Subaru to double the battery range on its electric car concept:

Subaru recently released a vastly improved second cut at a plug-in battery-electric commuter car. It seems that the 65-kilowatt, 5-seater G4e’s new high energy-density lithium-ion batteries gives it a 200km range from a charge and with the help of a quick-charger it can reach up to 80% in just 15 minutes.

With 40 units of Subaru’s older EV R1e battery-electric vehicle already out and being evaluated by TEPCO’s regional sales team and local government officials, the constructor also announced the launch of an updated 5-door model with more than twice the range thanks to advances in lithium-ion battery technology.

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A normal full charge takes around 8 hours to reach full capacity, which will deliver around 200km of normal driving. Subaru has also developed a quick-charger that would allow the battery to be brought up to 80% charge in around 15 minutes. The company envisages that such quick-chargers could be easily located in carparks outside supermarkets and other public facilities. As you can see , energy per mile is a lot cheaper than a gasoline.

Forty test units on the road proves nothing, of course. As I keep pointing out when a handful of hydrogen fuel cell cars go on the road, you can build a tiny fleet of cars that run by burning wood chips, but that doesn’t mean the technology would, could, or should be generalized to the market in general. I consider EV’s to have an immensely more promising future than hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, for all the reasons I’ve mentioned countless times.

Two hundred km on a charge for a car that appears to be about the size of my Scion xA 5-door wagon (or whatever the hell they’re calling that form factor today) is decent.

But the killer detail in this article is the ability to reach an 80% charge in just 15 minutes.

Think about that for a few seconds, and start to work through the ramifications of an affordable car with those characteristics. What’s on your list? I have:

A long-term future for gas stations, which will begin dispensing electrons in addition to liquid fuels.

The death of the mirage of using hydrogen fuel cells in vehicles. Give people a way to operate an affordable, clean vehicle over long distances without being tethered, even metaphorically, to a very small number of outlets (home, work, etc.), and pay one third to one fourth the cost of fuel per mile as a hydrogen fuel cell car would require, and they’ll race to buy it.

Once vehicles like these start to appear on the road, the charging infrastructure will spring up pretty quickly. Yes, there’s definitely a chicken and egg problem here, but it presents far less of a barrier to entry than does building out a hydrogen infrastructure. I’m not saying there’s no barrier, since clearly there is; you can’t recharge one of these cars 80% in 15 minutes from the 15 amp extension cord in your bedroom. It takes a heavy duty subsystem with some first-rate engineering to safely deliver the needed amps and not cook a customer. But that’s still a much easier chore than generating all that hydrogen in a CO2-free way and dispensing it at a local gas station.

Get vehicles like this from just one major manufacturer on the market, and the dam will break, leading to cars from several other companies in short order. As I’ve pointed out before, car company execs play the “copy someone else’s success” game as well as the executives at television networks and movie studios.

Once there are widely available offerings from even one company, expect to see alterations in public policy. If nothing else, they’ll have to adjust formulas for rebates and such to account for cars that burn zero gasoline and therefore get an infinite number of miles to the gallon. They’ll also have to account for ways to get road upkeep tax revenues from people who don’t buy gasoline. (My guess–they’ll tax the electrons at the gas station by enough to approximately include the recharging people do at home.) Perhaps the biggest change will come in the alteration (or introduction) of a feebate system that strongly favors EV’s over gasoline vehicles.

The electricity sector will quickly have to deal with quickly growing demand that starts to even out the traditional disparity in demand between day and night. Most people in their day to day driving of this kind of EV will likely opt for nighttime recharging, a whole new category of electricity consumption.

Third-party companies offering EV-specific goods and services, most notably larger and replacement batteries, will flourish. There will be the endless debates about whether it’s a good idea to augment your car’s basic battery with an add-on booster pack, what kind you should buy, whether it’s safe to install it yourself, etc. Expect to see these goods and services offered through not just newcomers, but established companies, like Midas, Monroe, etc. who not only want a piece of the new pie, but are worried that some of their old business is going away–EV’s don’t have exhaust systems that need to be replaced, engines to tune up, etc.

This technology–acceptably quick recharges of an EV–is the breakthrough that “changes everything”. It’s coming and it will kick off change in the transportation and electricity sectors like nothing we’ve seen before.

And with peak oil and all its attendant horrors–some more self-imposed than others–breathing down our neck, it can’t happen soon enough.