Hoovey689

iTrader: (16)

The makers of the cars you see here were dragged kicking, screaming, and, in some cases, litigating into eligibility for this test. If truth were ever told, then these automakers would undoubtedly say that they’d rather not be here at all, thank you very much; that all of their accumulated business acumen and experience rages against the absurdity of a $37,000 Ford Focus with a 64-mile driving range.

Yet, here they are, with six compacts at similarly loony prices, and utility that amounts to, as senior online editor Ron Sessions says, “cars with one-gallon gas tanks that take five hours to fill.” Why do they even exist? Because government simply will not get off the industry’s back.

It started with a 1990 California mandate for automakers to sell electric vehicles there. Since then, the mandate has morphed—shocked into amendment by the realities of the marketplace, by the unpredictable march of technology, by a couple of lawsuits, and by furious negotiation. The mandate has spread, with seven Northeast states plus Oregon and Maryland also adopting California’s zero-emission-vehicle (ZEV) requirements.

The executive summary is that high-volume automakers must make ZEVs a growing percentage of their annual sales. Here’s a highly simplified example: Honda currently sells about 225,000 cars per year in California. In 2015, it has to sell 2250 EVs to meet the mandate. Assuming Honda’s annual sales volume stays the same, it would have to sell 22,000 EVs per year by 2025. Just in California. Add in the seven Northeast states currently signed on, which account for 40 percent of Honda’s total sales volume, and you’re looking at 80,000 Honda EV sales per year by 2025.

However, one thing you should know is that since lawsuits in 2002 by GM and other players, California has considerably altered the rule, expanding the definition of ZEVs and creating an elaborate system of vehicle rankings and carbon credits (Tesla does a good business selling its abundance of credits to other companies), which permits automakers to fulfill their ZEV requirement using a variety of means.

At the bottom and earning the fewest credits, or the “bronze” cars under California’s code, are extremely clean but conventionally powered gasoline cars. The “silver” and “silver-plus” vehicles are mostly hybrids and plug-in hybrids, while “gold” is bestowed on vehicles emitting absolutely zero tailpipe emissions, such as fuel-cell cars and the pure electrics you see here.


The fact is that automakers won’t see much gold from the golds, especially since most of these cars are available at heavily subsidized lease rates. And research shows more electric miles are being rolled up, car to car, by owners of plug-in hybrids than by pure EVs, which is not altering the industry’s current grim reality. Backed against a wall—though still pushing for changes—carmakers have begun rolling the assembly lines.

The result is our assortment of six small cars whose prices, only two of which begin under $30,000 before federal and state tax incentives, seem comical. And we haven’t even mentioned our logistical gymnastics to keep them charged

We staged the test in wintery-cold Lancaster, California, in the high Mojave Desert. The location was selected not for its scenery, climate, cuisine, or thriving hipster tech scene, but because it was close enough to our testing venue at the remote Hyundai proving grounds to be reached on a charge. We assembled only the most affordable electrics, excluding Tesla because its one vehicle is way expensive, and the Model S’s huge battery would have given it an unfair advantage. We asked Mitsubishi for an example of its electric car, the i-MiEV, but the company hadn’t yet received any updated-for-2014 models.

The government-mandated green initiative is here to stay, which is why we broke out the test gear. For better or worse, this collection of high-tech golds is the industry’s newest niche. We could only drive them about 100 miles over two days without risking a long walk, which gave us a lot of time to think. Here are the conclusions.

2013 Smart Fortwo ED Cabriolet
Sixth place: Field of Dreams.

The Smart’s last-place finish isn’t the result of some grudge against tiny vehicles, even ones that look like ***** Wonka’s car if ***** Wonka ran a Ukrainian cathouse. We totally buy the concept of the Smart, even applaud the former DaimlerChrysler for first putting it into production way back in 1998. We just don’t buy its execution. In striving so earnestly to be different, Smart forgot to make a good car.

The handling is just bizarre. The steering is epically slow, and it’s nearly impossible to take a clean line through a corner as the front and rear ends quibble over which way to go. From overhead, your path would look octagonal. Heading straight down a highway, your senses are prodded to confusion by strange side forces as the car stumbles over bumps and suddenly gets the wiggles for no obvious reason. The floor-mounted brake pedal is abrupt. Even if you never leave the city, where the Smart is designed to thrive, you’ll still live in fear of hard stops, hard rights, and curved on-ramps.

Some of its dynamic, er, shortcomings, plus the choppy ride, are simply inherent in a tall vehicle put on a 73.5-inch wheelbase. We can thus forgive the Smart for some of its eccentricities, especially since this is the only car offering a retracting softtop despite being the second-cheapest in the test.

Because it’s extremely light, at 2113 pounds, the Smart’s modest 17.6-kWh battery didn’t produce the shortest range. That dubious honor went to the Fit EV. The Smart also wasn’t as pokey as the Leaf or Focus, and it has no trouble pacing traffic—as long as traffic is moving slower than its governed 78-mph top speed.

However, what bugs us most is that in fulfilling its government requirement, Smart has phoned it in. While the other vehicles in the comparo show you through their navigation systems where to find the nearest charging stations, the Smart tells you where to find the nearest gas stations. The company didn’t even change that. The only info you get on energy consumption, range, and *battery state-of-charge is via some very rudimentary gauges on the dash and in the digital cluster. Compared with the others, it’s a bare effort, though you can at least program the charging time to take advantage of late-night utility rates.

The Smart looks like an electric car even when it’s not. If this is the de facto poster boy for the class, the class needs a new poster.

2013 Fiat 500E
Fifth place: Field of Dreams

Credit to Fiat for being the fun one. How Italian of the company, taking a government mandate and bouncing it back with orange-pinstriped wheels, body stripes, and a steering wheel trimmed in red leather. Shows you what Italians think of government edicts: It’s an excuse for a party, for sprezzatura!

Of course, a gasoline model converted to electric drive carries with it most of the donor car’s faults. The Fiat 500 was small inside before electrification, with just two cramped seats in back—two more than the Smart, at least—and a giant center console seemingly intended as a knee-knocker for the hapless driver, who has to struggle with the gorilla-like driving position. Arms out, legs splayed, ankles cocked. Naturally, the discomfort is more tolerable at $16,995, the price of the cheapest gas 500.

Fiat makes only a modestly greater effort than Smart to cater to the EV buyer. You start it as you would a ’78 Monte Carlo, by inserting the key and twisting it through a spring-loaded detent, which seems especially old fashioned in an electric (the Fit EV is the same). The drive selector’s push buttons, which are lonely and a terrible waste of space on that knee-banging console, offer no modes besides D. Others have sport, eco, L, or B modes that step up the motor’s response or the regenerative braking as desired.

The cluster is a bright multicolored info screen, but it’s an opportunity squandered. The data is limited to the bare essentials: battery life, a miles-to-go estimate, and power flow. There’s the usual trip odometer plus tire-pressure information, but the screen only shows you EV-related statistics, such as the estimated recharge time, in one shotgun blast at shutdown. And it appears only for a few seconds before going blank. We had to cycle the key several times to get all the numbers.

The 500e has no built-in nav screen. Instead, a rudimentary TomTom unit clicks into a hole on the dashtop, standing tall like a highway billboard and impeding your 1-o’clock forward vision. The TomTom will tell you where the nearest charging outlet is, but only after it’s synced to your phone via Bluetooth. Compared with the data-screen champ, the Leaf, it’s clunky and minimalist.

The Fiat drives well despite being about 500 pounds heavier than the comparable gasoline model. The extra tonnage improves the 500’s normally harsh ride, however, and it hangs in a corner, has fabulously firm brakes, and will easily spin an inside tire with its stout torque. The 500e was quickest through the slalom thanks to its racier Firestone tires, fast steering, and tight roll control. The largest battery, tied with the Leaf at 24.0 kWh, also produced the longest observed range if not the most frugal MPGe consumption figures.

2013 Nissan Leaf SL
Fourth place: Field of Dreams.

The only car here sold exclusively as an electric should ace this test, right? Nissan’s expensive and risky clean-sheet approach should give it no excuses for falling short of outright total domination. And indeed, the Leaf does a lot of things very well.

It and the Focus are the luxury cars of the test. They both deliver lots of interior space, a pillow-top ride, and the most amen*ities. Though there are less-expensive S and SV versions of the Leaf, all are equipped with heated seats both front and rear plus a heated steering wheel, which is nice when you’re trying to conserve range by not running the more energy-intensive cabin heater. However, Nissan neglected to install a telescoping steering column.

Except for a few too many pieces of hard interior plastic, everything about the Leaf is soft, from the cushy leather buckets to the way the steering and suspension respond to driver inputs. The Leaf lists and rolls with languid motions, like a sailboat tacking in a middling swell. It is happiest when following taillights in city traffic. The brakes are only just adequate.

Nissan’s designers went for a futuristic motif, with all-digital displays and a kind of computer-mouse gear selector that takes no time to master. The car hums a few bars of massage music on startup. What the driver sees ahead is a series of stacked ellipses, from the arched cluster to the (distant) steering rim to the speedometer up top. This being a dedicated EV, you’d expect a full complement of readouts and computer coaches to help you stretch the range, and no car in the test gives you more. There’s even a battery-temperature gauge, unique in the group, as if you’re supposed to know what to do with the information.

Push the blue button on the steering wheel and the nav display handily shows your range in concentric circles on the map, the larger one a one-way trip, the smaller for a round trip. Push it again to be shown the nearest charging stations. The center screen also can show you current energy consumption by both the drive motor and the car’s auxiliary systems (the Fit and Spark also have a version of this), plus a full menu of energy data, from your consumption history to your recharge times based on several levels of charging power.

No question, the Leaf’s creators fretted over its EV-centric details, even if the baggy styling could use a little work. The real problem for us is that the Leaf isn’t as composed as the Focus and the Fit, and it isn’t much fun to drive.

2013 Honda Fit EV
Third place: Field of Dreams.

You can’t even buy this car; you must lease it for $259 a month for 36 months. Now, doesn’t that sound a whole lot nicer than the advertised (but meaningless) price of $37,415? No doubt, Honda thinks so. Last year it lowered the lease price from $389. Surely, this gold bleeds red ink.

It’s public record that we like the Fit as a hydrocarbon consumer, so the Fit EV has an automatic head start. It’s so trim and space efficient and, well, fit for universal duty as an enjoyable commuter. The trouble is that two key things we like best about the Fit, its 6800-rpm engine and its low price, are omitted from the Fit EV, which comes in one trim spec and one color. Hope you like blue.

The question is whether the Fit’s frisky charm can survive its powertrain transplant and associated weight gain of more than 700 pounds. The answer: mostly. It still stands apart from this crowd as a fun, tossable machine that feels lighter than what it has become. Alert steering and firm, responsive brakes make it easy to control, though a stiff suspension tune causes it to jump on rutted surface streets.

At just 52 miles, the Fit’s range proved to be the shortest, though its consumption figures—both observed and government reported—are among the best. The 20.0-kWh battery, the second-smallest in the test, must take some blame. At least you get something for all those electrons moved: The Fit’s acceleration times were second-quickest.

You have the option of driving in sport, normal, or eco modes, which alter the power delivery and range to some degree. Eco will not get you to Vegas, but it might get you rear-ended. The Fit has the most noticeable noisemaker for safety. It’s a transporter-beam thrum that rises and falls with speed, causing several drivers to complain of motor noise.

Honda cut a middle path with data, employing some rudimentary display screens in the nav and instrument cluster but without going above or beyond. A simple meter with illuminated blue hash marks indicates how much power the traction motor is consuming relative to the accessories, while dull analog needles read out the battery state and power-versus-regen status. Two simplistic bar graphs provide consumption history, while the nav screen can display range on the map once you drill down into its menus. It also will show you the nearest charging stations. It’s not as easy to access as the Leaf’s, but at least it’s there.

What we like best about the Fit has been tampered with. What’s left is only good enough for third place.

2014 Ford Focus Electric
Second place: Field of Dreams.

As with the other automakers in this test, Ford gives you the top-spec interi*or with all the trimmings when you go electric, a partial salve for the extra money you’re spending. With its clean, aero-swept styling and crouched stance, the Focus is laden with buttons, screens, and thumb controls set in soft-touch plastics and other quality materials. Perforated dots in the seat leather evoke coral reefs as seen from space. The cabin is quiet at all times, even at freeway speeds. You can fit three people in the back seat.

This Tesla Model S for the rest of us only suffers from high power consumption, as its battery gushes juice to move the Focus’s 3632 pounds. Its electron appetite ranked at the top with the Fiat, though the pack’s relatively large size, at 23.0 kWh, still ekes out a comparatively decent 64-mile range. However, if you’re profligate with the *climate control, the range can drop considerably. Sitting still, we dialed up the auto temperature control a few degrees, and the indicated range immediately dropped 10 miles. No other car makes the energy cost of our modern comforts so apparent.

The most natural-feeling of our EVs, the Focus delivers a smooth if somewhat muted rush of torque and has excellent brakes. It stays flat through corners and cuts a clean freeway groove with an unflustered ride. No doubt because of its bulk, or the fact that it runs on the widest tires, it was second-slowest to 60 mph. At low speeds, such as when you’re trolling through a pedestrian-heavy area, you can catch the motor clunking between its drive and regen modes, but otherwise the Focus feels solid and well integrated.

Ford packages its EV-related data mostly in the instrument cluster, into two high-res screens surrounding the speedometer that are manipulated with the steering-wheel buttons and will dazzle you with info. We spent 20 minutes exploring the system’s many pages, which read like a PowerPoint presentation from the local electric utility. A “brake coach” helps you stretch the range if you follow it closely, while another screen will populate with electronic “butterflies” according to how ecologically you drive.

You can smirk at such gimmicks—one editor called the butterflies “dumb”—but driving an electric car is a game of managing a limited energy supply, and visual aids are useful. Geez, who hates a butterfly? Less handy is the MyFord Touch system, which requires a couple of steps of menu-drilling to get it to show the nearest charging stations.

What the Focus Electric really does best is give you a reason to go test drive the top-of-the-line gas-burning Focus.

2014 Chevrolet Spark EV
First place: Field of Dreams.

Here’s a car that puts it all together. It’s a total effort, a studied application of brainpower and enthusiasm that embraces the electric mandate with gusto and without a whiff of the-government-made-us reluctance. And this from none other than GM, the company that sued California over the EV mandate; that forever bears the mark of Cain for killing off its own pioneering electric, the EV1.

Everything about the Spark is all-in. Its cropped dimensions, along with its styling, fit the image of an EV but still manage to produce respectable and well-organized interior space. The interior is bristling with high-res display screens packed with energy info. And its husky electric motor is a deceptively simple yet potent design that technical editor K.C. Colwell dubbed “the 110-cube Harley V-twin of the EV world.” Colwell wishes readers to know about its hollow coaxial design, which routes one half-shaft directly through the motor; its low, 5500-rpm redline; and its ripping, no-typo 400 pound-feet of torque.

All of these attributes blend into a happy balance for zero-emissions driving. The 21.0-kWh battery is on the large side, while the car’s 2940-pound curb weight is on the light end, so frugal consumption produced our observed 66-mile range even as the monster motor, set in sport mode, delivered a 7.9-second goose to 60 mph. That makes the Spark the quickest by more than half a second and, even more exceptionally in this group, a kick to drive. It zaps through traffic with notably eager steering and roll control and a hearty response from both the go and stop pedals.

The Spark is cheap-chic inside, with lightning strikes of body-color accents (five paint colors are offered if electric blue isn’t your flavor) and a motorcycle-like stand-up cluster on the column that packs a high-res and vividly colored display. Another in the dash conveys even more data about your energy supply and consumption. A lot of the pages look borrowed from the Volt, especially the transparent beaker of green goo that Chevy uses to graphically represent battery-charge state.

In-dash navigation is only available as a pricey smartphone app that syncs to the console screen. To find the closest charging points, you’ll have to rely on your smartphone. Also, we wish the onboard charger’s capacity, at 3.3 kW, were as mighty as the 6.6ers in four of the test’s cars (only the Smart has the same 3.3-kW capacity). To get the test done, which took two complete recharges, the Spark spent more than 12 hours sucking the cord of our Level 2 charger, versus 6.5 for the Focus. Only the Fiat spent more time plugged in, at almost 14 hours.

Yet, for EV drivers who will use it for city commutes and recharge at night, the Spark has ample range. It is the one gold that sparkles.

VEHICLE, POWERTRAIN, CHASSIS, CD/TEST RESULTS, FINAL RESULTS:
http://www.caranddriver.com/comparis...e-specs-page-8

bitkahuna

iTrader: (20)

what a horrible group of cars.

Hoovey689

iTrader: (16)

that is impressive on the Spark EV