saying hydrocarbon cars are banned, we want to say keep your combustion engines. In fact, we are no longer importing any combustion engine. We have a nationally produced vehicle or a continentally accepted vehicle, so that was my push.

    “We just signed an agreement to first import either a white label vehicle, all the BYD vehicles and look for a Nigerian brand. We are still looking at the name we want to use and by 2020, we would start an assembly plant here, assembling a Nigerian branded electric vehicle with all the modern fittings that you want in a car,” he said.

    The Nigerian electric vehicle, he said, will have its “DNA initially from BYD.

    He said the BYD Head Engineer was the head of engineering from Audi, adding, “so, we know that it’s going to be a tremendous amount of creature, comfort and modernity in these cars and we are hoping that by the time we start assembling them, we would also bring Nigerian designers from around the world to come in and have an Africanised DNA in the vehicle as well. So, we are looking at competitions for design.’’

    On partnership, Ibrahim said: “China is the largest manufacturer of lithium iron phosphate batteries and these batteries will give us the ability to store electricity, deliberately at a reduced cost. I mean it’s expensive now, but it would begin to reduce if they become very available and as it is right now, we believe lithium iron phosphate batteries are going to be, not just what you see in your cars, it’s also what you are going to see in your homes. They can be as advantageous as generators can be. Part of the product that BYD and Nigus are bringing is actually our home storage unit and office storage unit.”

    On the cost of the vehicles, he said: “At the most it will be 20 per cent  higher than the hydrocarbon cars. But we are looking at vehicles that are ranging from between $26,000 and $100,000, everything in between from cars and trucks and then commercials.

    The affordability issue, he said, has two distinct opportunities. An electric vehicle, according to him, is 20 per cent more expensive than other cars. “But if you compare the SUV side,  which is comparable to the Range Rover, they are probably up to $7000 more expensive in Europe.

    “If you bought this car and you ran it exactly at the same mileage with an average gasoline car, your operating cost is not even in the ball pack, you are not buying oil, you are not doing maintenance, you are not taking it for service. The only t

    hing you are putting are brake oil and the tyres that are consumables, nothing else,” he said.

  • BMW, Ford, Mercedes, VW to build charging network for electric cars

    BMW, Ford Mercedes and VW have concluded arrangement to design and build a network of ultra-fast charging stations along Europe’s major highways.
    BMW, Daimler (parent of Mercedes-Benz and Smart), and VW Group’s Audi and Porsche brands joined with U.S. maker Ford to announce the joint venture last week.
    The network will include 400 sites by 2020 where chargers reportedly will operate faster than today’s Tesla Supercharger stations.
    Silicon Valley electric-car maker Tesla Motors laid out the template with its Supercharger network, which now numbers 327 sites in the United States and more than 400 sites outside the country.
    The network will be based on the Combined Charging System (CCS) protocol currently used in a lower-power version by all four makers.
    The global group that sets software and physicals standards for the CCS specification has been working on upgrades from the current 50-kw maximum spec for many months.
    More than a year ago, Audi pledged that a 150-kw DC fast-charging network would be available by the time its 2019 Audi e-tron all-electric crossover utility vehicle launched sometime in 2018.
    Porsche followed with a mention of 350-kw fast charging as it unveiled the concept version of its Mission E all-electric sport sedan, expected to launch in 2019.
    “This will be an important step towards facilitating mass-market battery-electric vehicle adoption,” said the partners in their joint statement.
    The 400 planned sites will incorporate “thousands of high-powered charging points” by 2020, they said.
    Fast charging at rates as high as 350 kw could cut the time to recharge an electric-car battery to 80 percent of its capacity from the current 30 minutes or more to as little as 15 minutes.
    That would be, in the words of the joint venture, “as convenient as refueling at conventional gas stations.”
    The four founding auto companies will be equal partners, but other makers will be encouraged to participate in what the group calls a “brand-independent network.”
    Statements by each of the four partners said encouraging things about the future of all-electric vehicles.

  • Firms set to launch electric cars in Nigeria

    Firms set to launch electric cars in Nigeria

    A firm, Carbon Credit Network (CCN) has concluded plans to storm the world with made in Nigeria electric cars through her renewable energy drive. The Chief Executive Officer of the company, Mr. Femi Oye disclosed this at the fourth anniversary ceremony in Lagos recently.

    According to him, “The technology is already here only waiting for some documentation. CCN is pioneering electric cars in Nigeria, starting with our tricycle cars to advanced luxury cars. The good thing about it is that they are not imported, they are to be manufactured here.”

    Oye, who recalled that he set up shop few years ago with less than N100, 000, said the company has recorded some milestones. “Today, it is a multibillion naira organisation as a result of the contributions of partners across the globe,” he said.

    While reeling out the achievements since its inception, he noted that over three million Nigerians have benefitted from the impact and opportunities created directly or indirectly from over 45, 000 entrepreneurs created in the last four years.

    “With the seed investment of 500, we have leveraged more than three million external investment to creating an organisation now imparting five million customers and beneficiaries in Togo, Cameroun, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Abidjan and many more countries joining. CCN has paid over five million in credit bonuses to participants in the last past years. Indeed, the future is green,” said an elated Oye.

    While noting that over 70 per cent graduates are out of jobs across the country, he urged the Federal Government to create the enabling environment to allow entrepreneurs to thrive.

    “We have over 45, 000 active entrepreneurs talking about our business every day. Each of these entrepreneurs has a family of about six to seven people that depend on them. If we have like six other companies doing this too, government can raid in taxes to build infrastructures that we need,” he said.

    While speaking on the CCN plan to establish a bio-fuel refinery in Nigeria, the CCN boss said his company has seen a lot of economic opportunities in what the world calls a monster waste. “To militate against the effect of food security we cannot continue to produce fuel when the world is going hungry. We are losing over 100 thousand women yearly to indoor air pollution from black carbon that is why we decided to do something differently.”

    The event tagged: ‘Renewable Energy and Economic Development: Impact and Opportunities’ had academia, environmental experts, financial experts, community women, banks and civil society groups.

  • ‘Electric cars won’t spread even with rapid chargers’

    ‘Electric cars won’t spread even with rapid chargers’

    Battery-powered electric vehicles don’t have a practical future as a long-range alternative to conventional cars even if technological breakthroughs allow them to be charged quickly, a top engineer at Toyota Motor Corporation has said.

    Electric vehicle (EV) supporters have touted developing high-speed charging technology as the way forward for cars like Nissan Leaf, but Yoshikazu Tanaka, chief engineer of Toyota’s hydrogen fuel-cell car Mirai, said that would guzzle so much energy at once as to defeat the purpose of the EV as an ecologically sound form of transportation.

    “If you were to charge a car in 12 minutes for a range of 500 km (310 miles), for example, you are probably using up electricity required to power 1,000 houses,” Tanaka told a small group of reporters at the first test-drive event for the production version of the Mirai, the world’s only mass-market fuel-cell car.

    “That totally goes against the need to stabilise electricity use on the grid,” he said.

    Even as rivals such as Nissan and Volkswagen AG promote battery EVs, cars like the Leaf require lengthy charging, reducing their attractiveness for customers planning to drive longer distances frequently. The Leaf requires about eight hours for a full charge using a 200-volt outlet, giving a listed driving range of around 84 miles in the United States.

    “Toyota isn’t denying the benefits of EVs,” Tanaka said. “But we think the best way to use them is to charge them at night (to avoid peak power consumption hours), and use them for short distances during the day.”

    Instead, Toyota says hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles (FCVs) offer the most promising zero-emission alternative to conventional cars since they have a similar driving range and refuelling time.

    While FCVs require massive investment and government subsidies for fuelling stations, Tanaka noted that hydrogen – the most abundant element in the universe – could be extracted from many different sources and had the advantage of being portable and more easily stored than electricity.

    He noted that the southern Japanese city of Fukuoka last month completed a fuelling station that uses hydrogen made from sewage and that could power about 70 Mirai FCVs a day.

    “Of course, there are technological hurdles that need to be cleared to make this commercially viable,” he said.

    “But remember ‘Back to the Future’? In that movie, a car from 30 years in the future comes back to the present – the year 1985,” he said, referring to the flying Hollywood time machine that was powered by garbage.