Electric vehicles!

[Darell]

Hey look here... Toyota will soon be making their *first* all electric car! I can't wait to park one next to my 2002 Rav4EV.

"Toyota's iQ-based electric car, due to be launched in 2010, will get its own body style to create a stand-alone model which will become Toyota’s first all-electric car. "

from:
http://www.autocar.co.uk/News/NewsAr...ncepts/241909/

[McGizmo]

Darell,
The short term anomaly in CA at the end of last century is not part of the historical record many wish to be recorded or acknowledged. The more I know and have lived and in comparison to history as it seems to reflect these times, the more I doubt the veracity of any history of any time. I have heard that the victors write history and I suspect it is even less direct than that.

The EVworld.com news letter this AM had a bunch of news on loans and support from out government directed towards EV and Hybrid programs and it certainly does look like there will be some real progress!?!?!

[Darell]

Originally Posted by McGizmo

The more I know and have lived and in comparison to history as it seems to reflect these times, the more I doubt the veracity of any history of any time.

Ain't that the truth? Whenever I read something in the paper - something that I'm either involved with, or know intimately - I always notice errors in the reporting. Sometimes *significant* errors. So when I have no clue about an article, I know always wonder if I'm learning something, or just being tossed a bunch of crap.

The EVworld.com news letter this AM had a bunch of news on loans and support from out government directed towards EV and Hybrid programs and it certainly does look like there will be some real progress!?!?!

Oh, it is huge. If you ask me, this thing is now too big to be stopped. We *will* finally see the cars we've needed for the past 20 years. It finally looks like it'll happen in my lifetime!

[theforester]

Good to hear the Toyota is getting back in the the BEV market once again! I wish that they would make a more "normal" looking car as their "first" though. That iQ looks like it was built on a go-cart frame! I would be VERY glad to see a revival of the Rav4EV instead. That's just me though!

I hope we see more announcements of this kind in the future! Sure is good to see

[Darell]

Here you go! Nissan just "revealed" their entry into the EV market. Will be sold at the end of 2010 (you know - like every other EV known to man).

Still, it is real - and has a real company behind it. Looks sort of like Nissan's version of a Prius-shaped car. Which I have more respect for than Honda's version which is WAY too close to the actual Prius for my comfort! A bit goofy looking perhaps, but likely very practical, and *almost* mainstream.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjPU-2ZImts

http://www.hybridcars.com/news/nissa...eaf-25950.html

Aw crap... never mind on the 2010 thing. That's just to fleets of course.

"Nissan Leafs (Leaves?) will be offered to commercial fleets in the U.S. in 2010. By 2012, the LEAF will be offered to consumers in select markets, including Oregon, Phoenix, Raleigh, San Diego, Seattle, Sonoma, Tennessee, Tucson, and Washington D.C. Nissan says the price of the EV will be close to that of a family sedan, which we take to mean somewhere near $25,000 to $30,000."

[idleprocess]

Originally Posted by Darell

Which I have more respect for than Honda's version which is WAY too close to the actual Prius for my comfort! A bit goofy looking perhaps, but likely very practical, and *almost* mainstream.

Honda invented that shape back in the distant mists of time with the final iteration of the CRX. Toyota borrowed heavily with the Prius, which has become the hybrid shape, so Honda is more ... reclaiming ... what was theirs in the first place. The original Insight bore a strong resemblance to the CRX anyway.

[McGizmo]

Well I would buy one if I could but by the end of 2011 if they have decided that the earth will in fact face major disasters in 2012 based on solar magnetic pole reversal and/or the earth's magnetic pole reversal and the radiation that will kill all things electronic, I will probably hold off on a purchase for a year or two more.

In the one link they say the batteries are to be leased and not bought. That might be a good thing or it might be deferred trouble?!?!

At least for me, the car's shape and presumed interior geometry can provide the utility I would hope to get from a car. It has a reasonably long roof line that would lend itself to racks.

Ultimately, this is quite promising provided time tables don't slip more...

[Darell]

For quite a while I've been wanting to go camping with the EV. Finally had a chance to this summer. We took our tandem kayak, our tandem bicycle, all our cooking and sleeping gear, firewood... Here's a shot of my packing up for the trip home.

[Darell]

Solar boat to "sail around the world." Should be interesting.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/SPORT/07/29/...oat/index.html

[McGizmo]

Really interesting hull design too!!

[Darell]

Problem is, they only let you move the deck chairs out and play shuffleboard at night.

[McGizmo]

On a related note (not the deck games ), I saw a piece last night on the science channel where a guy is working on an unmanned sail boat (rigid wing mast) that has solar panels on deck and wing for self powering and indefinite duty time. The idea is to send these boats out into the ocean to take surface air/water temp readings and aid in hurricane monitoring and prediction. The boat is self sufficient and self righting. The narrator claimed that the boats could stay out there indefinitely but I know better. Depending on the biocides used in the bottom paint or any form of ablating paint or slippery surface will ultimately foul from marine growth and need to be serviced.

The concept though is really cool and I can imagine any video feed might be rather exciting to watch!! I had a friend who built a sail boat down in Taiwan and sailed it back to CA. He got caught in a typhoon and spent two days with the boat on its side. No sails up but the wind on the mast had enough force to keep the boat on its side and the wind was so strong that no large seas were capable of being generated where he was. The wind blew the tops off any waves. Not a cool place to be!!

[Darell]

Maybe they'll have tear-off, or self-dissolving hull skins?

Yeah, plenty of weather that I wouldn't want to sail through. In fact, that includes just about anything that is labeled "weather!"

[josey]

There's a wonderful profile in the August 24 New Yorker of Elon Musk, chair and CEO of Tesla Motors. Lots of stuff about the EV market and his plans.

There's a quote from Bob Lutz, then vice chair of GM, on how all the geniuses at GM kept telling him that lithium-ion cell technology was a decade away, when Musk came out with the Li-ion-powered Tesla [0-60 in less than 4 seconds, 244-mile range]. Lutz asked his geniuses, "How come some teeny little California start-up run by guys who know nothing about the car business can do this, and we can't?" GM suddenly got serious with the Volt.

Still, Musk mocks the GM effort and its hybrid concept because the Volt has just a 40-mile range on batteries. After the battery runs down, Musk says, "You'll have a tiny engine pulling around a big car with a dead battery -- you'll be the worst car on the road." Ouch.

But I found a really scary revelation, too. Tesla was having trouble getting transmissions from BorgWarner. Musk said, "It's ironic that we're being held up once again by the incumbent technology -- the transmission -- not the new one, the battery." Marc Tarpenning, a Tesla co-founder, offered the scary part, at least for the future of our country: "We learned that the car industry is unbelievably good at delivering what they've done in the past with a little tweak -- faster, or in yellow. But if you want something a lot different -- a simplified transmission that's electrically actuated -- that's too radical. The designers and engineers who can do radical changes all left Detroit forty years ago."

[idleprocess]

I hope that the Volt performs about as well on the gasoline engine as it does on battery power. From what I've read on it, the engine is there solely to act as a generator; the motor is the sole source of motive power. Hopefully the engine/generator combo is sized somewhat larger than the average demand from the motor so the battery can buffer energy consumption.

[McGizmo]

Everything involves compromise. My personal disappointment in the Volt as I perceive it is that it is a complicated and complex vehicle and I fear a poor compromise. I hope to put my money into a pure EV and accept the compromise of limited range but at the benefit of a much simpler vehicle and reduced maintenance considerations. The Volt may well have its place in many people's driveways but not in mine.

It appears that we will in fact have a number of alternatives and choices coming up and the market might be in a position to be finally heard and hopefully catered to. It would be a real boon if the market has real and valid information upon which to make its decisions and not a load of misinformation and manipulated truths. I won't hold my breath on this one.

[josey]

Tesla seems to be on the right track with power and good range, but the car industry is one of mass. It's difficult for an innovative new company to get into the business because the scale is so large.

I'm struggling to see how the Volt will have any performance after 40 miles. If I have this right, 750W is about 1 horsepower. Even with greater efficiency with EV, it seems that it would take a very large generator to generate enough power to run the Volt and the dead weight of its batteries.

[Darell]

Originally Posted by idleprocess

I hope that the Volt performs about as well on the gasoline engine as it does on battery power. From what I've read on it, the engine is there solely to act as a generator; the motor is the sole source of motive power. Hopefully the engine/generator combo is sized somewhat larger than the average demand from the motor so the battery can buffer energy consumption.

There has been precious little made public about just how the "extended range" mode will work. And on top of that, they have still let nobody, and I mean NOBODY outside of GM operate the car in "extended range mode." A bit has been written about it here and there - and it is all based on rumor and invalid information. There are those who are close to the project who know more than others, of course. And they are being amazingly mum about it.

Here's what I know: There is NO reason to not have seemless performance between battery and extended range mode - especially when you consider how much capacity the batteries will have, and how much GM plans to use before they switch over to extended range mode. There is NO reason to not keep the battery at a reasonable (and low) SOC where you can suck off it for acceleration, and then replace the charge from the generator during cruising. This is how the Prius works in a VERY mild way. And it isn't rocket science! You drive the thing on battery from 100% SOC to 50% SOC. Then you *mostly* drive the motor directly from the generator (to avoid needless charge losses to the battery) and put the battery back into the system for high power needs, and again to recharge it back to 50%.

So that's how it *should* work, and could provide just as much driving pleasure at the end of battery life as it had at the beginning. If it does NOT work this way, and depends entirely on the power of the generator, we're in for a really crappy car. Unless GM wants to sabotage this thing, it won't happen that way.

[josey]

Hey Darell:

So how big do you think the generator will be?

[Darell]

53 kW peak
30 kW typical

An interesting point to note: The Rav motor is rated 50 kW peak, 30 kW constant. So the generator in the Volt produces all the power that the Rav's motor could handle. The Volt will (at lease should!) additionally have extra power demands handled by the remaining 50% SOC in the battery. Another way to put it is that the Volt will never have less "performance" than my Rav.

[josey]

That confuses me. A 53,000 W generator seems massive. My biggest home generator is 6,000 W, and has to be on wheels. So the Volt's auxillary IC generator would kick out 70 HP -- that's a fairly large engine.

The big car companies build big, heavy cars -- basically a legacy of seemingly infinite supplies of cheap oil -- so their idea of an EV is a big, heavy car with a more complicated EV/IC drive train. What we need are small, light cars with good range for 90 percent of our driving. The Tesla can range more than 200 miles and has power up the ying yang. Wouldn't most people prefer the Tesla approach to that of the Volt?

[McGizmo]

Originally Posted by josey

....The Tesla can range more than 200 miles and has power up the ying yang. Wouldn't most people prefer the Tesla approach to that of the Volt?

I sure would! Just dial down the creature features and luxury appointments and do it in the economy of scale that the big guys likely could if they didn't have their heads......

[Darell]

Originally Posted by josey

That confuses me. A 53,000 W generator seems massive. My biggest home generator is 6,000 W

One issue is that you're comparing the peak output of the Volt with the continuous output of your home generator.

So the Volt's auxillary IC generator would kick out 70 HP -- that's a fairly large engine

All depends on what you compare it to. The tiny gas portion of my Prius "hybrid synergy system" puts out far more HP than that, and it sure isn't very big! What's the minimum HP engine we've got out there in gas cars these days? 110 hp? Maybe as low as 90? 70hp is smaller than any engine that a gas-only car has, certainly. Make no mistake - toting that gas engine and and exhaust system and fuel tank, etc... will add significant weight, expense and complexity. And please not that this generator has wheels on it too!

Wouldn't most people prefer the Tesla approach to that of the Volt?

"Most people" is not you, me or Don. "Most people" like drinking a version of Budweiser or Coors or Miller. "Most people" are scared of running out of battery. They're scared of the new and unknown. They take great comfort in the status quo. "Most People" see the only benefit of an EV as being the money they save on fuel. Every study I've seen, shows that "most people" would love to have a product like the Volt because it gives them the money savings on fuel coupled with the warm-fuzzies they get with having a gasoline engine onboard to see them out of a jamb.

Me? Of course a full BEV would be better than an E-rev like the volt.

[rodfran]

The price I have seen projected for the Volt is $40K.
For a car that has a range of 40 miles in electric mode? I will wait and see if any of these BEV's appear by the magical year of 2012.

I already drive a car that gets 30-35mpg. Why would I want a Volt? I just cannot see people rushing to GM to buy a Volt at that price. BEV with 80-100 miles range for $20-25K makes more sense to me.
I would use the car I have for extended highway and a BEV or ride the bus for in town!

[Darell]

Yes, price is going to be a tough one. What do you do if you're GM, and all your hopes and dreams are pinned on this one car? Do you charge enough to make a profit, or hope it'll be so successful, that you can survive a loss for the first few years while the material cost drops rapidly? The car was announced with a really nice price - something south of $30k. Like the cost of a Prius. At that time, I predicted $45k. They are reinventing the wheel, afterall. According to most people at GM, this is the first electric car they've made. So of course they had no experience on which to draw. :bigger sigh:

[idleprocess]

Originally Posted by rodfran

The price I have seen projected for the Volt is $40K.
For a car that has a range of 40 miles in electric mode? I will wait and see if any of these BEV's appear by the magical year of 2012.

The $40k price point is lunacy. If they sold them for even $30k and GM opted to make nothing on all sorts of sexy options, it would fare better and GM might sell enough of them for it to catch on.

The catch with the Volt is that it has to try to be everything to everyone since it's going to be the first mass-market EV (of this century anyway... ). So that means it sacrifices price and some BEV efficiency in order to address some of the big questions everyone has, like "what if I run out of charge?" and "what if I need to make a cross-country trip with 90 minutes' notice?" Given that the average daily commute is < 40 miles round trip and the need to ease fears in the market (that automakers have played a part in perpetrating), it's a sensible proposition.

It's not like there aren't some serious technical challenges associated with the fantasy of a 5-minute BEV recharge. The instantaneous power requirements are nothing short of enormous, and the ordinarily small losses would be greater and generate significant amounts of heat. Even a more reasonable 20-minute recharge would take a heavy-duty power connection and some means to buffer the load. I don't believe that the challenge of a 20-minute recharge is all that great, but it's not as simple as charging at home over 4-8 hours at manageable electric-dryer or air conditioning compressor rates of energy consumption.

It's also not helpful that everyone thinks there's a market for charging 20x the price of commercial power for public charging stations and is trying to figure out how to make BEV users pay gas-like prices for electricity. I can understand charging for a service with a major investment like fast-charging where the business owner has the equivalent of a 100kW residential branch circuit to himself and capacitor/battery banks, flywheel generators, or some other major capital investment ... but charging $1-$2/KWH for a 240V/40A dryer circuit with a semi-smart device to ensure continuity and cut power before the breaker trips?

I already drive a car that gets 30-35mpg. Why would I want a Volt? I just cannot see people rushing to GM to buy a Volt at that price. BEV with 80-100 miles range for $20-25K makes more sense to me.
I would use the car I have for extended highway and a BEV or ride the bus for in town!

Who thought gas would hit $4/gallon? It's closing in on $70/barrel again - who knows how high it will go this time?

I'm not saying it makes sense for you as-is, but it's on the same level as owning two vehicles for personal use.

For me, I might have been in the market for one at $30k ... but $40k is too much. $25k and I would have gone for it.

[idleprocess]

Originally Posted by josey

That confuses me. A 53,000 W generator seems massive. My biggest home generator is 6,000 W, and has to be on wheels. So the Volt's auxillary IC generator would kick out 70 HP -- that's a fairly large engine.

The engine for an automobile needs to be compact, and (relatively) inexpensive in addition to whatever mass, reliability, and power requirements are imposed. Good thing for auto engines that they're already on wheels...

A generator engine needs to be inexpensive before most other considerations. A quick glance at the average generator reveals all sorts of opportunities for mass/volume reduction ... but those would add cost and complexity to something that can usually be given relatively unlimited space.

The Volt's generator will be operating under a fairly static load, so it can be designed to run within a narrow RPM band and be optimized for efficiency rather than torque and peak power like an automobile engine.

[Darell]

Good god.

http://www.ecofriend.org/entry/eco-c...-speed-record/

The look of the machine coupled with the record speed just makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Dang!

[josey]

Awesome stuff. Can anyone explain how a wind-powered vehicle can go faster than the wind and what the theoretical speed multiplier is?

[jtr1962]

Originally Posted by josey

Awesome stuff. Can anyone explain how a wind-powered vehicle can go faster than the wind and what the theoretical speed multiplier is?

Nice explanation on page 4 here. Prior to reading that, I figured intuitively it would involve the wind hitting the sails at an angle. And there doesn't seem to be any theoretical limit to the speed multiplier (but practically I think Mach 1 would be a hard limit). The .pdf I linked to mentions multipliers of 8 to 10 for the best ice boats.