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News Archive
Saturday, April 30, 2005
Owners charged up over electric cars, but manufacturers have pulled the plug
News from The San Francisco Chronicle
by Michael Taylor
It can make you dizzy, watching those numbers on the pump whiz by in such a blur that by the time you've pumped a measly 15 gallons of gasoline into your pickup truck, you've spent nearly $45.
But wait. What if you left your house in the morning, drove your 20 miles to work and 20 miles back -- by then, you'd have burned up $7 worth of gas - - and the whole trip cost a mere 50 cents?
That would be about the price of the electricity it costs to recharge your Ford Ranger electric-powered truck overnight. That's the truck that will go about 80 miles between charges, the one that looks the same as a gas- powered Ranger.
And there are other vehicles in this electric-powered class: the most original is General Motors' EV1, built from the ground up as a fast, economical two-seater, along with the Honda EV-Plus, the Ford TH!NK, Toyota RAV4 EV, Nissan Altra, Chevrolet S10 Electric and Chrysler Epic.
Pretty nifty cars, if you want to get out from under the thumb of the oil companies. There's only one problem: For the most part, you can't have them.
GM and other manufacturers have recalled most of their cars, leaving some in public agency fleets and others in museums or universities. In fact, GM has been hauling its EV1s out to the Arizona desert and crushing them.
For all intents and purposes, the hugely expensive electric car program - - created in the 1990s by the California Air Resources Board's mandate that the major automakers build a certain number of pollution-free cars -- is just about dead. The law requiring manufacturers to offer those cars for sale has long since been modified -- hybrids, compressed natural gas and 'SULEV' cars (super ultra-low-emission vehicles) have taken up the environmental slack.
The automakers, saying all-electric vehicles occupy a tiny and economically worthless niche, simply stopped making, leasing or selling the cars.
And the people who leased the cars and wound up adoring them, only to see them called back in at the end of the lease period, are livid. Many wanted to buy the autos, but all but one manufacturer said no.
Over the past few months, the electric car enthusiasts have conducted noisy protests and held round-the-clock vigils against Ford and GM in front of auto dealerships or storage yards, most of it to no avail.
David Raboy, however, was one of the lucky few -- when Ford told him he had to turn in his beloved truck because the lease was up, he conducted a well- publicized vigil in front of Senator Ford in Sacramento. Ford finally relented and sold him and other lessees their Rangers for $1 each.
Raboy and his wife, Heather Bernikoff, both 34, plug the Ranger into a charging device on their ranch in Mariposa County. It costs them pennies to recharge it each day.
And the truck is hardly a slouch. With half a ton's worth of batteries slung under the pickup bed, lowering the truck's center of gravity, it handles more like a Mustang than the workhorse it was designed to be, taking corners marked for 30 mph at more than 65. Raboy said that in the past four years, the truck 'has cost me nothing to run. No maintenance, no oil changes, no gas.'
That, of course, is the point of the electric vehicle aficionados in California, a group of several hundred people who are, without exaggeration, fervent evangelists for their cars. Many of them look at the auto industry as a tribe of idiots who will never break their reliance on the dwindling supply of fossil fuels, despite experimental forays into fuel cell technology.
'Electric vehicles are loved by the people who drove them, almost universally,' said Marc Geller, a San Francisco photographer who had a Ford TH! NK until Ford took it back, then spent $38,000 to buy a used Toyota RAV4 EV. Geller concedes that the car needs to be plugged in each night, but says that once people get used to an electric car, they love it.
The electric RAV4s, small SUVs that have their batteries under the floor, are still being sold, but only as used cars by individuals. Toyota discontinued its electric RAV4 program.
Some electric cars can still be found in public utility and city government fleets. Vacaville, for example, turned the niche craze for zero- emission, no-gas cars into public policy, largely through the efforts of the city's transportation systems manager, Ed Huestis."
Read the full article...
Monday, April 25, 2005
Electric cars generate a buzz
News from Times-Standard (Eureka, CA, USA)
by Mike Morrow
ARCATA -- Often, Kevin Johnson will wave as he drives past one of those $2.89 per gallon gas stations that pepper the landscape.
But even Johnson knows he's going to have to stop every once in awhile.
'Yeah,' he says, 'maybe to put air in my tires.'
His 1984 Volkswagen Rabbit -- no, make that, Voltswagen Rabbit -- has become somewhat of an attraction throughout Arcata, a community known for and proud of its uniqueness.
And during Saturday's Sustainable Living, Arts and Music Festival at Humboldt State, the car and several others on display drew a constant gathering of interested individuals.
'I just paid $35 to fill up ... where do I get one of these?' asked one woman.
Johnson is among more than a dozen members of the Humboldt Electric Vehicle Association, individuals whose mission includes, among other things, educating and promoting sustainable transportation."
Read the full article...
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Jay Leno Buys First Lithium I-Cell Zero-Emissions Vehicle
News from Automobile.com Auto News
It seems fitting that the worlds number one car fanatic, and owner of one of the most eclectic car collections on earth which even includes an environmentally friendly Stanley Steamer, gets the worlds first lithium I-Cell powered sports car.
Renowned comedian and Tonight Show host Jay Leno is to take delivery of R-Cars first production car, a retrofitted Chrysler Crossfire. Producing zero emissions, the R-Car uses the latest high-power, long-life battery technologies from Californias Hybrid Technologies Inc., maker of batteries for mobile products, plus other components developed by a consortium of companies including R-Electric Car Company, Global Hybrid Corp., Solium Power Corp., and WhistlerTel.
The cars lithium I-Cell, developed specifically for the vehicle, enables it to achieve more than 100 mph, proving that even powerful performance cars can be easy on the environment.
Jay Lenos enthusiasm for all things automotive has done much for the collector car market, and hes now using his celebrity influence to shed light on an EV, or electric vehicle, a segment of alternatively powered vehicles that has recently been overshadowed by development of the hydrogen fuel cell (FCV), internal combustion hydrogen (H-ICE) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEV)."
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Tuesday, April 12, 2005
An Exotic Electric Car
News from Forbes.com
by Dan Lienert
Vehicle of the Week
OK, so, the title of this story is something of a red herring: to automotive enthusiasts, an 'exotic car' is exotic not just for where it is built, but for otherworldly performance capability.
But for this story, we have deemed the REVA-NXG electric vehicle 'exotic' because of its point of origin: India. The nation, which is becoming increasingly famous as a technological hub, has now produced a bold-looking electric car, a type of automobile that many had thought was headed for extinction, but appears to be enjoying a resurgence--at least as a kind of prototype.
The REVA-NXG was made by REVA Electric Car Company (RECC), which recently unveiled the concept car--an automotive industry term for prototypes--in Monaco. The car is a two-seat roadster with a range of 124 miles per charge and a top speed of 75 miles per hour.
Using a 50-horsepower motor to drive the front wheels, the REVA-NXG has sodium-nickel-chloride batteries instead of conventional lead-acid batteries, which have a shorter life. Its hydraulic brakes are regenerative, as well--i.e. they convert thermal energy burned during braking into potential energy for the vehicle to use.
Inside the cockpit, the car has what RECC calls a 'wireless tablet'--an appliance that integrates into a high-resolution, single touch-screen display all of the vehicle's dashboard functions, including speed, state-of-charge, range and critical sensor inputs, as well as a GPS-based navigation system, a modem and MP3 compatibility.
Read the full article...
Monday, April 11, 2005
ArvinMeritor Developing New All-Electric Commercial Vehicle
News from Australasian Bus and Coach (Australia)
ArvinMeritor is developing an all-electric drivetrain for commercial vehicles in the US with Unicell, a medium-duty body builder.
The resulting new medium-duty vehicle (GVM 7250 Kg), which is being designed for a fleet customer, will use a fully-electric drivetrain and will be demonstrated to the public in 2006.
The initial vehicle application is for pickup and delivery vehicles. The particular fleet name is being withheld pending completion of the vehicle development."
Read the full article...
Sunday, April 10, 2005
Hybrid car owners seek an outlet
News from Contra Costa Times (CA, USA)
by By Danny Hakim (NYT)
Ron Gremban and Felix Kramer have modified a Toyota Prius so it can be plugged into a wall outlet.
This does not make Toyota happy. The company has spent millions of dollars convincing people that hybrid electric cars like the Prius never need to be plugged in and work just like normal cars. So has Honda, which even ran a commercial that showed a guy wandering around his Civic hybrid fruitlessly searching for a plug.
But the idea of making hybrid cars that have the option of being plugged in is supported by a diverse group of interests, from neoconservatives who support greater fuel efficiency to utilities salivating at the chance to supplant oil with electricity.
If you were able to plug in a hybrid overnight, you could potentially use a lot less gas by cruising for long stretches only on battery power. But unlike purely electric cars, which take hours to charge and need frequent recharging, you would not have to plug in if you did not want to.
"I've gotten anywhere from 65 to over 100 miles per gallon," said Gremban, an engineer at CalCars, a small nonprofit group based in Palo Alto. He gets 40 to 45 miles per gallon driving his normal Prius. And EnergyCS, a small company that has collaborated with CalCars, has modified another Prius with more sophisticated batteries; they claim their Prius gets up to 180 mpg and can travel more than 30 miles on battery power.
"If you cover people's daily commute, maybe they'll go to the gas station once a month," said Kramer, the founder of CalCars. "That's the whole idea."
Read the full article...
Sunday, April 10, 2005
There's no problem with knocking, but it does kind of belch now and then
News from SiliconValley.com
At speeds of 32-40 mph it'll never hold its own on the Autobahn, but Energine's Pneumatic-Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) might be just the thing for earth-friendly trips to the market. A low consumption, low pollution vehicle, PHEV uses both a two-stroke compressed air engine and a battery-driven motor. 'The compressed air is used when the car needs a lot of energy, such as for starting up the car and acceleration,' Energine's Cheol-Seung Cho told CNN. 'The electric motor comes to life once the car has gained normal cruising speed. You could say our car has two hearts pumping. That is, we have separate motors running at different times, both at the time when they can perform most efficiently.'
Energine, it should be noted, isn't the first outfit to develop an air-powered car (Motor Development International rolled one out in 2002; see 'Pranksters let air out of Compressed Air Technology car tires, engine') . Nor is it the only novel hybrid approach. University of California, Davis professor Andy Frank just converted a 325-horsepower Ford Explorer into a hybrid electric/coal monstrosity that gets 25 to 30 miles to the gallon and goes from 0 to 60 in seven seconds using very little gas. 'We just built a high-performance plug-in hybrid Ford Explorer,' Frank said recently. 'It's 325 horsepower -- 200 of that horsepower is electric and 125 is gasoline. This car goes like a rocket, but still gets double the fuel economy of a regular hybrid. And for the first 50 miles it is all electric -- zero emissions.'"
Read the full article...
Monday, April 04, 2005
Peak Oil Presentation in the US Congress
Transcript from US House of Representatives via Energy Bulletin
Conservative Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, Chairman of the Projection Forces Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee, gave an hour long presentation on Peak Oil to the US Congress on Monday. This is the full transcript. We hope to get a hold of the graphs used by Mr. Bartlett and will update this article to include them if they come to hand.
[...] Hubbert noticed when the bell curve reached its peak, about half of the oil had been exhausted from the field. Being a scientist, he theorized if you added up a lot of little bell curves, you would get one big bell curve, and if he could know the amount of reserves of oil in the United States, and he was doing this in the 1940s and early 1950s, and could project how much more might be found, he could then predict when the United States would peak in its oil production.
Doing this analysis, he concluded that we would peak in our oil production in 1970. This curve is what is known as Hubbert's Curve. The peak of the curve is what is known as Hubbert's Peak. Sometimes this is called the ``great rollover'' because when you get to the top, you roll over and start down the other side. It is frequently called ``peak oil.'' So peak oil for the United States occurred in 1970, and it is true that every year since then we have pumped less oil and found less oil. The big blue squares here are the actual and Members see they deviated a little from the theoretical as M. King Hubbert predicted, but not all that much.
[Continues at length...]
Read the full transcript...
Saturday, April 02, 2005
Car that runs on thin air
News from CNN International
A Korean company has created a car engine that runs on air. The engine, which powers a pneumatic-hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV), works alongside an electric motor to create the power source. The system eliminates the need for fuel, making the PHEV pollution-free.
Cheol-Seung Cho, of Energine Corporation, told CNN the system is controlled by a computer inside the car, which instructs the compressed-air engine and electric motor what to do.
The compressed air drives the pistons, which turn the vehicle's wheels. The air is compressed using a small motor, powered by a 48-volt battery, which powers both the air compressor and the electric motor.
Read the full article...
Saturday, April 02, 2005
Modding the Prius
News from Technocrat.net:
The Prius is a popular Hybrid car, but some enthusiasts want it to have the features of a pure electric, they want to be able to plug it in overnight and be able to commute to work on pure battery power only.
Read the full article...
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