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.

Comments

BMW C-1

[nacturation]

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.

Re:BMW C-1

[pnatural]

I had a conversation with a veteran motorcyclist who explained the method he used to avoid getting in accidents: assume that no driver can see you, ride as if you were invisible.

He went on to explain that he had been riding bikes for 20+ years, and had never been in an accident. When you think about it, it rings true.

I have explained this to my children, but have expanded it to be inclusive of all motor vehicle activity. Never assume that the other person on the road can see you. Do the thinking for every driver within your range of vision, and you will be much safer.

and...

[r00t]

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?

Re:and...

[skids]

>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?

Known to collapse during the day, when the ACs are cranked. If the electric cars start causing the power companies problems they just move their off-peak rate breaks to the morning, and the owners just install a timer (actually with cars like this the timer is usually built into the charging station) Then they can recharge using all that extra baseload capacity that ends up going to waste because we can't just shut down coal and nuke plants when we aren't using them, unlike combined cycle spinning reserve.

> How about the transmission line waste?

Yep that's waste, for sure.

> What if I let my car sit for a week or two?

Lithium batteries are famous for not self-discharging very fast. It's NiMH that do that, and even then it takes more than a week or two to lose very large amounts of power.

> Aren't these the batteries that tend to explode if you look at them funny?

Li-Poly are touchy, however the new Li metal phosphate batteries are very stable, and considering their superior performance they will likely supplant Li-poly for this application very rapidly.

> Just what does battery production do to the environment? How about leaks and recycling?

Well, to answer the second question first, normal lead-acid car batteries are one of the biggest success stories in recycling ever. When you own a battery pack that large, you're damn sure going to recycle it because the scrap value is pretty high. These aren't camera batteries you don't just throw them out.

As to the "leaks" concern, modern non-lead-acid batteries rarely "leak" -- their insides aren't liquid in the first place and they tend to be in hermetically sealed metal cylinders. It takes a lot of effort to get them to spill their guts. I suppose if you make a habit of parking your dead cars on your lawn and allowing the body to rust such that the batteries get a bath every time it rains, in a decade or so you might actually manage to generate an evironmental hazard. People that do that are pretty rare though, especially when the salvage value of the battery is so high, and for the most part the neighbors will complain before that happens.

The fabrication is not especially environmentally destructive. Li is mined from some of the most barren areas on the planet (dry lakebeds in South America.) The rest of the chemicals and materials are fairly common and probably even have a market surplus problem as is. There is some concern in that the supply of minable Li is limited, but by the time it is exhausted decades will have passed and we'll be onto the next battery tech or fuel cell or whatnot.

Anyway, pure EVs and PHEVs (where fuel use is low enough to consider biofuel without too much inconvenience) are an important first step, not necessarily because they will be cleaner on face value, but because they open up the owner's option. The owner could buy renewable energy credits from the power company, or they could charge from solar panels, or like I said for PHEVs they could use biofuels since they don't have to fill up much/often. It's that flexibility that will finally put the automobile owner in control of their own energy choices. That's a heck of a lot better of a situation than we have now.

Anything not in "mobile coffin/underpowered" size?

[sethstorm]

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.

Re:60mph

[silentbozo]

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.

Mwahaha !

[Joebert]

Who's laughin now bitches !? **puts clown nose back on & gets in the car**

too slow

[Unsus]

>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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Done before (20 years ago!)

[jmv]

I'd be terrified of being smushed by a truck while driving one.

Which is why every American feels the need to own a car that's bigger than the median car on the road. I say seatbelts should be forbidden on SUVs, while Hummer-type vehicles should be required to have a blade coming out of the steering wheel. Now, *that* would even the chance in case of a crash.

Buy carbon credits instead

[btempleton]

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.

Puhleeze.

[dtmos]

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?

Re:Done before (20 years ago!)

[arivanov]

That is already installed.

The Hummer chassis is incapable of absorbing its own impact energy after a crash. Making a car very big does not necessarily make it safe and vice versa. The Hummer has not been formally tested to EURONCAP, but it is likely to have a lower safety score than nearly all cars on the EU market. I have seen a hummer smashed at 30mph into a rock wall and it looks pretty much like this: http://www.euroncap.com/content/safety_ratings/det ails.php?id1=1&id2=73 (classic example of bodyshell colapse).

A selfrespecting moderately safe car should look at least like this: http://www.euroncap.com/content/safety_ratings/det ails.php?id1=1&id2=67 (Note the lack of chassis deformation)

or like this:http://www.euroncap.com/content/safety_rating s/details.php?id1=9&id2=210 (for a vehicle in the same class as the Hummer)