An Electrifying Week

I’ve driven no fewer than four vehicles with full or partial electric power. And as usual have enjoyed the experience. We have been running a long term test on a Honda Civic Hybrid for six weeks now and the car is going like a dream.

We will spend the best part of half a year in it to really get a taste of the legendary engineering and build quality of Honda. And, of course, check out its fuel use characteristics in real life motoring. Midway through the week I swapped a little Toyota Prius c (the new hybrid city car) for a Toyota Camry Hybrid. These were both part of our routing weekly road tests and you will read more about them here soon.

Later I drove the Camry Hybrid to the airport to catch a flight to Sydney for the long awaited official launch of the Nissan Leaf. The drive program was necessarily brief as there was quite a queue waiting to get behind the wheel of Australia’s first purpose-designed mass-production electric car. I’ve driven Leaf before, both in Australia and overseas and liked the experience.

Sadly, a trip to Le Mans to witness the first ever victory by a hybrid car in the the world’s toughest circuit race wasn’t on my agenda. But I did manage to get my iPad to talk to my television (a remarkable feat given my ham fisted ways with modern electronics) and tuned into a continuous broadcast direct from the track.

The big Audi diesel-electric hybrids used the huge braking that’s such a feature of the French racetrack to recover energy created by the cars slowing down, energy that would normally have been turned into heat and totally lost, stored it in special batteries and reused the electricity to drive motors to accelerate up the next straights.

Energy recovery is almost something for nothing and is by far the biggest feature of any electric or hybrid electric vehicle. Possibly the most fascinating feature of the electrifying week I’m describing is the fact that Prime Minister Julia Gillard may also have had a trip in an electric car.

Nissan and its alliance partner Renault provided many pure-electric cars for the Rio+20 conference and there’s every chance our PM was charging along in one. Are electric vehicles the way of the future? Our feeling is that they are, though proponents of hydrogen power may disagree. In any case, hydrogen powered cars usually use electric motors rather than burning it as fuel.

The biggest advantage of electric cars is that the supply grid already exists all over Australia. Every building of any consequence (and most of little or no consequence) already has electric power inside and out. Interestingly, the current Australian electricity grid is already capable of charging up tens of thousands of electric vehicle - provided the charging is done during the night when demands of other electrical equipment is very low.

The biggest disadvantage is that Australia’s electricity is mainly generated by dirty coal. That situation is improving and the amount of sustainable power coming from clean sources is increasing at a reasonable rate. Will the future be as electric as the week I’ve just experienced? I certainly hope so.