Electric Vehicle Bill Wins Some Powerful Supporters, But Can it Pass?

Chelsea,

I'm not sureI'm getting this right so please correct me where I'm not quite right... Don't most ev owners charge their vehicles at home to get a full charge as possible and not worry about range as much... Public chargers are slightly more cosmetic than critical to ev driving...? In a city, like Kalamazoo, Michigan for example, could we get by with 2 to 4 for the whole city, with most charging being done at home? In that case would the money be better spent actually spread out for rebates to purchase evs?

In terms of nationwide access, if I live in Montanna, I may want to buy a ev, but rebate or no, I'd take into account it might be the equivalent of 150 mile drive to the next private 120v electrified outlet, [let alone public chargers] . In that case I'd have an ev for local driving and my present gas car for driving out of state.

You have a better sense of how realistic these scenarios are. Am I close?

Chelsea:
The Fisker Karma, Nina and the Chevy Volt will have plug-in and gas systems (there may be others with split systems that I am not aware of, but that's all my memory gives me). Like you, I think the likelihood is that many people will plan on keeping their older gas vehicles for long trips and using a new electric vehicle for local driving. Unfortunately, if gas vehicles are not used more than a few times a year, the fuel degrades and there are other "housekeeping" issues.

Locally, I can recharge at the nearest Costco (or buy gas there), the largest shopping malls (where I can not buy gas, but I can spend lots of money), and at home (solar on the roof...I like my solar). I cannot drive from here to Montana, Colorado or Utah in a pure EV, and I do have family in the region. So yes, I am on the fence between EV and EV+gas. The one thing I dread is driving across the desert, and having a gas vehicle fail because I forgot some "housekeeping " trick, or not being able to charge my EV. For that reason, I am mulling over exactly the question you ask. If I had the Big Bucks, I'd buy the Karma, just because it is a beautiful car.

My wife and I own two 2002 Toyota RAV4-EV all-electric cars that we have been driving as our daily drivers for over 5 years now.

In addition to a dozen years of experience on Capitol Hill with Congress earlier in life, for the last few years I have had the privilege and honor of drafting EV policy and legislation for my state, with a lot of help and collaboration from a number of EV industry veterans from around the country. In discussing this piece of legislation with them, I've come to the following conclusions:

The EVDA is ambitiously well-intentioned about vehicle electrification. However, in its enthusiasm to pursue “Manhattan Project” scale initiatives, it’s overlooking some simpler but more effective approaches, as well as unintentionally feeding longstanding negative messages about EVs.

The first challenge is the competitive regional approach. While fostering “creativity” may be useful, much work in the last several years has gone into creating consensus among a variety of EV stakeholders around the things we know are effective in creating “EV-ready” regions and accelerating EV uptake. A template of these things can be found at www.projectgetready.org. So, while there may be additional creative ideas, it makes more sense to many of those stakeholders to implement the things we know, before we spend hundreds of millions- even billions- of dollars on the things that might work. To that end, the offering of technical assistance and funding that the EVDA includes is very useful, but should be used to apply this template to as many areas as possible- and based on market potential, not arbitrary demographic metrics. Picking an area because it is rural, for example, risks sinking huge amounts of money into a region that may not actually be viable, only to have it flounder when such support stops in a few years. It also forces automakers to choose between sending their limited vehicle supplies (and other resources) to regions where the market is known and those which are unknown but funded under this plan.

Another significant concern about the regional plan is the intention to raise the federal tax credit to $10,000- but only for buyers in designated regions. There is already a negative perception that EVs are only for the “chosen”, and some resentment about providing financial incentives at all to early adopters who tend to be of inherently higher financial means; increasing incentives only for some buyers feeds these problems. While some states and regions are incentivizing their own residents, it’s important that any federal incentives remain consistent nationwide, regardless of whether the amount is increased through this legislation.

One of the most common points of misunderstanding is that because some public charging is useful to address “range anxiety”, more must be better. In fact, most initial buyers will charge at home or at work- so beyond a bare framework of public charging as a “safety net”, deploying more of it does not create demand for more cars. Further, PHEVs and EREVs like the Prius and Chevrolet Volt aren’t dependent on public infrastructure except for a minimum amount of public or workplace charging available to apartment dwellers or others that can’t charge at home. These two types of plug-in vehicles are expected to make up a significant percentage of the market in the near-to-mid term. For all of these reasons, the EVDA’s infrastructure efforts should be shifted to emphasize residential and workplace charging over public charging.

While there’s a current trend of installing infrastructure now for a vehicle deployment level some decades hence (e.g., Nissan/eTec’s project is installing infrastructure in certain cities now for the number of EVs they expect to be deployed by 2050), the extra infrastructure creates an issue of “stranded assets” and breeds public resentment over taxpayer dollars funding chargers that aren’t being used to capacity. Additionally, the chargers end up being long out of warranty before they see regular use. Because the excess charging is generally installed to create visibility, it’s actually more effective and fiscally responsible to install more signage along roadways and within cities to direct EV drivers toward the chargers that are often already nearby, but overlooked. Once vehicles start to be deployed and “pool” geographically, more public charging can always be added as needed.

One of the more interesting aspects of the EVDA is that it seeks to identify overlooked market areas- this is a very useful goal, but would be better accomplished by doing an objective nationwide assessment of the various metrics that make for a promising area, and grating support accordingly. There is also a huge consumer education need in all market areas; this would be a worthy use of a portion of the funding sought in the EVDA.

There are elements of many of these suggestions in the current iteration of the EVDA, but priorities need to be shifted some to arrive at a piece of legislation that would engender more enthusiasm by the EV stakeholders. Expectation of broad support requires willingness to broadly engage.

While I love incentives to engineer positive results (carrots), what we need now are incentives not to do something negative (sticks). We've already got some pretty good incentives for buying plug-in cars and installing charging infrastructure. The utilities are mulling over providing EV charging rates that will incentivize off-peak charging, and municipalities, stores and workplaces will provide free charging here and there, so we seem to be flush with carrots. To offer more carrots to only a few select regions will engender envy, or worse, in communities not so lucky.

Which brings me to the big elephant in the room - taxing gas. This is a huge stick just sitting there waiting to be used.

It's not like there isn't justification for increasing the gas tax. We all pay for the war over oil that is Iraq. We all pay for the non-Iraq military costs of protecting access to oil (RAND calculates this cost at $75-$85 billion/year). We all pay for decreased quality of life by having to breathe polluted air, drink polluted water and seeing our land contaminated by the effluent of combusted petrol products. The list of negative effects brought to us by oil is very long.

Instead of digging up more carrots and handing them out to a few lucky folks, we'd be better served if our leaders used the big stick they have to engineer our society in a positive way.