Wheels and (bailout) Deals - Vehicle News

Is the bbc correct when thet say it costs 1.5 Euro for a fill up or not. So roll on August. It says that your home compressor will recharge the car in 4 hours or the garage will take 3 minutes. When I overtake you EV don't worry about a thing because the pressure in a scuba tank is 3000 psi.

youngdan wrote:

Is the bbc correct when thet say it costs 1.5 Euro for a fill up or not. So roll on August. It says that your home compressor will recharge the car in 4 hours or the garage will take 3 minutes. When I overtake you EV don't worry about a thing because the pressure in a scuba tank is 3000 psi.

What do you think of that EVM? Is wiki talking through its hole again or is this type of pressure an everyday occurrence on the coasts of Europe, Australia and elsewhere?

Question is what carbon footprint is involved in filling a tank. How long would it take a person to manually pressurize a diving tank with a foot pump or something? (if it's possible)

The highest pressure ever recorded will be on the politicians tying to figure out a way to tax air. The thieves will be raking their brains to figure out a story that the mutts who vote for them will believe.

No, that sounds about right. Though they are made from 8mm steel not carbon fibre. Weight is not a massive problem here as they are used in a buoyant environment.

Industrial gas supplies are also distributed in pressurised cannisters at ~2500psi and they weigh a bloody tonne.

My problem here is the transition from steel to carbon fibre, so that the air tank doesn't end up weighing more than the car itself.

youngdan[b] wrote:

The highest pressure ever recorded will be on the politicians tying to figure out a way to tax air[/b]. The thieves will be raking their brains to figure out a story that the mutts who vote for them will believe.

Well, if it can be made to work, there's a job for eirtricity on those windy nights...

What is needed is a real Green Party not one taken over by phonies who sold out their voters. Ireland should be totally energy and unadulterated food self sufficient. They should pull out of Europe and sell the excess of both these industries instead of letting others decide their future if they have any.

Quote :

Toyota Prius sales top one million units

When including the other hybrid models, Toyota's cumulative overall sales of gas-electric vehicles total 1.46 million, according to Toyota, which also makes the Camry sedan and Lexus luxury cars.

Toyota said introduction of the Prius has resulted in 4.5 million metric tons less of global warming gases compared with having standard gas engine cars on the road instead of the hybrid.

Of the more than one million Prius sales worldwide, nearly 592,000 were sold in North America and 315,000 in Japan, Toyota said.

A hybrid delivers a cleaner, more efficient ride by switching between a gas engine and an electric motor at different speeds, and by recycling the energy the car produces as it moves.

Of course the questions are about the battery products and around the energy and co2 released during manufacture of hybrids or (lingo watch) gas-electric vehicles. Watch the share price below go up over the next year with the oil pricis that we are having now (or watch it go down, if the air-car takes off in August)

Graph: Totyota Five-Year Share Price

As Captain Pichard would say, Hold that Order. The shareprice of Toyota is likely to fall. It's best days are behind it. Remember when the car for 2500 dollars by Tata moters start rolling out then nobody will give a barrywhite about saving gas on a few extra miles on a prius. It will be the 1st car for most and the 2nd car in the richer countries
Then we have the aircar. Should it turn out as hoped it is a whole new ballgame.
Also GM seems to have a promising electric car in the pipeline called the Volt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Volt
I have saved the best for last. Check this baby out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOl_1S10jTk

This deserves a post of it's own. 2 cents per mile.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOl_1S10jTk

Its here! Its here! The wind powered electric car!

Link

And they will be run off excess wind energy, solving two problems at once.

LINK

And electric and solar hybrid

LINK

hydrogen created from wind energy hybrid - more expensive than current petrol costs - but looks the least carbon dependent of the lot.

LINK

I will stay with the Tesla rather than the Dong company. The Missus says my Dong never worked too good and she wants a change.

I think my prayers have had a great effect thus far but now I have discovered this bit of unsettling news. I will double my efforts morning, noon and night. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article3958376.ece

It is a pity the article doesnt say which car performed best. There is need for NCAPO or similar to take the testing on independently. Driving less still works best.

cactus flower wrote:

hydrogen created from wind energy hybrid - more expensive than current petrol costs - but looks the least carbon dependent of the lot.

LINK

That's a very good little blog too 'Environment and Technology'- pity your man is not updating it anymore. He has archived it here anyway http://greenwombat.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/

I saw these reports during the week somewhere - possibly in Irish Times. The Honda Civic gets a thumping as does some big Lexus (GS450h - a total gimmick and an insult to the idea of reducing emissions, purporting give to 35mpg but does only 26; a Toyota Yaris will do over 40mpg and a Nissan Micra about 50mpg - diesel cars do more)

The hybrid will be intermediate technology unless the battery power side becomes a lot more powerful and the infrastructure built to recharge it etc. Combining it with hydrogen like in cactus' link above could be the future or one of the futures unless the Air Car takes off.

The Prius is regarded as a genuine effort by that study.

Preeeeeee-us

or

Pry-us

?


You say tomayto, I say tomato, I guess..

Preeeeee-us on the radio ad.

This article is recent and discusses a few different things of interest http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080526.FUELS26/TPStory/Environment This zenn company has made great strides and has recently made a deal with a maker of advanced capacitor. A capacitor is an interesting but dangerous device that is somewhat similiar to batteries. Their capacitor gives a range of 500 km at a cost of 9 dollars. http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/03/zenn-motor-comp.html

The new TLA: HCCI - could mean 20% more efficiency from your ICE. According to CNN today, automakers are now trying to come up with a way of combusting petrol without the spark plug.

Quote :

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Car companies are working to perfect a new generation of gasoline engines that could get up to 20% better fuel efficiency. The system, which burns gasoline without spark plugs, relies in massive amounts of speed and power - the computer kind - to work.

It's called Homogenous Charge Compression Ignition, or HCCI. General Motors (GM, Fortune 500) has been allowing journalists to drive a test vehicle with this technology. It clearly isn't quite ready for the mass market, but GM insists that it's finally in the home stretch after years of trying.

"You're basically getting the best of gas and diesel all together," said Kelly Mundt, director of gasoline system marketing for auto parts supplier Bosch, which is working on some components needed for this new engine system.

That means more fuel efficiency, like a diesel, but with cleaner exhaust. But it's not easy to get a gasoline engine to behave this way.

This technique for burning gasoline requires loads of on-board computing power and the ability to control to the tiniest degree everything that goes on inside the engine in real-time. The ideas behind HCCI have been around for decades, but the parts have only come together in the last few years.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/05/30/autos/hcci/index.htm?section=money_topstories

In the last few years? Yeah look at the state of the price of gas in the shtates
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/oog/info/gdu/gasdiesel.asp

Looks very interesting. It seems to be a mix between a petrol and diesel engine, using the compression based ignition to ignite petrol.
There's more info at http://www.me.berkeley.edu/cal/HCCI/ and http://www.iddpl.com.au/HtmlFiles/HCCI.htm but some of it is quite technical.

Mixes fuel and air before ignition like in petrol which it says is cleaner for soot unlike the diesel with the big dirty black smoke sometimes.

Multiple ignition points - what's the reason for that? Must be tricky to engineer that...


There's an avatar for somebody

Auditor #9 wrote:

Mixes fuel and air before ignition like in petrol which it says is cleaner for soot unlike the diesel with the big dirty black smoke sometimes.

Multiple ignition points - what's the reason for that? Must be tricky to engineer that...

I would say that is to ensure a more even and controlled burn. In present engines, the combustion is a bit spread WRT time, so they can probably get more combustion efficiency by doing this.

I still can't see how thay can get a significant efficiency increase, when the largest loss by far is heat. (70% or something)

I wonder is the increase to do with evening-out the burn as you say above? I think I read on that article that AfricanDave posted that it's cooler in the chamber ... maybe that's because as you say there's a more even burn. I don't know really how diesels get more mileage per gallon either - the fuel isn't burned I suppose it's compressed and ignites because of compression so some of the fuel isn't lost in heat at BANG stage. Suck squeeze bang blow, as www.carbibles.com says. On carbibles they also say that if you can, to turn your sparkplug so that the spark opening is facing the jet of the fuel, that way you get a slightly bigger quicker bang.

What a car nerd he is.

Yep, if you look at that diagriam you posted up there with the 3 engines, it explains it quite well.

On a standard petrol engine, the air/fuel mixture (charge) is not homogenous, i.e. in areas the mixture is more lean than others. When you spark the cylinder, you get a flame-front, which takes a certain time to burn throughout the cylinder.
Unfortunately, the flame front travels faster in a lean mix than in a strong mix. The result is a very stormy burn. Also, you can end up with not all the fuel being burned.

The HCCI idea seems to be to get the mixture much more homogenous, and to spark it at various places to achieve a smoother burn and use all the fuel. Presumably this will cause a cylinder pressure response which is more efficient, better tuned to the cylinder mechanics and wasting less heat.

Although you don't want the pressure response too fast either, that would be like powering your bicyle by hitting the pedals with a hammer.