Detroit News: Buyers won't recoup extra cost of electric vehicles, but electric vehicles will save Michigan's economy or something

This may be one of those unfortunate article placements, with one directly contradicting the other:

Anyone over at the Detroit News notice? Nope. The lead article of course trumpets the rolling out of lithium car batteries to be used in the Chevy Volt that is touted as an electric vehicle, but is in reality a series hybrid where the engine recharges the battery only and never is hooked into the drivetrain. Electric vehicles right now are neither economically or environmentally feasible. The environmental part isn't even alluded to by the News, but at least they noticed that whatever financial benefit is reaped by increased fuel efficiency is more than swallowed up by the increased cost of the vehicle: Study: Buyers unlikely to recoup extra cost of electric vehicles

As automakers aggressively pursue electric vehicles, a study released today shows the cost targets behind the plans are unlikely to be achieved, making it hard for consumers to recoup the extra cost of buying electric.

The study by Boston Consulting Group, released at an Automotive Press Association event in Detroit today, concludes the cost of electric vehicles is unlikely to drop to the $250 per kilowatt/hour threshold that is cited by many carmakers for these vehicles to be competitive in price. That benchmark is not possible without a major breakthrough in battery technology, and no such breakthrough is on the horizon, said Xavier Mosquet, the Detroit-based leader of BCG's automotive group.

Actually, the units are those of energy, kW-hr, not kW/hr which doesn't make sense. Does the News have competent technology writers that can write article without major technical gaffes that make it obvious that they don't have the technological competence to write the piece? Shees! This has been a huge pet peeve for me for many years now. Further:

As a result, the payback time for an all-electric vehicle in the U.S. is about 15 years, and for an extended-range vehicle such as the Chevrolet Volt it would be 19 years, the study finds.

19 YEARS?  Did they mention that the battery pack will last about 100,000 miles and then has to be replaced adding even more to the cost? Nope. But at least the writer mentions battery prices, albeit frustratingly with the wrong units for energy:

The cost of batteries is expected to decrease as much as 65 percent by 2020 from the current price of $1,000-$1,200 per kW/hr to about $400. But many carmakers expect the cost to fall to $250 per kW/hr, which is the current cost for many lithium-ion batteries used for consumer electronics.

kW-hr!!! Good grief! A Joule is a unit of energy, a Watt is a Joule/s and is power, so what the heck is a kW/hr? Power per unit time? Good grief.

"Consumers want a three years or less payback period for the extra cost of the batteries," said Massimo Russo, a partner in the Boston office.

Which is not going to happen. As I kept reading this article, I saw something unusual to say the least. The write finally gets the units correct:

BCG expects the cost of a 15-kWh ranger extender pack will drop from about $16,000 now to about $6,000 in 10 years, and consumers could still be expected to pay as much as $10,000 extra for electric vehicles at that rate.

There we go. kW-hr, a proper unit for electrical energy capacity. Thus, why did the author get the preceding units wrong and not fix them if it was corrected later ion the article. But then the writer, Alisa Priddle, goes right back to the wrong units in this list at the end of what would have to happen to make the technology economically feasible:

• There is a chemistry breakthrough that keeps material costs the same while creating a battery that can store twice as much energy, reducing the cost from $400 per kW/hr to $215.
• A new $7,700 government incentive is offered.
• Owners triple the number of miles they drive annually so the extra cost pays for itself.
• Oil prices increase from $100 a barrel to $375 a barrel.
• A 210 percent incremental gasoline tax is implemented.

The last 2 especially are pure lunacy because if the price of oil would skyrocket, so would the price of producing the car. This is a common mistake of the non-technical writer - assuming one thing changes and everything else stays static. The first one is the only real possibility as #2 on the list is economic stupidity. In essence, what #2 says is that since the technology is not economically feasible, government should throw money at it to make it so. Except that throwing government money at it doesn't change its economic feasibility at all. If it's a money loser, then it's a matter of who loses the money - the consumer or the government. In that case, the subsidy would put the loss mostly on the government and partially on the consumer. That same consumer, however, is paying taxes so that teh government can cover some of the loss. So it's a lose-lose, albeit the consumer would take a smaller loss overall as it is socialized over all taxpayers. That's just dumb.

I wrote before about the claim of a increasing, and even doubling, of fuel mileage by going plug-in hybrid, but it's worth repeating here. It won't really double the cars mileage. It will just offset some gasoline with coal. Not the best trade-off in my opinion but there it is. Converting a car to hybrid may in fact save 120 million gallons of fuel per day, as has been claimed in several articles that I have read, but that will come at the cost of using a whole lot of coal. Let's do a bit of math. Gasoline weighs 8 lb per gallon and has an energy content of 47 MJ/kg. Coal is at 30 MJ/kg. To get the same amount of electrical energy as that in 120 million gallons of gasoline, it would take about 1,840 million pounds of coal assuming a power plant efficiency of 33%! That is nearly 1 million tons of coal! Extra! That is, beyond what we are using now! So just keep in mind that when you charge your electric vehicle, you are filling up on coal.

Thus, there is both an economic as well as an environmental downside to this. Anyone with even an iota of knowledge of the conservation of energy and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics knows this, yet instead of spreading the word, they are doing this:

Oh - did I mention the U.S. doesn't have nearly enough lithium for all these batteries and that we will have to import it from countries such as Bolivia that have both a corrupt totalitarian government and the largest lithium deposits on the planet? That instead of being held hostage by countries that don't like us but have oil we will instead be held hostage by countries that don't like us but have lithium? That lithium mining is one of the most environmentally damaging prospects that exist? Oh never mind...

UPDATE: via Instapundit: Boston Consulting Group says car battery costs will not fall far enough in the next 10 years to allow a massive shift toward electric vehicles.