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More on GM's New Fuel Cell Cars
Whispers_in_the_dark writes "Scientific American has an article about GM's approach to fuel cell based vehicles of the future. It appears that GM wants to build a common fuel cell based drive-by-wire chassis that it will mount the body panels, control systems, and passenger compartments. This would provide a great deal of flexibility and upgradability to the cars of the future. GM has even more details."
From the GM link: ''With its robust 42-volt electrical system, the car is configured to run any number of devices in the passenger compartment, from homes to entire farms.''
um... what????
Right. Lets just monopolize the market and set insane pricetags, then finally close the division saying it didn't work out. Case and Point
Last spring GM had demonstration units at the auto shows. Apparently you can lift one body type, such as 4-dr sedan, and replace it with another, such as pickup truck. Plug'n'play.
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...case mods for cars. *sigh*
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
here.
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GM is the only US automaker developing its own fuel cell in-house: at the company's Warren, Michigan, research facility; at a 300-engineer skunk works near Rochester, New York, that recently expanded by 80,000 square feet; and at a third center in Mainz-Kastel, Germany.
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Why? We have seen one wheel cars before :)
Speaking of economical cars, I'm tired of waiting for them to get their act together. I've read about all the great leaps and bounds the big three have made but I've yet to be able to buy the products they design, test, prove and then shelve. Where are they?
Don't get too excited. It's just another PR filled "Vision" of the future. This ranks right up there with the flying cars and moon vacations we were supposed to have by 2000.
There isn't even a prototype for crying out loud! It's LESS relevant than the concept cars you see at auto shows.
Will not happen.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I've heard that GM will debut this car at this years Paris Auto Show. According to GM the real driver for development on this car is emerging economies like China. Your typical Chinese farmer lives in a house that's miles and miles off of any electrical grid. With the AUTOnomy platform, he can buy one transport that can serve as Tractor, Truck and power generation for his house when he comes home at night. Pretty cool. Of course, where is a Chinese farmer going to get a reliable source or Hydrogen??
yea i stole your sig- whats the big deal, it sucked anyway.
I remember reading a magazine article about this earlier. My impression was that they are in the extremely early planning stages of any such endeavor. The idea of basing all their cars around a common chassis and powertrain sounds like an amazing way to reduced production costs all by itself, even without the fuel cells. Still, I am not holding my breath. The article I read quoted GM execs as saying something like, "We will make a decision on this around 2008-10." Sounds like they have a political interest in announcing this now. They probably want to avoid having the government force them into making fuel cell cars, and the best way to do that is to pretend they are already working on them.
This isn't anything new. GM announced this at the North American International Auto Show in January.
Anyways, the idea is for a fuel cell car that can be easily produced and not put UAW workers out of a job. You have one plant making the core part of the car (the bottom part with wheels and all points in-between to make the car move). Other plants build the top part of the car (one makes SUVs another makes luxuary lines...). and plug the top part into the same base.
Now this 'plug-in' idea is not meant for the consumer to detach different car bodies at home, but it makes production cheaper since you're building the same engine.
I for one am glad that there seems to be one new idea coming out of Warren, MI.
AnamanFan - Trying to find the Truth, one post at a time.
GM wants to build a common fuel cell based drive-by-wire chassis that it will mount the body panels, control systems, and passenger compartments
There's a reason that different cars have different chasses. I'd like to see the ride a Caddie body on a standard size frame gets. In addition, the fuel efficiency of a small car (and how small could you make it) on a standard chassis would suck, too. This would lead to a bunch of cookie-cutter cars, most of which have lousy handling, don't perform well, and are ugly to boot.
Oh yeah... I forgot. This is GM we're talking about. Never mind.
That is all.
When my '72 Bonneville hits one of these things at 15 MPH. "Sorry, the fuel cell is cracked, gonna need to total it"
It's called "hot rodding" and it's been around for a while now. Maybe you've heard of it.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
GM's fuel cell cars are just a bandaid on the wound of excessive energy consumption caused by private vehicles. Even if they can be recharged overnight by electrolysis, that just moves pollution from the tailpipe to the smokestack, you are still moving over a ton of material to move one person.
Motorcycles really aren't a solution, as they suck in bad weather and too many riders are just potential organ donors. Plus, the newest super bikes have worse gas mileage than an entry level Honda.
We need to swallow our American pride and look after our European betters. We need to change zoning laws to prevent suburban sprawl, while implementing light rail and mini-bus transportation to give everyone about the same commute time as now, but with a less polluting mass transit system. In fact, intelligently applied, commuting times might be less, as traffic density would be a lot less. The next time you're stuck in a traffic jam, think how much more productive you could be in a mini-bus with wi-fi, giving you full internet access on your Linux webpad, instead of stuck behing the wheel.
As a side benefit, we would greatly decrease our reliance on imported oil, and could tell all those towelhead in the mideast to suck sand. Japan's economy would certainly suffer, but they didn't have any qualms about destroying our electronic and automobile industry.
Now, there will be the predictable outcry from the exurbs and rural sorts, but I think private vehicles owned by rural collectives, much like the famed kibbutz of Israel or the efficient collective farms of the Soviet Union would fill the bill neatly.
It's always nice to imagine upgradeable hardware, kind of like the promise of DSP-based electronics that could be field upgraded with new capabilities in the future. There's just one problem with that scenario: lost future revenues. The manufacturer can't expect to earn much on those software upgrades, so once they sold you the hardware they have little incentive to follow up with software. Instead the "future" upgreadability ends up being just another selling point for hardware, without actually delivering it. There are plenty of ways of weaseling out of it.
This holds especially true of automobiles. The main investment with new automobile development is in the platform or chassis. While the body and interior are the most visible things and what define the car to the customer, they're really just eye candy and quite interchangeable. What differentiates the automobile and its driving and performance characteristics is its chassis: the rigidity of the frame, the suspension, and the engine and transmission. Car manufacturers guard their chassis as closely as aircraft manufacturers their wings.
I just finished reading a book on the take-over of Chrysler by Daimler, and one of the driving forces of the deal was the promise of platform synergies, saving a lot of money between the two companies by sharing platforms. But when it actually came down to doing it, the Mercedes folks were going to share car platforms between say an E-class and a Dodge Stratus only over their dead bodies. To them what makes a Mercedes a Mercedes is the platform--the rest are mostly components from third-party parts bins which anyone else could buy. If a customer could get the same chassis in a Stratus, why on earth would they fork out for an E-class? Incidentally, speaking of DaimlerChrysler, they're way ahead of GM in the fuel cell game, regardless of what the article might imply. In fact, the article seems to be an expanded advertising section by GM.
This all is not to mean that I don't think that GM's shared platform idea is a great idea, I just don't think that it will actually happen for competitive reasons.
Fuel cells are a boondoggle! All they are is a new way to burn old fuels. Yes, they run on Hydrogen. Where does the hydrogen come from? There are two answers:
So what is wrong with this?
Well, in the first case, you produce a lot of carbon dioxide, and worse, carbon monoxide, in the extraction process. At least the extraction process is energy self-sufficient, i.e. it gets all the energy it needs from the fuel being extracted.
Extracting hydrogen from water, on the other hand, you get out the same amount of energy that you put in, minus losses. As such, it is not a way to produce energy, only to store it. So where does the electricity come from with which to do this?
Fuel cells are an interesting technology, but they do not come anywhere near offering a solution to any energy production problem that we are likely to face.
www.wavefront-av.com
That has happened in the past.. the original Volkswagon was very moddable thanks to the fact that the body basically bolts onto the frame.they ended up being used for the basis of other projects and there was/is a hobbiest industry dedicated to providing custom bodies.
I honestly don't think there as much of a diffrence between auto hobiests and computer as first appears. I have noticed that a lot of the traits I have that make me good with computers are the same ones make my father good with cars.
Is it any wonder why we both like to extract every last bit of performance out of our respective platforms and try random mods?
I love this idea. The design concept, the adaptability, the price, the envrionmental impact. Everything about it is great.
... Thousands upon thousands of gas stations. Hundreds of thousands of jobs... all gone.
But it'll be a long time before these take over internal combustion engines, and it's not because we can't make the technology work or get the public to buy them.
Put simply, oil. Billions of dollars in investments, oil tankers, refineries, oil rigs
It would kill the Western world's economy if done too quickly, and the larger companies with a keen interest in oil are going to make dang sure it doesn't happen too quickly, if at all.
In the end, the only two winners would be the envrionmentalists (we all would win), and the peace loving people of the Western world who would love to see the Middle East region reduced to nothing but a third world desert (if nobody buys oil, how could they afford those fancy weapons). Neither of the two have any foothold in the policy makers domain.
There has to be some careful decisions made if these are going to be rolled out. Lets hope for the best.
In the meantime, be a patriot; Walk.
The Internet is generally stupid
I don't think a system that works by electrical signals is necessarily any more unreliable than one that works by mechanical or hydraulic linkages. That is, unless the engineers fall prey to to the siren call of developing control systems, which unfortunately it sounds like they are.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
> The "on-board hydrogen storage system" (that fits in a six
> inch frame, no less!) is currently total fantasy.
Actually, not at all. This is exactly how DaimlerChrysler's latest NECAR is designed. The entire drivetrain is under the floor board, and it even uses regular fossil fuels, not compressed hydrogen. What's not there yet is the commercial feasability of mass producing and selling this at competitive prices. That is, mainly the fuel cells, which are still too expensive to install profitably in a $20K vehicle.
wouldn't it? The noise from the tires on pavement would be there but that's it. Kinda like riding a bicycle.
These look really interesting, are affordable, and you can drive them in the HOV lanes. Not all the models are electric yet, but they seem to be working on it.
No problem: at the same Paris show, GM are debuting their new energy drink, "Coca Petrola". Rumoured to be the product of years of research into untapped beverage resources under the Middle East, Texas, and Alaska, Coca Petrola is nearly 100% water free. GM plans to have have pumps of the stuff in every town and is understood to be re-using their older distribution networks.
Larry Burns is on record as saying "Heck, I even bathe in the stuff", shortly prior to a mystery accident which has hospitalised him. GM deny Burns' habit of smoking in the tub is to blame.
I'm not sure what you mean by competitive reasons. GM already owns several brands (Chevrolet, Pontiac, etc.) and they commonly share chasis and bodies between these brands. The main differences are often just the extras (styling, interiors, etc.).
So why wouldn't they share chasis between models? Seems like a natural extension of what they are already doing.
I'm not a scientist, but as far as I know, it's not really that difficult to make fresh water from 'dirty' water through simple desalinization. Granted, the process now is cumbersum and time consuming, but with the proper technology, I doubt it would be more difficult or use anymore resources then what a current oil refinery uses to give us gas. Just a thought.
The Internet is generally stupid
This would be the same GM that was testifying before Congress in the early 70's that it was impossible to meet their clean air standards act while at the same time their Engineers had already finished the development of the catalytic converter. Of course, I read in the LA Times yesterday that California was modifying their timetables regarding electric cars. Then of course there's the hybrids...made by Toyota and Honda. Try as they might, American car makers just can't seem to get it together...
What happens if we change the salinity of the oceans? Lowering the salinity of the oceans is a posited factor in the beginning of the last Ice Age.
Call me a novice, but wouldn't taking the water of the ocean raise their salinity?
Also, no chemical reaction is perfect, so we lose a little of Earth's water supply every time we expend a tank of hydrogen, do we not.
Not unless we toss it out into space. Every chemical reaction is perfect. The measurement and clean up isn't, which leaves an entrophic residue, but the water's still "here."
This seems on the face of things like a clean source of energy, but could it also be the path to even more rapid climate change?
I don't think so. AFAIK one of the chief causes of global warming is still dirty automobiles. Shifting the pollution from there to power plants would be a good one--we'd have a volume where the necessary tech to clean the exhause (really clean it, that is) is affordable.
Fuel cells, by an large, are seen as a Good Thing ecologically speaking.
The amount of hydrogen you get from a volume of water is staggering. Very little water would be taken. The use of the energy in the fuel cell turns the the hydrogen back into water. Net water loss: zero.
There is no issue here.
You mean like Legos? Maybe this story should be listed with the Lego brick icon.
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
fuel cells are being postulated becuase the energy density of hydrogen is magnitutes better than even LiH batteries, let alone lead acid ones.
Fuel cells take H2 and O2, combine them through a catalyst, and generate electricity and water (actually, 2 H2 + O2 -> 2 H2O + electricity). Basic high school chemistry, check it out.
Electrolysis takes water, runs electricity through it, and generates H2 and O2. More basic chemistry.
So, the incremental cost for a fuel cell car to be able to take household 120V and reconvert the water from the fuel cell back to H2 and O2 is pretty small, and it elimates the problem of where to get H2.
than many new motorcycles, and calling motorcycles fuel efficient is silly today.
So, if the cost of car is the sum of...
- chassis design*
- powerplant design*
- interior design
- body design
- safety testing and government approval
- marketing
- support*
... I can see the ones with stars being reduced by sharing a chassis. There will be an additional cost/unit from being constrained at the chassis/body interface. After all, the car industry optimized away frames because they could save by providing that function in the body.So, the finaly question is, does the savings in design and support justify the increased per unit cost? The answer has to be "it depends".
If GM only makes a couple of models and sells them with different trim in all their model lines like they do now, then the design savings is relatively small compared to the per unit cost.
If GM is planning to make many more models than they do now then this provides a large design savings which might more than make up for the increased per unit cost. I doubt it will work in the end. Marketing will be too expensive. It would be a nice way of letting the market decide what it wants in a car. Provide many choices and after a few years concentrate on the ones that people liked best.
That's what the government thinks, too, so that's still one major hurdle to overcome before you can buy one of these. BMW has a nice interim solution that is a sort of hybrid, using both mechanical linkage and steer-by-wire. It works somewhat like a differential, where the steering column enters a gearbox and the steering shaft exits the other end of the box and goes to the steering rack. This box is pretty fancy and contains the actuator motors for the drive-by-wire system, which act on the steering shaft that goes down to the wheels. They never act on the steering column that goes up to the steering wheel. When there's no power, the box acts a lot like a locked differential, where the incoming and outgoing steering shafts are directly mechanically linked. When the system is powered, the actuator motors kick in and can either diminish or enhance the steering wheel motions, depending on speed, wheel position and a bunch of other factors. In a way, you've got the best of both worlds, except that it's more expensive than current steering technology or pure drive-by-wire alone.
> They better have some type of Speaker system
They will. In fact, a whole industry of sound themes will sprout out of nowhere, making you wonder how you ever managed without engine sound themes before. You too can have a New Beetle with the engine sound of a Lamborghini.
You are right, of course. But this happens anyways through electrolysis and radiolysis in nature. I also agree with you that this loss would be tiny.
But you've got nerds debating automotive design and mechanics. Talk about armchair quarterbacking. It's right up there with a blind guy trying to describe the color Teal.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Let's get literate: The phrase is "case IN point" not "case AND point."
Would I trust my life to a cars computer? No way.
Do you ride a bike or a '57 Chevy?
The steering may not be by wire, but pretty much every car made in the last decade uses computers to work the engine, the brakes, the airbags, and other stuff that you don't want going south at 65 MPH.
Wow, GM is right - it will be like the car has been reinvented, only this time they'll be profiting from the entire life cycle of the vehicle and its consumables. And you can bet that as long as we have a Presidential administration and a Congress that kowtow to big business interests, this turn of events will benefit no one except GM and the politicians whom they bribe, oops, I mean to whom they contribute campaign funding.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
did you know the oil industry owns the patent on NiMH battery technology? That might have had something to do with it. Toyota and Panasonic were/are being sued because they didn't use "D" cell NiMH batteries in the Prius like the ones in the Honda Insight.
BTW, The US government gave the US auto industry billions of dollars for the advancement of battery technology and they came up with nothing. All the while they told CARB that people wouldn't pay for an electric car and that you'd need to pay them $17,000 and give them the car. They hired experts to present this "case" to CARB. Just like the US auto industry turned away the Rosen Motors hybrid design, they will keep turning away anything which cost THEM money. They all jumped on the HYBRID bandwagon when it was shown how well Toyota was doing with the Prius but as soon as there was a way out( fuel cells ) they dropped the hybrid projects and started holding up the fuel cell banner. Only hybrids are here TODAY and fuel cells are just a "hopeful" technology.
And the result is no current change in fuel consumption for the foreseeable future. And if you thought Microsoft was bad, I'll bet the US auto industry is full of corruption at any cost.
IMHO
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
That's part of GM's sales model for this tech.
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The GE fuel cells are supposed to run an entire house and aren't that big. They are fueled by natural or LP gas, I don't know how that might affect size vs. power.
It does seem odd that GM would over-engineer the power plant by a large margin to run a farm, but on the other hand maybe the farm is using Energy Star sheep shears and milking machines.
If we allowed the Open Source developer community complete access to this new electrifying technology they would be able to improve efficiency dramatically.
No, they'd spend five years coming up with two (or more) different and incompatible types of fuell cells, neither of which was really any better than the five-year-old GM product. Then they'd get into huge flame wars over which of their designs was better. Finally, they'd whine like babies when a commercial interest chose to use the best features of both designs to create something that had half a chance of competing with GM's product. Of course, by then the GM fuel cell would be far advanced from the prototypes which the open source folks originally tried to improve upon.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Yes, but the Japanese manufacturers have never been concerned with profitability. They just want to be the first there, costs be damned--the Apollo mission of car manufacturing. They're selling their hybrids at a loss as we speak just for the prestige of it. Nominally it's to lower costs through mass production, but whom are they kidding? It will take more than 10,000 Priuses to reach economies of scale.
OK, here's the deal.
It would cost a lot of money and piss off the oil cartels if we replaced gas with fuel cell cars.
The big 3 don't like to innovate. Innovation is expensive. Even the energy crisis of the 1970's didn't make them change until the Japanese started selling fuel efficient cars. They'd have to spend many billions of dollars developing new cars if a switch to fuel cells really happened. Auto mechanics would have to retrain, the tow truck drivers would need to add gear to tow the new cars, full cell stations would have to be set up nationwide. Factories would have to be retooled to manufacture the new cars. They'd have to bid out a whole slew of contracts to manufacture the outsourced components.
The only real changes that have taken place in fuel efficiency has been forced by legal mandate.
If they throw a sum of money at alternative fuel R&D, they have a very strong footing to push back new regulations. "We're already developing these new cars. It will be $current_year + 20 before they're feasible!" becomes a valid, supportable excuse.
They're spending 1 billion, not to develop new cars, but to avoid spending even more on developing a real line of fuel cell cars. They want to keep selling us the same old same old year after year, which is far less expensive than developing something new.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Of course, where is a Chinese farmer going to get a reliable source or Hydrogen??
Biomass.
Alias: Weeds, manure, inedible parts of animal carcases...
Leave it to rot and you get lots of methane. Burn that straight, or reform it into hydrogen (using the energy from burning the carbon) for fuel cells. Use the leftover solids for fertilizer.
(Most of the energy is in burning the hydrogen anyhow, and a fuel cell isn't limited to carnot cycle heat-engine efficiency. So you may even be ahead to throw away some of the energy from the carbon to get the hydrogen into a form suitable for fuel cells.)
Now maybe in the "third world" it makes more sense to use an inefficient animal that makes more animals without the aid of a factory. But China has serious industry now. It's a nuclear/space/manufacturing power, no longer a collection of farms with minimal roads.
China was a major civilization for most of history and is now breaking the ideology-bind that had it melting down its infrastructure and returning to world-class status (in more than brute-force army size) as measured by western standards.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
And then the rice boyz would poke holes in the speaker to make the sound as annoying as possible. Either that or they'd find some way to modify it to sound like a weed eater. Of course, they'd also have to bolt on a 6-inch diameter tube somewhere, since the fuell cell's actual exhaust would probably be tastefully hidden.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
This would provide a great deal of flexibility and upgradability to the cars of the future.
Can't wait to hear about someone overclocking their car and adding extra fans and windows in places they don't belong.
This concept is what pulled Chrysler out of the hole. It's not a new concept IMHO but I don't think GM can pull it off. Think about it, instead of producing fuel efficient hybrid( gasoline/electric ) cars( Toyota Prius, Honda Civic ) with some of these technologies( Prius uses most brake-by-wire and has electrical-power steering ) they are shooting for the moon.....
:(
It's all a ploy to do nothing now and to spend federal grant money so it looks like something is happening.
The money and oil keep flowing as usual. And the public is buying it.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Essentially, because fuel-cells allow a radically different organization of cars' structures, GM is betting it can make cars cheaper. This despite the fact they'd be running on the famously expensive fuel cell. Wired wrote about this"billion dollar bet" in its August issue and quotes a GM exec: "If we're not there by 2010, we'll have dug too deep a hole to recover the time value of that money."
In other words: call us bad businessmen if you can't drive one of these by 2010. This is some good reading for those wanting to know more about what GM's plans to do with its fuel cell "platform" that it hopes to use for virtually every vehicle it makes in the future. Of course, as Wired notes, a fairly heavy dose of skepticism is NOT optional. It's very much required.
---- SNIP ----
oh yeah, hehe
Note: grousing about rejected submissions is Offtopic and usually gets moderated that way. It happens, don't take it personally.
Moderators: Do your worst ;-). But there are some intersting links in there, so be fair!
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Hrm.. Lots of parallels...
Windows are a definate must.
Lights - also good.
Cooling systems are a plus.
Display Panel - I should hope.
Tool-less access doors, wireless communications, quadrophonic sound...
Hey, cars have had all this stuff for years! When did computers fall so far behind?!
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Im glad you brought this up.
The reason BMW went to all this expense is because unless there is a direct mechanical link between the wheel and the wheels, the steering feel is shit.
Many power steering systems get this completely wrong. BMW has always been a driver's car, and they aren't willing to sacrifice the "experience" for anything. This is their approach to making an active steering system - you get good road feel, but electronics can step in and assist if necessary.
I dont thinkt he BMW system should be considered "interim". Until they can accurately recreate the subtle road-feel transmitted to the steering wheel that is required for road confidence, there will be mechanical connection between driver and wheels.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
GM has spent over a billion dollars on this design. They can sell this where no other car can go right now. Think about China; no gasoline infrastructure in most of the country, and no reason to put one in. But if a car that costs less, has a higher utility value, can power your house, and requires less maintenance is available, more Chinese will buy it. That's a market with a huge possibility for growth.
And what do you do when everyone hass the wonderful 15-year fuel-cell car? You build something better while the competition is still reeling from your advances.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
This model seems to be based on the Ford Hindenberg announced earlier this year.
...not fuel efficiency. They have been in the past- it was one of the biggest selling points of the Yamaha Virago back in the 70s. But no one cares now. They either want big, ground-pounding Harleys, or Grand Prix poseur sport bikes. If people really wanted fuel efficient motorcycles, they'd get them. Blame motorcyclists, not manufacturers.
The "California Fruitcakes" (Oh, Rush! you neologistic god!) are drowning in a oxide poison tank. The IC engine, over a hundred years old and horribly inefficient, needs to go the way of bustles and button-up corsets. The "fruitcakes" actually breathe in the gunk that most car drivers blow over into other states.
There is no reason, industrially, why lithium or nickel-metal batteries should cost what they do, save that the owners of the IP want them to cost that much. And as another poster in this thread said, these new battery techs are bough up by petrocorporations as soon as they show any promise.
The "free" market, isn't. The taxpayers ponied up hundreds of millions of dollars to car companies to develop non-IC powerplants. The car companies develpoed the Insight, an great vehicle, and several hybrid vehicles, which work great too. The battery tech has stagnated, tho, for no apparent reason. GM nuked the only working electric car, to the horror of its engineers.
Point is, they didn't make an alternative to their IC cars because, well, it's suicide for them! Electric cars don't have a tenth of the parts a present-day car has. They don't break down. Theat means the entire service bay portion of the automakers' bottom line is almost GONE. It means the cars don't fall apart as fast, since the stress on the engine is nil, so that means that they can't nearly as many new cars.
Endgame: they don't want their money machine to die. They won't give us electric cars, even if we give them free tax money to develop the tech. The "free market", as Adam Smith forsaw, is it's own worst enemy. The triopolists simply have agreed amongst themselves never to make the things, and they won't. It's not in their interests.
If we want an electric car that works, let the feds give cash to non-industry affiliated universities, with the stipulation that the IP generated becomes open-source to those that paid for it, the taxpayers. Then people can hack together their own powerplants.
No one is going to be displaced or made redundant. The same players will be in charge in the hydrogen economy, as in the oil economy now. The greatest amount of money being spent on hydrogen fuel R&D is by the oil companies themselves. If and when the hydrogen economy ever arrives, they want to ensure their piece of the pie.
I am prolly gonna lose most of my karma this way, but sometimes you have to take a stand on things.
Open sourcing everything simply isn't the answer. While wonderful as a phenomon, Open Source Movement also has some really bad deficiencies. It can - and does - suffer from some of the worst problems of committee work and short term fashions. There are exceptions, but all of us can think of very promising projects that hyped in the beginning in the OS community, only to fall apart due to a lack of attention span.
Additionally, if the general software community's quirks are transfered into hardware, especially a car or other mode of transportation, I'd rather not ride in it (re: software engineers, woodpeckers, and civilization).
OS is great, but it has its deficiences. Int he case of hardware these quirks are nontrivial things to be concerned about.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Fuel cell vehicles, electric cars, etc. are not being produced because there is no demand for a vehicle with a large pricetag, limited range, and no fueling infrastructure. Oil, and consequently gasonline is very cheap to produce, and also easy to distribute compared to these hydrogen alternatives, and most people are not going to willingly surrender their money to purchase vehicles that make no economic sense.
until the price of driving my gasoline fueled car rises above the cost of driving an (fill-in-the-blank-alternative-fuel-vehicle) I'll go out and buy one, but not until then.
Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject
I have real questions about how well this will behave with mediocre maintenance. Engine control computers have a good track record, though, better than was expected by auto engineers in the 1980s.
I worked on an engine control reliability project in the early 1980s, so I saw some of this happen. There were lots of backup modes; not only did the computer have a stall timer and could restart in less than a rev, but the ignition module had a hardwired backup (with no spark advance) in case the CPU quit. You were limited to about 25MPH in this "limp-home mode", as it was called internally. Presumably something of equally brutal simplicity will be provided for steering and brakes.
In the end it will all work, because, unlike most software companies, auto companies have to take legal liability for their failures.
> The reason BMW went to all this expense [...]
Well, it's the steering feel, but also the fact that no western country will currently approve a pure steer-by-wire vehicle.
> Until they can accurately recreate the subtle
> road-feel transmitted to the steering wheel
There's no reason to believe that good sensor and actuator technology couldn't duplicate the steering sensations of a mechanical linkage. In fact, they could even enhance things by providing virtual feedback, such as vibrating the steering wheel when drifting out of a lane (similar to driving on the ribbed line on the edge of a freeway), or periodic vibrations to simulate driving over those slow-down lines across the road before stop signs or reduced-speed areas.
> I dont thinkt he BMW system should be considered "interim".
You might be right, we may never see pure steer-by-wire for various reasons, although I'm sure someone will try marketing it at some point. It just may never catch on, who knows.
"I honestly don't think there as much of a diffrence between auto hobiests and computer as first appears."
... except grease.. lots of grease.. and I only know one person who has a case that you need a pit to work on.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
Fieros are still the number one platform for kit cars, since the tube frame provides all the strength. I've seen a very nice Ford GT-40 built on a Fiero. There are also at least a couple companies that make frame/suspension mods to swap the V6 (or I4) out for a V8. If GM goes forward with the AUTOnomy, you can bet there will be a revival in fibreglass. They will probably encrypt the "x-by-wire" thing to keep us from buying entire bodies from someone not approved by GM, but that won't stop people from building their own mechanicals around GM electronics. I'd like a '57 Bel Air with 2 trunks, please.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Probably not the BEST place to ask this, but why does everyone always mention Global Warming and Climate Change as if it were necessarily bad? Wouldn't heatting the earth up 5 degrees actually end up giving us MORE arable land in places like siberia and canada?
Maybe a warmer earth is a good thing!
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
I'll be brief: nope, you're wrong.
Yes, fresh water is low, but the fuel cells don't run on water, they run on Hydrogen, often taken from such things as natural gas. Yes, you can use electrolsys to get the h from h20, but it more expensive.
How do you propose we are going to change the salinity of the oceans? See above.
Umm... in this case, the reaction is perfect... if you don't use the hydrogen, you don't get the electron... although there will be some leakage of the tanks, I'm sure... but there's already h2 in the air, it nature does just a fine job of using it.
I have a 1999 Pontiac Firebird. Just after 30,000 miles the Alternator went out - not a big deal, I replaced it myself. Now, it's in the shop - after 52,000 miles the transmission blew. Something about a "Reaction Sunshell" that split wide open. There's $1500+ I didn't want to spend.
Maybe GM should worry about rolling cars that aren't lemons off the assembly line before trying to develop fuel cell cars. Fuel Cell doesn't do you any good if you can't get the damn thing to shift into gear...
There are 2 major things stopping them from building this car today:
Steps to migrate from today's common car to this design.
This looks like a good strategy. They've defined a goal, know the impediments that nust be surmounted, can build interim designs that lead to the goal. Making small steps will also get acceptance John Q. Publik -- who is wary of major change.
I'm not sure how many interim steps will actually reach the consumer, but I venture that this is more likely to result in a car acceptable to consumers that can be built affordably.
The Japanese hybrids are great ideas, but they're cars that many car buyers can't or won't buy, and the manufactureers are selling them at a loss. How will it help the environment if nobody will buy the car & nobody can afford to build it?
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
"Electric wheels just dont turn as hard as gas-driven ones. (torque)"
That simply isn't true. Electric engines have gobs of torque. Their limitation is that their power is great at low RPM's and drops off precipitously as the RPM's go up, Kinda like a diesel, only more so. Thats why Hybrid vehicles have caught on. The electric engines are very good from a dead stop, but peter out at 30 or 40 mph, and then the little gas engine can carry the load.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
you're correct in one sense, but I would like to see more companies open source there code for the public to view.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"Did enough people lease them? No"
Actually, there was a long waiting list of people wanting to lease them.
"GM has spent over a billion dollars on this design."
GM spends about a billion dollars on every car model redesign, so that isn't a dire a sit sounds. And they spread the expense over a decade. And deducted the expense from their taxes, so taxpayers subsidized it to the tunes of hundreds of billions. And billions of tax dollars was sprqayed at the car companies to develop new tech, which they used to develop proprietary IP they get to keep -- not to mention bury in a hole, as well as using the patents to nuke similar lines of research by others.
So, GM did not even spend half of what they spend on a Grand Am redesign. And the Impact gave them lots of patents. And they are going to crush them all.
I don't see how battery-powered cars help anything, if we're just going to build more coal plants to charge the batteries.
I find it hard to believe that fuel cells used in cars would be so fragile that they would "crack" from the jarring involved in going over a speed bump. These things contain hydrogen after all, which is MUCH more explosive than gasoline. But by all means go ahead and drive your Bonneville into a hydrogen explosion. Somehow I doubt your big car will menace these new cars any more than it already menaces the environment and everyone else on the road.
later,
Jess
I am programmed for etiquette, not destruction!
It seems like most of the naysayers around here are only considering the US market. One of the articles pointed out that only %12 of the current world population have automobiles. That leaves a bunch of people who could use more flexible/better transportation, and many of them would also be interested in the possibility of powering their home off the vehicle. If GM could capture even 20% of 1 billion Indians that they wouldn't get with an IC car...
I think the world demands fuel cell vehicles. It doesn't matter if the US won't build it because of conspiracy or whatever, it will be built. Perhaps GM realizes this and wants to be ready so that the fuel cell revolution isn't driven by India, or China, or Brazil.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Point is, they didn't make an alternative to their IC cars because, well, it's suicide for them! Electric cars don't have a tenth of the parts a present-day car has. They don't break down. Theat means the entire service bay portion of the automakers' bottom line is almost GONE.
There may be SOME truth to this BUT the situation is only tenable while the superior technology is only marginally superior. (by superior I mean superior for the purposes of the consumer not in a diffuse "better for everyone" sense) Once the technology reaches a point where it is inarguably better for the consumer the situation will change. One (or all) of the car manufacturers will be driven by greed to betray their tacit agreement if they can produce a product significantly superior to those of his competitors. If greed isn't sufficient motivation FEAR that those competitors will be the ones doing the betraying will be the motiviation. Established companies like the big three auto makers have no particular interest in pursuing speculative research but once the research progresses to something more concrete their interest in it and willingness to develop it will pick up dramatically.
There will probably be a lot of false starts and abortive attempts at introducing any truly new, disruptive technology. What is interesting about this latest effort is that they are spending a significant amount of $$$ on it. Perhaps it is a sign that the technology is starting to reach that critical transition from "vapor" that looks good on paper to something real.
This is the Chrysler K-car concept but with fuelcells. Not new really and atleast the K-Car was real. This is fantasy and mostly hype to stall attempts to reduce oil consumption by using existing technology. IMHO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
They spend a billion on every platform redesign (mostly more than one model to a platform). In 3-4 years they're going to be due for a new platform to run for the next 20. The Autonomy is a contender for that new platform design. If it makes financial sense, I think GM will do it. If not, it'll get buried and the patents used defensively to hinder competitors from blowing GM out of the water just as you speculate.
But it *is* a speculation, not a certainty that it'll all get buried. If Saddam Hussein decides to nuke the Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti oil fields, you can bet the Autonomy's going to get built because we'll be stuck at the oil price ceiling of $35 a barrel, extracting oil from the tar sands of Canada to make up the volume. That's $3-$4 oil here, $5-$7 in Europe. That makes hydrogen much, much more attractive.
God forbid it happens, but it's certainly not impossible.
Sorry but that all sounds too much like the PR crap we got from Microsoft for 4 years and resulted in Windows 95. All hype and only used to stall the competition.
It would make more sense to be designing home fuelcell systems and hybrid gasoline/electric cars today. Did I say TODAY? Then, migrate the hybrid toward more electric and charged via the home fuelcell before building a car run by fuelcell 8-10 years from now( maybe ). If they did this then I might believe this is less than hype.
if it looks like a dead fish, smells like a dead fish, and feels like a dead fish... it's most likely a dead fish.
IMHO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
You'd think the best way to market a new technology like a hydrogen car would be to say "Just like your current car, except great for the environment (and doesn't rely on foreign oil *cough*)".
Yes, but the problem with your model is that it the new environmentally friendly engine is 10 times more expensive than the Internal Combustion one it is replacing. Sort of a deal killer, BUT the new engine also allows you to build a very different and much, much cheaper to manufacture design that wasn't possible with the old engine. That is why they are pursuing a whole new design.
my vfr750 gets around 45mpg and does 0-60 in 3.0.
its a honda as well.
heck my passat gets 36-38mpg on the highway. the big 3 should just adopt supercharger/turbo technology on more of its cars if people want displacement, the turbo isnt spooling up while the car is on the highway anyways.
most new bikes still get 30+mpg.
most oil in the US is not used in cars, its used for consumer/industrial goods and power generation.
www.commutercar.com is an interesting idea. its an electric car that is a good autocorsser and does 0-60 under 5 seconds. its range is only 80 miles and can have a quick charge in 10 minutes.
too bad its super expsensive.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
What is interesting about this latest effort is that they are spending a significant amount of $$$ on it.
Spending money does not equate to delivering products. GM has had a long history of holding up really cool concept technology (anyone remmber their one-person commuter vechicle?), but only as hype - never as an actual product.
Superior technology argument is partially true (I'd argue that the benefits of hybrids currencly outweigh any negatives for 40% of the US population) - it takes a shitload of money to product cars for the consumer market - there's all sorts of saftety testing that must be done before certification, you still have to have manufacturing capacity to build the actual cars, even if you have the tech to produce an electric or hybrid drivetrain/powerplant. This is the barrier to entry for competitors, barring those who have gotten government supports for domestic competitive concerns (ie, military/industrial.)
Finally, you have to have a distribution network. It's like going up against Microsoft in the pre-open source days - nobody is gonna fund you.
In the interests of fairness, I'd yank all government funding to corporate labs that don't deliver products. No, the EV1 is not a product, and it never was. Witness the GM exec who said the EV1 was pulled because it "sold poorly." Of course it "sold poorly" -- IT WAS NEVER SOLD - only leased! This sound byte was repeated by the press so often, I'll bet every American was convinced that there was no market for the electric car - despite the fact that there was a long waiting list for new EV1s...
change displacement to fuel economy
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Actually, electric cars are clean, compared to fossil-fuel burning cars, especially gasoline and diesel powered ones (CNG and propane don't pollute nearly as much as those). Why is this, when the electricity is produced by fossil-fuel burning power plants? Because those power plants take advantage of economies of scale in producing power, and also are much better maintained than the average privately-owned automobile. The internal combustion engine is horrendously inefficient in converting fossil fuel to power, since it's designed for the maximum power output. That's why the new hybrid-electrics are so much more efficient, since they don't have to size their gas engine for the maximum horsepower, instead using batteries to store power for use during peak periods. This technology has been used for a long time in railroad locomotives and large-scale construction equipment as well for the same reasons.
Electric cars may not be completely pollution-free, but overall their pollution is much lower than a comparable fleet of gas-burning cars, given current technologies. However, the hybrid-electrics may change that, but then again the new superconducting transmission wires will help improve efficiency for the power-plants as well by reducing the losses in transmission (as high as 30%).
Um yeah, it wouldn't be any different. Now explain to me why we should kill a few thousand or tens of thousands of them, at a cost of a few hundred or thousand lives and billions of taxpayer dollars to us, just to have nothing change?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Now that's a non sequitor if I ever saw one. Emissions include CO2, which gasoline will always produce. To be zero-emission, it means no CO2 either. Also, gasoline is deliberately manufactured during the cracking process at the refinery. If there were less demand for gasoline, then the oil can be used for other purposes thus reducing the demand for oil which means less trade deficits for the U.S., better national security by reducing dependence on foreign sources of oil, reducing the price of oil which reduces the amount of money for terrorism, etc., etc.
You've made a huge freaking assumption that coal plants are the only source of electricity.
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sorry, but I don't buy your argument.
The whole point of the AUTOnomy is to be able to swap body styles and to a lesser extent power plants of cars as needed, so you keep a basic chassis and swap out the power plant and frame as desired. GM probably won't lose money because they can sell new bodies and more efficient power plants as your needs change. Got a sports car and just had twins? Swap on the minivan frame. Want a convertible for summer but a SUV for winter? Just buy two frames and swap 'em out. What you drive suddenly becomes a fashion statement (then again, it is already or people wouldn't dump $60G-100G into Hummers).
Early battery powered cars didn't work out - they cost too much to compete with combustion engines and can't be fueled as fast (or at all, depending on where you live). This is why we have hybrid engines - a tradeoff that allows the technology to mature and cuts some of the problems. Hydrogen has similar problems - no refuling stations, more expensive to build (right now), potentially dangerous in accidents. A lot of people are also fearful that terrorists will use hydrogen powered cars as explosives, but I don't know how feasible that is (depends on quite a few factors).
Also, a good chunk of automobile parts aren't manufactured by the big car companies, they're purchased, so less parts may be BENEFICIAL to the makers. AUTOnomy specifically could be VERY beneficial to GM, seeing that frames are a big part of their profit (that and engines, but engines have more 3rd party).
Monopolies on parts are bad, however, so if one company owns the IP on batteries and charges high fees for use, manufacturers will look elsewhere for technology. So oil companies owning and charging high prices on battery technology could easily be crippling the industry. I know nothing about this, so I'll let others argue it.
Most of all, though, cars obsolete themselves just like computers, so sooner or later, people will upgrade because they use power more efficiently or have better styling, or just cooler features (mmm GPS). I really don't think automakers fear electic power all that much (in some ways it's being forced on them early, but that probably is because they want the technology to mature first and in reality the only way to get the technology to mature is to use it).
heh.
none of the things you mention "enhance" steering feel. They piss me off.
Im talking more about things like feeling the texture of the road, when the steering gets "light", etc etc. Some of these are pretty subtle, and i dont know how you'd come up with a good system of sensors and actuators that duplicate it. Especially since much of it is tire dependant (tire transmits feel to wheel / linkage / steering wheel )
Where do you put sensors ? do they need to be tuned for the wheel ? Any scheme where you're adding instruments to the wheel/suspensino assembly will increase unsprung weight (maybe not much) and potentially create imbalanced spots on the rotating components (bigger issue)
This are crappy issues to work though.
Going fully steer-by-wire has some packaging advantages (no more steering column/box/rack/pump ) but no failsafe (except for lots of redundancy)
Engineering in the "feel" (most brands wont do this - expect BMW to), and the reliability will be quite expensive, IMO.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
They better have some type of Speaker system that coincides with the throttle to blast out a throaty exhaust note.
And somewhere to mount my shotgun so that I can take a few pot-shots at those annoying people that think its "kewl" to stuff a trumpet up the tail-pipe of thier toyota.
Am I alone in this, or does anyone else think that those things sound like a lawn mower being pushed to its limits?
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
did you know the oil industry owns the patent on NiMH battery technology?
I thought that Energy Conversion Devices did?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
It's an impossible upgrade, but if the PTO could be privatized, with a cap on its income based on inflation, the world could be better off.
Imagine registering a patent, and being given a per-licence royalty dependant on inflation. That royalty would be worth, say $99 today.
The PTO would then license patents out at $100, again dependent on inflation.
The licenses would be on a per-product basis, making its cost almost an afterthought on behalf of the designers. This would make technology cheap for the consumer, and economical for all but the very smallest (as in, custom jobs on 5$ trinkets) businesses.
By privatizing it, you're cutting as many ties with the government as possible.
What's this Submit thingy do?
Whether it's worth it depends on how the "new Iraq" turns out, and whether you believe the "old Iraq" is a real threat. In other words nobody knows for sure.
brakes: powered, but like steering still work very effectively without the engine running
The point was not power, of course, but ABS. ABS is computer controlled and, if it fails, the stopping characteristics of the car will be quite drastically, and dangerously, changed.
airbags: so I'm going to get in a wreck at the same time that the very simple IC that controls the airbags somehow gets fried? I guess I should be wearing my seatbelt then.
If your airbag deploys because you tap the brakes hard at 65 when someone pulls in front of you, yes, you will be in a wreck.
Tell you what, let's use an emp gun on 495 at 8:30 AM and see how many critical injuries we get. I guarantee you that loss of computer handling on a highway would be very dangerous.
Multiple entire farms will fit easily in the back seat after activating the Dr Who(tm) space transformer.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Disclaimer: I work as a contract employee for GM. The points made in this posting are my own, based upon my own observations and opinions. In no way do they (or I) represent General Motors or my direct employer.
With regard to the Insight -- It's a Honda. I really doubt that any of the "American" car companies have anything to do with its relatively poor sales. I seriously considered purchasing one (ignoring my GM employee-discount) and abandoned the idea. They cost too much, and I'm leery of the diminished tire width. Less tire = = less control, which is a consideration in Michigan winters.
With regard to the EV1 -- amazing vehicle. Not yet ready for primetime. The battery life is simply not there; 90 miles does not a commute make. In my opinion, it would be better to regard these vehicles as very advanced prototypes. I believe they were as much about testing consumer acceptance as they were about battery technology. (Incidentally, if battery technology is so artificially expensive, why are the batteries on the Insight and Prius just as expensive as those on the EV1? I don't buy market-dominating conspiracy theories. I think it has been proven by the drug companies that profit-generating IP rights pale before consumer outrage. Li-ion batteries are not as necessary to life as AZT, but they are expensive enough so that somebody would break from the cartel and go into production, alone.
I've been following the internal GM news about AUTOnomy/Hy-Wire, the Parallel Hybrid Truck, and Displacement-on-Demand (shuts off engine cylinders when they aren't needed -- projected to save ~25% MPG). I have a completely different take on this article, and on GM/American automakers' view of these electrically-powered vehicles.
I think the Big 3 (2 1/2, whatever . . . :-) have finally realized that American consumers aren't coming back without a real reason to do so. I also think they've figured-out that Americans will only buy stereotypical "American" cars (read: BIG) from them. Successful econo-boxes (for whatever reason: better engineering, cheaper labor, weak dollar-to-Yen, Consumer Reports bias, etc.) are all imported. That means the only way for American car makers to survive is to change the rules.
That's where I think these vehicles are coming from. Finally, somebody pulled his head from the sand and decided it was better to risk losing the entire company in a hurry than to certainly lose the entire company slowly. That's why the first projects are "American" vehicles, in my opinion. BIG trucks, with better gas mileage. These are designed to be the point vehicles. To get the ball rolling, so to speak. The AUTOnomy is the follow-up.
You make, I think, an excellent point about the car makers losing control of the cars. It's not too difficult for me to see GM making the AUTOnomy chassis, but people buying auto bodies from other manufacturers. I think the people leading this project at GM have considered this, and accept it as the price of changing the rules. I also think (based, not least on what I read in the sciam article) that they aren't worried about it. I read between the lines and see GM trying not to become a resurgent car company, but a major energy company.
Last point -- about losing money from servicing vehicles. I work for the unit of GM that deals with servicing cars. GM doesn't make money on servicing cars. If the vehicle is under warranty, GM has to pay to get it fixed. If it's not under warranty, customers don't take it to the dealership -- they take it to AutoLab and repair it with aftermarket parts.
Spending money does not equate to delivering products. GM has had a long history of holding up really cool concept technology (anyone remmber their one-person commuter vechicle?), but only as hype - never as an actual product.
Of course not. But GM is apparently spending more than just PR/play money this time around. The Wired article pegged the actual number at $1 billion. As a GM exec put it that's not "betting the farm" but it's real money (about what they spend on developing a new model). Failing to ship "cool concepts" is not the result of a conspiracy. As you pointed out it costs a "shitload" of money to to produce cars for the consumer market - every idle idea that makes it to a whiz-bang demo is not going to be developed especially if it is a new or risky. Even a behemoth car company can't blow the $1 billion necessary to develop a product unless they are resonably sure it will sell - alot. I'm sure some people want a one-person commuter vehicle I tend to think that GM was right that it was not enough to be worth the expense of developing the idea.
Superior technology argument is partially true (I'd argue that the benefits of hybrids currencly outweigh any negatives for 40% of the US population)
Just being superior isn't sufficient to suplant an established technology it has to be vastly superior. Just the fact that the "benefits outwieght the negatives for 40% of the population" isn't going to cut it. There can't BE any negatives, or they have to be so marginal as to be outweighed (in a painfully obvious way) by the overwhelming positives for everybody.
The auto manufacturers are dabbling with these new technologies, milking concept cars for good PR but not ever really quite producing a product. I'm more inclined to suspect that this has more to do with the technologies not being ready to suplant the old technology than some conspiracy between the oil companies and the car manufacturers. The car companies have nothing to lose and a lot to gain by producing a superior product. The only reason to fail to do so is if it is "superior" only in the eyes of it's proponents but it is in fact inferior in the eyes of the intended consumers. What is intriguing about this article is that the technology seems to be advancing to the point where the advantages aren't only in the eyes of ideologues but are real enough in the eyes of profit conscious auto execs to actually make a stab of it.
Not neccesarily up to the 80's..
There are two major schools of car construction
A> Body on frame: More durability.
B> Monocoque/ Unit body: Stiffer, cheaper to produce.
The vast majority of front wheel drive cars are monocoque, whereas the majority of RWD cars are body-on-frame (Exceptions: The Mustang is RWD, yet is monocoque, as is the Jeep Grand Cherokee).
While as a rule most cars produced after 1980 or so are monocoque, there are exceptions. For instance, Chrysler products were monocoque from the mid-fifties on.
Which set me thinking that the way to get started with fuel cell vehicles would be to start an open wheel racing series. After Montoya's qualifying record at Monza last weekend it is clear that the big problem F1 now faces is that the cars are too damn fast. The only realistic way left to slow them is to reduce the engine capacity again and that will be mega expensive.
An open wheel fuel cell series would provide a showcase for fuel cell vehicles and a blank slate for interesting new developments.
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> none of the things you mention "enhance" steering feel. They piss me off.
If they're done right, I'd be neutral about them, especially if you can turn them off.
> Im talking more about things like feeling the texture
> of the road, when the steering gets "light"
I know exactly what you're talking about, because I also value those things and BMWs for that reason. But you could simulate those effects quite well to the point where you couldn't tell the difference if you didn't know. For example, steering lightness occurs during upward acceleration where the pressure of the tires on the road diminishes. You can measure that with accelerometers and/or stress sensors inside the suspension (which are there anyway in sophisticated suspensions), and decrease steering wheel resistance proportionally, making it feel lighter. Rough road surfaces can be transmitted back to the steering wheel using the same stress sensors and steering wheel actuators. If anything, a system like this could put you just a software update away from BMW-like steering feel, even in a plusher car.
There's nothing sacred about having a metal rod reaching directly all the way from your fists down to the wheels. Up until now (and for a while yet) it merely was the most efficient and cheapest way of getting the job done, but once the job can be done equally well or better with new technology, I won't shed a tear for the old way. I'm sure there were those that cried for the old crank when electric starters became popular, feeling that merely turning a key to start an automobile wasn't sporting enough for a man. Or look at the dash instrumentation itself, which looks practically identical in a 50s car and a modern car, except that it works completely differently behind the scenes. As long as the driving experience is the same or better, I really don't care how it's done.
Nah, most are sold to the Hertz concession at San Francisco airport where they have an enormous fleet of mustangs decked out in arrest-me-yellow.
It is like driving a huge banana
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The new Jaguar models (apart from the manual X-type possibly) all have an entirely electronic transmission control. What appears to be the gear selector lever is actually just an electrical switch that tells the computer what gear is requested. The throtle is also just an electical switch. The reason they do this is that it allows them to ensure that they hit the emissions requirements, avoid the gas guzzler tax while at the same time gaining about 20hp through optimal tuning.
The brakes and steering are a combination of electronic with a mechanical failsafe - as are all ABS brake systems and power assisted steering systems.
The main objections to fly by wire came from Boeing FUD campaigns trying to convince the public that their obsolete 30 year old design was safer than the modern airbus. Although Boeing thinks fly by wire is perfectly safe for military jets it kinda got afraid of using it in a passenger jet. Despite the FUD the Airbus safety record ten years on is pretty much the same as the Boeing record.
The fly by wire systems that have been implicated in failures are the ones that attempt to fly the plane for the pilot. While every so often there is a loony attempt to bring cars that drive themselves to the market it is not very likely this will succeed.
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Set light to a match and you can give a person heat for a minute.
Set light to the person and you give them heat for the rest of their life
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Point is, they didn't make an alternative to their IC cars because, well, it's suicide for them!
Except that us Californians just changed the rules.
Basically, auto emissions are going to have to come down. Honda is about the only automaker that won't have to do something drastic to meet these requirements, and Toyota is a close second. We can probably kiss Excursions and Ferarris goodby (I won't miss the Excursions, but I get to see a Ferarri at least once a day, and I'll miss that) and the SUVs will either need to go hybrid, fuel-cell, or hack themselves back so badly nobody will buy one who doesn't really need it.
Why is CA doing this now? Well, in part because the air quality issues here, though that's been steadily improving over the last 20 years to the point that LA barely even ranks for bad air quality these days. Personally, I think the state got so soundly fucked by Enron last year while Bush and the rest of DC sat back and watched that this is an opportunity for CA to drive the rest of the nation for a while.
California is unique among states in having the ability to set pollution standards for cars. Automakers won't make two distinct cars for the US market, so CAs rules become the nations rules. I don't expect that CA is going to back down on their timelines either - the automakers are going to have to make some changes. Time to stick it to the Texans, I suppose...
How about:
The US might get better access to Iraqi oil?
Distraction from economic problems (see wag the dog).
George Bush is an idiot?
Anyway things will definitely if US attacks Iraq. Coz you'd piss off lots of people and throw up more potential terrorists against your own country.
The nuclear/chem/bio thingy is nothing - Iraq has no launch capability that can reach US. They can reach Israel though, so that could be another reason.
Whereas to attack US you don't have to sneak weapons in. US is full of weapons, you just have to sneak in. Which is easy.
In fact, there are quite a few types of cars being made today which have very little computer control, but I'm not surprised that people here are not aware of them, as i don't think they're available in the US.
My car has a engine management computer (it is almost impossible to find a engine desigend and produced in the last 10 years not to have one), but other than that, there is no other computer control. No ABS, no power brakes, no power steering, no airbags. And yes, my car was designed less than 10 years ago as a bran new model. It's a Lotus Elise, but the same could be said for a Caterham 7, or any number of similar cars.
If the engine CPU dies, the worst is the engine cuts out, I don't lose any other controls nor does it become different or difficult to control.
In essence, as the parent post to which you are replying to say, I don't trust my life to a computer running my car.
Just because you are not aware of something, doesn't mean it does not exist.
"The best part? I became an ordained minister while not wearing pants." -- CleverNickName
That is, when ABS was added to certain cars, it didn't make those cars less safe than they already were in any situation.
Actually, that's not true. When ABS was added to cars, studies have shown that people began leaving less space between them and the next car, braking more abruptly, and generally treating the ABS as a license to drive recklessly. (The same thing happens with 4wd vehicles in snowy areas).
Actually, you make a pretty good case for the idea that California's legislative whims affect interstate commerce. That means Congress can step in and modify California's rules, perhaps invalidating them. The Supremes will probably make the ultimate decision if it comes to legal blows.
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
wow, 10 years ago and still nothing. I guess my main piont is that hybrid gasoline/electric systems exist today and can reduce our fuel consumption considerable while also using technologies needed for next generation propulsion. At the same time, fuelcell based home generation( and others ) should be addressed before they try to put these things in moving vehicles. At a point were we have distributed and clean power generation, we can work on both shrinking the system for vehicle use AND/OR use it for a more electric use in vehicles.
Shooting for the moon all at once is dangerous and will most likely fail. Then again, I still feel that failure is what they want because anything less than failure would mean less oil use.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
It's been a while but I believe Standard Oil purchased the patent from Ovonics and then British Petroleom ( BP ) purchased it from Standard Oil.
I forget who started the legal proceedings against Toyota and Panasonic but it was mentioned last year in the Toyota eGroups ( now Yahoo Groups ).
The thing about Ovonics was that they only could make a very few NiMH batteries work enough to show to investors and customers. When customers attempted to make the licensed batteries, they didn't work and only when the Japanese fixed the problems did the market for NiMH take off.....
IIRC
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus