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The green car - déjà vu all over again?

By Tom Gosling - posted Friday, 4 July 2008


When Kevin Rudd dusted off his pre-election promise to provide $500 million for research and development of “green car” technology for Australia, he told Parliament that “any idea with a serious chance of reducing the carbon and other environmental impacts of Australia’s vehicle fleet will get a hearing”.

Well here’s a good idea, Mr Rudd - why not save everyone some time and money by having another look at the green car developed during the Howard era?

Yes, that’s right - John Howard’s government actually provided funding for a green car way back in the year 2000, when petrol was still less than a dollar a litre and climate change was not in the news every day.

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Most Australians have forgotten, if they ever knew, two petrol-electric vehicles called the ECOmmodore and the aXcess, the first built by Holden and the second by a consortium of Australian components manufacturers using a little bit of government funding and some brilliant CSIRO technology.

Perhaps it was advice from some visiting General Motors executives that Detroit was going for hydrogen cars rather than hybrids, but for whatever reason the Howard government withdrew its support for the work, and both cars quickly became literally museum pieces - the ECOmmodore is now in the Powerhouse Museum, and the aXcess in the basement of the Victoria Museum in Melbourne.

The inspiration to build the cars came from CSIRO’s Australian Automotive Technology Centre, headed by a former Ford executive, David Lamb.

Lamb had the foresight to see that rising petrol prices and the emerging problem of carbon dioxide emissions issues would need the development of more economical and cleaner cars for the 21st century.

He got the backing of the then CSIRO Chief Executive Dr Malcolm Macintosh, to establish links with the automotive industry by developing “Australia’s own hybrids” - and within the amazingly short time of a year both vehicles had been developed.

Before it was dumped, the aXcess vehicle, a small-to-medium sized car, was promising to provide excellent performance on only one-third the fuel and carbon emissions of a conventional car.

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The management team claimed it had measured the car at just under 5 litres per 100 kilometres in a simulated city cycle on a Melbourne test track - and with expected weight savings were confident they could get it down to 3.2 litres per 100 kilometres.

It was “frontier technology”, to use Mr Rudd’s term - brimming with new Australian engines, batteries, electric motors and computer systems which were up with, and even advanced on, the technologies being used in Toyota’s and Honda’s hybrid cars.

The aXcess vehicle was conceived as a “show pony” for Australian automotive components manufacturing and some 80 components manufacturers participated, contributing specially-designed components.

The vehicle was then shipped off at government expense to motor shows throughout Europe and Asia to generate sales for Australian components. But just before it was due to be shipped to the US for another round of motor shows, it became suddenly unpopular within the bureaucracy.

The US trip was cancelled, and aXcess fell into a black hole.

What went wrong? In principle, the car was great, but CSIRO could not get the control algorithm in its computer management system to work properly - so the interplay between the batteries, supercapacitors, generator, motor, petrol engine, accelerator and brakes could not be precisely controlled.

With an unpredictable communication system, the car committed that most grievous of all transportation errors - it couldn’t be relied on to go. Although it could run on the road with its petrol engine supplying power direct to the electric motors, it couldn’t glide noiselessly onto the podiums in the trade fairs on its electric motors alone.

It is said that when some video was taken of it “driving” into a showroom in Europe the camera was carefully angled to conceal the three men crouching on one side to push it along.

When this became known, it gave the Industry Department a pretext to scrap the project. It was a brutal slap in the face for the aXcess team, which had achieved a small miracle under impossibly tight deadlines and with government funding nowhere near enough to put together something so advanced and complex.

Japanese makers Toyota and Honda who saw the car on show in Japan were stunned to learn it cost only $13 million to build - both companies have spent billions developing hybrid technology.

The Australian bureaucracy was influenced by General Motors in Detroit, who were convinced that the way of the future would be hydrogen, not hybrids.

David Lamb says the ECOmmodore, which used the CSIRO technology coupled with the Melbourne-manufactured 4-cylinder engine that has just been given the chop, demonstrated good performance.

“Visiting General Motors US executives were impressed,” he said.

“But the wisdom in Detroit was that hydrogen cars would be on the road by 2008. Since then, GM has realised that hydrogen won’t happen for a long time, and they’re frantically trying to catch up in hybrid technology.”

Why reinvent the wheel? Building on the work that’s already been done might be a good idea. And it might also get the new project going a little earlier than far-off 2011, which is when the Government’s Green Car Innovation Fund is scheduled to cut in.

The green aXcess vehicle was actually the second version of the marque to be produced. The first version, a red car which got a lot of exposure in the late 90s, was not a hybrid and was intended purely as a coat hanger for components. It was structurally weak and could not legally be driven on European roads, although the then Minister for Trade, Tim Fischer, drove it across the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

AXcess Mark II was a hybrid and a much more serious attempt to develop “Australia’s own car”, fully roadworthy, with performance, space, style and comfort on a par with a small-to-medium-sized saloon.

It was also built with manufacturing costs in mind - the target was for the vehicle to cost only $3-4,000 more than its conventional counterpart, meaning that with fuel consumption in the low 3s it would pay for itself in the first year of operation.

It was based on a cosmetically altered version of the Holden Astra body, then still years away from release in Australia, donated to the project by Holden.

Onto this shell was grafted a plethora of Australian-made components contributed by some 80 Australian firms - everything from leather seats by Howes (one of the companies to pick up big overseas sales) to instruments, lights, brakes, tyres, magnesium wheels, novel control systems and a swag of other innovations that have since appeared in regular production cars.

Under the bonnet, it had advanced Australian technologies including electric motors, batteries and energy management from CSIRO and high-power “supercapacitors” based on CSIRO research to deliver and absorb large amounts of power quickly.

The “switched reluctance” electric motor was expected to be cheap to mass produce - possibly as low as $100 per unit - because it did not require expensive winding on the rotor or permanent magnets.

Water-cooled and driving the front wheels, the motor was also robust, needed no gearbox, and became a generator by reversing the switching, thus putting power back into the batteries when slowing down or braking.

While cars like the Toyota Prius use expensive nickel metal hydride batteries, the aXcess team specified a beefed-up version of the familiar, and relatively cheap, lead acid battery.

Improvements developed by CSIRO gave these new batteries the edge with lighter weight, and a quicker charge time. These improvements were achieved by redesigning and compressing the plates, and working with Pasminco to rewrite the international standard for lead purity.

The “supercapacitors”, originally developed by an Australian company, Cap-XX, for radios and small electronic power systems, were capable of delivering and absorbing power quickly as required during acceleration and braking. The car had 100 of them, each about the size of a chocolate block, packed into a suitcase-sized container.

In the years since aXcess was made, CSIRO continued to work on its energy storage technologies and achieved a further breakthrough when they found a way to combine the battery and supercapacitor into one package. This has eliminated the need for the elaborate electronic controller used in aXcess.

Now being manufactured in Japan as the Ultrabattery, it looks like a regular car battery, but lasts five times as long and performs much better. Furthermore, it can be produced at about a quarter of the cost of the high-tech batteries in today’s hybrid cars.

Tucked away under the rear seats, the aXcess car also had a lightweight petrol engine that automatically switched on to recharge the batteries when necessary.

This engine, designed to operate at the optimum speed for efficiency and low emissions, was developed by a Sydney company CMC Power Systems Limited. It incorporated a unique crankshaft mechanism which allowed the engine size to be reduced by a third. CMC claimed it had lower noise and vibration, and lower fuel consumption and emissions, than conventional engines.

CMC spent some $2.5 million to develop the 1.4 litre engine specifically for the vehicle, a feat it achieved in only eight months. This expenditure, with no payback from the expected further development of the car, contributed to CMC going into voluntary administration. Its technology, supported by 3,000 shareholders over 20 years, has now been taken over by Malaysian interests.

With a remarkably low cost to government of less than $7 million, Australia nearly got its own “green car” in 2000. Unfortunately its computer control problems meant it could be killed off before it really had a chance to become well known to the Australian community.

The Industry Minister at the time, Ian Macfarlane, later defended the decision to cease funding, saying it had performed its function of marketing Australian components and was never meant to become a production vehicle anyway - but the swiftness of its demise before its trip to the US makes it hard to resist the notion that it was perhaps too successful and was terminated before Australians started actually wanting it to be made.

With the Rudd government to provide $500 million the industry stands a much better chance now than it did with less than $7 million of Howard government and CSIRO money.

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About the Author

Tom Gosling is a freelance science journalist with an interest in population and environment. He started in Sydney as a general reporter for ABC News in the early 1970s, and was Editor of The University of Sydney News from 1974-84. He then worked with CSIRO’s national media office in Canberra before moving to Melbourne in 1989 to report on science for the Herald and Herald-Sun. In 1995 he returned to Canberra to edit Australian Innovation Magazine, In 2002 he joined He was formerly CMC Power Systems where he was a Director. It was one of the companies that contributed to the aXcess project.

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