Zoomi Life

Full electric power trains like battery electrics, hydrogen fuel cells, and so forth are coming, but slowly. Let’s face it: most of those on the market so far are nothing more than curiosities. The Tesla Roadster and the Aptera 2e, while they look really good and are desirable vehicles, aren’t exactly mainstream.

Whether it’s the price tag, the limited occupancy, or just the limited numbers available, full electric cars aren’t here yet. While the next five years promise to see many new models from several manufacturers hitting the streets of the world, it will be a long time before these vehicles are totally accepted and are available to everyone.

Robert Bosch GmbH executives released their annual International Automotive Press Briefing earlier this month and basically spelled this out. If anyone’s in a position to know, they are. The company is a supplier of components on both sides of this ball game, supplying both combustion engine auto parts and electric motor and battery parts.

The company is putting $4.25 billion in research and development money into the automotive sector this year and is using that cash for both improvements in combustion engine efficiency and in getting the electric drive future moving.

“We’ll do the one thing without neglecting the other,” says Dr. Bernd Bohr, Chairman of the Bosch Automotive Group. “Our engineers are working to reduce the fuel consumption of gasoline and diesel engines by up to one third. … The electric car will come, but in small numbers at first. It will occupy a niche and will not make a noticeable mark on the roads until after 2020.”

He also said that the company is predicting about 500,000 electric vehicles being sold annually by 2015, worldwide.

The company also expects by that time to have gasoline and diesel engines that output power equivalent to the 2.0L, 4-cylinder engines of today at only 1.1 or 1.2L and 3 cylinders. These engines will be much more efficient than we have today.

Bosch foresees start-stop (engine off rather than idle), thermal management, and other technologies to be commonplace by then.

In electrics, Bosch is currently focusing on three basic technologies: all electrics, hybrid electrics, and on range-extending (plug-in electrics). Bosch is working on the whole power train, from electric motors through to the individual components, all the way down to the batteries at the other end.

In fact, Wolf-Henning Scheider, President of Gasoline Systems (believe it or not, this is the name of the forefront of Bosch’s electrification tech), envisions the electric car of 2015:

• Weighs in at 1,000 kilos
• Has a coefficient of drag of 0.34
• Uses a 40kW motor capable of up to 120kph
• A 35kWh battery pack capable of 200 kilometers range

Based on the advances being made today, he expects that battery to weigh 250 kilos, cost about 350 of today’s Euros per kwh and it may be even cheaper than that by 2015. Some of those insights come from Bosch’s recent joint venture into lithium-ion battery technologies with Samsung SDI, called SB LiMotive in Korea.

In fact, Dr. Joachim Fetzer, Executive VP of SB LiMotive, went into some detail on those battery plans and expectations. He has a definitive list of what he says has to be available if battery-electric drive trains are to be possible on a marketable scale.

Those improvements include power and energy densities much better than we have now and SB’s goal is to reach densities of 4,000 watts per kilogram. They hope to have this by 2012 for hybrid applications. SB also wants a density of at least 150 watt hours per kilogram within 3 years for all-electric vehicles.

This is pretty ambitious, but Bosch is being realistic with these numbers. Batteries are definitely the biggest downer for fully electric vehicles becoming commonplace. I think 20 years is a reasonable minimum time frame for EVs to offset combustion engine vehicles in the market.

I would add that those batteries also need to prove a shelf life of better than the 5 the best warranties have today. I’d like to see battery warranties approaching double that or whose price is not such a huge factor in the car’s value, so the packs can be replaced reasonably at the end of their life, allowing the car’s lifespan to be much longer. I can swap the engine in my Toyota for $3,000, so why not the batteries in an electric car?

Source: Bosch via Green Car Congress