Are electric cars losing their spark?
— -- Rather than electrifying auto buyers, the plug-in car revolution is feeling more like a fizzle.
A year after the first two plug-in electric cars from major makers went on sale, buyers appear put off by high sticker prices — even with federal subsidies — and, for the moment, by more-stable gasoline prices.
The Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt also have had their own issues. For owners of the Leaf, and other electric-only vehicles, there still are relatively few places to plug in and recharge away from home, limiting use. And the Volt, which has a backup gas engine to run a generator for extended range, is under the shadow of a government safety probe of why its big lithium-ion battery pack could catch fire days or even weeks after suffering severe crash damage.
Meanwhile, some start-up makers of electric cars, including the Think City car and the egg-shaped Aptera, have gone bust. Others have hit pot holes and delays in their drive to get plug-in cars in front of buyers. Even some major automakers have had hiccups developing new plug-ins.
Electric cars on the way to showrooms also face stiffer competition from conventional cars and hybrids that not only are cheaper, but also have gotten markedly more fuel-efficient as automakers work to meet tightening federal fuel-economy rules.
All these problems amount to some big bumps on the road to President Obama's stated goal of 1 million electrified vehicles (including advanced hybrids) on the road by 2015.
But even some avid electric-car fans say they aren't all that surprised at muted mainstream interest in the initial models of electrics. "I think the public is just not really ready for them — and I don't think (the cars) are ready for the public," says Art Spinella, an electric-car fan who is president of CNW Research, a tracker of auto-sales trends.
The high-tech Volt, for instance, had narrow interest from car buyers overall, even before the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's probe into battery fires began last month.
About 1% of general consumers said in a July CNW survey that they were willing to consider buying a Volt, a figure that fell to 0.6% this month after reports of the safety probe. Among those in the market immediately for a new car, Volt interest fell from 4.3% to 2.1% over the same period.
GM had hoped to sell 10,000 Volts by the end of this year but now acknowledges it will fall short. Just 6,142 Volts had been sold through November, according to Autodata.
Nissan has sold 8,720 Leaf electric sedans through last month, and the company has said it is satisfied with first-year results that were hampered by early delivery problems that since appear ironed out.
But the combined sales of those two models represent just 0.1% of the 11.5 million new car and truck sales in the U.S. through November. While Nissan and Chevrolet were delivering limited numbers of their shiny new electrics, Toyota sold almost 120,000 of its 50 miles-per-gallon Prius gas-electric hybrids, despite the March tsunami in Japan that disrupted production.
Electric-car enthusiasts believe their day will come. "Just like when the car arrived to take on the horse, it was not an instant win," says Chris Paine, a Volt driver and director of the documentary Revenge of the Electric Car, which had its debut earlier this year. "This stuff takes a long time to shift."
