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Looking To Better Engines Instead of Electric Vehicles
hlovy writes "Don Runkle thinks it's engines, not batteries, that will make automobiles cleaner and more efficient. 'We unabashedly say that we have the best solution,' says Runkle, the CEO of Allen Park, MI-based engine developer EcoMotors International. The startup, which brought in $23 million in Series B financing this summer from Menlo Park, CA-based Khosla Ventures and Seattle billionaire Bill Gates, has designed an opposing piston, opposing cylinder engine that uses fewer parts than traditional motors do and generates more power from each stroke of the engine, CEO Runkle says. He says the 'opoc' engine is smaller, lighter, and less expensive than the motors already out there, and a more viable option than switching automobile fleets over to electrical power."
When you can store energy as densely as liquid hydrocarbon, you'll have a successful electric car.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
An engine-developer and seller tells us that the future is in the engines that he happens to be able to sell you. Didn't see that one coming.
Just because some of the world's power is generated by coal, doesn't mean it all is. There are plenty of places where renewable sources make up a significant if not a majority of the power on the grid.
I don't know the limit of efficiency that this new engine design will deliver, but at any sane value this does not solve our biggest problem here in the United States (and probably other nations as well.)
Everything we do is regulated by oil. Our food distribution runs on diesel, our manufacturing runs on diesel. Our military runs on diesel. Our workforce requires gas to get to work. Every facet of American life is dependent on oil based fuels without which our economy, our military, our industry, our agriculture and our commerce will fail. Even with extreme improvement in our ability to harness these fuels, it is extraordinarily unlikely that we can produce enough fuel to be self-sufficient. In short our national security and our very survival are in the hands of foreign powers.
In the best of circumstances this would be worrying, depending on close allies for your ability to survive is harrowing, but sustainable. We are not in the best of circumstances, The nations that produce the majority of oil are not staunch allies, but nations with populaces that are predominantly anti-US. At any time the structure in these countries could break down and we could find ourselves at war with them. This would be a war that even if we win could destroy us as a nation. If we conserve all our fuel resources for the War effort, which we would have to do if we want to win with conventional weapons, we would find ourselves bereft of fuel and the fuel production infrastructure itself most likely in shambles due to the war. Our way of life would be over just as surely as if we had been conquered by a foreign power.
We need to switch to electric not because it is more efficient (although it is) not because it will create jobs (though it will) not because it can be more environmentally sound (although it could be); we need to switch to electrical power because it keeps our vital infrastructure requirements in our own hands. It is a matter of national security, no nation can prosper if it id dependent on unfriendly nations for its very survival.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
Everyone makes that same sorry mistake, extrapolating an unfavorable curve to infinity as if problems don't have gradual solutions. Lost of Bruce Sterling et all sf postulated worlds full of junkies, so many that society fell apart. Marxists had their nightmare fantasies, and when the world moved beyond tose conditions, they refused to recognize it, failed to adapt, and killed hundreds of millions to prove it.
The world just doesn't work like that, Hydrocarbons won't vanish overnight. They just get more and more expensive, and as the expense climbs, people come up with solutions.
The English burned up all their wood, then found coal, then found oil, and that is how things work.
It doesn't work by flying spaghetti monsters suddenly turning 90% of people into junkies, or sucking all the oil out of the ground in 5 seconds flat.
The biggest problem the world has is the damned fools that think they, and only they, can see the future, and if the world doesn't start working on their pet solution RIGHT NOW, everything is going to hell in a handbasket.
They refuse to believe that anyone else is smart, let alone smarter, that people have always found solutions, and that emergencies on a global scale just don't pop up out of thin air (except killer asteroids and rogue solar waves).
Give it a rest, smarty pants. Get on with your life. Stop living a daily nightmare, you will just scare yourself to death.
Infuriate left and right
What you described is a standard diesel-electric engine, which is essentially a diesel engine with an electric transmission. The engine was not always constant RPM; in most models, you actually controlled your speed with the throttle to the gas engine; forward, reverse and neutral were controlled by electrical switches. That configuration was invented almost a hundred years ago because it was physically impossible to build a 55,000 horsepower mechanical transmission. Battery-based hybrid locomotives have come into vogue in the last 20 years for yard switching, and more recently as long-haul engines, and were an obvious extension of the diesel-electric concept.
I used to wonder like the GP about the absence of all-electric-drive hybrids. The reason why hybrid cars like the Prius and the Volt use an electric-mechanical combination transmission is because it is more efficient for the gas engine to power the wheels directly when you're going 70mph, since it's close to peak efficiency there anyways. Then you don't need a larger, more expensive electric motor, and avoid losses in the electric transmission whenever possible. On the scale of a locomotive, this is physically impossible, but in an automobile it is the desired configuration.
France has approximately 31,939 km, or 19,845 miles, of track. The USA has approximately 233,000 miles of track, or over twenty times the track that France has. But the USA is only about 17.7 times the volume of France.
The problem isn't that we haven't put effort into the rail system, the problem is that the continental US is so much larger than France. France is 543,965 sq kilometers; the USA is 9,629,091 square kilometers, or about 17.7 times the volume. By both rail-km and rail-volume, we actually have more track than France.
It just isn't enough -- nine million square kilometers is a huge area to serve, and it is area that developed at a rate that was different than the rate rail expanded. In addition, France's population density is hugely higher than the USA; you have 60 million people, about 110 per sq-km, while we have 300 million, about 31 per sq km (and actually, because we have very high density coasts, that number is way too high for the US interior and way too low for the coasts.)
France and the USA present two entirely different rail problems, and the same strategies can't be used to solve both. It's not practical to set up a rail grid that serves the USA in an equally distributed way -- it wouldn't save money, or fuel - it would lose money and waste fuel.
We would benefit a great deal by moving to dual-track on many routes (the US hiline is one good example... many trains sit and wait for hours in sidings because there is only one track in many locations) and of course, with all that area, hi-speed rail would be lovely - but again, with 17x the area to serve, the amount of funding we're talking about is simply staggering.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.