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Efficiency? Think Racing Cars, Not Hybrids
Gordonjcp writes "A renowned racing car designer has said that car manufacturers should be looking at making cars lighter to improve efficiency, rather than adding complex drive trains. In this article on the BBC News website, Professor Gordon Murray explains that a weight saving of 10% in a normal car would make more difference than switching to a hybrid engine and motor combination. Could this be the next nail in the SUV's coffin?"
Because they're afraid they'll be crushed to a fine pulp when they get hit by a big honking SUV.
People are still buying SUVs, and really, I still prefer the idea of an SUV than a minivan or station wagon to try and haul people/stuff around. Maybe I'd feel different if I had a few children to get in and out, but I don't see the SUV going away anytime soon. Plus why not just make a lighter SUV?
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
... but how many coconuts can an SUV carry?
Cars need to be lighter and more aerodynamic. The drag on a standard automobile is just ridiculous. Rear ends today are typically vertically flat! Who are these designers that aren't familiar with the teardrop shape?
Developers: We can use your help.
"If it can be made out of black plastic, make it out of black plastic!"
(I had a crack in my radiator - sure enough, part of the manifold for the radiator was made out of black plastic as well. Surprised the engine block itself isn't black plastic, at times.)
Weight and cost savings. Nothing new (my car is a '97 Saturn; alive and well with 160k miles and between 30-40 MPG city).
I'm just saying...
It might be helpful.
So aerodynamics and weight make a difference when trying to propel an object?!
This is going to revolutionize everything!
Maybe if we drove cars in space we wouldn't have those pesky problems.
I have spoken'eth.
What's wrong with the idea of making cars lighter AND looking for alternative (and cheaper) fuels? Is there a reason for either/or, or can't we just build lightweight hybrids?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I like bigger autos. I'm 6'3" with a family history of back problems. I DON'T want a car, I want a fuel-efficient pickup/SUV/Crossover that doesn't bounce around like a jeep and I don't have to deal with the up-and-down motion of getting in and out of. I like hauling crap around. I like being able to see OVER traffic.
GM is on the right path with the Hybrid Silverado they are making, but I would like to see something a little smaller, along the lines of a Ranger or S-10/Sonoma (I LOVED the 1994 Sonoma I drove through college). Americans are going to buy small cars in the near future, but the REAL money will be made when we can drive larger SUV's and trucks that get 30+ MPG's.
Lighter cars use less gas? What's next? Telling people that they shouldn't live 200 miles from where they work? I heard a kind of a funny fact this morning on BBC, average energy consumption per capita in North America is double that in Europe. It's not like the standard of living or climate is that much different, it's all about the culture.
One could hope that the coming oil problem and the focus on energy use will spill over to the general public's energy use. We have up to know, had almost unlimited energy and we've thrived in that environment. But now that we see a huge energy resource shortage in the oil markets we're starting to rethink this policy of unabated energy use. Hopefully in the coming years there will be more focus on energy efficiency in all aspects of life.
The original Lotus Elise got almost 30 mpg with 1.8l, 120 hp, and it was a high-performance car.
Put a little 1 liter, 60 horsepower engine in there and it'll probably get 50 mpg, but have regular car performance.
The secret? Weighing only about 1,650 lbs.
How about this. You force people to walk more, and you solve two problems at the same time :)
Because basically a long time ago, someone discovered that you can cut off the tail of that teardrop, and the air flow will still be largely the same. Only this time without the added mass and drag of that teardrop tail.
And especially if you read the RTFA, weight is a big problem. Increasing the car's weight with a useless tail would negate any aerodynamic benefits anyway. If you save, say, 0.5 litre per 100 km in aerodynamic drag with a tail, but pay 1 litre per 100 km to move that extra weight, it's not worth it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Hybrids get their benefits in two ways: reclaiming power that would otherwise be lost during braking, and the fact that electric motors have a flat torque band. You generally can't do either that with an internal combustion engine alone.
However, there are a few ways to do both the above without an electric motor. One way is to have a flywheel connected to a CVT on the drive shaft. When you hit the brakes, the flywheel spins up. You can then release that power again when you accelerate. The flywheel will also act as a gyroscope, so you need to have some way of tilting it so you can go through corners with it spun up (which has the side effect of increasing handling). This method is being put on F1 cars soon.
The other way is to have an air compressor, which again is run off the drive shaft when you hit the brakes. On acceleration, the compressed air could either run the drive shaft, be dumped into the intake to increase boost, or dumped into the exhaust manifold to eliminate turbo lag. This is probably easier to design than a tilting-flywheel system, though it won't make handling better.
The compressor could also run off turbines using inlets around the car's body that are opened when braking. This particular use is probably illegal for F1 and other types of race cars (which often ban variable body shape systems), but could easily be used in road cars.
Both the above don't require any particularly exotic materials (though carbon fiber or nanotubes would be nice for the flywheel), and shouldn't be as heavy as an electric motor/battery system.
Not a typewriter
A lighter car means a smaller and lighter engine, which works on two factors to reduce energy consumption.
Busy helping non technical users of OpenOffice.org - http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/
The majority of "SUVs" are light pickup trucks, and they are the lifeblood of the working class. Landscapers, yard cutters, painters, plumbers, etc etc all require pickups.
A truncated teardrop with a flat back (like the Prius or the Insight) is actually more aerodynamic than the teardrop. It's called a Kammback, and it's named for the gentleman who noticed that if you chop off the back of the teardrop, the air keeps flowing the same way, except without the drag of sliding along the surface of the parts of the teardrop you just chopped off.
I feel like I'm re-living the past. I am old enough to remember the oil embargo of the 1970s, and how that quadrupled the cost of fuel. For a short time, it was all windmills, car pooling, public transportation, and econo-box cars, then it was right back to the guzzlers.
I also remember fuel prices dropping, very briefly, in early 2006. The sales of SUVs spiked right along with the fuel cost drop. If fuel prices drop during the election, the same thing will probably happen again.
Those who don't remember the past, yadda yadda.
I bike commute to work, and the only close shave I've had is with the new Gillette Fusion(r) Power razor. Truly, the best a man can get.
Haha - gotta love mass hysteria.
How come nobody is freaking out about heating oil?
- That's 4.50/gal in my area.
Granted, we don't really need it now, but in a few months...
Gas @ 15gals per fillup vs Heating oil at 300gals per fillup.
I can change driving habits pretty easily, but I can't stop heating my home. I keep the heat as low as I can with an infant in the house, and use a programmable thermostat.
Oh my god! Death to the oil fired furnace - long live wood!
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Unfortunately it's not a myth, and it wasn't created by marketing.
The crash compatibility topic (big car vs. small car) was first brought up by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in a 1998 news release that stated:
The basic findings reinforce whatâ(TM)s long been known about vehicle size and occupant death rates. As vehicle weight decreases, the number of occupants killed in crashes increases.
and
Lighter vehicles have higher occupant death rates in two-vehicle crashes, and within each weight class, cars and pickups have similar occupant death rates.
Here is the link http://www.iihs.org/news/1998/iihs_news_021098.pdf
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
- One that I only drive to and from work, maybe grab a 12-pak of Diet Dr Pepper®
- One that has ONE seat, maybe 2 in tandem for carpooling, thus a narrower front for lower drag coefficient, maybe a tripod
- One that gets a55-load MPG, on regular gas
- One that is enclosed against rain, maybe even snow.
- save weight by removing the automatic transmission, power steering, power brakes, Bose Stereo, the GPS, the air bags, spare tire. Make the tank small enough to weigh little and still get me through the work week without refilling
- Actually, remove ALL safety features except the brakes and the brake lights! Save weight. no OnStar, no Lojack, no side curtains.
- Cut us some slack on emissions. Yes, commuters are the bulk of the problem, but not if we are burning half of the fuel that we would have been.
- it has to be CHEAP! Like $2000. Cheap to insure. Cheap to replace panels if we bump each other. Easy to park.
- if you want to get REALLY froggy, give us tax breaks, or our own LANE on the freeway. Watch people buy em like hotcakes.
Ok, so I just described a 1982 Suzuki, full face helmet and a rain suit, except for the 3-wheel stance.My point is really this. We need a small, commuter-only vehicle, unfettered from the legal burdens that add weight and reduce gas mileage. And yet still capable of highway speed and 200 mile range. Take an F1 car, make it 3-wheeled with a Jet cockpit. End of problem. It's not rocket science...
What about not driving absolutely everywhere? I see a lot of people drive from my apartment complex to the convenience store next to it. Total time to walk is about 2 minutes. When you add up going to the underground parking, starting your car, exiting the underground parking, waiting for traffic to turn onto the main road, drive down 30 feet of road, and then wait for traffic again as you drive into the parking lot of the store. It takes more time to just get to the store than if you walk. Sure that short drive isn't going to cost too much in gas, or cause too much harm to the environment, but the whole attitude of having to drive absolute everywhere is just terrible.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Come live in Europe. Americans pay on average $4 for a gallon of gas. That comes to about 2.5. In Europe we pay 6 for the same amount. No wonder you're all driving SUV's. At least in the states you can afford it.
But then they would have to actually burn calories from their fat asses. Won't you think of the asses!?!?!
this is something most of the posts I see have missed. Not only is he an F1 designer - he's a *good* one. This guy understands perfectly well all the crash dynamics that dozens of posts here are complaining about. Carbon fibres or even the engineered cellulose in an article below this one should be looked at.
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And of course you're inferring a causal relation from a correlation. None of those quoted statements take into account specific circumstances. Do people speed more in smaller cars than in large SUVs, thus leading to more accidents? Are people more likely to switch lanes more quickly in smaller cars than in large ones? Smaller cars also accelerate faster than SUVs, so at intersections the small cars will be the first into the intersection after a light turns green. None of these things are taken into account.
If you want to give up weight in cars.
a) get rid of the catalytic converter
b) shorten the tailpipe and shrink the muffler
c) get rid of airbags
d) get rid of power heated super seats
e) get rid of side impact safety beams
that right there gets you some good weight savings.
This is my sig.
"A closed mind is a good thing to lose"
Main Website: http://waterpoweredcar.com/
Videos:
Genius US Inventor (water car): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZOsOB3z3IE
From Australia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXzK-zrWDgI&feature=related
Water Car Inventor Murdered -news channel report: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6yRn4IAsrU&feature=related
Ford Conversion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-piMEZ2WcQU&feature=related
From Japan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1OWDcWoXHs&feature=related
Company selling water cars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4mz7MPSquU&feature=related
WAKE UP AMERICA, your government lies to you! Well, ok, so does every other government, but this particular issue (water car) is worth fighting for.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Just like for trucks - make heavy cars/SUVs/whatever have slower speed limits on all roads, and fine heavily for going over it. That way, when people "need" to use their SUVs they can still use them- in the snow, hauling furniture, etc. Average Joe who uses his SUV for a commuter car in Los Angeles, will not want to use it since he can only go 50 MPH, and everyone else will be passing him. Obviously there are better examples than L.A, since average traffic speed is about 12 MPH.
..........FULL STOP.
SUV are much, much worse at avoiding collisions, and are more likely to be involved in accidents per driver miles.
..........FULL STOP.
Playing somewhat of the devil's advocate here, but it's been pointed out several times that increases in vehicle weight are directly caused by extra safety features. I'd say this is a prime example of correlation not equaling causation. What you're looking at is lighter vehicles that are lighter due to being older and lacking safety features, thus being less safe. Higher death rates aren't a function of weight, but a function of safety features (that is, the lack thereof). It simply happens that those safety features make a vehicle heavier, hence the correlation of lighter = less safe.
That doesn't mean that lack of weight is fundamentally unsafe, just that we need to reduce the weight of all those safety features (and the rest of the car, while we're at it) without compromising, uh, safety. Probably a tall order tho.
Nobody expects the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.
Actually look at the study. It actually correlates even more strongly with manufactures than it does with vehicle type. With GM and KIA being the death machines.
(newer study: http://www.iihs.org/sr/pdfs/sr4003.pdf)
Mini four door cars are poor. But they only have 3 cars in the study 2 poor Kia/Huyndais and 1 Toyota Echo. The echo does very well.
The most deadly vehicle in the study is the GM blazer. 4 times as many death as a the tiny toyota echo.
If you want to use this as any kind of basis it would have to be model vs specific model, not generalizations based on body type. You would somehow need to move driver disposition from it as well. Sports cars don't kill their drivers, it is some of the idiot that buys a sports car that gets themselves/others killed.
Current hybrids include storage batteries that weigh a lot. They can be replaced with a much lighter flywheel that also has a higher efficiency than batteries, at storing and releasing energy (and also works with regenerative braking). Do not confuse this with other decades-old ideas of using flywheels to fully replace the car engine; we cannot make them strong enough to hold energy for 300 miles of travel. But we can easily make them able to hold enough energy for a few bursts of rapid acceleration. The only reason a smallish car has a 100HP engine is to get rapid acceleration. Any hybrid can replace that with a much lighter 15-20HP engine, which produces plenty for cruising at a fixed speed, plus some extra to charge up the storage unit for the desired rapid acceleration. A hybrid that uses a flywheel might weigh about the same as the ordinary car, but it will get better gas mileage because of the smaller engine.
Smart car crash test...
http://pl.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1NHXiGd0rQ
Which driver suffered more?
No sig today...
Many of them weigh around 2000lbs...I have two of them, a quick little 4-seater (well the rear seats are a joke, to be fair) sports coupe that barely seems to use any gas (over 40MPG highway with careful use of the gas, 50 is possible with hypermiling techniques, it's only had a slight lightening), and a 4-seater 4x4 that goes over anything, and gets ~34MPG combined, even though it has the aerodynamics of a washing machine. Combined weight? 4200lbs. Combined displacement? 2.9 litres. Both very affordable cars in their day. They certainly don't have any advanced materials in them, they don't use any advanced construction techniques, and they only have one powertrain each. Imagine if they had EFI systems instead of carburetters!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"Significant" meaning "Redesign lots of towns more or less from the ground up".
Yeah? Well, I commute
By bike to work
That SUV driver
Is such
A jerk
Burma-Shave
In a fair world, refrigerators would make electricity.
Seriously.
I don't know why people don't make the connection, but corporations thrive on inefficiency. It makes more money.
The caloric value of a gallon of gas would get you a ridiculous amount of mileage if you used your legs on a bicycle instead, and it would save our society resources because you'd be healthier for it. The only problem with this kind of transportation is that you're not using enough stuff. No brake pads, transmission fluid, tires, stops at the Kwik-E mart...
The real flaw of American capitalism is that corporations have corrupted and infiltrated the government and created totally unnecessary wants purely to make a profit. Remember GM and the tire companies buying and dismantling mass transit after WWII?
Just think about this. According to popular convention, these are two different entities: Road and Highway Budget: Necessary for the maintenance of our infrastructure. (In fact, a transportation subsidy.) Mass Transit Subsidy: Government assistance given to subway systems. (In fact, a transportation subsidy.)
And what are subsidies? The result of a radical idea that money collected from taxpayers should be used to benefit taxpayers! Totally communist/socialist/liberal bed-wetting propaganda if you ask me! These lies and half-truths are marketed to us by the media, because the media's TRUE clients are corporations and their advertising revenue. Corporations win, everyone else loses.
In case anyone actually believes this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterpowered_car Sorry to spoil your fun.
-Xoltri
A wise asian person (me) once said(5 seconds ago) that you don't need a sledgehammer to put a thumbtack in the wall. likewise, you don't need to commute to work by yourself in a 5000pound 6 person SUV. sure you may need your 6 person suv people carrier when you and your buddies go out, but not when you're commuting to work. we as commuters need to realize that the size of the car should reflect the number of passengers. why isn't there anything in the market for a 1 or 2 person enclosed commuter car with a 500cc engine? a commuter vehicle doesn't need to go 0-60 in 5 seconds and have a trunk capacity of 100 cu ft. it just needs to go 0-60. commuters in europe and asia have already realized this with submini's and kei cars. why are us americans so thick in the head?
How about the average American just loses a few pounds? When you think of all the overweight people in American and how much each would save in gas.
-Nemo me impune lacessit-
the obvious stupidity of Professor Murray's statement that removing 10% weight will reclaim what advanced hybrid systems do? So by those calculations, I suppose I'm losing something like 35% gas mileage when I have one fat passenger in my Honda Fit? Of course, I'm talking about Hybrid Synergy Drive and not GM's pathetic "mild hybrids" that hardly beat a 4-cylinder. Clearly lighter cars is a good thing for efficiency. But let's not get our information from someone who lost his grip on reality. The 10% figure is nonsense.
The Audi A2 was a marvel in this regard. Made out of aluminum and whatnot. Didn't sell at a 20000€ price tage since no one wanted to pay that much for a small car, but got 80 mpg in the most efficient version.
The original Smart was also lighter (745kg), but they had to fatten the car by a whopping 60kg to pass US safety standards.
problem is, this guy has no knowledge of real world driving, formula one cars spend all there energy accelerating and decelerating like crazy and have ridiculously low drag coefficients. Because of this weight effects them tremendously. Many times more than any average car.
-How's that Fiero work out for carpooling?
/shrug.
Good enough to car pool my neighbor and I on a 60 mile round trip commute. Sure, it's not going to haul 8 people, go rock crawling, haul sheets of 4'x8' plywood, or tow the horse trailer, thus the reason that I also have a Golf TDI, an '87 dodge raider, and a '97 F250 super duty. A car is a tool and I use the best tool for the job. I'm not going to use a nail gun to help my latest IVR application, and I'm not going to use nUnit to fix a squeaky stair.
-Would you be willing to crash test it vs a Suburban?
I'd prefer not to, I'm rather fond of driving it. But I feel no less secure in it than in any other car from the same generation. I'd much rather crash while driving it than driving the other cars I've owned from the 80's. My '06 Golf has air bags, but structurally it performs no better than the Fiero in a front impact.
-Where do you put your children?
I put him in a car seat certified for his weight with a 5-point safety harness and seat latching mechanism. Since I don't have air bags there is no major threat to having him in a "front" seat, and with the Fiero's ample crumple zones and space-frame construction, the likelihood of him being injured in that seat is about the same as his spot in the back seat of the '06 VW Golf.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3ygYUYia9I
It's a crash between a Volvo 940 (big car: 4.80m, but bad Euroncap rating) and a Renault Modus (small european car: 3.90m and great Euroncap rating: 5/5 stars)
The result? A driver in the Renault could go out on his own from the car. The Volvo driver...well, would have several damages in his legs and would need some help to get out of the car.
The older large cars and almost all trucks, vans, and SUVs often have much poorer crumple zone designs than modern passenger cars. Passenger cars are built to tougher standards than SUVs. The g-force experienced by an occupant of an SUV can frequently exceed the g-force experienced by an occupant of a car, particularly if both are driven into a fixed obstacle.
Your ball analogy is confusing momentum with forces seen by the passenger during impact. The more rigid the balls are, the effectively momentum will be transferred. The goal in a car accident, is to absorb the momentum in the body of the car. You don't want the rapid change in momentum to be absorbed by the passenger or the passenger compartment. In car accident terms, when the 1lb ball hits the 2lb ball, you want both to stop. How quickly each comes to rest is governed how each absorbs the impact. If the 1lb ball is a car, then the crumple zone is designed to absorb the impact. This reduces impact felt by the occupants. If the 2lb ball is something really stiff, like a big block of steel, then the entire force for the impact is transmitted directly to the occupant. This is really bad.
Incidentally, this is why the newer SUVs and pickups have crumple zones, and crush up like the small cars do now. You want the vehicle to take the impact, not the occupant. Nevertheless, SUVs are often made to truck standards, not passenger car standards, and frequently passenger cars have many more passenger protecting features.
My Geo Metro has a 51Hp engine, gets 50 MPG, and cruses at 75 MPG on the highway. I live at 9000 ft elevation and commute down a mountain to 4500 at steep grades. It goes as fast as you'd want to on mountain roads with 3-4 passengers. Yes its no drag racer, but it goes from pt. A to B efficiently and reliably. Besides it cost me 1/10th of a hybrid and gets the same milage. We love it.
Now imagine making it lighter and hybrid. No Doubt 20 Hp is sufficient.
If you go side-to-side, sure. If you go top to bottom, you're looking at closer to 7. But then of course there's Scotland stuck on top of England. According to the AA's (like the AAA) route planner, driving from Dover (major port in the South of England) to Aberdeen (city in the North of Scotland) takes 11 hours. But we English don't just drive to Scotland (and Wales, that's on the same island too!), we have ferries and trains to continental Europe. People regularly drive to the continent.
I've toured Europe in a Ford Sierra (a "UK big car" or "US mid-sized car" from the 80s/90s - this was a while ago), with a family of 4 and luggage for a 3 week camping holiday. Plenty of driving for double-digit hours. It's rather trivial to accept your dare, as I've already been there and done that. I can tell you from first-hand experience of long journeys (even by US standards) that cars of that size are fine for families.
This will really freak you out: I've done the same with family of 3 in a Peugeot 205, which is what you'd probably call a subcompact. Not especially comfortable, but far from unbearable.
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