History of Vehicle Electrification 21 Geely, Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC) initially through their joint venture with GM, Chang’an, Chery, Dongfeng, First Auto Works (FAW), Brilliance Automotive, Foton, Great Wall, Lifan, and many others. In addition to the major OEMs, the 2000s brought the introduction of many smaller manufac- turers offering new EV options to the marketplace. Some of them, such as Tesla, were very successful after some early challenges. While others, such as Fisker, Azure Dynamics, and CODA Automotive, ended up filing bankruptcy, they did make significant inroads for electric vehicles.
This is clearly not a complete listing of all hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and electric vehicle offer- ings, but is intended to give you an idea of the scope of change and the amount of options that have come into the market over the last decade. It also shows us how different the market- place is from a century ago when the first electric vehicles were introduced to the general public. Today these vehicles are common place and are quickly becoming the “standard” and reaching mass market acceptance, at least for the hybrids, rather than simply science experi- ments for early adopters. Today, electric and hybrid vehicles are clearly here to stay.
By the early 2020s, I would expect to see almost every vehicle having at least a very simple Stop/Start type microhybrid as its base offering. Will fully electric vehicles become “mainstream”? That is much more difficult to prognosticate; however, I think that as technology continues to improve the option for fully electric vehicles will become better options for many drivers. In the meantime, I believe that PHEVs are a great “transitional” technology for much of the population since they bridge the gap between standard ICEs and advanced fully electric vehicles.
The PHEV vehicles eliminate the concern over “range anxiety” as they continue to offer the same, or greater, driving range as traditional ICE’s, while still offer between 10 and 40+ miles of electric driving range. This will enable the general consumer time to get com- fortable with the new technology. Table 1 breaks out each of the general categories of hybridization from the simple Start/ Stop all the way to fully electric vehicle and highlights the differences in these different options.
In the next chapter, we will begin reviewing all of the different terminology that is used for both the electric vehicle as well as for the advanced batteries in order for us to be able to “speak the same language.” As with any other industry, the advanced battery industry has generated quite a unique set of acronyms and terminology that can get quite confusing if you are not familiar with them. For this reason, Chapter 3 is a very good starting point for the rest of the book.