Slashdot Mirror
Aircraft Maker Will Produce Electric Cars in 2006
clarkie.mg writes "French aircraft maker Dassault has announced that they will team up with Hydro-Quebec to produce an electric car, available as of 2006. Hydro-Quebec will provide the lithium-metal-polymer (LMP) battery and the wheel motor propulsion system. The car will be built in partnership with a car specialist and sold in association with a large automaker not yet found."
The hybrid honda civic looks exactly like a normal car, and one can even get it with a manual transmission. The toyota prius isn't that bad either. The reason the all electric cars are so ugly is that if you have to wait overnight for the battery to charge then your car sure as hell better be light and aerodynamic enough to make it enough miles to get through the day.
An aircraft maker gets together with a government-owned power supply utility company. They hatch a half-baked plan about an electric car that they hope a big car company will want to sell for them. Sure...why not? I wish them luck.
I think the boss of the aircraft company has been inhaling too much jet fumes and the other guy's been standing too close to the hydro-electrict turbines with no protective gear.
This being slashdot, I expect the usual nonsense about "But electric cars just get energy from gas-burning power plants . . ." will start up immediately.
Here are some facts that I don't think anyone disputes. Absorb these, and then continue with the ranting.
Fact 1: Electric motors are more efficient than internal combustion engines. Run a gas engine at X watts for 20 minutes. Run an electric motor at X watts for 20 minutes. Afterwards, the gas engine will be hotter than the electric motor. Yes, it depends on the load, blah, blah, blah, but in the loads typically encountered by cars, the internal combustion engine loses.
Fact 2: The energy density of batteries has quadrupled in the last 10 years, mostly pushed by laptop and cellphone battery technology. Lead acid batteries have about 35 Wh/kg, while different variants of lithium batteries are in the range of 100 Wh/kg to 150 Wh/kg. Note that the cost of a lithium pack is substantially higher than that of a lead acid pack of the same capacity.
But don't worry, zealots! There are still lots of other things to debate! Does every family of four really need TWO cars with more than 100 mile range? Was Carl Pope of the Sierra Club being blackmailed when he endorsed hybrid SUV's in the latest issue of Green Car Journal? Would you cry if someone gave you a lithium-ion-powered Tzero for Christmas or other nugatory tradition? Can putting a 500 W solar panel on a car that consumes 15 kW at highway speeds make any difference? Will people ever stop suggesting that putting generators on the wheels of electric cars is a good idea? Am I really as much of a tool as I seem?
Have at it, boys!
Can't really say that looks futuristic. Thats how
many asian manufactured cars look that are sold
in Europe.
Electric motors not only can have a lot of torque, they basically don't have a torque-vs-RPM curve either. They start pulling hard from 0 RPM, which is one reason for accelerating well.
The also means that there is basically zero reason to leave the engine running when you're stopped at a traffic light or stuck in traffic. The engine can just as well be stopped when the car isn't actually moving. When you need to start moving again, just push the pedal and you have maximum torque within the next millisecond anyway. In the long run, that should count for some energy saved.
The problem nowadays is mostly that batteries suck. They're large, heavy, expensive, slow to load (compared to just pumping some gas into the tank in mere seconds), and the power stored isn't that great. Pollution notwithstanding, oil is still the superior way to haul some energy around.
Basically what I'm saying is: after you factor in the batteries to sustain that kind of power, you'd end up with a car heavier than the Viper. At a wild guess you'd probably need at least 600 HP to actually have the same power to weight ratio as a Viper.
And even then, to get that kind of juice on batteries and not have 5 tons of them... let's just say you might win the drag race, but you'd be out of power at the end of it. Whereas the Viper driver will get a good laugh and drive home.
So, well, I can see the point of electric engines in small or family cars, but I really can't see an electric race car being produces any time soon. Because that's more or less what the commercially sold Viper is: the race car minus the big wing. If you want a clean green way of racing a Viper, I'd set my hopes higher for hydrogen engines than electric engines.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The wheels will be too heavy and add kinetic energy of the rorating mass. It will require more breaking power and will be slower to react on the controlls. I say, put one sufficiently large electric motor where it can be cooled and distribute that power the traditional way. This looks very nice in theory but drivers will no like this concept. A normal wheel is heavy as it is. Permanent magnets can not be made light and they will require volume. The magnet height along magnetic lines acts like a source and the air gap as a resistance. Those things add up to a heavy fragile (alt. inefficient) design. You'll crash that engine the first time you run over a curb at 30 mph (or forget low-profile tires).
A single electric motor inside the car can be isolated from road vibrations and shock. The motor can optimized with fewer requirements and a traditional clutch can isolate the wheels form the kinetic rotation energy of motor (when required).
Lead-acid batteries rock, as long as they're not small enough for someone to carry around. The 7000 pound lead-acid batteries in the forklifts at work go for a week without a charge, and a 10k GWP forklift moves a ton faster than a wheelchair. Donuts in forklifts rock, man.
"Why do you consent to live in ignorance and fear?" - Bad Religion
Oh come now, what do people do with their old car batteries? Smash them open on their front lawns? Dump them into the rainforest?
We recycle them, and I imagine that for expensive lithium batteries the incentive to recycle will even be greater. Unless you mean that recycling causes more pollution than it prevents, in which case I'd like a source on that.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
Ah, but I got two wheel drive for that exact reason. It's basically a Mazda pickup truck (same drivetrain, or at least similar) with a different shell wrapped around it. The big expensive "lookit me!" SUVs are pretty impractical, but then, so are the big shiny pickups when driven by people who just commute to the office. The rule of thumb that I've coined is that four wheel drive should not be purchaced for any vehicle that is expected to stay clean. A good mud spatter across the bottom of the side panels at minium. :)
There's a good lineup of SUVs that are nice and practical for people who would buy large station wagons (which have dwindled to extended hatchbacks) or vans. Two wheel drive and sensible momentum gets me through Florida sugar sand, which is as bad as I'm gonna go off-road... but then, off-road is not the prime reason for it. OTOH, the high clearance gets me over curbs and parking stops into loading bays, public squares and other places where normal cars are not allowed/cannot go (but I often have a crew standing around waiting to unload). In other words, a great utility vehicle along the lines of what the model is, in theory, designed for.
Incidently, if you ever are driving where you shouldn't and get approached by the police, tell the cop you're unloading or loading for -name of closest business-. I have *never* been questioned further, nor have I ever seen any officer follow up with the business. Private security is a different story, however.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Even if present fossil fuel plants are used to power EVs, they're still far cleaner per mile than ordinary cars. In California, that works out to about 97% cleaner.
Even the cleanest modern car engine is just plain dirty, even when compared with coal-fired power plants.
And as others have pointed out, as cleaner power plants are brought on line, electric cars will use them too.
Using electric cars is the logical next step in our society, synthetic alchohol fuels are a good idea as well, but the problem with those is the flammability issue.
Forgive my ignorance, but how is there an issue with the flamibility of alcohol, that's different from the flamibility issues with regular gas? As I understand it, Alcohols are infinitly renewable, significantly less polluting, and can be used in most vehicles with only minor alterations (valve settings and different material for the head gasket or something.). Why isn't this being persued as actively as fuel cells? The only reason I can think of is that High schoolers would be able to pull up to the gas station and get their resources for the kegger that weekend, (and how is that any different than now anyway?) Just a thought..
And as long as we're talking about electric cars, here's the obligatory Tesla refference: Tesla Electric Car #1
"Operating systems suck: you're better off using only the BIOS" --trainsaw.com
First of all, you're making a strawman of environmentalists -- I've never heard anyone seriously complain that a slow-moving wind turbine might decapitate a passing bald eagle.
Oh yeah?
A mistake that many electric car designers have made over the years is to fail to recognize that the electric car is not simply an internal combustion engined car with the engine replaced by an electric motor.
I'd say the designers are pretty well aware of this. However the budgets aren't infinite, and they're trying to make use of existing technology and parts as much as possible.
Only GM has created a fuel cell powered concept car from the ground up. This seems to be a nice article about the skateboard concept.
On the Geneva fair, an number of nice hybrid concept cars were introduced. Have a look at them:
Alessandro Volta
Honda IMAS
Lexus RX 400h
Smart fuel economy is around 60mpg (combined city/country) - although not the absolute best, that's still pretty good. I was in Italy last year and they were absolutely everywhere, definitely the single most popular car. I'd say every tenth car that I saw in Rome was a Smart. Understandable when you see the size of the streets they have to drive down! Not so many in the north of the country however.
The best feature, I believe, is how incredible small this thing is. You can park two in a standard parking spot, or even park perpendicular to the road. For those of us living in crowded European cities and can't do without a car, this is very compelling.
On the other hand, I'd rather not think about what a soccer mom can do with her tank, er SUV, to it... which is probably the reason they haven't introduced them in the US yet.