Green Vehicles
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CLEVER & Carver's Tilt Cars |
CLEVER & Carver's Tilt Cars
Nine European partners (including BMW) representing the industrial and research sectors have done something clever. Working with the University of Bath, the collaboration has given birth to a new kind of vehicle for crowded, polluted, urban driving environments. At one-meter wide, incorporating the maneuverability of a toyota or a motorcycle - including the ability to tilt - and featuring the high safety rating of a Smart car, the three-wheeled prototype they developed is indeed "CLEVER," i.e., "Compact Low Emission Vehicle for Urban Transport." The project cost L1.5 million and could easily change the face of city driving forever.Direct competition for the CLEVER, which may become commercially available later this year, is represented by the gasoline-powered Carver One...
PV Costs to Power Car?
In previous posts, Fisker's Photovoltaic Cars, and Photovoltaic Powered Cars, we have reported on the potential for commuters to power their vehicles with energy collected from rooftop photovoltaics. In the online interactive spreadsheet Gigawatts per E-Commuters there are only a few assumptions; the quantity of commuters using electric cars, the average round-trip commute, and the average miles per kilowatt-hour. In another interactive spreadsheet on this topic, Photovoltaics per Electric Car, we look at the cost of rooftop photovoltaics to power a car...
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Fisker's Luxury EV |
Fisker's Luxury EV
Here comes another all-electric automaker, and one with quite a pedigree. Henrik Fisker has designed some of the most sought after luxury sports cars in history. If you go to the website for Fisker Automotive you will be tantalized but definitely not overwhelmed with information. This Southern California start-up is keeping a low profile as their next generation car takes shape. On Fisker's home page you will see a sexy green silhouette of a sports car, alongside a clock ticking backwards to the formal launch of the vehicle on January 19th, 2008 at the Detroit Auto Show...
GM "Volt" Battery Delivered
There are no official announcements of when the GM Volt will actually hit the showrooms in production quantities, but the year 2010 continues to hold up as the unofficial date. Last week in the Detroit Free Press, in a report by Katie Merx entitled "A New Era Dawns for GM," Vice Chairman Bob Lutz stated he "wants to make up to 100,000 fuel-efficient Chevrolet Volts in the first year of production." This got our attention...
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Honda's "Puyo" |
Honda's "Puyo" Concept Car
It's generally accepted that to develop new cars with a green ethos designers will have to start thinking outside the traditional box, but this year at the 2007 Tokyo Motor Show, Honda decided to redefine the box while they were at it. The company unveiled its concept vehicle christened "Puyo," a name meant to onomatopoetically convey the Japanese phrase for "touching the vehicle's soft body." Outfitted with panoramic windows and a glass roof, the vehicle's body is crafted of a soft, gel-like material derived from silicone...
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Aptera's "Typ-1" |
Aptera's Next Generation Car
This is incredible. This is definitely love at first sight. Introducing the Aptera "Typ-1," which has quietly taken shape in, once again, you guessed it, sunny California! The car looks like a porpoise with two front wheels. It has a drag coeficient of .11 - compare that to .26 for the Toyota Prius. It has an always-on climate control system, super efficient and powered by solar energy. It has advanced sandwich composite materials in the body and an aluminum and steel frame and crash cage. It weighs 850 pounds, seats two and can get 230 mpg, with a 12 horsepower diesel combined in a classic hybrid design with a 19 kW electric motor. An all electric version with a 120 mile range is also planned...
Cars Are Green
If 100% of California's 33 million registered vehicles used 10kWh per day, it would only take about 50 gigawatts of output for eight hours to recharge them all each night. And that's on the high side, overall electrical consumption if half the transportation miles in California were electric powered would probably only require a 15-20 gigawatt increase to off-peak output, since solo commuters drive lighter vehicles than average. With 1,000 square feet of rooftop PVs, battery powered cars can get 25 miles of range per hour of full sun. A car with photovoltaic skin can store 2.5 miles of range per hour...
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The Chevy Volt |
GM's "Volt" Concept Car
To follow up on GM's announcement on January 7th of a series hybrid car, the "Volt," today I spoke with Jon Lauckner, GM's vice president of Global Program Management. Since the series hybrid, which has at most a two-speed transmission, with only the electric motor connected to the drive train, is simpler to engineer compared to the parallel hybrid, we wanted to know what took so long...
In-Wheel Electric Motors Found!
If you are designing an all electric car, in-wheel electric motors could replace any on-chassis motors, and having four of them independently coordinating whether they function as generator or motor allows sophisticated power management - improving efficiencies. In-wheel motors also allow more payload space on the main chassis. According to Mitsubishi's 2005 Annual Report...
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The ZENN Car |
ZENN Cars & EEStor's Ultracapacitor
We've been electric car fans for a long time, and the relationship between Feel Good Cars, located in Toronto, Ontario, and EEStor, located in Austin, Texas, is too intriguing to ignore. Feel Good Cars manufactures the ZENN (zero emission no noise) "luxury neighborhood electric vehicle." According to the ZENN specifications, this two-seater car has a top speed of 25 MPH, a range of 35 miles, and costs $12,500...
"Nano-Titanate" Car Batteries
The race to devise a next generation electrical storage system is heating up, with batteries competing with ultra-capacitors and hydrogen fuel cell technologies. In all three of these technologies, nanotechnology is held out as the key to breakthrough products. Our money is on batteries to extend their lead as the most practical overall solution out there. A few days ago, Altair Nanotechnologies announced...
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The Tango T600
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The Tango T600 Electric Car
The next generation of electric cars have been in gestation for several years, as evidenced by Commuter Cars Corporation's Tango T600. This is probably the most unique battery-powered car design yet seen. This car is 39? wide, 8'5? long, and 60? tall. It is designed to seat two, with the passenger behind the driver. Because it's narrow, and because it's so small, it can split lanes like a motorcycle, and it can park perpendicular to the curb in spots only motorcycles would ordinarily fit...
Lithium Ion Batteries For Cars
A car running on electricity drawn from the power grid and stored on-board can be fueled at about one-third the cost per mile compared to a gasoline-powered car. We prove this in our recent post Electric Car Cost Per Mile. There are at least three technologies to store electricity on-board an electric vehicle; hydrogen powered electricity producing fuel cells, ultra-capacitors, and batteries...
More Battery Powered Cars
There aren't many cars on the roads today that run purely on batteries, but three new models are off the drawing boards and - if the manufacturers claims are to be believed - will be selling and seen on the streets within the next twelve months. And all three of these companies are in sunny, high-tech California...
Electric Car Cost Per Mile
With the advent of the Tesla Roadster, a new generation of 100% battery powered car is upon us. It's about time. But hybrids with extra battery packs, known as "strong hybrids," and their counterparts, hybrids that you can plug in to recharge, appropriately known as "plug-in hybrids," are moving out of the hands of tinkerers...
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The Tesla Roadster
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The Next Generation Car
It finally happened. The future is here. The future is now. Tesla Motors in San Carlos, California, a company we scooped about a month ago in Silicon Valley - The New Detroit?, has released specifications on its revolutionary battery powered car...
Silicon Valley - The New Detroit?
It's about time someone took Northern California's high-technology prowess and applied it to building the green car. In San Carlos, California, in the heart of the high-tech capitol of the world, a new company called "Tesla Motors" is taking up the challenge to build an electric car. As we demonstrate in "The 100% Electric Car," there is technology available...
Finding Bioethanol in the USA
Increasing prices for gasoline are having the welcome side effect of increasing the supply of alternative fuels. Unfortunately, alternative vehicle fuels are kind of like alternative energy in general - rapid percentage growth sounds impressive until you remember what a small base exists. While there are 685 filling stations in the U.S. offering "E85" bioethanol...
Ultracapacitors Could Change Everything
We've been skeptical about ultracapacitors. They are devices that could, theoretically, store electricity (expressed as kilowatts per kilogram) at ten or even twenty times the density that even the best batteries currently achieve.
Today, however, a blogger by the name of Michael Urlocker, of Northern Technology & Telecom Research, published on the superblog website AlwaysOn...
Plug-In "Strong" Hybrids
The California Air Resources Board is holding a symposium in September 2006 to discuss ZEV (Zero Emissions Vehicle) technology. If you want to submit a presentation visit their Call For Abstracts and follow the instructions. It's not surprising the call for abstracts includes topics such as "hydrogen storage technologies" and fuel cells "balance of plant" components...
Greener Cars are Coming
It may not be soon enough for everyone, but the greening of America's automobile population is happening. Hybrid cars are here to stay, and more and more of them include innovations such as expanded battery packs that can be recharged from an at-home wall socket. As battery technology improves at a faster pace than ever, look...
Fuel Cell Cars Aren't Ready
Fuel cell vehicles are not ready for prime time, and this isn't because of a conspiracy on the part of the auto-makers. If any car threatens the status-quo, it's a battery powered commuter vehicle, or a serial-hybrid using an onboard high-efficiency constant RPM clean diesel to power a generator to charge a battery that powers...
The 100% Electric Car
Hybrid cars, which combine the power of an electric motor with a gasoline engine, are often presented as a transitional technology that will eventually be supplanted by fuel cell cars. This argument rests on an assumption which may or may not be valid - that on-board hydrogen, used to create electricity using fuel cells - is a better electricity storage medium than batteries. Examining this assumption reveals some strong challenges to the idea that batteries are going to go away, or that hydrogen fuel cells are the ultimate vehicle technology...
Racing toward the Car of the Future
Maybe you've been driving down the road, minding your own business, when all of a sudden the car next to you catches your eye. It looks almost like a normal car, but there's something not quite normal about it. It's sleek, and rather futuristic. You think to yourself, "Hey, that must be one of those new vehicles they've come out with...a hybrid or something...
Electric Postal Vehicles
Using rough numbers, California possesses about 50,000 megawatts of generating capacity, and over half comes from power plants that aren't turned off at night, even though we use significantly less megawatts at night. What should we do with the extra power? How about use it to charge up Electric Vehicles...
Car of the Future
Would you buy a car that goes 700 miles on a fill-up, and costs only $20 to fill the tank? There are many candidates for next-generation cars: high-tech diesels, hybrids, electric cars, and fuel cell cars. But the most efficient we've seen yet is a prototype fuel cell car being developed by Anuvu Inc....
Green Diesels
Much excitement has been generated by the latest generation of Hybrid cars. The Toyota Prius, for example, is a hybrid four-seater that gets 50 MPG and costs only $20,450. We've been waiting for hybrids for a long time, and the Prius, with that kind of cost-performance, is a car to be taken seriously. The green generation of automobiles has arrived, and within 20 years, if not much sooner, cars that aren't green will be collector's items...
Hydrogen Fuel Cell Cars
In the western corner of West Sacramento, in a promontory of light industrial buildings that runs along the south frontage of Interstate 80, is the home of the California Fuel Cell Partnership. They are a depot for most of the hydrogen fuel cell powered cars in North America...
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