Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Yes, it's still an urban legend that you can violate the laws of thermodynamics.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.'"
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Even with complete combustion, gasoline (or any hydrocarbon) combusts to CO2 plus water vapor, not only water vapor, which was what the GP was asking. The only way something can combust to just water vapor, even assuming complete combustion, is if it doesn't start out with any elements other than hydrogen and oxygen in the reactants.
(The wikipedia article you quote makes this clear, too, but your statement here seems to have overlooked that rather basic fact.)
The carbon is certainly the major problem. Perhaps when it comes to using hydrocarbons for fuel we need a new definiton of "perfect". A reaction where the carbon by-product is a solid not a gas, might be of more long term interest than maximum energy extraction.
We are all just people.
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:
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.
Capacitor Tech is increasing!
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
The problem with compressed air is that the energy density is even worse than batteries. Plus, as you approach capacity, the incremental energy required to add more energy to the tank increases exponentially. Converting the air pressure directly to motive power will always be more efficient than converting the energy to electrical then to motive power. Compressed air is inefficient to produce, dangerous to store, and low energy density. It is not currently a viable alternative.
---- Just another spud server.
No mass-market innovation will EVER come out of the government. Superficially, the Internet appears to be an exception to his rule... You sir are an idiot. I can't believe you're being modded as insightful. What about polarized sunglasses, insulation, cordless power tools, the smoke detector, LEDs, infra-red thermometers, better golf balls, and that's just the space program. If you want military let's include jet engines, rockets, GPS, satellite communications, mature broadcast communications. The list goes on and on and on.
Not at all. I run one myself. It has a big funnel on the roof which feeds a reservoir. A simple waterwheel and high ratio reduction gear provides forward movement. Okay, not much forward movement, but as climate change increases the average rainfall, things can only get better.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
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?
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
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.
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.
The world can't handle more cars. The car has to go away.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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.
I already have my car of the future: it is called a bicycle :-)
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.
I agree with on on every point, and hope that the future turns out to be nuclear/fusion powered, with hydrogen and battery cars on the road.
One question i have above future power sources is how, if battery power is made the norm, we will find all the materials to make all these batterys and what will their cycle lifes be?
BTW ethanol would never work, we did calculations in high school chemistry. Everything about ethanol is great, the only problem is that in order to produce enough to run the USA's cars alone (not industry, or other countries) we would need to devote most of the worlds farmland to the venture.
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.
But dust and particulates are "solid". I want my engine to extrude its waste as a block of graphite. Or a rope of carbon nanotubes!