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Zero to Rutabaga in 6 Seconds
DarkenWood writes: "I found an interesting article over at BBC SciTech about a sports car that runs on rotting organic waste. 0-60 in under 6 sec. Very cool."
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it just sits there till its all done with its vegetables, mister!
Buy a house on top of the hill, find a job on the bottom. If it's an .com job you'll never get to go back home anyway. :)
You can read more about the Advantige R at Rinspeed's web site.
Apparently they are using Kompogas for their bio fuel.
In fact, in some cities (San Francisco), you can get across town far faster by bike than any other way!
There is, however, this little issue of all those steep hills in San Francisco. I'm not sure if those messenger bicyclists are willing to go up and down Nob and Russian Hills.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Based on that BBC online article, that's still not a good idea.
A much better solution is diesel fuel derived from plant sources (biodiesel). Already, BMW is selling the BMW 330d turbodiesel coupe/sedan, which has a top speed of 143 mph and does 0-60 in six seconds--with vastly superior driver comfort. And the 330d could probably be made to run on biodiesel with only some minor engine modifications with no loss in performance.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Sure this thing runs off rotting organic waste but a tank full of a certain ex-girlfriend's hash brown casserole would kill it like sugar in the tank of a gas powered car.
Yes Susan, I only said I liked it to get you in the sack :)
Gord
Trolling is a art,
Well, it seems like it could be more efficient. Considering a person who would buy a car like this, is probably more concerned about the environment than going Really Fast(TM). The car is designed obviously to get the most power out of the biomass. If you had a city car, the requirements would be different. Also, one could probably improve the effiency by using a high quality biomass, it doesn't say specifically what it runs on, but some vegetation that has a high concentration of.. uhh.. Chemical X would definately help.
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Insert Witty Sig Here
Because that's what you bought, thereby keeping the market for gas guzzlers nice 'n' healthy.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The car: http://www.rinspeed.com/pages/press/pre-r_one.htm
The Fuel: http://www.kompogas.ch/e/index.html
copy and paste the link text for the goatsex-wary...
Too bad it stinks like crazy... and having dozens of those together in one small area would, well, smell a lot worse then it does now..... *shrug*
uhh.. hovertech?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Ok, say lettuce is roughly $0.89/lb and according to the article the car will travel roughly 62 miles on 220lbs of garbage. From what I can tell you would have to spend $195.80.
My car gets about 22mpg (the way I drive) and it costs (even at the broom stick up your ass price of $2.00 per gallon) about 30 bucks to fill it up. And with a full tank I get about 300 miles.
IANAM but from what I can tell it would cost you about $979 bucks worth of lettuce to go 300 miles, that is about $3.26 per mile or (using my car's fuel economy) roughly $71 a gallon! Even with our completely fucked up gas prices (thats Bill, and Gray, and OPEC, George is in there too, the finger to you all!!!) it's still a better deal to get raped at the pump.
Although this does give a new meaning to dumpster diving
BTW Offtopic, but oh well, my plan against the gas companies is to get my self a box of hotel card keys, a shitload of super glue, and one night were I insert superglued cards into all of the pumps at several local gas stations.
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
They say "environmentally friendly", but mention nothing about emissions. I'm skeptical that those cars won't stink really badly. ... What's STL?
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I'm a C++ guru
Most cities WERENT designed for cars. Hence the traffic problem.
LA WAS designed as an automobile city. From what I hear, it's not any better off in regards to traffic.
The automobile is become more of a problem than a solution. Sure, it's still good for long trips, especially the long trips to visit grandma in her town with a population of 1500 people, but as far as commuting, living in a bigger city, or trips between big cities, it's doing pretty poorly.
All I can hope is that someone designs a nice mass transportation system that works really well, finds a way to fight past the incredible greed and the amazing stranglehold of the automobile/oil industries, and gets it successfully put into a city.
Doubt it'll happen though, at least not until commutes start reaching the 4 hour mark for a sizable amount of people. (Obviously 1-2 hr commutes aren't that bad, since people do them, and I think they'd even put up with 3 hr, but I think spending 8 hrs a day driving to and from work will make some people realize how incredibly ridiculous and stupid it is)
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"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
One of the bigger problems for young people is that in many neighborhoods there's literally nothing to do, and nowhere to go until they get old enough to drive. The other big problem is that the sprawl tends to isolate poorer people, denying them access to good jobs outside of their neighborhoods.
Well, they've turned any imaginative and artistic types away from urban planning with the standard ways they do it... put big subdivision here, put big apartment complex here, a couple major roads here, and put all the commercial development along this other big road. Think about it - just about every city of decent size, and the suburbs of the bigger ones, are set up like this. You can't walk from most residential areas to the commercial areas in any decent amount of time - and they often don't even bother with sidewalks because they know that nobody walks.
It's all designed for the automobile, and it's got this feeling like any SimCity designed for maximum efficiency - sure, it works, but it has no personality, no variety - and in real life, forgets about entire groups of people.
Sure, I don't want that three-story Woodfield Mall within walking distance of my apartment. But I would like the opportunity to walk, rollerblade, or bicycle around to places without ending up trying to hurry across roads with 6-8 lanes of traffic while walking on that tiny patch of grass right next to cars doing 60 mph.
America itself is becoming as diverse as the stores we shop at. (ie not very diverse at all, since we've already pretty much got the same stores all over the place)
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"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
but smoking several acres of the stuff per joint.. well.. you'll have lung cancer before you're high.
I'll stick to good old Cannabis Sativa Hollandica, or nederwiet. (no points for that quote)
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
FYI my chemistry professor in High School was a real weird bird... not necessarily because he powered his car with chicken crap but that didn't help. He picked up chicken crap from the local chicken farm and let the crap ferment in a big washtub in the back of his car. He used a small charcoal fire under the washtub to heat up the crap and speed up the fermentation process while he was driving and he snuffed out he fire when he got to school by cutting off it's oxygen supply.
He said sometimes when going up a big hill he'd have to pull over and let the methane collect a bit to have enough power to make it up the hill. Now this was back in the early 80s when the environment wasn't a big issue and he was mostly trying to save a buck. The car was an old little import like maybe a 75ish Opal. He had a coil of copper tubing mounted on top of the washtub which piped the gas to the carb. It looked like a still on wheels. He was also a radical Jehova's Witness who didn't believe in deoderant but that's another story. Anyone going to my high school in the 80s will recognize this story.
That is all.
If they could make garbage trucks that use that kind of engine...
AccountKiller
Er, i hope you're not serious. I don't see this anywhere.
Because there's no way this things fuel consumption exceeds the waste produced by your average child during a long car trip
:wq
The car runs on rotting organic waste AND gasoline. I'd imagine that when you're accelerating to 60mph in 6 seconds it's running primarily off of the gasoline.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
This car uses a shitload of gas.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
For a couple months in '92 the city (Madison WI) was running 4 of their older busses on soy oil. The curbside tables at the State Street restaurants and coffeshops have never since been as busy.
The experiment ended when the new busses were delivered, and the fleet could be held under Federal pollution limits with cheaper diesel.
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
Actually Sunflower tops Soy as an oil crop. Soy has the advantage of also yielding a higher protien seedcake (animal feed.) Soy oil is cheaper because it's a byproduct. Hemp is in the same league, which oilseed crop to plant will vary with local conditions if fuel is the end product.
Petroleum is cheaper than veg oils as long as we don't consider replacement costs.
Hemp and other biomass crops actually look better in electric generation than in automotive applications, as there's no need for inefficient conversionto a liquid fuel.
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
And right now, useless for normal driving. However, considering this is the only the first, I would say there is a lot of leeway to learn how to develop such a vehicle. I do wonder what the exhaust gasses are tho. What byproducs? What wastes? I also dont think it will be great in Western countires. However, in third world countries (sorry if this appears to be flamebait, but it's an observation of present situations in such countires) there is a great deal of waste that isn't disposed of well. I see there could be potential in say India. Not only using up wastes, but even helping to clean up the enviroment. A neat transportand also garbage disposal. Could be a real winner if done right.
"Old Rallydrivers never die - they just fail to book in on time"
The point is well made. I'm native to the LA area, and back before the new train systems came in you were royally screwed without a car. I don't know how well the new trains work since I no longer live in the area. One of the big reasons I moved out was the fact that to get anywhere, you had drive at least an hour. There was very little in way of community as well. And, this in an area that came of age with the automobile. If you go into the older parts of LA, like Silverlace, Hollywood, and Century City, the place has a fairly back east feel to it, and there is a sense of neighborhood. However, that's a very, very small part of the region. One of the bigger problems for young people is that in many neighborhoods there's literally nothing to do, and nowhere to go until they get old enough to drive. The other big problem is that the sprawl tends to isolate poorer people, denying them access to good jobs outside of their neighborhoods. And, from a racial point of view the automobile based city can be very segregated. So, yeah, I'm the camp that agitates for a fundamental redesign of the US City around dense development and public transit. Mainly, I just feel that time spent driving is a little bit of my life wasted, and when the commute gets up in the hour + range, it's a lot of my life wasted.
When they reported on the vegetable oil car they were reporting on 100 year old tech.
This is only 60 year old tech.
Running cars on gas produced by rotting organic waste was fairly common in Europe during WWII.
If you find a copy of the Bosch book of the Motor Car in it you will find an illustration of a common rig, a complete gas producing 'still' in a trailer towed behind the car burning the methane gas.
KFG
There is only one in the world and it comes with a half-a-million-pound price tag.
i hate it when they bundle cars with 250-ton price tags. its really annoying. why can't they just make the material lighter?
Since when did Slashdot become Popular Mechanics?
The Concept car page is here (broken out of the frame).
Photos too. very much worth checking out.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
...not to finish your vegetables!
"But mommy, if I eat my limabeans we can't drive to see grandma!"
They did say it takes 220 pounds of fuel to go 62 miles, right? Think about 62 miles as one moderately long commute, round trip. A bit inefficient, eh? Though I suppose they could make garbage trucks which were powered this technology...
you're going to see some serious shit.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Does the car have to take a shit every few miles?
Would you have to pull over to a rest stop, because your car couldn't hold it?
The Sydney Morning Herald posted a very good story about Biodiesel last week.
*** I am the real stylewagon
Big deal. I saw a discovery channel show about turbine powered cars developed in the 1950's. Basically, the concept was to put a jet engine down the length of the car (!)
Not only did they build them, they started handing out the prototypes to random families. People liked driving them. The acceleration was poor, but they were working on that. The exhaust wasn't even hot. And of course, with almost no moving parts, they had no good reason to break down.
The kicker is that they would run on *any* flammable liquid. They had video of the president of south africa incredulously pouring cognac into the gas tank.
I saw this on tv three years ago, and my jaw was on the floor for the duration of the program.
Why didn't they go into mass production? Good question. From what I remember, the car companies simply lost interest in the project.
However, is it really what is best for society?
The automobile, while a blessing for many, has also become a curse, especially when our cities are designed around its use. In some cities in America, for example, people sit around in traffic jams for hours because of the fact that they, along with most others in the metro area, need to travel across the freeways or highways to get to work. If, say, a million people need to get to work in the space of an hour, and they all drive their own cars across the roadway, there are bound to be traffic problems. Millions of man-hours are lost that could've been spent doing other things rather than commuting.
Furthermore, the millions of people commuting using automobiles takes up lots of space. Automobile-oriented cities eventually wind up sprawling across the countryside, replacing lots of important open space near the city with highways, strip malls, and tract housing. Among other effects of widespread automobile dominance are the death of a lot of social aspects of the city (people need the automobile to get anywhere, and thus it becomes expensive and troublesome, not to mention time-consuming, to travel between cities), smog (a la Los Angeles or Houston, though this may not be as much of a problem with an alternative-energy car), unnecessary expense on the individual (if everyone needs a car to get around, they need to pay for the car, gas, insurance, etc) and as a result is discriminatory (not to mention age discrimination, as people younger than driving age or too old to drive are effectively confined to the home without means to go anywhere). The list can go further, but I ramble, and the basic point is that the automobile-oriented city is inefficient. The low-density development provided thus is incongruous with a city (which is what the majority of the people still function in). Perhaps mass transit and 'walkable' cities are better.
At any rate...the point of this whole argument is, when viewed in the grand scheme of things, is this really better? The problem of needing lots of gasoline is solved, but this is only a surface problem - lots of energy is still required to operate these things, and the automobiles still affect their surroundings negatively when there are too many. The only thing that's changed is the fact that a different type of energy runs the car. So, in the long run, would it perhaps be better that it were more expensive to operate a car? The eventual result would be that fewer people would use them (they are more difficult to afford, and thus less widely used), and the structure of the city would change accordingly to one more beneficial to human interaction and transport. We'd also have less energy needed to power our cars, and more energy could then go to preventing rolling blackouts and other fun things. ;-)
OTOH, would IT be a good fix as well? With more telecommuters, this means fewer commuters, and thus less of a need for massive highways and traffic jams and the like, and also preserves more energy for more important things.
Of course, this is a neat technology...I wouldn't mind powering things off of my garbage :-)
While hemp isn't marijuana, it does contain tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Hemp is the plant; marijuana is the dried flower of a variety of this plant (cannabis sativa L.)
Did YOU look it up?
Eugenicists should be shot.
Grass, ash, or trash. Nobody rides for free.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Having learned of the new vehicle, the American government has entered into a plan to purchase trash from an undisclosed Middle Eastern nation, at a current average rate of 2 dollars per gallon of refuse. President Bush, on an unrelated note, has declared war on several Russian landfill sites, stating that, "We, the American people, must protect our vital energy resources."
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Biogas has long been a popular fuel, but it's better suited to stationary applications. Methane is effectively 120 octane, you can replace the injectors in a big diesel with spark plugs and use a simple mixing valve for a carburator. Many sewage tratment plants are powered this way.
I wonder how long it will be before this type of thing is econically viable.
A hybrid version of the Dodge Durango is only a $3000 tax credit away from costing the same as a normal-fuel Durango (see here)
Unfortunately I don't think that's the kind of thing Cheney (who is the one actually controlling things), with is interest in the oil industry, would let slip.
Gas-electric hybrids don't need any additional infrastructure. They use what exists, ie. gasoline, but in a far more efficient manner than traditional cars through things like regenerative braking and more efficient (but still powerful, think VTEC) engines.
about a sports car that runs on rotting organic waste. 0-60 in under 6 sec.
Of course, because it's so slippy.
Wait a minute, you meant runs on gas given off by fermenting organic household waste, as one of its fuel supplies?
oops.
I bet it will take a long time. They'll have to stop to get potato chips and Oreos every couple of blocks.
"Hey, man, can we, like, stop for some munchies again?"
Does it travel through time when it hits 88mph?
Back to the Dancin Santa
That is one badly written article. The Kompogas website was so badly slashdotted it took me a couple of hours to look at 3 pages -- but it's quite clear this car does not carry fermenting compost. (You couldn't get anything to ferment fast enough to handle the autobahn.) Kompogas collects the methane from big compost tanks at fixed sites and compress it at 250 bar. (I didn't find anything about how or whether they filter out the other gases produced -- most of these gases would burn too, and if your fuel doesn't leak, you won't care whether it smells like garbage.)
The bulk of the compost winds up as fertilizer. Methane is sort of a byproduct. It's certainly better than filling up landfills and letting the methane burp into the atmosphere. However, Kompogas's web site is so perky and technical specification-free that it pretty much qualifies as fertilizer to begin with...
Now if they can just make a veggie-powered computer, coders will be set for life. With all the organic waste stacked around the average programmer's comp (day old pizza, last week's coffee, doritos) he could power the thing for a year!
The energy crisis isn't going away, I wonder how long it will be before this type of thing is econically viable. I have the feeling things will suddenly switch the day that gas prices finally top the total prices of rutabega's and retooling... and not a second before.
Companies have to have some sort of contingency plans, don't they?
I still think that hydrogen fuel cells are the way to go. This thing requires 220 pounds of stuff so that it can travel 62 miles? That just doesn't cut it.
You can produce hydrogen from water and sun light. Hydogen fuel cells have vastly greater power per pound yeilds than this lame power system, and the exhaust is pure water vapor.
Here's an article about the Mercedes-Benz NEBUS.
"The only rights you have are the rights you are willing to fight for."