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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.
The BMW C-1 looks way more comfortable than the reclining Clever car. It didn't require a helmet (in Germany, France, and Spain) but they only made 2000 then discontinued it due to poor sales. Despite the fact that this article is just a PR piece, I can't see it helping sales much.
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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.
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How much will the power cost me?
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?
How about the transmission line waste? What if I let my car sit for a week or two?
Aren't these the batteries that tend to explode if you look at them funny?
Just what does battery production do to the environment? How about leaks and recycling?
It's nice to have the smaller cars, but the immediate reality is you're going to have to match feature-for-feature (outside of the high-emission, low-efficiency parts) in performance and otherwise without ending up in the Lexus or BMW range, and doing so without the driver noticing. That includes similar size and performance without having to take any notice as to driving a low-emission car, with the down-the-road option of converting existing cars over to low emissions parts that do the same but retain the body and performance of the previous engine/drivetrain as close as possible (again, without the price being beyond a conventional swap of such kind).
Not all of us care to drive something that would result in a guaranteed pre-packaged closed casket burial in the event of the Absolutely Unavoidable Collision- especially if such vehicle performs in a manner that would predispose it to being a 5'x8'x5' object with relative ease in ordinary operation.
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Horsepower isn't really an issue. Electric motors are capable of generating large amounts of torque - enough to rip the motor loose of the mounting if you're willing to give it enough amperage (do a google search on EV drag racing - no shortage of smoking tires there.) The issue is battery life. You load the motor that heavily, and you will lose a lot of energy through resistance losses, thereby depleting your driving range.
So to answer your question, haul away, but be prepared to sacrifice range for pulling capacity.
Who's laughin now bitches !? **puts clown nose back on & gets in the car**
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
>It has a top speed of 100 km/h (60mph) I want to save money on gas, but not at the expense of doubling the time it takes to drive home.
Compact Low Emission Vehicle for Urban Transport
Is that part of the name or an instruction for fellow drivers on what to do to a low-emissions vehicle?
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
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It really needs noting exactly how poorly researched the BBC News article on that car is.
. You really would expect that a BBC Journalist reporting on automobiles would have some knowledge of them. Or, at the very least, have watched Top Gear for a couple of years.
Drivetrain asside, the vehicle is effectively a clone the dutch-designed Carver http://www.carver-europe.com/.
So, why am I accusing that BBC journalist of being lazy? Well, the Carver has appeared on the BBC excellent flagship car show Top Gear http://www.bbc.co.uk/topgear/prog19/carver.shtml>
You get yourself a backup diesel generator.
Having spent most of last year living carless in the big city, I'm here to tell you that personal cargo capacity is very important factor in designing an efficient and useful low-emissions vehicle for urban transport, a factor that the 'clever' car designers seem to have ignored. Where am I going to store my groceries in this thing? I suppose the passenger seat might do the trick, but with that kind of limited space, why am I driving a car anyway? I can take a taxi just as easily, or even a bus. Hell -- maybe I could even buy a bike, which might help reduce both my fat ass and be good for the environment. What's the use in owning a car that costs twice as much as a regular car, but which has no room to transport me and the occasional junk I buy at the store?
As I see it, no urban vehicle is going to catch on with buyers unless it has some, even if limited, cargo carrying capacity. Small size is great -- especially when you consider the parking situation in most cities -- and fuel efficiency is wonderful, but if it doesn't move both me *and* my stuff, what good is it?
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
According to Toyota - and the company is commendably frank about its car's environmental equations - Prius doesn't even begin to break even on greenhouse gas emissions until it's been driven around 20,000km. This is because extracting and manufacturing the raw materials to make a Prius consumes more energy than a conventional car. The extra energy required means more carbon dioxide is emitted to make a Prius than a conventional technology car.
So no, hybrid cars don't grow on trees, but they do win in the end on total emission. Toyota cars are known for their reliability (the main German automobile organization have found toyota to be the top reliable car for years in a row already), so expect them to overcome this 20.000 km barrier many, many times over. (estimated battery life seems to be about 160.000km at minimum).
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In a lot of cases the issue is whether governments should be co-ordinating transport to cut down on pollution or whether it should be left to private individuals to use vehicles that pollute less or consume less resources. A decent train service can keep thousands of cars off the road for most of the week. An electric train, LPG bus or other forms of mass transit are often a better answer.
Greenhouse gasses have nothing to do with the issue unless you get all your electricity from hydro, geothermal or whatever - so currently in no city anywhere. The nuclear lobby is pushing nuclear generated hydrogen and nuclear supplied electricity to power cars for greenhouse reasons but whatever your feelings that can be considered irrelevant to the issue for the next decade as far as a car purchase is considered (it takes a long time to build a big thermal plant of any kind, much longer for a cutting edge nuclear design).
new "Clever car" (Compact Low Emission Vehicle for Urban Transport)
Sure, but it's not such a clevut acronym.
You were doing well until you repeated that old hybrid-EMT scare. Any first responders that were afraid to approach a hybrid weren't well informed in their profession. I can't speak for Honda, but not only did Toyota work with national first-responder organizations to get their comments on the design of the US model, it made presentations on its design at their national conventions, made publications about it in the trade press, and distributed literature about the car freely and widely. The locations of the high-voltage elements of the car have been available on the web since time immemorial, and Toyota, at least, spent a lot of time repeating over and over that there's no high voltage in the roof pillars (how do these rumors get started?!?).
Both Toyota and Honda were and are exquisitely well-aware of accident procedures involving their cars; that's why the high-voltage lines in the Prius are armored International Orange cables isolated from the ground of the chassis, surrounded by identified conduit, and centered under the car floor, where the jaws of life and other EMT tools are least likely to be used. The battery itself is placed in the statistically safest place in the car (just over the rear axle), and protects first responders by an accelerometer-based circuit breaker, a Ground Fault Interrupter, and interlocks. Criminy, what do you want?