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The Quest for the Car of the Future
Lux writes "Where will the car of the future come from? It's unlikely to come from anywhere you'd expect it to. Wired's money is on the car of the future coming from NASA. 'New technology that promises to revolutionize the automobile as we know it is emerging from research institutions and startups — and these innovations won't set you back $100,000 like a Tesla will... One experiment involves small electric motors located in the wheels of the CityCar, a tiny, nimble and practically silent vehicle with wheels that turn 360 degrees, enabling it to slip neatly into tight urban parking spaces. Others are looking to revolutionize the automobile's engine, not replace it.'"
wheels that turn 360 degrees
Indeed, that is a revolution.
So are they finally going to get that car out that runs on water and produces no emissions other than water vapor? Or is that still an "urban legend"?
Take a modern TDI engine from Europe and add it to a plug in hybrid.
Run it on biodiesel when available and put solar cells on the roof of it.
Ok the solar cells may just be for cute factor but my car sits in my office parking lot all day in Florida. It might give me enough power to run the AC on the trip home.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Google pushes 100-mpg car
Google plugs in and goes green
Frankly, I'm surprised this hasn't made it to a /. article yet.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
The real car of the future may in fact be no car at all. Might it be possible that there are methods of living that do not require us to live distantly from useful and necessary services? Looks like we can get services to our computer fairly well, right?
I think that's called the Smart car. It may still run on gas, but can park backing up to a curb. And I guess if you want more style, you can go with a Mini.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
That didn't take long -- My boss was dinking around on that when I was there in 1971.
Love to see the stills of a simple 20 mile per hour crash, let alone higher. A four wheel drive would literally drive right through it without slowing at a guess.
From Silicon Valley, that's where, and it's almost here.
... the TESLA Electric Roadster.
It would be nice to have full automatic computer control, at least on highway. It will greatly increase throughput and allow to spend time during daily commute more productively.
Why do the developers of these fancy futuristic cars always make them look so dorky? do they even want people to want to buy them?
We've been promised that cars like this will be coming in the future for many years now. So far, nothing's come of it. Wake me when one of these is actually being mass-produced and is affordable for the average person.
I can has sig?
Their design requires you jettison your gas tanks once you get up to speed and occasionally the vehicle explodes on the way home (even worse than the Pinto).
It's my very humble and limited understanding that the big reason we don't see electric cars is the battery technology. Not that the basic technology isn't there, but it's my understanding that a battery specific to autmotive applications still isn't on the market. Didn't the Tesla just string a bunch of NiMH or lithium ion batteries together from laptops?
Leave the gun, take the cannoli -- Clemenza, The Godfather
The compressed air powered car from India has been getting a lot of coverage lately. It looks like they've created an entirely new kind of engine to run off of compressed air.
Instead of a whole new kind of engine, why not use the compressed air to power turbines that would generate electricity to run an electric motor? Electric motors are probably more reliable and more advanced than their air powered engine.
No mass-market innovation will EVER come out of the government. Superficially, the Internet appears to be an exception to his rule, but in fact it was only once the NSF dropped the AUP and gave up policing interconnection policies that it became a commercial success. I give this "car of the future" exactly zero chance of being anything in anybody's driveway. The real question is, why is NASA wasting dime one on research and development that GM, Ford, and Chrysler should be doing?
Dog is my co-pilot.
Motors in the wheels? Porsche did this years ago with his racing designs. How they hell is this a new idea?
If anything, these "future" cars harken back to far earlier designs.
Motors in the wheels are okay when you're moving at low speeds and/or over extremely regular pavement. So they're fine for city-only cars that will never go over 35 mph. But while you might be okay going up and down the hills in SF, get on the freeway to scoot across town and you're fucked.
Why is that? It's because one of the greatest enemies to handling is unsprung mass. The "sprung" mass is everything sitting on top of the springs, hence the name. But the unsprung mass is the weight that's not sprung, which in practice means directly or indirectly attached to the wheel and moving up and down with it.
Thus, the problem is one of inertia. When the road sends the wheel upwards, the tire deforms more and it takes longer for it to rise, when there is more mass to move. When the wheel returns, the spring has to push against the greater inertia of the more massive suspension member, so it takes longer to make the first part of its motion, but the spring conspires with gravity (which has more to work on with more mass) to push the wheel back down. The falling wheel has more inertia than it would if you had a lighter unsprung mass, so it comes down harder, compressing the tire more (again). All this excessive compression of the tire makes handling inconsistent.
This will actually negatively affect handling even in most cities, when cornering quickly. And it is often necessary to do so, or be stuck behind long rows of people.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Years back I saw a video of a company (from one of the Scandinavian countries), using electric motor "inside out" as wheels.
They built buses with these electric motors, put a small Volkswagen car engine (it may have been diesel) under the hood, running always on the most optimal rpm to generate electricity. It seemed like a perfect, cheap, immediately available hybrid solution - I always wondered why we don't see these "3/4 green" buses on the city roads.
Automotive manufactures and the OIL industry.
Wake up and try public transportation, lamers.
Damn commies! everybody knows the true American Patriotic Car of the Future is an eight wheel, 6 ton, armour plated X-SUV (Extreme Sports Utility Vehicle) with night vision, aircon to chill a Canadian winter, bull bars to win any collision with anything short of a tank, 12 seats, and a beer cooler, doing two miles to the gallon (US not the dirty supersized British one). It's my Right as an American citizen!
You will die unhappy.
Even people in cities will take a taxi or drive a car before waiting for a train or bus.
People will always want on-demand travel.
Some form of car will be around forever.
Electric cars are looking like the best bet for a clean car. The big issue, of course, is the batteries, but those problems are being solved very quickly.
I think the route to all electric cars will be traveled using better and better hybrid technology to wean people off of gasoline. Right now, my hybrid car uses it's batteries about 20-25% of the time. Next generation plug-in hybrids will at least double that, so you'll only use the gasoline engine 50% of the time. After that, you're looking at cars like the Chevy Volt where the power train is 100% electric and the gas engine is only used to power a generator. Concurrent with that, you'll see batteries evolve to the point where they're cheap and powerful enough to run a car around town for a day or two on a single charge.
I can't help thinking that all of these futurist projects assume near damn near ideal conditions of road, weather, distance and terrain.
I am so sick of reading about how the "car of the future" is going to run on hydrogen and be extra-sleek and this and that. We've heard it all before, for the last 15 years or more. What I REALLY want to know is this... when will the car of the future be the car of the PRESENT? Tell me when they will be on the market and be affordable for the common consumer. What good does it do us to say what's coming if it NEVER GETS HERE?
Or money that people would rather use to build roads instead of to subsidize train systems. A lot of people who are against subsidizing public transportation seem to conveniently ignore the fact that we are already subsidizing private transportation. (I am not lumping you into this category.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Toyota will make the car and Honda will make the driver. Just as soon as he's finished learning how to carry a tray of coffee cups upstairs.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
Because One-Size-Fits-All everytime.
Because Somebody loves to live in suburb, while working in a big city and has to commute 20-60 miles each way.
Because Someone thinks everyone should drive the same damn thing.
Because Someone hates SUVs because they can't afford one.
Because Someone Can't parallel park.
----
Seriously. I'm sick of people who suggest "the City Car" (or other super small, single or dual seater) as a perfect car for most everyone.
I drive a van (Aerostar) seats seven. I live in a small town having grown up in Los Angeles. I use maybe 25 gallons of gas a month, most months. I haul computers around in it. I can parallel park. And I don't fit in most subcompacts at all (6'5" or 1.95m and 270lbs or 122.5kg).
So please stop projecting your tiny little self in your tiny little world onto the rest of us who live outside the city and actually practice conservation. Thank you
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Summer 1977 Probably you weren't born yet or were an infant.
In any event your parents were sneaking a few tokes on a joint in the parking lot of the theater (and a few gulps of Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill) that was showing Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever, Marathon Man ('is it safe?'), or Black Sunday (' Zere ahr no accidents!' Martha Keller and Ahhnold - jeez what a team!)
Honda is losing all their credibilty on a piece-of-shit CVCC engine. Mazda is blowing their wad on a Wankel. Toyota is toying around with the uglyest cars ever made. GM gives us the Vega, Ford the Pinto, and AMC brings up the rear with the Pacer. And the only pants that we could buy a bell-bottoms. No wonder we needed to get stoned and right now if not sooner.
If you could predict a car for 30 years in the future that you would want to buy you could have done worse than a Hyundai Accent with a ten year warranty or a Prius. Hell you could have just kept your BFAC (Big F*ucking American Car, with the emphasis on Big), your Monte Carlo or Riviera.
So the car that I want 30 years from now. Small, for good mileage. Cheap. everyone's going to be poor with the coming Peak Oil and Global Warming situations manifesting. Big Tires for driving on really bad roads. Safe, with serious air bags. Durable; something that will last a long time. Bulletproof safe, because the Peak Oil and Global Warming situations are going knock a lot people out of the middle class and they're going to looking to fuck with someone just like me for no other reason than I have a car and have the ability to make enough money to not have to live with people like them. Vandal-proof,with special coating on the exterior so that spraypainted gang symbols just wash off. Theft-proof, with a tracking device so if the shitpeople actually do manage tosteal it then I can get it back quickly.
Are you looking for a career with a real future? Make cars like the one described above. I'll buy it and so will millions of other people.
I am already driving the car of *my* future
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
>> Others are looking to revolutionize the automobile's engine, not replace it.'"
= ariel%20atom
The only justification for this is that it benefits the car and oil companies.
There are massive disadvantages to internal combustion technology over pure electrical cars, such as pollution, maintenance & running costs and overall performance.
Check this if you don't believe me about performance (electric car eating a ferrari and a porche alive):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2DGfisAndI&search
Yes this particular car costs $100k but its a one off. obviously if the same tech. got put into mass production it would be much less due to scales of economy.
I _know_ many will think I'm over-reacting but... I'm a child of the 70s when cars went VRROOOMMM! In the early 80s when I was about 10 or so I meet my first very quiet car. I was crossing a road on one of those stereotypical winding English country lanes. Well, I didn't get hit (that time) but it was pretty close. Obviously the car driver hadn't seen me and was cruising at a steady 30MPH. I certainly hadn't heard them. We stopped a meter apart and looked equally terrified (yes, I looked both ways... but if you don't know an english country road then... err.. they're scary!)
Well... All I'm saying is that a silent car cuts off one form of input to the human mind to us pedestrians trying to avoid them. Of course a silent car makes living near a big road (like Archway, London) a bit nicer... the choice is "ours" to make.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
we are gonna need a smart car for people like meadow soprano. =)
It's ok, she is hot so she gets a pass from me.
Now that's parking.
R.Buckminster Fuller developed an interesting teardrop-shaped car back in the square-fender days -- think it used a Ford Model A engine -- that had wheels that could pivot 90 deg. or better to allow parallel parking with a couple inches clearance. Got up to speeds of 100mph fairly easily. It was called the "Dymaxion Car" and a good place to start is here http://www.washedashore.com/projects/dymax/
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
They are improving only a few percent a year, with no signs of any acceleration in this trend. If anything, it is slowing. The reason is that batteries are actually pretty simple devices. Even the first ones over a hundred years ago weren't all that bad. Like the internal combustion engine, the simplicity of the device led to even the earliest designs being reasonably functional...and leaving little room for improvement.
One can never say never, but within the limits of our knowledge, it is unlikely that batteries as we know them will ever improve two-fold.
...Is a DeLorean DMC 12. We just need 1.21 jigawatts to power it.
Why do alternative-fuel vehicles always have to look like 1970s Mazda GLCs, or AMC Gremlins? 2008 is here, lets at least try for some retro lines at least, as a change from the bubbly/cute/tiny archetype?
Take something with chrome, fins, etc. from the 1950s, give it the punchline, "fuel of the future, blast from the past."
If you're at all interested in the forces at work behind the "car of the future" topic, you owe it to yourself to see the movie Who Killed the Electric Car?
The state of California mandated in the 1990's that 10% of the cars sold in California be emission-free, so GM and Toyota put out all-electric vehicles. The cars had a top range of 80-100 miles before recharging, but since most people only drive around 36 miles a day, that was a non-issue for many people.
Here are some of the issues the film discusses:
1) the people who leased the cars were absolutely in love with them and thought that they were very well-engineered
2) The people who leased the cars tried desperately to buy them, but were never allowed to. GM turned down $1.9 million for the 78 uncrushed EV-1's before they were finally crushed.
3) All of the electric cars were crushed, even the brand-new ones, after the companies who made them promised that wouldn't happen.
4) The drivers of the electric cars really loved the engineering and handling of the cars.
5) The federal government joined the car manufacturers in a suit against the state of California fighting the 10% zero-emissions law.
6) one person in the movie told about a congressman who told him to get the electric car killed before it spread to other states (or the congressman would "battle" him)
7) The electric cars were so simple to work on that major dealership revenue sources would have been lost.
8) Consumers were very interested in lowering emissions and helping the environment, and were also willing to pay to do it.
The top 3 oil companies in America pulled in well over $700 BILLION for the last two years, without even looking at the record profits for the previous years. The movie makes a serious case that there was a serious push against the electric car to preserve those future profits from harm and keep the electric car from being a mainstream idea / product.
Some might call this a conspiracy theory and there are market forces involved, but it also really just sounds like intelligent business practices by the oil companies. Given the tremendous needs in the marketplace now, and the advances in technology, it will really be very interesting to see how this market develops.
Nor will a practical new car come out of Detroit who just use lobbying to replace innovation.
A real car for the masses is far more likely to come out of China.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Telepresence. See the Wikipedia telepresence article.
"We must imagine a future without cars."
Designing a city without any cars.
Orson Scott Card on 'walking neighborhoods' (I first thought he was talking of some scifi idea, such as moving neighborhoods, haha.)
Carfree (?)
Monorail Opportunity in Seattle, Washington (1998)
From #19302663:
Also, from #10313790:
Creating car free cities dupe with >1k comments.
Post #5975896 gets it right:
Just an interesting tidbit here: "It's things like cars that take people out of public spaces and make a community less safe."
Arcosanti, an interesting experimental town supposedly as an alternative to urban sprawl.
Argument that car-free is too expensive.
An interesting problem in #5975908:
Apparently Venice is not the solution, either. ...
Small steps needed to make the change.
Pipes from Futurama? Or maybe, dare it be said,
Efforts like this may slow the effects of the decline somewhat but I suspect that they'll lower where we bottom out at, too. Technology and conservation might be able to dig us out of this hole that we've dug ourselves into, but I don't think we're clever enough to deal with the issues central to this problem. In a nutshell, the people are the problem and they're not going to want to change.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm kinda certain that it won't be a car driven by a combustion engine (anymore), no matter which type.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER4xoWyRTgI
I cant believe you referenced Peak Oil!
While I think it's a big problem, and Oil is a bell curve, we are still using it faster and faster, (on the growing side to the left of the curve) we havent hit the 1/4** way mark yet, but are damn close. Once that hits, then panic, but slowly.
Hopefully new tech will emerge while we are in the 2nd 1/4 of the curve, approaching the top. (that is how it usually is with finite resources. At least in StarCraft...) Just kidding about the SC ref. As we approach the top of that curve, we "set the bar" at the top of the curve, and that becomes the bottom for the "New" tech. as the new tech gains momentum, fuel use goes down. This should happen pretty evenly.
Shit hasn't even started to get bad yet, but with the announcement of "no new refineries" you have to wonder if we are at the switching point for the 2nd quarter of the curve.
**If you draw a belcurve, you actually have four parts of the curve. The curve on the left 1/4 facing up and back, the next 1/4 facing down and right, the next 1/4 facing down and back, then the last 1/4 facing up and right.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
cuz I'm still waiting for Segway-City
The technology is there. It's proven. I guess its the investments in factories putting the big guys off?
p.s. found the homepage to the project:
* Asimov's Caves of Steel
*
are all that seem to be the main contestants that match your books.
Personally, that sort of life sounds rather dull. I agree. Transportation is pretty bleak when you view it more as a prison, trapped in your vehicle, etc. So maybe making it less necessary for work and the operation of civilization would be useful, imagine the sort of optimizations we can engineer. Then travel can be more liberal and less the resource trap that is today.
Money should be put into building more complex roads that provide the power to the vehicle. It has always been inefficient to carry fuel on long trips.
NASA has the brilliant "idea" of building a space station so that the "shuttle has somewhere to go". They spend $10,000 a kilogram to put things in low earth orbit, and are dreaming up moon and mars missions with no plans to build the infrastructure to slash launch costs.
I can't see how an organization with such sheer, boneheaded decisions at the core of their strategy is likely to dream up cars significantly CHEAPER overall than existing technologies. If a "Mr. Fusion" were possible, NASA's version of it would cost 1 billion per engine. It might be revolutionary technology, but no-one would ever drive it.
At some currently unknown date, later in time. Probably not tomorrow.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
It will come from a country where they know how to handle sparse resources: japan:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601080&si d=atw_4DmW_OjA&refer=asia"
Japan's `Mileage Maniacs' Hack Hybrids, Beat Toyota Engineers
By Terje Langeland
April 5 (Bloomberg) -- Toyota Motor Corp. says its Prius gasoline-electric hybrid car gets about 55 miles to the gallon, making it one of the most fuel-efficient cars on the road. That's not good enough for Takashi Toya.
Toya, a 56-year-old manager for a tofu maker in central Japan, puts special tires on his Prius, tapes plastic and cardboard over the engine and blocks the grill with foam rubber. He drives without shoes and hacks into his car's computer -- all in the pursuit of maximum distance with minimum gasoline.
Toya is one of about 100 nenpimania, Japanese for ``mileage maniacs,'' or hybrid owners who compete against each other to squeeze as much as 115 miles per gallon out of their cars. In a country where gasoline costs more than $4 a gallon, at least $1 more than the U.S. price, enthusiasts tweak their cars and hone driving techniques to cut fuel bills and gain bragging rights.
``My wife thinks I've joined some strange secret society,'' Toya said in January at a nenpimania gathering in Nagoya in central Japan.
Mileage maniacs aren't alone in pushing the limits of hybrid vehicles. As U.S. automakers General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. race to introduce their own models, first rolled out by Japanese companies in 1997, engineers at Toyota and Honda Motor Co. are trying to boost hybrid performance to maintain their advantage.
``With higher oil prices and tightening environmental regulations, people will focus more on hybrid technology,'' said Koji Endo, an auto analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston in Tokyo.
Hybrid Power
Hybrids combine a conventional gasoline engine with an electric motor. The motor powers the vehicle at low speeds, and the gasoline engine kicks in as the car accelerates. The motor uses the motion of the wheels to recharge the batteries.
Toya said he switched to a hybrid after years of driving sports cars, trading muscle ``for the fun of maximum mileage.'' Nicknamed ``The Shogun,'' Toya said he drove 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) on a single 13-gallon (49-liter) tank 17 times last year, an average of 79 mpg. At the advertised efficiency rate, a driver would get 715 miles per tank.
Toya isn't the best, though. A woman from Akita prefecture, nicknamed ``Teddy-Girl,'' is cited on mileage maniac Web sites as getting almost 116 mpg. That's enough to drive from New York to Wichita, Kansas -- 1,386 miles -- without refilling.
By comparison, a 2007 two-wheel drive Ford F-150 pickup running at peak efficiency burns through five times as much gasoline over the same distance.
Mileage Varies
While the nenpimania may take things to extremes, there is a long history of car owners tinkering with their machines to improve gas mileage.
``The Gas Mileage Bible'' (Infinity Publishing, 2006) promises to help drivers improve fuel efficiency by more than 30 percent. It is the latest in a line of books stretching back to at least 1942, when an American author named Lee Richter published a 64-page pamphlet on increasing tire and gas mileage to help save resources for the U.S. war effort.
Since the 1997 release of the Prius, the first mass-market hybrid, owners in Japan and elsewhere have fiddled with their cars to raise mileage and shared tips, including the best driving techniques, over the Internet. The mileage maniacs strive to perfect what they call the ``pulse and glide'' driving method.
On a chilly Saturday afternoon in Aichi prefecture, a short drive from Toyota's world headquarters in Toyota City, Toya removes his right shoe to demonstrate. Pulsing and gliding demands sensitivity when pushing or releasing the accelerato
http://youtube.com/watch?v=IsFfBB2W7IA
The radical new design of the Scuderi power plant splits the cylinders of an internal-combustion engine in two, compressing air in one chamber, then shooting it into a combustion chamber where it's mixed with gas and ignited....It also creates a highly efficient combustion environment, promising to double gas mileage while drastically reducing tailpipe emissions.
This technology already exists in a sense. It is called a "turbo" or a "super-charger", and has been in use for years. The only difference is that instead of doing it external of the engine as a separate device, they want to combine it into the engine itself. Personally, I think this is a stupid idea. They are increasing the complexity of the engine, adding more moving parts into an already complex system, when you can already get the same or better results by having the compressor (either a turbo or super-charger) being separate from the engine and simply feed the engine cylinder the compressed air. You can get just an efficient combustion environment without increase complexity to the engine system, simply place some electronic controls on measuring the amount of compressed air fed into the cylinder. This is also call engine "tuning"...
Again, if you can't tell, this is not anything new. Everyone who knows anything about cars knows you can get more efficient engines by having a properly tuned engine to feed the correct amount of gas for the correct amount of air that is put into the cylinder. The problem is that doing this has a lot of variables on that exact specific car, from the air intake system all the way to the exhaust system. Even the small tolerance changes from part to part will screw up the calculations to doing a mass production car that is properly tuned right off the line. So you get what we have, which is cars that put more fuel into the cylinder then there is oxygen to burn completely (in other words, the fuel/air mixture is "rich"). The reason you run "rich" is because there is very little risk of physical damage to the car or engine for running the car rich, other then the loss of some power and wasting of fuel. However, if you run "lean" (the opposite of rich), you risk serious damage to the engine and vehicle as a whole. Excess waste heat is generated when running "lean", as well as environmentally damaging gasses are produced in this condition (as there are extra oxygen and nitrogen molecules available in the chemical system to create these gasses). You run the risk of there being enough oxygen from the previous ignition in the cylinder to ignite with the new fuel being injected and causing "knocking" (which is a premature ignition which fires when the cylinder is in the incorrect position, usually while the cylinder has not reached the apex of its current rotation, and is still compressing the fuel and air mixture. When this happens and the fuel/air mixture ignites while the cylinder is still compressing, the cylinder has nowhere for the gasses to expand because the other cylinders in the engine are all pushing against the single cylinder that mis-fired. This can cause anything from the cylinder itself being shot out of the engine (like a bullet being fired out of a gun), to the engine block failing and cracking so the gasses can escape, to the crank shaft being sheared off where the cylinder rod connects.... In other words, major engine damage can occur when running too lean. This is why all cars are factory set to run rich.
Now again, this is no radical concept, everyone knows the engine could use more air intake, which was why turbos and super-chargers came about in the first place to get more air oxygen into the cylinder to allow the amount of fuel to be increased or burned fully. It is also why the diesel engines are almost always turbo diesels (well, it also helps with the basics of the design of the diesel, as it increases in rpm's there isn't as much air that gets sucked into the cylinder in the time it has before it is compressed and ignited by the compression, so as the rpm's go up, the exhau
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I think the drug prohibition is an absolutely unjustifiable assault on civil liberties that has done nothing but promote violence both domestically and in South America. But this constant mindless promotion of hemp is just silly.
Hemp is not a great biodiesel crop. It is better than corn, but that is just because nearly every conceivable crop is better than corn. Here is a decent approximation of vegetable oil crop yields for various plants.
In reality biomass fuel from any traditional crop is not a sustainable substitute for petroleum - we use too much of it. There isn't enough arable land, and there are already concerns about top soil depletion just with food crops. That isn't to say it isn't a good supplement (especially if the oil is a byproduct that would go to waste otherwise), but we need to figure out something else, like algae or hydroponic crops with sustainable fertilizers, if were are to produce enough biomass to have a significant impact on petroleum use.
To my knowledge most high-powered modern cars can go from 0 to stuck in a traffic jam in exactly 2.3 seconds. But cynicism aside, our (American) average commute-to-work time has been on the rise. Therefore I predict what is already being reflected by the automotive industry: priorities lay with comfort and gadgets over gas mileage or reduced emissions.
For example, MP3 players came to be standard part of low-end cars way before they came in as a luxury option on high-end cars (one example- Ford Focus vs Volvo S80). Secondly, there have been some advancements in seat technology: there was at least one prototype out there that had a pony tail cubby hole in the headrest.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3528757.stm
Alright, so it's not exactly a hole - but I am moving along. I predict that before long there will be audio games on the stereos which are voice controlled (kind of like the kind that Ford is developing). E-mail while you are stuck on 23rd street. Tell your World of Warcraft guild that you are running late with Ventrilo over OnStar (tm). As you can tell, I am not very enthusiastic that the principle idea behind a car is going to evolve at all: and that is taking the driver from point A to point B. Legislation and some clever marketing is going to force part of the market share to actually try new automotive technologies but for the most part it'll be a question of gimmickry. Tell me that I am wrong after a decade has passed.
Henry Ford once said "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black." I seem to be picking on Ford too much - but that's an indicator of how he focused on the car selling itself as a tool rather than the car being sold for its gimmicks. (Well, to be more accurate he also focused on profit through volume and consumerism).
Sure, traffic optimization would rock. Just punch in your destination and the the DOT GloboComputer will tell you how best to go about your way without causing compressive delays. Maybe you can even work off some of your license points by cooperating - sacrificing your commute time to alleviate congestion from your normal route. Of course - more entities than just the government are going to tap into that treasure trove of information.
Capacitor Tech is increasing!
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Now, consider this: Who pays the most on fuel taxes per mile of road (where, for sake of discussion, one considers one mile of two-lane road to be approximately "two miles of road"), urban areas or rural areas? There is a "redistribution of wealth" away from the cities (where public transport is most helpful, or at least gives you the biggest bang for the buck) and towards the country.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The first 5 would cost 1 billion. Then anyone in the private sector would be able to build them.
The whiners like you would bitch that is cost NASA a billion dollars to make it when you can buy one for 49.95. Completely disregarding the RnD effort.
Politician are killing the space station, not NASA.
It cost NASA a lot of money to RnD thing for projects the private sector would never do themselves.
The taxes generated from spinnoff product from NASA RnD have generated far more money for the government in taxes then NASA has cost. Far more.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Your problem-system is impossible to solve, I think. Therefore, looking at the fundamnetal aspects of the system (land, ownership, money, property) might provide more insights into possible solutions that will allow us to live. From this perspective, permanent residency could be replaced with assured residency and then move towards an understanding that we do not all have to permanently stay put in one place. Lots of people like to roam around, set up camp, mobile homes, etc.
As someone who drives 40 miles a day on Texas interstates at 65 mph I don't think fuel prices are high enough for more economical cars to be consumer driven.
For an immediate solution what about the converted diesels running on vegetable oil?
The best way to ruin your hobby is to try to make a living at it. Waiting on the paperless office since 1997
The most significant problem is couples who want to live together, but who don't necessarily work in the same place, ...
Obviously this could be mitigated by strongly encouraging dating among co-workers and nepotism in hiring (hire me, hire my wife and offspring)...
Have to get rid of those pesky sexual harassment and equal-employment laws and rules, though.
(Fortunately, Clinton already got a good start on that by pulling their teeth when it comes to relationships up-and-down the chain of command.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Every time I think that the Slashdot crowd may have regained some of their critical thinking skills, some fool goes and posts a whackjob conspiracy theory and gets modded +5 informative. What's next? Gonna tell us all THE TRUTH about the Kennedy assassination? Or maybe you'd like to talk about the Apollo moon landing? Let me guess, Kennedy was whacked because he wanted to buy an electric car, and the moon landing was faked because all that rocket exhaust makes people want to buy gasoline, right?
Separately powered wheels that could swivel through 360 degrees was a feature of Bucky Fuller's Dymaxion Car
It works great for train engines. But it either doesn't scale down to car size for technical reasons, or it doesn't scale down to car size for business reasons. Why?
All pass beyond reach of medicine. None pass beyond the reach of love.
Motors in the wheels? ... How they hell is this a new idea?
It's an ancient idea in internet time. They were talking about this back in the 1950s.
It's also a rotten idea. The more mass in each wheel, the more forward momentum is converted to vertical momentum in the suspension as the wheel follows irregularities in the road, then converted to heat as the suspension damps the bounce. This is one of the major sources of energy loss that must be made up by prime-mover power.
I.e.: Heavier wheels, lower mileage. That's why even electric cars with independent motors on each wheel put the motors on the frame and connect them with axles and CV joints, despite the considerable increase in moving parts count and expense.
NASA designing a car? Why does this remind me of BART and AMTRAK? In both cases aeronautical engineers were hired to redesign a surface vehicle (despite their experience with surface travel being limited to things like landing gear, used for a tiny percentage of each flight). In both cases they threw out more than a century of engineering solutions and started from scratch. And in both cases they ended up with an expensive deisgn that had rotten ride. (In BART's case new cars now cost six MILLION each and even at that price only one manufacturer - located in France - is willing to build them.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Wouldn't it be reasonable to expect the "car of the future" to come from the people who design cars for a living?
...
After all, we live in a free market society, where superior ideas win out and succeed in the market place, right?
Oh, crap, I forgot -- this is the REAL world.
actually almost certainly false. I haven't actually seen any electric motors, of the size fit for vehicles, that make anywhere near the torque of a gas/diesel at low rpm's at the motor shaft. For instance we (company I work for) make both electric, and mechanical drive trucks behind 2000+ HP diesiels. The electric Truck has a fixed 50:1 gearing reduction where the mechanical drive is around 35:1 in first gear.
It only makes sense, electric motors are well known for making even torque across a wide RPM range, hence no need for multiple gear ratio. Since torque*distance=power (or torque*rpm with fixed gearing), a electric motor of the same HP as a gas motor is going to have a-lott lower peak torque than a lower RPM turning diesel (assuming the electric turns at higher RPM.)
As for no need for brakes, in the Generator world, torque=current, voltage=speed, so at low speeds you can't run the brakes in generator mode any where near peak torque, so you would have to run it in power mode to plug brake to a stop. Otherwise you have to run insane current, (is your motor to be made of super conductors?) at extremely low voltage, or change winding configurations dynamically.
similar to brake mode, you need insane current to get extreme torque, and since power = torque*rpm at 0 rpm you got 0 efficiency so you really get your motors extremely hot if you run them at (or near) stall RPMs for any length of time. So although it may makes good (maybe 60% of peak) torque at stall, you can't use it for long.
With the economies of many industrialised nations shifting towards service focused industry, I seriously hope the whole telecommuting thing actually happens. And I'm not talking about ssh'ing into a server somewhere, I'm mean the yes-you-can-see-the-body-language telepresence sort. What is the point carting people over ever more glogged transport systems, beltching out tonnes of CO2 as you drag a 1 tonne (or 2 tonne in the US) car with you if you really only need their ears, eyeballs and brains there.
Car makers are trying to transform their industry as the engergy crunch approaches, while I'd like to see most of that industry go away.
GM once marketed a highly desirable car of the future, the EV-1, and then they scared everyone away with this commercial.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Environmentally, we are far better off letting Westerners burn up the oil in their clean-burning monster SUVs with catalytic-converters , rather than letting it get burned up in some crappy Chinese car.
Make no mistake, nobody is saving the oil from being burned. If "we" don't do it, someone else will.
All the oil in the world will be burned by someone, as long as it is economically feasible to do so.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
NASA is claiming that they've already won the mattress arms race with their space-age foam technology, and I must concur after testing it out for myself. I saw an infomercial about three months ago with a short guy in white socks jumping on their memory-cell mattress in a mall somewhere. As the experiment went, a glass of red wine sat on top of the bed and ultimately refused to spill over even though he jumped on it as hard as he could. Well, I finally saved up the cash to try out the miracle properties for myself. No sooner did I get a knee up on my side of the bed to start jumping when my bottle of Yellow Tail wine tipped over right in the middle of the fuckin' mattress. NASA never said in the commercial what would happen if the wine actually spilled, but those micro foam cells completely soaked up all the red wine and scent! I just flipped it over, put a fresh sheet on it, and the wife hasn't noticed the strawberry patch to this day. Toyota better watch their back.
I'd get a 17hp 3 wheeled rickshaw for round town use. I may still. They're registered as motorcycles.
We have already seen the car of the future. It was called "The Homer" and it was met with derision by both industry and consumers.
What the fuck is the idiot fetish with "city cars that are easy to park"???....
Last time I checked, the problems that existing electric vehicles had was that they were small and cramped and that the batteries were too expensive and didn't offer enough range. Not once have I ever heard anyone say they weren't driving an electric car instead of an internal-conbustion because it was "too hard to park the electric in the city"...
~
A typical mini-van has enough roof space for 300 - 400 watts of solar panels. Assuming 300 watts: 300 watts * 9 Hrs (typical parked time for an 8 hourt work day) = 2700 kwh. Assuming a 1/2 Hour commute, you're air-conditioned with room to spare!
They are improving only a few percent a year, with no signs of any acceleration in this trend.
Yes, but how much battery do you really need? Does a car really have to go 500-1000 miles on a charge? Today you can buy a car that will travel freeway speeds for 200 miles on a charge. That car will serve 90% of most people's daily driving needs. That car is more expensive today, but prices will most likely drop as production ramps up.
I think one of the biggest issues is not battery life, but charge time. When it takes hours to charge a car, then range is a problem. If you could charge a car in minutes, then a slightly reduced range is less of an issue. One manufacturer (ZAP) is claiming their new ZAP-X car, based on a Lotus chassis, can get 350 miles with a charge time of 10 minutes using new nanotechnology batteries. Aerovironment (designers of the EV-1) has independently tested these batteries and claim they deliver as promised.
When did NASA issue their IPO???
Seriously, when I read things like this, after what the "Space transportation system" has turned out to be, I can't help but see images of the Wired editorial office populated by characters from the movie "Idiocracy".
Seastead this.
The world can't handle more cars. The car has to go away.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I'd believe 5 amps from a 270-300V battery (~1500W), but not from a 12V battery. 60W wouldn't be much more than what it takes to run the fan.This does hint at one advantage of a hybrid, running the A/C compressor off the electrical system rather than the fan belt - the compressor can operate at near ideal speed most of the time.
FWIW, railroad passenger cars of the 30' and 40's often had the A/C powered by an axle driven generator and typically drew 200A from the 32V lighting power supply.
The organization that wastes your money and can't even put a shuttle into space with blowing one up every 10 years? Screw that.
This is Wired attempt at glorifying technology by using big words and organizations names that there user base understand.
How about if we take the money that we put into NASA every year and put it into "X type" prizes. Great technology has been improved greatly very quickly comparatively cheaply using this method.
Safety is not related to weight at all. Granted, a Geo Metro is probably not a good example, but this fallacy needs to end.
What matters is structural integrity - good design. A car from the 50's weighs twice as much as a Prius, but you're highly likely to get crushed, burned, impaled by the steering wheel or launched through the window. You're also more likely to roll your car or lose control because of faulty steering from that era. Please use some sense!
And yeah, a Metro is made to be inexpensive and not efficient per se. It just so happens those principles tend to coincide by reducing the amount of raw materials involved. A cheap ass Metro holds its own to a Prius or a Civic Hybrid in fuel efficiency. A well designed Metro with proper aerodynamics, body structure, lightweight materials, and maybe a hybrid drive would make the Prius and the Civic Hybrid look like the jokes that they are. Space age "economy" cars that are giving us fuel efficiencies from the 1980's! Being heavier is no excuse for a car that is supposed to be efficient. That is part of the fundamental design and is a failure on the part of the engineers for ignoring it.
Am I the only one who thinks small motorbike (with optional sidecar) whenever they read "tiny, nimble and practically silent vehicle". Let's see: tiny - check, nimble - check, practically silent - depends on the bike, but in principle, check. So why reinvent the wheel (or, indeed, 4 wheels)?
As a bonus, bikes (even without hybridding) use vanishingly small amounts of fuel compared to pretty much any car you care to mention. I would *love* to see who high you could get the mileage if you set out to built a motorbike with fuel efficiency as your main aim.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=eBRHetKH4MQ
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
By Ford! How will companies ever make a profit off of bicycles? They tend to last at least 30 years with minimal amounts of replacement parts. You're not going to find a way to get someone to spend $8,000 a year on chain lube and cycling shorts. A reduction in consumption must be discouraged at all costs, capitalism is at stake!
Multi-fuel vehicles are the KEY!!!
Once a vehicle can run on a VARIETY of fuels, these fuel sources will compete against each other, allowing the cheapest, most efficient energy source to rise to the top.
This would also allow fuel sources to vary from one geographic location to another, decentralizing the energy monopoly, and allowing each region to be more energy independent.
The major problems with the contemporary automobile are:
1. Inefficient, complex, polluting, PISTON engine
2. Dependency on ONE source of fuel
My dream car would be a multi-fuel, plug-in, electric hybrid. A vehicle which is powered by an electric motor.
This electric motor's batteries could be recharged by a combination of:
1. Regenerative braking
2. Standard wall socket plug-in recharging
3. Solar cells
4. A small, efficient, low emission, MULTI-FUEL engine spining an alternator
The multi-fuel engine could be fueled with gasoline, diesel, bio-diesel, ethanol, methanol, kerosene, high-proof vodka, Freddie Jackson's jerry curl, or other combustible liquids.
A small turbine would be ideal for this, as it can efficiently burn these fuels, has fewer moving parts, and is much lighter than a traditional piston engine.
There would be NO TURBO LAG, as the turbine spins the alternator, NOT the wheels.
Something like this is the key. Develop a vehicle that can run on most combustible liquids AND can plug into the wall.
I guess MCI/ Worldcom CEO Bernie Ebbers wasn't really convicted of conpsiracy to commit securities fraud in the $11 Billion Worldcom collapse. Again, there's plenty of proof.
Both of the above conspiracies have been proven in a court of law. The oil market is many times larger than the California electricity market, so there is plenty of motive there.
"Critical Thinking Skills" should include a better understanding of how the world works, not some pollyanna "no one would try to cheat me" attitude. That type of head-in-the-sand attitude helps no one.
What amazes me is that the parent post is the one that dredges up the whackjob conspiracy theories, and then somehow gets modded "insightful". The kind of anger and vitriol in the post is not helpful, either. This is not Digg -- if you disagree, at least put some reasoning into it, and not just name-calling
I wonder how well those techniques would work here in blighty, with the road 'calming' measures such as big bumps in the road, traffic lights and artificially narrowed roads(so that you have to wait for oncoming traffic to clear before you proceed)?
More miles per gallon would be useful for us as more and more roads and bridges are blocked off or become one-way systems. The shortest drivable route to the centre of town (6 miles as the crow flies)has increased at least 10% since i learned to drive (and the average speed has probably dropped by a third).
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I already have my car of the future: it is called a bicycle :-)
There's quite a lot of evidence that we are at the top of that curve, and nothing that seriously suggests we are only half way up.
Government figures are divorced from reality (political spikes in reserves, oil invented to meet demand curves) whilst the reality is peaked output from SA, falls from Mexico, etc. Canada is capped in the amount it can produce, and oil shales are a joke.
Reality will set in in the second half of the year. There just isn't enough oil to go round, so prices will rise and some will go without.
Most batteries wear out faster than tires!
Some of the best and most expensive batteries currently available are good for only about 3000 cycles with about a 2/3 draw down. The batteries in the Toyota Prius are drawn down about 25% and are good for only about 3000 cycles at this level. This is with the best battery management we can conceive.
If I calculate the amount of energy the battery will furnish at the best possible management of the battery system what I come up with is that they are at best marginal. Now Toyota has much better usage data than I have and perhaps the physics of the battery system is that they get many more cycles at lower draw downs and at draw down/recharge cycles which are quite short. I don't have the data. Maybe others do. If so then it would be great to put up a website with a consolidated explanation of the care and feeding of battery systems.
Nevertheless, having invested bux in RailPower (TSE:P) after doing the engineering and concluding their systems would not work... I conclude now that I was foolish to have relied on their engineers. The short of it is that their systems didn't work! They ended up selling hybred locomotives and then buying them back for about 1.5x what they sold them for in order to avoid litigation - litigation presumably for fraud.
Toyota and Nissan are playing this game now and I suspect they are banking on developments in battery technology IN THE NEAR FUTURE to bail them out when their present battery systems start to fail.
Perhaps this is what GM faced. I suspect they would have clicked their heels and screamed "Yahoo!" if the battery systems in the EV* autos were standing up. They seem to have done pretty much every thing else right. Of course the owners loved the car. We just need batteries that work.
Last I looked, the best batteries cost about $10,000 and could convert a Prius into a true EV with gas assist as required. I think this is an excellent way to go. But even with these batteries we are looking at 3,000 cycles.
The short of it is that most batteries wear out faster than tires.
----------------
What we are looking for is a way to store energy or to buffer energy.
Toyota and Nissan designed their current hybrids to buffer energy.
Its a small step as people have noted to buffer from the wall outlet to the office and call it an EV.
There are nuclear alternatives. Alpha emitters can be used to create a small to large and continuous energy flow which can _slowly_ recharge batteries. These are totally safe. But they provide no surge ability. In this hypothetical senerio if when you get home you forget to plug your car in then what does the car do with its extra juice once the batteries are full? One option: make lotsa noise then run a big toaster and finally if that fails catch on fire?
What of a high pressure air tank?
What of phase change?
Here is a funny idea: Lets use CO2. In liquid form its at 800 PSI at say room temperature. When compressed it can provide quite a lot of energy. We could expand it through a normal motor and run the low pressure gas into a bag. For regenerative braking we could take the low pressure gas and re-compress it. The problem is the size of the bag. To do anything useful the bag for a Prius sized auto might have to be about the size of a city bus. We could put this on a trailer - like a boat trailer of course and tow it behind the car.
This system would have virtually unlimited cycles and I guess when the car wears out we could trade in the car and keep the old bag and trailer system.
Obviously I write this tongue in cheek. I wish to illustrate the problem.
How do we store or buffer the energy?
If we can solve this problem the rest of the problem is simply a matter of good engineering and even GM showed they have very good engineers available.
This UK firm claims to make a sports car with special ceramical batteries (from US company Altairnano) that have 12 year warranty and they can be fully recharged in 10 minutes from a normal wall socket!(I really have hard time believing that, how many homes can handle such a current flow?) Autonomy about 300 miles, and 0-60mph in 4 seconds. 700 Bhp Car http://www.lightningcarcompany.com/ news article http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/News/articleI d=121268
batteries http://www.altairnano.com/
Why cars don't have collision radars in cars? nature can easily regulate traffic using sound waves. For example, bats use a radar system to avoid collisions, yet you don't often see bats colliding in mid air. The same system could be done with cars: the car could emit a radar signal with its signature and regulate its speed in order to avoid collisions with other vehicles.
After all, most other types of vehicles have radars on them (ships, aircraft, spacecraft etc).
Every conspiracy theorist uses the same logic. For example, compare and contrast:
..... I guess MCI/ Worldcom CEO Bernie Ebbers wasn't really convicted of conpsiracy to commit securities fraud in the $11 Billion Worldcom collapse. .... That type of head-in-the-sand attitude helps no one."
"9/11 WUZ AN INSAID JOB!!! U"R DA ONE DAT'S DA CONSPIRACY THEORY! DIDN'T U EVER HERE OF OPARETION NORTHWOODS?!?! THE USS LIBERTY!??! DEY CAN'T BE TRUSTED!! GO BACK TO YOUR BILL O"REILY YOU SHEEPLE!!!1ONE!!ELEVEN!"
vs
"So I guess Enron didn't really cause rolling blackouts in California just to drive up the price of electricity?
Now, granted, you sound a bit more reasonable than the 9/11 conspiracy nuts, but only on the surface. When we actually examine your reasoning, you use the exact same logical fallacy that every conspiracy theory makes use of, and the original post used several common logical fallacies, as well as many lies. Unfortunately, as they say "A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes". Debunking this type of nonsense takes way too much time. If you're interested in improving your critical thinking skills, and minimizing the chances of you being fooled again, check out the James Randi Educational Foundation. Otherwise, carry on believing whatever you want.
Billions of dollars are being spent to brainwash you people, flooding this nation's airways to hypnotize & mesmerize everyone to thinking we still have to burn liquid wood (gasoline, diesel, ethanol that now robs your store shelves, hydrogen that all robs billions in research dollars from taxpayers' pockets) that you have to pay for, flooding being done by BP Petroleum, ads being paid by your $3.00+ pump stickups, flooding being paid for by the Oil and Natural Gas people, Exxon, Shell, and chicken livers incorporated to keep you all dancing barefoot on the hot sidewalk worried about Species Dying, Ice Melting, fish dying in the ocean "dead spots".
Your question about water was a good one. I hope I answered it completely. You won't get my engines because the system can't yet figure a way to charge billions of tax dollars for air & water and it can't figure out what to do with millions of mechanics out of work from engine systems that run 5,000,000 miles without breaking down. The Gov is reaping tax money from the billions spent on TV ads. You are living in a gerbil wheel, one that is primarily kept rolling by Republicans, a money wheel. The more & the faster it spins the more money falls out of your pocket into the Net. Democrats can't stop the wheel either, not even if they tried. Money keeps everyone spinning. After all, God help us if we turned the clock backwards to where no money was being spent for car fuels. This system we are living in is geared to take as much money as you are willing to pay to have your job. That's another one of those perpetual motion 360 degree engines also, a prime example of just how good imitation energy is.
Imitation Energy works both directions. It can work for you one day hopefully under God's Government {Kingdom} but right now it's running us down because they are are being artificially occupied dancing the sidewalk dance to get to a punch clock. The system we live under now is the best Mankind has ever been able to produce even if it has become rather doped with socialism's tricks. It's what Jesus said would happen, that new wine {engines} can't be put in new wineskins.
Industrial Age 2 + How-to Stop Malignant Cancers.
"You can't save the earth unless you're willing to make other people sacrifice."
g es/dilbert2004073470620.gif
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ima
95% of greenhouse warming is caused by water vapor, which means less than 5% is caused by all other sources, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and other gases (CFC's, etc.). If you eliminate CO2 from the list then CO2 looks huge in comparison to the remaining causes of greenhouse warming, but in fact it's role in the big picture is dwarfed in comparison to water vapor. Of the 3.6% caused by CO2, 3.5% is naturally occuring, which means that humans contribute only .1% and for water vapor we contribute only 0.001%. If all human causes were eliminated the reduction in greenhouse gases would be no more than 0.28%. The effect on global climate would be insignificant. So if water vapor contributes 95% and CO2 less than 5% why are we trying to replace CO2 emissions with water vapor? If everyone switched to hydrogen power we'd be contributing more to global warming than we are now. Not to mention all the energy that would be required to produce the hydrogen. It takes electricity to split hydrogen and oxygen. Where does that electricity come from? Power plants that produce what? CO2 and water vapor. There are always alternatives but at least choose one that makes sense.
Lots of other video available online (which I can't check as most video sources on the web are blocked here at work) including the famous one from UK's "Fifth Gear" where they drove one at around 50mph into a concrete block: http://xo.typepad.com/blog/2005/12/video_smart_car .html as a starter...
The Smart cars are actually remarkably safe, despite their appearance.
When Marconi started his pioneering radio company, he envisioned it as wireless telegraphy. Basically, take a telegraph company and replace the wires with radio.
He never thought of broadcast radio, much less anything like the pesonall cellular networks of today.
Early telephone pioneers had similar ideas: you'd go to the telegraph office to make and recieve calls.
This is why old fasioned views of the future seem so quaint: their view of the future was that it was just like the past, only some of the details were replaced with new technology. Gentlemen would go from their home to their club, not in carriages, but in dirigible balloons. A few actually tried it.
Thinking forward 100 years, is it certain that we'll be using cars just like the ones today, only driven by Mr. Fusion or some such thing?
So much of our society is organized around cars. Producing them, fueling them, and building infrastructure for them. We've reorganized the geography of our society both to exploit cars and to support them.
If we imagine a society not organized around cars, it would be very, very different and unfamiliar. But our society would seem strange to those gentlemen of old, dreaming of their dirigible balloon carriages.
What such a society would look like is frankly beyond me. It would be beyond Jules Verne if he were alive today, and I'm no Jules Verne. But I suspect the future will not be so much futuristic, as alien.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Did anyone see the Science Channel's future cars special? I've been drooling over this www.flytheroad.com. Ever since I saw the Akira movie, I always wondered why they never made a cool-looking enclosed motorcycle that didn't expose the driver to the elements. And, I'm not talking about the goofy-looking Irkel-mobile.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Well, thinks like braking and waiting will be ok. Braking feeds back electricity into the batteries. There is always loss of course, but you won't lose it all in heat as with conventional brakes.
A inventor made an active energy management system for existing cars with similar techniques and got a 23% better efficency on an existing car!
Speedbumps however are something different. The energy goes into the springs and cannot be easily recovered.
You haven't examined anything. The parent post uses some high-sounding words and a few straw-man attacks, and then somehow gets modded +1 insightful.
The Enron conspiracy was true even before it was proven to be true in a court of law. You and your high-school buddy mods would have used the exact same accusations of "whackjob" against a post suggesting that Enron could be gaming the electricity market. Why? because there is no thinking in the accusations, just reflex.
Given the coming energy crisis and other factors, it seems not altogether inconceivable that the car of the future will be no car at all! Now that would be a revolution.
"If your regenerative braking system fails, you need a mechanical brake for backup."
Why, no one else has such a setup. See, this is where you chime back with "Yes they do, blah blah blah, parking brake is mechanical blah blah"
At which point I will tell you that with the increase in car sizes, mechanical brakes became impractical (and somewhat dangerous) nearly FIFTY YEARS AGO. The dual circuit hydraulic master cylinder, used on modern autos, is easily reliable enough to totally do away with mechanical brakes.
That's why they call it the parking brake, not the emergency brake. That's a result of direct instruction from the auto companies to not use the parking brake in an emergency.
Imagine putting one of these in your garage. If the ground traffic is at a standstill, then take to the the third dimension and rise into the air!
That is true but in many cases such as sugar cane the leaves and stalks already leave the land to go to the crushing mill - corn is also chopped off fairly close to the ground but I don't know where the stalks and leaves end up there. With other crops that are not harvested in the same way there is still a lot of material that could be used for fuel.
The reason I said China is threefold:
(1) They don't have a huge and resistant big-vehicle culture. The biggest problem in USA is getting people to give up their huge SUVs and people movers and accept smaller cars. Any car would be a major step forward for most Chinese families, even a tiny battery car that only does 20 miles at 30pmh. This opens up a huge bottom-end market that is easy to expand from.
(2)China already has a booming electric vehicle industry with electric hub bicycles. This forms a strong basis to move forward from.
(3) They don't have a huge existing infrastructure, but are building it now. That makes it far easier to incorporate electric vehicle support without obsoleting gas stations etc (a move that would be lobbied to dead in the USA by all the gas supply companies).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
There is a minimum weight a car can be and remain practical. There is a minimum energy input required to move this car in any practical way. There are actual thermodynamic limits to how much of that motion energy can actually be released from the energy source. There is a global population that cannot support universal BICYCLE ownership, let alone universal car ownership and it's growing... FAST (It'll be 10 billion before we know it!) People really believe we'll have hydrogen fuel cell cars and and the good life for all?
If we could harness every photon that falls on the earth, and turn it into one electron movement in a wire, there's still a limit to the population this planet can support. Welcome to entropy, even electric cars and magic wands can't beat that. {sheesh}
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1