Posts tagged electric car
Written by Understanding The Solar Power Car Battery
2009
Written by admin
The rumors of the electric car’s death have been highly exaggerated.Not only is the electric car on the road, mostly in the form of a hybrid vehicle, but the solar power car is also on the boards. Solar power cars have been around for a while, usually in university competitions, but they had to have incredibly large solar panels in order to power a tiny race car.Now, the solar power car battery seems to be just around the corner.
Honda’s Plans
You may think that one of the companies making the most money off of gas-powered cars would not welcome the electric car, but Honda is striving to make a more and more efficient solar power car battery. Not only are they limiting their market to automobiles, but also to all of the uses that solar power can be put to.
Honda isn�??t the only company that’s investing heavily on improving the efficiency of the solar cell.hey opened a manufacturing plant in 2007 to the tune of .5 million (US). Its sole purpose is to make solar cells to power buildings and vehicles. They mean to make everything from solar power car batteries to solar power battery packs.
New Material
The key to being able to get solar power moving has been the realization that not only silicon could be used to make a working solar panel. Silicon has the ability to make energy molecules hang on and acts as a sort of bus in order to transfer these molecules to other places. They make great conductors. However, you needed a huge silicon panel to get enough silicon to make something like a solar power car battery.
Now, Honda has another material that also acts as a conductor of solar power into electricity. Instead of silicon, Honda’s solar cells are made of ultra-thin membrane of copper, indium, gallium and deselenium. The material is often called CIGS. Get used to hearing that anocrym.In a few years, when you hear the media talking about CIGS, they don�??t mean the tobacco kind.
When Can I Get It?
There are already tiny solar powered cars that run on a solar power car battery that you can buy and put together. These “kit cars” are street legal and are usually only two-seaters.They usually can only go about thirty miles an hour. However, the world’s smallest solar power car that world perfectly is only less than an inch long.
Go here for more about Residential Solar Power and Solar Energy Solutions
MpgTips News: October 2008
2009
Written by admin
Big Myth about Environmentally Friendly Cars: ‘All the major car manufacturers are committed to making more enviromentally friendly cars’. Yeah Right!, and oil companies don’t go around buying out new technology companies just to bury anything new that threatens their monopoly. If car manufacturers are so interested in developing more economical cars and helping the enviroment, how come the first generation of hybrid cars are all based on PETROL engines?, where are the diesel versions?. The current range of hybrids available in the UK are a sick joke by the big boys, when compared to the large number of new super frugal 65+ MPG diesel cars available today, and the more frugal diesel cars are a hell of a lot cheaper to buy new. The answer to this particular question is very simple. Car manufacturers are just like politicians, they all want to create the illusion of doing something, while not actually making any real progress.
If Hybrids are the cars of the future, then Disneyland is full of skinny people.
Hybrids still burn petrol or diesel, they still pollute, they’re expensive to buy and they still cost £70 to fill up. They also deliver poor MPG in relation to the latest diesel cars and everyone knows this is old technology. What I would like to be able to buy at my local dealer is a purely electric car capable of achieving a sensible range on one charge, but nobody is interested in building one. Second choice would be a hydrogen fuelled car because I know that you can make hydrogen out of water, indeed I have already done just that with a diy hydrogen booster I previously built, so I already know its releatively easy to make your own hydrogen fuel. Nope we can’t tax water so you can’t have one, and if we did decide to allow someone to build one, we will scare you shitless by making it so complicated that you will have to use a hydrogen re-fuelling station, which is convenient for us because we are quietly confident that we would be able to continue taxing the shit out of you until you have no money left. The truth is that we live in an oil based economy, so the last thing our leaders want is a cheap mode of transport for the masses that utilises anything other than a heavily taxed oil based fuel. Especially if one of your oil company owning buddies is the president of an even larger country, and you’re currently helping him plunder the middle east (I hope he doesn’t read this).
Build Your Own Hybrid?
Any fool could easily build a better hybrid than Toyota or Honda have produced thus far. Boat owners in the far east realised a long time ago, that if you replace the factory fitted diesel engine with a 240vAC Electric Motor, and power that electric motor with a smaller diesel generator, fuel efficiency increases anywhere from 40 – 200% depending on the boat, so let’s take that same theory and apply it to your average hybrid. It appears to me that any hybrid would be a damn site more efficient if it simply had a small diesel generator powering its electric motor. If you add in a very small battery pack to capture regenerative braking energy, which in turn would occasionally reduce the load on the small & efficient generator. Any battery expert will gladly tell you that there are sometimes up to a 40% energy loss when charging a batteries, so it’s obviously much smarter to send any electricity you produce directly to the motor, eliminating the loss incurred through charging a battery pack first.
Update: General Motors are currently developing a car using similar technology in the Chevrolet Volt Project, to what I described here, except that instead of using a small efficient diesel engine to charge the battery pack, they are opting for a 1.4 litre turbocharged petrol engine, you know just like the one that propels the Volkswagen Golf 1.4TSI to 130mph and pumps out 140bhp! The American public probably think that’s a small engine compared to the V8′s they’re used to, the rest of us in europe can clearly see them getting the shaft!
The People’s Car
Does all this make sense to you? I should think so, I think it’s high time the car industry woke up and smelled the fumes, instead of spoon feeding us old technology, just give the people what they actually need, a cheap fuel efficient car for the masses. I have often thought that if just one car manufacturer were to build a modern super cheap ‘peoples car’, bung in a super frugal engine, offer a ‘no frills package’ ie fit wind-up windows and a radio, they would sell millions of them. While there are a few cars that already come close, they all seem to be fundamentally flawed in some way, like the Ford Ka, the initial idea was a good one, but they fitted an old crappy 1300cc petrol engine that struggles to return 45mpg, where is the diesel version? The latest BMW 320i petrol returns 46.3 mpg, so the puny Ford Ladybird is harder on fuel, WTF is going on? Another example of the extent of this problem is the latest small car offering from Volkswagen UK, the Volkswagon Fox, another reasonably priced small car but no Diesel version available in the UK, WHY NOT? the petrol VW Fox only returns a pathetic 46 mpg. I get the distinct impression that certain influencial people don’t want us to have access to truly economical cars at an affordable price.
Is There A More Fuel-Efficient Car Than The Hybrid?
2008
Written by admin
With all of the cars that are on the market, you may be thinking that there must be a car you haven’t discovered yet. You’ve heard of convertibles, Mazdas, Fords, and Buicks. And, you being an educated car-buyer, know all about hybrid cars, too. But surely, you think to yourself, there must be a more fuel-efficient car than a hybrid. If only you could find it.
This car that you believe is more fuel-efficient than a hybrid car, must be hidden in the back of a dealership behind the red, green, and yellow cars. It must be stuck between a big SUV and a van somewhere.
And what does it take to fuel this car? You don’t know the answer to that question. You barely know if this type of car exists. But there just has to be something out there better than a hybrid car. You insist that it’s true.
Well, there are a few choices for you. You could be thinking that a very small conventional car is more fuel-efficient than a hybrid car. You could be thinking that an electric car is better than a hybrid car. You could also be thinking that the dealership employees must have some cars in the back that they are creating on the spot that run on anything but gasoline and batteries. These cars, you think to yourself, would be better buys than hybrid cars.
Well, electric cars don’t get better fuel-efficiency than hybrid cars mainly because a lot of times electric cars don’t even need gas to power them, so you can’t even compare electric cars to hybrid cars.
A small conventional is definitely not more fuel-efficient than a hybrid car because no conventional car is.
And there are not any just-made cars sitting in the back somewhere. Car dealerships don’t make cars. They sell them.
But the final answer to the question is the new fuel-economy numbers that have been issued by the EPA. Those numbers conclude that the most fuel-efficient cars available to the public when looking at 2008 models are hybrid cars. Just the Toyota Prius as an example has a combined highway or city mileage of 46. This and other hybrid cars have overcome the 40 miles per gallon mark.
So, it looks like there are no new discoveries to be made at the auto dealer. And that’s a good thing. You wouldn’t want to be outdone by the Joneses because you thought you bought a great car, but you saw that they had a better, more fuel-efficient one. Nope, that’s not going to be you. Now you are armed with the knowledge that hybrid cars are the most fuel-efficient cars around and until automakers start to come up with more ideas, a hybrid car is what you have to work with.
However, advancements in fuel-efficient cars are on the horizon. Auto manufacturers are working on plug-in hybrids, battery-electric cars, and gas-engine systems that are more efficient. So look out, your dream car is coming soon. But if for now, you just buy a hybrid, you won’t regret it.
17 Year Old Builds Bradley GT Into Electric Car
2008
Written by admin
Image: benteen
There are some electric conversions that are just too interesting to pass up. We’ve talked about a 16 year old who built his own electric truck and the EcoModder co-founder’s 2 electric car, but we’ve yet to look at a car like this one. It’s not the car in the picture (the original story did not come with any images), but it’s the same model of kit car, the Bradley GT.
For decades (the pictured GT is a ‘71) the Bradley GT has been one of the standbys of kit car builders. Not only is it light and cheap, but it looks pretty good. It was no doubt this combination that led Lucas Laborde to choose the Bradley GT II as the basis for his electric car. It was purchased off of Ebay with a few thousand miles on the original VW engine, but all of that was promptly stripped out to make way for an all electric drivetrain.
The specs on the car are a little sketchy, but here’s what the original article has to say about the range and top speed:
The car uses the Bradley’s original transmission, a manual four-speed, but the clutch is no longer needed to change gears. The car has a top speed of about 45 mph – plenty fast for in-town commuting and lots of low-end torque.
The motor doesn’t make any sound, but Laborde inadvertently makes the rear tires chirp when he steps on the accelerator a little too hard while backing the car out of his father’s shop.
“It has a lot of power,” he says sheepishly.
These aren’t overly impressive, but considering the low cost of the conversion (the electric parts only cost an additional ,700) and the low weight of the donor vehicle, they seem fitting. Of course, the most important thing is that the car fits Laborde’s needs and will be yet another rolling advertisement for electric cars.
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© 2008 EcoModder.com Taken from 17 Year Old Builds Bradley GT Into Electric Car.
Tesla Releases Pictures of its Model S 4-Door
2008
Written by admin
Based on all the buzz that Tesla has created, you’d be tempted to think they were the only electric car manufacturer out there. However, they’ve really taken it to a new level today, releasing some pictures of the long talked about 4-door sports car, the Model S.
The Roadster has become the ubiquitous electric sports car, partially because it has built off of the Lotus Elise’s reputation as a superior driving machine. However, this next car will be an all Tesla design, though it has high expectations from Tesla’s own developing reputation (transmission issues aside).
The car should go on sale in 2010 with a starting price tag of ,000. If that seems a little too rich for your blood (definitely is for me!), compare it to the Roadster at 9,000. However, even if we can’t buy the car, Tesla’s efforts are definitely driving the production and performance of lithium ion batteries for use in electric cars, so we can all be happy.
One more teaser of the rear:
Source: Road&Track
