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German carmakers playing catch-up in electric current
Published in Saudi Press Agency on 03 - 05 - 2010


Moving out into the fast lane of the A100 motorway
that threads through Berlin's southern suburbs, the Mini E from
German automotive giant BMW seems like a sensible, modest city car -
but not for long, according to dpa.
Stepping on the accelerator pedal produces, in contrast to any
normal vehicle, no noise, only speed. Lots of it. The cheeky little
roadster surges forward with disarming, effortless alacrity. Driving
it is, well, electric.
Appearances are deceptive, however. Despite the Mini E's
exuberant performance, the German car industry has been accused of
moving far too slowly to develop viable alternative-drive and
electric vehicles that can help tackle the twin problems of carbon
dioxide (CO2) emissions and city pollution.
"We still have no fully developed and price-competitive mass
production vehicle available," Transport Minister Peter Ramsauer told
the Berliner Zeitung newspaper on Monday.
Whereas Toyota's Prius, an electric-gasoline hybrid, has been on
the road for years and Nissan's all-electric Leaf is due to go on the
market in the US by late 2010, no German manufacturer expects to have
a market-ready car until 2013.
In general, despite electric vehicles having been around longer
than those propelled by the internal combustion engine, reasonably-
priced electric cars that are capable of taking a family on more than
a city jaunt are still not on sale.
The Germany government is now trying turn the country's dominance
in the high-technology, luxury-car sector into a market lead in
electric vehicles.
On Monday, Chancellor Angela Merkel led a summit of chiefs of the
car industry as well as energy providers and policy experts in Berlin
to launch the so-called National Electric Mobility Platform.
Merkel's aim is to have 1 million electric vehicles on the road by
2020.
"The competition with other countries around the world must now be
taken up stronger than ever," she said at the summit.
To that end the national platform set up seven committees to drive
government-industry cooperation, each representing an area of
technology, from batteries to integration of electricity networks,
although no major promise of state funding for any of them was made.
The government says that since early 2009, over 500 million euros
(665 million dollars) of state money has flowed into research and
development of electric vehicles.
Since 2009 the car industry itself has been active in two major
pilot projects in Berlin, which seek to build experience of how
electric vehicles would work in the real world.
The first, which involves the BMW Mini E, is run by energy
provider Vattenfall, and has let 50 of the vehicles loose on the
public with the proviso that they report their findings.
A similar system is operated by Daimler and utility RWE, with a
battery-powered Smart car as the test vehicle.
In each system, the participant gets a car and a charging device
installed in their home, to which the vehicle gets connected for
recharging.
The Mini E takes about 4 hours for a full charge, which Vattenfall
has designated to come exclusively from wind energy, a renewable
source of which there is plenty in blustery northern Germany. In this
way the CO2 reducing effects of driving an electric vehicle are
maximized.
"In normal commuter use, there are plenty of our test users who
say they only have to recharge the car once every three days,"
Vattenfall spokesman Andreas Weber told the German Press Agency dpa.
But the range limitations of electric car batteries - less than
200 kilometres on a single charge - are still the major hurdle that
needs to be overcome.
Another is the convenience - or lack of it - of finding somewhere
to charge the car: If you don't have a garage to put your car in,
where do you charge it up?
Weber says that the next stage of the pilot project will involve
street-mounted loading columns that will allow inner-city apartment
dwellers to connect their cars to the grid.
The National Electric Mobility Platform is to present a report by
the end of 2010. It will then be seen, if, as claimed by Economy
Minister Rainer Bruederle, that Germany can "re-invent the automobile
for the 21st century."


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