Using taxis in its Tokyo electric vehicle trial has provided six years of valuable experience in just six months, Better Place says.
Tokyo’s 60,000 hard-working taxis, and their unfailingly competent and polite drivers, endure long days busily ferrying people around the city.
Industry pioneer Better Place — which intends to establish battery swap and charging stations for electric vehicles in Israel, Denmark, Australia, Japan and the US — settled on cabs as the centrepiece of the Tokyo trial.
In the first three months, three converted electric taxis drove more than 40,000km and switched batteries more than 2100 times, taking less than a minute on average.
Better Place Japan president Kiyotaka Fujii said the trial impressed customers and drivers, and provided a wealth of “real world” data on the performance of the batteries, which are integral to the business.
“The battery needs to be baby-sat because it’s still a baby and we don’t know what it’s going to do,” Mr Fujii said.
“A taxi is a good way to find that out because it drives 10 times more than a regular car and that means you learn in a year about battery behaviour what would otherwise take you 10 years.”
Distance per battery per charge in the trial is about 50km-60km, which is taking drivers two to three hours.
“We would like to see that double,” Mr Fujii said in an interview with The Weekend Australian at the company’s Tokyo base.
“We can select batteries that state they can perform, but we have to see if they really do or not, and that’s the purpose of this whole exercise.
“We want to know when the performance goes down, when they shorten their lives.”
Yesterday Better Place began a three-month extension of the trial, which is being funded by the Japanese government and conducted with drivers from leading Tokyo cab company Nihon Kotsu.
“We are accumulating a lot of data from the batteries and how the electric vehicle behaves, and it would be nice to have the full data from April to the end of the year, which covers most of the seasons,” Mr Fujii said. In the second half of the trial, the taxis, which are sometimes needed for demonstrations, will increasingly undertake normal duties, providing better guidance on how many battery stations might be needed for commercial operations.
To compare the effect on battery performance and life, Better Place also plans to use one of the three cabs in a more conventional charging regime, in which an exhausted battery is recharged from the mains for 30-50 minutes instead of being swapped and charged at the depot.
It’s disruptive, “but we would like to see how the drivers feel, how the battery behaves and how it affects the whole operation”, Mr Fujii said.
For the trial, Better Place converted three conventionally powered Nissan Dualis hatchbacks.
Electric vehicles with a switchable battery are not being mass-produced yet, although various manufacturers are close to building models.
Renault has been confirmed as a supplier of vehicles suitable for Better Place’s Israel and Denmark operations scheduled to come on line at the end of next year.
The California company’s global plans, which include an Australian network beginning in Canberra, mainly focus on private cars.
But the Tokyo operation, which would feature perhaps 12 battery swap stations, may involve taxis initially. “We thought let’s find a segment where it makes sense economically without subsidy,” Mr Fujii said.
“The way the economics of the electric vehicle works is you invest a lot of money in the batteries and you try to recover that investment by arbitraging the difference in the electricity and gasoline price.
“So a taxi drives a very short difference in a very short time.
“Given the current prices it takes 10 years to break even, which means the taxi breaks even in a year. And I don’t think taxi companies would adopt electric vehicles in a massive way unless they could make money out of it.”
The company is confident battery technology is improving, and it aims to run relatively “lean”, with just one spare battery for every 10 cars.
The batteries, which are up to 20-30 per cent of the cost of a vehicle, are expected to last up to 2000 full charge cycles, or almost three years in a taxi. Mr Fujii says the batteries aren’t dead at the end of this period, as they retain up to 80 per cent of their charge, so they will have some resale value or use in storing power purchased off-peak.
Better Place hopes to use close to zero-emission energy by buying most of its power at night, largely from nuclear power plants.
Mr Fujii said the demonstration project, which aimed to prove the battery swap technology for global operations, had attracted interest from governments and visitors from around the world.
“If we can put this together as a business, we know there is huge pent-up demand,” he said.
So far the only victims of the trial have been Tokyo’s hapless pigeons. They are yet to adapt to the silent approach of an electric taxi and more than a few have given their lives to the cause of establishing a cleaner vehicle fleet for the Japanese capital.
