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Google Spends Money to Jump-Start Hybrid Car Development
slugo writes "Internet search giant Google (GOOG) hopes to speed the development of plug-in hybrid cars by giving away millions of dollars to people and companies that have what appear to be practical ways to get plug-in hybrid automobiles to market faster. 'While many people don't associate Google with energy, analysts say the fit isn't all that unnatural. Renewable energy, unlike coal or nuclear, will likely come from thousands or tens of thousands of different locations. Analysts have long said that one of the big challenges will be managing that flow into and out of the nation's electric grid, and that companies that manage the flow of information are well placed to handle that task.'"
... every Google Car will have Google Maps built in ... complete with Google ads based on your GPS derived location.
They are just as efficient as non-hybrids. We should perfect solar cells and windmills and use that for alternative energy.
this is the sort of thing they said their philanthropic foundation would invest in. It's really got nothing to do with managing the electric grid flow of information.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I think it'd make more sense to use the money as a bounty for advances in hybrid cars than to throw it around, the same way the x-prize does. It saves you the difficulty of efficient capital allocation.
\u262D = \u5350
Well I know how to regulate the flow of water in and out of my body. Therefore I'm well poised to manage the future electrical grid.
* The advanced hybrid vehicle research center at University of California-Davis (founded and directed by CalCars advisor Prof. Andy Frank) has converted nine sedans and SUVs into PHEVs that have repeatedly won prizes in US Energy Department-sponsored "FutureTruck" competitions. Dr. Frank, widely known as the "Father of the Plug-In Hybrid," has been working on PHEVs for thirty years, and building them with students for more than a decade.
* CalCars produced the world's first plug-in Prius (the PRIUS+) in 2004. Since then a number of companies have emerged to offer conversions for sale to consumers and fleet buyers, and CalCars has worked to support a growing open-source conversion movement.
* In 2003-04, the US Marine Corps demonstrated a diesel-electric PHEV-20 HUMVEE. (The military likes the silent, zero-heat "footprint" in all-electric mode, and appreciates saving fuel that can cost well over $100/gallon to deliver to front lines.) This advanced Shadow RST-V (Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Targetting Vehicle PHEV, built by General Dynamics, uses lightweight lithium-ion batteries and motors in four wheel hubs. See details and photos and more descriptions.
* Long Island, NY has converted a city bus to a plug in hybrid with 40 miles of all-electric range. Many more heavy-duty vehicle conversions (including three recycling dump-trucks that will run in "silent" mode for pickups) are in progress. see here
How we know is more important than what we know.
If Microsoft copies this endeavor we can all start up the "if Microsoft made cars" jokes again. Here's hoping!
They're slow, inefficient, and thirsty. Manufacturing the batteries and disposing of them when they wear out after five years or so is an ecological nightmare.
Batteries can be r-e-c-y-c-l-e-d.
Football Odds
How we know is more important than what we know.
Mmm, diesel hybrids.....
Aside from the battery issues, what is wrong with hybrids? AFAIK they're not particularly slow, ineffeicient (diesel hybrids can be pretty darn efficient), OR thirsty. I mean the whole POINT of them is that they are efficient (for city driving at least).
They're "complex" mostly because they're new and most mechanics don't know how to work on them. The idea is to get more out there and standardize them and make them less novel.
How are hybrids and evolutionary dead end if electric cars will eventually be the future? Hybrids will drive battery development, electric motor development, etc. Seems like a natural step to me. Where do you get off calling it a dead end.
Sticking with a purely combustion drive train the dead end.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Hybrids are not a dead end. They are the equilibrium waiting to be punctured.
Or, in less metaphorical terms, they are the bridging technology that makes the transition to electics possible when the battery technology improves. When the first really economical, environmentally reasonable battery comes along, it will face the chicken-and-egg problem of cars first or charging stations first. Hybrids wiil solve that.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
That doesn't make any sense at all. It makes so little sense, I can't even think of an analogy close enough to what they said to properly mock them.
have put that money to energy source research.
Better batteries and fuel cells.
an efficient car takes a lot of resources for different parts, so the research money gets spread thin amongst many different technologies.
Relax, it's just an opinion.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Which forces me to ask why "companies that manage the flow of information are well placed to handle that task"?
You'd think that the power companies, at most, would need to update their billing software. WTF does managing the flow of information have to do with a $1 million grant? Am I missing something else?
As an aside, one of the continuing problems with electric vehicles is battery temperature.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
...until I hooked up my LAN cable to it and did a Google search. Then it started right up!
I recommend you get a license to sell real estate
:(){
If you are concerned about impact, diesel is not the way to go. The produce much more toxic chemicals then a gas powered vehicles. Biodiesel is better then diesel, but still not cleaner then gas.
"what hybrid car exactly have you been driving? at the very least they are more efficient than most of the cars on the road and certainly any SUV that people drive."
Sure, but not more efficient then a 3 cylinder gas powered car like the Chevy Sprint.
Cheaper to make, more efficient use of energy, cheap to maintain on has a small battery to worry about disposal. Uses less resources to make.
I have no idea why you brought up SUVs, they're not in the same class.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Most people don't know that.
SUprise, must people don't know google uses a cluster.
I wonder if the moved into some of the new mainframes. Some of which could run 90,000 machines in memory. Seems it would cost a lot less when power is considered.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Overall, Biofuels are a mistake. About the only place that I see them of use is in the algae's ability to accumulate a LOT of CO2. But if we move from fuels in the first place, we will almost certainly move to electric cars. That means that we will have the ability to manage the pollution at single sources rather than multiple points.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
you'd have to ask everyone to step out of the car, break out the seats, unscrew the door at the drivers' side and open all your other windows so you can pump gas because your tires were guestimated to a traction experience rating of 2.7 and the gaspump requires an overal experience rating of 3.0. When your gastank opening has a pump experience rate of 5.2...
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Part of the benefit of hybrids and electrical plug-in vehicles is that they are source-neutral. Any source can feed the grid, and in turn, your vehicle. As new energy sources become viable, your vehicle reliability increases and it becomes easy to phase in and phase out sources depending on economical viability, political environments (wars, etc), disasters, and technological breakthroughs.
Diesel is a great start to help us get there in the meantime.
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=ev1&start=0&ie=u tf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en- US:official
Seems to me the oil companies are just making sure we keep using oil and make sure no competing infrastructure exists to provide vehicles with energy.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Google has reduced the energy consumption at its giant data centers by more than 50 percent compared with "standard" data centers, using evaporative cooling for its servers and other means, said Urs Hoelzle, a senior vice president of operations. At the same time, he admitted, Google is growing so fast that its energy consumption each year is actually increasing. Funding hybrid development is apparently one of their "carbon neutral" endeavors.
To achieve a goal of getting to 10% of PV power in one year, you'd need to put in 10% * 10 = 100% of current electrical power. That would require first doubling existing electrical generation capacity. Even a 2% PV goal requires 20% of current generation capacity which is still way too high (and 2% per year is hardly going to make any significant inroads - it would not even address growth).
Clearly PV will only ever work with a huge mindshift that goes away from curent silicon-based strategies to a new silicon-based strategy, or radically different strategy, with a far better payback. There are alternatives, but they lack funding and support eg. http://masseynews.massey.ac.nz/2007/Press_Releases /04-04-07.html This is not the only such different approach - there have been quite a few through the years.
The major labs are still focussed on silicon and high performance and fighting over conversion efficiency rather than $/W which is the important measurement for general usage. Until $/W is targetted as a primaray goal, these technologies will get nowhere useful.
Perhaps it is telling that many major oil companies (BP, Shell and others), with a vested interest in preserving the status quo, are directing a significant portion of the industry research.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
uh, your aware that the recycling process is insanely toxic and invovles lead smelting and burning plastics, and disposing of sulphuric acid waste.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Renewable energy, unlike coal or nuclear, will likely come from thousands or tens of thousands of different locations.
That's great and all, and I'm all in favor of utilizing the zillions of acres of rooftop in the US and around the world to accommodate solar cells. But if you're going to move the automobile infrastructure to electricity and away from petroleum, you're going to have to build more nuclear power plants.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Nice gesture, but can we ditch the fossil fuel dependancy? I can already blow up at the gas pump when Bill Dumbass is smoking next to me or leaving the engine running. Hydrogen cant be much worse.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Consider the responsiveness of google's applications, the volume of data, and the number of users. This isn't a server at some ISP, or even a server farm-- google owns a massively distributed network of staggering complexity from central points all the way out to local nodes. They snap up dark fiber left and right to augment their backbone. They're currently running somewhere in the neighborhood of a half-million servers.
If anybody can figure out how to coordinate the use of millions of hybrid-car batteries as some sort of parellelized grid-connected energy store despite the obvious availability problems with mobile energy stores that are only connected intermittently, it's probably them.
You are not taking the entire energy equation into account. You have to factor in the energy used in the mining, refining and maintenance of the batteries + charging system.
If anyone wants some good history about the electric car and how it was killed in california, the documentary "Who killed the Electric Car" is worth watching.
r ic_Car?
You can catch the trailer over at youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSBykAngDpY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Elect
I think its a great initiative by Google, but why aim for producing Hybrid cars? As I see it, the overall idea is trying to move away from fossil fuels. Why keep a fosil fuel component at all?
http://youtube.com/watch?v=OXqYbNEiW0Y
Purely electric cars look like a great option.
Cars are the best examples of recycling we have. Have you ever passed by a junk yard? Next time, take a better look.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
GM had an exhibit for awhile that placed all of the parts in a mainstream car, all of the parts in a hybrid car, and all of the parts in a hypothetical fuel-cell car. the first was a good twice the length of the second, which was a comparable length to the third.
http://www.geothermie.de/egec-geothernet/basic/200 3_05_06first_shell.htm
I was told that the hydrogen is sealed so good that you can even smoke when you are refilling hydrogen by a scientist from National Renewable Engergy Lab.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Google is doing this simply because they can not lose and may gain big. This is not going to change anything else that they are doing.
The article is very long on fluff and does not give up a lot of details which makes it very hard to read between the lines or even to read much into the article. This is not something that aligns itself with Google's "core business" so one must ask why is Google doing this?
Almost everyone will agree that the folks at Google are smart. Frankly they have not comitted a lot of money. It could be that they are just funding this for the goodwill (and publicity) that they will gain. From the amount of money that they have pledged, this could be the only reason. Aligning yourself with an energy issue that everyone cares about is worth a million or even ten million to a company with the reach (and pocketbook) of a company like Google. Google is certainly doing "no evil" with this.
Going back to the part where I said the folks at Google are smart makes me think that this may be something a bit more. Something that they can justify simply for the goodwill and publicity that the effort generates but can maybe give them something more. It seems like this is how they almost always work. In this light, I am wondering if this is a "testing of the water" of the energy venture capital business. Low risk (with billions in available cash one or ten million is not a big wager) with huge potential rewards if the smart folks at Google pick the right project(s) to fund.
The smart people at Google come from a wide range of sciences and specialties. If you put the right people together to review the requests for funding, they stand a fair to middlin chance of picking the right one(s).
Google is indeed smart.
Manufacturing the batteries and disposing of them when they wear out after five years or so is an ecological nightmare. Hardly... at least insofar as the Prius is concerned. Its batteries are recyclable, and NiMH isn't toxic or dangerous like lead-acid or lithium anyway. Furthermore, the batteries should last the life of the vehicle; testing showed no measurable degradation after 150,000 miles.
And then there is tesla roadster, and compressed air car (which is in fact negative emission car, because to compress air you must filtrate it).
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
Too many people. Use pedicabs. Far simpler, nearly non-polluting and employs all those that would otherwise be sitting at home collecting welfare and watching TV.
Bubble 2.0, but this time it's almost entirely funded by google.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I can't wait for the crash.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Uh you are aware that no electric cars use Lead acid batteries anymore? Only the ones designed in the 70's and sold at a deep discount rate are based on old lead acid tech. Almost ALL current electric cars have Li-Ion battery packs, can go far longer on a charge and are easily recycled.
Only the knock-off electrics or the ones cruising on 20 year old tech use lead acid. Heck a company in Texas makes a Li-ion battery pack and motor that can make a Mini cooper beat the crap out of a Z06 vette off the line easily (you cant beat having 100% torque available from 0 rpm to top rpm.) and their battery packs are 100% recyclable without harmful waste.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
First, google and everybody is focused on doing cars. That is a HUGE mistake. Cars are subject to a load of regulations. Worse, you have to deal with styling, specs and all the interior/exterior. The right way to start this, is to fire up a company doing hybrid Trucks. In particular, just the frame, cab, motor(s), and a serial generator/ICE that is in one component. The frame should have multiple sizes that match many of today's trucks. From there, they should make it available as stripped or as a simple panel truck. What will happen is that all the bus manufacturers, Panel trucks, delivery trucks, even mail trucks will port their stuff over to it. Once the company is up and running AND they have a name, then switch up to doing Automobiles. One of the most important things here is to develop the name and the manufactuers line. Later, as battery or even better yet, capacitor tech improves, the generator/ICE can be pulled in one piece, and the new energy carrier put in.
But yeah, Google doeas continue to show innovation.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Um, all of the current Hybrids already use NiMH batteries. I don't know why you think they use Lead-Acid. Recycling the batteries would be a problem, but they're designed not to wear out--and empirical evidence suggests that they do a pretty good job of not wearing out, the only people that I've found who replace Prius batteries are the guys who are converting them into plug-in Hybrids and want to get more miles out of them.
I read the internet for the articles.
Not being a farmer, when I came to live with my sister and her husband, I have become quite spell-bound when my brother-in-law tells me his "Farm" Stories. One of those, he recounts to me, is about this guy that bought a new Ford F250 and found he was getting 30mpg no matter how he drove it. On the Farm, on the Highway, in the city, no matter what he did, he got 30mpg. Instead of thanking his lucky stars and keeping this a secret, the guy returns the truck to the dealership, where they take it from him and tell him they have to order him a new one. Apparently, this F250 was made for Saudi Arabia and not to be used in the US. So, I got to ask this. Are those folk-stories true that the BIG Car Companies having gobbled up the technology that would allows to get 60, 70, 80, or even 90mpg in our autos and trucks? And if so, then why would we even have to consider hybrids? Just one of those hmmmm moments
because cars are a necessary evil and yet there are some of us who would like to lessen the impact of the cars we need to use.
Yes and No. Most people can get away with one car and a bicycle or velomobile for their daily short commutes. adding electric assist would greatly improve your distance. Every wingle other country on the planet has more bikes on the roads than cars.
Americans are just too lazy and fat. They would rather drive 2 blocks to get ice cream instead of riding a bike or god forbid... walk there.
Cars ARE a necessary evil for trips over 10 miles. and even then I guarentee I can find at least 1000 people that will disagree with that and mention that public transit like busses and trains will get you there.
But I'm like you, I cant stand sitting next to some icky poor person or not look like I'm rich by pulling into work in my Mercedes.
so I ride in to work on a $4500.00 recumbent. I'm hoping to buy a velomobile by the end of this summer for all weather commuting (yes even winter) simply with the money I am saving on Heath club membership, gas and insurance.
Side benefit, I stay in way better shape than everyone else, my cost to commute is zero, and I get to be even more smug than the prius drivers.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Crash? What gives you the idea there is going to be a crash?
Is it because Google isnt generating earnings at a rate of 70% Year over Year... no?
Is it because their rival search engines have had such good news lately... no?
Is it because $500 is a lot of money for a stock... no?
So out of curiosity, what bubble are you talking about? And do you have anything substantive other than the hot air coming out of your mouth to back it up?
They're slow, inefficient, and thirsty.
Have you ever driven a hybrid? Mine is plenty fast and gets great gas mileage.
I will say that the current cars are only the start, and the technology will get better with each new generation.
Here is a nice overview of compressed air cars. They are going into production soon.
http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/659/
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer. - Edward R. Murrow
You haven't heard of the Automotive X_Prize?
h tml
http://www.xprize.org/xprizes/automotive_x_prize.
I think one of the biggest issues with electric cars and plug-in hybrids is not battery life, but charge time. Right now, Tesla has a car that goes 200 miles on a charge at freeway speeds. The problem is that it takes several hours to charge it. 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. But who knows, it could still be hype.
If Google can focus their attention on reducing charge times, then a lot of the problems associated with electric cars go away.
There is one very sever problem with doing trucks first; trucks actually have to be economical. You can sell a consumer a car that costs more over life of the vehicle on warm thoughts and green trendiness. For a truck, you will have absolutely no such luck. Trucking companies run on thin margins and will demand economics above all else. Further, trucks are the hardest of all possible problems to solve. Namely, a truck demands extreme range and extreme power. The range issue in particular is very hard problem for 'green' cars to solve.
Cars are (relatively) low hanging fruit. You still need range, but in truth, if you can offer a car that for the first 40 miles runs off the grid and then switches over to gas, you have just made a car that will spend 95% of its time on the grid and make a dent in the problem. For a 'first 40 miles is on the grid' truck on the other hand doesn't even begin to touch the problem nor entice any trucking companies to buy your product.
I am not suggesting that shipping is not a major environmental problem. It is. That said, it is a problem that is much farther out of reach then the issue of personal transportation. To fix shipping, it is going to take a major technological breakthrough that really is not yet on the horizon. Cars on the other hand can be tackled with the tools of today and have a significant environmental impact.
Google thinks it knows mechanical engineering. And they think they know where to put money in efficient cars. And they think it's plug-in hybrids. Please stick to what you know Google. You're basically awesome at what you've done, but take it from a mechanical engineer, you're barking up the wrong tree with this one.
So out of curiosity, what bubble are you talking about? And do you have anything substantive other than the hot air coming out of your mouth to back it up?
Hot air and about a decade worth of experience.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
So you mean the chicken didn't come first or the egg but instead some hybrid bird-egg creature?
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Ok. That explains it. The only connection that I could see between this and Google was the fact that Google's facilities are well-known energy guzzlers, and hybrids are perceived as energy-sippers.
Really, this carbon-offset fad is BS. If I piss in the pool, but pay you not to, does that make the pool cleaner? It's the environmentalist equivalent of indulgences in the religious context. If you really drink the environmentalist Kool-Aid, you'd stop pissing in the pool to begin with, and find a way to power your massive datacenters off of solar power, wind power or some other totally ineffective technology.
Either that or get over it and put your money to better use.
I am MuchTall
Nuclear Energy is non-renewable? Excuse me? That is like stating that solar energy or wind power is non-renewable. They are ALL in infinite supply and are non-expendable (we cannot use them all up.)
Coal fired power plants, which burn a non-renewable and expendable resource, release tons of "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere. With Nuclear power, we know precisely where every single molecule of waste material goes, which is into a barrel, encased in ceramic, and stored away in a facility designed to last 5x longer than the radiological half-life of the waste material stored there.
The fear of nuclear energy has its rational sources. First is the environmental movement that fought against atmospheric testing of nuclear warheads during the cold war era. I applaud those efforts. What also happened is during this same period is we were taught what to do in case of a nuclear attack from Russia, which by every measure would have been horrific. Add in a 3 Mile Island and a Chernobyl and you've got an entire generation of Americans that has transferred the horror and fear of Nuclear weapons over to everything Nuclear. Fact is that 3 Mile Island, while it did release radon gas is not a catastrophe that even approaches the generational fear that it inspires and Chernobyl is a classic Soviet-Era f**k-up-cover-up situation. Its funny that nothing is ever said of the 100+ nuclear reactors currently in use in America, or that ALL of France is currently powered by Nuclear Power. With hundreds upon hundreds of plants in use throughout the globe running for all these years, all with nary an incident to report... What are we so afraid of?
Charging a battery takes electricity. Electricity that is generated from anything other than nuclear, wind, or solar power is a net negative on the 'greenhouse gases' scale. Of all those energy sources, the only one viable for long term is nuclear. Sorry, but it is a fact.
A renewable resource is one that can be replaced, like a tree. The lumber that is used to build houses, the wood that is used to make paper is all generated from (ghasp!) a renewable resource. What drives me nuts is that these multinational corporations that produce lumber and paper harvest it ALL from their OWN TREE FARMS. They own millions of acres of land where they methodically grow their trees on a rotational basis where they harvest the same spot every 20 years. Oh, and your Christmas tree; it is grown on a tree farm as well. To say that paper production or wood production depletes our natural resources is the same thing as saying that eating french fries depletes our national supply of potatoes.
I'm an expert (of sorts) in document printing, specifically with optical document security and printing of security papers. A small printing company I work with consumes 28 tons of paper every single day. They know exactly where the wood pulp comes from. You don't make paper from just any old wood pulp (although you could). The trees are bred and grown specifically for use in making paper. But some folks out there want you to believe that they are forever seeking a new rainforest to chop down to consume their insatiable desire for more wood pulp.
Uh, sorry folks, trees, yeah, trees are a renewable resource.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Mmmm. Bombs on wheels, and they don't meet any reasonable set of safety standards.
But hey, that farting sound they make is really cool...
> cat ~/.signature | grep -v bullshit
>
... that way, if it breaks down on your grandmother, all she has to do is pull out her trusty toolkit, break out the blueprints, locate the part at fault in the engine, fashion a replacement for it out of chewing gum, and she will be on her way...
(I am not usually this cynical, but after 3 hours spent yesterday trying to get Beryl running on a coworker's new Ubuntu-inside-a-VM I am not in the best of humor when it comes to OSS today. He was very big on installing Beryl after he saw videos on Youtube of how cool it looked compared to Vista. Key distinction: Vista could have been installed on his machine by a trained monkey.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
However, it does make it less dirty, and that is still a good thing.
That said, I totally agree with the point that the total energy consumption of course should go down. That is in the end the way to go. But with the money google is now spending on energy efficiency (in and out of their datacentres), in the end they will make sure a lot of energy is saved.
In the end we want of course to go to a completely carbon-neutral economy (and it seems that Venezuela may beat the rest of the world in that, I'm really interested on how they're going to pull that off) - and one way to do this is investing in energy-saving technology on the one hand, and renewable energy sources on the other hand, and it appears to me that Google is now doing exactly that. Both of them even.
Instead of all the rigmarole of dealing with hybrids, why not go with an all-electric car that draws its power from the road like the old toy slot cars did? Electrify the interstates and be done with it. That way, you don't care if your car with cheap lead-acid batteries only has a 100 mile range because the interstates aren't any further away than that. You power the rails with nuclear power and away goes the demand for 40% of the world's oil. Standardize the nuclear plant designs and you can stamp them out of a factory which makes electricity dirt cheap.
Adding slots adds a few more benefits. Now that the car knows where the slot is, it knows where the road is so you can get on the highway and turn the driving over to the car. You can read, sleep or do whatever on your commute. You get the benefit of trains combined with the flexibility of cars.
Since the power source is not coal or gas, the air in the cities clears. If you ever have seen Los Angeles on a clear day, you know why people wanted to move there in the 30's - it's really, really pretty when you can see 60 miles. The cities would become attractive places to live again.
It just requires the will to electrify the roads and we can tell the Saudis to go to hell. Forget hybrids - give me slot cars instead.
So, why hasn't Toyota started shipping them? Conspiracy theories abound...
New tech.. Conservative company.. no long term track record.
The 2001 Prius released in the US was old tech with a proven track record by the time they introduced it in the USA in 2001. I believe it had a 5 year test in Japan first. The consumers biggest concern was $5,000 extra for hybrid tech and the battery will be dead in 3-5 years requiring a $5,000 replacement. That $10,000 will buy a lot of gas at $1.50/gallon. A hybrid will never payback the investment.
Now you have a new battery and because it's not deployed in full scale yet, it's a conspiracy theory. I'd rather believe they are trying to avoid the SONY Li-Ion syndrone. The SONY battery problem could bankrupt Toyota and they know it. A few fried laptops is one thing. A few battery packs going into Li-Ion meltdown next to the fuel tank on the freeway is a litigation lawyers dream and an engineer's nightmare. Remember, this is a high density energy battery. There is a large energy release in failure mode.
I'm not on the conspriacy theory side this time. I'm on the conservative engineer's side on this one. Even though I may get better performance with Li-Ion instead of the battery Toyota uses now, I feel safer with this battery. After 5 years in a limited test, maybe they will be safe to deploy on a large scale. For safety, I wouldn't want one untested on the freeway next to my gas tank. The current batteries have been crash tested.
The truth shall set you free!
Gee, good thing the Toyota and Honda hybrids come with a 8 years/100,000 mile warranty on the batteries! (http://www.toyota.com/vehicles/2005/prius/faq.htm l) This warranty means that the batteries won't fail every 5 years.
I'll believe it when I see it. I know hybrids use NiMH batteries, but I haven't bought a normal lead-acid car battery in ten years because I buy the "Guaranteed for Five Years" ones and replace them every three or four years when they eventually lose capacity.
at the very least they are more efficient than most of the cars on the road
At best they do about 45-50mpg, which is frankly pathetic. For a diesel VW Golf was burning fuel at the rate the (rather smaller) Prius was, it would have to be on fire.
that is what recycling is for.
Oh right, and batteries are recycled with no pollution or toxic waste?
so is everything that is relatively new technology
No, they're costly and expensive because they need roughly twice as many components as a non-hybrid car.
Mmmm. Bombs on wheels
And a metal tin with a mixture of petrol, petrol vapour and air is *what* exactly? From one of the linked video clips, the pressure in the tank is only around 4300psi (300 bar or so), which is about the pressure in a normal LPG tank when it's full.
The Prius may cost more than the Corolla, but it depreciates more slowly. Assuming you drive it for a few years and sell it, it'd be more cost effective to go with the Prius even if they got the same mileage.
No. Fuel cells is a red herring, designed to divert and waste money invested into alternative fuel. Hydrogen in fuel form is not naturally occuring, and producing it will reduce efficiency way way below any standard car.
investing in hybrids, ay.
I mean, make sure the cars are able to supply power to the grid as well as get power from it. Almost all cars spend most of their time standing still, and their vast battery capacity could be a great help for grid stability and take some load off of dirty peak power plants.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
It's important to think of this as two problems: energy source, and energy storage.
Part of what makes petroleum hard to compete with is its incredible energy density. If you stop to think for a moment about the idea of propelling a few tons of steel twenty or fifty miles even through all of the ridiculous inefficiencies of an internal combustion engine, it becomes clear exactly how much energy is in that gallon of gasoline.
The big downfall of pure-electric cars has always been that electric batteries are absolute rubbish for energy density when compared to petroleum. It takes nearly a ton of electric battery to hold the same amount of energy one gets out of a gallon of gasoline.
I'm sad to say it, but petroleum addresses the energy storage problem vastly better than any other available solution. When combined with its convenience as an energy source (it is, literally, just sitting there waiting to be picked up), it is clearly, by any single-point-in-time measure, the best choice to drive vehicles.
Which is unfortunate, because it has some serious downsides in the longer term. But "the longer term" is generally an externality, not something that a market can incorporate well on its own.
What's with the ticker symbols? Either the submitter did a simple cut&paste from a press release, or he's still lost in the dot-com era.
What information value has the ticker symbol in this news?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Cars seem to have become useless in large metro areas. At best all they can do is create traffic jams. I'd prefer not to have to drive at all, and let someone/something else do the driving.
Hope is the currency of fools
Swapping out batteries works pretty well for phones and laptops. Is anyone working on swappable batteries for cars? Filling stations would offer a pretty good infrastructure for keeping people on the road. What are the conceptual problems, if any?
I think I see a Google Power Plant (beta) coming in the future (between servers, cooling and now plug in cars, their electric bill will be huge). To subscribe to Google Power Plant you must be invited by a friend (who get's 6 invitations). Your bill will come with targeted ads if they notice you use power at night you will get ads for sleep aids, if you use it during the day you will get ads for work at home jobs, if your power usage spikes at 5:30 they will assume you are cooking dinner and send out some grocery ads.
Have you ever driven a hybrid? Mine is plenty fast and gets great gas mileage.
Yes, I've driven a Prius. It could keep pace with other motorway traffic at 85mph, but that seemed to be about its limit. The acceleration was fairly quick, but top speed and handling were poor once you got out onto open roads. At an average of 60mph, it was returning a less-than-amazing 45mpg.
I will say that the current cars are only the start, and the technology will get better with each new generation.
True. It's early days yet.
I have a 2003 civic hybrid, with 140,000 KM on it, and the batteries are still going strong. They charge up, and last pretty much like the day I bought the car. I compared the car with several other vehicules when I bought it, and it give much better acceleration than any non-hybrid I tried that had a similar fuel rating.
Google should focus on a core business, and not be a piggy-bank for new-age hobbies. Almost every company goes through financial bottlenecks sooner or later.
Neither can you.
The working class often do have garages. They just aren't necessarily attached. Those that don't have garages can build them if the really one. Some do from time to time.
You are confusing those who are working and well off enough to have cars with those that might as well be called the "working poor" and don't have any cars to worry about to begin with.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
How is that different exactly?
Modern industrial production of just about anything is a nasty toxic process.
Don't want to burn plastics? Are you read to give them up right now?
I don't think you have any real clue what you're babbling about.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Unfortunately there are not bike paths everywhere, and many places don't have reasonable shoulders. Combined with the typical American drivers attitude that they own the road, especially on highways, biking to work is dangerous proposition. I was looking into biking ot work sometimes, but I'd rather not get killed.
I'm impressed with your post. Almost every sentence is a personal attack, and you even admit you are smug at the end. Yet you are labeled "interesting" and not flamebait. Kudos, I have much to learn from you.
Thanks for the link to the air car--seems very cool to me, and I think cars are the least exciting use for air power.
Think of wind power that--instead of using lossy conversion of mechanical power to electricity, which has to be transported somewhere and is hard to store--uses compressed air directly, and stores it in big tanks (which are not bombs, as intelligent posters, and decades of experience with SCUBA tanks has shown).
Imagine a farm, where the farmer pulls his tractor, or Combine, up to the air tap (run from his windmill) and fills up to go and plow, harvest, whatever that back forty. Imagine that the same compressed air runs a generator to power his house (and air-condition it). Imagine heating same house in the winter with the waste heat that results when air is compressed (just need a thermal sink, basically a big slab of masonry to store the heat for a heat exchanger).
Imagine massive rows of windmills in South Dakota, the Saudi Arabia of wind, compressing air that is transported in high pressure pipelines (easier to build than hydrogen pipes) to centralized industrial centers in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Where the power runs cleanly and predictably, backed up by big storage tanks. Big power plants can be built in anyone's backyard, since their only output is extra air and cooling (put a cold sink for one of these on Lake Superior, to help counteract the current warming caused by climate damage).
Will it work everywhere? Probably not. But we could take some big chunks of our current power needs off the Carbon grid and put it into wind.
Viva compressed air!
P.S. For the inevitable trolls, remember we already handle liquid nitrogen in industrial quantities without ever hearing about disasters caused by exploding tanker trucks, etc. Counter that with the recent total destruction of an access bridge in Oakland caused by a single tanker hitting an abutment and burning. Nothing is totally safe, but compressed air power can be made much safer than energy relying on combustion. And it is inherently more efficient, since there is no state changes involved. Air get squeezed, air expands.
Fundamentalism is a crime against humanity
They're made with nickel. The production of nickel is horribly toxic and the production of the batteries involves a lot of senseless shipping things back and forth, sometimes across oceans and sometimes just across continents.
The batteries WILL wear out eventually. Nothing lasts forever. When they do, how many of them will not be recycled? It's not like recycling NiMH batteries is lucrative. Even if they give you a little money for them, it's still an additional task to turn them in. That means that you're going to have to do it yourself at your inconvenience, or pay for it to be done, which means that in some cases, it won't be done at all.
I think we would be better off with air-diesel hybrids or something.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In some designs the electric motor replaces the alternator and the starter. I don't know if that's being done on any production vehicles, however.
Also, in an intelligent design there is no coupling between the two systems, beyond the road. The gasoline system is attached to the rear wheels and driven only when it is optimal or close enough. The electrical system is connected to the front wheels, where it is most useful for regenerative braking. Real, physical brakes are installed only on the rear wheels, where they will be useful as emergency brakes and parking brakes. Front wheel braking is done regeneratively or by applying power for brief moments, depending on the RPM (at very low RPMs regenerative braking doesn't work.) Rear brakes hold the car on hills.
That's the intelligent way to do a parallel hybrid, anyway. It eliminates the need for the coupling entirely. In a series hybrid the gasoline motor isn't connected to the road at all, just to a generator, so that's another non-issue.
Personally I want to see three things; full electrics, fuel-cell electrics, and series hybrids with turbines or other engines much more efficient than a typical four-stroker. Direct-injection two-stroke would be fine, or a small rotary (did you know that Norton made a couple different models of rotary-powered motorcycle?) or what have you. I think that a small turbine is the way to go, and I would start with Chrysler's third-generation car turbine design from the sixties, but what do I know? I'm more a pundit than an engineer.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't want to whine, but I'm asthmatic. Even riding a bicycle on flat ground when I was in good shape (I'm not now) would make me winded. And I hate living in the city, so I'm going to need to make longer trips. When the fuck will someone design a credible human-hybrid bicycle with regenerative braking? A friend of my lady's is testing the only regenerating model I know at a hilly hot springs near here (in Middletown, CA) and has been killing them left and right. When is someone going to come up with a full-sized diamond frame with regenerative braking? And that can haul my fat ass up a hill (perhaps with help?) I cannot bicycle up any hill worthy of being called that which is at all long.
There ARE other considerations. For example, the county in which I now live is far too dangerous to bicycle in.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
2007+ diesels require low-sulfur fuel because they have catalysts and the sulfur will burn them out. They actually have pretty good emissions, particularly in vehicles with direct injection (almost all of them now) and they should have quite good emissions on biodiesel.
There are also various things you can do to make diesels more efficient, like water injection. And you can get good clean performance by injecting methane and nitrous :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Nickel is a heavy metal and hazardous when in the states involved in battery manufacturing and recycling. The manufacture of the batteries involves heavy components shipped from all over the world and the batteries themselves make a couple of intercontinental trips during their manufacture... and some of the work is done in countries with little or no environmental oversight.
NiMH batteries involve significant environmental impact.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Tesla Motors already has a very nice electric car that will suit most people's needs. The only bad thing is the price ( about 90K - they are paying off R&D ) http://www.teslamotors.com/index.php Google ( as well as the Federal Government and the auto industry ) should forget about hybrids and focus on enhancing all electric cars. These cars will work with whatever form of energy is used to generate electricity. Maybe the can donate money to battery research to either get longer range batteries are ones that charge fast enough for a pit stop.
Nickel is a heavy metal
Ooooh, a dangerous heavy metal like Cadmium and Mercury? Not hardly; Ni has a lower atomic weight than copper and zinc. And it's not nearly as toxic as (for example) mercury.
Like this?
take a look at this It's a great system that assists you and they have a upscale versino that will charge the batteries with regenerative breaking.
It's incredibly cheap considering what it does. I will be adding one to my velomobile for electric assist.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yeah, that pretty much looks like what I'm looking for. I'll have to see if I can ride a bike equipped with one sometime, someplace. I might go to the SolFest in Hopland, it's coming up soon, maybe they'll have them there.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
WHAT!?!?!?!? Oh NoooooooooooooooooOO!
Can you say GoogleRON ???
While this sounds good, I tend to like the dependability of a good-ole' mechanical engine with simpler technology that's been tested, improved, and optimized for about a century. And picture this: an EMP goes off, and assuming you can get a jump one way or another, your diesel engine runs fine. Your PHEV-20 would likely be toast
All the same, that's a neat example of an application of PHEV innovations. Thanks for the heads-up.
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.
Then maybe you should get on to building one of those air diesel hybrids then. I'm sure you'll find that they have to be manufactured with toxic chemicals and materials that have to be shipped around through.
I read the internet for the articles.
You're fun. If only you knew who I was, then we could all enjoy your comments about me together, but for now I'll reside to my own amusement.
All cars have alternators, motors and batteries.
Yes, they do. How amazing that you realize that.
But no car I've ever owned has had a regenerative break system, a completely automatic starter, or an alternator/engine -- which is something substantially different from an alternator or an engine.