GETTING MOVING ELECTRICALLY

By William J. Clapp

Chairman, The Electric Vehicle Council

My name is William Clapp. I am Chairman of The Electric Vehicle Council and we want to welcome you to the First International Electric Vehicle Symposium.

We want to give a particular welcome to those who have come here from abroad. Among the countries represented are: England, Japan, Mexico, Columbia, India, Sweden, France, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Canada, Ireland, and Holland. If I have left any out, please forgive me.

We believe that this meeting will provide all of us with an opportunity to exchange experience and information, to renew acquaintances and make new friends, to bring new focus and enthusiasm to the development of electricity as a form of motive power, and to broaden our understanding of the future for electric transportation.

We represent a variety of interests here today:

Electric utilities
Vehicle manufacturers
Motor makers
Cable manufacturers
Battery manufacturers
Research organizations
Consulting engineers
Educators
Students
Investment bankers
Government

and many more. And all of us are interested in some aspect of electric transportation: Industrial vehicles, on-the-road vehicles, components, batteries, railroads, mass transit.

We hope that one of the results of this meeting will be that all of us have a better understanding of the fact that electric transportation can advance over a broad front, and that progress in one area can have a positive effect on the others.

The program outline for the next two and a half days is fairly simple. Today we will be together in general sessions, intended to bring us up to date on the state of the art in electric transportation and to present some directions for the future. The luncheon speaker today will be Norm Farsje, President of the Association of American Battery Manufacturers. I know his message will be of interest to us all.

This evening, there will be a reception at the poolside. We hope this informal occasion will provide an opportunity for fellowship and for discussion of the ideas presented during the general session.

Tomorrow, we will spend the day in technical sessions, and the luncheon speaker will be Colonel Norman Tomblin, Secretary of the Electric Vehicle Association of Great Britain. The experience and direction of Great Britain in electric vehicle development should be of great interest to all of us.

On Friday morning, we will hear from Japan, Ireland, and Great Britain. The details of course, can be found in your program. This will take place during general sessions so that we may all benefit from the comments of our visitors. Walter Lucking, Chairman of the Board of Arizona Public Service Company, will summarize what has taken place during the meeting.

The sessions will begin promptly, and we hope you will be on time for them. Whether the particular subject being discussed is golf carts, fork lift trucks, cars, busses, trains, rapid transit systems, or any of the other subjects on the agenda, we must bear in mind that, essentially, what we are talking about is transportation. In the sense I am using the word transportation means moving people and things from one place to another. It is that simple.

The most basic form of transportation is people. A man walking ... or carrying something.

The next stage in complexity is a man riding something ... or putting things on something that moves. That is really all that transportation amounts to: it is the process of getting people and goods from one place to another, either using human energy or some other form of energy to make the move.

When we talk about the possibilities for electric transportation we are giving attention to the whole spectrum of transportation jobs --big and small, indoors and outdoors. These jobs are being done today mostly by gasoline engines. The process of getting all these jobs done makes up our transportation system.

We are all concerned about air pollution, and we know internal combustion engines cause most of it.

At the same time, we see a growing concern over noise in our urban areas, and we can expect this concern to grow, too.

And yet we have available a form of energy that is clean, quiet, and that can be applied to almost every transportation task we have. Shouldn't we be doing more to put it to use?

There is a variety of battery-powered vehicles available for use today. They are clean, quiet, economical, fumeless, easy to use, and easy to maintain. From the point of view of the electric utilities, we know that electric industrial trucks use 9,000-10,000 kilowatt-hours of electric energy a year. That is about what a good residential customer uses in many parts of the country.

It is estimated that in 1967 the revenue produced by battery-powered electric industrial trucks in New York, Chicago and Detroit totalled about $3-1/2 million.

Do you blame us for trying to develop this market?

On a national basis, about a third of the industrial trucks in use in this country are electric. Two-thirds use gasoline engines. In England, the reverse is true. Two-thirds of the industrial trucks are electric, and twice as many electric industrial trucks as gasoline trucks are being produced each year.

There is no reason we should not be in the same position.

To help get the off-the-road electric vehicle market moving more rapidly in this country, the Electric Vehicle Council and The Lead Industries Association have employed a market research organization to define the market for electric industrial vehicles on an industry-by-industry basis. This work is underway, and we will hear a report on it later in the day. The identification of the market, in national terms, is the first phase of the program. Second, electric utility companies, or others, will be able to call on this marketing organization to translate its findings into specifics for a particular area. That is, a utility company will be able to identify the potential customers for industrial electric vehicles in its service area and work with manufacturers and dealers to sell the customers.

The value of expanding the industrial vehicle market and strengthening the manufacturers of these vehicles and their components can have an effect in advancing other segments of electric transportation.

In this country, the on-the-road electric vehicle market is virtually untapped. Because of our interest in going at high speeds over long distances on nonstop throughways, we have been giving most of our attention to development of high-energy-density batteries which will make it possible for electric cars to duplicate the performance of the cars we can buy from Detroit today. With this in mind, through Edison Electric Institute, our industry has committed $1.6 million toward the $3 million development of the zinc-air battery and individual companies and groups of companies have spent additional sums encouraging the development of other energy sources. The zinc-air work supported by EEI is progressing well and it is expected that a prototype van using this advanced battery will be ready for testing next year. One of the papers being presented tomorrow will be a progress report on this work. But we must not allow the potential of high-speed, long distance electric cars to distract us from the electric vehicles that we can sell right now and which we can help develop using available technology.

In Long Beach, California, there are about 1500 electric carts being driven on the streets. The input to these carts is about 1.7 kilowatts. Assuming only one hour a day use -- and that is surely low -- this would mean that the present on-the-road electric vehicle load for the utility serving Long Beach is about 2,500 kilowatt-hours a day or 812,500 kilowatt-hours a year.

In order to help get the on-the-road electric vehicle market moving, the Electric Vehicle Council has undertaken to develop specifications for an electric vehicle which electric utility companies might use in large numbers. We made a survey of some 100 electric utility companies in this country and found that they own and operate some 85,000 cars, trucks, vans, and other vehicles. About 30,000 of these vehicles travel 50 miles or less a day. This is well within the capabilities of technology available today.

Of the 30,000 low-mileage vehicles operated by these 100 companies, about 8,000 are service trucks, about 2,500 are cars driven by meter readers, the remainder are used for a variety of other purposes. During the next few months we intend to call on these utility companies and ask them to pledge to purchase a number of vehicles that will meet their requirements. We will take this package of tentative orders and specifications to a number of manufacturers and, in effect, ask for bids.

We expect that the number of vehicles being produced will be substantial enough to keep the cost per vehicle down. The vehicles will give us valuable experience in production and operation of electric vehicles -- and open the gates to larger production runs.

We invite anyone -- utility, industrial organization, or agency of government -- interested in joining with us in this activity to get in touch with us promptly. Obviously, the larger the number of vehicles in the package we put together, the more valuable this effort will be.

I might mention, by the way, that the same survey of 100 electric utility companies showed that only about 1/5th of the fork lift trucks now being used in the electric utility industry itself are now electric. Here is a place managements of electric utility companies can act to get moving electrically right now.

A third big area of transportation ready for immediate action is railroad electrification. Compared to other nations, we have fallen far behind here. Our friends in Japan and Europe are far ahead of us. Happily, however, there are signs in this country that the railroad's interest in electrification is reawakening. We will be hearing more about this during the railroad electrification session tomorrow.

Urban transit systems, and the transit systems needed around airports, form another immediate area for action. Application of electrification to transportation problems in our crowded cities could do much to ease traffic, and to improve the quality of urban life.

In addition, there is a host of ideas emerging from the drawing boards of planners, engineers and builders. Hybrid vehicles, using a combination of batteries and internal combustion or diesel engines, are a step in the direction we are aiming. Dual mode systems, which make it possible to have a personal vehicle that will also operate on an automatic system, are being planned. It is time that a demonstration of one of the many approaches to this kind of system was built somewhere in this country. This may be something that government and industry could work on together.

There are many activities The Electric Vehicle Council might undertake. It is a new organization and it is just beginning to find direction. We welcome your advice. We solicit your continued interest and support as we work toward getting transportation moving -- electrically.

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