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Electric cars catch fire, sales not so much
Visitors admire U.S. auto giant General Motors' plug-in electric vehicle 'Chevrolet Volt' at the annual auto engineering exhibition in Yokohama, suburban Tokyo on May 19, 2011.
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Kai Ryssdal: Oil closed up today about a buck and a half, just shy of $100 a barrel. Gas averages $3.31 a gallon nationwide.
There will come a day when motorists aren't dependent on fossil fuels to get where they want to go. But the journey from here to there is going to be a bit bumpy.
GM is moving fast to handle customer concerns over its new electric car, the Chevy Volt. They're giving loaners to Volt owners while the feds investigate a couple of battery fires that occurred after crash tests. Not exactly the ad campaign they'd have hoped for.
From the Marketplace Sustainability Desk, Sarah Gardner reports.
Sarah Gardner: Electric car advocate Tom Saxton says he's not worried about the Volt fires. Saxton says 250,000 gas-powered engines catch fire every year in the U.S.
Tom Saxton: And in fact, if you listen to morning DJs, they make fun of car fires. They call them 'carbeques' and such. It's just such a common occurrence that everybody accepts as normal.
But until regulators determine their cause, the Volt fires may give car buyers one more reason to shy away from electric cars and hybrids.
Tim Dunne at JD Power says, for one thing, they still cost too much.
Tim Dunne: Let's face it: Engineers have been working on electric vehicles for more than 100 years and there's a reason why electric vehicles haven't become mainstream.
Hybrid and EV sales haven't met initial expectations. GM sold about 5,000 Volts in the U.S. the first 10 months of the year. Its sales target for 2011 was more than three times that.
Dunne: At some point, it's going to have to make a return for the automakers and their suppliers. And that's not going to happen unless volumes go up substantially.
No one knows when that will happen. But automakers need to sell more hybrids and electrics if they're going to meet long-term fuel efficiency standards.
Michelle Krebs at Edmunds.com says that's why carmakers will give them a fighting chance.
Michelle Krebs: I think they're down the road enough that we will not see them, so to speak, pull the plug on these kinds of technologies in the near future.
But automakers are hedging their bets. They convinced regulators to revisit stricter fuel efficiency standards in seven years.
I'm Sarah Gardner for Marketplace.
Ryssdal: You should know Chevrolet is one of the underwriters of this broadcast.
I agree with Brandon about the price of these cars. (Full disclosure, I sell the LEAF). I've owned EVs for 9 years now and can say they are worth every penny of their price. Too often, I hear these cars compared to a cheap gas burner that isn't as quick, certainly not as quiet, and definitely more polluting. And no gas burner can be 100% pollution-free, but any EV can be.
I thought NPR was aligned with those qualities in a car, yet twice in the last two weeks you've broadcast news items that either blatantly malign EVs (http://www.npr.org/2011/11/21/142464818/can-electric-cars-help-automaker...), or like this one, miss an opportunity to make the qualities of EVs clear to your listeners. Is NPR anti-EV? How could that be?
I've listened to Sarah Gardner for years and always thought she was a fair reporter. I've even been interviewed by her for this program on another EV piece two years ago. But today, she missed a great opportunity to use quotes from Tom Saxton that would have lent more balance and nuance to this story.
Transitioning to electricity from oil is absolutely crucial if we are to keep our cars running while trying to maintain economic balance in the world, reduce the pollution associated with transportation, and to mitigate the need for more wars over oil. Please stop giving this issue short shrift. If you must do a story on EVs, interview users of EVs, such as Tom Saxton, then use their quotes to give context. Don't use the one that makes the best sound bite. You totally missed his point.
It's not quite fair to say that EVs are "too expensive."
Sure, currently their price is supported by tax credits, rebates and/or incentives. But the new Nissan Leaf I bought, I paid less than what I bought my Toyota Camry V6 10 years ago. Not to mention the savings in gas costs. It only costs about 2¢ (in electricity) a mile to drive my Leaf vs. about 18¢ (in gas) a mile to drive my old Camry. And I live in CA where we don't exactly have the cheapest of electric rates.
