Powertrains: Petrol still leads the race to replace itselfBy James Mackintosh Published: February 27 2006 16:04 Last updated: February 27 2006 16:04
The race to replace petrol as the fuel of the future is shaping up as a three-way sprint, with the current leading contender being – petrol. Petrol driving an engine made more efficient by being linked to a “hybrid” battery and electric motor, but still petrol.
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Hybrids have taken a clear lead over the two main rival contenders, biofuels and diesel, as politicians and celebrities have picked the technology as the best way to boost their green credentials.
A distinctive look has helped the Toyota Prius hybrid hatchback become a green badge of honour for drivers wanting to show they are concerned about the environment. Tax breaks and access to local perks such as free parking and the use of lanes otherwise reserved for multi-occupancy vehicles have given hybrids a further boost. Sales are growing fast but remain small compared with the overall market – just 1.2 per cent of the US market, the world’s biggest, where 205,000 hybrids were sold.
In the past nine months the car industry has also accepted that it cannot resist the march of the hybrid. Until last summer hybrids were being pushed mostly by Toyota and Honda of Japan, where the heavy traffic provides the ideal conditions for hybrid systems. With a battery and electric motor as well as an engine, hybrids are most efficient in start-stop traffic where they can recycle braking energy.
Since then General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, BMW, and even long-time hybrid opponent PSA Peugeot Citroën have jumped on the bandwagon and begun investing in hybrids, although Peugeot has opted for a diesel-electric system. Nissan is launching a hybrid using Toyota technology, while Ford, which sells two hybrid sport utility vehicles in the US, is planning to increase annual output of the systems 10-fold to 250,000 by 2010.
Yet, executives at many of the car companies now developing or selling hybrids remain firmly opposed to the technology in principle. “Hybrids are a wildly inefficient solution,” says one senior official at a western carmaker. “They cost $3,000 to $4,000 per unit extra and involve having two powertrains, rather than one.”
Drive on a German autobahn at a steady 130mph and the expensive hybrid system turns into a heavy load of electronic junk doing little or nothing to help.
Kjell Bergstrom, head of powertrain at Saab, GM’s Swedish arm, says ethanol derived from plants is a better environmentally friendly solution.
“Getting a hybrid is like telling your wife that you are going down from four boxes of cigarettes a day to three boxes,” he says. “And then it is like smoking those cigarettes in a water pipe, a very expensive way to smoke them. Just driving a hybrid doesn’t make sense when it comes to value for money or value to society.”
He is not alone in his opposition. Patrick Pélata, head of strategic planning at Renault, which does not have a hybrid on sale, says governments are pushing carmakers to invest in them even though environmental improvements could be made quicker and more cheaply elsewhere.
“There’s a technology war that is not relevant to the real issues of the planet,” he argues.
However, the politicians are not only supporting the technology, but in many cases are choosing to drive hybrids too.
Britain’s top politicians have been offered Prius hatchbacks as an alternative to the ministerial Jaguar, while US President George W. Bush says hybrids are “the most promising way to reduce gasoline consumption quickly”.
The US president went on to tell an audience in Milwaukee that hybrids could go “twice as far on a gallon of fuel as gasoline-only vehicles”, although he did not point out that such performance would require a skewed test where the cars spend almost all their time in stationary traffic.
In fact, on government tests most hybrids get a 20 to 30 per cent fuel economy improvement against equivalent petrol vehicles, with more in the city and less on the open road.
Toyota, by far the market leader in hybrids, argues that the cost disadvantage of hybrids is outweighed by their fuel economy and low carbon emissions. It hopes to sell 1m hybrid vehicles a year by the early 2010s and is working to reduce the costs of the system to make them competitive without subsidies. Last year for the first time its sales exceeded 200,000 hybrids, with 112,000 of them in the US, although overall hybrids still took only just over 1 per cent of the US market, the world’s biggest.
Gerald Killman, general manager of Toyota’s powertrain engineering in Europe, accepts that hybrid systems are more expensive than diesel, but says the costs will come down rapidly.
“Hybrid technology is only eight to nine years old so cost savings that can be made are much bigger than for traditional engine technology which is more than 100 years old,” he said.
Toyota and Honda both claim to make a profit on hybrids, although they admit that the cars are less profitable than equivalent non-hybrid vehicles.
Several of their rivals, including GM and Nissan, have admitted that they expect to incur losses when they launch their first hybrids.
Still, rival technologies are not being given up, even by Toyota.
“We strongly believe in diversification,” Mr Killman says.
“There will be several technologies and evolutions of existing technologies that will be on the road together.”
DaimlerChrysler and Volkswagen are both trying to promote diesel in the US, where it has been ignored by both manufacturers and customers since gaining a reputation as a dirty and smelly fuel in the 1980s.
So far, though, only biofuels and hybrids are getting serious government backing.
Diesel cars use up to 20 per cent less fuel than petrol cars, but because they produce more smog-forming nitrous oxide and carcinogenic particulates they cannot be sold in five US states, and sales have not taken off outside Europe.
Even in Europe, tougher rules due by the end of the decade will push up the cost of diesel cars sharply.
This is likely to help hybrids secure their lead as the environmentally friendly technology of choice, at least until zero-emission hydrogen cars become available in a decade or so.
