When gas prices retreated from their extortionate 2008 highs last winter, a lot of the talk about alternative vehicle solutions likewise dimmed from public consciousness. It revealed a simple truth — that much of the public and media focused their attention on electric and hybrid vehicle technology as a potential rescue from high petro-fuel costs, and not necessarily as a solution to the excessive production of carbon dioxide, the most widely recognized contributing factor to global warming.

But Luc Nadeau isn’t waiting for the pendulum to swing back again, even as pump prices start climbing again. The alignment of ecological and economic mandates isn’t a distant event — it’s today, here and now.

As founder and president of EVolve Electrics, based in Longmont, Nadeau is working on the solution, or at least a part of the solution, right now: transforming existing gas-powered cars into all-electric ones.

“We started the business in July 2008, so we’re almost a year old,” he says. “We’ve completed two full conversions to fully electric vehicles using a DC motor and lead acid batteries. But what we’re starting now to sell is the same system, a DC motor, but with lithium ion batteries… actually, a lithium iron phosphate battery, which is the technology where it’s really starting to make economic and technological sense.”

The car industry is all about economics, of course, just as car ownership is, and Nadeau has worked the numbers pretty exhaustively at both levels. Off the top of his head, he can rattle off a convincing equation that adequately demonstrates that, even with today’s battery technology, the long-term cost-to-own benefits for a retrofit match or even beat the cost to replace an older sedan, over the vehicle’s presumed lifetime.

“If you were to do a conversion on, say, a 10-year-old Toyota Corolla, it would cost you less over the next 150,000 miles to drive [a retrofit] Corolla than to buy a new Corolla.

“A lot of it is the upfront costs. Looking at the cost of the battery-powered car, it would be anywhere from $25,000 to $35,000, versus a new Corolla at about $17,500. But when you factor in the cost of gas, the new car would end up costing about $35,000, where the electric one would cost about $32,000. What I didn’t include was maintenance. In terms of the maintenance of the vehicle, a gas vehicle is generally going to have more maintenance costs than an electric one. We can call that a wash, even though the battery manufacturer says that the batteries now can go 2,000 charge cycles through its lifetime, and that can represent up to 200,000 miles.”

And as Nadeau points out, lithium battery technology is advancing rapidly, and he estimates that even an owner who does have to swap out a battery pack once during the vehicle’s 150,000-mile lifespan will still come out ahead economically.

Today’s motorists, of course, don’t all neatly fit into a single, monolithic carbon-making profile. There are commuters, commercial short haulers (bread trucks), long haulers (semis), recreational drivers, and so on. EVolve’s technology by itself isn’t designed to address long-haul driving, for example, as the infrastructure isn’t yet there to allow drivers to recharge their batteries as quickly as they can fill a tank of 87 octane, and even Evolve’s higher-end conversions can currently only deliver about 100 commuter miles per 4-to 8-hour charge. Companies like Better Place, the California-based company that has recently partnered with Renault/Nissan to design and build an infrastructure of charging stations, powered by wind and/or solar, in places like Israel and San Francisco, are addressing that issue today, and battery technology is advancing toward significantly faster recharging batteries, but both are still a little ways off.

Nadeau recognizes that re-inventing the power systems behind modern automotive mobility will be a beast attacked from many sides, and he’s focused on just one practical piece of the equation, one profile of driver.

“The transportation sector is responsible for about one-third of the nation’s CO2 emission production… Let’s say we want to get that sector down to 17 percent of the current emission production. That’s going to entail a lot of different pieces of the pie.

“One will be the slow conversion of new vehicles produced. And I think eventually everything will be produced on electric motors, which are far more efficient than internal-combustion engines, with some being assisted by gasoline to extend their range.

“We’re just looking at a chunk of that pie. It’s a fairly small chunk; there’s 250 million vehicles on the road in the U.S., and about 10 million get scrapped every year and get replaced with new vehicles. We’re saying, let’s take 10 percent of that, do electric retrofits on that million vehicles. That leaves 1 million new vehicles off the road. New vehicles cost around 20,000 pounds of CO2 just to produce, in the case of the Corolla, and then about another 100,000 pounds of CO2 over that 150,000 miles. So you take out all the manufacturing CO2 cost and all the CO2 cost over the life of the vehicle.

“So, you retrofit these guys… plus, you have new vehicles coming out that are electric or hybrid being produced in the meantime, and those that are running with gas assist could be using low-emission bio-fuels… you could easily get to 20 percent or less by 2050.”

And for those who might argue that the government, which offers fairly generous tax incentives already for purchase or retrofit of
electric vehicles, may be tampering too much in the “free market” by springing tax credits and R&D grants, Nadeau offers a short and incisive response.

“We do subsidize the internal-combustion engine industry far more than we subsidize alternative-fuel vehicles. If we really want the free market to decide, gasoline would be about $10 to $15 per gallon right now, if you add up all the environmental and other costs associated with it. If the free market really got to make all those choices. So, yeah, electric vehicles would crush gas vehicles if no one had incentives.

“Second thing, with any new technology, you need to provide incentives. People are risk-averse. They need something to mitigate that risk, and that’s what incentives do.”

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