Futuristic electric vehicles like the Chevrolet Volt and the Nissan Leaf seem to herald bright days ahead for the auto industry, but a leading expert on EVs says the technology is fraught with limitations that could hamper its growth in the early going.

As such, President Barack Obama’s goal of having 1 million EVs on the road by 2015 is probably unrealistic, says Brett Smith, the co-director of the Manufacturing, Engineering and Technology Group at Ann Arbor’s Center for Automotive Research.

“If battery technology over the next three to five years develops, you’re going to miss your 1 million by 2015 (goal), but you may see some growth after that,” Smith said. “To get to the president’s goal is very difficult.”

Brett Smith

AnnArbor.com recently spoke with Smith about the early verdict on electric vehicles.

The Chevrolet Volt

Courtesy photo

AnnArbor.com: It seems like the pieces are in place for electric vehicles. Oil prices are rising, there is geopolitical instability in oil-producing countries, higher CAFE standards for fuel economy, yet fuel economy actually slipped last year. What gives?

Smith: There are a lot of factors that go into a person’s decision to buy a vehicle. Certainly one of them is cost. Battery-electric vehicles or plug-in hybrid electric vehicles are still extremely costly compared to their gasoline counterparts, or even the hybrid-electric counterparts.

Yes, we have several new electric vehicle — battery-electric vehicles or plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, or GM’s extended-range vehicles, the Volt — on the market. Those are truly early models, early in the development phase. They’re not proof-of-concept models, but in many ways for the market they are. The first time the mass market is seeing battery-electric vehicles. The mass market now sees what they can and can’t do.

What do you think needs to happen to make EVs find broader marketplace acceptance? It seems like a chicken or egg thing with costs.

The payback period for a battery-electric vehicle or a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle is going to be a pretty long period of time — years of payback for a consumer — for the foreseeable future. The next biggest challenge for the electric vehicle is two-part. It’s the overall performance, it’s the ability to drive as far as you want to when you want to and fill up quickly when you want, and the battery electric cannot do either of those. They’re very range-limited and it takes quite a long time to recharge them. And the faster you recharge them, curiously enough, in many cases the more damage you do to your battery.

So there are huge technical hurdles in becoming mainstream. That doesn’t mean they aren’t very good niche products for specific applications, they’re wonderful for that and will be for the foreseeable future, but it’s a pretty small niche.

Through February, GM had sold about 600 Chevy Volts and Nissan had sold about 150 Leafs. Do you think those are disappointing figures?

I think they’re very realistic. You have a couple of things. We’ve had battery-electric vehicles for a hundred-and-some years but it’s truly first-generation technology on the market. And it’s very risky technology in a lot of ways.

The Nissan Leaf

Courtesy photo

Both the Leaf and the Volt are different takes on technology, but they’re still huge leaps in terms of what the consumer is used to. Both companies are managing very carefully the selling part of the deal, very slow start-up to the manufacturing of the batteries and everything.

But then on the other side, the delivery side, it’s a very careful, very cautious delivery to the consumer, understanding that most of those consumers have probably never driven a battery-electric vehicle or never owned one, most of those consumers don’t have the charging infrastructure in their house.

GM, Nissan and all the companies offering battery electrics, they’re holding the consumer’s hand, as they get to the point that they can get the charging apparatus installed if they need one, understanding what options are with the utility and all kinds of things they’ve never done.

You mentioned charging infrastructure. How important is that going to be to build out and scale up to popularizing electric vehicles?

I think it’s a different take for the battery-electric vehicle and for the plug-in hybrid and range extender.

When you hear General Motors talk about a charging infrastructure, they really draw a pyramid where you see the core, the main charging infrastructure for the product they believe is in the home. Everyone that has one would likely have a charging station or access to electricity in their home. The next step for them in terms of importance is for the companies, businesses, offices, the work environments to place them, because people will park their car for six to eight hours at work. The third and by far the least important is public charging stations at library parking lots, public charging stations at malls where people will spend an hour or so, where you really don’t get that much charge.

With a battery electric, that’s a little bit different. Volt, remember, if it runs out of electricity, it can drive home. The battery electric can’t. Nissan or Tesla or others put a lot more emphasis on the build-out of the charging infrastructure, and I think then the discussion comes down to, is it a fast charge? A medium charge, 240 (volt) charge? Or is it the basic 110 charge? And then how do you put that in place and how expensive is it?

One of the old stories that you hear from California from the ‘90s when they had this push with a little older technology is you’d go to a shopping mall and there would be three or four or five or six electric charging stations all empty with the front row right up by the front of the store, and nobody would park in them because nobody had the cars. And people started to get a little angry about that. How do you prevent that from happening while still making sure there’s enough charging for the vehicles that are on the road today or tomorrow, but not worry about 10 years from now?

Michigan has been a prime beneficiary of federal spending to promote advanced battery and electric vehicle manufacturing. Do you worry we may be setting ourselves up for overcapacity problems?

With every new technology, there is a bubble. Every technology you can look back on there’s been an investment bubble. That is inevitable and in many ways it’s good. It leads to more technology development, more competition, more challenge to develop the best product.

But inevitably there comes a time when the winners and losers are decided. And that will likely happen to some extent in this industry. Better to have the winners and the losers than just the losers.

It seems like there really is kind of an awkward balance between, on the one hand, massive investment in electric vehicles, a lot of it publicly financed, and halting initial sales on the other. What gives first?

The biggest concern that I have had over the last couple of years as I have watched this is understanding that there is some wonderful technology out there. Some of the companies in Michigan and elsewhere have developed some wonderful technology. Yet the public perception driven partly by the administration, in part by those that want to believe in the electric vehicle and in part by the car companies, is that the technology is ready for the mass market prime time now.

We see GM and we see Nissan with electric vehicles on the road, or extended-range electric vehicles, and consumers led to believe, hey, they’re here. Why aren’t all of them electric? That has been kind of a three-pronged public relations push.

I think that the truth is that there is some real neat technology out there, some real fascinating stuff. But it’s very early stages of a long, long, long technology development path that may take 10, 15 or 20 or more years. And it may happen sooner than that, but not likely. That’s where we run into the situation where the investment bubble in many ways got ahead of the market. And the challenge is trying to figure out the winners and the losers and making sure those companies with the good technology make it to the market.

Contact Sven Gustafson at sventg123@gmail.com, or follow him at twitter.com/sveng.