THE MOTOR AGENT AND THE ELECTRIC VEHICLE.
Page 14
Page 15
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
Will the Growing Popularity of the Industrial Electric Provide the Gar4e Proprietor with a Further Field for his Activity ?
By "Vectis."
ICANNOT HELP thinking that the relations between. motor agents and those who are interested in putting forward the claims of electric vehicles either as manufacturers of chassis or batteries or as suppliers of current, are not all they ought to be. In the early days of the. commercial motor the agent was accused of taking little or no interest in the movement and compelling the manufacturer to run his own business from A to Z untiNt had been got on to a profitable basis. The manufacturer maintained that, if the agent did not help in the pioneering work, he had no clams to share in subsequently profitable business. I am not concerned at the moment with the rights and the wrongs of this contention, but only to suggest that in the young electric vehicle industry we are threatened with a very similar position, distinctly to the detriment of the whole movement.
Is the Sale of Charging Current Profitable ?
If the electric vehicle is to come into its own, this result must be achieved largely by the assistance of people • who, for business reasons, will push, the legitimate claims of this type of vehicle before the notice of probable buyers. The motor agent possesses much more widespread powers in this direction than thqp.lectaicity supply company. The question is, whether ho will take the trouble to exert them. At present he feels that the supply companies are cutting the ground away from beneath his feet by seeking powers to maintain and repair, as well as to charge electric vehicles. If an agent takes this subject too seriously, the first thing he has to do is to put in a charging installation. *He naturally asks whether this is likely to pay him. The answer appears to be that he will get no direct return from it. On the contrary, for some time to come, he will have to run it at a loss. At this point he begins to draw unfavourable comparisons. Petrol, when it can be sold at all, can be sold at a profit. Apparently electricity, on the other hand, must be sold at a loss. He begins to doubt whether all the calculations made in favour of the electric vehicle are on a sound basis.
In current being sold too cheaply, in order to encourage people to buy vehicles, the price of the current for which will have to be subsequently raised considerably if the supplying of current, considered alone, is to. be made a reasonable commercial undertaking? We know that current is supplied at id., or even id., per unit for many power purposes. Are these cases parallel with our own?
A motor agent who wishes to charge a vehicle battery cannot simply connect up the battery to the electric mains and pass in current supplied to him, say at id., and retailed at, say, lid. per unit. Even if he could do so, there would not be much iw the business. In point of fact, he has to put in a charging installation, involving probably a, motor generator. Something of this kind is always necessary if his electric supply is in the form of an alternating current
Electric v. Petrol.
If it is a continuous current supply, he still cannot use it in the simplest and most direct way, unless it is at very low voltage. For higher voltages he must either inital resistances, which really will be wasteful of current, or else he must transform his current from a higher to a lower voltage by means of a motor generator. ' The installation is not cheap. It needs attention and a certain amount of upkeep. If it is not kept regularly bbsy, the standing charges are disproportionately high. The agent is quite likely to find that it costs him 3d. or 4d. a unit to supply current to a. vehicle battery, and that he is in competition with an Electric Supply Co., which will supply current for the same purpose for Id. or lid. a unit. He is at .a disadvantage so long as he ison competition with his own. suppliers, and he is disinclined to go into the business. -Moreover, he is taught by the pioneers of electric road traction to regard the road vehicle merely as the competitor of the petrol vehicle. As a retailer, of vehicles he is no more anxious to sell the former than the latter. How, then, will it pay him to lose money on the supply of current when he might be making it on the supply of petrol, merely in order to change the character of his business without necessarily enlarging its scope I Furthermore, it is urged upon him that the repairs of electric vehicles amount to a. negligible figure. To execute such repairs at all he must employ specially trained workmen. His ordinary staff will not be adequate. He is not anxious to reduce his repair work, while spending more money on the ststiff to perform it. 'Altogether he is inclined to give the electric vehicle the cold shoulder.
Estimating Fuel Costs.
In point of fact, I believe that his attitude is largely the result of a fundamental error in the system of propaganda, adopted by the advocates of electric road traction. To begin with, there is far too much tendency to compare the electric vehicle on all occasions with the petrol vehicle, to the detriment of the latter.
As already mentioned, the agent does not want to change his business but to enlarge it. It is no good going to him and saying, "Give up selling these petrol vehicles, on the fuel of which you are maithig profit, • and the repairs of which are a, considerable asset to you, and sell instead these electric vehicles, on the fuel of which you will incur a loss, and in connection with which there will be no repair work worth mentioning." No, one would be fool enough to put the matter to theNa,gent in these wards, but when he has digestedall that is told him, this is more or less what the proposition appears to him to be. As an illustration of what I mean, let me take an example referred to in the official organ of the Electric Vehicle Consmittee. Details are given of the costs of a 3-ton tipping wagon. in service in .Ipswich. A point is made of the statement that 21,petrol lorry working alongside the electric lorry costs in fuel a little over M. a mile, while the electric, with current at lid. a unit, costs for power only a little over id.
mile. •
In the record of the Performance of another vehicle mentioned in the same journal it is stated that the cost of repairs and maintenance, including overhauling, has averaged only 5s. per week, and the question is asked, "Could such a statement be Made, with regard to the best 2-ton petrol vehicle on the market to-day?"
Got Wrong End of Stick.
It will be seen that the tendency all along is to put the electric vehicle up against the petrol vehicle, to the detriment of the latter, whereas if the interest of the agent is wanted the point should rather be to show him that the electric is4suitable for work to which the petrol vehicle is unsuited, partichlarly over small mileages. It is not, therefore, a. question of selling one in preference lo the other, but of selling one where the other could not be sold at all, and so developing the dimensions of the agent's business.
Let us take the two statements quoted above from the electric vehicle, and go into them a little further. As regards the first, which deals with the cost of fuel, I find the following items in the statement of annual working costs for a mileage of 5500 mites :—
The garage charge is stated to include housing of vehicle, supervising of charging, connecting and disconnecting, together with genera inspection and the logging of readings in the battery record. We may perhaps put half of this down as garaging and. half as attributable to requirements connected with fuel and its supply. From the total we can therefore deduct half of 238 Si., leaving a total of 2135 18s., all concerned with the cost of fuel supply and the maintenance of what we may call the containers in which the fuel is kept on the vehicle.
These are the costs involved in a mileage of 5500, and if we regard them as fuel coats then we must recognize that the provision of fuel for the 3-ton electric vehicle involves an expenditure of merely 6d. a mile and not merely of about Id., as previously suggested. I am looking at the thing in this way, not with a view to discounting the lust claims of the electric vehicle, but rather for the purpose of putting the proposition in a different light before the agent.
The agent may actually lose by supplying electrical energy at lid. a unit. This dries not mean that he will make no profit out of the incidental work involved in the supply of the fuel. Whether he will make anything out of the biggest item, namely, the renewal of
battery plates, depends entirely on whether the makers of batteries deal direct with the user or do their business through the agent. If the latter, then the agent's possibilities of profits on an electric vehicle are reasonably good.
Take again the question of repair. The example mentioned above quoted 5s. per week. It referred to a vehicle which had been 31 years in service and had covered rather over 20,000 miles. The total cost of repairs for that mileage was apparently 245 10s. The cost per mile was therefore about id. This result is excellent, but I do not think that it is fair or necess sary to suggest that no 2-ton. petrol vehicle has ever given similar results over an equal distance. Here, again, I am not standing up as an antagonist of the electric vehicle. I am merely trying to prove ray point that the electric vehicle is put before the agent in. the wrong light. Show him how he may make a profit on supplying its fuel and keeping it in running order, and his interest will be awakened..
If the thing were so perfect that it needed no maintenance,the agent would have to have a much bigger commission on sale to make it worth his while to go to the trouble of selling it. The motor agent IS in the habit of looking for his living not entirely out of commissions but largely out of the business which continuallyeomes to him froro those to whom he has sold vehicles. He must see his, profit one way or the other, otherwise the business of eleetrics will not interest him.
Moreover, his ease needs emphasis of the real fact, too often obscured, that in nine cases out of ten the electric vehicle is supplementary to the petrol vehicle, and not a direct competitor at all. Its peculiar merits are such as to make motor traction economically good all over a widened field. This is what the agent wants to see. If we wish an agent to take up an agency for electric vehicles, we should not tell him that they will supersede petrol vehicles ' • but we should tell him—and it would be true—that he would often find cases where he weeld have to advise in common honesty that a petrol van would be a bad investment, hut for which ha could with equal honesty recommend an electric, knowing that the client would come back to him sooner or later grateful for his advice.