It’s obviously a tumultuous time for Chrysler, writes John Voelcker. With two thirds of its US sales made up of trucks, light trucks, or crossovers—and insignificant volume outside the US compared to GM and Ford—it’s widely perceived as between a rock and a hard place. And despite statements that owner Cerberus Capital Management is in it for the long haul, bets are being laid as to when the private equity firm will have had enough.
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But hints that there’s more to the company than you see in the sales are starting to emerge. Statements over the past year from their ENVI advanced electric-drive group are pointing to a couple of different cars: a series hybrid (think Chevrolet Volt) and, surprisingly, an all-electric commuter car with a fairly limited range.
This year, Chrysler’s biggest launch is the redesigned 2009 Ram full-size pickup truck, its highest volume product at roughly 300,000 units. Of course, between the January reveal and the first trucks now heading for dealers, the US pickup truck market imploded. Some analysts say up to a third of pickup volume may be gone forever, as suburbanites dump quad-cab trucks and decide that a minivan or crossover will do just fine for family transport after all, thank you. Equally horrifying, its midsize cars—the Chrysler Sebring and Dodge Avenger, built on a platform shared with Mitsubishi—seem to be dead in the water, even as passenger cars gain overall share.
After a decade in Daimler’s pocket, Chrysler’s advanced powertrain strategy seemed to be diesels, diesels, and more diesels, all of them bought in from others—Cummins, Daimler, VM Motori, and Volkswagen. But today, diesel fuel in the States is pricier than petrol. With diesel passenger car share in low single digits, one of the scariest questions in the market is whether Yanks will in fact buy oil-burners in anything other than trucks.
Sure, Chrysler’s got the Two-Mode Hybrid it shares with GM, Daimler, and BMW. Hybrid versions of the Dodge Durango and Chrysler Aspen full-size SUVs are just now launching—but the appeal of a “Hybrid Hemi” (the company’s biggest, butchest, thirstiest V8) just ain’t what it used to be.
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By GlobalDataMeanwhile, Ford is readying a slew of European models for their US debuts: the new Fiesta, the next Focus, most likely the C-Max, S-Max, and Kuga. GM just showed off its 2011 Chevrolet Volt, the world’s first series hybrid, which will run 40 miles on electricity alone—less than a dollar’s worth, straight from the wall socket—plus 300 more miles from a petrol engine that recharges the battery. If it launches on time, it could leave the green-haloed Toyota Prius in its wake.
So what’s Chrysler to do in this new world? The first clues came at last January’s Detroit auto show. It unveiled a salvo of three concept cars, one per marque (Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep), all driven by electric motors. Each used a different mix from a common set of electric, hybrid, or fuel-cell building blocks that Chrysler said it was considering for future drivetrains. The luxurious, egg-shaped Chrysler ecoVoyager—for customers seeking “understated elegance and simplicity”—took the company’s Nineties cab-forward design into a whole new dimension. (Assembled journos judged it the best of the three designs.) It featured a fuel cell and lithium-ion batteries.
The two-seat, all-wheel-drive Jeep Renegade was for “stylish green off-roading,” with 40 miles of electric range, its batteries recharged thereafter by a small diesel. And the small, electric Dodge Zeo sport wagon, with a full 300-mile range, was aimed at drivers who value performance and “wind in the hair” speed—though its 64-kWh battery pack might run to 1600 pounds, in a vehicle with a quoted weight of 2800 lbs.
Chrysler’s ENVI demonstrates intent
The previous autumn, Chrysler announced the formation of a unit called ENVI—for the first four letters of “environmental”—that would focus entirely on electric-drive vehicles and technology. In a January interview with Lou Rhodes, its newly announced president, he said, “My mission is to bring the vehicles to production and make a viable business for Chrysler.”
ENVI’s research actually started years before, Rhodes said, when he was a director of advanced vehicle engineering. “The thesis of this idea started about two and a half, three years ago. Some of it leveraged and will continue to leverage Daimler and some of their technologies, but now we’re starting to shift to other suppliers,” he said. “The ENVI organization was created recently, but most of the key members have been involved from Day One.”
That January interview was largely limited to the concept cars. Rhodes gave away little beyond their specs to explain how they might translate into real products, with one exception. Asked about the notion of integrating the components of new powertrains—battery packs, electric drive, series hybrids, even fuel cells—into architectures also built to accommodate standard engines, he reacted sharply. “Sharing platforms? We don’t think that makes sense. You would have to design the platform for conventional power trains in addition to all these emerging technologies. You won’t really create an efficient application. We believe that end result is sort of the worst of all.”
In other words, Chrysler won’t adopt GM’s tactic of using a global platform for both the conventional Chevrolet Cruze and the extended-range EV Chevrolet Volt. “We are shifting to really focusing on the best vehicle architecture, the vehicle platform, the packaging, the materials,” Rhodes continued. “Some of those choices may be unique for electric drive, choices we wouldn’t make for some of our IC-engine vehicles.”
He did point out, though, that unique designs and architectures didn’t preclude shared production lines and intermingled assembly: “To be able to cross-load ENVI vehicles with our current conventional power train vehicles, our hybrids, is something on our radar screen.” That’s an ambitious goal if the concepts’ aluminium structures and reorganized packaging carries into production.
Lately, further hints have emerged about the company’s direction. Cole Quennell, the manager for ENVI and hybrid communications, spoke with Just-Auto last week about how Chrysler views the emerging electric-drive market.
The challenge going forward, he said, is the mix among increased regulation, the state of technology development, and consumer demand, which he characterized as “getting from Point A to Point B using as little fuel as possible.” Although, he added, that has to happen at a reasonable cost. The mix differs among markets, of course, but Chrysler is focusing first on North America.
ENVI, Quennell said, is looking at two primary formats. First are pure electrics, for which a reasonable range might start at 40 miles. “If you can expand that for commuting,” he said, “you’ve met the need of a huge population, with a gas cost of zero and much less maintenance.” The likely audience for these battery electric vehicles (BEVs) might be drivers who want to do something for the environment, and are comfortable with the limited range.
‘Range anxiety’ drives REEVs…
The second technology is range-extended electric vehicles, or REEVs. (GM calls its Volt an E-REV, for extended-range electric vehicle, but never mind.) Here, as in the Volt, a small IC engine hooked to a generator would recharge the battery and drive the wheels after the electric range was exhausted. This approach he assigned to “regular passenger vehicles” where buyers expect today’s range of 300 miles or more. In July, the company confirmed that it was indeed working on a plug-in hybrid, though it gave no more details.
It’s that first alternative that’s the interesting one, though. From Toyota’s initial Prius, and even more so the second one, successful vehicles with alternative powertrains have been built to do pretty much everything that regular cars do. That’s the tack GM is taking with the Volt, based on the concept of “range anxiety” as a huge barrier to customer acceptance. As Volt chief engineer Andrew Farah recently told TIME magazine, “With past electrics, people had to change the way they lived; I want a vehicle that doesn’t ask them to change at all.”
Conversely, neither commuter vehicles nor two-seaters find many buyers in the States. Two-seat sports cars get less than 1 percent of the market (even the Mazda RX-8 and Porsche 911 have rear seats, for any friends or children who happen to be double amputees). Pontiac said it was trying to make a sporty commute vehicle when it launched the Fiero mid-engine two-seater in 1984, though its wedgy styling and dodgy mechanicals didn’t exactly lure buyers. It was killed in 1988, just months after a widely lauded restyle.
On the more esoteric end, GM’s now-legendary EV1—for all its virtues and advanced engineering—had two seats and a range of just 40 to 70 miles from its 1997 lead-acid battery pack. (A nickel-metal-hydride pack fitted to the 1999 batch raised that to 160 miles.) And its first Insight taught Honda the same lesson at the same time: While 70 miles per gallon is a wonderful thing, very few US buyers are willing to accept a tiny, rough-riding two-seater to get it. The new Insight hybrid—like the Prius and Volt—is a conventional five-door hatch that just happens to have hybrid bits.
…but BEVs work for commuters
While Quinnell didn’t address how many seats might be in a Chrysler BEV commuter car, he dealt swiftly with the notion of range anxiety. Electric vehicles, he said, would be “desired by the customer who knows his commute, and his deviation from that, up front—the kind of customer who makes lists of things to do on the way home.” He might as well have cited GM data showing that 78 percent of US drivers travel less than 40 miles a day. “For the people where it’s an issue,” he said, “they’re not a potential BEV customer. If you’re at all worried, there’ll be lots of other options.” You could almost hear the man brushing off his hands.
As always, this will all start modestly. “Most of these technologies would be introduced at fairly low volumes,“ said Rhodes in January, “in the range of a thousand to 10 thousand vehicles.” So what’s the timeframe? For pure EV sales, “we see a start in 3 to 5 years,” Quinnell said. “It’ll be small numbers at first, but it’ll ramp faster than hybrids have, driven by regulatory concerns.” Without citing numbers, Quinnell said that Chrysler thinks the number of BEVs on the road in five years will be higher than those projected by others.
The kicker in all this is Global Electric Motors LLC, or GEM, located in Fargo, North Dakota. Founded in 1998, it sells 90% of the neighborhood electric vehicles (NEVs) in the US. These are a subset of “low-speed vehicles,” a new vehicle type (established the same year by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) that roughly equates to quadricycles. NEVs have four wheels, a top speed of 25 mph, and weigh less than 3,000 pounds. They also have four-wheel brakes, lights, signals, safety glass, wipers, mirrors, and safety belts. And they’re now road-legal and licensable in 40 of 50 states, where they are largely limited to 35 mph.
Of the 50,000 NEVs built globally to date, 72% have been sold in the States. Some retirement communities in temperate climes include secondary path systems just for NEVs, which in many cases resemble glorified golf carts. Now more than half GEM’s sales go to fleets and commercial customers, for use in parks, warehouses, and the like, but there’s quite a civilian user base nonetheless.
Almost all GEMs use conventional lead-acid batteries, giving them a range that tops out at 30 miles. “We have a pricey nickel-metal-hybride pack” as an option, said GEM CEO Larry Oswald earlier this year, “but we haven’t sold many.” Given their speed and range limitations, the current vehicles seem to meet their users’ needs just fine.
Where does GEM play into all this? Well, as it happens, it’s 100% owned by Chrysler LLC. GEMs are currently sold through a subset of the Chrysler dealer network, chosen from the company’s 3,000 outlets. It also has six independent dealers, including “our largest and most experienced,” according to Oswald. Having sold tens of thousands of electric vehicles, GEM knows quite a lot about what EV users like and want—and hence Chrysler does too.
Asked whether a Chrysler BEV would be a “real car” or a NEV, Quinnell was emphatic: It would be fully highway capable, complying with all NHTSA standards. A useful comparison might be the Th!nk City, due to go on sale in the States sometime next year.
With so much publicity focused on the very lengthy rollout of GM’s Volt, Chrysler is quietly beavering away in relative obscurity. They’re not talking, but how ironic would it be if they launched a car similar to the EV1 that GM abandoned five years ago—within months of the time the Volt is due to hit the market in 2011? As they say on radio, stay tuned for more.
John Voelcker
