Two-hundred is the magic number: The imminent arrival of next-generation battery could finally slay EV 'range anxiety'

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It is a number that is the holy grail of electric motoring – 200 miles of emission-free travel on a single charge. The distance from New York to Washington; from Miami to Orlando; or from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. The stride-length that marks out the pleasures of road-tripping across the USA. But unless you're the cash-flush owner of a Tesla Model S, it's a number likely banished from the 'distance-to-empty' metric on your dashboard.

Of course, that shouldn't really be a barrier to EV ownership. Not when over 99% of the nation's car journeys are less than 70 miles, a distance most mid-range EV models can cover with consummate ease. The thing is though – that last one-percent really does matter. Drivers may only occasionally need to push beyond one-hundred-mile mark on any one trip, but the ability to do so conveniently – wherever and whenever you choose – is a powerful part of the appeal of owning your own car.

Give me more range, now

That's true even among EV owners. A survey last year by the Center for Sustainable Energy (CSE) showed that Nissan Leaf drivers would like to see the range of their non-polluting motors trebled to 200 miles. It is a shortfall that many believe is hindering EVs from achieving mass adoption. The good news, however, is that the quest to deliver on that much-desired number is really beginning to hot up. In fact, you could take the flurry of recent announcements on extended-range models as heralding the era of the 'battery wars'.

The spur to innovation in battery technology has been the emergence of upstart Tesla. Following on from its success in the high-end of the EV market, the Californian car-maker is looking to push its famously long-range (but expensive) EVs down into the mid-range market, with the Model 3. Reducing battery cost is critical to Tesla's goal of mass market dominance.

Sliding towards the price-performance sweet-spot

That is why Tesla has jumped so eagerly into the role of battery manufacturer, partnering with Panasonic to construct a 'gigafactory' in the Nevada desert. The company is hoping that improved lithium-ion battery technology, coupled to manufacturing batteries on a larger scale than ever before, will bring the EV battery sliding down the price-performance curve – and into the electric car of the every-man.

But the established automakers are not sitting on their hands. And standing behind many of them is a growing giant of the battery-tech world – Korea's LG Chem. It already furnishes its lithium-ion cells to 13 of the top 20 global car-builders. Like Tesla and Panasonic, though, LG Chem believes it is evolution, not revolution, that will deliver on the 200-mile battery.

Enter the pouch

Chief executive of LG Chem, Prabhakar Patil, told the WSJ back in August that its new batteries are formed from flexible lithium-ion pouches. They are making use of an improved chemistry to increase their energy density, while better battery management is knocking prices back. These batteries would enable a new generation of low-cost, long-range vehicles within the next 2 years, he said.

Now GM has joined the fray with their plans for the Chevy Bolt, promising a 200-mile roaming successor to the Volt. Many believe that the battery technology to deliver on that promise will come from LG Chem. Then there are plans from Ford and Nissan to bring their own two-century-topping models to market by 2018.

Push and pull

This is the date that all of these eager grail-seekers have in mind, as they surge forward on their quest for the 200-mile battery. The year 2018 is when a fistful of populous U. S. states will ramp up requirements on manufacturers for the provisioning of zero-emissions vehicles – and when federal rules on emissions are being tightened.

So between the push of regulation and the shining lure of mass-market dominance, the next chapter in the saga of the electric car is undoubtedly approaching fast. What remains to be seen is who will be lifting the long-sought-after chalice – and who will be cast down as also-rans. Time to turn the page.

Martin Leggett is a freelance writer from the UK, who specializes in writing on the strategic impact of environmental issues. After a 10-year sojourn as an analyst at Brady plc – a Cambridge-based provider of services to commodity investment banking professionals – Martin set himself up as self-employed writer at the beginning of 2010. Since then he has written for a number of environmental websites and companies– including cutting-edge clean energy startups – and has been one of the principle journalists for green news website, The Earth Times.

Go tail-pipe free, and the benefits are shared: How the low-costs of EVs actually extend to one and all

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For Parisians traveling in City of Love last week, any feelings of benevolence towards fellow citizens may have been in short supply. Thanks to a week-long build-up of smog under windless skies, the city's administration was forced to introduce a license-plate lottery for its commuters. Odd-numbered plates, and you were in. Even, and you had to leave the car at home.

It's a type of road-space rationing that's become common in many Latin American cities, and which has recently spread to Asia and Europe. Thanks to ever-growing urbanization and burgeoning car-ownership, it only takes a stilling of the wind for dangerous levels of pollutants to ratchet up. High levels of fine-particulates, ozone and volatile organic compounds have been linked to everything from breathing problems to heart disease and cancer.

Legacy of ill-health

It's one of those often-unacknowledged costs of driving gas-burning cars – a legacy of pollution and ill-health whose effects spread far beyond the car's owner. It's been calculated that each year as many as 1.3 million people die prematurely in cities across the globe from such pollution. That number is around 53,000 in the U.S. according to a recent MIT study. Such negative costs placed on the rest of society certainly don't figure in the ticket price of a new car purchase. But if they did, the cost equation would shift significantly in favor of the electric car (EV). EVs famously have zero tail-pipe emissions.

Looking at the cost of ownership of personal transport from such a global perspective is an approach increasingly being driven by policy-makers. And while putting numbers to such an emotive cost as people falling ill or dying early can seem crude, it does put perspective on the numbers game,

so often indulged in, when comparing EVs to their ICE brethren.

Exhausting $4 billion a year

One study that has attempted to quantify these kinds of 'external costs' was conducted in 2013 by the Natural Resource & Environmental Research Center at the University of Haifa. They gathered up all the negative impacts imposed by tail-pipe emissions on wider society for three countries – France, Denmark and Israel. Their model indicated that replacing the whole vehicle fleet of a country like France would save the economy over $4 billion a year in costs, from reduced air emissions alone.

At the level of the individual car, that works out to some $3,000 you could avoid placing on everyone else, just by driving an EV, over the course of 10 years.  There are other more subtle avoided costs from using EVs too – such as a reduced 'heat-island effect' from cool-running EV motors – as well as the huge scope they have for providing services, and stability, to a radically-changing electrical grid.

Then again, a more obvious and immediate benefit was apparent for Parisian EV drivers last week. Each time the city has imposed its license rationing in the face of high pollution, a select few have been given the green light to go, whatever their license plate number. Hybrid and plug-in EV drivers, it seemed, had no need to catch the bus.

Martin Leggett is a freelance writer from the UK, who specializes in writing on the strategic impact of environmental issues. After a 10-year sojourn as an analyst at Brady plc – a Cambridge-based provider of services to commodity investment banking professionals – Martin set himself up as self-employed writer at the beginning of 2010. Since then he has written for a number of environmental websites and companies– including cutting-edge clean energy startups – and has been one of the principle journalists for green news website, The Earth Times