Some good friends and I have been having a debate over plug-in electric cars vs. cars powered by fuel cells. They are both electric cars, which are likely the future. The difference is their source of power. Here is the bottom line for me:
Yes, Tesla is a superior technology to any other electric car on the road today. Their approach to using a pack of more than 8,000 lithium-ion batteries with computer controlled fail-over instead of one big battery like the Chevy Volt should make GM very ashamed of themselves. Elon Musk and his team are true innovators. But not all innovations succeed.
Let me give you an example...
15 years ago I was a big proponent of RFID, because it promised much more convenience than bar codes.
Theoretically, instead of having to scan each item in a shopping cart, you could just push the cart through an RFID gateway and everything would total up automatically. I worked with Microsoft and SAP to build some really compelling RFID demos in 1999.
At the time, I thought: sure RFID cost more than bar codes, but their obvious advantage in convenience would eventually drive prices down.
Here is the problem: RFID signals can easily be blocked by liquids and metals. So, you fill up a grocery cart and then throw in a couple gallons of milk and six packs of Pepsi and all of the sudden the cashier still has to scan every item. So the convenience never materialized and therefore prices never became as cheap as bar codes.
RFID has had some success in limited scenarios, like tracking pallets in warehouses, but 15 years later it has completely failed to displace bar codes in large retail scenarios because of the technology limitations.
Plug-in electric cars may be the new RFID -- the technology hype of the moment, but their inability to keep people on the road without long recharging stops will likely doom them in the market.
Yes, for many uses they could work. But people like / need to take road trips too. Does that mean that everyone will need two cars with completely different technologies -- one for short haul and one for long haul??? That is not reasonable and such an environment will keep prices high for both technologies.
As someone who grew up with the auto industry in Detroit and whose father owned an auto repair shop, I've been following all of this for several years. I'm still betting on fuel cells. The physics of fuel cells work -- the technology just needs some improvement to drive costs down. The physics just doesn't seem to work with batteries as a long term solution to transportation.
Of course I could be wrong and I've been wrong many times in the past. :) But right now, I'm pretty sure. So, we'll see...
