While Aussie car makers stand still, Europe goes electric... #EV #Audi

It's an Audi, or an Audi on a VW platform (nothing new there). Most importantly it's an electric vehicle, and a prestige one at that... and it's real, and it's small. It's a 2+1, would you believe! And whilst it's offered with a range of motors, it's the electric one that'll steal the show. Whilst VW itself is banking on squeezing the last drops out of small, turbo-charged diesel and petrol motors, it obviously has a Plan B, too. If the US car makers (and their Aussie offshoots) don't wake up and smell the roses soon they'll miss the boat, let alone the mixed metaphor, completely.

A variety of engines will be offered, although the star of the show will be an electric powerplant. It incorporates lightweight lithium-polymer batteries and a punchy electric motor driving the front wheels. So the small, agile car will be ideal for city motoring, delivering 0-60mph in around 10 seconds. And with a full charge providing enough energy to travel up to 100 miles helped by regenerative braking, the plug-in machine will have real all-round ability.

EVs 'no better than current polluters' yet 'far better' - confused? #environment

The journos - if that's what they are - at Fairfax's Drive.com continue to pollute the Internet with their confusion. The headline reads Plug-in cars no better for the environment and they go on to explain that in Victoria, where 85 per cent of electricity comes from power stations burning more highly polluting brown coal, the figures show an electric vehicle will produce the equivalent of about 130 grams of carbon dioxide a kilometre - about the same as small-engined petrol hatchback. No problem, except that they then completely and utterly expose their own headline as misleading.

How do they do this? By turning the story on its head: But recharge the same electric car in Tasmania, where almost all the electricity is generated using more environmentally friendly hydroelectric power plants, and the equivalent carbon dioxide output falls to about 13 grams. This is far better than any car on our roads today - including petrol-electric hybrids - and lower even than the next wave of ultra-efficient vehicles slated for Australia.

Bizarre. Why write a headline like that - except to get people to read it I guess. And of course its all true - if utterly self-evident. Of course hydro-power is going to be cleaner than brown - or even black coal. Same with wind or solar powered grids. It's a no-brainer. Or is it?

They could have engaged their brains further and mentioned that hydro-power floods an entire valley, wiping out (in Tasmania's case) substantial forest ecosystems and replacing it with cold, 'dead' water. Apart from the environmental vandalism, there has to be a carbon cost to building a dam in the first place. Now it could be that hydro in the right place makes great sense, but we need to do a comparison with the carbon cost of building an equivalent scale of solar cell or wind farms, or building tidal generators. Such a comparison would include actual carbon emitted in construction and maintenance, the expected replacement life-cycle (ie when do we need to build another one?) and the extra cost of building the connection to the grid (which could be a very long wire indeed). And then do a comparo with current black and brown coal (or even nuclear power) power plants.

Until we do that analysis we are just making stuff up and generating misleading statements.

Subaru says Stella "clean" but Drive.com says it's a "dirty" EV #environment

Who do we believe?

My confusion is all about the Subaru Stella EV. Apparently Subaru (in a press release) says: Based on power supplied from a coal-fired power station, STELLA produces an estimated 12.5 kilograms (kg) of Carbondioxide (CO2) per 100 kilometres of travel, compared to 20.24 kg of CO2 for a typical 2.0 litre small car.

So it's cleaner, no risk.

But Fairfax via its Drive.com site says the opposite (seemingly): Recent research has shown that electric cars don’t necessarily reduce the carbon footprint. Subaru recently said its electric Stella would account for 20 per cent more carbon dioxide emissions if recharged from a coal-fired power station.

Did Subaru say that? I didn't see that. But wait...

If we pull that apart a bit... Subaru compared the Stella, a small - in fact quite small, if heavy at 1,000kg - car, with a much larger "typical" 2.0l car. I assume they mean larger, because Subaru's 2.0l cars are "typically" Imprezas and the like... so it's not apples vs apples, is it? If we compared tiny Stella with a micro car with a 660cc engine we'd probably see around 10kg of CO2 per 100km, which is indeed somewhat less than the Stella and backs Drive.com up. You'd probably pick the petrol car over the EV for environmental reasons.

I do wonder though if Drive.com actually thought it through. It's not actually what Subaru said, although it's what we can derive from their statement. They are being a bit narky here, to use the Aussie idiom. Indeed Drive.com had a go at Subaru when it earlier reviewed the Stella, here: One thing the Stella not completely free of, though, is guilt. Despite no greenhouse emissions coming from its electric engine, Subaru says using Australia's coal-fired electricity would produce about 125g of carbon dioxide for each kilometre travelled in the Stella - almost 20g more than a Toyota Prius hybrid car that uses a 1.6-litre petrol engine alongside its electric motor.

Interestingly I think they meant 1.5-litre rather than 1.6, but they are the experts so let's go with that. So we can assume (so many assumptions!) Drive.com is actually comparing the Stella with the "1.6l", 1325kg Prius, which opens up a can of worms indeed.

All of these things are worked out by average use, of course, but nothing is ever really average, and it's not just about use. We need to look at the manufacturing footprint, too. If you are heavy-footed in your somewhat porky Prius, what happens to your carbon footprint? It goes up, obviously, and probably more so than an EV (better check that). And what of the extra complexity of the petrol/electric hybrid, with 2 power sources, a petrol tank and batteries? Which of these 2 cars (the Stella EV vs the Prius "1.6") is less resource-hungry - and has the lesser overall carbon footprint - to make and maintain? I'm guessing (so much guesswork!) the Subaru EV wins hands down if we look at it that way; but there's no denying, either, that a 660cc petrol Stella will beat both by a wide margin.

Of course none of this really stacks up, if it's not what you need in a car. You may drive short distances and the Stella EV will be ideal. Or you may travel long distances at a steady speed and can make the most of a hybrid's advantages. Indeed the Stella may be a perfect fit for me but too small for you. It all depends.