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Interesting enough VW have already done it, see:
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/04/vw_abandon s_its.html
The VW Lupo is available but it only does 78.4mpg(US). Their development car did much better: 0.89 litres of diesel per 100 kilometres (264 mpg) top speed was still 75mph. but they could not make the commercial version cheaper than $25K

There is also an interesting breakthrough that hasn't made much news UPS (which has a lot of stake in the cost of driving around) has invested in a new technology. Hydrolic hybrids http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/06/epa_and_pa rtner.html No battery needed.
They are implementing this as a test right now. But from another article I read the technology is applicable in street cars as well.

Cars with 14 secs 0-60 don't sell in the US.

It's more about what people buy than what can be engineered.

And don't get too excited about your SUV. Your SUV getting 25mpg (Imperial) is only 21.2mpg US.

So you're only the same as the US average you crap on. Well, if the average really were 21mpg. Which apparently it is (see updated link http://www.greencarcongress.com/2004/11/average_fu el_co.html there)

I do think Americans should value mpg more. But we don't require it in this country, so people don't.

When I needed an AWD car (so I wouldn't have to chain up in Tahoe), I could have bought an SUV cheap. I would have gotten 30% worse mpg, but even at $2.50 a gallon, I'll never get back the extra $15K I spent to avoid that. I can afford to spend more to get better mpg, but I can't expect all Americans to do it. They aren't in the financial position I am.

TFA: According to the Energy Information Administration, the average cost of gas in the U.S. that year was $1.85 per gallon of regular grade4 and the average gas mileage of a new, light-duty vehicle was 21 mpg

Okay, forget the rest of the damn article. Amercia, your problem is right there: MPG.

Whilst American cars struggle to reach 25MPG, the average MPG of a European car is over 40MPG (source).

How can the country that has MIT have such crappy MPG? I mean, aren't you chaps utterly ashamed of your engineers? Forget saving money, just bring it down to technical prowess. Why aren't American engineering nerds hanging their head in shame?

I have a 4x4 SUV that does better than 25MPG, not just on the motorway and country lanes, but on crowded higgledy-piggledy British towns. And it's a stupid 4x4 that I only really need in the winter! My mother's sporty saloon car does 45MPG. My wife's Volvo (read: APC with upholstery) does 35MPG. What the hell are you Yanks driving to need that much fuel per mile? Do you just grab a fire truck and bolt a couch to it, or what?

(Even given 1 Imperial gallon = 1.2 US Gallons, your MPG still sucks, Amercia)

Sure, but the first step is certainly a hybrid diesel/sail propulsion to alleviate the rising costs of diesel fuel. And there are a few industrial projects around hybrid propulsion for cargo ships these days, one of the most interesting IMHO being Beluga Shipping. The towing kite would "cut a ship's fuel consumption by up to 50%" according to the article. A really interesting read.

You missed the point. I was interpreting "hybrids" as an example or metaphor of everything we're doing to save energy, and pointing out that, even though that's not enough to reverse the damage we've already done, it's still a necessary first step. I just wanted to reiterate that to head off any defeatist argument that "if we didn't cause it we can't stop it, so we might as well not try."

Besides, I'm aware that diesels are great too. However, I don't agree that hybrids aren't useful; even if they're a net energy and pollution loss now (which is far from proven, as far as I know) it's entirely possible that future advances in technology (e.g. fuel cells) will make them more feasable later. Moreover, the fact that they've become popular helps drive that very research!

I also don't agree that a diesel hybrid is infeasable; there's no rule that you have to put any heat-sensitive electrical stuff (e.g. the batteries) near the engine. The only downside I see to it is that you'd have absurdly excessive levels of torque, but not enough horsepower. Besides, you could always design the thing as a series hybrid, like a diesel-electric locomotive.

By the way, what's a really cool technology is VW's new "twincharger" gasoline engine. I'd sure love to have a hybrid version of that!

Who is going to own one of these, and what does it really teach us any more. We can simulate aerodynamics, and can create several kinds of cumbustion, electric, and hybrid engines. We've got compressed air powered cars from France, etc.

The only people I'm really excited but in that field right now are Audi -- http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/03/audi_diese l_win.html who just won the "Twelve Hours of Sebring" endurance race with a diesel that was clean, didn't smell bad, was quiet enough to pass neighborhood noise rules, fast enough to take the poll position, and reliable.

Hmmmmm..... They're not saying much about mileage yet, but one quote compared it to production diesel cars -- which for a racing engine would be insanely better results. This thing was 650 horse power over 12 hours in hot temperatures under racing conditions, got mileage consistant with production cars, and was quiet -- almost silent compared to the other cars.

I've always wondered why someone couldn't team an ECVT transmission with a highly optimized diesel to produce a fantastic drive train for an automobile. A diesel at low RPM's produces massive torque on a fairly narrow rpm range. A strong ecvt transmission would keep that engine at a constant optimized RPM for producing the best torque/mileage compromise and convert it into an always perfect gear ratio. Seems like a no brainer to me. It must be a materials science problem with the ECVT parts.

Green Car Congress reports a Li-ion cell from A123Systems with phosphate chemistry (no thermal runaway like cobalt oxide) and a charge to over 90% capacity in 5 minutes.

This is not vaporware, this is product going into high-end power tools as I write this. If the cost can be brought down with experience or some sacrifice of charge/discharge rate will make it cheaper (a 10-minute charge wouldn't bother me), it's more than good enough for a killer electric car.

This isn't the first serious electric car to crush a Ferrari in the 1/8 mile; the tzero (from AC Propulsion) came before it. The tzero with Li-ion batteries has a range of nearly 300 miles and can go from LA to Las Vegas non-stop - and it's even faster.

Build me a 350Z, not a Previa. Build me an NSX, not a Civic.

Wow, and people look back to when they thought the earth was the center of the universe and think that is silly now.

They make 350Zs and NSXs. And, yes, they both are killer cars.

However, hybrids are doing well, despite the fact that you don't want one. Take a look at http://www.greencarcongress.com/sales/index.html

Hybrids are good cars, and getting better. I've heard of people using their Prius as a quiet and efficient generator after a massive power outage. I've heard of people driving their Prius half way across Texas during the hurricane evacuation on half a tank of gas. They got something like 100mpg because of the stop and go (mostly stop) situation on the highway. They passed a number of people pushing their gas cars because they had no gas.

Trains are hybrids.

So what is your beef? You can't afford a 350z or an NSX?

VW tested and found the diesel to be better than a hybrid version: http://www.greencarcongress.com/2004/09/vw_tests_h ybrid.html

But then again, who says there can't be a diesel hybrid? It'll be pretty cool, as it will have amazing torque :)

"Stop buying vehicles that are wasteful."

Something that could easily be accomplished. A Jetta TDI wagon rated at 36/47mpg has comparable cargo capacity (34 cu ft) to many midsize SUVs that are rated at 15/20mpg.

"Maybe investigate how to make 18-wheelers get 5mpg more than they do now."

Interestingly it is WalMart that is pushing the hardest for this.

Wal-Mart Seeks to Double Truck Fuel Economy by 2015
"Wal-Mart has set a goal of doubling the fuel efficiency of its new heavy-duty trucks from 6.5 to 13 miles per gallon by 2015, thereby keeping some 26 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the air between now and 2020.

Beginning with the its 2007 model-year trucks, the company will begin introducing models with improved aerodynamics, transmission and tires, as well as an auxiliary power unit in every truck in its fleet.

Some of the changes include:

* Trailer Side Skirts. Wind skirts under the trailer significantly reduce wind resistance and reduces airflow around the trailer. This is a big fuel economy benefit.

* Super Single Tires. Wal-Mart combined the two wheels normally seen on a rear axle into a single wheel that is not quite as wide as the sum of two wheels. This gives a smoother ride and better fuel economy from the reduced surface area and improved tire wall stiffness.

* Aerodynamic tractor package. Making the tractor more aerodynamic radically reduces the fuel required to operate the truck, as approximately two-thirds of all gallons burnt today by trucks can be attributed to overcoming aerodynamic resistance.

* Tag Axle. Reduced weight means increased efficiency. This type of rear axle reduces the weight of one rear axle as it eliminates internal axle drive train.

* Auxiliary Power Unit. This APU eliminates the use of the tractor's main engine for keeping our drivers warm or cool at night. Instead, this very small diesel engine does the job at optimum efficiency. This saves a substantial amount of fuel.

The company has estimated it will save some $52 million per year in fuel costs."

More info: http://walmartstores.com/GlobalWMStoresWeb/navigat e.do?catg=447

Ethanol looks to be a slam dunk replacement...

It's not entirely clear that Ethanol even gives us more energy than it took to harvest and process whatever crops we used for the biomass in the first place. Site

The main reason we hear so much about it is that the US has been subsidising corn for decades, and we've gotta find something to do with it now that we've got it. Companies like ADM want to push up demand by widening new markets, but that doesn't mean Ethanol will save the world, or even delay the unpleasantness.

How about this: http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/01/psa_peugeo t_cit.html

There actually are such vehicles, however none in serial production.
For example this one: http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/04/vw_abandon s_its.html, which is apparently very dead.

I'll pay a little more in gas for a car that'll go faster than I can walk somewhere.

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/04/vw_abandon s_its.html

Excerpt:

The naturally aspirated, direct-injection diesel engine generates 6.3 kW (8.44 hp) at 4,000 rpm, with a top speed of 120 km/h (75 mph).

It's acceleration rate may not meet your hot rod race standards, but most adults
have put that childish hot rod racing crap away as they became adults .

Too many ppl I knew from my high school days are now worm food due to hot rodding .

Go ask the dead and and the parents who get to bury their kids .

Top speed on a federally funded US interstate highway is 75 mph .

So it meets that requirement .

Ex-MislTech

The acid catalyst they are talking about replacing is liquid Sulphuric Acid. Most homebrewers of biodiesel, like those using an "open source" Appleseed type reactor, are not using both an acid and base catalyst, only the base being Potassium Hydroxide or Sodium Hydroxide (along with Methanol or Ethanol).
With higher Free Fatty Acid feedstock, such as really used grease, the acid cataylst helps convert those FFAs. You can read a little more on the chemistry of
the news item here:
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/11/inexpensiv e_eff.html
Nature abstract:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1628102 6&query_hl=3
Another abstract:
http://www.researchsea.com/html/article.php/aid/34 0/cid/2/research/green_chemistry__efficient_cataly st_for_making__biodiesel_.html>

Seems this process is five times more reactive than other solid catalysts, but still 50% that of the liquid acid - however sepearation afterward would be much
easier.

I've been mulling this concept in my head for years. Enriching desiel fuel with hydrogen created by the heat of the engine. The direction I started with was to generate the hydrogen using a "reverse peltier" methode. Two disimilar metals create a current when one side is hot and the other is cold. http://www.greencarcongress.com/thermoelectrics/ I wish I could find a link to the guy that actually created a generator out of this process using the exhaust system of a semi to create electricity in the 1Mw area. Anyway, using electrolysis was only good to create small amounts. The difficulties in pluming the hyrdogen into the fuel system, while keeping steam/water out of the mix, made the expense greater than the gain. Lately I've been thinking of routing the heat exhaust onto, or against, an area of a water tank. On the inside of the tank, where the heat is focused, I would like to place a zinc coil. In, an untested, theory the heated rod should suck the oxygen out of the water leaving hydrogen. Unfortunately, both ideas require me to cross into the area of patented technologies.

Universal Electric Vehicle has the Spyder in pre-production stage.

Commuter cars has the little electric commuter thing that looks quirky but supposedly works really well.

Electric cars will be back in vogue sooner than most people think.

http://corporate.honda.com/environment/fuel_cells. aspx?id=fuel_cells_fcx
http://www.honda.co.jp/FCX/ (Flash in Japanese)
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/10/hondas_mor e_pow.html (chassis)

http://world.honda.com/news/2005/4050629.html (with family)

http://www.hondanews.com/CatID2045?view=p&page=1&f irstcat=false&kw=05familyfcx (image gallery)

Enjoy!

And a slightly longer version, just in case a) you care and b) you've seen enough Goatse already.

...here:

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/08/solarpower augme.html ...and that's with the heavy old-style silicone cells and a bodged-together power convertor system made from off-the-shelf parts. Imagine flexible CIGS cells printed onto the roof/hood/trunk.

Combine the above with thermoelectric convertors for exhaust heat recovery and you could be talking 200mpg for average driving patterns. All that stands in the way is current component costs.

Pimental assumes that all corn is irrigated (only 16% is, and that corn is rarely used for ethanol production - and Pimental even notes this, but assumes all corn is irrigated anyways!).

Pimental used energy calculations for fertilizer production from the UN's data for worldwide average costs, while the USDA and others use the energy cost of US fertilizer production (these are widely different numbers - a 2.5-fold difference).

You can't burn ag waste in your car. You can't burn coal in your car. You can't burn nuclear in your car.

There appears to be a relatively simple method to make ethanol and electricity from ag waste, but it doesn't involve corn.

*Furthermore*, almost all ethanol production plants utilize on-site heat production, using electricity only for things like the mashers. Heat is the big energy cost for ethanol production. Typically either coal, ag-waste, or both are burned (occasionally, natural gas is used).

I've heard of exactly one proposed plant that uses coal and cogenerates electricity before using the spent steam to run distilleries. Just one. And I can't find the link, either.

there's good reason to call him "dishonest".

Even if you can take them at their word, the results aren't all that great. Some claim 1.34 BTU of ethanol out per BTU of fossil fuels in (with a large fraction of that BTU coming from petroleum). In other words, barely more than 25% of the energy in ethanol is actually grown; the rest comes from fossil sources. If we are going to spend tax money to encourage people to convert e.g. coal to motor fuel, we shouldn't discriminate against those who aren't corn farmers.

PS: Modern cars don't gain tailpipe emissions benefits from ethanol, and ethanol increases smog-forming evaporative emissions. To compensate for the high vapor pressure of ethanol, the petroleum fraction must be refined to remove high vapor-pressure components. I've never seen a listing of the energy costs of ethanol which accounted for the additional refining losses involved with meeting emissions standards.

Brazil Leads Drive to Biodiesel 'Clean Fuel' http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_vi ew.asp?no=224467&rel_n

BIODIESEL - BRAZIL RESEARCH: SOYBEAN, CASTOR, PALM, SUNFLOWER, PEANUT, AND COTTONSEED OILS, PLUS RECYCLING AND JUNGLE FRUITS http://www.nuclear.com/archive/2004/09/01/20040901 -002.html

Brazil Opens Another Biodiesel Plant; Wants to Be Largest Renewable Fuel Supplier http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/05/brazil_ope ns_an.html

Some people reported some research cars running on certain mixtures of Biodiesel as smelling of French fries. Well, better than gasoline combustion...

Lithium-ion batteries are currently smaller, lighter

They can be, but not per unit of energy.

Let's consider whole (real) vehicles here:
2004 Focus: ~2650 lbs
Ford Focus FCV: 3808 lb (1727 kg)

Real-world fuel cell cars are much worse than I thought - the weight penalty for the FC system is 50% more than a 60 kWh Li-ion battery pack.

The regenerative fuel cell, coupled with lightweight hydrogen storage, had by far the highest energy density

Great. How much does it cost, and how long does it last? (I understand that PEM fuel cells degrade fairly rapidly over time.)

[batteries] may be cheaper up front, but they need to be replaced regularly, and are not cheaper over their entire lifetime.

Lead-acid is already cheaper if you don't push your depth-of-discharge. Both Altair Nanomaterials and Toshiba's advanced Li-ion cathodes have pushed cycle lifetimes into the thousands; even if you only got 100 miles per cycle, 3000 cycles is longer than the rest of the car can be expected to last. Batteries out of scrapped vehicles would have considerable value for stationary storage; can you imagine how long your UPS would run with a 15 kWh battery?

[hydrogen] has the highest energy density of easily transportible non-fossil-fuels. But of course "fixing" on hydrogen doesn't prevent you from driving and promoting battery-powered cars instead.

Electrons have a far greater energy density than hydrogen molecules if you are measuring flows into the vehicle, and the overall energy density of the systems currently favors Li-ion batteries.

I'm sure that vehicular hydrogen FC's will one day pass the energy density of the best batteries. Some time later, they may become cheaper. But your example of the regenerative fuel cell argues against building a hydrogen fuel infrastructure, because those vehicles could "regenerate" using electricity and use the existing electric infrastructure. Instead of spending a trillion dollars to re-vamp the nation wholesale, you replace vehicles individually.

Like you've said, the infrastructure for electric cars has existed for decades.

But mass-market cars with drivetrains which can run on electricity alone did not. That had to wait for Toyota to ship the Prius. The hackers got their hands on it, the cat is out of the bag, and I'm enjoying the fireworks.

We shouldn't care if hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels, even inefficiently, in the short term. Inefficient conversion will still be on par with internal combustion.

Yes, we should; anything which puts an unnecessary roadblock in the way of eliminating fossil fuels is to be avoided.

Let's take the coal-to-hydrogen angle. If you gasify coal with a chemical efficiency of 76% and then reform to hydrogen at 90% efficiency, you get about 69% out. Feed that to a fuel cell of 60% efficiency and your overall efficiency is about 41%. If you bought wind power to electrolyze water at 70% efficiency, you'd get 42% overall; about the same.

Now consider batteries. You convert the coal to electricity, either with a combined-cycle gas turbine or through stationary fuel cells; let's say you go with fuel cells and get up to 50% efficiency, or 45% after 10% battery losses in the vehicle. But wind or solar power gets 100% to the vehicle and yields 90% out, or twice as much. Why pick the systems design that gives renewables a 50% penalty, unless you are biased against them?

And how are people supposed to store this energy they create? Should they have two cars and leave one plugged in, or just hope that the sun is shining or wind is blowing when they need to recharge?

You were ragging on lead-acid batteries for being heavy.

Here in the U.S. we live in a capitalist society, but the ethanol industry enjoys a large government subsidy. How large is it and how much does the ethanol actually cost?

It's difficult for us to use ethanol, mainly because we don't have the infrastructure to make, distribute, and burn it in our engines at more that 10% concentration. Yet. So that's the main problem. Switching over our cars, distribution infrastructure, and manufacturing facilities will be a huge cost. But we can look at Brazil to get some idea of the possibilities in front of us.

Brazil currently has a huge ethanol manufacturing infrastructure, and, as your research indicated, they sell ethanol on the international market for less than $1/gallon.

The limiting factors for the US are total manufacturing capacity (currently nowhere even remotely close to addressing US energy needs) and other infrastructure. But recent developments in using bioengineered enzymes to convert agricultural waste to ethanol are very exciting.

For those who want more, the best links on for intelligent green reading:

WorldChanging.com -- which also has an article about wave power.

TreeHugger, which is already linked in the story.

Dave Pollard, which writes very insightfully about lots of things including environmental philosophy.

Green Car Congress, where you can get the best news about green mobility, cool cars & industrial developments.

IDFuel, which is more about design but covers some of the same ground as TreeHugger.com

FuelCellWorks for all the latest news about fuel cells.

Grist Magazine, for news and a touch of humor, plus lots of interviews.