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Electric Vehicle Kits for the Masses?
Aciel asks: "I just finished watching 'Who Killed the Electric Car', and was quite impressed. I'm too poor to buy anything but an old clunker, and not eager to pollute the atmosphere (or empty my wallet) with gasoline. The movie inspired me: I think I'd like to convert an old car (or perhaps a motorbike) to run on electricity. Have Slashdot readers attempted such a thing before? What experiences have you had, and what would you recommend or not recommend?"
The expensive components in this amplifier are large bucket capacitors and rediculous huge transistors or valves.
The whole rig would cost roughly the same to build as a small radio transmitter, plus the cost of modding the car itself (connecting the motor(s) to the drive shaft) and building the computer and controller.
It would be great to see the following prices suggested by traders or users below:
10KW Transistors / 100MV Capacitors / 10KW Motors / Embedded controllers i.e. ARM7 / etc...
P.S. Thanks for asking the question, I was thinking EXACTLY the same myself. The cars currently available are beyond my financial reach, but the fuel isn't ...
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A properly designed small direct injection Diesel powered car (VW Golf in the 100HP version, say) is probably about as good as you can get in terms of fuel plus lifetime costs (pollution arising from manufacture and disposal). Hybrids like the Prius don't seem to factor in the batteries in the equation. If it was possible to build high capacity batteries with a low manufacture and disposal energy footprint, an electric car deriving its power from nuclear, wind or wave energy would do much better. But it is not yet possible. Some forecasts suggest that significant benefits from technologies like fuel cells are probably in the 30-50 year timeframe.
So, right now, I suspect the best you can do is a VW, Toyota or Peugeot small Diesel. In any case, buying the smallest vehicle that meets your needs and renting if you need bigger is plain environmental sense. In a few years, perhaps Diesel hybrids will do better for high mileage. Electric cars - don't hold your breath.
Pining for the fjords
I want to know how to go about converting my 18-speed. Going thirty miles an hour uphill would be teh aw3some.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I've looked pretty hard at this question myself. But, sorry to say, electricity to drive a vehicle doesn't make much sense. The problems are two-fold.
(1) The electricity. Here in California, paying PG&E rates, the cost to drive a mile with a given vehicle size/weight is much less for gasoline than electricity. I have seen this argued endlessly, but it is simply true. Even if you are willing to pay the cost, availability isn't there either.
The electricity infrastructure is teetering on the edge of failure now. Adding a bunch of electric cars would collapse the system. If the public would encourage the building of a bunch of new nuke plants (I think the Pebbel-Bed reactors being designed now are very promising) we might be able to meet the demand, but realistically that isn't going to happen. Adding new coal plants to charge electric cars seems just WRONG on several levels.
(2) The vehicles. The technology for electric vehicles simply isn't there for anything more than a glorified golf-cart. The best batteries are nowhere near good enough, are way too expensive, and don't last near long enough. Heck, we can't even build a good reliable battery for a laptop computer yet. And as for avoiding pollution, not only does most current electricity generation use fossil fuel and thus pollute at the generation site, but the manufacture and disposal of large numbers of toxic batteries is not exactly green either. And think those exploding Sony batteries have been a headache to laptop owners, wait until the scenario repeats itself on the scale of an automobile sized battery. Can you say "Car Bomb"?
I honestly think the best solution is to buy an older, small and efficient car from a manufacturer known for producing reliable and efficient cars. I bought a 20 year-old Toyota MR2. Cost, under $500.
Pollution? First, when buying an older car, simply budget putting a new catalytic converter on it right away, even if the one on it is working. Ditto, a good tune-up. I did, and then when I registered it the state mandated a smog test at speed, under load on a dynometer. The numbers returned were so low, the tech was blown away. He actually re-tested it a second time before believing the numbers. He said I could qualify as a "Super Low Emission Vehicle" based on the numbers alone. But since the make and model wasn't endorsed for that category, I couldn't officially do so. But new catalytic converters do work very, very well.
Mileage? Around town, grocery store runs and the like, it gets 37-39 mpg. On the road, between 43 and 48 depending on various factors. Plus, it's fun to drive. Plus, it's been dead-bang reliable.
It ain't a Prius, but it's darn close in terms of overall pollution and mileage. Cheap to buy, cheap to run, low impact on the environment, and reliable. Downsides? Well, it's getting a little long in tooth, appearance-wize. I probably should budget some paint and trim sometime soon, and because it's so tiny, I keep banging my head when I get in and out.
I keep hoping to put up a bunch of solar panels and charge my own electric car and declare my own personal fuel independance some day. But it isn't practical, and may not be for a long time, if ever. Ask me again in 20 years or so. Like it or not, the old-fashioned gas-buggy is the overall best solution. Just pay attention to what you're buying, buy just what you need and no more, and arrange your life to require as little driving as you can, and you will know you are living a life in harmony with both society and the environment.
Stony
No, it really isn't. You're basically trading one bad (more greenhouse gases) for another bad. The production of Ethanol requires significant amounts of water, the vast majority of which (especially in places like Minnesota, where ethonal is becoming more and more popular) comes from groundwater. Groundwater is already a scarce resource, and with a dramatic spike in usage because of ethanol refineries places like the Midwest will turn into deserts. The best power sources that are feasible right now are true renewables like wind and solar. The next best are nuclear, both fission (because that's all we have right now) and fusion (think ITER.) Hydroelectric power is devastating on the environment because of the drastic changes over the extremely short amount of time, which can (and does) severely disrupt the ecosystems for both the areas upstream as well as downstream. One of the most recent examples of this is in China, where they just finished/are building the largest dam to date.
older cars would not be that bad for a project like this, since they used put way less steel into tunring the car into a crash-proof tank 20 years ago than they are doing today (at least speaking of european cars like the smaller ranges of VW, a 50ies US cruiser with cast-iron tail fins would probably be a different story). "passive security" might be nice for people who are even scared of walking, but it poses a bad hit on fuel economy.
but that aside, i question the whole idea of converting cars to electricity. as long as most of our energy comes from fossile sources, it is the most environmentally friendly thing to allocate that fossile fuel to mobile applicatoins, where their high energy density makes a real difference in overall energy consumption.
hybrid is a different story, it still sources from the dense fossile fuel but uses some electric components to kind of "low pass filter" the overall energy demand over time, leading to more efficient burning of the primary energy carrier.
that all being said, there are electric cars that are very friendly to the environment (like this), but they are friendly to the environment because they use less total energy thanks to being extremely lightweight and low-powered and not because of being electrically powered. i would really love to see a hybrid built on a base like that, with a low-powered, high-efficiency primary power source based on fossile/bio high density liquid fuel. could give amazing range of operationat extremely low cost, but i guess there is not enough money in developing a sufficiently small engine far enough to reach the efficiency of modern diesel engines.
[i have an opinion and i am not afraid to use it]
Years ago, I read the book Divorce Your Car!
It tells the reader about how even if cars ran on pollution and planted flowers everywhere they went, they're still a big pain in the ass and really, not worth the trouble. They're hard to maintain, expensive, deadly, hard to find parking for (and when we build more roads and parking, traffic and parking problems just get worse), and expensive to society as a whole.
The book also tells of two possible solutions to the problem, that you can implement right away. There's the car-lite life, and the no-car life. Because I was young and living in a big city with good public transit (where I still currently live, but not for much longer), I chose the no-car life. Instead of buying a car, I found an apartment closer to rapid transit, which gives me a direct route to work. I get my groceries delivered to my door - I can do this over the internet or any one of the many local grocery stores. If the trip is short, I just walk or bike. And if I *need* a car, I call for a cab.
The car-lite life means using your car as little as possible. 90% of all trips are less than a mile anyway, so why not walk or bike them? And yes, you'd be amazed how many shops will deliver, but I'd bet you hadn't had the need to ask before, have you? If your city has rapid transit in one form or another, it more than likely lets you park at the nearest train station, so that you can keep the trip distance down. Or perhaps you can lock up your bike there. There's not always a need to bike the *whole* way to get where you're going.
Either option is also good for your health, by the way. Not only are you contributing less to smog, but you're getting more exercise. And no doubt, your doctor knows how that's a good thing.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert