Car Insurance

Electric cars are poised to become the dominant clean- energy vehicles as new technology makes it faster to recharge batteries that are getting cheaper to make.

Electric cars, available mostly in Southern California and Arizona, could account for 20 percent of the automobile market by 2003, said Robert Wilson, vice president of technological development at Arthur D. Little.

Fuel-cell cars, which convert natural gas, methanol or hydrogen into electric energy, are further behind in development than battery- powered cars. Fuel-cell cars won’t be widely available until at least 2015, Wilson said last week at the Platt’s Automotive Metals conference in Chicago. “The early winner is the electric vehicle,” he said. “Fuel-cell technology has three to five years of additional work needed before we can put those cars on the road.” The implications for the metals industry include increased use of copper for wiring, lead for lead-acid batteries, and specialty metals such as titanium and magnesium because of their light weight. Toyota will introduce its first fuel-cell car later this year. Germany’s Daimler-Benz AG is vying to become the first European fuel- cell automaker, with production set to begin before 2005. General Motors introduced the first electric car, the EV-1, in December. With a sticker price of about $33,995 and a travel limit of 70 miles before the battery needs several hours to recharge, sales got off to a slow start. California legislators are pushing for 10 percent of all cars by 2003 to run without emissions, and automakers are rushing to make their electric cars more attractive. By 1998, batteries will take 30 minutes to fully recharge and cost about 4 cents a mile to run, compared with eight-hour recharging now and an operating cost of $1.09 a mile in 1992, said Patrick Moseley, an electrochemistry specialist at the International Lead & Zinc Research Organization. Technological advances also are giving the batteries a longer life. By next year, drivers will be able to recharge lead-acid batteries up to 800 times, compared with about 75 times in 1992, Moseley said. Electric cars, which emit less than 1 percent of the pollution emitted by diesel-engine vehicles, will become more attractive as rising oil consumption depletes reserves, he said. While oil remains plentiful and cheap, the United States is the world’s largest consumer of the fuel and its appetite is growing. The nation consumes about 18 million barrels of oil a day, almost half of which is imported, up from less than 15 million in 1983. With demand expected to rise for battery-powered cars, lead production will have to rise 5 percent to 10 percent to meet demand for lead-acid batteries, Moseley said. “Today’s lead production in the world could not cope” with the level of demand expected for wide-scale use of batteries in cars, he said. One hurdle to electric-car sales growth is weather. The batteries don’t start as easily in cold climates, Moseley said. Fuel cells were first invented in 1839. The auto industry embraced them only recently, as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency tightened emission standards, Arthur D. Little’s Wilson said. Fuel-cell cars will weigh 40 percent less than today’s diesel- engine automobiles. Reductions in the amount of cast iron and low- alloy steel parts will bring the weight of fuel-cell cars below 2,000 pounds, compared with today’s average auto weight of about 3,200 pounds, Wilson said. The cars will use more plastics, aluminum, high-strength steel and specialty metals such as titanium and magnesium. The most significant increase will be for copper, which is needed in fuel-cells and electric cars to conduct electricity. Each fuel-cell car will use about 200 pounds of copper, compared with 50 pounds in today’s cars, Wilson said. Unlike lead supply concerns among proponents of electric cars, copper production has kept pace with a recent surge in demand for electrical equipment, components and wires.