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Modded Hybrid Cars Get Up to 250 MPG
artemis67 writes "Politicians and automakers say a car that can both reduce greenhouse gases and free America from its reliance on foreign oil is years or even decades away. Ron Gremban says such a car is parked in his garage. It looks like a typical Toyota Prius hybrid, but in the trunk sits an 80-miles-per-gallon secret -- a stack of 18 brick-sized batteries that boosts the car's high mileage with an extra electrical charge so it can burn even less fuel. Gremban, an electrical engineer and committed environmentalist, spent several months and $3,000 tinkering with his car."
TFA talks about cars getting up to 250MPG, this dude has a car that gets around 80. Am I missing something, or do you have to overclock it to 7Ghz to get that kind of mileage?
Build a better car that doesn't guzzle gas, and the oil industry will beat a path to your door, destroy the car, and kill you. Adios, Dude!
How ya like dat?
No where in the article does it state that he actually got 250MPG. It only alludes to the fact that "modders" can. What an awful skew of the facts.
HJ
This is a very cool mod, but with the turnaround time in the auto industry and the legal costs that acquiring the rights to use the guy's idea would entail, it may be decades before you see this in new hybrids...
-nick
I prefer the Quicktime format, myself.
My Greatest Heist - Muisc partly inspired by the unbeatable Qwantz
By this reasoning, I could build a car that has a little 1 horse power engine and a big bank of batteries which are charged by plugging it in at night. I could claim 1000 mpg, but that doesn't actually mean that my car is more efficient than any other car.
I agree that this may be useful, sort of more of a middle-ground between hybrids and electric cars, but really they should stop making mpg claims.
EDrive is the company making the LiIon plug-in Prius conversions.
Link
It's funny how that pesky electric car just won't die. Maybe because it really is a good solution for the majority of one's commuting. This one may still have an ICE in it, but it's only a matter of time before that is dispensed with.
And don't even talk about those "fool cells". Like nuclear fusion, fuel cell cars will always be 10 years away.
Modified Prius gets up to 180 Miles Per Gallon
The interesting thing about the new article is that there evidently now a company that will take your Prius, plus $12,000, and convert it into an all-electric car.
VW is selling 84 MPG vehicles since '99 http://www.usatoday.com/money/consumer/autos/marev iew/mauto497.htm
The problem is not really making a high MPG car, it is that people, especially in the US, don't want to buy them. Not even the best technology can make an energy efficient car handle like a porsche or sound like a truck.
I've built electric cars. (college solar car team).
... but he gets power from the wall, which had to come from somewhere.
This car does not get 80 mpg. It uses 1 gallon of gas for every 80 miles it travels
Although large power plants may be able to make electricity more efficiently, he has to deal with transmission losses, and then storage losses from the inefficiency of battery storage. And he has the extra weight of 18 more batteries.
The only advantage wall-plugs do on electric vehicles is move where they're poluting -- it moves to the power plant, instead of the point of use.
Billing any of these cars as '250mpg' unless gallons of gasoline is the only input to the system is a disservice to everyone.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I suspect - but have no proof - that the plug in option reduces some of the pollution per mile. The reason why I suspect this is that you have reduced the engine size and carry less of your fuel (part of which is at the power plant) Additionally the power plant should be able to run cleaner per Watt produced - they should have better polution reduction equipment.
This message was brought to you by "Lack of Sleep."
I do believe that the generators down at the power plant are in general more efficient than the engine in your car (though it's tricky to make an apples to apples comparison, as few power plants run on gasoline (though some probably do run on diesel)) but I suspect it's not a LOT more efficient.
Also, you were talking about `pollution per unit of energy' not efficiency, though in practice I suspect the two are just different ways of looking at the same thing -- after all, power plants will burn a given fuel in the same way that a car engine will, so the waste products will be the same. The power plant may be somewhat better maintained, however, and can have more things similar to a catalytic converters on a car.
And even if the power plant pollutes just as much as a car engine for a given amount of energy, there's another advantage -- the polution is generally produced away from the city, which helps keep the polution around the people who actually use the cars down.
That's certainly true. Alas, not much of the US's power comes from things like this.But I made the mistake of trying to patent my special water conversion carburator so a mole in the patent office turned me in.
I'm now in the Ford "dungeon" right now...I just got this 300 baud modem hacked up from paper clips and mouse droppings and the first site I got to was this "Slashdot"
Hey how are you all doing.... Frist Post?
http://www.e-traction.com/TheWheel.htm
Put the motor in the hub. No drive train! AWD!
All I need is some big bucks to get a welding torch and put 4 in some old jalopy. (And some batteries..)
Anyone know what these things go for? They can use a lot of juice and put out a lot of power.
Cheers!
-b
You can make a hummer get better than 80 mpg. Not too far from my house is a hummer that gets better than 80 mpg, but it's also a hybrid.
It's a combination diesel-continental drift vehicle, and they fire it up maybe once in 10000 years.
Of course, if they power it up and use the vehicle to drive down the street, it's back down to 6 mpg.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
The inevitable smart-ass question of "Oh, but that electricity has to come from somewhere!!".
Consider this:
Energy content of gasoline: ~45 MJ/kg
Density of gasoline: 737 kg/m3
1 cubic meter = 264.172051 gallons, equals 2.79 MJ/gallon.
Now 1 kWh is exactly 3.6 MJ. Electricity costs (let's exaggerate) 30 cents per kWh.
What do you pay for gas?
Now add to that the facts that:
1) It is easier to clean up a handfull of power-plants than a millions cars distributed over the whole country.
2) Electricity doesn't have to come from fossil fuel sources
3) Even if it does, power plants still produce energy more efficiently than an automobile engine.
Politicians and automakers say a car that can both reduce greenhouse gases and free America from its reliance on foreign oil is years or even decades away. Ron Gremban says such a car is parked in his garage. It looks like a typical Toyota Prius hybrid, but in the trunk sits an 80-miles-per-gallon secret -- a stack of 18 brick-sized batteries.
And as the average American wants a big SUV and certainly isn't going to accept downgrading to something the size of a Prius and losing all of their trunk space to 18 brick sized batteries, it looks like the politicians and auto makers are correct.
In 1904 or whenever it was, two guys managed to invent a plane that, yes, technically could fly. A full hundred years later, why don't we all have our own planes or flying cars? Because, for the average person, they're totally impractical - they simply cost too much and have too many trade-offs for the benefits gained.
A Prius stacked full of batteries with no trunk space is exactly the same: Sure, you can do it. But that doesn't mean everyone in America is going to rush out and get one.
The theory is that it'll take years or decades to reach the point where it is practical for the masses. And that theory remains true.
I can get 250MPG.
Shift into neutral, and find a 250 mile stretch of downhill....
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
What about the batteries? Aren't most batteries toxic as hell? Isn't the manufacture and disposal of batteries a colossal headache? Am I really doing anything productive at all, trading a few gallons of Saudi crude for a lithium/ion toxic waste site? Somebody, please, set me straight. What do they do with the batteries?
Oh, and what if you live in a place with real winters? Last I heard, batteries die a quick and silent death in subzero conditions.
As someone else said, plugging it in doesn't count. That electricity may or may not come from environmentally friendly sources. Most likely, environmentally hostile sources like coal.
Furthermore, there's a lot more to it than simply sticking a bunch of batteries in the trunk. Some consumers use their trunks. Why do you think they put them in cars? Because they just happen to have a lot of extra room when they're done building the car?
Also, by adding all that weight, you're changing the dynamics of the car. For a dealer to sell a car modified like that, it now needs to go through safety tests.
There are a lot of people that think, "Oh geez, all the car manufacturers need to do is XYZ and we won't need gas anymore." I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's a lot more complex a problem than most people make it out to be. You have to build a car that's safe and a car consumers want to buy. Those aren't always easy things to accomplish when the source of power isn't in question. When you're trying a new source of power, it's a big additional question.
Sure, everyone could rely on hydrogen, except we don't have enough hydrogen fuel pumps yet. Not to mention, hydrogen is pretty expensive to produce right now and certainly there isn't infrastructure to produce it in the quantities necessary for a mass market.
It's not a simple problem and there isn't a simple solution.
Translation: I am insecure and need to compensate with my penis car.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
"Even if it does, power plants still produce energy more efficiently than an automobile engine."
Everything except natural gas (which is running out and expensive) is stuck below about 35% efficient. Coal power plants a bit more efficient than an engine, but once you factor in transmission losses and storage losses it doesn't really look that good. That, and coal is a very dirty source of power (eg it releases lots of particulates some of them radioactive). The only viable large scale alternative is nuclear, and it's not exactly cheap.
Also, the transmission infrastructure can't take a significant number of people doing this.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
not much of the US power comes from hydro or nuclear ?
r .htm
did you even bother to google before making such a stupid statement
"Today, nuclear power plants--the second largest source of electricity in the United States--supply about 20 percent of the nation's electricity each year."
http://www.nei.org/doc.asp?catnum=2&catid=106
http://lsa.colorado.edu/essence/texts/hydropowe
30mpg in town, and 41 on the interstate.
An RV posted for sale on the bulletin board at work gets 2.5 miles per gallon. Also posted are lots of SUV's that get 10-12mpg in town and 18-20mpg on the interstate. That's why folks are dumping those gas hogs.
BUT, as the price of gasoline crosses $3.50 to 4.00/gal even my car will be too expensive to drive. I believe $3/gal will arrive before Christmas, and $4/gal by the next Christmas, if not sooner. Luckily, work is only 3.7 miles away and I have a nice bike.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Assuming I had one of these cars, where would I plug it in? I park my car in a parking lot, not a private garage attached to a single-family house.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Electricity will be next to free within the next 10-30 years: Technological breakthrough article just a few days ago.
I'm suprised people aren't excited about this as I am. Solar panels never took off because the energy they produced didn't cover costs. This is more efficient and cheaper. They'll make money off their solar farms, then reinvest the money to create more solar farms, which allows them to reinvest even more money on even more solar farms. Its a cyclical process where somepeople are going to end up being in the top 100 richest people in the world. I'm so excited that I applied to their company and I'm trying to prototype out my own sterling engines. I figure that even if I can't be employed by them, nothing will stop me from running my own buisness.
God spoke to me.
"Translation: I am insecure and need to compensate with my penis car."
Translation: I'm envious of your ownership of the penis car.
"Derp de derp."
Sounds as if you didn't bother to read the article. Most of the issues you insinuate about are covered. Yes it's a trade off, but still to our advantage. [Everything but the battery replacement is discussed and this is not big an issue.]
The options are very much higher gasoline prices, and more wars. The next ones will require more bodies and cash from somewhere. Hence, are you of draft age? Are you ready to be part of our next noble adventures? Or do you have better things to do like talk politics, drive extravagent cars and chase the "good" life? Sounds nice, but there will be hell to pay for those outrageous indulgences.
Pay now or pay even more later.
Ask for a refund on your high school education, as they failed to deliver.
737 kg/m3 divided by 264.17 is the number of kilograms per gallon of gasoline. Multiplying the 2.79kg that a gallon of gasoline weighs by the net energy content of 44 MJ/kg gives you 122 MJ per gallon of gasoline, or the equivalent of 34 kWh of electricity.
I pay about USD 20 cents per kWh of electricity with tax, so the electrical equivalent for a gallon of gasoline would be about USD 6.80. Or, I can buy gasoline at about USD 2.15.
The more interesting question is: For each of those joules combusted in the engine, how many of them make it to the rubber/road interface (according to one FAQ about 0.2) and for each of the joules my ersatz-electric car pulls out of the wall socket, how many of THEM make it into the rubber/road interface (according to another FAQ about 0.6). Of course regen braking lets me use some of those joules over and over again, how much of which is highly dependent on driving conditions.
So, it turns out that the utility-electric-sourced car is about $11.30 per mega-newton-meter/second at the road surface, while the gasoline car is at about $10.75 - although it would not take very much regeneration at ALL to push that to the other side of the equation.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
If they had hybrids that can store more electrical energy, and they can just be charged while they sit in the garage all night and be good for the next morning, I think that will be a 'good thing'.
So, have you ever driven a Prius? I have, for the past four years. I don't have trouble with city traffic, or with highway traffic. It is the easiest driving car that I have ever owned.
Last Monday I put on 280 miles at 70 mph, and got 49.5 mpg. Sure, I got passed by a few Suburbans, but I passed a bunch, too. Our Prius is quite sensitive to who is driving it; I get significantly better milage than my wife. Also, in winter the milage drops substantially (colder battery? alcohol in the gas?).
It's true that the cost of the hybrid is such that it is hard to make a strong argument for buying a hybrid on strict economic grounds. However the estupidass US automakers have been so distracted with making ever larger SUVs that I simply couldn't bear to give them a dime when we needed a new car several years ago.
Look: my Prius is not a sports car, obviously. I'm not going to haul a horse trailer over Snoqualmie Pass with it. But it is really ignorant to describe these hybrids as lemons. They are extremely good at what they are designed to be good at, and that turns out to be just about 95 percent of all my family's driving needs. My Prius is comfortable, thrifty, fun to drive, and interesting to drive.
The single largest problem with the Prius is that it is so quiet that pedestrians and bicyclists don't hear it.
They even make a kick advertising it (as opposed to coal power generation). France comes to mind. So at 75%+ electricity generation is CERTAINLY less polluting if you count only ground+air type pollution. Even comparing radioactive pollution only it might win anyway (it is concentrated pollution in the case of a nuclear plant and not released widespread over earth, although it says there for a great deal longer time whereas other method like coal release a bit of radioactive element in atmosphere. A little bit albeit by the sheer tonnage of burned coal the little big get big...). In such country the vehicule shown is LESS polluting than your average car.
But then again this always comes down to the US not wanting to go away from their oil policy, isn't it ? By the way did you know than exxon announced the peak of oil for non-opec oil (60% world crude production)in 5 years ? This time this is not an ecological kook which announced it, but an oil company. Funny that nobody is reporting it that much in the press...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
...it's not worth it. You can get a non hybrid Civic for $14k that gets 32/38 milage. The hybrid Civic runs $6k more but gets 10mpg more. How many years does it take you to break even on the gas costs?
I know there are tax deductions and such for hybrid cars. I think I can understand why the politicians want Hydrogen. By looking at this page: http://www.gaspricewatch.com/usgastaxes.asp these taxes are used for budgeting everything from road contruction to new projects. The politicians are worried where their sweet money is going to go if this caught on TOO FAST! They would have to get the money from somewhere else and this would mean increasing taxes to compensate the reduction of gas taxes. And Raising taxes does not get one re-elected! By having Hydrogen cars and refueling stations, they can still charge taxes on the refill and keep their current tax structure. This is the new age, you can never rely on only one thing such as this tax to keep everything balanced!
They are, in fact, a LOT more efficient. An ICE in the modern car converts gasoline into kinetic energy with about 25% efficiency. The modern power plants exceed 60% efficiency in converting fuel (typically oil) into electricity.
The reason the ICE efficiency is so low is that there is considerable wasted energy in the form of heat. A power plant burns fuel to boil water to drive a turbine, so heat is in fact desirable.
Third time in this article I've seen someone make this mistake. It's an epidemic.
The gasoline powered car is only 25% efficient so although you pay $2.15/gallon you only use a quarter of the energy. Electric motors are very efficient so you don't need 1:1 energy equivalent with gasoline. The "electrical equivalent for a gallon of gasoline" is actually closer to $1.50, using your figures.
A motorcycle on the other hand is quite different. When you lay a motorcycle on it's side, there's a hundred pounds of human flesh and blood acting as a wear plate, before you scratch the paint on the motorcycle. The human rider is directly exposed to the energy of the impact, a very efficient transfer of energy.
As an extra side bonus, when humans act as wear plates to protect the motorcycle, they are also helping with the culling process, improving the gene pool. I always get a big grin on my face when I see a big dumb biker riding down the road, jeans and a t-shirt, no helmet. Nature will always prevail, the culling process is natural in that scenario. The only real problem these days is the sneaking up of license ages. If they keep letting it sneak up higher, pretty soon, the culling process wont be able to take effect until AFTER those folks have propogated the genes that contain utter stupidity. But I have faith in nature, it'll find another vector around this problem....
Per mile costs with gasoline at $2.44 a gallon would be 3 cents. I could live with that.
Put it this way, my normal daily round-trip commute is 4.8 miles. This means I'd use only a gallon of fuel every 16.7 days, or a total of 15 gallons of gas a year, just to get back and forth to work. Even with gas at $3.00 a gallon it'd be a whopping $45.00 for the year.
With other travel my total bill would probably be $200 or less. Can't argue much with that.
The question I have is why nobody has come up with a diesel hybrid. You have all these arguments that hybrids are no better than old-style diesels, which is true. The diesel engine is just a whole lot more efficient.
So, why not just make a diesel hybrid? Best of both worlds, and if you only need to tank up every 800 miles don't tell me you can't find find a gas station that sells it...
The issue with these modded Priuses is that they ruin the batteries draining them in this fashion.
:)
Personally, in my garage I have a car that runs on straight used frying oil which I get free from local resturants. Much cheaper and if I run out of veg oil I can run on diesel
As I posted a ways up "The same idiots argue that having batteries in your trunk automatically were made by some "dirty" power source is causing just as much harm. Im guessing the ratio of cars to power plants in the US is around 1:7500000"
Lets do some statistics - Their are a total of 2,776 power plants in the United States - Lets compare that with the estimated 1.9 million cars in the United States
The ratios between the different types of power plants goes as follows : Coal accounts for 43% of the energy in the US , Gas is 19% , Nuclear 14%, Renewable enery 12%, Petroleum 7%, Hydroelectric 3%
So anyways back on topic your saying that 63% of the US's power supply is made from dirty sources ( coal - gas and petrol ) is equivalent to 1.9 million cars, thats 1748 ( dirty ) power plants.
People that saying buying a fucking hybrid is a crime because they ASSUME that the energy created comes from dirty power sources ( might be the case in your area, might not ) are complete dumbasses.
You can list many types of loss, but they are all very small. For example, losses due to transmission and distribution are about 5%. Info http://www.energy.qld.gov.au/infosite/eff_trans_di st.html
My business partner has a couple of pure-electric RAV4s. He has a special hookup with the LA DWP to charge his cars during non-peak hours, for around 5 cents per kWh. Anybody driving an electric car every day would do the same thing.
So, using your numbers (except for your high electricity price) the electric car gets four times the miles/dollar as the gas car. Of course, the electric RAV4 only gets 100 of those miles per charge. Based on a month's driving and his electricity bill, we calculated that the electric RAV4 cost about 1 cent/mile in electricity.
Of course, the car was very expensive, and the batteries will probably need to be replaced after (say) 80,000 miles at a cost of (say) $10,000, so that drives the cost/mile up considerably -- but battery technology is getting better, pretty fast.
But right now, at least, the cost of energy for getting vehicles down the road is significantly cheaper using electricity vs gasoline. It's probably an historical oddity that won't last -- as many forms of energy are fungible.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
All power, whether fossil fuels, solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, or some as-of-yet-undiscovered resource, is really just transferring energy from one place in the universe to another. As long as we use energy, we continue to observe entropy. And as long as that happens, there will be whiners complaining about it.
I would ride mine all year, except for that winter thing. I need something warmer for the October to May period.
As a straight male, I find the idea of climbing into an '18-second pussy-mobile' rather more enticing than any kind of 'penis car'....
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
But perhaps the best solution is getting your local government to support mixed use zoning. New Urbanism is a great start, but not if these end up as islands in a sea of suburbia -- you'd just end up driving to get to them, sort of like a Universal Studio's City Walk. Relaxation of zoning and land-use laws in suburban areas would help even more. The ability to open a cafe on the corner of your subdivision -- or even in your own house -- would be a great way to create more local services that obviate the need for driving.
The market will take care of you.
As it continues to become more expensive to commute, people like you will either go broke commuting, or find a way to make a living locally.
I'd rather see farmland in places like Ohio & Upstate NY be used as farmland, instead of being yet another place for asshats sick of citylife to throw up yet another cookie-cutter 4 bed/2.5 ba colonial on 1.2 acres.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
The diesel engine is just a whole lot more efficient.
Actually i'll agree with you on the new turbo diesels. Some of the 80s passanger autos with diesels were not all that much better than their gas counterparts, but i'm starting to see a remarkable improvement. On trucks or an SUV... no contest, always been an improvement in terms of efficency.
The big issue in America is that diesel = bad. It's been a long time since I looked up the issue but the Volkswagon turbo diesel according to the VW website couldn't be ordered in a handful of states most notably California. And the pesky issue of finding a place to fill up a diesel. You can find them... but they are typicaly further away than your local petrol only stataion.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
That's not exactly true.
:)
Of course you don't get your power from a different source - but your provider, assuming they're a public utility, is usually legally required to produce a percentage of their power proportional to the percentage of their output used by 'green power' buyers from renewable sources.
The extra amount you're paying goes into green power funds to pay for windmills, solar panels, etc. Obviously this is questionable if you get your power from a private company, but I get mine from Seattle City Light, and they no longer even operate non-renewable sources due to high demand for green power.
Just like anything an individual can do to lessen their impact on the environment, this one works well in numbers, but not so well when there are detractors like you.
Okay- I agree with the fact that the market will take care of it- but with more fuel efficient cars and new technology.
I'd rather see farmland in places like Ohio & Upstate NY be used as farmland, instead of being yet another place for asshats sick of citylife to throw up yet another cookie-cutter 4 bed/2.5 ba colonial on 1.2 acres.
We don't like the city asshats either, but on the other hand I am financially secure for the rest of my life because we sold my grandfathers farm for development.
And I am sure you would be glad to know that I get paid (YES PAID $$$) to actually NOT grow things on the farm I currently own. Isn't the gov't great!!!
And I hate to tell you, but most people buying these house on 1.2 acres can afford higher gas prices.
Here is the rub my friend- There are many people with a lot of $$$, and these people have 50K SUVs and 750K homes. A lot of intellectuals who went to great schools and feel intellectually superior to people who have big houses and cars, make 40-50K a year. They act like they hate the people with the 50K SUVs and and 750K homes because they pollute, when in actuality it is resentment that they feel smarter, yet have no $$$.
And we all would like to see more farmland used as farms. But with CAFTA, we are only going to see more produce from S America grown by people making 50 cents a day. And I personally know three farming families that had to sell the farm due to inheritance tax. 500 acres is worth way over the exemption.... Why do you think 99% of farmers are Republicans?
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
"Translation: I'm envious of your ownership of the penis car."
Translation: I own one of those penis cars.
Smart Cars ARE designed to meet current US safety guidlines! In fact, they WILL be selling them here in a year or so.
See, here's the funny thing: surprisingly enough, when they make these small cars they take that into account and make them safe despite it. I drive a Hyundai Accent, and the thing has so many safety features it's not even funny: front airbags, side airbags, crumple zones, side-impact door beams, etc.
I saw a thing a while back comparing a Mini to a F-150 by crashing them head-on into each other. Guess which driver would be less injured? The MINI driver! You know why? Because the passenger compartment of the Mini is designed to maintain its structural integrity in a crash. The front of the thing was completely flat, but the passenger compartment was completely intact. The driver of the truck, on the other hand, would have massive damage to his legs because the footwell crushed in completely. Incidentally, the Mini looked worse, but both vehicles were totaled (the truck was folded in half at the joint between the cab and the bed).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Cars sold in Europe are rated for safety using the Euro NCAP system. If you check out the tables you'll see that in terms of crash protection the Smart MCC scores the same as a 2002 Jeep Cherokee. In terms of what it does to a pedestrian when it hits it the Smart is safer.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
My understanding is that smartcars pass US safety standards just fine (they actually have pretty good safety features and perform better than a lot of standard US cars in crash tests). The issue is more to do with emission standards. It's not that they have particularly bad emissions, in fact a major study ranked the smartcar's tailpipe the least polluting in the world, ahead of more than 1,200 cars. It's just that it doesn't mean particulars of the US standard. Apparently the engine can converted so that it does, but Smart claims that would force the price above the $US14,000 mark they aim at.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I used to have a 1988 Chevy Sprint (carbed 1.0L, 3 cylinder with automatic transmission). The car was dangerously underpowered (~50 hp), but if you gave it about a minute or two you could reach it's maximum speed of about 135 kph (83 mph). Obviously better accelleration could be had with a 5 speed, weight reduction and some engine tuning. Using something like a 30 shot of nitrous might not be a bad idea for easing merges onto freeways as well.
In the US the '87? - '88 (MK1 series) of the Chevy Sprint and Suzuki Forsa were briefly available with a fuel injected, turbocharged, 1.0L 3 cylinder engine. These vehicles stock, put out a much healthier 80 hp. These little cars can be frighteningly quick with some engine mods and the boost turned up.
Divide by zero hurts my brain.
I had this same question a year or so ago, and as I recall, the following is the reason there are no diesel-electric hybrids. I may have part of this wrong, but I'm too tired to look it up again right now.
Gas-electric hybrids work well because electric motors are well-suited to low-RPM, high-torque situations and gas engines are most efficient when driven at some particular, relatively high, RPM. The electric motor is used at low speed and in stop and go situations, and the gas engine is used in the regime in which it is most efficient.
The sweet spot for diesel engines is in the lower-RPM, higher-torque regime, so a diesel-electric hybrid would have two engines that work well in city traffic, and none that works well on the freeway.
Again, look it up for yourself to verify the details.
Having said that, hybrid diesel for buses has been on market for a while, so hybrid diesel in passenger cars may not be too far off in markets that tolerate it...
There's more to it than that. Anyone remember Thorstein Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption? The basic idea, for those who haven't, is that when unnecessary overconsumption is socially sanctioned -- that is, when it becomes fashionable -- then the normal laws of supply and demands are, if not suspended altogether, then greatly modified.
There is no consumer pressure to make fuel-efficient cars because the very inefficiency and extravagance of the modern SUV is what is really being purchased by design. People want wasteful, expensive vehicles because they are fashion statements. They say, "Look at me! I have assloads of discretionary income." An Armani suit is manifestly inferior to jeans and a denim work shirt in purely practical terms, but no one buys Armani because it's practical. A twenty-dollar digital watch is a functionally better watch than a fancy Rolex, but people aren't buying Rolexes because of their chronographic accuracy.
If you want to reduce the waste of resources, you have two options: make efficiency hipper than waste, or require efficiency through regulation. To wait for simple market forces to correct the situation is to wait in vain: viewed through a purely economic lens, the market is working correctly. It is delivering what people want, which is waste.
Energy-efficiency is primarily a social problem, and only secondarily a technological or economic problem. Oh sure, in the long term, energy-efficiency is a survival problem for the human race, but humans are not very good at long-term decision-making.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Flame? That wasn't a flame.
Afraid so. Compilation aborts at the first error.
1. I didn't get my license until I was 23, and then it was because my evil Evil EVIL ex-wife demanded that I learn how to drive. So I bludgered about in her POS Mercury Bobcat and got my license. The Bobcat (mercifully) self-destructed a few years later. So: first: DON'T DRIVE unless you have some psycho harpy bitch chewing you a new final voluntary sphincter (cuz it feels good, at first... nemmind...)
2. I didn't own a car of my own until I was 27. A 1972 Chevy Nova. Got horrible mileage, but no one fucked with me over a parking space. It was olive green and nicknamed the Urban Assault Vehicle. After I put it into a guard rail doing about 95 dodging a fucking DEER in Pennsylvania (long story) I sold the parts for what I paid for the car - $425.
3. I moved across the country after that and didn't own another car of my own for almost 5 years. When I did get one, it was an old Honda Civic wagon I bought for $800. I sold it a few years later to my sister for $700.
4. In 1999 I bought my present vehicle, a 1991 Toyota Corolla. It gets about 27 mpg on the highway and about 19 in the city. It's old and dying and there is NO way it's going to pass Smog next month, so the State will take it off my hands for $1000.
After that, I won't own a car, and I hope to never have to own another. If I DO buy another car, it will likely be an old used Geo Metro or an old Rabbit Diesel so I can run it on vegetable oil.
If you REALLY want to do the Earth a BIG FAT FAVOUR DON'T buy a car. And if you do, buy a gas sipping used car. Why?
1. The energy that went into making the car (which is about equal to the amount of energy the damn thing will consume) has already been spent.
2. Buying a new car means that at your behest and convenience a lot of energy was spent making this energy sucking device.
3. NOT using a car at all, or renting them when you need them, means that you have organised your life in such a way that they are no longer of use to you. And THAT is a good thing - I am convinced that Suburbia will prove to be the single most wasteful expense of resources the human species has ever endured.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. So LIVE THE FUTURE NOW. Get rid of your car. Move to a small (or even not so small) city that has decent public transport and RIDE A FUCKING BICYCLE. It rains where you live? Well, DRESS FOR IT or TAKE A TRAIN. In the town where you live, agitate for light rail, trolleys and suchlike.
Make it happen. Hybrids are NOT a solution - they are just a less (and not very less) heinous face on a cancerous blight. The solution is energy curtailment and population reduction. I say, "Live it, or live with it.
It's a bit like having bees live inside your head, but it's a really good BUZZ.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I have a similar question: why hasn't anyone come out with a gas-turbine hybrid? Weren't there some jet cars in the 50's that were ultimately scrapped because, although they were fast and fuel efficient, the had crappy low-end torque and took a while to spool up? Aren't gas-turbines significantly more efficient than IC engines? Coupling that with a low-RPM high-torque electric sounds ideal. Also on the plus side, those engines could burn anything -- I remember hearing the engineers tried scotch and perfume and they both worked fine.
There should be one coming to the US market this year:
http://www.hybridcars.com/ram.html
From the article:
Notice any similarity between the two? This is plagiarism. If you're a regular reader of
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
That's a neat trick. Whenever you hear someone mention a problem - you define the "real problem" as their complaint. It both gives you a specific person to target as the problem causer, and makes the solution really simple: get them to shut up.
Unfortunately, sometimes when people complain they have good reason. When that happens, your system fails.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
for my wind powered car pantent to go through.
Basically the idea is you strap on a big windmill to the roof of the car, and as the car moves, electricity is produced, thus moving the car.
The added bonus is that you get free meals from all the birds that get caught up.
Care to sample some Pigeon Pie anyone?
Do what I say, cuz I said it.
-Meatwad
On longer drives when I'm really riding the guages, I've managed to average slightly over 80mpg over more than an hour in my 2000 Honda Insight. And that's this year, not when it was new. I'll admit that's way better than 'city' driving, when it drops down to 55-60 mpg when I'm going up hills, stopping, going down hills, stopping, and never getting to keep any decent kinetic energy. Still, this didn't require any overnight charging or multi-grand modifications.
Or, if that's too much exercise, how about an electric scooter? Top speed 30mph, range of maybe 30 miles, costs you 15 cents to recharge from flat.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Actually, the proof on this is pretty strait forward, and lets simplify it, use gasoline both in the vehicle, and in the power plant, ignoring the economies of using less refined fuels (coal) in the power plant.
The internal combustion engine runs on a compression/expansion cycle. A standard 4 cycle gasoline engine uses the Otto cycle (suck,squeeze,bang,blow). Energy flows in as gasoline/air mixture, which is then compressed, and ignited. The ignition triggers expansion and heat, the cylinders/pistons are arranged to extract a bunch of the energy from the explosion in the form of longitudinal motion, which is converted into torque on the crankshaft. 35% of the input energy is then used to feed the compression cycle for the next cylinder, 30% is dissipated as waste heat, and about 35% ends up on the shaft as useable torque to drive the system. Overall the cycle is about 35% efficient. The cycle is modified to a constant flow system in a turbine engine (the Brayton cycle), and modern turbines run about 40% efficient. Axial flow turbines with high bypass can approach 45% efficiency.
Contrast that to a typical large scale power plant, which uses an external combustion cycle. combustion chambers are designed so that approximately 90% of the energy in the input fuel ends up in the heated medium, usually a boiler, and about 10% actually disappears up the chimmney as waste heat. The resultant steam is then fed to a turbine that extracts about 80% of the energy into useable mechanical form, which is converted at an efficiency of approximately 98% into electricity. these numbers reflect power plants that are typical, they are 10 to 20 years old in design, modern designs do much better, but the typical result is an efficiency of about 72% in the conversion to electricity for current operating coal plants 10 to 20 years old.
As you can see, it's actually quite simple, the internal combustion engine uses a lot of it's energy to keep itself in a sustainable cycle, its used up on the compression stroke. The energy used by a large scale external combustion engine to sustain it's cycle is inconsequential (a few conveyor belts and some lights). The net result, all that energy used by compression in the car, is available for conversion to output in the power plant. Even if they were both burning gasoline, the power plant would win by a factor of 2 on efficiency. Now factor in the cheaper fuels a power plant can use, it doesn't need a highly refined fuel, works just fine on coal, or on bunker crude (unrefined oil). the external combustion system now gains both in terms of efficiency, and cost, because of the less expensive fuel. Putting in a fuel that's half the price per MJ as the gas in a car, and then converting it at twice the efficiency, you end up with energy available at the output for 1/4 the cost of that obtained on the crankshaft of an internal combustion engine. And that is exactly the reason we have an electrical grid infrastructure, and dont all run our homes on gas fired generators.
In terms of the pollution per unit energy as your were looking to compare, you must factor more than just the emissions from the internal combustion engine into the equation. On the internal combustion side, factor in the emissions from combustion, and the emissions from the refining process where the crude is refined to gasoline. On the coal side, factor in the emissions at the mine site, and at the power plant, and now, you have a valid comparison, and you'll find that they are similar in terms of emissions per unit energy burned, so, the external combustion cycle wins by a factor of 2 when it's measured in terms of emissions per unit energy produced. Ofc, all of this changes somewhat when you factor in the scrubbers in the coal plant chimney, and the internal combustion engine lack thereof, the coal plant becomes an even bigger winner, on a first rub, but, in reality, the scrubbers just remo
While hybrids are a step in the right direction, there is something that every owner of a gasoline powered vehicle can do to reduce their fuel costs, and reduce the emissions their car produces.
Convert your vehicle to propane. Propane is currently half the cost of gasoline, and when combusted, produces dramatically few emissions than gasoline or diesel. People may argue that propane has slightly less energy than gasoline, while this is true, the higher octane rating of propane (110) allows you to compensate for this by advancing your engine's timing, increasing it's compression ratio, or upping the boost (if turbocharged). Because propane is clean burning, your oil stays cleaner longer, and your engine will have a longer lifespan as well. Most conversion are dual-fuel, which switch back to gasoline, should the propane run out. Propane conversion is becoming popular in Europe, and there are a number of modern propane systems on the market that work with today's fuel injected engines.
Propane is a byproduct of the refining of methane and natural gas. In many parts of the petroleum industry, propane is regarded as a nuisance to be flared rather than harvested. Currently more propane is generated that there is demand for it, causing it's price to be proportionally lower than other fuels. As much of the methane and natural gas refining is done in North America, consumption of propane over gasoline keeps more money out of the hands of foreign oil producers that are known for sponsoring terrorism.
Although propane is still a fossil fuel, and won't end our dependancy on oil, propane is widely available commercially (unlike pie-in-the-sky fuelcell or hydrogen schemes), and nearly all gasoline engines can be converted to run on it right now. Most people recover the cost of conversion with the first few monts of use. Also most propane vehicles fetch a higher price when sold on the used market.
Divide by zero hurts my brain.
SUV's occupy a public space. Surely you can't be such a complete, selfish ass as to consider the public roads and our atmosphere to be "your business."
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
Did you know that Henry Ford designed car that was working on and made of products created out of cannabis, but his experimental plantations grown for several years were destoryed
For the rest of the world,
250 miles per gallon = 0.94 liters par 100km.
That needed to be said.
Not to mention that unlike Lead-Acid and Ni-Cad, Lithium's are environmentally friendly.
The big news is the same as was announced earlier this year; that Lithium-Ion can now be constructed to electrically survive in a car.
Evan
Is there a reason your family needs to be so large? How about something more earth friendly like, 4? You know, replace yourself and then stop? 4 fit very nicely in any eco-box auto - been there and done that and it works.
Every human added to the world uses resources - your family is a case in point. You have 7 in the group so your house must be bigger and you need a monster SUV to take everyone for trips. Fewer folks = less demand on the environment = good.
Do you REALLY need to haul around a boat to have fun? Boats are uber-gas hogs so now you're driving a monster truck and hauling a gas guzzling , pollution (air and noise) spewing recreational vehicle out into the wilderness where peace and quiet should be what we seek. How about a couple of canoes/kayaks and a couple of tents - might that work? Might you not have some fun doing that also and teach your kids it's possible to have fun without making quite such a big footprint?
Sorry, big car is 'valid' for your case just isn't working out for me.
Having said that, it is certainly your right to have as large a family as you want, buy whatever toys you need, and live your life by your definitions. Eventually, resources will dry up and we'll be forced to make hard decisions where hard isn't what to pay for gas.
I've heard this claim before, but can you actually provide any sort of proof to back it up? I suspect you can't, but I'd like to be proven wrong.
Simple. You have zero cold starts where the engine runs highly inefficient. The rpm is allways spot on at the optimum operating point (max efficiency). There is also an 'economy of scale' issue but I don't have the link to prove it. Anyway that's two points for the power plant.
In addition the power plant is stationary and can therefore be fitted with much bigger filters, catalysts etc than a car. This gives an advantage in sulfur and particle emmisions. That's and additional point for the power plant.
I'd say the power plant beats pretty much any car you can come up with.
TCAP-Abort
You don't necessarily have to get oil from dead dinosaurs.
:)
There are efforts going on to advance the technology of Thermal Depolymerization.
That's a ten dollar word for "oil from pretty much any biological waste" including turkey offal and medical waste (what they're using now.)
Doesn't do anything for greenhouse gasses or global warming, mind you, but as a solution to Foreign Oil Dependency, it sounds like an interesting concept.
And you can make the case that perhaps the car companies need to be getting behind this technology in order to make sure that there's a device that will consume all this lovely thermally depolymerized chicken crap.
But what do I know?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
As far as the over-active sense of entitlement, I think that's the parents who can't stomach the idea of driving a station wagon. Hate to tell ya, folks, but most SUVs these days have 8" ground clearance and soft-ass suspensions and probably can't deal well with potholes. You're not fooling anyone, it's as pathetic as a combover. Embrace the inner soccer mom - after you spit out the 7th puppy, that's what you are.
My 1980ish VW Rabbit 1.8L deisel got 50-60mpg. It had an extended fuel tank, that allowed me to go over 1 month between fillups (and that was while doing DELIVERY jobs in high school)!
The ironic part about the prius story is that it requires electicity from the utility company to charge, and that is being generated by burnig fuel oil, or even worse coal in the majority of the county. So the owner is probably causing more environmental damage with his prius than if he just had a biodeisel, solar or hydrogen card. (oops, hydrogen takes massive energy inputs to produce...more coal and oil).
Believe it or not, silver spoon boy, we hate you for the SUV, not the money. I have a nice house and enough money, thanks.
Oh, we also hate you 'cause you're a fucking prick, but we wouldn't have known that if you hadn't posted.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
"Quote some numbers please. "Doesn't really look that good" is meaningless."
Coal generation is about 35% efficient, transmission losses can be up to about 20% or so, battery storage is around 60% efficient, electric motors are around 66% efficient, so 0.35 * 0.80 * 0.60 * 0.66 = 0.11.
Cars are what, about 25% efficient at converting the energy into work?
"Then look up coal gasification on Google."
Coal gassification doesn't make up a majority of the electricity generated in the US. When we're talking about electricity generation, traditional coal can be taken to be the majority.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
2-stroke or 4-stroke, lawnmowers (and leaf blower and etc) have no pollution controls at all. Per dollar spent, you'd get about 1000 times as much result going after lawn care eqipment as cars.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Let's have him charge his batteries overnight using a gasoline generator that's rigged to automatically shut off when the batteries are fully charged. Then we can measure how much gasoline he's using to keep the thing running and get a _real_ number.
That's a good question, and I have a couple of points to address it. First of all, they use these things in on industrial size trucks and equipment, so they must have addressed that issue already. Secondly, we're talking about torque. Currently, most cars already have a limited slip differential. You know the saying, "moving power from the wheels that slip to the wheels that grip." This would be the same thing, and the "dead" motor would simply coast. Certainly, they would not make the wires in question easily broken. Currently, there is a ton of wiring in cars that don't fail easily. Hydrolics have been replaced in aircraft since the late 70s with the F-16, and the success there has been folowed in other aircraft. Another point is that the power brakes on your car, all cars, use a fairly fragile hose that one leak will make useless. One nick in the hose, and no brakes in the whole system; hence the emergency break, which is a steel cable backup for the hydrolics. My last point is that the electric cars like the EV-1 by GM, I think, have used this exact design. The big three have already addressed this issue. Having all 4 wheels have the motor would prevent the failure of one to cause a catastrophy. Even then, the loss of the electric load that one dead motor would represent would be noticible by the system, and then a smart designer could design the system to react to it.
- Mike
Once you've lost your temper, you've lost the argument - Me