Another electric car huckster bites the dust

My EV-loving pal Dave Ruigh sent along a link to the Spark-EV home page with the comment: “I guess they have wifi in the Pennsylvania jails.”  It seems that the owner of Spark-EV was arrested and thrown in jail. Turns out a little research showed that Michael Papp, the owner, has made bail and since they also confiscated all his computers, my pals figure he must be using the computer at the library to update his home page.

At first when I read his homepage I felt a bit of sympathy. I have run my own business and it sure is hard to keep things going, witness the fact that I closed it and became a salaryman. Then I started reading about Michael Papp on the net. I found one blog that was less than charitable. They make him out to be much more of a scammer than his “fairy tale” does. It may just be a troll impersonating him, but there is a post supposedly from the Michael that goes:

There is nothing in the world that I am more proud of than giving it a shot and failing, instead of being a keyboard commando loser that works 9-5, pretending he "gets it". Like Rodger here. Rodger, who never put his neck out on the line for anything, other than typing words on a screen to make himself look superior.

Rodger, nothing you WRITE will have any affect on me - I am superior to you in every way that counts. Write something after you have imported, designed, built, paid for, and actually worked on something when you have everything at risk. That is when you get respect.

If the sheep here want to say "Go Rodger" with your diatribes, then so be it. I don’t care at all. Anyone who has actually DONE something, such as myself, knows you are just a fool. Oh, and your twin brother Ian also.

The language he uses seems to be the same as stuff he has already said before his little run-in with the law, so I think this may really be Michael. Then there is this blog that attributes this comment to him:

If you are searching for a visionary, a company that wants to save the world, screw big oil, animals-come-first, tree-hugging, there is an oil company conspiracy, who killed the electric car type of company that will plant a tree on every car sale, and you feel you may have found it in Spark-EV? Then I apologize - You have come to the wrong place."

"Not a day goes by that we don’t receive a phone call from an avid EV enthusiast who asks intelligent questions, has good suggestions, but then the conversation degenerates into perpetual motion machines, big oil conspiracies, tinfoil helmets, and the REAL killer of JFK.

Needless to say, I am beginning to like this spastic crank– as someone that understands how hard it is to do anything in this world, I can kinda see how his BS ability got the better of him. He is like all the “idea men” that I met when I was consulting. All I had to do was take their great idea, build a prototype, test it, manufacture it, and market it, and then we could split the proceeds 50-50.

Well, a little more research and maybe my inclinations towards fondness are misplaced. This forum really explains in detail what a pig this guy is. But there was one neat taking– the fellow “Kevin K” that asked him a very perceptive set of questions:

1)      What specific lithium battery technology are you using? "Li-Ion Polymer" doesn’t answer which specific chemistry is used for the anode. Cobalt, Iron Phosphate, Silicon etc… is what I’m looking for.

2)      Can you publish any crash test results for the vehicles either before or after the conversion to electric drive?

3)      How many vehicles have you actually sold?

4)      How many vehicles do you expect to sell and in what time frames?

5)      Does the "3000+" charge cycle life expectancy on the batteries include 100% charge to 0% or some smaller percentage?

6)      Who makes the batteries and what model are they?

7)      Who makes the electric motors and the controllers?

8)      Where would one take a malfunctioning vehicle for repairs?

9)      Do the donor vehicles have galvanized body panels for rust resistance?

10) How many KWHs are consumed to travel 40 miles under normal use?

11) Is it reasonable to expect 10 years of daily commuting use out of these cars?

12) When the batteries are worn out will it be more practical to replace them or buy a whole new car?

13) What safeguards are built in to protect the circuits in the event of a crash?

14) Airbags, ABS, traction control?

15) Where can I go to test drive one?

16) Can you publish more thorough performance data? 0-20, 0-40, 0-60, top speed, braking distances, skidpad performance, 1/4 mile times, etc?

The fellow that wrote that sure understands the criteria for a viable electric car, not a pipe-dream electric car. And just when this Papp guy thought he might have hit bottom this link shows that the DA is thinking of pressing even more charges. I guess we will just have to enjoy the sparkenfruede. For those poor people burned by Michael, both in his real-estate and electric car scams, it may help to listen to Wesley Willis, the schizophrenic homeless street artist singing He’s doing time in jail.

Now it is interesting that people are surprised that some yahoo might peddle a bunch of lies about electric cars. Why, they think that electric cars are going to save the plant so this is almost as bad as lying about religion or charity workers. But hucksterism is most prominent where there a bunch of people that really wants to believe. Be aware that it is not just small-time importers like Michael that may be, shall we say, overly optimistic. Michael claimed that he could deliver a four-door electric vehicle that cost under $20,000 and have 100 miles range.  The sad fact is that GM may have done the same kind of over-promising when it says the Volt will be available in 2010 and have similar capabilities. Margery Conner did a great blog post on the Volt that mentions this article in the Atlantic Monthly by Jonathan Rauch. The article discusses how GM may have bit off way more than they can chew. They saw Toyota getting all kind of good PR from the Prius (while losing money relative to their normal margins, by the way) and GM decided it needed some of that self-same electric car mojo. As is typical with big decisions made on high, nobody did the back-of-the-envelope calculations to see if a practical, safe salable car was possible in 2 years time. Every engineer will sympathize with the subtext of the story, how when Rauch first visits the Tech Center they are all upbeat and excited about the new battery pack the vendor just sent. A few months later and the whole engineering team is sleep-deprived zombies. I guess that simple engineering job of designing a whole new vehicle with a whole new battery chemistry is a bit tougher than the boys upstairs thought.

This next GM fiasco reminds me of the Moller Skycar. The Moller fellow made 25 million inventing and selling Super Trapp mufflers for motorcycles. He then decided that the world needed a car that could take off and land vertically. He has blown the 25 million and I saw the prototype for sale on eBay last year. He never did the back-of-the-envelope-calculations. My buddy, Bob Dible who is a EE but builds and races RC planes did the calculations for me. It took 30 seconds. Bob showed that in order to move enough air to suspend a car like that, the ducted fans would make about 120 dB of noise. Then he did a few more calculator button presses and said that the specific fuel consumption would be about 4 miles to the gallon. Now since then, Moller has made the car very light, and is suffering with the monstrous control problem of servoing 4 ducted fans to keep the car level. There is a reason the Harrier is the most crashed jet in the fleet.

So GM is finding out the hard way that, as one EV engineer told me, silicon doubles in power every 18 month but batteries improve 8% a year. Of course that is not even true now that all the automakers have decided that regular laptop battery lithium ion chemistry is too dangerous for a car. They are all looking at ferric anode chemistry like the cells made by A123 Systems. That chemistry has half the energy density of lithium polymer and lithium ion. As a former auto engineer I can assure you that designing a car is wickedly hard. It is not just getting something to go 35 miles an hour down a straight road at 70 degrees. Everything in the car is subject to vibration. When I was at Ford the worse accelerations came in the railroad cars that delivered the vehicles to the dealership. A modern car has to work at –40 and 130 degrees. When I was at GM we learned that the highest temperatures were not in Arizona but in the re-paint bake ovens. We expect cars to have heaters, air-conditioners and power steering. You can take all the weight out with carbon fiber and take all the convenience items out and then you could just substitute a tiny internal combustion engine for the electric drive train and get 50 mpg while having all the convenience and legacy of gasoline. For tiny little commuter cars owned by people fastidious enough to keep them charged and brave enough to face running out of charge in the middle of nowhere, sure, lithium gets us pretty close to a viable vehicle. But close is not quite there. Expect another decade of development before anyone makes an electric car that people will buy for a real price (as opposed to those inevitable government subsidies, that will only waste more resources then we do now).

And I do not even have to weasel about any breakthroughs—it will take 10 years even if the breakthrough happened tomorrow. Remember when the Insurance People got the government to pass laws that cars had to withstand 5 mph crashes?  Well, the auto engineers put shock absorbers behind the bumpers. But to have absolutely no damage meant they had to stiffen the structure— so that you were worse off if the car got hit at 10 mph. Then some cars caught fire and the bumper shock absorbers exploded, killing a few fireman. Well, would you have thought about that when you had to rush out the product? Worst of all, when it was all over, it turns out that having 5-mph bumpers actually increased the cost of fixing cars. The cost saved under 5 mph was more than offset by the cost of heavier components and the shock absorbers at 6 mph and higher. That is what happens when you let insurance people design cars. Be careful what you wish for. There was no conspiracy to kill the EV-1, GM’s electric car. Nobody wanted them but for a few acolytes. You cannot be in a high-volume manufacturing business with cars that cost a billion dollars to develop and only 30,000 people want to buy. This EV foray into bogus public relations will turn out for GM just like the last one— the Saturn car. It was wildly popular but cost way more to design than anyone ever could dream. It wounded GM badly, a business is business, and PR can cost millions, but not billions of dollars. Hopefully GM is in such a weakened state that the Volt will electrocute GM. Then Honda or Toyota will buy them, fire every person over the level of group leader and start making cars that are not a piece of crap.

And please, do not tell me about how obsolete gasoline vehicles are and that we need new technology. Michael Faraday invented the electric motor in 1830. The first practical internal combustion motor came along in 1856.