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Ford Shows Off Recyclable Car
Opspin writes "MBDC (who wrote the book Cradle to Cradle) write in their
January Newsletter about a Ford Concept Car that includes Bluetooth technology as well as Cradle-to-Cradle design strategies. Read the MBDC press release, and the Ford Motor Company press release."
To prove my point, I found some more photos of the thing. Especially notices the seats.
a t=539&thumb=1
From the Detroit Auto Show
http://www.corral.net/photopost/showgallery.php?c
and From this story
http://www.evworld.com/images/ford_modelu_2.jpg
http://www.evworld.com/images/ford_modelu_1.jpg
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Don't forget that Ford really sucks.
This is a concept intended as "proof of concept", and not for production.
If it were intended for production, there would be a lot more refinement of processes, materials, and even design elements involved, and a lot more details fothcoming about such elements. If it were intended for production, there would at least be focus groups involved in such things as its marketability in its current form (such as it is). Not to mention lobbying for the infrastructure necessary to get a car like this produced and feasably useable (hydrogen-refill stations, for one).
Instead, this seeks to prove that something, in theory, COULD be done. Recyclable body panels are nothing new (Ford had an aluminum concept several years ago, and the new Jaguar X-type owes its many production delays toward the use of aluminum). Even subassemblies can be salvaged. And Hydrogen fuel cells have been in limited use and testing for over a decade.
What's interesting about this, is the use of new materials for fluids (arguably the most cancerous of all automotive components) and plastics. I'm not a chemist, but the testing of new corn and soy-based polymers for everything from interior materials to fluids is fascinating to me. At the very best, if pursued such processes could finally wean the US (and manufacturing in other sectors outside of the auto industry) off petroleum-based plastics and fluids, which would be a gigantic leap forward for industry, without question.
The "modular interior/ exterior" BS is all just marketing of design concepts. That's there to show that designs can lead themselves toward being more eco-friendly in a subtler fashion. Going back to the salvage industry: It's a lot easier to find salvage parts from platform-sharing cars Cougar/Thunderbird/MarkVII, Cavalier/Sunfire, Chrysler K-car, etc etc etc) than it is for one-offs. This concept I think seeks to carry over that mentality on a larger scale, tho with the public's demand for unique vehicles I doubt we'll ever see swappable parts on a grand scale.
It will be years if not decades before something like this can be driven off the lot, but it's good to know that the ideas are being tested. This concept should be good for new materials processing if nothing more. The only trick will be to keep Ford and other companies pursuing this, as opposed to saying "Great, we know it's possible, now go mothball that POS in a barn somewhere and let's forget it ever saw the light of day".
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"The slave thinks he is released from bondage, only to find a stronger set of chains" - NIN
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
And with the emphasis this year on horsepower, it just goes to show that history does repeat itself - the "big three" still don't get it - "it's the (fuel) economy, idiot!"
A higher tax on gasoline would force us to pay the true cost (including the externalities of pollution) for burning it. Consumers could still choose to pay more and pollute more, nobody would be forced. Or they could choose to buy a cleaner car, and get rewarded for it. It'd be like pollution trading schemes that the Bush administration has suggested.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
Because of the European take-back regulations, BMW and other automakers have been designing their cars to be taken apart and recycled faster and easier for several years now.
Back in one of my environmental engineering classes, we saw a film on one of these take-back plants. It took a couple people just an hour or so to strip a BMW from all its recyclable parts, including stuff like draining (and saving) the fluids, pulling off all plastic parts, etc.
And BMW is always watching and feeding back into the design process. They've reduced the types of plastics used to have less bins and sorting involved. They've reduced the use of gluing, welding, and riveting of parts on and replaced with mechnical fasteners (screws, bolts), making it easier to take apart. Instead of a taillight assy having two types of plastic (lens, backshell) being glued or rivetted together, now its one type that may snap together.
German car fetishists may voice concern that stuff like this may reduce the quality or performance of their favorite vehicles, but to me that means they aren't as purist as they claim, they don't trust the same engineers that designed their favorite cars in the first place.
Sure I would. With a properly designed safety cage I would feel no less safe in a glass/carbon fibre car than in a tin can. The motor sport world has known for many years that the monocoque design is the way to go if you want to want to walk away from an accident. The actual material used for the body shell is irrelevant. Having seen more road accidents than I would care to remember, many of which involved the car occupants being trapped in their cars while the rescue crews cut away the twisted metal, I for one do not view 'modern' car construction with a warm cosy glow. The driver ran away from this and jumped in another car three minutes later. It's all about construction, not just materials.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
Also note, that the majority of stolen cars are stolen for their parts.
This is not because the parts are more valuable than the whole, at least not in the obvious way.
By stripping a stolen car for parts, the stolen materials become that much harder to track. The vehicle's VIN might be stamped on the engine block and the dashboard, but the muffler and the seats and the tires and the catalytic converter probably don't have any unique identifying marks at all. Once those are sold, the owner of the car has NO chance of recovering them.
I agree with all the above points, and am not advocating "a race car on the street". The requirements for a family car are obviously very different from those of a 200mph+ F1 car. My point was that the classic steel contruction of road-going vehicles is not intrinsicly safer than composite construction. A robust safety cage will save your life even if the cosmetic/aerodynamic body shell is made of bubble wrap. People need to get away from the idea that steel is stronger than plastic and therefore safer. That is a myth.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
He did not stutter, the concept is in fact called Cradle to Cradle. It's a concept presented in a book by the MDBC founders called, Cradle to Cradle [slashdot], in which they claim, rather reasonably, that you're not -really- recycling unless the product you produce is of equal or greater material quality than the product you started with.
If you take petroleum, and make soda bottles, and then you take soda bottles and make them into seat cushions and polyfill for coats, blankets, etc, you've recycled the material only once, but you can't recycle polyfill into anything useful, so it goes into the landfill when you're done with it.
You've recycled the material once, doubling its lifetime. In a perfect world, you're reducing the waste stream by only half, by making every coat from recycled material, and new bottle with new material. Cradle to Cradle says, let's make that soda bottle out of a plastic that can be broken down and made back into feedstock for making soda bottles, and coats out of material that can be made out of coats. In other words, returning it to the Cradle. Assuming some wear and tear on the materials, you still could expect to recycle more than 95% of the bottle back into another bottle. Now, in a perfect world, 19 of every 20 bottles is made from recycled material, ditto for coats.
Cradle to Grave just means someone is responsible for the eulogy, which will eventually be ours if we don't stop dumping high-grade materials into holes in the ground.
Just because it works, doesn't mean it isn't broken.
The Hindenburg fire was not a hydrogen fire.
Better yet, it might be wise to bring back the days when cars were built almost entirely out of steel, not out of plastic and sheet metal like they are today. Those old cars could withstand collisions with just about anything short of a tractor/trailer (lorry for you Brits), and sometimes even then. You could actually walk away from a 20mph crash, instead of having to call for an ambulance.
Sorry, but that's a common fallacy. See, when you have a collision between two objects, the kinetic energy has to be dissipated somewhere. In older cars, the body/chassis of the car didn't deform, which meant that the kinetic energy was (in many cases) transferred to the people inside. Modern cars crumple on impact so the people inside don't. Hence, if you were in a car from 1960, the car would have a dent while the people would be gravely injured, while the same accident in a 2000 -model car would probably total the car, but the occupants could walk away.
If you can make a new car as crash-resistant as an old one, without using steel, that'll be great. If not... well, I care more about my safety than I do about miles per gallon. I agree that most people don't need gas guzzlers such as SUV's, but the sacrifice of auto safety on the altar of the environment has been going on for way too long.
SUVs are not safer for the driver/occupants, and significantly more dangerous for other people on the road. Hence, each large SUV bought is a net decrease in total road safety, as well as fuel economy. If everyone drove Japanese/European passenger sedans, the roads would be significantly safer than they are now, since those cars routinely score the highest on IIHTS/NHTSA crash tests and don't endanger other drivers/passengers.
Still, I had better luck with the numbers than you did... A feature-similar Civic EX (I wanted airbags, ABS, A/C) would cost about $2k less than the Insight (at the time there was no Civic Hybrid and I personally didn't like the Prius). I didn't need the extra seating or space that a Civic (hybrid or no) would provide. I get about 2x the mileage (73 mpg over 53k miles so far), saving me about 2 cents a mile (1.5 $/gal * 1/75 gal/mi), which I could get back in ($2000 * 50 mile/$) 100,000 miles. You can tweak the numbers this way and that... save $4k over 200k miles, or maybe gas gets more or less expensive, etc. It's not unreasonable to expect to drive a Honda for that far or long. For me, the numbers worked out close enough, plus I was thrilled enough with how the car drove that I was sold. I'm happier giving the money to Honda engineers than to oil pumpers, as well.
Repair-wise, the batteries in the Honda Insight are in a pack of 120 nickel metal hydride 1.2v D cells (yes, D cells). The car carries an extra factory warranty on all the IMA-related equipment (DC motor, batteries, controller) for 5 years or 80k miles. I think people estimated it would cost a couple grand to replace those batteries, but the estimate is rather old (last I talked with someone about this was nearly 2 years ago).
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
There is absolutely no reason for this when you have fuel-cell.
Notice they only talk about "Carbon dioxide emissions are nearly zero" - but that's not the whole story...
There are three major components to car emissions: Hydrocarbons, CO2, and NoX (CO should not be emitted at all)
Hydrogen, last i checked, burns hotter than gasoline; remember now that they are not carrying an onboard oxygen tank, so there are other crap that gets sucked into the combustion chamber - this includes the Oxygen that we need, a little bit of CO2, and a whole mass loads of Nitrogen.
the higher the combustion temperature, the more likely the nitrigen will become NoX (oxides nitrogen, IIRC - including NO2 NO3 etc, hence the X).
NOX is a major contributor to acid rain and the like - however since there are no more hydrocarbon emmissions (or, very little - CO2 needs a whole lot of energy to break apart) - the catalyc converter can't do jack about the NOX; so instead of worrying about global warming, we will simply have something else to worry over.
Two ways out of this:
1) use fuel cell - painstaking and difficult, but probably the most environmentally friendly. besides if you get it right electric motors have more torque anyhow - and real drivers know that torque = acceleration, horspower doesn't
2) carry some liquid oxygen onboard (yeah right) - infrastructure won't support it unless something serious changed - but would be very cool... I will see amature rocketry explode because you can get liquid O2 and H2 at refuelling stations now! =)
still better (CO2 side) than using reformers, but damn... not there yet. gotta wonder though - if they already went with a hydrogen tank, might as well just go with a fuel cell - that was probably the biggest prob w/ fuel cell in the first place
My life in the land of the rising sun.