The electrical age

When the Velib bike-hire scheme was launched in European cities four years ago, there were far more sceptics than believers. But now the concept is being adopted in cities across the world.

In December, the city of Paris officially opened a similar but even more ambitious scheme. Dubbed ‘Autolib’, it provides battery-powered cars for public hire, to be returned after use to Velib-type, plug-in parking stations.

But these aren’t the under-powered, short-running, much-mocked electric cars of previous years like the General Motors’ models of the nineties which were all recalled and crushed. These four-seater Bluecars have a top speed of 130kmh and can travel 250km on a single charge, quite enough to get around a city.

And at just ¤5 a half-hour after payment of a modest subscription fee, they’re much cheaper than taxis and not much more expensive than public transport. The venture is the ¤100m brainchild of the family-owned Bollore Group which aims to have 3,000 Bluecars on the roads in Paris by next summer.

After years of unfulfilled promises and technological failures, the era of the electric car may finally be nigh. That’s what a growing number of automobile bosses such as Carlos Ghosn, the chief executive of Renault-Nissan, are saying. “This will be the decade of the electric car,” he recently predicted.

According to a recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ghosn may not be bullish enough. PwC estimates that “green” vehicles including hybrids could account for a third of all global sales by 2020. “The race for electric vehicles is heating up,” insists PwC’s Dr Martin Hoelz. Certainly, there’s a flood of models coming on the market. Renault-Nissan has started mass production of not one but two electric cars – the Leaf and the premium Fluence. Cost∞conscious municipal authorities in France have already booked entire fleets of them. Next year, two big-selling badges are released in electric versions – Ford’s Focus and Toyota’s Prius.

Hybrid-powered cars are proliferating too. Chastened by its experience in the nineties, GM made sure its $41,000 (£26,000) hybrid Volt is a high-performing saloon. Boosted by a petrol engine, the much-praised Volt will be able to run for 340 miles.

A line-up of hybrid supercars are also in their final stages of development. Jaguar’s electric-petrol model is due out as soon as 2013; roughly the same time as BMW’s $200,000 electric-diesel, Vision EfficientDynamics, capable of travelling 62.5 miles on a single gallon. Evidently a huge step from the battery-powered milk-delivery vans that wheezed around cities in the 1960s.

This silent revolution started in public transport. The city of Chattanooga in Tennessee started running electric buses around 20 years ago. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, visitors were transported in a 50-strong fleet of battery-driven buses. And America’s first fast-charge bus – the Proterra EcoRide in Pomona, California – has only been in operation since September 2010.

The breakthrough came with the development of the faster-charging, light-weight lithium-ion battery. Billionaire Vincent Bollore believes his company’s lithium metal polymer battery will store five times more energy than any other battery on the market.

The environmental benefits of electric vehicles are irrefutable. Because they do not produce any emissions – all electric cars don’t have an exhaust pipe, they would help to reduce carbon dioxide pollution in most cities by between 20–40 percent. This is why Washington has belatedly pledged $2.4bn in federal grants for the programme while China, having showcased its buses at the Olympics, has budgeted $15bn for electric transport.

And next up? Vehicles could be sun-powered. From next year, a California-based company will start selling solar panels made from multi-crystalline polysilicone that can be mounted on the car roof. Ford’s already offering a solar package.