Gas 2.0

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You Might Be Very Surprised

A few days back I posted a You Tube presentation about two professors from Duke University who came up with a different, and in their minds, more accurate way to determine the efficiency of the engine in your vehicle.

It’s nice to know how many miles per gallon (MPG), or as the profs say, gallons per mile (GPM) your vehicle will get, but there’s more, much more to that equation.

First of all, you’re paying a premium for regular gasoline, $4 maybe in excess of $5 a gallon, and you decide to fill it up.  Sticker shock will settle in quickly, but how about this, how many hours will you have to work in order to pay for that fuel? Read the rest of this entry »

Revetec, a little known company from the Gold Coast region of Australia, may be on to something huge: they’ve created an engine that is 50% smaller, 50% lighter, has 50% lower emissions and is cheaper to manufacture than a conventional internal combustion engine of the same horsepower. Oh yeah, did I mention that it doubles the fuel economy too.

What that means is a car like the 2007 Toyota Yaris, which is rated at 40 mpg on the highway, would get 80 mpg with a Revetec engine.

This isn’t some hoax… They have a prototype which has been attached to an actual vehicle and independently tested to substantiate their claims.

Read the rest of this entry »

Editors Note: This guest post was contributed by Charley Territo, spokesperson for the Alliance of Auto Manufacturers, in an effort encourage better dialogue between the auto industry and the environmental movement. Charley also contributed a guest post on Grist on May 20. I asked him to weigh in on a question I’ve had for a long time: How can automakers like GM complain that consumers only want to buy big cars when they spend hundreds of thousands advertising brands like Hummer? Here is his response. Feel free to weigh in with your own comments below.

For years it’s been assumed that, using their superior marketing skills, automakers have the ability to trick consumers into buying SUVs and pickup trucks…when, in reality, the consumers really only
wanted to buy compact cars.  While that’s probably quite flattering to the marketing departments, it doesn’t have the important benefit of actually being correct.

Current events are now allowing people to see more clearly the greater force at work driving consumer demand: Gas prices. Read the rest of this entry »

Those trendy Californians…

Recent jumps in gas prices have seemingly driven them [sic] to adopt a new chic habit: letting their cars run out of fuel on the highway.

Allstate has announced that the number of Californians running out of gas on the highway jumped 17% in the first 5 months of 2008 compared to the same time period in 2007. Additionally, AAA of Northern California saw a 6.5% increase in stranded “empty-tankers” in April.

Phil Telgenhoff, Allstate assistant field vice president for California had this to say about it:

“We can’t directly correlate this rise in the number of people running out of gas to the rise in prices at the pump, but anecdotally we know that consumers are trying hard to stretch their dollar and sometimes that means stretching fuel into fumes.

In California, the highway patrol hands out free gas to stranded motorists and AAA will do the same. There has been speculation that this is one of the reasons people choose to let their tanks go empty.

Read the rest of this entry »

Vacuum Cleaner Whiz Going To The Streets

Update: Dyson Is NOT Making An Electric Car, A Report from London

The king of vacuum cleaners, James Dyson, is betting that a souped-up version of his vacuum cleaner and hair dryer motors will power cars over hundreds of miles.

Using technology developed for his lightweight electric motors, Dyson hopes to partner with Honda or another car maker, rather than build a car from the ground up.

Solar panels on top of the vehicle, or on the garage where it is stored, would provide electricity to charge the car’s battery.  Of course, the best performance would probably come from a country where there’s abundant enough sunshine to keep the battery charged.

Of course, he could also think about adding a plug-in function, just in case it stays cloudy for days on end. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few months, several big car makers, including Nissan, Subaru and Mitsubishi, have announced plans to produce all-electric cars before the end of the decade, or soon after. Now Daimler has announced that it to plans to jump on the growing EV bandwagon, with plans to roll-out a Mercedes-Benz electric car in 2010. According to Chief Executive Dieter Zetsche, the company also plans to offer an electric Smart car in the same year.

At this stage, it’s unclear whether the cars will be based on an existing model, or on a completely new platform. If the former, it’s likely that the Mercedes EV will be based on either an A-Class or B-Class, as is the case with their fuel-cell prototype (pictured below). Read the rest of this entry »

On his campaign swing through the west, Sen. John McCain proposes awarding $300 million to the first developer of a battery technology that exceeds all known technology today.  The package would have to be superior to any technology known today, to power plug-in hybrids or electric cars.

McCain is also focusing on alternative fuels, suggesting a $5,000 tax credit for every person who buys a zero-emission vehicle.  He says that should level “the playing field for all alcohol fuels that break the monopoly of gasoline”. Read the rest of this entry »

Norwegian company Th!nk is hoping to kick start the market for electric cars with its upcoming five-seater, the Ox.

Although an Ox is not what I’d call a particularly stylish or intelligent animal, don’t let the name confuse you — the Th!nk Ox could be about the most attractive and functional electric car ever designed. Before the debate starts over that claim, note the all-important “and” between the words attractive and functional.

Due out in 2010/2011, the Ox is about the size of a Toyota Prius. It can go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 8.5 seconds, travel between 125 and 155 miles on a single charge, and its lithium-ion batteries can be charged to 80% capacity in less than an hour.

Read the rest of this entry »

All these years, I’ve been doing the simple math of dividing the number of gallons used over a given number of miles driven, to determine how my car is doing on gas mileage.

Now come two professors from Duke University who say that may not be the accurate way to determine how efficient your car really is.

A team at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have revealed a potential revolution in hydrogen cars, after driving 650 miles on one tank of liquid hydrogen. In a recent test, the scientists set a new world record after they installed a super-insulated hydrogen gas tank in a standard Prius hybrid that was able to keep a full load of the liquid without evaporating for six days.

The tank, weighing in at around 300 pounds, removes a heck of a lot of obstacles to the advancement of hydrogen-powered cars. Current versions, such as the fleet of hydrogen-electric Toyota Prius’s used by various city governments across Southern California, run on compressed hydrogen gas, and have a limited range of around 80 miles between refuels. Even a pretty unambitious three-gallon tank fills the entire trunk of a Prius, yet still only enables a range of approximately 200 miles, not really enough to compete with gasoline-only vehicles. Read the rest of this entry »