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."
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.
><));>
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.
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
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.
Mercedes truck division is way bigger than its car division.
And plenty of Italian farmers drive a Lambo to work.
No sig today...
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.
"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.
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.)
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.)
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
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.