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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.
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 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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've had a Honda Civic Hybrid for about two months, 4,000 miles. I couldn't be more impressed.
It has enough pickup for the driving most people do. Its more comfortable than my Subaru Forrester, including more leg room. It handles well. Best of all, I average 50.8 miles to the gallon. Yes, there is a MPG gauge. It has a range of over 600 miles per tank of gas and is a Ultra Low Emmissions vehicle.
It charges its own batteries through regenerative breaking and cruising without depressing the gas pedel, e.g. going down hill. The electric engine kicks in for some extra horsepower when you drive uphill or are accelerating. The gas engine is only about 96 horsepower, but that is enought when you are driving a light car on level roads . I drive it through the Green Mountains and it performs very well. It can cruise at 70 mph or more on a highway very easily, though I find I downshift a little more in the Civic than my Forrester for some extra oumph.
I've added a Sirius Satellite radio, so now I can drive coast to coast on five tanks of gas while listening to the same radio station!!!!
Put your environmental money where your environmental mouth is and buy one! I believe congress has just pased a tax credit for people who buy a hybrid.
Go forth and be GREEN!!!!!!!!!!!!
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.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Generally, the batteries used in electric vehicles are absorbant-mat type valve-regulated sealed batteries. This means you can shoot holes in the batteries and very little, if any electrolyte will spill out. Think of them as bigger, more advanced gel-cell lead acid batteries.
Also, given the fact that your vehicle will probably be heavier (since you're carrying the lead acid batteries, and the steel to support them) the other vehicle (unless it's a huge-ass truck) will probably come out of the accident in much worse shape than you will.
I haven't a clue as to what they put into the EV-1, but I doubt that it would fare worse than a Toyota Corolla in an accident.
As far as GM crushing their EV-1s to permanently get them out of consumer reach, well, they're assholes who have already written off the money they spent building what amounts to a working fleet of prototypes, so from their point of view, "disposing" of the asset makes sense, tax-wise, since they feel that they're no longer going to be in the electric-car business (despite the fact that fuel-cell cars ARE electric cars!!!)
The biggest joke is on states who built electric car charging stations with proprietary Magnacharger paddles to support EV-1s. With the EV-1s off the road, there really isn't any use for those charging stations anymore - I haven't heard of any hobbyists using the very expensive magnacharger system as part of their EV conversions, so there you go, more taxpayer money wasted on the behalf of these corporate bozos.
That's nice - 180 MPG is roughly equivalent to 80 km/l to the imperial-challenged crowd. But check out the 100 km/l car done by Volkswagen(yes, that's 100 km to the litre, or 235 MPG if you don't like SI units). I'm not affiliated with Volkswagen or anything - it's just cool technology.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
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.
Why?
High pressure containers can be designed to fail safely. Simply put, the majority of the tank is stronger then it needs to be, then create intention weaker "seams". This encourages the tank to tear itself apart rather than disintegrating.
Why is tearing good? Because as the tank tears, the hole get bigger and the trapped gas can expand through a larger hole thereby decreasing the relative pressure. Combined with a kevlar webbing around the tank, and protection in the floor of the vehicle, these tanks are probably safer than petrol cars, simply because you can't burn to death.
For an illustration of this tearing effect, the easiest search is +fireworks + flowerpot. or look for failed oxygen cylinders.
And I don't give it a secoond thought. While I don't know what particular type of tank they're using here, I'd guess it's a carbon-fiber wrapped tank. They're actually pretty resilient - crushing damage isn't going to do much, as whatever pressure you manage to put on the side of the tank is going to be small compared to the 4500 PSI pushing back from the inside. Really the only likely way to fracture one is with some sort of piercing damage, and if that happens there's no shrapnel, the tank just kind of tears apart leaving you with a bunch of un-wound carbon fiber. You obviously wouldn't want this to happen right next to your ear, but other than that, as long as the passengers are separated from the tanks, safety shouldn't be an issue.
paintball