This post is an unabashed and enthusiastic “plug” for the Volta Foundation, which bills itself as “the world’s largest network of battery professionals.” Since I have no idea how big the other networks of battery professionals are, I will accept that claim at face value. Regardless, Volta is a spectacular resource for anyone with any interest in batteries, and in the context of this blog, that would mean EV batteries. Every year Volta produces a very large, very authoritative, and very thorough report on the state of the battery industry in the world, and of course that means a large and useful chapter on EVs. If you are not reading this report you are depriving yourself of an immense amount of data and insight.
And it’s all free, all 518 pages of it. I donated to Volta when I grabbed this latest version (just made available for download a few days ago), and I encourage you to do so as well, but you do not have to pay a cent if you don’t want to. And you get more than 500 charts, actually, because the most pages contain extensive links to more sources and more data.
Just as an illustration of what Volta shows you, and because this wouldn’t be Car Charts without a … car chart, here’s one, on the revival of EREVs:
BEV purists will blanche at this chart and the trend it reveals, but while I do indeed think that BEVs will become the dominant power train over the long run (don’t ask me for a specific date or market share forecast), I have no objection -and even enthusiasm for - any and all bridging technologies that help customers cross the gap between ICE and BEV. (Disclosure: our household owns both a BEV and a PHEV.) “Horses for courses,” as they say.
But, while I am happy with customers having powertrain options, I am not happy with the alphabet soup of electrified-vehicle terminology that we are faced with as a result. My own list (and there are certainly abbreviations1 I have missed) includes LEV, ULEV, SULEV, PZEV, TZEV, HEV, PHEV, BEV, EV, ZEV2, REEV, EREV, and MHEV. I do believe that this proliferated and confusing terminology only serves to, at the margin, dampen demand for vehicle electrification generally. For example, I once had a long discussion with a person who had a BMW i3, with the range extender gasoline engine (which, to add to the confusion, BMW called a REX). She swore she had never owned “a hybrid” and never would (she seemed to mean by “hybrid” a Prius.) And she had some authority on her side, since the Feds (EPA, e.g.) called this car a PHEV (plug-in electric vehicle), while the Californians (CARB) called it… wait for it… a BEVx. BEV with range extender. As described by one source, this is “a battery-electric vehicle with a small “limp-home” range extending engine or APU (auxiliary power unit).” Sigh. Yeah, that’s gonna be a winner of an advertising tag line: “And hey, if the battery dies, you can limp home!” (Not sure how the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) would respond to that phrasing!)
I think I wandered off topic. This has never happened before….
Anyway, go look at the Volta Foundation report, you’ll be glad you did.
Pedant Point: these are mostly abbreviations, dear readers, not acronyms. To revisit the difference: an abbreviation is any shortened or contracted form of a word or phrase. An acronym is a type of abbreviation formed from the first letters of a multi-word name or phrase, with those letters pronounced together as one term. Thus “dept.” is an abbreviation for “department,” while “OPEC” is an acronym for the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, because it is pronounced as one word, “oh-peck.” In sum, all acronyms are abbreviations, but not all abbreviations are acronyms! Some of my list above count as acronyms, I guess, since I have heard EREV pronounced as “ee-rev,” for example. Okay, back to our regularly-scheduled programming.
To be completist, ZEV would also include the sub-category of FCEV (or FCV), fuel cell electric vehicles, which many people would call a form of EV, since the final drive is electric, but others (notably Elon Musk) would assert are a separate category, because the fuel is from a tank of hydrogen, not from an electrical outlet.