World's First Plug-In Electric Car Goes On Sale Next Month - In China

As the ghost of GM's assassinated electric car haunts a fearful Detroit, another boogeyman is waiting in the wings: the world's first mass-produced plug-in hybrid electric car, being readied for its December release -- in China.

BYD, a company that first made its reputation as the world's largest maker of cell phone batteries, has announced it will release the F3DM hybrid sedan on December 15. And BYD says it plans to release a version of the car in the US and Europe in 2010 or 2011, just when GM plans to begin selling its own plug-in hybrid, the Chevy Volt.

As Mike has reported previously, the F3DM -- which can be charged using a standard electrical outlet -- can switch between a fully electric mode and a hybrid one that uses both electricity and gasoline. BYD says the car can travel as far as 60 miles (100 km) after one charge in full-electric mode, or longer when also using its small gas tank. The all-electric range of the Chevrolet Volt is only 40 miles.

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Comments

[nddaveman]

Wasn't GM's EV1 the first plug in electric car?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1

[kellygrrrl]

sadly, I suspect the Volt will ever see the light of day.

[Nikola Tesla]

There's always my baby:

http://www.teslamotors.com/

[KillTheMessenger]

Your baby seems to have trouble shipping...

[clashcitysupermarket]

If only the Americans could remotely catch up with Asia where innovation is concerned....

[degenerate1991]

Too bad the buyer or said car will have to fire up a diesel generator to get the electricity.

[quiviran]

The BYD car will enter the market about the same time as the GM Volt. By the time they get here they will have already made hundreds of thousands if not millions. GM will still be working on their first. Plus, it will have better specs and a lower price. GM needs to liquidate their assets to fund their existing claims and roll into the history books.

[seattleviggen]

There's also the never produced Saab Hybrid Plug-in from 2006 that never saw the light of day. GM dragging their feet yet again!

http://www.autoblog.com/2006/04/11/saabs-biopower-9-3-convertible-hybrid-secretly-a-plug-in/

http://www.trollhattansaab.net/archives/2006/04/the_smoking_gun.html

http://dyc.saab-web.com/main/GLOBAL/en/hybrid_intro.shtml

[KillTheMessenger]

Writing "bio" in green letters on a conventional car is green painting, not engineering. Actually, the image on the Saab page does not even look like the actually took the pains to paint the car. They just overlaid the letters on an image of a car with image processing software. Why would one put lettering like that over the trim of a real car? It looks awful. They could have at least separated the upper and the lower line using the trim as the dividing line.

:-)

[seattleviggen]

Way to be off topic. Did you even read the articles?

[lvogt]

OK, I'm not an engineer but I don't get why this is such a technical problem. Electric and hybrid cars already exist. The bodies are essentially the same. It seems like they could retrofit almost any smallish car. Electric motors are common. Adding a charger doesn't seem like a big deal. The biggest problem is improving batteries but the Prius seems to work just fine. Then just set up the battery compartments so they can be replaced periodically with ever improving versions. T!ink City electric cars even lease the battery.

[KillTheMessenger]

"OK, I'm not an engineer but I don't get why this is such a technical problem. "

We know how to propel any size vehicle with electricity, that's no big deal. See streetcars and trolley buses that are around for over a century. But unless one has a power source, an electrical motor is useless. The only power sources that can be used at this time are rechargeable batteries. Until very recently the batteries we could make did not have enough energy density to make viable vehicles designs. And the Lithium batteries that have enough energy density suffered from aging effects which would have required to replace the battery ever couple of years, which is economically not feasible. You could have built specialty vehicles and toys for the rich, but nothing that was interesting to ordinary people who need a cheap transportation tool.

The Prius battery, by the way, does not store much energy and it works for over 100,000 miles because it is only utilized to 20%. Would the car use the whole capacity, the battery would have to replaced ever other year or so, maybe even more often.

[lvogt]

Right. It's all about the batteries. I am encouraged that there are now capacitors being developed to improve battery life. Let's keep everything else about at least one model as inexpensive as possible.

[dolphy]

The greenest car IS the compressed air powered car now being manufactured and sold in France for under 20K USD. It's made of almost 100% recyclable materials and does not have a big bank of batteries that need to be properly disposed of. The cars can go almost 200 miles for every fill-up and with the help of half a gallon of bio-diesel, can go for 800 miles. It gets the equivalent of 120 miles/gallon when we consider the electricity needed to produce the compressed air.

[Russycle]

link?

[dolphy]

http://www.mdi.lu/english/

[research]

WOW! I hope is pans out!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVIwropRMME

[Roadblock]

Compressed air car doesn't work.

cars running on lithium-ion batteries out-perform both compressed air and fuel cell vehicles more than three-fold at same speeds.

read: http://www.efcf.com/reports/E18.pdf

[research]

Excellent article. Thanks.

However: air is probably a lot cheaper.

Air compression heat loss can be used for heating or regenerated or used for air conditioning in the car.

We may not have enough easy lithium after about 50% of the world goes electric.

This is a purely theoretical comparison.

I would like to see actual cars compared.

[dolphy]

My only beef with this article is, it's talking about using the compressed air in a turbine. The technology that MDI has uses it in the same way as your regular internal combustion engine using pistons, cams, valves, etc. The best thing about this technology is that it does not use massive amounts of batteries which are hazmats after their use.

[KillTheMessenger]

During compression gases heat up. That heat has to be removed before the compressed gas can be stored. When the same gas gets decompressed it cools down and the heat that has been removed during compression is now missing. In effect we lose energy twice: once during compression and once during decompression. This gets increasingly worse with larger compression ratios. So if one wants to store a limited amount of energy, e.g. for regenerative breaking, compressed air works fine, but for the sole power source of the vehicle the method has very poor efficiency.

[dolphy]

But it works.

http://www.mdi.lu/english/

[rf-hawaii]

No disposal of batteries necessary. They are highly recyclable.

[NeverRepublican]

First electric car? What about the AV-1. I also understand that most cars ran on electricity back 1915's and early '20's.

Am I wrong???

[KillTheMessenger]

No, you are not completely wrong. It's not even an electric car but a plug-in hybrid. I think your assessment that "most" cars were electric in 1915 is probably a little euphoric. The most abundant car in 1915 was probably Ford's model T, hardly an electric car.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-T

There were a few electric cars around in the very early era when ICEs were rather unreliable. But there were also steam cars around at that time... I would call both fringe technologies because neither can compete with an ICE on most levels (but efficiency) even if we use the most modern implementations and it is questionable if either ever will. This is not an engineering problem but has to do with the laws of nature which lead to scale dependent effects. On the 10-1000kW power output scale an ICE plus a gas tank is awfully good. Beyond we will see gas and steam turbines pick up the slack and somewhere around the 100W scale electric motors and below and batteries can compete, again (ICEs become too inefficient because of heat losses). There are gray areas where multiple technologies deliver similar results (albeit at different cost).

[NeverRepublican]

I simply did a google search...and found plenty of information about electrict cars.

Although this is a wikipedia entry it does give some good links to the history of electric cars and the batteries they used.

Bottom line...the technology has exsisted for more than a centry...and that makes these ideas look pretty stupid. Yes it's a hybread...but it seems to make a reader "believe" that electrict cars have never exsisted.

They have.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Electric

[gopSTEALSyourTAXmoney]

TESLA Showroom at the 405 and Santa Monica blvd.
Wish I had $100k to spend on a car that has a 220 mile range on one charge!

[KillTheMessenger]

I would still beat you with my Prius in a 300 mile race.

:-)

[Nikola Tesla]

But not the quarter mile.

[Nikola Tesla]

Not in the quarter mile.

[johnie2xs]

Did you ever wonder whatever happened to all those great entrepreneurial inventors and their ideas that got bought up, or denied patents so the oil companies and auto makers could make their sub standard cars and rape us on gas. Ahhhhh! Those were the days.

[KillTheMessenger]

The myth of the great entrepreneurial innovator is greatly exaggerated. If they exist the world would know their names which are on the patents. But since nobody can point me to valid patent numbers, I have to conclude that it's just another conspiracy theory.

Looking forward to your list of key patents that are supposedly suppressed.

[NeverRepublican]

Maybe you should do your own homework. How many patents does Tesla have? many many many!!!

There are thousands and thousands of patents...you can access them IF you do your homework.

[solarwindmilly]

This is what we need our automakers to be focusing on. We need to get on about the business of becoming energy independent and using alternative sources of fuel. The high cost of gas this past year seriously damaged our economy and society. While we are doing the happy dance around the lower prices at the pumps OPEC is planning further production cuts to drive prices back up. We have the knowledge, we have the technology, what America lacks is a plan. Jeff Wilson has a new book out that is beyond awesome. The Manhattan Project of 2009 Energy Independence NOW. He walks you through every aspect of oil, what it is used for besides gas, our depletion of it. The worlds increased need ie 3rd world countries becoming more modernized and consuming more. He explains EVERY alternative energy source and what role they can play to replace oil. His research is backed up with hard data and even includes a time frame and proposed legislative agendas to wean America off oil.

[newpotusplease]

how much is the FD3M?

i need to prepare my trade in and crank the numbers

I wish I could have given the money to the USA but the US auto industry told me "F--- You" along time ago!

[7deadlycyns]

Absolutely. Even my parents (die-hard American Car Buyers all their lives) now own a Toyota. Toyota is the only major car company to have several models of hybrid (I get 52mpg in my Prius), and the small cars in their regular line get far better mileage than anyone else (Corolla = 36mpg). Plus they are also the most reliable car on the market. Is it any wonder that Toyota posted record profits and record demand, while Detroit is failing? It's not the case that "the technology isn't there." US automakers just haven't wanted to get on board. Now a pluggable-hybrid Prius is in development for release in 2-3 years. I'm getting in line now for my #2.

[mamacat]

Bravo, but...........I notice the article says it may be a long time before they can pass Western pollution and safety standards. There is a reason why China is so full of pollution, and why they can make things cheaper than we can.

[KillTheMessenger]

The problem for us is that they are making things cheaper and better than us. I have a product that uses some batteries (for a backup circuit) and we tested a bunch of expensive Western brands. These were all expensive batteries and they all had poor performance. Then I found this little Chinese company with a sales rep in the US. He laughed when I told him that we only needed a couple hundred batteries a year (and not a shipping container full) but sent me a sample, anyway. The battery blew anything I had seen before out of the water. Almost 50% more capacity, three times lower internal resistance, wonderfully flat discharge curve. We are buying from them ever since and batch after batch the product performs well. And, last but not least, it's 60% of the price of the cheapest competitor.

[ObjectiveRealist]

... and the Yangtze River dam killed the world's only fresh water dolphin, and Tibet's right to exist is always in question, and their Internet is heavily censored especially regarding political speech ... I'm happier with my right to protest the war in Iraq, thanks anyway.

[mamacat]

An interesting story, one that bears looking into. However, it does not change the fact that China is the center of world pollution today. It is not surprising that they make things cheaper and bring them to market faster than in North America, what with their lack of labor, pollution, OSHA, retirement, and healthcare laws. A paramount factor in their business model is that they are a totalitarian state. They can say "Do this," and they can make it get done, as they did with their one-child per family law in 1979.

Before we praise China's business, political, and societal model too strongly, we should take a close look at how their people live. U.S. government statistics state that about one out of every three illegal immigrants in this country are from the Far East. Given that it is much more difficult to get here from China than from Latin America, we should ask ourselves why they want so strongly to get out of their own country. The answer is tied into why they can get a PHEV built so quickly and cheaply.

[research]

Thank you China.