Wheels and (bailout) Deals - Vehicle News

The Tesla Roadster is landing in Europe, according to the Irish Times today

Quote :

THE NEW Tesla electric supercar is now on sale in Europe, and Irish buyers willing to pay in the region of €99,000 plus taxes are being invited to submit their orders for delivery next year, according to Aaron Platshon, European marketing manager for the new car brand.

"The Roadster has been approved for sale across the EU and an Irish buyer placing a deposit now will receive their car in May 2009," says Platshon.

Electric Supercar makes it to Europe



Shane O'Donoghue in the Irish Times continues ...

Quote :

The Tesla has become something of an icon for the future of electric cars in recent years, but much of that hype was prior to its production. Now it is here, and on sale.

The viability of electric cars is still in question, given the carbon-emitting nature of electricity generation.

However, the Tesla's launch coincides with promising news from Japan, who pledged at this year's G8 summit to cut overall carbon dioxide emissions by 60-80 per cent by 2050.

To assist with such ambitious targets, the Japanese government has joined forces with national electricity supply companies and carmakers, with plans to build hundreds of "quick-recharge" power stations and other infrastructure to accommodate electric vehicles.

This is part of a programme that will involve installing power outlets at car parks, supermarkets and restaurants for drivers to use, free of charge.

And the Financial Times had some more on this about Japan the other day...

Quote :

Japan is preparing for the arrival of plug-in electric cars next year with plans to build hundreds of “quick recharge” power stations and other infrastructure to accommodate the vehicles.

Drivers in Japan will be the first in the world to be offered battery-powered cars by large automakers. The transport and power system upgrades, which are supported by the government, carmakers and electricity utilities, are designed to promote rapid adoption by easing concerns about the cars’ convenience and driving range.

Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the utility giant that supplies Japan’s capital region, said it had developed a recharging device that could provide enough power in a five-minute stop to drive a small electric car 40 km – a big advance over current experimental systems. A 10-minute charge delivered 60km worth of power, it said.

Japan fuels electric car revolution

Is the Future finally coming?

Auditor #9 wrote:

Is the Future finally coming?

I think so Auditor, it seems we have reached a commercial tipping point when it comes to electric cars, we'll be seeing their prices tumble as more and more are purchased.

Still no sign of personal jet packs though?

Anyway, if you want "alternative" transport. How about we roll everywhere on a bed or oranges. Unlike oil we can grow more and they can provide a healthy snack while on the move.

This is how inefficient the internal petrol combustion engine is .... now someone somewhere wants to utilise all that escaping heat...

Quote :

Say "steam power" and you conjure up images of Stevenson's rocket, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the heyday of the Victorian railways – romantic, but hardly the stuff of a clean, cutting-edge technology.

But steam could be about to make a comeback thanks to a company that is trying to make the internal combustion engine more efficient.

Clean Power Technologies, in Newhaven on the English south coast, is developing steam hybrid engines that claw back some of the immense amount of energy wasted by the internal combustion engine. Ultimately they aim to develop a car engine that runs partly on steam power.

"When you talk of steam people think you are going backwards," said Abdul Mitha, the company's CEO and president, "Anywhere where you are wasting a lot of heat, we can go in, capture the heat and turn it into energy savings ... Steam has tremendous power. If it can drive a steam locomotive, why can't it drive an automotive engine?"

Mitha's company aims to target the wasted heat that is currently pumped out of the exhaust and convert it into useful power. Of the energy in your petrol tank, just 27% is converted into forward motion, 33% is spent cooling the engine, 4% is lost as friction and a whopping 36% is lost as exhaust heat. "There is a lot of heat that is created and totally wasted," said Mitha. Clean Power Technologies aims to recover 40% of this exhaust heat.

Guardian

Recovering the lost flue gases/exhaust is very very expensive. To recover most of this heat you have to condense the water vapour in the gases. This water will then absorb the various oxides from the air and turn acidic making shite of any metal parts (unless they are very expensive).
The problem with the above is that the inefficiency wiould be large. the exchanger would be quite big. Further any system that uses electricity (refrigeration) to recover heat (steam) will be more expensive as we are reducing the grade of energy from elec to heat.

riven wrote:

Recovering the lost flue gases/exhaust is very very expensive. To recover most of this heat you have to condense the water vapour in the gases. This water will then absorb the various oxides from the air and turn acidic making shite of any metal parts (unless they are very expensive).
The problem with the above is that the inefficiency wiould be large. the exchanger would be quite big. Further any system that uses electricity (refrigeration) to recover heat (steam) will be more expensive as we are reducing the grade of energy from elec to heat.

Moving freight onto rail and developing in rail corridors would seem to be a more effective approach than trying to fix the internal combustion engine? And what about going electric?

** cactus posted above

riven wrote:

Recovering the lost flue gases/exhaust is very very expensive. To recover most of this heat you have to condense the water vapour in the gases. This water will then absorb the various oxides from the air and turn acidic making shite of any metal parts (unless they are very expensive).
The problem with the above is that the inefficiency would be large. the exchanger would be quite big. Further any system that uses electricity (refrigeration) to recover heat (steam) will be more expensive as we are reducing the grade of energy from elec to heat.

Do you know anything about the engines of ocean liners? I believe that though massive they generate a lot more than movement and electricity - the heat is used to distill water and provide heated water for showers, heating systems and other stuff. You get a lot more use out of the same gallonage of diesel per person.

What about thermoelectric devices attached to the engine to capture waste heat in a car? Are those things any way efficient at all? All this business of trying to capture the escaping heat would be bypassed once engines are more or less battery operated like in a lot of electric vehicles coming out now - isn't that correct? Battery operated cars don't lose energy in heat (although heat is created when the electricity is produced so there must be some loss somewhere) One thing could be to build an expensive 'engine' like in the design above that is highly efficient (and expensive) but which generates electricity to power electric cars ...

Other good green and clean tech sites:
http://earth2tech.com/ - Californian?
http://cleantechnica.com/
http://www.greencarcongress.com/
http://www.greentechmedia.com/
http://www.azocleantech.com/default.asp - a telephone book??
http://www.icis.com/Home/Default.aspx - interesting ... Cnemicals
http://www.icis.com/blogs/biofuels/
http://www.cleanedge.com/ - serious business green

Algae Jet Fuel Makes the Grade
(we can all sleep soundly now)

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Algae biofuel maker Solazyme said today that its microbial-derived jet fuel has passed inspection with flying colors. The South San Francisco-based startup had its algal-derived aviation fuel studied by the Southwest Research Institute, a fuel analysis lab, and it passed the American Society for Testing and Materials protocol, the first algae-based fuel to do so, according to the company.

The race for algae biofuels to take flight is on. Just last week, a new player spun out of Arizona State University’s Laboratory for Algae Research & Biotechnology picked up $3 million to further the research into and eventual commercialization of a kerosene-based aviation fuel derived from algae. Solazyme, meanwhile, which was founded in 2003, picked up $45.4 million last month. However, just like in terrestrial transport, there’s plenty of room for multiple players in aviation fuels. Solazyme estimates that in the U.S. alone, 1.6 billion gallons of jet fuel are used every month.

Still, Solazyme has a long way to go. CEO Jonathan Wolfson said recently that the company would be able to produce millions of gallons of biofuel from algae within three years, up from just thousands today. That’s an ambitious goal, especially given that the company doesn’t plan on breaking ground for its first commercial-scale plant until 2010. So until then, air travel will still likely destroy any attempt one makes to reduce one’s carbon footprint.

Earth2Tech

Audi, have you come across the Cyclone Waste Heat Engine ?



http://www.cyclonepower.com/cyclone_engine.html

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

Audi, have you come across the Cyclone Waste Heat Engine ?



http://www.cyclonepower.com/cyclone_engine.html

An External Combustion engine - Jesus why hasn't someone thought about that already?? There must be a snag ... lots of googling for me on this one now.

Suck
Squeeze
Bang
Blow

-Isn't that the story of the internal combustion engine? I'd say the snag with an external combustion engine might be the 'Squeeze' or compression stage; they would need to engineer it so that little compression is lost.

Maybe there is no compression phase - maybe it's suck bang blow?

The Chevy Volt

Autobloggreen is reporting today on how bloggers love green cars and sustainable movement technology - zippies or travel addicts who are worried about getting their fix long term?

This interest in products revealed by hits on the internet must surely contribute to trends in products themselves? Isn't it a sort of feedback which the companies could use to augment products in the first place? Maybe it'll only be a matter of time before products are created purely from interest in them on the internet? It's almost like getting shares in the company, the dividend being the manufacture of the product the consumer wants.

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Bloggers love environmentally friendly cars. Or so it seems, according to research performed by J.D. Power and Associates. The most commonly referenced brands in blog posts over the last six months are Toyota, Honda and General Motors. This shouldn't come as shocking news, considering that the Toyota Prius, Honda Insight and Chevy Volt are all hot topics right now and are all expected to be thoroughly redesigned or first introduced within the next few years. Naturally, then, these are the brands that are getting the most publicity and are likely the ones that you are most interested in hearing about.

Not all of the blog posts were positive, though, and JDP therefore kept separate numbers for each manufacturer counting how many good things were written about their sustainability and efforts to reduce global warming. The surprising winner of that group was Nissan, though that brand only got two percent of all mentions overall. We blog, they watch, we blog. Fun!

http://www.autobloggreen.com/2008/09/24/toyota-honda-and-gm-most-blogged/

And this is why we shouldn't stop building SOME of our roads - could a lot of things be coming together? From the SBP again
State to unveil electric car plan

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A government plan to spearhead a move by Irish motorists to electric cars is to be unveiled shortly.

The Electric Transport Programme, to be announced by Minister for Energy Eamon Ryan and Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey, is aimed at helping Ireland meet EU targets on greenhouse gas emissions.

The plan will use Israel, Denmark and Portugal as models for a new electric grid system being developed for ‘clean vehicles’.

A senior ESB official last week visited Israel to assess the $200 million grid project led by international software company Better Place, which was adopted there last year.

This type of thing could seriously affect our balance of payments with oil and divert the revenues saved into indigenous industries or simply jobs at home ...

Quote :

The software company has piloted an electric grid network to recharge and replace batteries for standard-size electric cars and SUVs now being manufactured by Renault and Nissan in Israel.

A spokeswoman for Ryan confirmed he had discussions with company representatives and has been working on an electric vehicles policy that will be announced shortly.

Fine Gael’s energy spokesman Simon Coveney this weekend called for ‘‘radical and ambitious thinking’’ on the issue by the government and the ESB.

Coveney last week met with ESB chief executive Padraig McManus to discuss the aplicability of a grid network here for a new generation of clean vehicles being pioneered in Israel and Denmark.

Denmark’s largest utility company, DONG Energy - which generates 18 per cent of its electricity from wind energy - subscribed to the new business model earlier this year.

The new electric grid pilot scheme for cars in Israel involves ‘smart charge’ stations for batteries.
The cars are equipped with GPS-style energy monitors to alert drivers when they need to plug into an electric recharge grid operator system.

This might use electricity from excess wind or from wave power generated by the Red Snake we saw the other day off the coast of Portugal ... the stations themselves could potentially involved batteries which catch locally-produced wind energy, thus acting as that battery component in the chain. Even the cars themselves could act as batteries by being plugged into the grid and intelligently getting charged when there is a peaking over-supply of wind.



Not today though

Is it a bus? ... is it a train?
















It's both - the truck that drives on tracks

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But that's only half of the coolness of the Blade Runner. The most exciting possibility is that Silvertip hopes they've found a way to quickly and simply drive the bus onto some train tracks, and then have it become a train. The advantage, of course, being that trains are far more efficient than buses, but can't necessarily get to all the same places that buses can.

Not coming to the West Clare railway project anytime soon but would it have applications at all? Ecogeek is calling the idea a 'bladerunner'. Why are trains more efficient anyway? Less friction or what?

Ecogeek

SUCK SQUEEZE BANG BLOW

The strokes of an internal combustion engine but some people aren't happy with the 'suck' and are putting 'pump' in where traditionally there was sucking.

http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/2267/
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/21620/?a=f

However ...

Others are talking about pumping other stuff into automobile manufacture and that's MONEY. On the image just below is what GM have in the tank and what their mpg is - $2 billion+ per month is leaving their wallet and they have 16 billion left ... So what though - let it fail I say but it'll need to be retooled if it's going to be propped up as Obama says on the opening of the video below. The American auto industry really is in some trouble and is that because they are all going around driving dinosaurs and not Toyota Yarises and Nissan Micrae ? (Nissan have stopped producing the Micra - anyone like to own one while they're still around - my belief is that the second model - the 'Nun's Car' - will become the Beetle of the 21st Century)


But GM looks dead in the water and Ford is swimming in behind now, exhausted too. They'll have to try to produce alternative vehicles fairly quickly now if their industry is to survive .. thing is, an alternative vehicle in the States is one that does more than 30 mpg.