Posted: 2008-04-04 23:57 End of the car?  Presenter: Erika van der Merwe Guest(s): Peet du Plooy - Click here to listen to the interview Summit TV speaks to Peet du Plooy from the South African branch of the World Wildlife fund about the next generation of cars that might spell the end of the traditional “gas guzzler” we’ve become so fond of ERIKA VAN DER MERWE: My guest this evening is Peet du Plooy from the World Wildlife Fund in South Africa that globally launched a research document yesterday called “Plugged in - the End of the Oil Age.” Sounds rather exciting, rather prophetic, and as I understand it really looks at alternatives to oil based fuels for motor vehicles. PEET DU PLOOY: Yes, absolutely. I think we are in quite a crunch time when it comes to oil at the moment and one of the observations that we report is that the transport sector more than any other sector, is reliant almost solely on one single resource oil - 95% of transport uses oil to run and that has all sorts of risks associated with it. Prices are increasing and except for oil companies, it is not very good news and there’s also global geopolitical risk around oil. So looking for alternatives to oil I think is becoming an increasingly important imperative. ERIKA VAN DER MERWE: If you think about how old the motor vehicle is as we understand it, the kind that uses oil as its basic fuel, why has it taken so long for people to start thinking seriously about alternatives? PEET DU PLOOY: I think that the pressure is only coming on today in terms of the oil price certainly. The alternatives have been around for a long time. Biofuel for example - some of the earliest cars ran on peanut oil. So that’s not really new technology and similarly one of the technologies that we really feel would make a difference, electrically of course have been around the 1900s. In fact in 1900 there were more electrical vehicles than petrol or diesel powered vehicles around and we are seeing a shift back to these technologies of late because of the oil price pressures. ERIKA VAN DER MERWE: I know up to now those have been the butt end of a job because the performance has been poor. Why should we even be interested in an electrical car? PEET DU PLOOY: When you say performance is poor there’s a South African entrepreneur active in the US and they’ve developed a production electric vehicle that runs on 1,600 cellphone batteries and does 0 to 100 in four seconds. It really is quite amazing - the performance from electrical vehicles is far from the issue. What has been an issue is the cost of battery technologies. Now what we have seen lately is batteries have become cheaper partly because of development being done in the ICT industry - cellphone and laptop batteries would use the same lithium technology that cars would ideally use and that’s become cheaper over time. Quite the reverse trend from what we have seen with fossil fuels. I think that is one of spurs that is making it increasingly economically viable to switch to this greener option. ERIKA VAN DER MERWE: How far are we from seeing a car like this on our showrooms? PEET DU PLOOY: In South Africa I can tell you that’s probably about two years from now. There is a South African company called Optimal Energy in Cape Town. They have been started by government funding from the innovation fund and they are looking to go into production in 2010. Still a limited production but one is seeing electric versions or hybrid cars by the major manufacturers around the world. Developing nations like India and China are also playing quite a big role in terms - that they have brought out their own models of electric vehicles and are looking to expand this business. Battery companies in China are buying vehicle companies in order to push into this new market for example. ERIKA VAN DER MERWE: What has been the response so far from South African policy makers to this notion of a shift to alternatives like electrical vehicles? PEET DU PLOOY: Incredulity I think perhaps at first - one of the problems with the technology is that it does seem a bit science fiction and certainly the examples around the world are demonstrating that it is not. There is definite awareness-raising to be done but this is indeed a feasible technology when one looks at the costs overall - an electric vehicle itself need cost no more than a petrol powered vehicle. You can think of a much simpler engine, a simple electric motor as opposed to something with sparkplugs and with all sorts of components that need regular maintenance. Electric vehicles cost one tenth of the price to run over time. It’s only the batteries that cost a bit extra and because of the oil price pressure, the fact that electricity can be generated locally and oil has mostly for most countries to be imported that is a very good reason for national policy makers, for the sake of the economy to look at these options. ERIKA VAN DER MERWE: Can you give us some numbers? I’m sure you’ve got some numbers up your sleeve, and what this would mean for South Africa in terms of savings if we shifted away from oil for fuel... PEET DU PLOOY: The big thing about electric vehicles is it’s a much more efficient way to use energy than the traditional internal combustion engine - which is really quite a simple and inefficient machine where at least three-quarters of the energy that goes in is gets wasted through the exhaust pipe. In contrast if one were to turn coal into electricity and then power coal with that electricity - compared to turning the coal into liquid fuel through the coal-to-liquid process that we have in South Africa - the electric car would go three times further with the same amount of coal so it’s a way to use the same resource more efficiently and over time as we see more renewable energy technologies come into the energy mix or the electricity mix, and we also have the advantage of fewer emissions from for example nuclear that filters through to the net green house gas consumption in the production of electric vehicles. www.summit.co.za Transcripts: onsub1@avusa.co.za cw/ds Comments Related to this transcript: Comment on this transcript... Name : Email : Comments :