Fed-Up-With-Fuel-Price-Whining asks:
"Why are people still looking toward the gasoline companies for fuel? Is it because gasoline in a combustion engine is the most efficient, or is it because oil companies buy off the efforts of other possiable fuels? Fuel cells are a much better and cleaner way to use the fuel and there are other fuels out there with MUCH better potential than gasoline. Why don't people stop their crying and answer the oil companies jacking up of prices by converting their cars to other fuels?" Good question. The problem for most of us, I think, is availability. You mention Arizona, USA but what about the other American states? If something like this could be done here in good ole Virginia, I'd happily switch, assuming there existed a decent number of places to refuel. Honestly, if this were to be a reality for the states, alternate fuel sources and the infrastructure to support them would have to evolve pretty much simultaneosly. What do you think?
"Here in Arizona it costs around $6000 to convert your car to natural gas. If you do it Arizona will PAY the $6000 to convert the car. If you buy more than $280.00 a year in gas you will not have to pay for taxes or registration of your car.
I don't know, it just seems like a MAJOR buy off by the oil companies, the gas stations, and politicians. I know for FACT in Brazil you are able to buy a car which burns gasoline or methonol. And the Gas Stations have BOTH gasoline and methanol pumps. The methanol cars are still combustion engines.
There is one problem I know of methanol based cars. They are more like diesel engines. They are hard to start in COLD weather. But if they were converted from combustion to fuel cell based they would be even more efficient and much cleaner burning."
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From what I've read lately, today's IC engines generally top out at around 30% efficiency. So far, fuel cells range from around 40 - 60% efficiency. The problem is still heat. When a fuel cell is large and stationary, it can get up to 90% efficiency through cogeneration, which is using the heat that is produced to turn turbines to create more electricity.
Now, if they can just get them small and cheap enough to work well in a car, we'll be getting somewhere.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Plus the modern gas engine is very efficient, it produces a good amount of power for the fuel that you feed it. Ok some people buy SUV's that have much more engine than they need, but thats another point.
What I want to know is why do small aircraft still use leaded gas.
The Cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
I have to say this to all you folks out there.
The gasoline-powered automobile is still a viable means of transportation, because thanks to massive improvements in engine and emission-control technology since the 1970's, today's average automobile emit under 5% of the pollutants of a car circa 1970.
The development of catalytic converters, fuel injection systems, electronic engine controls and improved combustion chamber design has allowed automobiles to have excellent performance yet have extremely low emissions.
Remember, the entire world is going towards this end, too. The California Super Ultra-Low Emission Vehicle (SULEV), Japan's upcoming Stage III standard for 2004, and the European "Euro 2005" standards are almost identical in regards to emissions, and already companies like Honda, Toyota and Nissan have already manufactured cars that can meet these tough restrictions, with companies like Volkswagen/Audi, BMW and DaimlerChrysler closely following behind. These standards are so strict that it is more than likely the air going INTO the engine will be dirtier than the air coming OUT of the engine!
By drastically reducing the amount of sulphur compounds per billion in both gasoline and diesel fuel (something already required in California), it now makes it possible to introduce direct-injection systems that has the fuel injector directly injecting the fuel into the combustion chamber. This allows extremely precise metering of fuel necessary to do proper combustion, and that in turn increases fuel economy and reduces exhaust emissions at the same time.
In short, the gasoline engine is still a long way from dead. The technology is now in place to reduce pollutants to almost one percent (!!) of what a 1970 model year car emits and still get 15 to 20 percent better fuel mileage.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
especially with gas being as high as it is right now
The reason gas prices are so high is because people are buying gas-guzzling SUV's and driving up the demand for gasoline to insane levels, while OPEC has not increased production to match. If any chunk of the population switched to alternative fuels, the price of gas would drop through the floor. The lower demand would also severly hinder OPEC, and possible break the cartel, allowing the price of gas to fall further. But with gas at ultra-low prices, nobody in their right mind would want to pay for the (comparitivly) expensive alternatives.
Car companies will start making high-efficiency cars, since a fringe of the population (myself included) has grown large enough to make it profitable to satisfy the demand. Honda has that new car (the Prius?) that gets ~60-70 MPG, and Toyota is going to start shipping a similar car. The vast bulk of people (at least in the US), however, will still want their huge inefficient SUV's.
I belive a Ford exec said that the company would be overjoyed to stop manufacturing SUV's, but that as long as people demanded them, Ford had to supply them to stay afloat. The solution is in convincing John Q. Public that running an efficient, clean car (gasoline or otherwise), rather than his big, overpowered SUV, is what he wants to do.
Good luck.
You wrote: "We need a way to show the oil companies that we're fed up of lining their pockets with cash" which is kind of funny since there are so many ways, and so many organisations doing so.
Rule #1: Buy NO unneccessary plastic items. I make an exception, personally, for my kids' legos. But I don't buy a new case for my computer just because the ATX form came out, I hacksaw the old one. Plastics are essentially a waste product of the petroleum industry.
Rule #2: Buy NOTHING from Exxon. Because we need to convince the Oil Barons that there are some things that don't blow over - and Exxon's had the most egregious crimes as well as being the last vestigal trace of the original Petroleum Trust (Standard Oil = S.O. = Esso = Exxon, you can confirm this easily).
Rule #3: Stop whining and do something. I am converting my truck to gas/electric hybrid ASAP. My bud Pete runs used fryer oil in his (unmodified) Mercedes diesel.
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--Charlie
and I'm not joking... the person who invented the diesel engine originally planned for it to run on Hemp oil and other vegetable based oils.
Plus it cleans the environment as the plants are growing. I can't see any drawbacks.
Even so, there's something that doesn't smell right. I read that EV's are a failure because GM and Honda have backed out of their public EV programs, never mind that they were only available in *very* limited areas and never really marketed. They were pretty expensive though. That hasn't hurt the Corbin though --- at $15,000 ea for a single seater, they've got orders into next year. And these things are really beta vehicles --- I've gone through 2 controllers already and they have a number of glitches. Nevertheless, it's very fun to drive, and I love it when it runs. If a large manufacturer started cranking them out for under $10K, I'll bet you'd start seeing them everywhere.
The upshot is that while the technology isn't here yet for a complete conversion, and most people can't afford to have a vehicle for every use, a large number can afford an inexpensive commuter car if the advantages are sufficient. A Geo Metro that makes a number of sacrifices for a small decrease in gasoline consumption isn't enough for most people, but some of us are breaking ground for a more promising future.
Actually, like most so-called "zero-emisions" vehicles, this one is in reality just a remote emissions vehicle.
Something has to compress the air, and compressed air is not a particulary high-density energy storage medium. That something may be electricity, which more than likely came from an oil or gas-fired power plant and further absorbed the non-trivial power losses incurred in transmission lines, transformers, etc. (Granted, nuclear is the cleanest overall, but effectively impossible because of environmental zealots - nuke plants are already a dying breed - and ther is that pesky waste problem.)
Further, it requires expensive, filament-wound composite tanks, which are themselves a serious non-trivial safety hazard in the event of an accident. (For all gasoline's faults, it is much safer in a crash than many alternative fuels such as ethanol, hydrogen, L[NP]G, etc., and it does not require complex, expensive, or heavy containment and fueling sytems.)
Further, a cursory look at the zero emissions engine (listed on another page at the site) raises the snake oil alert flags: Although a spherical combustion chamber has some benefits (hence the famous Chrysler "hemi" (hemispherical) head, common in many modern motors), it requires small, inefficient valves, and will have to deal with the friction of two cylinders rather than one. As an experienced motorhead myself, I fail to see how this concept could even theoretically approach, much less exceed, the efficiency of a conventional IC engine.
Keep in mind that some ideas that look great on paper have problems in the real world. Mazda's incredible rotary being a prime example: The motor is small, light, has low friction, only a handful of parts, and you can literally rebuild it on your kitchen table. Unfortunately, although its power-to-weight ratio is quite impressive, its fuel economy is not, so it has been relegated to use in high-performance sports car duty where efficiency is less of a concern. (That said, I'm a huge rotor-motor fan - the things are awesome marvels of engineering. With reasonable care (mostly making *very* sure it *never* runs low on oil), the things are darn near bulletproof, too.)
It's easy to put together a web page making incredible claims (like the split-cycle folks did in Australia a year or two ago) - it's another thing to deliver on them. The reality is that cars are as good as we can economically make them today. They will continue to get better, but painting the automobile as the enemy of the environment is simply not realistic - modern cars emit virtually no pollutants once the catalyst is warm, and there is much promising research on how to avoid those initial few seconds. (Many new cars emit more in the first few seconds after a cold startup than they do for the next several dozen miles of driving. That's impressive!)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Who needs farmers? Don't you know? Food comes from the grocery store, not from farms.
-----
I live in NYC, i ride the train to and from work every day, it's fast, cheap, and efficient, a marvel of engineering.
When i visit my parents in CT, however, you can't do a thing without a car. Now, of course, people outside of cities *could* constrcut decent mass transit, but they don't, and that's fine -- it's a lifestyle choice based on perceived convenience and, to some degree, an archaic sense that one's car contributes to one's identity.
But it's a lifestyle *choice*, and when the price of gas goes up and this causes what were, essentially, forseeable economic impacts, what am i supposed to do, cry?
Stop whining. Take the bus. In addition to saving a couple of bucks, it'll help prevent your kids from getting skin cancer.
[This is without even addressing the point that cars contribute to the breakdown of neighborhoods, and that a quarter of a million americans are killed in car accidents a year. F cars. They suck. No sympathy from me. Gas should cost 6 bucks a gallon, given the harm it does.]
god is just pretend.
Here's a site that I check out pretty regularly on the Honda Insight hybrid. It's a "personal log" kind of thing, with loads of honest personal experiences from a bunch of people who've been living with the car for a while now.
I'd love one for commuting, but I probably couldn't even bring my briefcase with me for fear of carrying too much weight.
There are two central reasons why it is preferrable to have a plant making the pollution than a car.
a) A plant can be located away from residential areas. You probably notice there are no power stations anywhere near the cities they power (except maybe some of the older cities that grew towards plants). We can selectively place plants away from population centers and in places where the typical winds do not blow emission over cities. With cars the pollution is wherever the person is driving, and that is typically in population centers (since most people drive cars).
b) A plant can have better emissions control. Plants (can) have higher yet reasonable pollution control requirements than cars. In chemical engineering when you try to separate out two chemicals, to decrease the impurities in your product by half you must use x^2 more energy, equipment, etc. (i.e. money) in order to acheive this. At some point it becomes economically unjustifiable to continue purifying the product because the cost of the product production becomes higher than the average selling price of the product.
Cars have a minimum impurity amount that they have to achieve (where the impurity is the pollutants). However, we must multiply that by the number of cars.
If we have plants instead of cars producing pollution, we can reduce the impurities further. The plants are emitting more impurities so they can cut down on them further while still remaining profitable because each plant is producing the impurity amount equivelant to large amount of cars.
(Note that this is not valid if the plant is also producing the same amount of total waste gas (exhaust) as the number of large cars it represents, because the impuriy level is a ratio of impurity to everything rather than an amount. Under this circumstance that ratio is the same--I am assuming that it should be easy to cut back on the total waste gas when you are producing much more waste gas, thus giving a higher concentration of pollutants, which in turn makes it easier to separate them out).
- Sig
I don't think fuel cells are efficient or cost-effective enough yet. It'll be nice to see more electric-gas hybrid cars out there, but with the 3-gallons-per-mile SUV craze going on, I don't think it'll happen all that soon.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
There's another problem with methanol: it's hydrophylic, so it will absorb moisture from the air, contaminating it. I'd be interested in hearing how Brazilians address this problem. Another thing about alternative fuels is that I don't know of any that have the energy density of gasoline, so you have these big, unwieldy containers to deal with if you want the same range. Not to mention, where am I going to get my liquid oxygen to refill my fuel-cell equipped car? By the way, the FBI is very interested in buyers of LOX and liquid hydrogen. It seems that they're quite useful to terrorist bombers (uh oh, Carnivore is gonna log that one!). Gasoline is a great example of what being 'first-mover' can get you: dominance due to the sheer magnitude of the investment in infrastructure that grows up.
Well, turbines are great for bulk power, but not for efficient power. A jet engine, which is a kind of turbine (admittedly being used in reverse to the application in a power plant) would need to put out about 100lb of thrust to maintain freeway cruising speeds in the average car. The jet fuel (kerosene) required to do that would be in the range of 4 MPG. Compare that to the freeway cruising efficiency of a modern car.
As for where my statistics come from, the statistic about the hydro grid comes from the book, "An Engineer's Guide to Hydro-Electric Distribution Systems". The figure about the efficiency of the average car is taken from an article that I recently read on SAE's website at www.sae.org .
Friction in the engine, nonrecoverable heat from the combustion (biggie), friction in the transmission and tires, etc.Not to mention energy wasted as noise, energy wasted pushing the car through the air, energy wasted as the car idles.
Many new car brochures have the engine's power rated in kW now. If you stop and think about how much heat the car throws off for the fact that it's converting x kW of chemical energy into mechanical energy, I still think that's pretty impressive. By comparison, consider how much heat your computer's power supply throws off when you've got it running at its full 200W load (lots of disk drives and cards)....
You're also completely ignoring the benefits of regenerative braking in electric vehicles/hybrids.Nah. They're there, but I'm sure it's negligible. Consider the energy used to make the vehicle maintain a given speed. When you apply the brakes, if the traction motor is 90% efficient both driving and braking the car, 10% of your kinetic energy will be wasted as heat. The other 90% will go to recharge the batteries. Recharging batteries is an inefficient proposition - on the order of 50% maximum. I'm sure that regenerative braking improves cruising range by a few miles, but not much overall.
The more important benefit of an electric or fuel-cell powered car is that when you're stopped, the electric drive motor is off. The batteries or fuel cells are not running an idling engine, the way a gas tank has to keep an internal combustion engine running at stoplights. For city drivers, I'm sure that's a far more important benefit.
The other great benefit is that a gasoline engine achieves peak efficiency only at the top of its torque curve. In other words, only at a rotational speed determined by many factors, including the shape of the combustion chamber, the ratio of bore versus stroke, the design of the runners and plenum in the induction system, the back pressure and scavenging properties of the exhaust system, etc... It's pretty hard to maintain this peak efficiency as you're tooling around town. The transmissions in most cars are geared so that at legal highway speeds, the engine will be spinning at about the torque peak.
I will give you this: as you'd use it in a car, an electric motor's energy useage increases linearly with speed, making an electric car absolutely ideal for the slow puttering around a city that most people end up doing. But for the reasons outlined in my orginial posting, I greatly protest to running them off batteries, for the chemical dangers and charging issues I outlined originally.
Very good point. If i remember correctly, Ford engineers toyed with using Sodium batteries for their EV-1. Those babies have to be hot enough for the sodium to melt.I know. That's terrifying, isn't it? Most accidents happen on rainy/snowy days. Now, what happens when molten sodium from a broken battery hits the big puddle on the wet pavement beside the remains of the car...?
Geez, that takes me back to high school chemistry classes...
The "Oh no, more electrical bills!" argument is crap. New power plants would get built, and while they would probably burn fuel, they would incorporate more effective smokestack scrubbers than your catalytic converter on your car does.Oh, no question. A gasoline fired power plant could produce a lot less emissions that the same amount of gasoline being burned in even the best of cars. (I'm using gasoline as an example because it's a simple comparison, not because it would be a likely candidate for a power plant fuel.)
But now that you've got the energy out of the gasoline, you still have to get the energy into the car, and the transmission and storage of energy is the problem.
If a gasoline-fired plant products 1kW of energy from every liter of fuel (abysmal example, but easy for clarity), and a car produces 500W of energy from a liter, this looks good.
Then, subtract 50% of that 1kW of energy to get the power to the consumer. That leaves you with 500W of enery remaining. On par with the car, but a much cleaner exhaust, it's still probably worthwhile.
Now, as you charge the electric car's batteries, you lose another 50% or so to the charger and the chemical processes within the batteries. That leaves you with 250W of useable energy from that liter. Which means that for a given distance travelled in an electric car, you could easily end up using 4 times the fuel as you would have if you'd just burned the gasoline in the car to begin with. Then, if the scrubbers leave the exhaust from the plant twice as clean, per liter consumed, as the exhaust from a car, you're still producing twice as much pollutant as the car would.
A better option is a fuel cell, as soon as they're ready for mass production. A fuel cell will burn gasoline with stellar efficiency, and coupled to the operating efficiency and lack of idling of an electric motor, a fuel-cell powered electric vehicle would be the best option.
And it means no new nuclear power plants, no new hydroelectric dams, no new coal-fired plants: it can be run off ordinary gasoline or methanol/ethanol processed from agricultural crops.
And, it's clean. Running on hydrogen, the only emissions would be water vapor. Off gasoline, there'd be a little more. Even if it's not perfect, running on gasoline, it would still be an order of magnitude better than today's cars.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Sure, the acceleration isn't great, and these are not going to win any Formula 1 races in the near future, but think of it this way. The people who buy the cheapest, dirtiest, least-efficient, oil burning cars are your OAPs and students. OAPs are not the sort of crowd who go out-dragging the local chapter of Hell's Angels - they're more likely to be stuck in heavy traffic, crawling to and from the stores, hoping that their morning trip won't take until nightfall.
Students, likewise, are more likely to be driving to and from lectures. Cross-country trips are less than likely, and hauling ultra-heavy loads are unlikely to be regular events.
If someone were to build disposable cars, designed to last 3-4 years, using this ultra-efficient technology, you could throw away a good percentage of the gas-guzzlers. Less gasoline requied = more gasoline to go round.
As trends tend to catch on, especially really weird ones, something like this could utterly crush the SUV market (another horrible bleeder of the world's resources), and lead to people wanting to buy efficient for a change.
I can't blame the markets for pandering to demand. They're there to make money, not save the world. If most people want to turn precious reserves into pollutants, for no good reason, then the markets will respond and provide the means to do so.
Changing the fuel won't change the result. Only changing the attitudes can do that.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
On this site, you can also find this handy chart which shows visually exactly why ICE's are so inefficient.
--
Jake
Check out Zero pollution
Apparently the Mexican govt has ordered 1000's of these to replace taxis.
There's an old adage that in order to convince people to switch from an entrenched standard, you have to be 10x better. The infrastructure behind gasoline is extensive, and despite the technological deficiencies of gas, economically it is the cheapest way to get around.
The only way to make the alternatives that much better is to make gas worse.
Tax gas. Tax inefficient cars. Raise the pollution controlls on _gas_ powered vehicles through the roof.
You may think that this will hurt people and drive up prices. It may drive up the price of gasoline, and the price of driving around, but if you do it right, you can keep the cost of living about the same. Remember, the more expensive it is to drive around burning gasoline, the less gasoline will be burnt. The gas we burn, the less crude oil goes into its production. And the more crude we have, the cheaper we can make diesel, kerosene, plastics, etc. Artificially expensive gas means cheaper frieght charges (cheap diesel), cheap power (cheap crude/kerosene), and cheap consumer goods (plastics and other petrochemicals).
Of course, this would still look bad politically, but you can balance that out by putting all those tax revenues towards gas price relief for poor people, tax credits for efficient cars, etc. It would also (possibly) have the effect of breaking up OPEC. If demand falls, the marginal OPEC members (Veneualia (sp?) et. al.) will almost be forced to cheat on their quotas to make ends meet. And once enough of the small ones start cheating, the rest will follow suit, cutting the price of diesel/electicity/plastics/whatever even further.
If you are careful to balance the effects against each other, you can have your alternative fuels/low pollution without fscking everybody over.
They could construct it--but why? People "outside of cities" by definition have low population densities. "Mass" transit requires high populations.
This is simple overgeneralization; there are -many- places with the population density to support mass transit that don't have it - namely, just about every suburb. Presumably you'd run the busses infrequently and down only the major roads, but it'd be -something-.
Before you say it can't be done, consider the Sili Valley - despite the complaints about the efficiency or lack thereof and whether light rail is a waste of time, etc, there -is- a mass transit that runs all up and down and through the suburbs and shows no sign of vanishing. You can take the bus, the light rail, or the cal-train to various destinations, and at the other end take something else.
By contrast, in the Boston area, and most cities east of the rockies, -only- the metro region has mass transit, and the suburbs are left to hang. Or, (using the Boston area as an example) you have transit into the city with peripheral parking lots but no transit -out- of the city. In case nobody noticed, the high tech industry (and others that can manage it) are slipping out of the cities and building up along the highways that run out of them. I live -in- the city and work -outside- it, and the reverse commute is really only doable by car... it doesn't do me any good to be left in a 'commuter parking lot' with a residents-only sticker-required no-overnight-parking lot. I could, conceivably, even leave my car in the parking lot overnight and do -most- of my commute by transit and the transit-less leg by car, but the policies are set up to discourage it.
Anyway, the real reason there's no mass transit in the suburbs is because people in the suburbs don't want those icky 'city people' (read, minorities) coming out to shop in their nice isolated suburban shopping districts. Which, admittedly, they would probably do, but so what? Seeing a black face or hearing a conversation in portuguese isn't going to kill even the most whitebread of the suburb dwellers. (If you think I'm just trolling/flamebaiting, check out the zoning laws & transit-related votes in a suburb near you...)
Parity None
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--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
You can already buy half-electric cars from major manufacturers. Honda and Toyota both came out with hybrid cars this year. Check out the "Insight" and the "Prius".
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But of course any alternative would take time to phase in. Loss of profits and job cutbacks in the oil industry would be gradual. The people leaving the oil industry could find jobs in the new markets created by the oil alternatives. The oil companies would have plenty of time to diversify into new markets. 'Protecting Jobs' is never a good argument for holding back a better technology.
Thad
The Bolachek Journals
I bought one back in April. I can get over 80mpg on the highway (at about 60-65mph).
:)
City driving is another story. I don't drive to much in the city, but here in Chicago I "only" get 50mpg, not the 61 they claim. I'm certainly not complaining, but I wouldn't mind getting 60+ mpg in the city.
Since I drive over 500 miles a week, I thought this would be the best choice for a new vehicle.
Why do we still use gasoline instead of another power source? There are many reasons but here are a few:
The chemical energy stored in gasoline is very high for its weight while still being easily accessible. Methane and ethanol all have less energy stored per unit weight. This means that cars powered by gasoline can out accelerate these alternative fuel cars because they can release the chemical energy faster and turn it into kinetic energy. They also have better range because they have smaller lighter fuel tanks which weigh less. In many alternative fuel cars you loose a lot of trunk space to the fuel tank.
More energy per weight is diesel fuel. The problem here is that the energy is harder to release easily since diesel doesn't burn at room temperature at one atmosphere. This means the energy is harder to release and performance drops. Fuel efficiency is slightly better however.
As for fuel cells, I think the big problem is that you lose performance again. They don't combust gasoline they release the energy using a different chemical reaction. It works more slowly but more uses all the energy more completely and produces less harmful by products. This is nice, but makes for lower performance.
Electric cars are nice, but all the batteries are heavy and they take hours to recharge. You lose range and convenience. Hybrid cars are nicer because you power a set of batteries with a small gas engine. The batteries then power the wheels. Honda makes one of these I believe. The problem is that after two to three years you need a new set of batteries because current battery technology wears out too easily. And that many batteries are expensive.
I've also heard of all kinds of wacky fuels like vegetable oil. The guy did this to his volkswagen and got the oil from local fast food places that usually have to pay to get rid of it. His car exhaust smelled like french fries. No sure why this caught on, probably because it was an obscure idea that isn't practical on the large scale.
Basically what is preventing the widespread adoption of an alternative fuel is that nobody wants to loose anything. Nobody wants a slower car with shorter range. Nobody wants to pay more for such a car either. People also don't like to buy unproven technology. If you want an accepted alternative fuel car which is more efficient, buy a diesel.
BTW has anyone done studies to see if, after the power loss in transmission of the electricity to the house and the loss in the car itself, electrically powered cars actually pollute less than gas. The engine is less efficient, the transmission of the power to the house loses efficiency, and the power plant creates pollution just like the car would. By advocating electric cars are we simply changing the location of the pollution instead of reducing they levels of it?
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
One thing that seems to be forgotten in all these debates is how dependent we are for oil for other purposes. What is going to happen to the chemical and plastics industries - and indeed all the subsidiary industries that rely on their products once we run out of oil? We may well discover other sources of energy for transportation and heating - but there is no obvious substitute for the oil we require to manufacture the plastics we use. Just think of how prevalent plastics are today - just look at the big lump of plastic in front of you right now - and all the components under the hood that are keeping everything ticking over! If we waste all our oil resources on transportation and our technological civilization depends on oil derived plastics then how long can we survive with this level of technology? If we were a more responsible and mature society we would restrict our consumption so that future generations (and we should really be thinking way beyond our grandchildren) will enjoy some of the same resources we have today.
I work at Ford's Enviromental Vehicle project and i can't legally speak for them. Without trying to give out anything proprietary, in general, energy density is the real killer. 1 kg of gasoline efficiently tapped can give you 42-44 Megajoules. NiCad, Lead-Acid and Sodium-Sulfur of the same weight barely have a fraction of this energy. To replace 16 gallon (approx 42.39kg) of gasoline you need 14838.768 kg of lead acid battery. This is ten times the average weight of a car (around 1500kg). Since the car is 11 times heavier it should require 11 times more fuel. You do the math. It may more costly to your pocket and the enviroment (more energy use and heat dissipation).
Ultracaps? That's great. I know one company that sells ultracaps with 10,850.69 Joules/kg. Packs a punch for your house intruder but can't you anywhere (literally).
Ah.... somebody mentioned fuel cells. You can check out one of the suppliers ballard This is promising but the energy conversion unit is still heavy. Hydrogen actually packs more energy than gasoline: 38khw/kg (that's about 136.8 mejajoules/kg). Unfortunately, it hoards a lot of space. We could use methanol and carry methanol->hydrogen reformer that would take up more weight. After reliasing that the conversion unit takes more weight you begin to wonder, why don't you burn the hydrogen in the first place, instead of investing in the fuel cell stack, electric drivetrain and stuff? We are bothering with eletric motor? Why can't we just improve the efficiency of the internal combustion engine?
Relative to electric motor, internal combustion engine (ICE) is highly inefficient. While good motor with a good controller can give you close to 95% efficiency, an ICE is at 17% in a good day. Worse it's peak efficiency is at certain torque and at certain speed. That is why we have gearbox system and clutch. When the car stops, you have supply it with some fuel to keep spinning (idling) which is 100% loss (0% efficient). With electric motor you can adjust your torque and speed electrically and reclaim energy in braking.
I think I better stop here. in the meantime you are welcome to buy Ford electric bicycles and other stuff http://www.thinkmobility.com
Hasdi
Not speaking for Ford
I think the real problem is that Gas has been so cheap in the US for so long. We have had it WAY too good.
Plentiful supply, no shortages, cheap prices. Hell yes I enjoy it too. Even today with higher prices, gas is still fairly cheap.
Its cheap, its what we know. Whn the masses are confortable, there is no push to invest and research alternative fuels. Face it...any new system will need to be able to compete with the existing fuel infrastructure.
As for alcohol based cars....you can make your own ethanol and use it to power your car...many engines will run without modification (tho not well...much better to use a gas/alcohol mix). You can even get a licence to distil your own ethanol for fuel really cheap from the BATF. (in the US obviously).
Linday's Publications (http://www.lindsaybks.com) has a book on building a fuel alcohol still that talks about all this stuff. Really good book. Of course the MPG is less than Gas, but it burns ALOT cleaner....and thus keeps the engine cleaner.
I am personally of the belief that there is alot of potential in these feilds. I would like to get a Gas/electric hybrid (the honda insight beats the pants off even my motorcycle for MPG) and see it modified to run off Ethanol or methanol....now that would truely be a great car.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
It will happen sooner or later with enough incetive, but right now, there is a strong infastructure built up in the support of gasoline automobiles, and not one in support of alternative fuels. There are also a wide variety of fuels, and people want cars that run THE NEXT FUEL, not just a cleaner fuel. Also, cost is a big factor, most states won't pay to have your car converted. Most people know how to work on/supe up gasoline powered cars. They don't want to take them in to a mechanic to work on them when they are used to working on them themselves. Mechanics are trained to work on gas powered cars. Companies manufacture mainly parts for gas powered cars. The infastructure to purchase fuel, inexpensively, for alternative fuel vehicles isn't everywhere.
I mean, I would love to have an electric powered car, right? Where would I charge it? Just about only at my house! What would I charge it in? I plug that I have to get specially installed that is more powerful than the ones on my dryer, possibly requiring that I have lines run to my house for the power requirements.
It's not like, "Why would anyone run open source software." When the infastructure is there, and in fact better than that of closed source software. This is something where you really have to use the options given to you.
Eh...
If our province had that kind of incentive. Natural gas is much cleaner (and more efficient) than gasoline. The oil companies are a much greater monopoly than what Microsoft is, and everyone does complain.
The parallel to Microsoft is interesting because, of course, the first major anti-trust breakup of a company was of Standard Oil in (I think) 1911. The government ruled them a monopoly and split them into a number of smaller companies, which were the forebears of the major oil companies we have today.
The argument against the present oil companies is that they operate an informal cartel to keep prices up. This is one disadvantage of splitting a monopoly - it is much harder to show that a number of companies are colluding to act monopolisticaly, whereas its relatively easy to show that a single company is a monopoly. A two Microsoft cartel may be even worse than one Microsoft monopoly.
Sailing over the event horizon
"We need a way to show the oil companies that we're fed up of lining their pockets with cash."
And we are fed up with them paying their employees and paying those taxes. Pesky jerks.
Find a solution that will not result in hundreds of thousands of people being laid off. Find a way that will not result in the economies of several countries being tossed down the toilet which will further result in war, unrest and more people suffering not to mention economic problems for the rest of the world.
Find a solution that when implemented, will be as cost affective as what it replaced. For instance, don't force everyone to buy a new car which costs two and a half times more than a gasoline powered device and then force them to use a fuel that costs several dollars a gallon and have that same device and fuel get the same mileage as their previous gasoline-powered device.
These are just a few of the problems that enviromentalists and politicians usually don't address: What affect will this have on the working person in this country? Using the excuse "Well, it may cost you more, but we know what is best for you", will result in insurrection when deployed in this scale.
Gasoline is here for a while. There's just no good substitute for most people yet.
Natural gas/Propane are both great, but the infrastructure to support them just isn't there. Gas stations would have to make a huge investment to be able to support them at all stations. It's great for fleet vehicles like taxis, since the cab seldom leaves its home city, and the driver can get to be very familiar with which gas stations have already added propane/NG fueling services.
While gasoline is very nasty stuff, it's a little safer than carrying around a large tank of compressed and invisible fuel. A car accident that ruptures a full automotive propane/NG tank would be far more likely to be deadly than a car accident that ruptures a gasoline tank and causes a spill. Let alone the dangers of hydrogen as a fuel, which, like acetylene, sweats its way out of cast iron tanks.
You'll note that most parking garages won't allow propane/NG vehicles. If, over the years, one of the fuel lines corrodes or develops metal fatigue cracks, a slow fuel leak could cause a parking garage explosion. Since parking garages tend to be under buildings, conceivably, the building could come down. Dire consequences? Yup. One in a million chance? Yup. But if there are millions of propane/NG vehicles out there, it's a bigger worry than gasoline.
Gasoline tends to drip, and you can usually see a leak. You can always see a puddle. With invisible gases, that's not possible: you have to rely on the odor, which you might not catch if it's windy.
Admittedly, conditions have to be just right for a propane/NG explosion, but it's unquestionably somewhat more dangerous than gasoline. Much like a Ford Pinto's gasoline tank is more dangerous than the average.
Fuel cells are a great idea, and I'm sure they'll be with us in a few years. I've had the opportunity to drive a Ballard-powered golf cart, and it was a lot of fun. Silent, fast, much more efficient than an internal combustion engine. It was nice. But the problem is that fuel cells still require membranes that are as difficult and unreliable to mass produce as color LCD displays were a few years ago. In time, that will change.
Fuel for fuel cells will still have to be something combustible. A fuel cell simply burns fuel through what is essentially a catalytic reaction, as opposed to a combustion reaction. So we're back at the same choices: drag around a tank of liquid gasoline/methanol/ethanol, or drag around a tank full of compressed hyrdrogen/propane/NG.
Since the infrastructure already exists for the distribution of liquid fuels, you're probably still going to be pouring some sort of liquid fuel into your tank.
Fuel cells, by virtue of their basic operation, will be very sensitive to impurities in the fuel. Deposits formed inside the fuel cell will require the replacement of the expensive membrane. A conventional paper fuel filter, like your car currently has, will not suffice. That's going to mean very expensive processes of lining tanks in every refinery, truck, gas station... which will be carried on to you, fair consumer.
Electric cars are a great idea, but they're not practical for two big reasons.
First things first, all batteries use a chemical reaction to convert chemical energy into electrical energy. The more efficient the battery, the more efficient (and therefore nasty) the chemicals must be. In order to achieve range in an electric car, every bit of free space is going to have to have batteries crammed into it.
Now, what happens when you're involved in a fender-bender? A battery will probably rupture somewhere, spraying out strong acids or alkalines. Accident victims will often have chemical burns. And every last fender-bender on the Santa Monica Freeway would result in a Haz-Mat team cleaning up the road. As if gasoline wasn't hazardous enough.
Electric cars also need fuel. The fuel, of course, will be electricity to recharge the batteries. If you're plugging your car in at night, your electric bill will go up. No big deal, it will probably be cheaper than gasoline. But what happens when the majority of the 6 million or so cars in LA are plugged in every night? The power from your wall outlets comes from somewhere... how many nuclear power plants will have to go up to deal with the increased electrical needs? How many more Hoover Dams will have to be built? Remember, tidal and solar power just aren't capable of serving any sort of electrical need yet. Building coal or other fossil-fuel powered plants just defeats the purpose of electric cars.
What will your electric bill look like as the demand for electricity outstrips supply? It already does that every year just with air conditioners. Look at the situation in Montana at the moment.
Add to that the fact that a modern gasoline car is about 70% efficient. Not good, right?
Most electric distribution systems are only about 40-50% efficient. So, on a per car basis, you're already using more energy by running an electric car. Then consider that batteries are at best 70% efficient. While the car's electric motor itself may be upwards of 90% efficient, your efficiencies have already added up and negated any benefit.
Gasoline is evil. Electricity is evil. Cars are evil. But they're here to stay; better just to continue to refine what we have. And when the fuel cell is ready for mass production, I'll happily fill my efficient fuel-cell powered vehicle up with renewable and clean methanol/ethanol.
I know for FACT in Brazil you are able to buy a car which burns gasoline or methonol.Most American cars now will run very happily on either gasoline or methanol.
Methanol is, of course, a form of alcohol, and has properties somewhat different from gasoline. For one thing, it's significantly more corrosive to some of the rubber and plastic parts in a car's fuel system. That has been addressed; for example, all new Chryslers since 1991 (correct me if I'm wrong) include fuel system components that are meant to handle it.
Chrysler had a wonderful test car at about that time. It was a 1990 or 1991 Dodge Spirit R/T with a 2.2L or 2.5L engine - the same motor as most K-Cars, Dodge Shadows, etc. With very little work, they'd adapted the fuel system to happily take methanol/ethanol. And the fuel injection system (discussed below) was fitted with a fuel type sensor that would allow the car to run happily on any ratio of gasoline/ethanol/methanol.
Combustion properties are quite different. Since methanol burns differently, if you were to just dump it into your gas tank, your engine would run.... sorta. But since your carburetor and ignition timing are calibrated for gasoline, it wouldn't run very well. Knocking, poor performance, poor gas mileage, and stinky tailpipe.
Over the years, as the car makers have adopted electronic fuel injection systems, this has become less of a problem. EFI systems are meant to enhance driveability, gas mileage, performance and emissions by monitoring how the engine is behaving, and then adjusting fuel/air ratios and ignition timing accordingly. It's entirely a closed-loop, feedback oriented system.
As a result, if the engine is knocking, for example, a sensor on the engine will detect it and the computer will retard the ignition timing until the knock is gone. If the oxygen sensor on your tailpipe is reading too much oxygen (ie. mixture too lean), it will add more fuel. If the O2 sensor reads no oxygen, it will assume the mixture is too rich and lean it out a little bit. This happens hundreds of times a second as you drive. In this way, the engine can adapt a great deal to the kind and quality of fuel being used, with the benefits of better performance and lower fuel consumption.
And, if your oxygen sensor's (or any other sensor's) readings are way out of whack, the computer will realize it, and light up the "Check Engine" or "Service Engine Soon" light. At that point, the computer is making a best guess for how to run the engine, and while the car will still run, performance will not be optimal. If the car's engine can't cope with alternate fuels (ie. the computer isn't allowed enough range in its adjustments to timing and mixture) then this is probably what you'll see. And, likely, when you next fill it up with real gasoline, the little light will go out.
Of course, if your Check Engine light doesn't go out, take the car to the dealer as soon as possible.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.