Slashdot Mirror
Mercedes To Phase Out Gasoline By 2015
arbitraryaardvark sends in a story a couple of weeks back in Yahoo's Ecogeek blog, reporting that Mercedes will phase out petroleum-powered cars by 2015 (mirror), and notes: "Story is unconfirmed but well sourced." "In less than 7 years, Mercedes-Benz plans to ditch petroleum-powered vehicles from its lineup. Focusing on electric, fuel cell, and biofuels, the company is revving up research in alternative fuel sources and efficiency."
Nobody really gives a damn what fuels their cars, they care about cost and acceptable performance (can I make 70-80 on the freeway, or will I have a top speed of 40). If they can solve the problem of refueling infrastructure and sufficient mileage per refuel, there's no reason why not to go with a non-gas car.
you want this
No matter how we choose to generate power in the future, we have very few options for switching to anything other than gasoline for transporting that power.
Gasoline has a fantastic energy density. A 14 gallon tank of the stuff contains 491.2 kilowatt-hours of energy ($68 in electricity at New York rates), and the gasoline itself only weighs 81 pounds. If you fill up the tank in five minutes, you're transferring power at 7.368 megawatts. Can you imagine what kind of electrical infrastructure you would need to transfer the same power over mere wires?
About the only alternative I can imagine that would be comparable would be to hot-swap whole huge batteries at gas stations.
No, I think we'll be using gasoline, or at least a similar liquid fuel, for quite a while.
Plenty of people are already running their Benz on the stuff the local chip-shop would have thrown away. How hard is it to ramp that up a bit?
No sig today...
Perhaps what the OP meant was that as producing corn becomes more profitable, farmers will switch to producing corn instead of other crops, thus creating a scarcity of *those* grains and raising the price of food in general. A big chunk of world already finds it hard to afford food and hence the conclusion of people starving if prices rose further.
Most electric outlets have a 15 or 20 amp breaker. That means on the best of days you're only going to be able to get 1.8 to 2.4 kw or about 2.4 to 3.2 horsepower out of it. Unless your car uses less than an average of 3hp while it's running you're going to have to charge it, or at least your spare battery pack, for a pretty long time to get any range out of it.
Which is a perfectly good way to ruin a new diesel engine.
WVO/SVO is great in theory, but once you add modern high pressure common rail or unit injector fuel systems WVO causes nothing but havoc. There are numerous reports of failures on WVO/SVO. Injectors sticking open and burning holes in pistons, etc.
Keep your WVO/SVO for your 80's Benz. The future will be GTL and designer BioD.
Wrong on several levels.
First, the math:
491 kilowatt-hours = 0.491 megawatt-hours.
0.491 MWh over 5 minutes = 5.892 MWs of energy.
Second, you are ignoring efficiency:
5.8 MWs of energy is far more than it takes to move a car. Gasoline engines are remarkably ineffecient at converting all that energy into actual power.
Third, and most importantly:
"If it were possible for human beings to digest gasoline, a gallon would contain about 31,000 food calories -- the energy in a gallon of gasoline is equivalent to the energy in about 110 McDonalds hamburgers!"
Soure: http://science.howstuffworks.com/gasoline1.htm
(Okay, so maybe not most importantly, but it's the coolest.)
Somehow, I don't think you've actually be in a city that has decent subways or trains before. When you can get a pass that means just hopping on a subway that will go within a few blocks of just about anywhere you'd want to go, they become much more convenient than cars or busses. Especially when considering the parking situation that we have here in Seattle. No more waiting at stop lights or for pedestrians. No looking (or paying) for the parking that you had to circle the block for fifteen minutes just to get. I won't even talk about the cost of my Capitol Hill parking space.
Okay, well, first let's look at some common outlets in the US. Your standard NEMA 5-15R has a 15A breaker and, while there's a nominal delivery voltage of 120V, you'll probably get 117V or so out of it. That's 1.755kW. Kitchen outlets generally have a 20A breaker, so 2.34kW. The NEMA TT-30R, the standard low-power RV outlet, is also a nominal 120V, so assuming 117V still, that's 3.51kW. Dryer outlets are split-phase, either NEMA 10-30R or 14-30R (the 14-30 ones are properly grounded; the 10-30s are grounded through the neutral). They're able to feed a nominal 240V (we'll say 234V) at 30A. That's 7.02kW The higher power equivalents, the 10-50R and 14-50R, are the standards for range outlets. The 14-50R is also the standard high-power RV socket. This is 11.7kW.
Okay, so these are the outlets found all across the country. The RV ones are especially interesting, since RV parks can often be found in even the most remote places, and I'm sure your average RV park owner would love a new revenue stream, what with RV travel down due to high gas prices. Now, let's take an upcoming EV like the Aptera Typ-1e -- 2+1 seating, 120 miles@55mph, 70 miles@80mph, 90mph top speed, 0-60 in Oahu. They use 60kW PosiCharge fast chargers by Aerovironment. Aerovironment already makes them as big as 250kW.
To get an idea of what sort of driving distances you can get in a given length of time and how those compare to gasoline, there's always this convenient spreadsheet. Adjust the EV pararmeters to those of the EV of your liking. Explanations of the formulae and parameters are at the bottom.
Oh, and as for Mercedes? Who wants to bet that they'll make one or two EV/PHEVs, one fuel cell vehicle, and do the cheap/lazy thing and simply make all of the rest of their vehicles flex-fuel capable?
The only way I would lionize Dick Cheney would be while he was still alive, and it would involve actual lions.
Error in your logic: Electricity has already undergone Carnot losses. Gasoline hasn't. The average ICE is only about 20% efficient. The average li-ion EV is about 80% efficient when fed already-generated electricity.
Don't take my word for it. Take the word of a peer-reviewed study from PNL conducted for the DOE. We already have enough electric infrastructure for 84% of our existing vehicle fleet to switch. Of course, not as though it's somehow *harder* to build electric infrastructure than develop new oil fields and pipelines. Just the opposite, actually -- that's largely why electricity is so much cheaper per joule.
The only way I would lionize Dick Cheney would be while he was still alive, and it would involve actual lions.
Of course what people tend to forget is that you can make gasoline from a lot of non petroleum sources including water and air. The only thing that prevents it is cost.
Exactly. It's not the unavailability of all of the fuel that is the issue, but how much it will cost, and more importantly how quickly that cost will increase. This rate of increase will determine whether we will be able to actually continue with this easy motoring way of life, or not. The higher the rate of increase, the less probability that we will be able to maintain the current way of doing things.
The cheapness of the fuel *is* the issue. Right now, diesel and gasoline still give the biggest bang for the buck.
See these (now quite well known) sites for more info: Kunstler and The Oil Drum