The Volt lives!

Ever since I saw the concept for the Chevy Volt in January 2007 I have been watching for updates, and low and behold here it is! Final form, for sale in 2010. A little more standard looking than their concept car was, but still really slick.And all the fuel saving electric goodness is there too.

• A 16kWh battery pack that will run the car for 40 miles on electric only
  
• A 1.4L engine generator that runs on gas or ethanol to re-charge the battery while driving
• The electric engine produces 150 horsepower and a huge 273 lb-ft of torque that because it is electric is available instantly, rather than having to spin your engine up to 5,000 RPM. So acceleration is linear, compared to a gas engine where you start slow then speed up.
  
• Regenerative braking
  
• Great aerodynamics - but they didn't give any numbers
• 3 hr charging on a 230v outlet, 8 hrs on a standard 120v
• Costs about $1 to drive 40 miles.
  

But how much will it cost, and when can people buy it? No hard dates or numbers yet, but it should be out in 2010 and cost a bundle. But depending on how you drive, the fuel savings would be incredible. The photo here is a 20 mile radius from our house, so if we had a volt we could go roughly out to there and back with out using a drop of gas. Of course it is as the crow files, so road miles would be smaller, but you get the idea. So for 95% of the time we would have a $.02 a mile car, and that would turn into a 40mpg car ($.10 a mile) the rest of the time. Now that's cool!

BMW "GINA" concept

I saw this video for BMW's new "GINA" concept car and was really blown away. The skin of the car is made of fabric with arms underneath to control the contours of the design. It is worth watching just to see the headlight open at 2:18. Wow!



Benefits beyond style include some serious weight reduction, and the ability to change aerodynamics on the fly to best match your speed and performance requirements. Perhaps $4 gas is just the ticket for a real automotive revolution.

Skysails

I wrote about this a few months ago but have been tracking it with interest. It is Beluga Skysails a German company that is working on designing a new kind of sail for big cargo ships.  This kind of energy savings is great, and looks to eliminate CO2 from places that are less sexy than cars, but far more cost effective. (Ocean shipping produces 2x more CO2 than all air traffic).

Well the first successful test was done on a trip from Germany to the USA and back to Norway and achieved a 20% fuel-savings (thats 2.5 tons of fuel and $1,000 a day) round trip using an 80 sq meter para-sail. Next step, a 160 sq. meter sail followed by a gigantic 600 sq. meter sail to be built into a new super cargo ship. More of this please! 

Below is a german video showing the test trip. Happy sailing! 

Sail the high seas, in 2008

Wow, via Auto Blog green I found this video of something I have heard of for the past few months. To save fuel on big ships, simply attach a sail! Of course it is not so simple, but this looks like a working prototype of one of the leading ideas. Basicly, you throw a big kite a few hundred feet up into the air and it pulls you forward, even if the angle of the wind is quite off. It also has the benefit of stabilizing the craft. It is supposed to provide 30% of the ships power when in operation. Talk about a heavy duty hybrid!

Cary fridays

A few things came across the wire that are car related so I will post them at once.

First I was able to do some minor car repair on the Volvo this week when a headlight burned out. I am starting to remember why its fun to do car work in the summer, its warm! No fingerless gloves, no runny nose, no touching cold cold metal. Now its just back to unscrewing stuff!

The second bit comes from AutoblogGreen in the same vein as the air car I posted a while back. This has sort of the same idea of using alternative technology to store energy, it's a hydraulic truck. Developed for UPS, it is great at storing energy on short trips because hydraulic pressure can capture up to 70% of the breaking energy compared to a weak 30% with batteries. The down side is it can't hold nearly as much as a battery, thus the city usage only. Its also huge, so truck use only for now. They claim 39-74% fuel gains depending on how they run it. What if the UPS truck got better gas milage than your car?

Lastly, from Autoblog, another hilarious car mod gone wrong. Lets just say the idea of a spoiler is to technically act as a reverse wing, forcing the rear of the car down onto the road to obtain better traction at speed. This poor sap not only made his car look dumb by adding a silly post-production mod wing, he added it backwards thus slowing his car down a ton (think parachute), and lifting the back end off the road. I wish I could have seen it.

EDIT: From the AutoBlog comments section, "...the driver's hair was also cut really short in back, but he had really long bangs in the front..." heehee..

Is the "Air Car" almost a reality?

Some readers might remember my previous post about a prototype car that ran on just compressed air. Well it looks like it just took a big step into becoming a reality ... in India. Buisness Week is reporting that "Tata Moters" of India has licensed the French design of the air car for future production. An added bonus for hot places like India, the exhaust of the air car is normal air of course, but it's between 5 and 32˚ F - built in air conditioning! It can go between 135-185 miles before it needs a three minute recharge from a large compressor, or 3-4 hours using the on board.

This would be a great deal for places like India where pollution in the cities is a huge problem. I will be interested to see if they really work in the real world both economically and technologically.

Air Car

How cool is this? It is a prototype car whos idea is similar to the Chevy Volt or the similar Volvo consept where you use a moter running at a consistant rate to keep a battery charged. But, those cars rely on Lithium Ion batteries to hold electrisity that in turn runs an electric motor. Those batteries are expensive and toxic to make, wear out, and are hard to get rid of.

This idea changes things up by useing compressed air instead of electrisity and carbon-fiber storage tanks instead of batteries. The prototype is just the tanks, but in this video they talk about adding an engine air compresser (how about a bio-desel) to keep the tanks topped off. Or, plug it in at night to run an onboard air compresser that takes 3 hours and $2 in electrisity to run. Or re-fill it at a station in three minutes.

This seems at least like a hidrogen killer to me. Hydrogen is the most worthless of any of the alt fules out there. Its a made up idea that sounds good, but will always be 50 years away, while we are buying gas the whole time. There is zero infrasture for it and bulding one would cost billions. It is also low energy yeald and now one car costs one million to produce. But compressed air? Thats easy.

So check out the video and thanks as usual to AutoBlogGreen