He's president of the Toronto-based company that builds the all-electric ZENN Car (Zero Emissions No Noise) but he's not focusing on making many more of the little low-speed runabouts.
Says Ian Clifford: "This is nothing to do with building cars, it's all about energy storage."
There are about 500 ZENNs on the road in the 40 U.S. states where-low speed cars are legal. It's a little French-built micro-car that ZENN outfits with an electric motor and enough lead acid batteries to run it about 60 kilometres (in warm weather) on an eight-hour charge.
That's useful enough for buzzing around in local neighbourhoods but it's not the disruptive technology Clifford is seeking.
He has now bet the farm on a unique energy storage device from a company in Texas. The company is EEStor and the device is an ultra capacitor that, on a five-minute charge, can supposedly hold 52 kilowatt-hours in a 136-kg unit. That would be enough power to drive an electric car about 400 kilometres. It would also be enough to send most gasoline engines to the scrap heap.
The only problem: No one has ever seen this thing.
Vaughan: Ian, you've come a long way from when I first met you and you were stuffing an electric motor and a ton of batteries in an old Renault Dauphine, which I think you called the Feel Good Car.
Clifford: Oh, I've learned a lot.
With ZENN, we've sold 500 electric cars, which makes us one of the largest electric car companies in the world if you put it in that context.
But it's a drop in the bucket — there are 250 million cars in the United States.
We have revenue, we make profit on the cars we sell, but we are totally in investment mode. It's all focused heavily on EEStor's technology.
You need a better battery.
Electric cars in huge numbers are do-able with the right battery technology.
This is nothing to do with building cars; it's all about energy storage.
Isn't the answer with the battery companies doing lithium-ion or lithium-polymer?
They don't have a clue four years out what's going to happen to their batteries. They really don't.
You know what's going to happen in a cellphone, but 50 kilowatt-hours of energy storage in a car — forget it, they don't have a clue.
Even with some of the established lithium battery companies — they don't know how to price their technology because of all the uncertainty in the technology.
They're setting up massive government-backed trust funds to settle warranty claims on the batteries because they don't know how they'll behave.
So you're going a different way.
Back in 2002, we started looking at battery technologies seriously and that's when we met EEStor, which was developing ultra-capacitor technology.
People had taken runs at ultra capacitors, but typically the problem they hadn't been able to get over was the voltage limitations. EEStor has developed new materials that get over it.
The only capacitor that I can think of is in a flash camera.
A flash camera has a battery that dumps power into a capacitor.
Capacitors in their current form are really great at taking power very quickly and discharging it very quickly. They're not good at storing it; they lose the power very, very quickly.
Capacitors have been around for a long time and they're a buffer technology — in the case of flash photography, they're in between the flash tube and the plug in the wall.
They're able to hold a whole bunch of power and displace it really, really quickly and recharge really, really quickly.
They have not typically been able to store large amounts of energy for a long period of time and that's what EEStor is doing.
