Any flywheel capable of storing enough energy to be interesting in a car represents an insurmountable safety risk. Mechanical failure of the flywheel or bearing would instantly release all of the kinetic energy of the flywheel.
Even an exploding gasoline tank doesn't release all its energy instaneously -- the vapor above the liquid may explode, but most of the liquid just burns.
I don't really understand the craze we had/have over electric vehicles. Batteries are
HEAVY. The more weight you move around, the more energy it costs.
Vehicle weight is important only as it affects rolling resistance, which also depends on road grade, road surface characteristics and tire design and inflation pressure. Yet on the freeway, rolling resistance is not nearly as important as air drag, which depends only vehicle size and shape, not weight.
Despite its heavy batteries and very low drag coefficient of 0.19, on the freeway the EV1 still spends more than half its cruise power overcoming air drag.
Battery weight is more of a factor at low speeds, but it is also largely overcome by regenerative braking.
The Hypercar guys greatly overstate the importance of vehicle weight on energy efficiency. Besides, there are limits below which a vehicle's weight cannot be reduced without adversely affecting safety. The batteries in my EV1 give it excellent sports-car handling in high-speed turns.
Not true. When I leased my EV1s, there were $5000 buydowns from the San Diego Air Quality Management District plus 10% federal tax credits. These reduced the monthly lease payments by > $100.
Correct. The Insight and the Prius are basically ordinary gasoline cars with oversized starting motors. They cannot be driven without starting their gasoline engines, and their batteries cannot be charged off the grid.
A much more interesting hybrid would have a battery large enough to make most local trips without having to start the engine. It would be possible to charge this battery from the grid, avoiding the cost and pollution of the gasoline to do so. And when it did run the engine, it would do so at constant speed.
The AC Propulsion cars have generator trailers that work this way.
Ever heard of the Honda Insight and Toyota Prius? They achieve their extremely low
emissions because it uses a very small gasoline motor (with closely-coupled emission
control system) plus battery power to get the car going. The result is extremely low
emissions, qualifying for the California Air Resources Board's standard called Super
Low Emissions Vehicle (SULEV).
I don't think that's true. In California, ULEVs, SULEVs and ZEVs now qualify for solo access to the carpool lanes. Quoting from
the DMV:
Caution: Hybrid vehicles which use gas and
electricity do not qualify for the decals.
The only ULEVs and SULEVs I see on the
CARB list are all fueled by compressed natural gas. I believe no gasoline cars will ever qualify because even the hydrocarbon emissions during conventional pump fueling exceed the limits for those emission classes.
There are 7 public EV charging sites -- use of which is free -- within just a few miles of my house. But because I have a charger in my garage, I visit these sites only occasionally to verify that they're working. (I maintain a database of public chargers in San Diego county.)
The one charger I regularly use away from home is the one at work.
Gasoline emissions? The modern gasoline engine exhaust is almost all water and carbon dioxide
The key word here is almost.
Actually, most of the exhaust is nitrogen from the atmosphere, but we'll ignore that.:-)
Carbon monoxide, particulates, nitrogen oxides and unreacted hydrocarbons may be small components in auto exhaust, but in toto they are still causing serious air pollution. The California Air Resources Board
est imates that in 1995, 15,000 tons/day of carbon monoxide were released into the atmosphere by vehicles in California.
And then there's CO2, which most fuel cell cars do not eliminate because they produce hydrogen on board from carbonaceous fuels like methanol or gasoline. One of the few ways to eliminate CO2 altogether is with EVs powered from non-fossil-fuel sources like solar, hydro, wind or nuclear.
So called zero emissions vehicles simply shift the pollution source from the tailpipe to the power plants.
If you do the numbers, you will find that the power plant emissions attributable to each mile of EV driving are about 3% of those of conventional internal combustion engine cars. The actual percentages depend on the pollutant in question. See the detailed analysis of this exact issue on my website.
"But power plants make power more efficiently!" Ever study thermodynamics? Energy is always always
always lost when it's converted from one form to another.
You then proceed to list all the conversion
steps in the electric vehicle fuel cycle, claiming that because there are more steps, EVs are necessarily less efficient. You should know that it's not the number of steps, but the product of the efficiencies at each step.
If you do the numbers, you'll find that current production EVs are typically at least twice as efficient, in primary energy consumed per mile, as conventional ICE cars. Modern combined-cycle gas turbine generating plants can exceed 50% efficiency, vs perhaps 20% peak for an ICE. The power grid is typically 95% efficient (that's the figure for SDG&E). The charger & battery are typically 70-80% efficient, though this depends on the technology. The inverter and motor are usually well over 90% efficient.
To be more specific, the measured AC consumption for the PbA version of the 1997 EV1 is 248 Wh/mile. It's 373 Wh/mile for the 1999 NiMH version, mainly because of the battery pack cooling required in warm weather. There is definite room for improvement here, btw.
Then there's the fact that EVs are the only practical way to use certain primary energy sources, such as hydro, solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear -- all sources that pollute far less than fossil fuels.
And the current power grid could not handle the increased load should the public switch to electric vehicles.
Southern California Edison has calculated that California could easily support several million EVs with existing plants and transmission lines -- despite our well-publicized shortages -- as long as they're charged at night. Right now, as my EV1 is charging in my garage shortly past midnight PDT, the load on the California ISO-controlled grid is 23067 MW. The load at which they start to have trouble is around 40000MW. That's a lot of slack for nighttime EV charging.
Electric vehicles also shift pollution to the landfills. Depending on the type of battery, they are made up of
lead, sulphuric acid, mercury, lithium, cadmium, and other nasty chemicals. We ignore this problem. NiCd
batteries say "dispose of properly at an approved facility". Ever actually tried this? Trashing them is illegal,
yet no recycling facility in the Los Angeles phone book officially accepts cadmium!
No production EV I know of uses NiCd batteries. They all use lead-acid, nickel metal-hydride or lithium ion. There's a well-established recycling infrastructure for lead-acid batteries, and nickel is also far too valuable to just throw away.
Vehicle range. What fool even thinks of vacationing in an EV? It can't be done. Insufficient range before
batteries run dry. 100+ miles with no gas stations and no civilization at all *and* over hilly terrain? It's like
this all over the western US.
Several people I know regularly drive their EV1s on cross-country trips. The
first went from LA to Troy, Michigan. Another went from LA to Florida. Yes, it takes them a lot longer than in an ordinary car. They do it for fun. They spent some time arranging for 240V outlets to be available, but it was possible.
That said, no one really argues that EVs can now replace every ICE vehicle application. But they don't have to! The vast majority of daily commuting is well within the range capability of existing EVs, so if we reserved ICE vehicles for when they were really needed we could cut total vehicle emissions enormously.
My EV1 is my only car. Most of my trips out of town are by air, and my EV1 gets me to the airport quite easily. On the very rare occasion I/we need to take a road trip that exceeds its capabilities, I either take my fiancee's car, or we rent an ICE. This happens very, very rarely. Maybe once or twice a year.
Power? EVs can barely move themselves and some passengers about. A camper? A trailer? Cargo? Forget it.
My EV1 does 0 to 60 in less than 8 seconds. Does that count as "barely move themselves"? That said, see the previous paragraph about it not being necessary to replace every ICE, only most of them. If I ever need to tow a boat, I'll rent a SUV with a big engine -- something I hardly need to commute to work every day.
And stupid lazy drivers who don't recharge.
I recharge every night in my garage. Takes me 10 seconds to plug in the paddle, and it's full by morning. Second nature, I have yet to forget.
What about in winter when it's cold outside? Electric heating? There goes your battery. And of course,
bateries tend to get weak and have problems when it's cold anyway. Double handicap.
My EV1 actually has a pretty good heat pump, augmented with an electric heating element. Works great in both heating and cooling modes, but then again I do live in San Diego.
NiMH batteries actually work pretty well in cold weather.
Charge time sucks too. I can refuel a gas/diesel engine in a few minutes and be good for another 500 miles.
With electric? How many hours to recharge?
This is, in my opinion, the one valid concern about the present generation of EVs. The standard 6kW charger for the EV1 gives you about 25-30 miles of range for every hour of charge. On days when my total driving is less than a full charge (which is almost always true), charging occurs at night when I sleep, so as long as it's done by morning it doesn't matter how long it takes.
That said, I do believe we need high power public charging stations for those occasions when you need to drive more than a single charge will take you in a single day, and you don't have the time to spend at one of the public 6kW charging stations. GM is supposedly testing a 50kW charger now on a fleet of electric S-10 pickups. I'd very much like to see it publicly available.
And yes... the costs. EVs are currently sold at a loss
Any car made by hand in batches of 500 (like the EV1) is bound to be expensive. They'd get much cheaper in volume production, but even if they remain more expensive than comparable ICE cars you have to trade that off against significantly lower operating and energy costs.
What more needs to be said? The EV is nothing less than snake oil.
There's no question that we'll all be driving EVs some day. The only question is when -- before or after the oil runs dry, or before people are born and live their whole lives in LA without ever having seen the mountains.
Wimpy? 0 to 60 in less than 8 seconds is wimpy?!! That's what my EV1 can do. I love the reaction I get when I punch the accelerator when I'm demoing the car for a friend. You get a nice kick in the back, but all you hear is a little gear whine. The ammeter display on my palm pilot saturates at 400A, which at that battery voltage is >100kW. 100kW = 134hp.
Lamarr's invention was specifically for frequency hopping spread spectrum. Their original implementation used identical player piano rolls at the transmitter and receiver. It was not a practical scheme, which is why it wasn't used for many years until it became possible to implement in electronics.
Frequency hopping found its main application in military anti-jam links, just as Lamarr envisioned. It is also used in some (but not all) Part 15 wireless LANs.
The spread spectrum used in GPS and in CDMA cell phones is the *other* form of spread spectrum, direct sequence. Lamarr did not invent this.
Both forms of spread spectrum can appear as featureless wideband noise signals. They are generally flat across their bandwidth, though this can be affected by filtering. Frequency hopped systems can be programmed to avoid certain channels, thus punching "holes" in the spectrum. An IS-95 CDMA cellular signal, which uses direct sequence, is 1.25 MHz wide, and on a spectrum analyzer it bears a close resemblance to the top of Bart Simpson's head due to the filtering in the transmitter. From the early days of CDMA development at Qualcomm we called this a "Bart's head" signal.
Many years ago I proposed the idea of a "crypto dongle", running on a PDA, that would keep your RSA secret key and perform operations using it in response to requests over a serial link from an attached computer. The idea would be to provide a better level of protection for your secret key than otherwise possible on a desktop machine to which others might have physical access. The Pilot seems like a good platform for this. Has anyone else thought of this?
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Even an exploding gasoline tank doesn't release all its energy instaneously -- the vapor above the liquid may explode, but most of the liquid just burns.
Vehicle weight is important only as it affects rolling resistance, which also depends on road grade, road surface characteristics and tire design and inflation pressure. Yet on the freeway, rolling resistance is not nearly as important as air drag, which depends only vehicle size and shape, not weight.
Despite its heavy batteries and very low drag coefficient of 0.19, on the freeway the EV1 still spends more than half its cruise power overcoming air drag.
Battery weight is more of a factor at low speeds, but it is also largely overcome by regenerative braking.
The Hypercar guys greatly overstate the importance of vehicle weight on energy efficiency. Besides, there are limits below which a vehicle's weight cannot be reduced without adversely affecting safety. The batteries in my EV1 give it excellent sports-car handling in high-speed turns.
Not true. When I leased my EV1s, there were $5000 buydowns from the San Diego Air Quality Management District plus 10% federal tax credits. These reduced the monthly lease payments by > $100.
A much more interesting hybrid would have a battery large enough to make most local trips without having to start the engine. It would be possible to charge this battery from the grid, avoiding the cost and pollution of the gasoline to do so. And when it did run the engine, it would do so at constant speed.
The AC Propulsion cars have generator trailers that work this way.
I don't think that's true. In California, ULEVs, SULEVs and ZEVs now qualify for solo access to the carpool lanes. Quoting from the DMV:
The only ULEVs and SULEVs I see on the CARB list are all fueled by compressed natural gas. I believe no gasoline cars will ever qualify because even the hydrocarbon emissions during conventional pump fueling exceed the limits for those emission classes.
Do the numbers. A solar panel on an EV1 might cover the self-discharge losses, but it certainly wouldn't give you much added range.
The one charger I regularly use away from home is the one at work.
The key word here is almost.
Actually, most of the exhaust is nitrogen from the atmosphere, but we'll ignore that. :-)
Carbon monoxide, particulates, nitrogen oxides and unreacted hydrocarbons may be small components in auto exhaust, but in toto they are still causing serious air pollution. The California Air Resources Board est imates that in 1995, 15,000 tons/day of carbon monoxide were released into the atmosphere by vehicles in California.
And then there's CO2, which most fuel cell cars do not eliminate because they produce hydrogen on board from carbonaceous fuels like methanol or gasoline. One of the few ways to eliminate CO2 altogether is with EVs powered from non-fossil-fuel sources like solar, hydro, wind or nuclear.
Phil
If you do the numbers, you will find that the power plant emissions attributable to each mile of EV driving are about 3% of those of conventional internal combustion engine cars. The actual percentages depend on the pollutant in question. See the detailed analysis of this exact issue on my website.
You then proceed to list all the conversion steps in the electric vehicle fuel cycle, claiming that because there are more steps, EVs are necessarily less efficient. You should know that it's not the number of steps, but the product of the efficiencies at each step.
If you do the numbers, you'll find that current production EVs are typically at least twice as efficient, in primary energy consumed per mile, as conventional ICE cars. Modern combined-cycle gas turbine generating plants can exceed 50% efficiency, vs perhaps 20% peak for an ICE. The power grid is typically 95% efficient (that's the figure for SDG&E). The charger & battery are typically 70-80% efficient, though this depends on the technology. The inverter and motor are usually well over 90% efficient.
To be more specific, the measured AC consumption for the PbA version of the 1997 EV1 is 248 Wh/mile. It's 373 Wh/mile for the 1999 NiMH version, mainly because of the battery pack cooling required in warm weather. There is definite room for improvement here, btw.
Then there's the fact that EVs are the only practical way to use certain primary energy sources, such as hydro, solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear -- all sources that pollute far less than fossil fuels.
Southern California Edison has calculated that California could easily support several million EVs with existing plants and transmission lines -- despite our well-publicized shortages -- as long as they're charged at night. Right now, as my EV1 is charging in my garage shortly past midnight PDT, the load on the California ISO-controlled grid is 23067 MW. The load at which they start to have trouble is around 40000MW. That's a lot of slack for nighttime EV charging.
No production EV I know of uses NiCd batteries. They all use lead-acid, nickel metal-hydride or lithium ion. There's a well-established recycling infrastructure for lead-acid batteries, and nickel is also far too valuable to just throw away.
Several people I know regularly drive their EV1s on cross-country trips. The first went from LA to Troy, Michigan. Another went from LA to Florida. Yes, it takes them a lot longer than in an ordinary car. They do it for fun. They spent some time arranging for 240V outlets to be available, but it was possible.
That said, no one really argues that EVs can now replace every ICE vehicle application. But they don't have to! The vast majority of daily commuting is well within the range capability of existing EVs, so if we reserved ICE vehicles for when they were really needed we could cut total vehicle emissions enormously.
My EV1 is my only car. Most of my trips out of town are by air, and my EV1 gets me to the airport quite easily. On the very rare occasion I/we need to take a road trip that exceeds its capabilities, I either take my fiancee's car, or we rent an ICE. This happens very, very rarely. Maybe once or twice a year.
My EV1 does 0 to 60 in less than 8 seconds. Does that count as "barely move themselves"? That said, see the previous paragraph about it not being necessary to replace every ICE, only most of them. If I ever need to tow a boat, I'll rent a SUV with a big engine -- something I hardly need to commute to work every day.
I recharge every night in my garage. Takes me 10 seconds to plug in the paddle, and it's full by morning. Second nature, I have yet to forget.
My EV1 actually has a pretty good heat pump, augmented with an electric heating element. Works great in both heating and cooling modes, but then again I do live in San Diego.
NiMH batteries actually work pretty well in cold weather.
This is, in my opinion, the one valid concern about the present generation of EVs. The standard 6kW charger for the EV1 gives you about 25-30 miles of range for every hour of charge. On days when my total driving is less than a full charge (which is almost always true), charging occurs at night when I sleep, so as long as it's done by morning it doesn't matter how long it takes.
That said, I do believe we need high power public charging stations for those occasions when you need to drive more than a single charge will take you in a single day, and you don't have the time to spend at one of the public 6kW charging stations. GM is supposedly testing a 50kW charger now on a fleet of electric S-10 pickups. I'd very much like to see it publicly available.
Any car made by hand in batches of 500 (like the EV1) is bound to be expensive. They'd get much cheaper in volume production, but even if they remain more expensive than comparable ICE cars you have to trade that off against significantly lower operating and energy costs.
See my EV web page for another side to the story.
There's no question that we'll all be driving EVs some day. The only question is when -- before or after the oil runs dry, or before people are born and live their whole lives in LA without ever having seen the mountains.
Phil Karn
See my EV1 web page or the EV1 club web page.
Not only does the FBI not release the source, but the binary must be run as root!
I sent them email suggesting that they open the source, and saying that I will avoid it and recommend that others do the same until they do open it.
Phil
Lamarr's invention was specifically for frequency hopping spread spectrum. Their original implementation used identical player piano rolls at the transmitter and receiver. It was not a practical scheme, which is why it wasn't used for many years until it became possible to implement in electronics.
Frequency hopping found its main application in military anti-jam links, just as Lamarr envisioned. It is also used in some (but not all) Part 15 wireless LANs.
The spread spectrum used in GPS and in CDMA cell phones is the *other* form of spread spectrum, direct sequence. Lamarr did not invent this.
Both forms of spread spectrum can appear as featureless wideband noise signals. They are generally flat across their bandwidth, though this can be affected by filtering. Frequency hopped systems can be programmed to avoid certain channels, thus punching "holes" in the spectrum. An IS-95 CDMA cellular signal, which uses direct sequence, is 1.25 MHz wide, and on a spectrum analyzer it bears a close resemblance to the top of Bart Simpson's head due to the filtering in the transmitter. From the early days of CDMA development at Qualcomm we called this a "Bart's head" signal.
Many years ago I proposed the idea of a "crypto
dongle", running on a PDA, that would keep your
RSA secret key and perform operations using it
in response to requests over a serial link from
an attached computer. The idea would be to provide
a better level of protection for your secret key
than otherwise possible on a desktop machine to
which others might have physical access. The Pilot
seems like a good platform for this. Has anyone
else thought of this?