Hybrid-Car Tinkerers Scoff at No-Plug-In Rule

By Danny Hakim
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/business/02plug.html
April 2, 2005
 
DETROIT, April 1 - Ron Gremban and Felix Kramer have modified a 
Toyota Prius so it can be plugged into a wall outlet. 

This does not make Toyota happy. The company has spent millions 
of dollars persuading people that hybrid electric cars like the Prius 
never need to be plugged in and work just like normal cars. So has 
Honda, which even ran a commercial that showed a guy wandering 
around his Civic hybrid fruitlessly searching for a plug. 

But the idea of making hybrid cars that have the option of being 
plugged in is supported by a diverse group of interests, from 
neoconservatives who support greater fuel efficiency to utilities 
salivating at the chance to supplant oil with electricity. If you were 
able to plug a hybrid in overnight, you could potentially use a lot less 
gas by cruising for long stretches on battery power only. But unlike 
purely electric cars, which take hours to charge and need frequent 
recharging, you would not have to plug in if you did not want to. 

"I've gotten anywhere from 65 to over 100 miles per gallon," 
said Mr. Gremban, an engineer at CalCars, a small nonprofit group 
based in Palo Alto, Calif. He gets 40 to 45 miles per gallon driving 
his normal Prius. And EnergyCS, a small company that has 
collaborated with CalCars, has modified another Prius with more 
sophisticated batteries; they claim their Prius gets up to 180 m.p.g. 
and can travel more than 30 miles on battery power. 

"If you cover people's daily commute, maybe they'll go to the gas 
station once a month," said Mr. Kramer, the founder of CalCars. 
"That's the whole idea."

Conventional hybrid electric cars already save gas. But if one looks 
at growth projections for oil consumption, hybrids will slow the 
growth rate of oil imports only marginally, at best, with the amount 
depending on how many hybrids are sold. To actually stop the 
growth of oil imports and potentially even reduce consumption, 
automakers have focused on developing cars powered by hydrogen 
fuel cells. 

But fuel cells would require a complete reinvention of the 
automobile, not to mention the nation's gas stations, and the 
technology to put them on the road is still a long way from fruition. 
Advocates of plug-in hybrids say the technology for these vehicles 
is available now to the point that people are building them in garages. 

"All of the relevant technology is at hand," said Frank Gaffney, 
founder of the Center for Security Policy and an assistant defense 
secretary in the Reagan administration. His group was among a 
coalition of right-leaning organizations that released an energy plan 
this year promoting plug-ins as one way to increase fuel efficiency 
in light of the instability of the Middle East. 

"If you're thinking about this as an environmental issue first and 
foremost, you're missing the point," Mr. Gaffney said. Curbing 
dependence on foreign oil, he added, "is a national security 
emergency." 

Toyota, however, says the plug-in is not ready for prime time. 

"They say this is the next great thing, but it just isn't," said 
David Hermance, an executive engineer at Toyota. "The electric 
utilities really want to sell electricity and they want to sell it to the 
transportation sector because that expands their market. 
They have an agenda."

But the plug-in hybrid is not just coming out of the garages of 
enthusiasts in California. DaimlerChrysler has developed several 
dozen plug-in hybrid vans in cooperation with the Electric Power 
Research Institute, a group financed by more than 300 utilities, 
including the New York Power Authority and Southern California 
Edison. Testing of the vans will start this year, and one will be 
used by The New York Times on a newspaper delivery route in 
Manhattan. Several small companies are also developing or have 
developed plug-in hybrid prototypes. 

"We think it's the only way to rekindle interest in electric 
transportation," said Robert Graham, who manages research 
into electric vehicles for the Research Institute. "There are 
no technology hurdles at all. It's simply a matter of getting the 
vehicle built out on the street and getting people to recognize 
its value."

For power companies, the notion of people plugging in cars 
overnight represents not only a new way to make money, but the 
vehicles would also draw power mostly during off hours which 
would improve efficiency, because power plants cannot simply 
shut down at night as demand diminishes. 

As it stands, though, modifying a hybrid like the Prius to enable 
it to plug in would add perhaps $2,000 to $3,000 to the cost of 
a car that is already roughly $3,000 more expensive than 
conventional gas cars. Advocates say the costs would be much 
lower if such cars were mass-produced by a major automaker. 

But Nick Cappa, a spokesman for DaimlerChrysler, was cautious, 
calling the technology one of many the company was exploring. 
Among its current drawbacks is that the added batteries take up 
space and make the company's Sprinter van several hundred 
pounds heavier. 

"This is part of a small program investigating these technologies," 
Mr. Cappa said. 

And Mr. Hermance of Toyota said that batteries today were not 
durable enough to handle the wide range of charging up and 
charging down that a plug-in hybrid would need, calling that 
the most damaging thing you can do to a battery.

Edward Furia, the chief executive of AFS Trinity Power, a privately 
held company in Bellevue, Wash., that develops mechanical 
batteries called flywheels, agreed with Mr. Hermance, but said 
that a secondary energy storage technology like a flywheel 
could solve the problem.

"If you've got a flywheel with your chemical battery, you can 
draw down the chemical battery, but when it's time to do a 
heavy lift, to accelerate or absorb energy, the flywheel is doing 
the acceleration or the absorption, not the chemical battery," 
said Mr. Furia, whose company is developing its own plug-in 
hybrid that it says will get several hundred miles per gallon. 

While many environmentalists support the technology, some 
say in terms of emissions, electric cars would only be as good 
as the power plants that produce electricity. 

"The concern on plug-in hybrids is that we not substitute 
addiction to one polluting fuel for addiction to a more polluting fuel," 
said Dan Becker, the head of the Sierra Club's global warming and 
energy program. "Coal is more polluting than gasoline, and 
nearly 60 percent of U.S. electricity is generated by burning coal."

Roger Duncan, a deputy general manager of Austin Energy, 
a utility owned by the City of Austin, Tex., said that "it's hard to 
say what impact it will have on the nation as a whole," but that 
in regions that use cleaner-than-average power sources, like 
Austin or California, it would provide a clear emissions benefit. 
Mr. Duncan even imagines a day when drivers could be paid to 
return energy to the grid during times of excessive demand. 

Plug-in hybrid prototypes have been around for several years, 
but the idea of modifying a Prius stemmed from the curiosity of 
some Prius owners in the United States, Mr. Kramer said. 
They were aroused by a mysterious unmarked button on their 
Prius and discovered that in Priuses sold in Europe and Japan, 
the button allows the car to drive for a mile in electric-only mode. 
Mr. Hermance said the feature was disabled in Priuses sold in 
the United States because of complications it would have 
created in emissions-testing rules. 

Mr. Kramer said "a bunch of engineers reverse-engineered it in 
the United States and figured out how to hack it."

But they soon wanted to travel on batteries for more than a mile 
and began to collaborate through CalCars on adding batteries 
to the Prius that would allow for longer pure electric travel. 
With the help of dozens of volunteer engineers collaborating online, 
the group retrofitted a Prius in Mr. Gremban's garage to travel 
about 10 miles on nothing but battery power.

Mr. Duncan said the plug-in hybrid was "very realistic, because 
it's not that big a leap in technology."

"Look what Felix has done with Prius off the street," he added. 
"This isn't rocket science."



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