Slashdot Mirror
Low Emission Cars Continue to Gain Popularity
Rio writes "A company may soon offer American motorists a new option to save on high gas prices -- vehicles powered by lithium batteries. From the article: 'Just plug in these cars for about five hours or so and you'll get about 300 miles on a single charge.' The vehicles cost about $35,000 or about double what buyers would pay for a gas-powered model." Relatedly acidrain writes to tell us The BBC is reporting that a prototype of the new "Clever car" (Compact Low Emission Vehicle for Urban Transport) is starting to make the rounds on European test tracks. The car is one meter wide and less polluting than normal vehicles. It has a top speed of 100 km/h (60mph) and uses a novel tilting chassis to make it safe and maneuverable.
This soooo reminds me of the Sinclair C5 "urban" low emissions car.
http://www.sinclairc5.com.nyud.net:8080/
I'd be terrified of being smushed by a truck while driving one.
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
People keep saying all this "what about the waste when the batteries are disposed of" stuff. Are they on to something? Are there any battery experts here who can tell me if that's a valid concern?
cheap clean electricity sources to power it:
-Solar
-Hydroelectric
-Wind
-Tidal
-Bio-fuels (I know..right now they burn as much energy in production as you get out of the final product)
-Nuclear (In some countries)
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups. -- 0 1 My two bits
I don't think these special vehicles like TFA car will achieve any real commercial success. Most people want a safe, comfortable and practical car. And you most certainly don't want anybody to laugh at you while riding it...
No, I believe the future (until fuel cells are available) lays in hybrids, like the Toyota Prius, even though they're still not completely environmental friendly - fuel consumption is not better than most diesel powered cars. But battery powered only cars have their problems as well, darn expensive, well you have to plan your trips carefully, batteries have a limited life span and probably more important batteries are not environmental friendly.
Here is an interesting hybrid from Saab, running on 100% ethanol and batteries. It's a good looking convertible, and runs 0-100 km/h in just 6.9 seconds, not very bad from a fossil fuel-free car. Only problem is that 1) you can't buy the car yet 2) you can't buy 100% ethanol (and producing large amounts of ethanol is also a problem).
Without resorting to the 'alternative energy' sources, there are several factors in favour of EV:
CCGT (>50% thermal-electrial efficiency)
Peak efficiency of IC auto engines is pretty irrelevant in real world use. Expect to see less than 15 percent efficiency for normal driving.
Regenerative braking (yeah, hybrids do this too, but still suffer from the above disadvantages).
The disadvantage of highly efficient vehicles (electric and others), is you then start having to be 'inefficient' with energy use to create a comfortable driving environment in cold climates. Conventional IC engines have loads of waste heat to put to use. Reverse cycle airconditioners would solve this though.
Low-speed acceleration is the one really good thing about electric.
Properly done, with 4 fully independant wheels, there would be some traction and handling advantages as well. Differentials are sloppy. Steering on ice would be lots easier if the rear wheels could help out via Segway-style computer-controlled speed differences.
Well, by all accounts- much less. Electricity doesn't have the insane levels of taxes gasolene and diesel do (this is the primary reason it costs a fortune to fill up at the pump.) Even home heating oil (which is basically diesel) isn't taxed, and they dye diesel so anyone can inspect what's in the tank (or a piece of clear tubing installed just for this purpose- I kid you not, it's on ever VW TDI) and see if you're using home heating oil and avoiding taxes.
What is this going to do to the power grid which has been known to collapse, famously with the northeast blackout and the rolling blackouts in California?
Rolling blackouts in California were not caused by lack of generation capacity. They were caused by Enron calling up plant operators and saying "Hey. Shut down for maintenance. Find an excuse. Any excuse." Watch "Enron, The Smartest Guys In The Room"...they have tape recordings of the traders calling up grids and plant.
Also, right now, we've got gas shortages throughout the country because the EPA mandates MTBE (a known carcinogen, by the way) be in summer fuel, so all the refineries supposedly have to essentially "re-tool" for summer fuel. They happen to also go down for maintenance in "preparation" for the summer driving "season."
So in short- gasolene isn't without its problems as well.
How about the transmission line waste?
Probably compares to the waste in transporting gasolene or diesel.
What if I let my car sit for a week or two?
Lithium batteries don't self-discharge as badly as other battery technologies (mainly lead acid.)
Aren't these the batteries that tend to explode if you look at them funny?
Sort of. "Normal" lithium ion cells catch fire or explode if overcharged, discharged too quickly, charged too quickly, punctured, and so on. They vary greatly in what their discharge rating is (ie 5C,= 5 x capacity in Amp-Hours). There's a company in Japan that seems to have solved most of these problems with stability; I forget how. There's a Massachusetts startup that designed the packs in one of the tool manufacturer's new lithium ion construction tools; they claim insane recharge rates, and more safety as well (and using more common raw materials.)
As to your other questions, no idea. But I will tell you that for a few years, EMTs and firefighters were pissed as hell that Toyota and Honda didn't have a clue as to accident procedures involving hybrids with high voltage packs...ie what was safe to cut with a buzz-saw or jaws of life (ie roof pillars and such), where the cables were, how the battery pack contactors worked, and so on. For a while, departments had a "don't approach the vehicle if..." policies in place.
Please help metamoderate.
The first hybrid car I saw was to be used in a lead mine - fuel outside and electric underground. They cared about the pollution, they didn't want people breathing it in confined spaces. That situation isn't really all that different to a major city with a temperature inversion letting the vehicle pollution build up over many days into a nasty smog - that's why people are interested in hybrid and electric cars. Some of the mechanical aspects make sense too - with some hybrids you end up with something that runs in a similar way to a diesel-electric locomotive - runs the fuel driven motor at optimum rpms and lets the electric motor handle the rapid changes of speed. On the highway a straight diesel would be better, but for stop-go driving a hybrid makes sense.
Also it's easier to put pollution control gear on something that is big and doesn't move - so if the objective is purely reducing the pollution in cities electric makes sense. If the objective is purely minimising the resources consumed (implied above) then it makes no sense - but it isn't that simple.
Instead of buying this, you could buy a regular car and take the $18,000 you saved and buy carbon credits. $18,000 of carbon credits in the USA, which has an underpriced market because laws don't create demand, would offset the burning of, I kid you not, close to one MILLION gallons of gasoline. Yup, enough to take an 8mpg hummer and drive it around the Earth over 300 times!
So buying one of these is like driving a Hummer almost 8 million miles. Doesn't seem so good.
At the more expensive price for European credits ($13 per metric tonne CO2) it's still like driving the Hummer for a million miles.
How can it be that dramatic? The genius of pollution credits is they move the money spent on emissions reduction to where it can be done most efficiently. You can cut emissions by buying an expensive electric car, sure, but somebody else can do it far more cheaply by improving the output of a factory, or putting up a wind farm, or planting a grove of trees -- which are all things that allow people to sell these credits.
Now you may not like the credits, or think the numbers should be different, but the numbers in this case are so off the scale that there's no way that you will do a better job of helping the environment, at least today, with this sort of tech. At best you can feel good while being a gross polluter, and hope you're encouraging a market so that they eventually become cheaper and a thus more efficient way to reduce emissions.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
U235+n=> (Xe,Zr,Cr,Ru..)+3n +heat . Would be preferred method ;)
As for efficiency. Gasoline powered cars are in overall about 15% efficient.
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/atv.shtml
The electricity tranportation is over 98% efficient. The electrical engines are over 90% efficient, and can be done without gearbox and regenerate at braking. And the batteries have upto 95% efficiency.
So with fossile fuel plants that are in range of 600MW can get efficiency of 60% . There is big difference here.
So its basicly that small scale method of turning fossile fuel to movement is so inefficient. And turning electricity to movement is so effient that its really noise compared to turning fuel to movement.
We should also consider the efficiency of transporting fossile fuel from oilfields to gas stations too compared to transporting fuel to a power plants, I think the difference there counter acts what ever is lots in transmission lines.
In overall we could assume that well designed electrical car with good electrical powerplant gets over 50% overall efficiency compared to gas engines 15%.
Also by having separated the energy generation from highly efficient energy usage the choice energy source can be changed more freely from fossile fuel to fissile fuel or something else entirely. So the choice of going for electrical cars at society level would be great in terms of efficiency.
Perhaps as simple as mandating each gas station to have electric outlet with restrictions on premium the gas station owners can take from electricity. The chicken/egg problem would be solved and the electric cars could become slowly more common. But personally I feel that without way to fill the batteries when needed I'll probably buy diesel car next.
Either one of those small ones that get 50 miles per gallon or one that can transport 7 persons with 40 miles per gallon.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
broke it. They will not meet their targets, and frankly, the only reason they are within a country mile is the annexation of East Germany by West, and the fact that Britain turned out to be sitting on a zillion cubic feet of natural gas. Most European nations are performing terribly, many even worse than the US (in relative terms to 1990 baseline). Also, Europe has had very little population growth, while the US has.
Europeans like to play "holier than thou", but in reality, their lower emissions are largely due to population density and mild climate. Not surprisingly, low-density, harsh-climate nations such as US, Canada, and Australia all have similar emissions profiles.
Sitting around at a filling station for 5 hours while you recharge is not exactly my idea of a fun way to kill an afternoon.
But perhaps there is an alternate route that could be both profitable and benificial to the consumer. Think about all the prefilled propane bottle exchanges that you see in front of supermarkets. You could take that concept and apply it to a precharged lithium battery exchange. Drivers will be able to stop in, yank out their old battery, drop in a new one, pay the cashier at some point and then drive away with a full charge. The company providing this service would be able to adjust pricing to average out the cost of replacing worn out batteries during the life of the unit. Restriction systems could be put into place on exchange batteries to prevent home charging or the car owner could shell out more to get an unrestricted battery (that they won't exchange in) that they can fill at home in their garage.
The system could, I think, be tweaked into working if we can get past the chicken/egg problem required to create it.
My God! It's full of eval()'s.
Why do people and specially americans always think that "bigger" always means "more secure" ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
2% of road users are motocyclists here in the UK,
as are 20% of road fatalities.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
That's just due to the horrible engine design they use in the states. American cars go for large displacement and low rpm. Japanese cars tend to go for small displacement and extremeky high rpm, with European cars somewhere in the middle.
Most Japanese cars are 0.66L. Only 660cc, but they redline at 7500rpm. Mine is, yet it manages to haul my fat ass around the mountains at 60mph (when the speed limit is under 40). There are some stupidly quick sports cars here running 1.6L engines (admittedly with a turbo) that can rev up to over 10,000rpm!
They're all being charged for funny accounting tricks.
No one's been charged for deliberate economic sabotage to the businesses and private citizens of California. Essentially, they're getting away scott free on this issue, which I think is perhaps more sinister. Read more quotes from the case and note how the Guvernator didn't take them to task for blatant screwing over of California.
Gray Davis lost his election over the energy crisis, and Schwartzenegger does nothing to punish the parties responsible. I'm not saying that Davis was a great governor, but I doubt that he'd have let Enron walk away scott free.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The lithium bateries that have been exploding are cheap Asian garbage batteries that people have been buying off of Ebay for $2 instead of the OEM ones for $40
Finally if lithium battery production becomes much like lead acid batteries is currently, the recycle rate will hit near 90% after only a few years.
Yes, but isn't it the case that, since it requires a fair bit more fuel to start an engine than simply run it, that you need to be stopped for a reasonable period of time before this technology becomes more efficient over a standard car?