Romanian Design Team Proposes Car With Detachable Engine
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So you got yer gasoline cars, and yer electric cars. And yer extended-range electrics, and yer plug-in hybrids. Sure, old news, been there, done that.
How about an electric car with a gasoline engine you can swap in and out as you need it?
Think of it as a range-extended electric car (like the Chevrolet Volt) that doesn't need to carry around the engine when it's not needed.
The SCI hyMod five-door minicar concept is the brainchild of a Romanian team made up of an engineer, a designer, an automotive journalist (hurray!).
It uses what its designers call a "dedicated logistics center" for the transformation from electric to gasoline, in which the back end of the car containing a battery pack is removed, and replaced with one containing a gasoline engine module that drives the rear wheels.
In normal urban use, the battery pack powers an electric motor that drives the front wheels.
The hyMod combines elements of range-extended electric cars like the Fisker Karma and the Volt, plus a tiny, compact range extender (similar to the one proposed by KSPG in a Fiat 500 electric conversion), and perhaps even the Better Place automated battery-pack swap station.
Right now it's no more than a concept.
But we think it points to the burgeoning choices available in vehicle propulsion that will become available over the next decade.
It's all due to the energy storage capabilities of lithium-ion cells (which will likely improve at roughly 6 to 8 percent a year), combined with increasingly stringent rules on gas mileage (in the U.S.) and carbon emissions (in Europe and Asia).
Watch the video, and then tell us, what do you think? Would you like to have an electric car where you could easily swap in a gasoline engine for long trips?
Leave us your thoughts in the Comments below.
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Have an opinion?
Anyway, a second gasoline powered car (or rental car) for those longer trips really sounds like a more practical solution to me.
beijing *already* rotates the power supply across the city so that factories and homes only get power for 3 days a week!
no, the solution is that cars need to be designed to use less energy, and that really is the end of it. less materials, less weight, better aerodynamics (that's what i'm working on).
I can't speak to the situation outside the U.S. but the ramp rate of electric cars will be slow and predictable enough that I strongly suspect they will be only a tiny portion of overall electric demand growth in any country.
And, as I'm sure you know, in terms of raw energy content, running a car on electricity is roughly 3 times as efficient as doing so on gasoline--since gas engines waste 75% of energy content.
google "electricity production of u.s.", you'll find a
page with an annual figure of 4.151 billion kWHrs per year.
google "number of cars in u.s." and you come up with
a number, 137,079,843.
divide 4.151 billion by 137 million, and divide by 365,
you get a figure - a budget - of 83kWh per car per day.
what that means is that assuming that if everyone's vehicles in the U.S. were converted to electric, and
they all needed an average of 83kW do to a journey of
1 hour per day, the electricity production and the
supply capacity of all power lines across the US would need to DOUBLE. assuming there's no spare capacity, that's roughly twice the power stations and twice the power cables.
food for thought?
in my previous post: i had accidentally excluded the number of trucks. including *all* passenger vehicles
(but excluding motorcycles), the budget comes out at
44kWh per vehicle per day - assuming that the entire
U.S. energy production is exclusively used for charging
vehicles overnight.
let alone the problems of taking all U.S. electricity production to charge all vehicles, a 44kWh is not sufficient power for a modern U.S.-style vehicle
(weight 1.5 to 2.5 tonnes, drag coefficient 0.3 to
0.4)
thank you for the down-to-earth figures - i was bordering on overdramatising :) but look further at the wikipedia page for u.s. electriciy production, at the section labelled "plan". it mentions that over the next 5 years, U.S. electricity production is to increase a mere 7%.
but more than that, there's another reason why it's necessary to reduce car energy consumption: there's simply not enough neodymium to go round, to supply all the magnets. even if there was enough (it's a "rare earth" metal, remember?), the refining of neodymium requires *vast* amounts of acid. even trying to dilute that acid with water when disposing of it isn't enough.
the bottom line is: people really, really haven't thought this through properly.
It's like dividing total food bought in the U.S. by # of soldiers, and saying the result is the food needed for each soldier.
As I noted before, you need to read the 2-volume 2007 study issued by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) + the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). If those two unlikely partners jointly conclude that recharging demand is (a) low; (b) gradual; (c) predictable; and (d) manageable, I'm inclined to give them more weight than your rather odd calcuations.
Plug-ins will arrive very gradually into the total vehicle pool, and the electric utility industry isn't worried about the power they will take.
Neighborhood transformers in affluent areas that already have "Prius clusters" are a better thing to worry about:
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1038392_will-electric-cars-destroy-your-neighborhood-power-grid-no-but
You and I are of one might when it comes to radical energy efficiency of vehicles. However...
I personally have reduces my home electricity consumption by 70% which is more than enough to power one Nissan LEAF. That is the great joy of electricity, there are many opportunities to repurpose it.
Controlled, predominantly off peak, charging of cars can be hugely valuable because it becomes somewhere to put energy that must be produced and is often otherwise wasted.
Therefore, each time the toilet is flushed, the water that comes in to replace it must be drawn from a source, cleaned, treated, pumped to your house, and the wastewater must be pumped to a treatment facility, treated, and pumped to a recieving body of water. All in all, potable water use is one of the largest uses of electricity in the modern home.
If you want to make a difference in your electricty consumption, use less water. It trumps anything else you use in your home, by a wide margin.
the bottom line is: people getting their facts on this issue from Wikipedia this very afternoon, may not have had the opportunity to think this through properly, yet.
range will be increased when it is needed.
price will decrease when it is needed.
you guys still dont get it. whatever is needed to sell the cars will be available, when it is needed - IT IS THAT DANG SIMPLE.
Second, EVangelists need to realize that while most people only need a few miles a day to get to work, most of us also drive a LOT MORE THAN THAT otherwise.
If a car can't get people to grandma's house or to that quick weekend trip to Vegas or wherever, people aren't gonna buy them. Even you fools living in LA must realize that.
However, the average U.S. household has slightly more than 2 vehicles, and the affluent households that will buy the first few years of plug-in vehicles average more than 3 vehicles. At first, a plug-in replaces ONE of those.
The newest vehicles in a household get the most miles put on them. Fairly quickly, plug-in owners come to realize that they can use their plug-in for the vast majority of their driving needs.
Have you actually SPOKEN to owners of plug-in cars?
If you have not had a chance yet, consider test driving an EV to at least know what they are all about. It really is a different driving experience even though I know it probably will not be the vehicle for your needs.
Thanks
John C. Briggs
the car companies do not care if they sell you or me a car.
they have X number of cars to sell. they have waiting lines for those cars.
so as i said, PRICE and range will become better AS NEEDED.
this means that when the cars they have for sale outnumbers the buyers that want to buy, then we will see "improvements".
this is not rocket science, merely business as usual.
There's a reason for that. The study everyone refers to when they give that "75% of vehicles traveling 40 miles" had one huge flaw: it didn't ask ordinary Americans, it mostly asked urban and suburban dwellers. Sure, that's a large chunk of the population, but it's not all of it.
The statistics on car usage doesn't come from asking anybody anything. It comes logging people's driving habits so it comes with much more certainty than you are suggesting.
In any case, I have heard this argument before about what people's "needs" are in transportation. They need 400 mile range. They need a pickup truck. They need 0-60 in 4 seconds, and so on.
Experience shows that all of those are much closer to "wants" than to "needs" and people end up with econoboxes because that is what they can afford to drive. Increasing gasoline prices and, God forbid, supply disruptions tend to change minds, so we shall see what happens in the future.
In the meantime, envision the desired future and figure out how to get there.
Remember, 50 years ago, Ford was predicting nuclear-powered cars ... :)
Best estimates I've seen are a 6-to-8-percent annual improvement in Li-ion cell performance. That halves the cost by 2020 or so, but takes you to some very interesting places starting in 2025 or thereabouts.
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1074183_how-much-and-how-fast-will-electric-car-battery-costs-fall
People, for four generations now, have come to EXPECT certain things from automobiles. You can call those expectations "wants" if you wish, but that doesn't change the market. It will take generations to unlearn those expectations. Until then, the majority of people will not buy cars that do not meet those expectations.
Regrettably it's behind an IEEE paywall, so I have no way of accessing it unless you have a digital copy you care to send me: john (at) highgearmedia (dot) com.
They won't be a noticeable fraction of the market for a while, but estimates I've seen of plug-in penetration range from 0.5% to 3% of total global production by 2020. My own analyses are relatively conservative, at about 1-1.5%, which would be 800K to 1.5 million cars depending on total global market size.
do you have trouble reading ? your comment back to me is what is insane.
car companies do not care who buys their car. they only care about the car being sold to someone.
there are waiting lines for evs, because our supply is still just in the beginning stages.
There aren't huge waiting lists for EVs. They shut down Volt production because they had 90+ days of inventory sitting around that nobody's buying. I literally spoke with a GM rep for Voltec who confirmed that to me Monday.
The only EVs I know of that are sitting on "waiting lists" are those that just barely released, like the Karma and the CODA. You could put out an Indian air car and you'd have a waiting list of suckers to buy it. Doesn't mean the car will ultimately sell well.
as they need new customers, "new improvements" will be made.
they dont currently meet your needs. you will come in a later wave. they know what it takes to sell the cars that they make.
the price will decrease, the range will increase AS NEEDED in order to sell the current bunch of cars.
there will come a time when an ev meets your needs, and you will purchase one.
the volt is not an ev - it is a hybrid. and it is gm's excuse. i said from the get-go that it would not last long.
has the waiting list for the leaf been fulfilled ?
we will all see this unfold as each year passes by.
Have an opinion?Join the conversation!