Nissan’s knee in the curve?

What oh what, people wonder, will it take for people to leap on the electric vehicle bandwagon? And by “people”, the implied meaning is not just people like, well, me, who dream semi-erotic dreams of being able to buy an EV from a major car company, but mainstream consumers, the people who put costs and convenience ahead of environmental issues.

According to Nissan’s 2010 electric car in U.S. will be price-competitive with Camry, batteries included, we may be a lot closer to the proverbial knee in the curve than many people realize:

If you happen to be in San Diego this afternoon you may get a chance to view what Nissan ‘s director of product planning and strategy, Mark Perry, is calling “a true market introduction” of the electric car that the company will offer for sale in America next year.

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While speaking about the upcoming event, Perry let slip that the pricing of the vehicle will be competitive with the Honda Civic, Toyota Camry and Nissan Altima. “We’re not going to be charging a premium for this car, batteries included,” he said in a statement that seemed to rule out the battery leasing model.

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No clue was given as to the unveiling date of the actual vehicle and price though we do expect the car with its 100-mile range to be available sometime next July. We’ll have more details later today.

If the car really is “competitive with the Honda Civic, Toyota Camry and Nissan Altima”, which would put it in the (very) roughly $17,000 to $20,000US range, and it can deliver 100 miles per charge, then welcome to Knee in the Curveville, Population: Everyone.

Why would I be so positive? Follow me down the trail of reasoning:

• Between 2010 and 2012 we’ll see a surge in EV’s from various companies, including Nissan, Mitsubishi, and Ford.
• If Nissan can sell a car like this for that price, other companies can, too. Basically, this translates to an assessment that the price of batteries has dropped a lot (or will have done so by next year).
• Once the first such cars are on the market, they’ll sell faster then beer on shore leave. The initial production volume from all car companies are likely to be low, which means it will be far outstripped by the demand from people in a very particular demographic: Multiple-car households that can use a 100-mile EV as their “commuter and local errand” vehicle and still save a lot of money on gasoline. (At 12 cents per kWh for electricity, an EV’s fuel cost is only 2.4 cents/mile, far less than half the cost of driving even a 30MPG car when gasoline is $2/gallon, which it won’t be for much longer.)
• The complexity of the situation will let people mask their incentives. They can brag about reducing CO2 emissions, saving the Earth for their kids (or nieces), and reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil, even if they secretly bought the car purely to save money on fuel.
• This high demand/supply situation will generate a lot of press coverage, and will only encourage other companies to accelerate their plans to introduce PHEVs and EVs.
• There will surely be some glitches in the first generation of mass market EVs, but overall the early adopters will be extremely happy. If you think Mac users are smug, wait until you get a load of the EV drivers and their bumper stickers, e.g. “Are you STILL still paying more to drive around on dead dinosaurs???” These early adopters will do more to spur additional EV sales than all the advertising the car companies do, combined.
• Very quickly businesses will see two competitive advantages in the rise of EVs. First, they’ll want to use them for their fleets wherever possible, for PR value. Second, they’ll have a huge incentive to cater to EV owners. Hotels, airports, government offices, shopping centers, and general places of employment will all have reason to provide cheap or even free recharging, something they can do for very little up-front capital expense. That will hasten the infrastructure change needed to exploit fully all those new EVs, thereby effectively extending that 100-mile range and reducing the barrier to entry for yet more buyers.

Two complaints people often raise in this scenario are that electricity generation in the US is currently dirty, and that the grid can’t support 50 million (or some other Big Scary Number) EVs being plugged in all at once. Even though there’s a grain of truth in both claims, I don’t see any real issues here, assuming we look at the big picture.

Electricity generation in the US is indeed very dirty, relying as it does on non-sequestered coal for 50% of its capacity. But we have to clean up our electricity generation anyway, thanks to the mess we’ve created for ourselves with climate chaos, and in doing so we automatically make the cars consuming those electrons much cleaner. And even on day one, an EV like the one Nissan is talking about fueled by 100% non-CCS coal electricity will still emit less CO2 per mile than a 35MPG car running on gasoline.

Today’s grid would probably have a very hard time dealing with an instant influx of 50 million or more EVs. Thank Edison we won’t have to do that. It will take years for the first couple of million EVs to be on the road, and during that time we’ll be making dramatic upgrades to the US’ electricity grid anyway. We have to reduce the CO2 emissions from electricity generation by a lot, and that means adding quite a bit more wind and solar, and likely more hydro, geothermal, and eventually wave and tidal. We’ll also be rolling out smart metering, and likely feed-in tariffs to encourage more distributed generation. So, like the dirty electricity point, this one is true in a very narrow view of our situation and has to be fixed anyway for reasons that have virtually nothing to do with EVs.

And yes, when I trade in Space Wart, my 2006 Scion xA for some flavor of EV in 2012, I will definitely put at least one of those annoying bumper sticker on it.