As automakers tout non-combustion cars, batteries remain a problem - By Ulrike Fokken

Gulf emirate Abu Dhabi has taken a 9 percent stake in luxury carmaker Daimler - to help build better electric cars. But the technology is not up to the task. Just try driving an electric RV over a mountain pass.

Ex Oriente Lux" - long before their Christianization, Europeans knew that light comes from the East. And as of this spring, state-affiliated investor Aabar from Abu Dhabi has illuminated the gloom hanging over Germany's carmakers.

Alongside Kuwait, Aabar is the Mercedes manufacturer's second major Arab shareholder. To the astonishment of the German public, the Abu Dhabi fund announced it wants the money to help drive the electric car forward into series production.

Light or, more accurately, electricity has become the automaker's great hope. The market for new cars in Western Europe has long been saturated and the economic downturn has made clear that buyers are much more interested in small, fuel-saving cars than big gas-guzzlers.

At the moment, Daimler and its biggest German competitor BMW have little to offer in the compact segment. But just like their French and Japanese competitors, they both aim to provide reduced-emission, low consumption, and climate-friendly cars to their clientele soon. And they don't care if that means filling the "third car that runs on electricity" niche.

To be a trailblazer at least in marketing, BMW put batteries and electric motors into the back seats and trunks of 500 Minis and sent the test vehicles onto the streets of New York and Berlin. In the German capital, the Bavarian automaker is collaborating with Vattenfall, a Swedish-based utility.

Vattenfall Europe has developed charging stations so that electro-Mini drivers can charge their batteries in their own garages or at work. When electro-Minis are driven without headlights, windshield wipers and heating, they have a 200-kilometer cruising range. The practical feasibility of the electric cars has not been evaluated yet.

Daimler equipped 100 Smart test cars with batteries and let them loose in London. They underscore the fact that fully electric cars are still just a gimmick. Today's battery technology is far from fulfilling the hopes of drivers and the promises of car company managers and politicians who envision a million electric cars on Germany's roads within 10 years.

The lithium-ion batteries in Smarts have a modest output of 30 kilowatt hour, which gives drivers a maximum range of 100 kilometers. Even with the best technology, batteries have only 1 percent of the energy density of gasoline or diesel fuel. In other words, the cruising range of existing all-electric cars is the same as a car with an internal combustion engine and a five-liter tank.

Even hybrid vehicles - cars with combustion engines and supporting electric engines with batteries, like the world leader Toyota Prius - can cover little more than two kilometers when relying exclusively on their electric power trains. The good old gasoline engine takes care of the rest.

Batteries are expensive as well: one kilowatt hour for an electric power train costs ?1,000. In Daimler's two-seater, the battery alone is worth ?30,000. By no means a competitive price - it exceeds the cost of the entire car.

From Daimler and BMW to VW, Renault and Toyota: all automakers face the problem of costs. Around the globe, they are working to cut the cost per kilowatt to between ?300 and ?400 at least. The goal is a battery that costs no more than ?12,000.

To achieve this, German electronics, chemicals and automotive companies such as Bosch, Evonik, BASF and Daimler got together in March to move battery technology forward with ?500 million in federal research funds.

At present, the companies prefer the lithium-ion batteries successfully used to power mobile telephones and laptops. However, these are not designed to move almost a ton of metal, electronics and man-made materials.

They would have to weigh a good 200 kilograms to generate the 30 kilowatt output required, which equals 41 horsepower. And as every laptop owner knows, lithium-ion batteries discharge automatically and the older they are, the worse they perform.

Also decisive for car applications: lithium-ion batteries are temperature sensitive and have to be cooled when the temperature is high and heated when it goes below freezing. They discharge automatically when the car is not moving, just to protect themselves.

To solve the storage technology problem and a myriad of additional ones, Daimler acquired 49 percent of battery company Li-Tec and, with Li-Tec's parent company Evonik, established Deutsche Accumotive GmbH.

Until now, nobody has explained where the required supply of lithium will come from. The prized commodity is found in significant quantities in Bolivia, Tibet and the Atacama Desert in Chile, which means it is difficult to extract. But Axel Friedrich, a former transportation analyst at the German Federal Environmental Agency, calculated that even if the deposits were completely exploited, they would only meet one-fourth of forecast demand.

Technology leader Li-Tec has now optimized the battery to the point that 1000,000 electric cars should be equipped with it by 2016. "But that battery still won't put an RV over the Alps," said an Evonik manager.

That means that German car executives' favorites - SUVs and big, two-ton sedans - are not viable as 100-percent electric cars. Analysts give them a slim chance of survival and only during the transition phase, so car manufacturers and their industrial allies will have to think some more about mobility in the future.

One thing is certain: The automakers' current credo of "bigger, faster, more luxurious" has no place in the era of electric motors. When the age of personal electro-mobility dawns, companies will have to build small, light cars with no emissions that move people and goods in urban areas.

The industry is hoping for government support during its drive to get German car companies to embrace "small is beautiful" electric cars. One car manager suggested reducing vehicle traffic in inner cities and staking out eco-zones where drivers would have to pay expensive tolls for their combustion engines. Electric cars would get a free ride.

Why utilities want electric cars

Consulting company McKinsey accuses automakers of "pure marketing" but that interpretation of the welcome German auto dealerships are giving electric cars misses the point. Oil-producing countries are pumping billions into carmakers to safeguard the post-fossil-fuel era - as are utilities.

For these companies, electric cars are both outstanding electricity consumers and mobile mini-accumulators that can store excess wattage and release it as required. German energy companies have had a problem since the government started subsidizing power generation from wind, sunlight and other renewable sources. In low consumption periods such as the middle of the night or on weekends, there is too much electricity in the grid when strong winds make the turbines rotate.

According to the law, energy providers have to give priority to renewable energy in the electricity network. Also, they cannot cut output of nuclear and coal-fired power plants as needed to compensate for the excess electricity. Because they cannot store the power being produced, they are desperately seeking consumers.

If a few million electric cars stored the excess electricity and put it back into the network in high consumption periods, the utilities' storage problem would be solved.