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?
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.'"
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.
I can't help thinking that all of these futurist projects assume near damn near ideal conditions of road, weather, distance and terrain.
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?
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.
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.
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.