Gas/Electric Hybrids, Air Cars in the News

hackshack writes "eCycle is developing a hybrid diesel / electric motorcycle designed to get 180 miles per gallon. The small diesel engine kicks in at speeds over 12mph, and the electric motor handles acceleration. Target retail price is $5,500. They've got a beta test program going as well. Now I can laugh at all those "gas-guzzling" Insight drivers as I zoom by!" Reader clen writes in about the Toyota Prius doing well in a road rally, and fishdan sent in a note about a pure-electric concept car called the Tango. And the air-powered car is getting a little more media attention, too.

Comments

A great all-electric already exists

[Ellen Spertus]

Drivers of the GM EV1 are trying to save the car, or at least stop GM from falsely claiming that nobody wants electric cars. See http://cleanup-gm.org.

Re:A great all-electric already exists

[Phil Karn]

The inductive charging situation is even worse than that. Some years ago, GM talked Toyota into adopting inductive charging. Toyota imposed a condition: a new, smaller paddle would replace the original large paddle used on the EV1 and S-10 and become the inductive charging standard.

The new small paddle fits into large (EV1 and S-10) cars with a simple adapter, but the older large-paddle chargers are useless with the Toyota RAV4EV, the most common EV with a small-paddle receptacle.

GM was in the process of retrofitting all the public large-paddle chargers with small-paddle units when the California Air Resources Board decided to make conductive charging the California EV standard (the right decision, IHMO). In a snit, GM abruptly took all its marbles and went home. They stopped leasing EV1s and stopped replacing large paddle chargers with small paddle chargers.

So when the last EV1 leases are up, we'll be left with a whole bunch of large-paddle public chargers that the Toyota RAV4EV, the only inductively-charged EV still on the market, will be unable to use.

The poor RAV4EV drivers get the worst of both worlds: an expensive, inefficient and unreliable inductive charging system without even the benefit of the many public charging stations that we EV1 drivers have.

Inductive EV charging was a worthwhile experiment, but it was a failure. The sooner we junk it and move to conductive, the better.

Re:Efficiency?

[drinkypoo]

How much energy does it take to charge up? This car will only be worthwhile if it takes less energy to charge it than would be consumed by a conventional auto in the form of gasoline over the same distance and hauling the same load.

Well I haven't ridden one of these or anything, but the basic premise is this; You have a very small engine which is mostly efficient in one very short range of operation, and an electric motor which is good at accelerating. As they say in the article, electric motors tend to have maximum torque at 0 RPM. So you can use the little motor to cruise (and charge the battery off the drive motor.) The motors are usually very efficient.

Also there is the issue of regenerative braking. If their charge control system is good (and there are many engineers out there who are capable of building a good control system) then you get very good anti-skid braking by changing the load on the generator (the motor.) The batteries are the load, and when you brake, you store a fair amount of that energy.

I'm also a bit perplexed by the air exhaust filter. Why filter the outgoing air at all? If it's just expelling air that was pumped into it from the atmosphere, why would there be any reason to filter it? Surely the filtration decreases the efficiency of the car, since it would take energy to force the expelled air through the filter.

I can't answer this one for sure either, but I can tell you something about diesel exhaust, which is that it contains carcinogenic particulate matter (soot). Rudolf intended us to be running something a little more environmentally friendly in his engine. So it would be beneficial to filter it out. And second, backpressure tends to tune your engine towards torquey-ness (as in, power comes on at lower RPMs) rather than for maximum horsepower (more power but only at higher RPMs.) So if your exhaust were unrestrictive enough, which should be easy considering the small displacement of the diesel engine, a filter might not be unreasonable.

Instead, I think I'd design my exhaust for quiet and run biodiesel. Environmentally friendly, smells better, won't give the person behind you cancer. The bike goes as fast as you ever need go, and it should be light and relatively trouble free. You'll have to replace the batteries every few years, which is no big deal. They're not THAT expensive and remember, the idea is that you're going to be getting 180 miles per gallon. Diesel fuel is currently cheaper than gasoline, at least in my area.

I am somewhat concerned about the 80 mph top speed, however. I think that you really need the capability to hit 100 in case some asshole in a sports car tries to kill you or something. But maybe a hot exhaust and an ultraprecise balance job on that tiny little motor will let you get a little more speed.

Also: It only weighs 230 pounds! I want one set up as a funduro.

What about safety?

[User 956]

And just how would you ensure safety of these air tanks? That's a HELL of a lot of pressure!

I used to scuba dive quite a bit, though I haven't for a few years now. For those of you who don't you may not be aware that there are quite a few laws/guidelines about air tanks and safety.

Each time you pressurize a dive tank you are doing two things: first, you're causing a huge amount of heat to build up and secondly, you're stressing the metal of the tank. The hotter the tank gets the more quickly the metal it's made of will become stressed over time and become unsafe. That's why scuba tanks are placed in water when they're being filled. A dive shop is required by law (at least around here) to render a tank unusable if they see ANY signs of damage or metal fatigue. It's just a fact of physics that a tank has only so many use cycles before the metal fatigue renders it unsafe.

The dive shop owner who trained me had an interesting story about an experience he'd had. Many years ago his shop purchased a number of surplus tanks from the military. They had certified that they were in good shape and safe to use. Being a cautious guy he decided to fill them up and use them himself before selling any to his customers. While he was filling one of them he noticed a slight odd sound. He thought it could be a leak, so he placed his hand near the gasket at the top of the tank to see if he could feel any air escaping. He didn't actually touch the tank.

The next thing he knew he was lying on his back in a different room. The tank had exploded, blowing him over 50 feet through two walls! All the interior walls in his shop were flattened, his ear drums were broken, he was bleeding from tears at the corners of his mouth and eyes, plus tons of other crap was damaged/destroyed. The tank was about 3/4 full when this happened.

This was a steel tank, which has a max pressure of 1500PSI. And these cars are at 4500PSI???

I dunno. I'd have to be VERY confident of the safety measures they use before I'd consider riding in one of these things.

Compare these to Clive Sinclair's C5 from 1985

[rufusdufus]

Clive Sinclair's C5 from 1985.
The idea was a huge loser then, and its a huge loser now. People will buy cars that do more, not less.