meeting report
Electric Vehicle Symposium (EVS 20)
Long Beach, CA USA
November 16-19, 2003
- Acquire Innovations Corp.
Vancouver, BC
After last attending an EVS meeting at Anaheim in 1994, it was a thrill to be at EVS 20 to see the real commercial progress. The event was superbly organized by the Electric Drive Transportation Association’s Jennifer Watts (jwatts@electricdrive.org).
On Sunday we, the media, were treated to a series of conferences beginning outside with a demonstration of a hydrogen refueling station by Bill Crilly (bcrilly@stuartenergy.com) of Stuart Energy.
Inside the display hall, it was difficult to move the media away after the opening 20-minute session. This was on the new hybrid Prius, which David Hermance of Toyota (www.toyota.com) described with convincing energy. His energy, perhaps, results from market capitalization of Toyota being greater (Business Week, November 17th) than the sum of the market caps of DaimlerChrysler, GM and Ford. This primarily comes from conventional vehicles, but the wealth generated underpins Toyota’s ability to be a leader in hybrid vehicles. The Prius carries a preliminary EPA rating of 60mpg in city driving and 51mpg on the highway. The reversal in these numbers is because the drivetrain is optimized for maximum efficiency in stop-and-go driving.
Hermance’s problem, he said, was that demand was exceeding the supply. In October, 4,000 vehicles were needed and he was only allocated 3,000 per month. He talked of the Lexus RX400h which would be available as a hybrid in 2004. He could not confirm that the Highlander would be a hybrid but advised us to watch for it to be announced at the Tokyo Motor Show.
“We see the hybrid as an enabler for the fuel cell vehicle,” Hermance said. The fuel cell hybrid, which Toyota calls the Toyota FCHV, is developed in parallel to the hybrid and uses exactly the same NiMH battery pack, motors and electronics. Two FCHVs are already in operation at University of California Irvine (www.nfcrc.uci.edu) and UC Davis (http://its.ucdavis.edu).
People from Dynasty Electric Car Corp., were displaying their new NEV offering both inside and at the Ride N Drive. The vehicle is targeted for the same market as the DaimlerChrysler GEMs. Dynasty was also displaying a model that is better suited to rain than the DaimlerChrysler product. I had already driven both vehicles and thus, when I talked to Dynasty’s Richard Clarke (rclarke@itiselectric.com), I was more into batteries and such matters. The last time I had seen the Dynasty vehicle it had a flooded battery and I was pleased to see it was now sealed.
Max Gates (mg145@daimlerchrysler.com) ran the DaimlerChrysler media conference which featured the F-Cell FCHV hybrid and the GEM NEV. I was interested to hear that there are 28,000 GEMs now on the road in the U.S. Later Wolfgang Weiss (wolfgang.weiss@daimler chrysler.com) outlined the F-Cell vehicle to me and confirmed that it would be deployed in Detroit and California with various “customers” that were still being identified.
Richard Schaum (rich.schaum@wavecrestlabs.com) of Wavecrest described battery management, motor and, indeed, battery management technology. Though the Wavecrest concepts were showcased in a road vehicle, their present product is a bicycle originally developed to U.S. Army specifications. The battery is NiMH and is neatly packaged on the front wheel, which, of course, can be quickly changed. I enjoyed riding one of these later.
Sankar Das Gupta , CEO of Electrovaya (sdasgupta@electrovaya.com), presented his long range Li-ion battery vehicle. The MAYA 100 drove, but did not complete, the Tour del Sol and is a five-passenger SUV developed on a CAMI chassis. (CAMI Automotive is a joint venture between Suzuki Motor Corp. and General Motors of Canada Ltd.) (www.cami.ca/main.htm). The projected vehicle range is 150 to 220 miles, and Sankar talks of the system’s energy density being able to exceed 200Wh/kg. Electrovaya announced a $2.95 million NASA order for an EMU (Extravehicular Mobility Unit); one can surmise they are leaders. As the conference concludes we’ll give you the opinion of one of the world’s leading electric vehicle developers on this technology.
Sadeq M. Faris , CEO of eVionyx, Inc. (faris@evionyx.com), spoke eloquently on the subject of harvesting and carrying energy with metal fuels, particularly zinc. He described and showed magnesium-air, zinc-air and nickel-zinc products. The latter has always intrigued me since I visited Don MacArthur , then at GM, in 1984 to discuss it. I recall MacArthur saying that NiZn would struggle to get past 200 cycles. Here was Faris saying that he could even get zinc-air to 1,000 cycles. He attributes his success to a membrane that prevented dendrites shorting out the cell.
Soo Whan Kim (sswhan@hyundai-motor.com) showed me the Hyundai FCHV with which they were helped by Enova (www.enovasystems.com). The Hyundai information kit is one of the most pleasant to look at and it returned to Canada with me intact.
Phil Chizek of Ford (pchizek@ford.com) showed me around their stand. This included the hydrogen engined hybrid H2RV, their FCHV and the new Escape HEV which will be on sale in July 2004. Here we might note that the range on 5,000psig for the two hydrogen vehicles was actually similar to the range for an Electrovaya Li-ion vehicle. The hydrogen vehicles can attain 40% more range by going to 10,000psig, but readers will know that this comes at an extra energy and dollar cost.
Vectrix’s motor scooter is modeled by Christopher Moe.
Electrovaya’s CEO Sankar Das Gupta supports Li-ion.
Soo Wham Kim shows Hyundai’s FCHV.
Metal fuels are favored by eVionyx’s Sadeq Faris and Maria Bonilla.Vectrix (www.vectrixusa.com) people were outside showing their well-designed scooter while inside they were showing how the range could be extended with an 800W direct methanol fuel cell, developed jointly by Giner Electromechanical Systems (GES) and Parker Hannifin. Methanex are supporters of the project. I knew that I would be meeting Mark Grist later and I deferred discussion.
As the sun set, I saw the Hydrogenics (www.hydrogenics.com) HyPM fuel cell power module in a John Deere demonstration vehicle (pictured on page 1). I admired its four-wheel steer capabilities. John Deere ePower Technologies has strategically invested in this technology in the belief that there will likely be viable markets for Deere production fuel cell vehicles within the next five to seven years, according to Bruce Townson of Hydrogenics (btownson@hydrogenics.com). The fuel cell power module delivers 20kW and is supported by a battery to provide additional power if required.
We concluded the day with the Automotive Media Round Table that had the formality of a presidential debate. There were opening and concluding statements and even previously submitted questions from the media. The session was chaired by Bob Stempel , chairman of ECD Ovonics (www.ovonic.com). The panel was Masanobu Wada for Nissan Motor Co., Robert Bienenfeld for American Honda Motor Co., Michael Schwarz for Ford Motor Co., Kenneth C. Stewart for General Motors, Andreas Truckenbrodt for DaimlerChrysler, and Douglas West for Toyota.
West said that hybrids were now making money and that every manufacturer would have them out in 2005. Truckenbrodt was coy on the 2005 date and puzzled why it was that North America did not rush to simply adopt European diesel engines.
After the opening statements, Bob Stempel surprised the media by allowing two questions from the floor. Gerry Woolf (www.bestmag.co.uk) bowled in the best of these in blunt British style, asking why it was that Toyota was more active with hybrids than the others. Remembering the economic pressures outlined in Business Week, the memorable answer came from Ken Stewart who pointed out the success of GM’s work with the Allison hybrid drive. For example, he said, orders for hundreds of buses had been announced. The fuel and climate change savings by these massive buses were, he said, equivalent to those of thousands of Prius-sized vehicles. GM’s release will give you the scale of this step (www.gm.com/cgi-bin/pr_display.pl?6060). I was interested to find later that GM also had a 42V system in a truck at the show. Since this truck has regenerative braking and “idle-off” capability, it is a definite step to lower fuel consumption. Clearly it is not only Toyota that is in commercial action with hybrids.
On Monday the morning went to a plenary session. I noted down a couple of quotes from Robert Reimer , an environmentally concerned actor, who has done great things in helping children. “The single best way to fight terrorism was to not be dependent on oil,” said Reimer. “If all our vehicles were hybrids, we could eliminate the 25% of oil imports that come from the Middle East.”
On the Avestor stand I talked with Robert Gibney (rgibney@avestor.com) about the lithium metal polymer battery they were exhibiting. Immediately, Avestor is producing telecom backup batteries with their technology but they also exhibited a cutaway version of their 21kWh vehicle battery concept. The energy density is attractive and so are the future costs. The company is committed to the vehicle market but is also committed to near-term revenue. It is building up capability where prices can be tolerated and will be there for vehicles when needed.
EVS papers very much start with the vehicle systems and work back to the underlying components. After lunch in the opening “fuel cell” session I heard Arun Jaura of Ford describe the technology behind the supercharged 2.3 liter hydrogen in the H2RV, while Nissan’s Yukimasa Ban described not only the 3.6Ah Li-ion batteries but also the 25kW heater integrated into the Nissan X-Trail FCV.
In a battery session I managed to catch questions for Takenori Tsuchiwa of Toyota. He was presenting “Battery System for Toyota Intelligent Idlingstop System.” It was intriguing to learn that the batteries he was describing were produced by Toyota. This was followed by a numerically precise presentation on the ZEBRA (sodium nickel chloride) battery by Cord Dustmann of MES-DEA (cdustmann@mes-dea.ch). Afterwards, there was a significant lineup to talk to Dustmann.
In the evening, GM enticed many of us to a reception where I was delighted to get more time on the ZEBRA battery with Dustmann. The new system has a fine energy density of 120Wh/kg, but it is a little light on power at 170W/kg. Nevertheless, ZEBRA is finding niches and Cord Dustmann is confident that he can bring the costs down to $100/kWh as volumes pick up. ZEBRA batteries were illustrated in the exhibit hall. Zytek (www.zytekgroup.co.uk) showed a DaimlerChrysler Smart car with a ZEBRA battery while ISE Research is using the ZEBRA battery for a bus. Earlier that day, Jesse Keller of ISE (jkeller@isecorp.com) had explained their interest as well as their work with Maxwell ultracapacitors (www.maxwell.com).
Wolfgang Weiss with DaimlerChrysler’s F-Cell vehicle.
Avestor’s Robert Gibney shows a lithium metal polymer battery.
Dynasty’s new NEV is shown by Richard Clarke.
On Tuesday my own paper for Azure (www.azuredynamics.com) was scheduled to be in session 5E. I attended an author’s breakfast to meet the session co-chairs and fellow authors. Our table was split with session 6A and I had a chance to catch up with one of its co-chairs, Rex Luzader of Millennium Fuel Cell (luzader@millenniumcell.com). Their specialty is the use of sodium borohydride as a hydrogen carrier. Luzader updated me on progress. While there have been a number of vehicle demonstration projects, he was finding, like others, that a valuable niche was developing for Millennium in telecom and remote stationary applications.
I had arranged to meet Allan Cooper (ACatCorfe@AOL.com), a consultant to the Lead Development Association International, to discuss his update on his work on controlling Hawker Cyclon cells in a Honda Insight. Although Cooper’s battery weighs in at 50kg, as against the 28kg of the Insight battery, the lead battery community is optimistic that the required life can be achieved. I listened to Cooper’s paper and was delighted to find that is was followed by a classic Li-ion paper from Jet Shu of the Industrial Technology Research Institute in Taiwan (Jpshu@itri.org.tw).
The editor had kindly asked me to cover my own presentation. As a consequence it was relaxing to be able to sit through all the papers of session 5E. Best of all, co-chair Dennis Davis from GM’s hybrid team thoughtfully asked the authors to sit with the audience, the better to see the slides. Arun Jaura of Ford (ajaura@ford.com) described the thinking behind the fuel storage systems for the Ford fuel cell and hydrogen engine hybrid vehicle programs. He outlined his down selection process and discussed the relative merits of sodium borohydride, liquid hydrogen, metal hydrides and gaseous systems before focusing on the selected gaseous storage system. Jet Shu talked about the performance of the vehicle for which he had discussed the excellent Li-ion battery we had seen him describe earlier.
Paul Scott (pscott@isecorp.com) of ISE Research in San Diego, California, outlined the approach and benefits of preceding fuel cell hybrid buses with hydrogen-engined buses using a larger Ford hydrogen engine. Scott was discussing the buses around 30,000lb GVW. I gave, more or less, the same story for the Class 2 vehicle market, which is 6,000 to 10,000lb GVW, assuming numbers from the engine described by Arun Jaura and the Ballard HY80 fuel cell. With three papers describing the hydrogen engine as a near-term step to hydrogen, it was no surprise when the questions focused on this topic.
Passing through the exhibit area I saw that I had missed a relatively low-cost non-aqueous carbon ultracapacitor being shown by Michael Choi of Nesscap Co. Ltd. (http://www.nesscap.com/prod/prod.htm). His stand provided me with a final photograph.
The conference dinner was definitely “a night to remember” with first class ambience. The EDTA team had persuaded Southern California Edison and Toyota to sponsor an evening on the Queen Mary. At 6:45 p.m. buses were at the three conference hotels to move us all over. I was surprised to be sitting next to Ken Stewart , whom I mentioned earlier; though Stewart began his career as an engineer he enjoys market development. We were discussing the relative market caps of the automotive companies in the Business Week article as we reached the top deck of the QM. There, the view was magnificent and the air was clear. As Stewart expanded on the subject of the EV1 or Impact, we were joined by the most famous of its originators, Paul MacCready , the present chairman of Aerovironment (www.aerovironment.com).
MacCready had enjoyed his visit to the conference and had been particularly impressed by the progress on Li-ion. He was of the view that if progress continued there, it may become a dominant technology and might perhaps gain a larger niche than the vehicle fuel cell.
Later in the evening I joined Electrovaya’s CEO, Sankar Das Gupta, who described some of the interesting steps his company had taken on the way to Li-ion. There is no wonder that Toyota has developed an in-house Li-ion battery. The original GM EV1 battery weighed in at 395Kg. If, say, we can reach 200Wh/kg, this would give a stunning 94kWh and potentially quadruple the original range. Bear in mind this is a system where self-discharge is low, as Toyota emphasized in their Li-ion presentation. Gupta told me a lot of fleets and individuals had shown interest in purchasing a comfortable ZEV with a reasonable range. As a result, Electrovaya is seriously looking at how to commercialize the Maya 100 at the earliest opportunity.
The air was still clear when I walked back to the hotel with Ken Fielding , CEO of Delta Q Technologies Corp. (www.delta-q.com). Working with key industry OEMs, Delta-Q has launched their first product, an advanced high efficiency battery charger, and is shipping in volume.
On Wednesday morning I met John Lutz of UQM Technologies (www.uqm.com) just as he was leaving. Their unique brushless DC systems had been in many of the demonstration vehicles available for the Ride N Drive program, including a hybrid electric Chevrolet Suburban and a Mercury Sable developed by the University of California at Davis, both of which are powered by UQM propulsion systems. Several fuel cell vehicles are powered by Ballard fuel cell engines that incorporate a UQM air compressor drive motor, including the Daimler Chrysler F-CELL, the Honda FCX, and the Ford Focus FCHV.
Dave Barthmur with a GM car of the future.
Jesse Keller mans ISE Research’s exhibit booth.
Ultracapacitors are Nesscap’s specialty, shown by Michael Choi.
I rode from the hotel to Los Angeles airport (LAX) with Tony Bryant of TriMet (bryantt@trimet.org). TriMet is one of the few bus properties to have carried out long term testing of the New Flyer bus equipped with the new Allison hybrid drive (http://www.trimet- .org/environment/hybridbus.htm). Bryant is clearly enthralled with the results and talked of not only the reduced fuel consumption, but also the reduced brake wear and expectations of lower maintenance costs.
At LAX I finally rounded off the direct methanol fuel cell discussion with Mark Grist (mgrist@methanex.com) of Methanex. Grist was also enroute to Vancouver. Methanex is quite excited about the DMFC as a power source for small transportation applications, such as scooters. This is an application that could lead to development of a major new market for methanol. The easy availability of methanol may also give DMFC developers in small transportation markets a head start over other vehicle fuel cell technologies that are dependent on emergence of a larger automotive market to get practical supplies for hydrogen.
The conference was long and the interactions were many. The hot topics were the present reality of hybrids and whether the progress in Li-ion batteries would lead to pure electric vehicles or “Plug-in Hybrids” or both. Meanwhile, fuel cells are finding valuable niches and are being made easier to tackle with the addition of batteries as the DMFC (Parker/Methanex/Vectrix/Giner) and PEMFC (Hydrogenics/Deere) projects showed.
EVS20 was a great success, there were good exhibits, good papers, and the final mixing event on the Queen Mary broke down barriers and resulted in remarkable interactions. If your correspondent tinkled the ivories of a grand piano, then please be reassured that it was done to gain better access to the thoughts of some of the conference participants. My count of the main papers showed that 59 were related to hybrid vehicles or batteries for hybrids and 26 to fuel cells and hydrogen fueling. Here are some attendee statistics: there were 1,036 delegates, 543 exhibitor staff representing 107 companies, 83 people from the media for a total of 1,662 on site. There were 74 vehicles for which more than 2,000 members of the public paid $10 for rides. The delegates came from 32 countries in three major areas: 59% from the America’s, 21% from Asia-Pacific and 19% from Europe. Of note, 131 people came from Japan and 12 came from Nepal!
In the field of “electric drive” we are already entering a global village.
Vectrix’s DMFC catches an attendee’s eye.