from The Wall Street Journal
The Obama administration plans to direct the EPA and the Department of Transportation to jointly raise fuel economy standards and reduce greenhouse gas pollution so as to raise the overall fuel economy of automobiles to 35 miles per gallon by 2016, four years faster than federal law requires, people familiar with the matter said Monday.
http://wsj.com/#mod=djemalertNEWS
FD: I noticed that the Chinese Car Manufacturer BYD... "Build Your Dream" is planning to land their first boat loads of fully electric cars by
Warren Buffett takes charge
Warren Buffett hasn't just seen the car of the future, he's sitting in the driver's seat. Why he's banking on an obscure Chinese electric car company and a CEO who - no joke - drinks his own battery fluid.
Warren Buffett with BYD's E6.
The car came straight to Omaha from the Detroit auto show.
BYD CEO Wang Chuan-Fu figured out how to make cheaper batteries than the Japanese by replacing machines with migrant workers.
FD: This is a great article... and long,
so click below and come along for the ride!
http://money.cnn.com/2009/04/13/technology/gunther_electric.fortune/
(Fortune Magazine) -- Warren Buffett is famous for his rules of investing: When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is usually the reputation of the business that remains intact. You should invest in a business that even a fool can run, because someday a fool will. And perhaps most famously, Never invest in a business you cannot understand.
So when Buffett's friend and longtime partner in Berkshire Hathaway (BRKB), Charlie Munger, suggested early last year that they invest in BYD, an obscure Chinese battery, mobile phone, and electric car company, one might have predicted Buffett would cite rule No. 3 above. He is, after all, a man who shunned the booming U.S. tech industry during the 1990s.
But Buffett, who is 78, was intrigued by Munger's description of the entrepreneur behind BYD, a man named Wang Chuan-Fu, whom he had met through a mutual friend. "This guy," Munger tells Fortune, "is a combination of Thomas Edison and Jack Welch - something like Edison in solving technical problems, and something like Welch in getting done what he needs to do. I have never seen anything like it."
==================================================================
When David Sokol toured BYD's operations last summer, Wang took him to a battery factory and explained that BYD wants to make its batteries 100% recyclable. To that end, the company has developed a nontoxic electrolyte fluid. To underscore the point, Wang poured battery fluid into a glass and drank it. "Doesn't taste good," he said, making a face and offering a sip to Sokol.
Sokol declined politely. But he got the message. "His focus there was that if we're going to help solve environmental problems, we can't create new environmental problems with our technology," Sokol says.
=====================================
Even before visiting BYD, Sokol believed in electric cars. His people at MidAmerican have studied clean technologies like batteries and wind power for years because of the threat of climate change. One way or another, Sokol says, energy companies will need to produce more energy while emitting less carbon dioxide.
Electric cars will be one answer. They generate fewer greenhouse gas emissions than cars that burn gasoline, and they have lower fuel costs, even when oil is cheap. That's because electric engines are more efficient than internal-combustion engines, and because generating energy on a large scale (in coal or nuclear plants) is less wasteful than doing it on a small scale (by burning gasoline in an internal-combustion engine).
The numbers look something like this: Assume you drive 12,000 miles a year, gas costs $2 a gallon, and electricity is priced at 12¢ per kilowatt, about what most Americans pay. A gasoline-powered car that gets 20 miles to the gallon - say, a Chevy Impala or a BMW X3 - will have annual fuel costs of $1,200 and generate about 6.6 tons of carbon dioxide. Equip those cars with electric motors, and fuel costs drop to $400 a year and emissions are reduced to about 1.5 tons.
The big problem is that they are expensive to make, and the single largest cost is the battery. Manufacturing a safe, reliable, long-lasting, and fast-charging battery for a car is a complex and costly undertaking. BYD claims to have achieved a breakthrough with its lithium ion ferrous phosphate technology, but no one can be sure whether it will work as promised.
Skeptics say that BYD's battery cannot be both more powerful and cheaper than those made by competitors, and the U.S. Department of Energy has purchased an F3DM to take the battery apart. Chitra Gopal, an analyst with Nomura Securities in Singapore who follows the company closely, says BYD is betting on "entirely new technology, and the ability to produce it at scale and at a low cost remains unproven." William Moore, publisher and editor-in-chief of EV World, an electric car website, says, "They need to persuade people that they are selling a reliable, durable, quality automobile." Even BYD's admirers say the fit and finish of the company's cars leave much to be desired. "Their cars are way behind Toyota, for sure," Sokol admits. BYD currently exports gasoline-powered cars to Africa, South America, and the Middle East, but they compete on price, not quality
No comments:
Post a Comment