Car Sharing with Electric Leafs & Electric-powered Pods of the Future

Montreal-based Communauto, the
oldest car-sharing company in North America, has launched a pilot project with
50 Nissan Leaf vehicles, hoping to become an industry leader of the electric
loaner cars. Is this how will people get around in the cities of the future? To
listen to heads of R&D departments at Toyota and GM, people in perpetually
sunny, clean cities will zip around in electric-powered pods that drive and
park themselves while accidents and emissions become a thing of the past. That
vision was presented at Changing Cities-Changing Cars panel at the Meeting of
the Minds conference in Boulder, Colorado. Don’t forgot to hear the latest at
the Electric Vehicle Conference in Brisbane, Australia 26 October.

Ninemsn News (19 September 2011):

In a Montreal parking lot,
Jean-Francois Beauchamp unhooks a power cable from his loaner car and
cheerfully drives away, an enthusiastic user of a new service that is finding
fans in equal measure among commuters and environmentalists.

“It’s very quiet, pleasant
and and doesn’t use gasoline,” says Beauchamp, 44, a web designer and
frequent user of the electric cars made available for hourly rental by the
Communauto car-sharing enterprise.

His loaner vehicle is one from a
fleet of gasoline-free cars pointing the way forward for the increasingly
popular car-share industry, which unlike a traditional car rental, allows
customers to hire a vehicle for part of one day.

The Montreal-based Communauto,
the oldest car-sharing company in North America, in mid-August launched the
pilot project with 50 Nissan Leaf vehicles, hoping to become an industry leader
of the electric loaner cars.

Communauto also is a bargain,
charging about two dollars (1.50 euro) per hour, which includes the cost of
fuel, plus a subscription fee.

Electric cars early on met with
consumer resistance, but the chance to try out the vehicles in a low-risk
car-share has helped to greatly increase their popularity.

“I already have a car, but I
subscribed to Communauto precisely because I wanted to try out an electric
car,” said new convert Georges Charlebois.

Charlebois now dreams of when
he’ll no longer have to to rent one by the day or by the hour. That day may be
a long way off, however: there is a waiting list for the vehicles at his local
dealership.

The most ambitious electric
car-sharing plan is wildly popular, but has a downside, Beauchamp admitted.

“You have to plan ahead
because you can’t stop at a gas station to fill it up,” he said ruefully.

Communauto has tried to alleviate
that problem, installing — in partnership with the giant public utility
Hydro-Quebec — car charging stations in parking lots all across Montreal.

Devoid of a conventional combustion
engine, the loaner cars — emblazoned with the slogan “100% electric”
– are famously quiet, so not only do they not increase air pollution, but they
don’t add to the city’s noise pollution, either.

Most of the electric cars can go
about 140 kilometers (about 87 miles) before needing to be recharged –
although the batteries become partially replenished when the brakes are
pressed, or when the vehicle is driven downhill.

Benoit Robert, CEO of Communauto,
told AFP that the company is excited about the addition of the green cars to
its fleet.

“The electric car will allow
us to further reduce emissions from our users,” he said.

The popularity of the vehicles
already is having an ecological upside, he added.

“We already are having a
significant impact on reducing the rate of motorized car use by the population
and this has a direct impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” Benoit
told AFP.

Catherine Morency, a professor at
the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, said the program is a marketing masterstroke
because of the synergy between the car-share and green car industries.

The arrangement also is a plus
for manufacturers of green automobiles, because a wider range of renters — and
potential purchasers — try out the cars before purchase.

But the two industries part ways
in terms of their long term goals: While makers of green cars are hoping to put
a lot more of them on the road, Communauto seeks, in the end, to reduce the
number of cars in circulation.

Car-sharing will convert at least
some motorists to the electric car, thereby increasing the demand for these
vehicles, predicted popular automobile columnist Denis Duquet.

“The production will
increase, prices will drop and people who have used the electric car in
Communauto are likely eventually to buy their own,” Duqet predicts.

Source: www.news.ninemsn.com.au

By Charles Redell in GreenBiz.com
(22 September 2011):

How will people get around in the
cities of the future? To listen to heads of R&D departments at Toyota and
GM, people in perpetually sunny, clean cities will zip around in
electric-powered pods that drive and park themselves while accidents and
emissions become a thing of the past.

That vision was presented during
today’s Changing Cities-Changing Cars panel at the Meeting of the Minds
conference in Boulder, Colo. Less starry-eyed dreamers on it talked about car
sharing, electric buses, lighter vehicles and reducing idling.

The panel’s tone was set by its
moderator, Bill Reinert, national manager of advanced technology at Toyota.
“… A bus with one passenger is one of the most inefficient ways to move
people around,” he said. “Cars done the right way can be an effective
way to move people.”

The vision of Chris Borroni-Bird,
director of advanced technology vehicle concepts and the EN-V program for GM,
meshed nicely with that. Cities and residents have competing needs from
transportation, he said. Cities want clean air, to use less energy, to have
fewer accidents, less congestion and less parking needs. People want to drive
in urban environments because of the comfort and convenience personal
transportation offers. (Pictured above is a concept image from GM’s rollout of
the EN-V last year.)

“There’s a reason why people
still drive cars in dense cities,” he said. “It’s a freedom of
expression. For some, it’s a status symbol.”

His team’s solution is the EN-V
or Electric Networked Vehicle. This highly maneuverable electric pod is
networked and provides autonomous driving capability so it can automatically
caravan with other EN-Vs and avoid accidents. “It retains the essential
benefits of a car without the downsides of car,” he said. (The video at
right has Borroni-Bird walking through the EN-V concept.)

Autonomous cars would not only be
more efficient from an energy perspective — the 500-pound EN-V has a 3.4-kwh
battery compared with the 34-kwh battery in a Nissan Leaf, according to Larry
Burns, director of the Roundtable on Sustainability Mobility at Earth Institute
(and one of the presenters at GreenBiz.com’s VERGE event last June) — but
freeing people from driving could give them an extra hour a day, which he
valued at $12,500 a year, or half the price of a car.

“Alternative propulsion and
energy technologies get all the attention,” Burns said. “Driverless
vehicles and the coordination of all that moves us and goods around will be the
most sustainable transportation we’ll get to experience.”

Offering a different kind of
solution was Sascha Simon, director of Advanced Product Planning for Mercedes-Benz
USA. Two years ago Mercedes started exploring the concept of car sharing
because personally owned cars sit unused about 80 percent of the time, he said.

The increased efficiency of
shared assets drove the company to launch Car2Go, first in Germany and then in
Canada and Austin, Texas — where there are currently 15,000 members. Soon
electric vehicles are planned to roll out when Car2Go launches in San Diego as
“the future of urban mobility,” according to Austin.

Even more pragmatic was the
vision of Michael Austin, vice president of BYD America, which focuses on
selling electric selling cars to fleet operators and electric buses to
governments.

The buses run 187 miles on a
charge and could carry about 40 passengers in the United States for about $8 in
energy costs. Compared with using 25 gallons of diesel, e-buses make moving
people in cities “very much about public transportation,” he said. At
a cost of about $650,000, e-buses are twice the cost of a diesel bus but save
$500,000 in fuel and maintenance costs over 12 years, according to Austin.

Wrapping up the panel was a late
addition to it: John Coleman works on fleet sustainability for Ford. His goal
is to make the 5 million cars Ford currently sells each year significantly
reduce emissions without requiring new infrastructure.

Ford is aiming to cut between 250
and 750 pounds from the weight of its vehicles and plans to make its new trucks
30 percent lighter, according to Coleman.

The company also looked at idling
technology for applications such as utility bucket trucks which idle all day
long. By adding a small battery that only runs the bucket, Ford reduced fuel
usage by 80 percent and doubled the amount of time workers could be out because
of reduced noise concerns.

“It’s not as sexy, but with
an 80 percent reduction in fuel, now we’re making a difference,” Coleman
said.

Charles Redell has been covering
renewable energy and sustainable business for the better part of 10 years at
various publications including Greenfab-media.com, Sustainable Industries, and
Energy Prospects West

Source: www.greenbiz.com