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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."
Maybe this precedent (if true) will prompt the other automakers to follow?
GM failed to appreciate the coming change.
Good for Mercedes to be acting ahead of the curve. That is how you build technology and establish markets and presence.
Nobody killed the electric car. They killed their own opportunity.
Why? 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.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
As this isn't an official announcement, I'm not holding my breath. Sure Mercedes have been at the forefront of vehicle technology for quite some time, but do you really see their entire truck line going non-petroleum in 7 years? Maybe the passenger cars, but not the trucks.
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Well if a blog says it's "well sourced," that's good enough for me!
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
are still left in the 70's building 5 litre v8 guzzlers with solid rear axles
though looking at GM and Fords financial statements they wont be building much of anything if they dont change, fast.
In other news, the public will phase out Mercedes purchases by 2015.
Which public is that?
Mercedes is kind of a big deal in Countries that are not the USA.
Not to mention that it'll be a lot easier to build the necessary infrastructure in Europe, rather than in the USA, to support fuel cells & biodiesel.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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
Since this isn't an official announcement coming from MB themselves, I'm going to guess that "phasing out gasoline" and "focusing on biofuels" still means that they will still be running on diesel for their internal combustion engines. Not knowing much about automobile engines, or diesel in particular, I'm going to guess that they'll focus on the lower-sulfur diesel fuel that Europe has mandated (I believe, again, too lazy to look this stuff up), but it doesn't mean "no petroleum products ever"
Not to mention, there's still going to be plenty of oil in that engine, not to mention plenty of petroleum products in the rest of the car.
I'll create an amusing sig when I have something meaningful to post.
tremendous energy density, easy to transport, not even hazardous when spilled, near-identical performance to diesel /50 mpg in my VW
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
Local temperature been below average for the last two weeks? So much for global warming!
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
the USA only seems to import the luxury cars from Europe. In Spain and Italy, I have seen Mercedes-Benz garbage trucks, which shocked the hell out of my the first time when I was 15. Trips since then, barely noticed.
But the thing about a lot of Mercedes and BMWs and stuff -- especially the older ones: turbo diesel engines. Can't any diesel engine run biodisel unmodified? That was my understanding.
"Until we convert to completely non-combustive and non-fissile energy production..."
Why would we phase out fissile energy? We should be using that for everything. Nuclear power is the best thing we have.
"Besides, the vehicles will still probably depend on petroleum-based products for lubricants."
Not so much, actually. If you have a 100% electrically-powered car, you simply put an electric motor on every wheel. Electric motors don't need much lubrication.
You sir, are the exception rather than the rule. A lot of people in my area claim to care, but as soon as it hits their wallet, they go right back to their old ways. Me? I'm too poor to do too much driving, so I walk and take the bus. But that's only because I value other things above my time. Others see time as their only asset - probably because they're overworked and overstressed - but I'd rather relax, hop on a bus, and read.
Cynical Idealist
Mercedes truck division is way bigger than its car division.
And plenty of Italian farmers drive a Lambo to work.
No sig today...
Can't any diesel engine run biodisel unmodified? That was my understanding.
I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure you have to swap out your fuel lines and injectors. The engine is the same, though. All told, it's supposedly a very easy conversion to biodiesel.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
It is going to be with an electric car. I'll admit, the electricity distribution system needs a drastic overhaul, but it is for all intents and purposes, in place. Can Mercedes do it? Absolutely. As previously mentioned, Tesla Motors is doing it right now, and that's with a sports car faster than almost all exotics off the line. Toning down performance and allowing the technology to mature will all attribute to a successful conversion.
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.
Also, the link to HCCI in the story is broken. Use the one here instead.
The discussion about HCCI is written by someone named named Benjamin Jones. He obviously does not have much technical understanding.
"lot of us do care"
With 300 million people in America and 6 billion in the world, "a lot" of people do a lot of things. But the Majority does not care.
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
You only have to swap out fuel lines on pretty old diesels. The injectors should be no problem.
The only real problem with bio diesel is that it tends to "clean" old diesel engines. You get a bunch of old crude floating around and hopefully clogging your filters.
Any modern diesel can run bio right now. Now straight vegetable oil takes some mods.
So to meet the goals all MB has to do is drop there gasoline power plants.
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You know, GM really stepped on it's dick when it decided to crush the EV1. Here they had the chance to become the biggest auto manufacture on the planet, design a fully electric car, nearly maintenance free. Nickel metal hydride batteries that would outlast the life of the car, a motor good for a 1,000,000+ miles, regenerative breaking, would go 130+ miles between charges (NiMH), 300+ with L-ion.
If I had the chance I would buy a fully electric car, my commute is 60 miles round trip. However, not using gas would get me labeled as a thief by the state and federal governments since I wouldn't be paying the gas tax that never seems to go towards it's intended purpose (and never goes down when said road project is finished).
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
There are a lot of great reasons to bike, but $$ isn't one of them.
It is in this city -- and, I imagine, many others -- but that's due to how expensive it is to park rather than gas.
Good call - I've never had to work anywhere where I had to pay for my own parking. I only factored in price-per-mile (and left out all kinds of random overhead - If you can actually eliminate a car from your life, it makes a big difference). Sometimes I forget that not everyone shares my life-style - Shallow, I know.
Cheers.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
As usual, people assume that the problem is the fuel. Its not. Its the lifestyle. People are right to say that nothing can replace gasoline for the lifestyle we currently live. That is why the lifestyle is going to change, because there is not going to be affordable gasoline enough to live like that, and there are going to be no substitutes.
Folks, the 20th century is over. It was great while it lasted, suburbs, drive ins, shopping malls, long distance commutes. But its over. What is going to replace it will not be different fuels, electric cars, whatever. What will replace it is commuting by mass transit, living closer to where you work, moving into high density cities, walking to shops. Biking to work in some places. It will be a lot like Europe in the fifties. The suburbs will vanish.
And you won't like it.
...a green push it certainly within their capability, I believe.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz#Innovations
Innovations
The "Safety cage" or "Safety cell" construction with front and rear crumple zones was first developed by Mercedes-Benz in 1951.[25]
Anti-lock brakes (ABS), traction control and airbags in the European market, were Mercedes-Benz innovations. These technologies were introduced in 1978, 1986 and 1980 respectively.
In September 2003, Mercedes-Benz introduced the world's first 7-speed automatic transmission called '7G-Tronic'.
Mercedes-Benz was the first to introduce pre-tensioners to seat belts on the 1981 S-Class. In the event of a crash, a pre-tensioner will tighten the belt instantaneously, preventing the passenger from jerking forward in a crash.
Stability control, brake assist (Press Release) , and many other types of safety equipment were all developed, tested, and implemented into passenger cars--first--by Mercedes-Benz. Mercedes-Benz has not made a large fuss about its innovations and has even licensed them for use by competitors--in the name of improving automobile and passenger safety.
Mercedes M156 engine
Mercedes M156 engine
The most powerful naturally aspirated eight cylinder engine in the world is the Mercedes-AMG, 6208 cc M156 V8 engine. The V8 engine is badged '63 AMG' and replaced the '55 AMG' M113 engine in most models. The M156 engine produces up to 525 bhp (391 kW), and although some models using this engine do have this output (such as the S63 and CL63 AMGs) specific output varies slightly across other models in the range.[26]
The (W211) E320 CDI which has a (VTG) turbocharged, 3.0L V6 common rail diesel engine, set three world endurance records. It covered 100,000 miles (1.6×105 km) in a record time with an average speed of 224.823 km/h (140 mph). Three identical cars did the endurance run (one set above record) and the other two cars set world records for time taken to cover 100,000 km and 50,000 miles (80,000 km) respectively. After all three cars had completed the run their combined distance was 300,000 miles (4.8×105 km) (all records were FIA approved).
Mercedes-Benz's pioneered a system called Pre-Safe which uses radar to detect an imminent crash and prepares the car's safety systems to respond optimally. It also calculates the optimal breaking force required to avoid an accident in emergency situations and makes it immediately available for when the driver depresses the brake pedal. Occupants are also prepared by tightening the seatbelt, closing the sunroof and windows, and moving the seats into the optimal position.
Mercedes Benz is developing a fatigue-detection system that warns the driver when they are displaying signs of micro-sleep (when the eyes stay closed for slightly longer than a natural blinking action). The system will use a variety of data including the individual driving style, the duration of the journey, the time of day and the current traffic situation. Fatigue mostly sets in gradually.[27]
The fastest (production) automatic road car in the world is the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren at 334 km/h (208 mph). The car was co-developed by DaimlerChrysler and McLaren Cars. The fastest street-legal saloon car in the world is the Mercedes-Benz Brabus (tuned) W211 'E V12' - based on the E-Class saloon.
That's right, all of the "buy American" dolts destroyed the American auto industry. That is, the American-based carmakers, I'm not talking about foreign companies that build cars in the US like Honda and Toyota and BMW and Mercedes and.. well, probably just about everyone. For what it's worth, my BMW was built in South Carolina, and the quality is identical to the previous one built at the Motorsport factory in Germany, which is to say pretty damn good.
My car's in the (body) shop and I ended up with a Ford Taurus rental. 2 miles down the road and I concluded that every person involved in the Taurus should be immediately fired. The car sucked so much that I took it back the next day and ended up with a Mazda 6 instead (which I know from previous rentals to be a decent car).
The Taurus is a wholly incompetent car. I shudder to think that it was built in 2007. It droves like a 1984 Lincoln. Wallows all over the place, can't turn, can't brake, slow as hell, doesn't track straight, hard to see out of, big enough to require its own zip code, and ugly as sin, inside and out.
So, thanks for continuing to "buy American", thereby allowing our auto industry to maintain sales despite utterly worthless products.
Though I admit the Focus is a pretty decent car, that's actually what I had hoped to get in exchange for the Taurus.
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.)
That's why work is being done on developing second-generation biofuels.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
How is that sustainable? Last time I checked, petroleum went into every step necessary to make the food you're eating, which is totally fair to consider a "fuel source" for walking or biking. From extracting and transporting raw resources to make the machinery to harvest. Into the fertilizers necessary to mass produce. Into the machinery itself to harvest. To transport it to your local grocery story.
Beyond that, your walking shoes have the same issues, as does your bicycle.
I'm not saying trying to help in this way is BAD, but you have to pause to consider that EVERY bit of energy we use pretty much comes from petroleum or coal, with the exception of a small percentage from other sources.
Societies that aren't industrialized rely on food at their ONLY energy source. They have to be able to grow more energy than it took them to plant and harvest, or they would have starved to death. Discovery of fossil fuels is the ONLY thing that's broken us out of the Malthusian trap, and your ability to walk or bike instead of drive a car is completely dependent on fossil fuels -- especially petroleum.
Having said all that, hydrogen is the only viable fuel we have right now. Not fuel source, but fuel. Even if we are using solar power to run electric cars, we still need to make fuel for them to run on. Hydrogen is being proposed in fuel cells, but that's a VERY new technology. The idea of burning fuels is thousands of years old and works well enough. There's nothing inherently bad about hydrocarbons. If we could produce and oil or gasoline from purely organic sources, we'd be as well off doing that as any other idea I've heard of. When you really think about it, oil is a hydrogen fuel. An oil economy is a hydrogen economy.
The problem is the environment and political problems associated with using the stored reserves of oil in the ground. We are using oil as an energy source -- that's BAD. But using it as a fuel, just as a way to easily transport energy around; there's not inherently bad about it. We have the technology to synthetically make oil, and I think that's the best route to go. Making oil from renewable resources. There will likely be a period of time where we mix synthetic and natural oil to make gasoline (think E85), but eventually, as natural oil reserves dwindle, synthetic oil will replace it. As we being mass producing synthetic oil, we'll figure out ways to make it better and cheaper, too. It's really just a matter of time...
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
He is saying that current fission, not fusion, is still the best source of energy we have. I agree. However I stipulate that the "waste" must be used to create electricity as well!
Through transmutation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_transmutation) much of the "waste" of current reactors (30 years old here in the US) can be further used to create electricty. And the result is less, and less dangerous, waste.
There are valid reasons to fear nuclear, however the benifits outweigh the results by billions of tons of carbon emissions. If we moved to a purely nuclear society, the innovations made in the long term would virtually eliminate the risks... making electrical power generation a truly clean enterprise... especially compared to current methods!
I would take a nuclear plant in my back yard before another coal one within 100 miles!
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
People don't want to change their lifestyle and if somebody comes up with a plan where they don't have to, they'll jump on it.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Mass Transit? California? Hah. California performs an epic fail when it comes to public transit.
In the Bay Area no one single public transit system will get you around the whole bay. Getting from say Oakland to San Jose requires a number of rather inconvenient transfers. Actually trying to get around San Jose at all on public transit is a mess. BART was supposed to go to San Jose, but never did and trying to get funding to finish it has become a bureaucratic nightmare.
Down south, supposedly there's a subway system in LA but I've never met anyone that's actually used it. I think it exists purely so east coast writers can use it in their movie plots. Wikipedia lists its ridership as being 258,710 in a county with 9 million people. (NYC's subway system by comparison has 5mil daily riders). Southern California (and the whole state really) is very car centric, which is partly why the traffic around LA is so messed up.
As for trying to get between the major population centers in California (let's say, The Bay Area, LA, San Diego and Sacramento), your only options pretty much are Amtrak and Greyhound, both of which generally cost more then the cost in gas to just drive to whatever your destination is---assuming you have a car which most Californians do. If you start taking into account multiple passengers then the cost difference really becomes noticeable.
There is one potentially bright spot though. If high speed rail actually could somehow materialize into a reality it could offer a compelling alternative to driving or flying, in reasonable time. A major bond measure is on the November ballot to support funding for building the high speed train network in California. (Not to mention could actually solve the SJ to SF issue--- now if they'd only add a line along the Central Coast.)
I think you would be hard pressed to prove that point for any person with a decent diet.
1) Cars require more resources to build initially
2) Cars require more resources to run per mile (not just in terms of the fossil fuels themselves vs. human energy, but also in terms of the energy required to transport those fossil fuels around the world [hint, it's much greater than the energy used to bring you a peach or two] - 50% of the world's energy is burned just in transporting OTHER energy around the planet).
3) Cars cost more to maintain
4) Exercise is good for you and there are dozens of uncounted, beneficial health effects which will save you money later.
I'm sorry, but this is just pure FUD
Ack, the post got messed up... I should have previewed. Replace that second paragraph with:
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 under 10 sec, 15.9 cubic feet of cargo space, etc for $27k. It has a 10kWh battery pack. Charger efficiency isn't known, but 93% or so is standard for slow charging (i.e., charging in more than half an hour or so). Li-ion batteries range from 96% (fast charging) to 99.9% (trickle charging) efficiency. Let's say 99%. Let's ignore the slowdown at the end, since that's more significant with .
For ~2 hours worth of moderate speed driving or ~1 hour of high-speed driving, and assuming an appropriate onboard charger, you get the following charge times:
NEMA 5-15R (15A): 6.2h
NEMA 5-15R (20A): 4.6h
NEMA TT-30R: 3.1h
NEMA 10-30R or 14-30R: 1.5h
NEMA 10-50R or 14-50R: 0.92h
Now, these are with standard outlets that you can already find across the country. Thanks to modern batteries and chargers, fast charging is not only possible, but already available in places, such as Oahu. They use 60kW PosiCharge fast chargers by Aerovironment. Aerovironment already makes them as big as 250kW.
The only way I would lionize Dick Cheney would be while he was still alive, and it would involve actual lions.
As an interesting note, an engine designed with ethanol in mind will actually produce more power than a gasoline vehicle of similar displacement. This is because, while ethanol has a lower energy density per volume of fuel, it has a much higher octane rating and a higher synchromatic reatio (you can burn more fuel for a particular volume of air.) So, you can design an engine to run at a much higher compression for better efficiency (more power from the same amount of fuel,) or you can design a turbo engine to run with more boost (useful in a flex fuel design.)
A great example of this is the Koenigsegg CCXR
There are other issues with Ethanol, however. Some countries with a primarily agricultural economy are converting much of their production to produce bio-fuel. This is exasperating some of the world starvation issues.
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
It seems no electric car is truly available now. Everybody is talking about concept cars, limited production runs, cars that are only available in limited geographic areas and vehicles available to fleets only, and they are promised for 2010. For the Tesla, which is ahead of most, even if you have the 100 K$ burning a hole in your pocket, you better hope you are already on the waiting list, and located in California, or your chances are slim-to-none of getting one. I'm hoping Mercedes will make the electric version of the smart car available in the US. Eventually. Sigh.
- Looking for an Electric Car Before the Gas Price Surge
Computers obey me.
Meanwhile, beyond the borders of False Dichotomy Land, some of us will work out solutions that are even better. Have fun in Defeatistville, though. I hear the shuffleboard is great.
Though I wouldn't be surprised if it was 80mph for 30 miles or 30mph for 100 miles...
The real question is: "What's its range under normal motorway/town driving?"