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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 ...
This tagline was transcoded to result in at least one smirk. If you experience failure to smirk, please consult your Gen
Check out http://www.austinev.org/evalbum/ for over 800 examples of electric cars, most of which are conversions or kit built.
"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."
This is true except it is not a good analogy- it would be true if the power plant required the same quantity of fuel and released the same by-products as a car engine to generate the same amount of power. This is not the case. Power plants are FAR more efficient, as I recall it uses about 10% the fuel if not less to generate the same amount of power.
Remember, power companies have a (somewhat) vested interest in making their plants efficient, because they pay for fuel and get political flak for polluting. They are also willing to spend far more $/KW of output than a car buyer is. Car companies don't buy the fuel, so as long as it's decently efficient and not too bad on the air they sell it.
If you flip that around, and make people willing to spend $$ on hyper efficient cars, all the cars would have gas turbine engines, perhaps in some sort of electric hybrid mode. They'd cost $80k for a Honda, but they'd get awesome gas mileage.
--IronHelix
You might take a look at some of the used ones they have: http://www.zapworld.com/cars/salecars.asp
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
But they do sell a bunch of $1500 electric mopeds, if you're interested in going that route.
There are some other vehicles out there, too -- you'll have to look for them, though. Some are only in development, like the x-cycle, while others are incredibly expensive, like the Sparrow.
Here's my suggestion.
I'm going to assume that you can get under the hood of a car, remove the engine, and essentially work on a car without killing yourself.
In that case, you probably want to get a street-legal old vw-bug or Ford Fiesta (or Yugo)... anyhow, something that is small and aerodynamic, and then convert it to electric with a $3000 conversion kit from e-volks. (They also have a $1500 conversion kit, but I'd go with the better one if I were you.) This is Wilderness Energy (which sells hub bicycle conversion kits, unfortunately also of Chinese manufacture and easily broken) expanded to automobiles.
Just... I'd go ahead and make the electric supply/recharge system separate from the vehicle, for the reason that you'll want to change it over later as you get more money.
Initially, you'll want Sealed-Lead-Acid batteries as can be had from Wal-Mart in the Bike section. They're cheap but heavy, and you string up enough of them to get whatever distance and speed you need.
But later, you'll want to convert to Lithium-ion phosphate, since it is lightweight, extremely efficient, long lasting, and doesn't blow up like a DELL.
Two sources for those are A123 and Valence.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
No, I'm not an expert, but maybe I can sound like I make sense.
Transmission over power lines is about 85% efficient (over very long distances). A good internal combustion engine is (if I recall correctly) about 10-20% efficient. Plus, it takes a whole lotta batteries to equal the weight of the engine block plus the half-full gas tank.
Peeking around the tubes, the estimates I've been finding for EV fuel efficiency is about 1 or 2 cents per mile (compare to 7.5 cents per mile for a car that gets 40mpg at $3.00/gallon). Another benefit is that your electric car becomes more environmentally friendly every time someone puts up a new wind farm. Finally, slapping pollution controls on a handful of power generation facilities is much much more efficient than trying to convert a fleet of millions of vehicles.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
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!
From the article found here, in California (which has generally pretty clean power plants), "Over the course of 100,000 miles, CO2 emissions from EVs are projected to be 10 tons versus 35 tons for ICE vehicles". Even on the East Coast, which has much dirtier plants, "EVs in the Northeast would reduce CO emissions by 99.8 percent, volatile organic compounds (VOC) by 90 percent, NOx by 80 percent, and CO2 by as much as 60 percent".
One interesting comparison in the article takes power line inefficiences into account, starts with raw BTUs from the carbon product used for power generation and comes up with an equivalent "69 MPG" for a pure EV. So, you'd have to get an ICE up to 69 MPG (average!) to match it. Note that you cannot directly compare the "200 MPG" of plugin hybrids to this number, since "200 MPG" does not include the petroleum/coal used to generate the power.
A little bit of electricity? Just so you know, air compressors are not very efficient devices. They waste a lot of heat. If you want to store 2 kWh of energy as compressed air, you'll need to use maybe 10 kWh of electricity to compress it. Second, compressed air takes has extremely low energy density. A small shop air compressor (compressing to about 150psi) usually has a 10-20 gal tank just to store enough air to run something like an air drill for a minute or two. This is for a tank made of very thick steel. Even if you increased the pressure in the tank 100 times (which is completely impossible from an engineering viewpoint) it would still not have nearly enough energy to power a car (although you could run a drill for an hour). Not to mention, a compressor that can dump a few hundred kWh into a tank even overnight would take up more space than the car and would be loud enough to hear from a mile away. You'd need like a 100hp compressor, those generally take up a large room. Here is a picture of one.
Not to mention, running a car on compressed air is pretty simple, provided you have a source of compressed air. You could even use a regular gas engine without any modifications -- simply force high pressure air into the intake. The reason nobody does it is because doing so would require an ungodly amount of compressed air. There's not much you can do to improve the efficiency, either.
My conclusion: the site is a scam, attempting to extract money from dumb investors. Note how they are focusing on silly things like the benefits of not using gas (obvious) and how they will arrange the seatbelts (irrelevant) while thoroughly avoiding any description of the actual technology. Their tanks are supposedly good to 300 bar (~4300 psi), which is realistic (that's what scuba tanks or CNG tanks are rated for). However, this is not nearly enough energy to power a car. Hell, it's barely enough energy to power a car if you store NATURAL GAS in the tanks and BURN IT.
300 bar = 30 MPa = 30 MJoules / m^3 = 8.3 kWh/m^3. If you somehow managed to put 3 cubic meters of air tanks on that thing (that's about 800 gallons -- a HUGE air tank), you would have as much energy as ONE gallon of gas. To compress that air, you would use up several times that amount, because going from atmospheric pressure to 4500 psi will release a ton of waste heat. You would also never be able to get that energy out in any reasonable length of time because the air will become very, very cold when it expands.
If that technology really worked, we would have had air-powered cars 150 years ago -- it's a steam engine that's hooked up to an air tank instead of a boiler. The problem is, there is no way it could possibly work.
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
Nobody's actually spraying oil on the ground (that I know of!) But the reactions that produce it are energy-consuming and require fossil fuel as reagents. e.g. Haber-Bosch process.
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
At least solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, ethanol, etc are all possible at the plant (or in your house). It may be expensive, but we could actually switch them over to clean energy. You can't do that at all if everyone's driving gas cars.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!