Wheels and (bailout) Deals - Vehicle News

Better than free drink. As much air as your air car can hold for the drive home

Sunday night O.K.?

cactus flower wrote:

Sunday night O.K.?

Means I'll miss bingo :-(

You can drop in later...throw your winnings about and buy us all virtual drinks

cactus flower wrote:

You can drop in later...throw your winnings about and buy us all virtual drinks

Winnings? 15 euro drinking vouchers for the george?

Car makers try to copy green halo of Prius

Could people in the Shtates be starting to drool for the tashty thing the Prius is? Like the new accessory?

DETROIT, Apr. 7, 2008 (Reuters)
— When Tom Weatherbee swapped his minivan for a Toyota Prius hybrid two years ago, he was mostly hoping to save money at the gas pump. But he was pleasantly surprised by both the requests from friends for a test drive and the grins its aerodynamic profile drew at the grocery store, and he basked in the attention. "Even the people who own more expensive cars acknowledge the Prius as being pretty cool," said Weatherbee, 51, an electrical engineer who lives outside Traverse City, Michigan.Toyota's

Prius, with a list price of $21,100 and fuel consumption of 45 miles per gallon, commanded 51 percent of the U.S. hybrid market in 2007. Now the No. 1 Japanese automaker is considering extending the
Prius line-up -- effectively making it a brand on its own.

They are popular but the backlog is eased. There are more models than toyota and some big SUVs are the same technology and they get maybe 30 miles to the gal.

Too little too late, the petrol slow burn in view of the doom and gloom on the oil thread? Could cars with less mileage than 40 per gallon ever become outlawed? Would it be a good idea?

Why outlaw them. when juice is too expensive driving, especially trivial driving will fall

CNN News on Prius sales

How boring, eh? Could be interesting to see a graph of hybrid sale increase against rise in barrel of oil and/or rise in GAS price in the states.

Maybe the Chinese electric car below will be one to watch especially if the battery does what it says it does..

BYD E6 Electric Vehicle Specifications
So far, all we know is that the E6 will be a 5 seater with an acceleration of 0 to 100 kph of around 10 seconds. Top speed should be top speed of 160 kph (100 mph), and the battery pack, which is located under the rear passenger seats, will be based on BYD's own lithium-ion iron phosphate technology. Range per charge is expected to be 300 km (186 miles).

But most impressive of all:

"BYD projected the battery had a life of 2,000 cycles, for a lifetime range of about 600,000 km (373,000 miles)"

Wow! Even if thats just half true, it's still pretty good.


Treehugger

The current New York Times has an article about the risks of electric cars:-

Quote :

ALMOST without exception, scientists and policy makers agree that
hybrid vehicles are good for the planet. To a small but insistent group
of skeptics, however, there is another, more immediate question: Are
hybrids healthy for drivers?

There is a legitimate scientific reason for raising the issue. The flow
of electrical current to the motor that moves a hybrid vehicle at low
speeds (and assists the gasoline engine on the highway) produces
magnetic fields, which some studies have associated with serious health
matters, including a possible risk of leukemia among children.

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/automobiles/27EMF.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

I wonder how to they propose to charge all these batteries? Would wind energy do it in Ireland?

The batteries, and car production, are also pretty damn toxic. Trains, bikes, and feet get my vote. And bring back the Sinclair pedal car for urban trips.

There are less than 40,000 (38088) hybrid cars registered worldwide according to a counter on this site
http://www.hybridcars.com/news/march-market-dashboard.html which reports the sale of hybrid vehicles as recession-proof. I'm sure there are a lot more than 40,000 hybrid vehicles worldwide though.

It also reports that the weak dollar is affecting domestic American hybrid construction by Ford because batteries are imported from Japan

Ford currently sources batteries from Sanyo in Japan. As a result, batteries—the most expensive component in a hybrid system—are coming at an increasing cost to Ford due to a weak dollar. GM also has battery woes. Cobasys, which supplies battery packs for Saturn hybrids and the Malibu Hybrid, was put on GM’s distressed supplier list after the company was left with no operating budget for this fiscal year.

Scientists should be forced to say who is paying them ever time they open their gob. They are trying to scare people about a magnetic field from an electric motor but their concern is not with a high voltage wire with 400000 volts. They are the same mouthpieces talking about global warming even though Ireland was once covered in ice.

There's one Toyota Prius in my estate and I see that they have a 51% global market share. Look here.

4/21/2008 1:08:39 AM Sunday, automotive information and marketing solutions. R. L. Polk & Co. said nationwide registrations for new hybrid vehicles advanced to 350,289 registrations in 2007, up 38% from 2006. The company said Toyota Prius continued to lead the segment with 179,178 total new registrations or 51.2% of hybrid market share.

On the composition of the batteries and how much energy it would take to power them...

Powered by a lithium-ion pack built with BYD’s own lithium-ion iron phosphate large format prismatic batteries, the E6 will have a maximum mileage of 300 km (186 miles) after being fully charged. BYD says the 5-seat vehicle will accelerate from zero to 100 km per hour in around 10 seconds and has a top speed of 160 kph (99 mph).

Charging at 220V will take overnight; the E6 can also take a fast charge that can bring the battery to 80% SOC in about 15 minutes. Green Car Congress

Some vocabulary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery

I suppose some questions are next - is the construction of this or any type of battery sustainable? And the questions above - does the magnetic field have an effect and what will power the battery - will the electricity be generated from a sustainable source? I'd like to know what the different ratios of energy input to output are involved in these different technologies (air car, petrol, diesel, battery) and how local the energy supplied for them can be. Petrol is not local to Ireland but electricity can be local and I think we could be self-sufficient in sustainable energy given wave tidal wood/biomass and wind resources here. And on the ratios/efficiencies - does it take less or more energy to fill the air car than the others say, and get less or more mileage from it...?

AutoBlogGreen keeping an eye on it.

For only $10,000 you can add a battery to your 2004-2008 Prius which will give you 100mpg - that's twice the mileage of the Prius without that special battery. Petrol in the states is around $3.70 a gallon so if there's no other costs then the battery will pay for itself in 5-6 years though it comes with a 3-year warranty. However, if the price of petrol reaches European equivalents (nearly $6 a gallon) then maybe it could pay for itself in a shorter period of time. Or do you eventually fall off regardless of whether it's the swing or the roundabout?

http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1582/69/

A FOX Business News air car update - New York company says it will have an American air car out on the streets of the US by 2010 - the result of the oil price going well over $100 a barrel. Why it's costing $18,000 is another barrel of frogs...

According to the CNN report below, Detroit car manufacturers have been trying to come up with air powered technology for ages but now Guy Negre, a french engineer has finally had a design he's been working on since the early nineties licenced to TATA. The technology seems to work but the questions are there - how much energy does it take to put the air into an air car? How much jogging would you or your dog have to do on the treadmill to fill up to go on a 30-mile round trip?

It stands to reason that if the station chares 1.5 Euro for the fill up that it costs less than that. To fill my tire costs 25 cents of compressed air no matter what he size of the tire. I doubt if they are losing money.

Some technical details

More technical details

And still more

The cars use some carbon fuel in fabrication and in use.
There doesn't seem to be any reason why wind power can't be used to compress air: compressed air can be stored. This surely must have good potential in Ireland as we are quite a windy little island?

There is compressed air in every garage in Ireland for your tire so put in your order and bye bye petrol tax.

Ah no I don't like this.

First of all, this compressed air has to be pumped to a massive pressure, about 4,500 PSI. That is huge. I wouldn't want to be within 200 Meters of this thing, especially immediately after a fender bender. This kind of pressure makes the Shell piplene look like a party balloon. Note: this level of compression cannot be achieved at a tyre pump station.

Also, when considering these 'technologies', always keep the law of conservation of energy top dead center in your mind.

Quote :

Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be converted from one form to another.

And as an addon to that, energy cannot be converted from one form to another in the real world without some form of inefficiency.

So if the energy used to compress the air tank comes from an electrical source, and the electrical source is oil fuelled, then the air car really only makes matters worse.

Thumbs down for the moment at least.

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

Ah no I don't like this. First of all, this compressed air has to be pumped to a massive pressure, about 4,500 PSI. That is huge. I wouldn't want to be within 200 Meters of this thing, especially immediately after a fender bender. This kind of pressure makes the Shell piplene look like a party balloon. Note: this level of compression cannot be achieved at a tyre pump station.

Great points all - especially about the enormous pressure which they say can be achieved for a full tank in 3 minutes. And that's well put with the scale of the pressure needed - is the Shell pipeline 300 bar/psi?? Apparently the tanks are carbon fibre and in the event of a 'fender bender' release the pressure in a certain way that is safe enough ...

The reason they can achieve the efficiency is perhaps because the internal combustion engine is 25% efficient - the rest of the joules in the gas go on heating the engine whereas this is not the case with the air car.

But one of the biggest questions is what the net efficiency is after the car is filled with pressurized air - can a car be filled by a few revolutions of a 3.6MW wind turbine? How many solar panels etc.? There are half a dozen big engineering questions about the technology and a lot of them are being discussed now on the blogosphere. I just found this excellent site with excellent links ...

http://forestpolicy.typepad.com/ecoecon/2008/04/the-air-car.html

The car is going to be rolling off production lines in August I think ...