The Hybrid Scooter

anthemaniac writes "Hybrid cars are all the rage. Now comes a hybrid scooter. It gets beyond ethanol and lots of batteries, though, running on a hydrogen fuel cell that charges a battery. During braking, energy is also harnessed. All this and speedy too, says inventor Crijn Bouman of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. For now, however, the prototype lacks one crucial component: the hydrogen fuel cell! It's coming, Bouman says. Yes, just like $5/gal gas..."

Comments

Re:Go electric

[JanneM]

Here in Shanghai and everywhere in China, you can buy for an electric bicycle or scooter for less than $200 US dollars after some bargaining.

They're everywhere in Japan as well, especially the "secondary motor" bicycle kind, where you still pedal and the motor gives you extra help for inclines or headwinds. They extend the range, you don't get sweaty, and they're very cheap to buy and run - the drive system doesn't actually need to be able to push the bike all by itself afer all, so the whole package is small and light.

Not even funny anymore

[rammer]

>Sweden already have it.

So does Finland and many other nations around the world.

I always found it rather amusing the way people in the US bitched about "high" fuel prices.
BOO HOO.

This morning here in Tampere,Finland the price was 1.42 EUR/l for 95 octane (6.843 USD/gal for SI-unit impaired).
This about average for the whole of Finland.
Combine this with the fact that due to idiotic taxation Finland has the oldest cars in EU. (Not counting former soviet bloc).
And cold winters. And large distances. Then you will have some understanding of how much it sucks to have these fuel prices.

Stop complaining until your gasoline prices are as high as this.
Although when the US has $6 gas we will probably have to pay 12.

What is the price of fuel ethanol again?

Within the next year fuel ethanol will be cheaper than gasoline almost everywhere. If current trends continue.
They probably will not continue due to increased use of ethanol.

But within 5 years ethanol will the fuel of choice.
And until they can manufacture hydrogen fuel cells and hydrogen in sufficient quantities for sufficient prices I don't imagine that this will change. Maybe in the next 20 years. Maybe by then we will have fusion reactors. (Yeah right!!)

Re:Not even funny anymore

[miyako]

I am from the US, and I have not yet had the opportunity to travel outside of the US, so my knowledge is based on talking to friends who live in other countries, and specifically to people who have lived in both Europe and the US.
Granted, gas is cheaper in the US than in many other places in the world, but even with relatively lower gas prices, I think that the price of gas going up effects Americans more than people in a lot of other countries. Part of it is because a lot of people in the US buy SUVs and other big gas guzzlers as status symbols, but another big part of the problem is the transportation infrastructure of the US.
The United States is a big country, it's also very spread out. Even looking at a single city within the US, things tend to be spread out over a larger area, and arranged in strange ways compared to a lot of other countries. With the exception of a few larger cities, there is also almost no form of mass transit. I live in a fairly large city, and we have nothing like a subway or street cars. There is a bus system, but it only covers a fairly small portion of down town. I would have to walk over 20 miles to get to the nearest bus stop, and I live in the city, not in a suburb. Now, 20 miles is a fairly long walk if I'm trying to get someplace in a reasonable period of time, but even if I wanted to walk, due to the layout of the city, it would still be hard to do so. For the most part, with the exception of neighborhoods and a few shopping areas, there aren't crosswalks or foot bridges going over highways. If I wanted to walk to the bus stop, I would have to either cross a 6 lane highway, or walk an additional several miles out of my way to find a safe spot to cross.
Bicylce lanes are also pretty rare around here, and the most direct route almost anywhere in this city is via interstate, which doesn't allow bicycles (and one would be crazy to try, even if it were legal).
To take an example, I had a job interview last week. It was about 40 miles away from my house, on the other side of the city (technically it was outside of the city, but in the greater metropolitan area, and only a couple of miles outside of the city proper). The round trip in my car (a relatively small car by US standards) would have cost me about $20 with the current gas prices (40 miles each way, 80 miles total, and it would have taken probably about 1/2 a tank of gas). Assuming I were to get that job, until I could find a place to live closer to where I would be working, I would have to spend $100/week in gas. That would end up being about 15% of my paycheck before taxes, or about 20% after taxes, just to get back and forth to work.
Now say I decided to save money and the environment and use alternative transportation. I can't bicylcle there, because even after having lived in the city for 22 years, I can't think of a way to get there by bike at all, and if I did it would probably go through so many side streets just to avoid the interstates that it would take me half a day to get there. I could walk to the bus stop, but like I said, it's almost 20 miles to the nearest bus stop, and then the best I could hope for would be to get about 10 to 15 miles, and still have another 5 to 10 miles to walk. It's been around 100 degrees Farenheight here lately, with humidity at around 80 to 90 percent. Even if I were in good enough physical shape to make that walk (go ahead and make some fat, lazy american jokes if you wish, but I know there is no way I could make that walk in this heat) I don't think I would be able to arrive and still appear well groomed and professional enough to keep the job.
In short, Americans have cheap gas relative to a lot of other places, but we also are pretty much stuck driving further to get anywhere, and with fewer alternative options for other forms of transport than people in many other countries have. This is largely thanks to cities being planned out and having grown up at a time when everyone had a car or two, and gas was far cheaper than milk. Many european cities

Re:Not even funny anymore

[lowrydr310]

What we need is some government with some backbone to impose the tax, to encourage (nay, fund!) the research.

backbone = balls

I live in the USA, and I welcome a higher gas tax and higher gas prices, so long as that money is going to research and road maintenance instead of lining someone's pockets. Even though higher gas prices aren't hurting me substantially, I miss the days when $10 (USD) would get me 330 miles.

Re:Not even funny anymore

[TheRaven64]

The USA has one of the most expensive healthcare systems in the world. In a socialised healthcare scheme, when people start to feel ill, they go to the Doctor because 'the government' is paying for it. In a private healthcare system, people put it off as long as possible, because they will have to pay for it. At the end, the cost of treatment is significantly higher, because preventative medicine tends to be much cheaper.

Re:Not even funny anymore

[Fordiman]

Actually, it wouldn't be a tax. It'd be the death of a subsidy.

Seriously. We pay $3/gallon of gas cos our government makes it that way. I think it's kind of annoying. I'll take the $6-12/Gal it takes to drill and make the stuff, and you can use that subsidy money to pay for research into new technologies (which will then be lapped up by gas-price-exhausted citizens).

Meanwhile, the millisecond US citizens have $6/Gallon gas, you'll see a huge surge in ethanol conversion. The changes to a car are mostly flow-based (although changing your car's timing is a good idea, to take advantage of eth's anti-knock properties), and a good mechanic could do it in a day or so (under an hour if he doesn't have to consult Chilton). That's mostly because eth only costs about $2.70/Gal at wholesale prices.

Scooters are already efficient...

[richardtallent]

My Vespa LX-150 gets around 60MPG. It's a city bike, and only 150cc, but plenty enough power for city traffic (cruises up to 55-60mph). I spend less than $5/month in gas.

Piaggio, makers of the Vespa, are actually working on two hybrid models, but the rumor is the under-seat storage will be reduced or eliminated for batteries, so I have no interest in upgrading.

ENV Scooter

[Danzigism]

I'm sure most of you are aware of the many different types of Hydrogen Fuel Cell scooters out there on the market, or are about to make their debut.. Some time in 2006, the ENV Scooter is supposed to be released.. I really hope it pulls through, because the bike goes about 50mph and is super quiet.. supposedly you don't even scare the birds near the road away.. I read in a couple places that you can get a kit from this ENV company that will allow you to produce your own hydrogen, and when you have all your equipment paid for, it'll probably cost you about $2-4 for every 100 miles you drive.. thats not bad.. here's a link and some pictures

Re:SUV-bike collision?

[Firehed]

Seems that the problem with that is people tend to forego other things in order to keep their SUV, rather than get a vehicle with reasonable fuel consumption. My father was commuting out-of-state weekly, putting a good 40k+ miles on a car in a year. He did this for three years in a Durango. 14 miles per fucking gallon. He bought a Civic which gets around 40MPG, and in under a year it's nearly paid for itself. Certainly more driving than most people do, but at some point he finally realized that what he was doing was idiotic, and now he's got a good chunk of extra disposable income available.

I just don't see how Americans can be so ignorant as to think that $3/gal is expensive gas. Most of Europe is, what, $8-9/gal converted?

Re:nobody's going to stop buying SUVs

[NuShrike]

Already happened ...

Yukon vs Accord head-on
Mustang side swipes an Explorer

And from the archives, the Gladwell article about SUVs: the psychology, history, and numbers:
http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_01_12_a_suv.html

Personally, I'm glad people drive SUVs. It's like the stupid-tax they call the lottery, but here it's like watching Darwinism in high-chairs action.

Re:$5 a gallon?

[TheRaven64]

I think they were going to be called ecus

Before it was officially launched, the Euro was called the ECU (European Currency Unit). The ECU was not a real currency, it was (oversimplification warning) a weighted average of the currencies of the members of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. When the Euro was introduced, it was issued at a 1:1 exchange rate with the ECU (i.e. the initial exchange rate with any existing currency and the Euro was the same as that currency with the ECU; you couldn't actually trade in ECUs, since they were abstract). The Euro could not be called an Ecu, because that was the name of a pre-revolutionary French coin and it was a requirement of acceptance that the name not be that of an existing currency.

The correct term for a hundredth of a Euro is a Eurocent. For obvious reasons, no one actually calls them this.