Traction Battery Market to Exceed $55 Billion by 2020

In yet another attempt to predict a decade into the future, MarketResearch.com has announced the addition of IDTechEx Ltd's new report "Electric Vehicle Traction Batteries 2010-2020" to their collection of Energy market reports.

Rapidly growing market for traction batteries will exceed $55 billion in only ten years. However that spans battery sets up to $500,000 each with great sophistication needed for military, marine, and solar aircraft use.

Huge numbers of low cost batteries are being used for e-bikes but even here several new technologies are appearing. The largest replacement market is for e-bikes today and the value market for replacement batteries will not be dominated by cars when these batteries last the life of the car -- something likely to happen within ten years. The trends are therefore complex and that is why IDTechEx has analyzed them with great care.

Vehicle manufacturers are often employing new battery technology first in their forklifts or e-bikes, not cars, yet there is huge progress with car batteries as well -- indeed oversupply is probable in this sector at some stage. The mix is changing too. The second largest volume of electric vehicles being made in 2010 is mobility aids for the disabled but in ten years time it will be hybrid cars. The market for car traction batteries will be larger than the others but there will only be room for six or so winners in car batteries and other suppliers and users will need to dominate their own niches to achieve enduring growth and profits.

Topics covered in the report include...

• Progress With New Generation Lithium Traction Batteries
• Heavy Industrial Evs
• Light Industrial And Commercial Evs
• Mobility For The Disabled
• Two Wheeled Evs And Allied Vehicles
• Golf Evs
• Cars
• Pure Electric Cars
• Hybrid Cars
• Military
• Marine
• Other Evs

It's absolutely credulous to try and predict these figures, but IDTechEx has forecast unit sales, unit prices and total market value for each sector for 2010-2020. The replacement market is quantified and ten year technology trends by sector are in there too, with a view on winning and losing technologies and companies.

So if you're interested in reading some fiction visit their web-site where you'll have to exchange US$3,750.00 for a downloadable PDF containing their version of the future.

Vauxhall may offer lifetime warranty on Ampera hybrid

Vauxhall has announced it will offer a lifetime warranty on all its new cars in the UK.

Every new Vauxhall registered from August 1st 2010 will be covered. However, it sounds more like false advertising when details like the fact the warranty is limited to 100,000 miles are revealed and is only valid for the first owner of the car.

Vauxhall is yet to announce whether the scheme will also apply to the Ampera (the rebadged Chevrolet Volt, due for release in the UK in 2012), but company spokesmen have admitted it is the intention for all new vehicles to be covered by the lifetime warranty, suggesting it is likely.

The warranty covers the engine, steering system, braking system and electrics. As with any other policy, normal wear and tear isn't covered.

Honda's new hybrid to be priced at US$18,600, cheapest in Japan

Honda Motor Co. has decided to sell its new hybrid car for around 1.59 million yen (approx US$18,600), which will be the lowest price for a gasoline-electric vehicle sold in Japan, company sources said Saturday.

The price of Honda's new Fit compact car to be released in October will be some 300,000 yen lower than the 1.89 million yen price tag for the cheapest model of its Insight hybrid put on sale in February last year.

The move is expected to accelerate competition in the development and sale of environmentally friendly vehicles between Honda and Toyota Motor Corp., which is expected to release a new compact hybrid next year that will do more than 40 kilometers per liter of gasoline and have a price tag of around 1.5 million yen, analysts said.

Honda aims to shore up its hybrid sales with the launch of the new Fit car as sales domestic sales of its Insight hybrids between January and July totaled some 26,000 units, about one-tenth of the 204,882 units of Toyota's Prius hybrids sold in the same period.

To be equipped with a 1300 cc engine and an electric motor, the new Fit will be capable of 30 km per liter, much more than the 24 km of the existing Fit model, but will cost only about 400,000 yen more, the sources said.

Hybrid vehicles tend to have little room inside as they need to carry a large battery. But the new Fit will have the same interior size as the existing model because the battery is located under storage space in the back of the vehicle, they added.

Toyota hybrid sales top one million units

Toyota Motor said yesterday that its hybrid vehicle sales in Japan had topped the one million mark and worldwide it had sold 2.68 million of the vehicles by the end of July.

Toyota, the front-runner in hybrid cars that use two power sources — a gasoline engine and another source such as an electric motor — launched the Prius, the world’s first mass-produced hybrid car, in 1997.

Toyota plans to expand its hybrid range to 8 new models by 2014 - 15.

Best Defense Against Car Theft: Drive a Prius

You hardly need a car alarm if you drive a Prius. That's the conclusion of a new vehicle theft study from the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI). According to the report, thieves are after "chrome, horsepower, and HEMIs," but not "sedate family cars and fuel-sippers."

HLDI's report calculates the vehicles with the highest insurance claims for theft by taking into account the rate at which insurance claims are filed as well as the size of the payments. Unsurprisingly, the rap song-worthy Escalade is the most stolen car--one out of every 100 are swiped by thieves. Other popular targets include the Hummer, Corvette, and GMC Yukon.

Meanwhile, the Prius gets left behind--and that's a good thing. Toyota's bestselling hybrid gets stolen at a rate that's less than 15% of the average. It joins the Toyota Sienna, Toyota Tacoma, Saturn VUE, and Honda Pilot on the list of 10 vehicles with the lowest rates of insurance claims for theft.

The idea of buying hybrids just to deter thieves won't hold true for long. Luxury car makers are rolling out dozens of hybrids and all-electric vehicles in the next few years. Flashy fuel-efficient cars will undoubtedly become targets for theft. Fully electric vehicles, meanwhile, are uncharted territory. Are thieves more or less likely to make off with a pricey EV, since they can't fill 'er up at a gas station? Would a network of easy charging electric stations create more car crime, or deter it? Better fit a car alarm to that new Tesla Roadster, just in case.

China working on 1,000 kph Maglev Train

As if China building 16,000 kilometers of high-speed track from scratch by 2020 isn't ambitious enough, according to the Shanghai Daily, a laboratory at Southwest Jiaotong University is working on a prototype Maglev train that will average 500kph to 600kph. A much smaller model train traveling at 600 to 1,000kph in a vacuum tube will be introduced in two or three years.

Maglev trains floating electromagnetically eliminate track friction, but their top speed is still limited by air resistance. To eliminate aero friction the Chinese propose having the trains travel through tunnels, and then suck all the air out of them.

Known as Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) technology, it was originally patented by Daryl Oster in the United States. The US proposal was for a highly evacuated tunnel. The Chinese version only reduces air pressure, making the tunnel easier and cheaper to build.

The tunnel would cost US$3 million more than the current high speed railway for each kilometer. Considering China currently needs $118 Billion to complete the construction of 6,000 kilometers of high-speed lines by 2012, the vactrain track would cost approx $23 Million per kilometer to build, or approx 15% more than a standard high speed line.

Eastday.com
bloomberg

Electric Car Firm Pulls The Plug

Barry Bernsten, a Philadelphia-based steel wholesaler, launched his electric car company BG ("Be Green") Automotive Group with high hopes in 2008. The time had come, he said, to take the energy crisis seriously, and the domestic auto industry remained addicted to the high profit margins in large trucks and SUVs--even as the public was saying no to them in droves.

Bernsten's mission: bringing "reliable, safe, and affordable electric vehicles to the North American consumer." The route of "three-wheeled vehicles that look like moon rovers" or high-performance $100,000 sports cars was not for him either-- he wanted to take low-priced Chinese cars and electrify them.

But BG was a non-starter, and the reasons why make a cautionary tale. "I am exhausted and throwing in the towel," Bernsten said. "I'm going back to selling steel."

For his steel business, Bernsten is a frequent visitor to China (both as a buyer and a seller), and several years ago he got approached about importing gas-powered Chinese cars to the U.S. "I visited six plants, and though I saw some where the paint was peeling off the plastic bumpers, and the wheels and hubcaps were rusting, one of them made high-quality automobiles," he told me. "In fact, its cars were better built than many U.S. and Japanese cars on the market now."

Working with that gasoline vehicle as the base, Bernsten developed the BG-C100 electric car. Like the forthcoming Coda sedan and the Wheego Whip Life, the car used a Chinese body but incorporated many Western safety and engineering refinements, including the complete electric drivetrain. Still, if Coda and Wheego are guides, BG could have brought a credible battery car to market in North America for $30,000 or so.

The big hurdle is getting a factory up and running, and for that Bernsten--and every other electric vehicle maker--asked for up to $150 million in federal Department of Energy (DOE) funds. He didn't get it. Hundreds of millions of dollars did flow, but the recipients were, in addition to such established players as Ford and Nissan, Tesla Motors (maker of the celebrated $109,000 Roadster and the coming Model S sedan) and Fisker Automotive (another high-performance car, the Karma plug-in hybrid, plus the more affordable Nina). Tesla got $465 million, and Fisker $528 million.

"The well-connected guys with the lobbying teams got the loan guarantees," Bernsten said. "I'm not disillusioned with the Chinese, I'm disillusioned with the DOE and their evaluation process. I'm frustrated that we couldn't even get partial funding."

State and local governments were eager for Bernsten to locate what he envisioned were as many as six plants in their regions, and they offered available land, and generous tax incentives. But that's also true of many other companies, including Coda, that have applied unsuccessfully for DOE loans and lined up U.S. factories. (Coda is looking at Ohio, where the state government did everything but promise the company wouldn't have to pay its workers.)

Coda is going ahead without government money, but BG is over and done, and Bernsten says he wants to donate his one prototype to a Philadelphia museum. When electric cars rule the land, maybe we can all visit the museum and think about the electric vehicle revolution that had winners, and losers too.

Philly.com