Delivery trucks may be better suited to electric power because their size enables them to carry more batteries.
WASHINGTON — The biggest thing at the Washington Auto Show – quite literally – is a 22,000-pound electric truck. Two, actually. They have been built by Smith Electric Vehicles, an established British brand. The American company, a licensee based in Kansas City, Mo., began deliveries in December.
The buzz these days is about electric cars, like General Motors’ plug-in hybrid Volt or Nissan’s all-electric Leaf, but electric trucks might be closer to ready for prime time, because in some ways it is easier to electrify a big vehicle than a small one. The trucks on display (one indoors, one outside along the curb) have been painted for services as Staples and Frito-Lay delivery trucks. Both companies can easily use trucks with a range of only 100 miles or so, which is far less than most private car owners demand.
And trucks, as opposed to cars, can overcome one of the inherent limitations of batteries, the balance between energy and power. Energy means the amount of work that a battery can store, and power means how fast the battery can deliver that energy; most batteries do one much better than the other. Several manufacturers build batteries with enough energy to move a vehicle many miles, but it is delivered so slowly that acceleration can be painful.
Delivery trucks, which require many batteries to get adequate range, do not have to deliver lightning fast starts. The Frito-Lay truck, in a road test, proved this. With the accelerator pedal floored, the truck moved as fast as city traffic demanded. It ran like, well, a truck.
Smith is offering the truck in 12,000-, 22,000- and 26,000-pounds versions. The batteries are attached to the frame rails, and the company adds a metal skirt to cover them. A port on the passenger side accepts a cable that delivers 220 volts, the voltage used for a clothes dryer, although this comes in three phases, what industrial equipment uses. Charging time is eight hours, which fits well into a single-shift operation, said Bryan L. Hansel, chief executive for Smith in the United States.
Smith imports truck bodies that were intended for diesel trucks from the Czech Republic, and builds them at the rate of two a week in a plant in Kansas City, assembling battery packs from cells built by Valence. The company is expecting a grant of at least $10 million from the Energy Department under the stimulus program, which would allow it to build at least 200 more trucks, Mr. Hansel said. The trucks sell for $100,000 to $150,000, depending on size and number of batteries, but the stimulus money would reduce the price.
Joseph H. Gold, a fleet manager at Frito-Lay, said his company was buying 15, to be split among New York; Columbus, Ohio; and Dallas. The New York State Energy Research and Development Agency is helping to pay for them, he said.
The trucks will certainly cost the company more up front, said Mr. Gold. But trucks in this size category go only seven or eight miles per gallon of diesel fuel, and that comes to about 50 cents a mile; the Smith truck will go close to mile on a kilowatt-hour, which costs on average about 11 cents but can be bought at night for less.
Car price guide Parker’s has produced its latest depreciation lists for cars in the UK. It’s probably of most use if you’re shopping at the lower-priced end of the car spectrum, since a straight-up comparison would be pointless. Seven of the 10 cars with the least depreciation are Japanese, headed by the Honda Jazz, and all of them are small. Five of the 10 cars with the greatest depreciation, headed by the Maybach 57S, are English, and none of them are cheap.
Parker’s doesn’t break the list down into model trims, but the least expensive Honda Jazz on Honda’s UK site goes for £11,058 on-the-road (OTR). With 10,000 miles on the odo it will lose £1,379 in value a year later, or 12.5 percent of its value. A Maybach 57S goes for £297,945 OTR, and Parker’s says it drops by £127,526 a year later after 10K miles, or 43 percent. If, however, you’ve spent £400,000 on a car after adding special features, you probably have better things to think about than your fleet’s depreciation.
At the other end of the least depreciating vehicles is the Mitsubishi i, which loses £2,271 after a year, a slightly whopping 25 percent. That is almost as bad as the Ferrari F430, which does the ‘best’ on the most depreciating list, losing ‘just’ £37,188, or 27 percent. Back to that Maybach 57S for a moment, though: a dealer in Surrey has a used one for sale, with 10,000 miles, for £249,990. Perhaps he doesn’t read Parker’s?
Emblazoned on the logo of Spyker Cars is the motto, “Nulla tenaci invia est via,” or “For the tenacious, no road is impassable”.
Victor Muller, chief executive of the Dutch boutique sports car maker, lived up to those words when he clinched a $400m deal this week to buy Saab Automobile from General Motors after two months of fraught negotiations.
“At least 10 times, I thought the deal was dead,” he says, in an interview. “But I never gave up.”
The 50-year-old Dutch entrepreneur now faces the bigger challenge of turning round a carmaker that has lost money for decades in the face of scepticism over his chances of success.
Perhaps the most damning assessment came from Leif Östling, chief executive of Scania, the Swedish truck maker that was once part of Saab.
Speaking at a conference hours before the Spyker deal was announced, he said reviving Saab was an “impossible” job that he would not accept “even with the best pay in the world”.
“We need to stop believing in illusions,” he said of those who claim the brand has a future.
Mr Muller brushes aside such pessimism as the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that brought Saab to the brink of closure.
“If you are a sceptic in this business you have a better than average chance of proving yourself right,” he says, rejecting the argument that there is no place for niche carmakers in an industry dominated by big producers.
“What about Porsche? How can a small car manufacturer that was on the edge of bankruptcy in the 1980s now make 100,000 cars a year and big profits? Where was Audi 10 to 15 years ago? Now it sells 1m cars.”
Mr Muller says he can spark a similar renaissance in a Swedish brand once renowned for its innovative design and technology. “We’re going to be completely different to how GM dealt with Saab,” he says. “It used to be a cult brand and it can be again.”
Data released this week showed that Saab sold less than 40,000 cars last year, down from 95,000 in 2008. While sceptics would cite this as evidence of the company’s hopeless plight, Mr Muller sees an opportunity.
“We don’t need to go out and find new customers – we just need to win back the ones we’ve lost,” he says. “Saab customers were the most loyal and educated in the industry. The fact they left means they must have been disappointed.”
A new version of Saab’s flagship 9-5 model is set for launch this year, but the first chance for Spyker to place its imprint on the brand will be the planned redesign of the 9-3 compact car in 2012. “It will be as Saabish as possible,” says Mr Muller, in a nod to criticism that the brand lost its distinctiveness under US ownership.
Spyker’s takeover was met with jubilation in the town of Trollhättan, south-west Sweden, where 3,400 people work at Saab’s main production facility.
Mr Muller has given no guarantee on jobs but says: “I think the chances of hiring are much higher than firing. This company made less than 30,000 cars last year and we need to get it back up to 100,000.”
Such confidence is characteristic of a man who made his fortune turning around McGregor, the Dutch fashion brand, before founding Spyker in 1999.
Spyker’s heritage dates back to the 19th century, when it built coaches for the Dutch royal family, and the company went on to make cars and aircraft before going bankrupt in 1929. Mr Muller acquired the rights to the brand for his sports car start-up, which sells a few dozen hand-made luxury cars each year. Investors include John de Mol, the media mogul who created the Big Brother reality television format, and Mubadala Development Company, owned by the Abu Dhabi government, which controls 17 per cent.
Vladimir Antonov, the Russian banking tycoon, agreed to sell his large stake as part of the Saab deal after GM raised concern about leakage of intellectual property to Russia, according to people involved in negotiations.
Sceptics question Mr Muller’s expertise to run a mainstream car brand and point out that, much like Saab, Spyker has failed to make a profit over the past 10 years. Such criticism is unfair, he says, arguing it takes years to build a successful car brand. Reviving Saab will be easier, he insists, because the foundations are already in place.
I was excited to see that an automobile manufacturer had weighed in on car seats and child safety. One facet of the argument we make against the efficacy of child car seats is that government standards for car seats cut the automakers out of the safety loop to some degree, creating some misaligned incentives between regulators, automakers, and car seat manufacturers.
According to this article in the Australian newspaper The Age, the Swedish automaker Volvo has found a number of shortcomings with existing car-seat practices. Its recommendations are based on “independent crash tests and investigations of more than 4,500 crashes involving children,” and argue that:
Young children are much safer facing the rear of the car and should ride that way until age three or four (as they commonly do in Sweden), rather than facing forward starting at six months or one year.
“[C]hildren should be in booster seats until at least age 10 to ensure seatbelts are positioned correctly across their chests without riding up to their necks.”
“Current child seats require feeding the seatbelt and attaching a top tether, something that takes time and is often not performed properly. An RACV report in 2004 estimated that child seats were incorrectly fitted as much as 70 per cent of the time.”
All that said, there was no word about Volvo pushing for a further integration of child-safety measures into the cars themselves, hopefully obviating the need for an add-on piece of equipment made by a third party which has been shown to provide minimal benefit.
But I suppose it is a step forward nonetheless that an automaker is speaking out on child safety. That is not necessarily an easy thing to do. You may recall that when Robert S. McNamara (yes, the same one) tried to push Ford to install seat belts in its cars in the 1950’s, Ford feared that “selling safety” was bad for business in that it reminded people that cars were inherently unsafe.
Speedweeks schedules start earlier for a handful of NASCAR drivers who plan to start their 2010 racing season with the Rolex 24. Eight drivers plan to test their racing talents in the sports car arena with the 24-hour event.
Three of those eight drivers will stack a single team. Two-time event winner Juan Pablo Montoya will team with his newly-reunited Ganassi NASCAR teammate, Jamie McMurray, and Max Papis on the TELMEX/Target Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates entry.
They won’t all three be driving the same car, though. Papis will be part of the driver lineup for the team’s No. 02 entry, along with Scott Pruett, Memo Rojas, and Justin Wilson. Montoya and McMurray will share driving duties with Scott Dixon and Dario Franchitti in Ganassi’s No. 02 entry.
Other NASCAR drivers, however, will serve as the lone NASCAR driver on their respective teams. Four-time reigning Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson will see if sports cars are more of a challenge by joining the GAINSCO/Bab Stallings Racing team with fellow racers Jon Fogarty, Alex Gurney, and Jimmy Vasser .
AJ Allmendinger will share driving duties with Brian Frisselle, Mark Patterson, and Michael Valiante for Michael Shank Racing. This time around will mark the fifth-consecutive year that Allmendinger has raced in the Rolex 24 with Michael Shank Racing. His best finish was a second overall in 2006.
“Getting in the Grand-Am car, especially 24 hours of Daytona there at the Rolex, it’s just a great way to kick off the year,” Allmending said.
Meanwhile, Paul Menard will join the Spirit of Daytona team, along with Antonio Garcia and Buddy Rice. Colin Braun will run with Krohn Racing with fellow drivers Nic Jonsson, Tracy Krohn, and Ricardo Zonta.
Montoya, McMurray, Papis, Johnson, Allmendinger, Menard, and Braun will all be competing in Daytona Prototypes.
“Those cars are so much of fun to drive,” McMurray said earlier this month after his first time behind the wheel of a Daytona Prototype in about five years. “It took me the whole first day just to get used to the cockpit of the car. It’s so much different. The steering wheel has what looked like 500 buttons on it, but it’s only four or five. And the way the tach works and everything, it took me a while to get used to all of that, and where all the switches are in the car, and just get used to the mirrors and everything that’s different about that.”
As his NASCAR peers pilot Daytona Prototypes, Bobby Labonte, on the other hand, will be wheeling a Grand Touring (GT) car. He will be behind the wheel of a TRG Porsche, sharing driving duties with Timo Bernhard, Romain Dumas, Tim George Jr., and Spencer Pumpelly.
The green flag will wave on the 48th-annual Rolex 24 at 3:30 p.m. ET on Jan. 30.
