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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.'"
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
No offense sir, but assuming you're saying "gasoline" when you say "gas", you're absolutely, 100% wrong and never should have been modded informative.
When the article says "perfect combustion", it's referring to oxygen and hydrogen and nothing else. As it points out, most combustion occurs with a component that involves carbon, which is why C02 is present in most combustion reactions. The truth of the matter is that "perfect" combustion only occurs with pure hydrogen, which doesn't exist in the real world because hydrogen is so reactive.
Quite true - present battery technology is pitiful for bulk energy storage. Compared to any combustion fuel, batteries are at least an order of magnitude worse in terms of watts per kilo or watts per unit volume. The Tesla used a giant array of lithium polymer batteries, which is the best we can do right now. Consider this: An electric car like the Tesla has a battery pack several times larger and heavier than a normal car's full gas tank. The drive system and the vehicle as a whole are much more thermodynamically efficient (miles per watt of input). Yet, the vehicle's range is at most a third of a normal car's. Until electrical energy storage makes at least an order of magnitude improvement in density, electric vehicles will remain highly inconvenient compared to combustion engines.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
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.
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.
Er. Uh. WTF?
Automotive air conditioner compressors are not powered by vacuum[1].
Instead, they are driven by a belt which is connected to the crank shaft by means of two or more pulleys and an electric clutch (which is used to disengage the compressor when not needed, or conditions dictate[2]).
The reason the air conditioner seems so overbuilt in a car is because it -is- overbuilt, because the demands upon it are huge. Peope don't treat them the same as they do in their homes. You don't leave your glass house to sit in an unshaded parking lot for 8 hours and then expect its AC to cool it off from 100+ degrees to something tolerable in just a few minutes, do you?
But you do expect the car's AC to do just that, and cool the air as instantaneously as possible. And remember, it doesn't just have to keep up with the sunlight streaming through the windows, but it also has to remove heat from a few hundred pounds of plastic and sheet metal in the interrior, plus offset the heat generated by its warm-blooded occupants. A pre-heated car with 5 people in it on a hot, sunny day requires a lot of cooling capacity to catch up, let alone keep up, and I'm sure that a lot of folks in such a situation might feel that it's nowhere near overbuilt enough. (The profound lack of meaningful thermal insulation doesn't help much, either.)
So, yeah. It's inefficient and wasteful. But then, so is anything else that involves a piston engine.
[1]: Yeah, sure. The controls in the passenger compartment may be vacuum-operated, but they're just setting the position of various flaps and valves inside the maze of ducts inside the dashboard. There have been various vacuum-operated accessories in cars in the past (things like convertable tops, windshield wipers) as well as in the present (power-assisted brakes), but they're all pretty small things. To suggest that the vacuum of a small gasoline engine is adequate to run a multi-kilowatt compressor load is laughable, at best: Even if you did get it to work, the engine would be uncontrollable at low-to-idle throttle due to presense of copious amounts of air in the cylinders where there would normally be a partial vacuum. Fuel input would have to be increased to match, or else there would be detonation due to the lean mixture (which is every bit as bad as it sounds). This combination of increased air and increased fuel will result in, you guessed it, increased engine speed. Which is not exactly something you want happening just because you switch on the AC, and reeks of "lawsuit waiting to happen." And never mind the efficiency of this hypothetical clusterfuck.
[2]: The compressor may turn off and on depending on pressures (too high, or too low), engine load, throttle position, temperature inside or outside or both, or whatever else the car's designers had in mind.
Kid-proof tablet..
You're missing a vital point. Regardless of overall efficiency, an electric vehicle can be powered by any form of electricity generation. Nuclear, using an Integral Fast Reactor, is 'as good as it gets' in terms of power generation. Carbon neutral, no long-term radioactive waste output, inherently safe, and very efficient in terms of uranium usage (99.5% energy recovered as compared with ~1% in a standard nuclear reactor). In terms of CO2 output, switching to electric vehicles has no immediate negative impact and long term very positive impact.
According to this, the most efficient well-to-wheels technology is a hybrid drive burning a petrol/methane mix. However, hybrids still require fossil fuels which ultimately lead to carbon emissions, and they are orders of magnitude more complex to build than battery electrics, which are currently expensive only due to companies trying to recoup R&D investment costs, rather than inherent manufacturing expense.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
The processing into vegetable oil is a completely mature, low-energy process: simple mechanical pressing, ultrasonic agitation, and miner solvents are all used.
Transesterification of the vegetable oil is likewise a well-understood process, though it takes significant amounts (something like 10% of the energy content, IIRC) of alchohols, and is relatively slow. I've seen at least half a dozen new catalysts for transesterification which drastically speed the reaction, paper launch from the lab in the last year - metal oxides and high-surface-area nanoreactors.
Vegetable oil can be used as a pure fuel source in diesel engines, if it's preheated significantly and doesn't have to deal with cold weather. Transesterification into biodiesel brings the gel point and viscosity most of the way to diesel territory, though extreme-low-temperature performance can be an issue.
All this has been accomplished on an industrial level, but it's a very young industry, very private, and very tentative. If oil goes back to $20/barrel, the entire industry collapses overnight, like the one that formed after the last oil crash.
Soybeans are infact a horrible substance to make biodiesel out of - Rapeseed(canola) is the nearest comparable crop that's used, and it achieves 3x the yield per acre. Soya biodiesel is a huge PR project and a baseline demand load for the soya industry (see fuel ethanol coming from France's wine glut). Since Japan started buying whole soybeans instead of protein isolates a while ago, it's an unnecessary one.
Algae is promised to POTENTIALLY achieve 5000-20000 gallons per acre-year (Soybeans, 50, Rapeseed, 150) by the underfunded + now deceased Aquatic Species Program initiated after the first oilshock. This is a HIGHLY optimistic range, but even at 1/10 the lower bound, it's competitive with oil palms. Aquaculture of the ideal monocrop/ecosystem for maximal fatty-acid storage from photosynthesis in the easy-to-contaminate, hard-to-isolate micro-realm, on the other hand, is a work in process. We have tens of thousands of years of agricultural experience, and there are still agricultural science theses coming out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel_production
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation