Anncr: What are you looking for in your next automobile?
Design,
luxury,
performance?
LISA VAN PAY: What about something lower emissions that's better for the environment?
ANNOUNCER: Faster, slicker and greener, meet today's new breed of electric car.
LISA VAN PAY: Electric vehicles have been around for a long time, at least as long as cars with
internal combustion engines, but one of the big problems early electric cars posed then is still
with us today. How do you haul around enough stored energy to
get where you need to go? Most cars carry potential energy in the form of fuel,
but electric cars depend on the energy you can store in a battery.
Think about a rechargeable battery. Usually, when you get it, it's dead.
All the ions and electrons inside are comfortable and exactly where they wanna be,
but then you change the situation. You charge it, electricity makes the lithium
ions move from one part of the battery to another by changing which material the lithium wants to
hang out with. This is like if you push a boulder uphill or
pull back the arm of a mouse trap, except the electricity is doing the work for you.
All these systems are now full of potential energy, just waiting to be released.
The electrons have to move across the external circuit to get where they wanna go because only the
lithium ions can move through the electrons, and when the electrons move, the lithium ions
move too back to where they started. You can use this back and forth, keep charging
and discharging the battery for quite a while, but not forever.
Researchers are working hard to develop batteries that have plenty of power and short charge
time, long life, and include safety.
KATHERINE STROUKOFF: My project focuses more on making safer batteries.
Everybody knows that lithium-ion batteries are very powerful and that's what makes them desirable for,
you know, cameras and cellphones. When you make a powerful battery that is big enough
to power a car, it's dangerous and the components inside have the potential to catch fire or explode.
Most lithium ion batteries contain a great deal of cobalt, but this material contains no cobalt.
The cobalt is toxic.
LISA VAN PAY: And cobalt is a heavy metal and very bad to the environment.
KATHERINE STROUKOFF: Yeah. It's toxic for the environment and dangerous for people.
LISA VAN PAY: So that's what you work on, working on those different kinds of materials-
KATHERINE STROUKOFF: Yeah.
LISA VAN PAY: -that go into the batteries?
KATHERINE STROUKOFF: Exactly. Exactly.
LISA VAN PAY: Over at MIT, a team of engineers have replaced the gasoline engine in this classic
sports car with an electric motor. Who says science can't have style?
MIKE NAWROT: This is our Porsche 914 electric vehicle.
It's run by a true battery electric power and using an electric motor to drive.
This car is better than gasoline cars because it runs on pure electricity with zero emissions, meaning it's
a lot cleaner and a lot more environmentally friendly. So, an electric car is very simple.
It has a battery to power the motor, an electric motor to turn the wheels.
Additionally, there's a charger to recharge the batteries.
That's pretty much all there is to an electric car.
LISA VAN PAY: So instead of stopping at a gas station after you've been driving around all day,
you come home and just plug in your car like you do with your cellphone when it's running low,
but the thing is, you're charging your car with electricity from our national power grid, and right
now, that grid is fed by energy sources that aren't so clean.
Even so, electric vehicles are still lowering emissions and more efficient energy users than
combustion-powered cars.
DAN LAUBER: We were able to get the equivalent of 164 miles per gallon.
Well, for average driving between the city and the highway, you'd expect about 100 miles per one charge;
depending how you drive, you can get a lot more than that or a lot less.
With the charger that's built in, it takes about 12 hours so it would charge overnight.
LISA VAN PAY: Wait. I have to leave my car plugged in for 12 hours
before it's fully charged? Isn't there a faster way?
MIKE NAWROT: We are currently exploring rapid recharge as an option as opposed
to charging it overnight. The idea being that you can charge your car overnight
like any other electric car, but also charge it in 10 minutes if you need to go on a
long distance trip. You go home after driving around 50 miles,
charge the car the rest of the way and drive the next day, but if you go a long distance trip, say,
you know, from New York to Boston, you can drive two hundred miles, stop for 10 minutes and recharge and
continue on your way.
LISA VAN PAY: Rapid recharge isn't the only option for speeding up the charge process.
One company is going a different route entirely, building battery switching stations to get you back
on the road in less time than it takes to fill up your gas tank.
This all sounds good, but let's talk speed and performance.
How do electric vehicles compare with other kinds of cars?
MIKE NAWROT: So this Porsche, unlike the original Porsche, has a little less horsepower.
But it has a lot more torque.
So, it can go from 0 to 40 rather quickly, but from 0 to 60, it's a little slower.
It still reaches top speed of close to 100 miles an hour.
There's no real limit to it. The electric Porsche would probably beat the regular
Porsche off the line at the red light.
LISA VAN PAY: Not bad.
LISA VAN PAY: As concerns for the environment and rising prices of fossil fuels continue,
we're going to see lots more electric cars hitting the road in all kinds of models and sizes.
Who knows, thanks to the improving technologies, someday all our cars might be sleek,
shiny and electric. And as we shift more and more to renewable energy
sources, driving even long, we'll get cleaner and greener.
Cause you shouldn't have to compromise your conscience to be cool.