Who killed the Electric Car?

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by moementum7, Aug 10, 2006.

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  1. ScottMana Registered Senior Member

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  3. draqon Banned Banned

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    Solar Taxi in UK
     
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  5. draqon Banned Banned

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    Venturi Eclectic...

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    Solar charged...electric...fully

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    Cost: 24,000 Euros

    Will start sale in: 2009
     
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  7. ScottMana Registered Senior Member

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    SHOW ME THE MONEY!
     
  8. draqon Banned Banned

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  9. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    Looks a bit like a stagecoach...whatever is gained in solar energy is lost from bad aerodynamics, no?
     
  10. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    What do you mean? !!!

    That aerodynamics is good design. On cloudy days, the instruction manual specifically states:

    "Set the brake, and wait til the wind is blowing your way."

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  11. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    Something that hasnt been mentioned yet are the legal issues of pure electric cars.

    Canada for example has only one indigenous car manufacturer - ZENN Motors, which makes electric cars in St.Jerome Quebec.

    But strangely enough its illegal to drive them in all Canadian provinces aside from British Columbia!??

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    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8M88k6Ipp3c&eurl=http://zenncars.com/
     
  12. ScottMana Registered Senior Member

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    It is awesome, I just want to see it made. Many never make it to production.

    [Note: "Shoe me the money!" is a statement meaning: To produce an end result and present it for viewing. Taken from a movie called "Jerry Maguire" (1996) in which actor Tom Cruise yells the statement aloud at the request of a client, for which he is the manager, that wants "money". The yelling was a reminder that the client wanted money no matter what happened as the client would leave him if he failed to bring in the money and that he would stay with him if he did.]
     
  13. blinkgold311 Registered Member

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    OOOOORRRRRRR.....
    The fact a car is electric doens't really help the fuel consumption because everyone would have to plug their car into the grid, thus consuming more electricity that is being generated by all of our coal and gas plants, thus leading to more oil being used their instead of your car... dodo. That's why nuclear power is imperative.
     
  14. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    They are still way more efficient than regular cars. They eliminate air pollution around cities where most cars are. Pollution control is much more easily implemented at a power plant than on each car. The power grid can include sustainable sources like wind and solar power (and nuclear).

    How else would we use nuclear power for transportation? It's either electric trains or electric road vehicles.
     
    Last edited: Dec 19, 2007
  15. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    The UK government has just recently decided to go whole hog with enough wind turbines to power the entire grid:

    http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2007/12/noted-in-pass-2.html

    "Britain plans to generate enough electricity through offshore wind farms to power every home in the country by 2020.

    Business secretary John Hutton says the government plans to reach the target through a fourfold increase in the amount of space off Britain's coast allocated for wind farms. Hutton acknowledges that the move will change Britain's coasts.

    But he says the need for energy self-sufficiency leaves no choice.

    But its says a shortage of turbines will make it difficult to raise Britain's wind power production to 33 gigawatts by 2020 from the current level of half a gigawatt."
     
  16. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    This just in from Stanford University:

    http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/nanowire-010908.html

    "Stanford researchers have found a way to use silicon nanowires to reinvent the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power laptops, iPods, video cameras, cell phones, and countless other devices.

    The new version, developed through research led by Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, produces 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion, known as Li-ion, batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours, a boon to ocean-hopping business travelers.

    "It's not a small improvement," Cui said. "It's a revolutionary development."

    The breakthrough is described in a paper, "High-performance lithium battery anodes using silicon nanowires," published online Dec. 16 in Nature Nanotechnology, written by Cui, his graduate chemistry student Candace Chan and five others.

    The greatly expanded storage capacity could make Li-ion batteries attractive to electric car manufacturers. Cui suggested that they could also be used in homes or offices to store electricity generated by rooftop solar panels.

    "Given the mature infrastructure behind silicon, this new technology can be pushed to real life quickly," Cui said.

    The electrical storage capacity of a Li-ion battery is limited by how much lithium can be held in the battery's anode, which is typically made of carbon. Silicon has a much higher capacity than carbon, but also has a drawback.

    Silicon placed in a battery swells as it absorbs positively charged lithium atoms during charging, then shrinks during use (i.e., when playing your iPod) as the lithium is drawn out of the silicon. This expand/shrink cycle typically causes the silicon (often in the form of particles or a thin film) to pulverize, degrading the performance of the battery.

    Cui's battery gets around this problem with nanotechnology. The lithium is stored in a forest of tiny silicon nanowires, each with a diameter one-thousandth the thickness of a sheet of paper. The nanowires inflate four times their normal size as they soak up lithium. But, unlike other silicon shapes, they do not fracture.

    Research on silicon in batteries began three decades ago. Chan explained: "The people kind of gave up on it because the capacity wasn't high enough and the cycle life wasn't good enough. And it was just because of the shape they were using. It was just too big, and they couldn't undergo the volume changes."

    Then, along came silicon nanowires. "We just kind of put them together," Chan said.

    For their experiments, Chan grew the nanowires on a stainless steel substrate, providing an excellent electrical connection. "It was a fantastic moment when Candace told me it was working," Cui said.

    Cui said that a patent application has been filed. He is considering formation of a company or an agreement with a battery manufacturer. Manufacturing the nanowire batteries would require "one or two different steps, but the process can certainly be scaled up," he added. "It's a well understood process."
     
  17. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Possibly "fracture" is not a problem, but degraded by difusion, surely must be. I will believe this is practical when they report one survied 1000 deep discharge cycles. (about 3 years of one deep discharge per day.) Lithium, with one outer shell electron, is very "hydrogen atom like." There has been years of work in trying to get some metal to absorb and store hydrogen. Most of these systems, with almost any metal work for a while, but fail before reaching a practical number of absorb/desorb cycles. - I.e. just become a mess of dust like junk.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 20, 2007
  18. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    Good point Billy. The half dozen articles on this story say nothing about life cycles...the testing of which will depend on the re-charge time. A thousand cycles could take weeks or years.
     
  19. ric0h Registered Member

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    I don't know how anyone can discount "conspiracy" theories when they do things like that that absolutely force people to believe that something really wrong is going on.
     
  20. Echo3Romeo One man wolfpack Registered Senior Member

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    Makes anyone who drives it: automatically gay.

    I love the micro machines that have been coming out of Europe for years, but realistically, that shit will never sell here in the US. Not only due to aesthetic reasons but also because a collision with the 4500lb boulevard queen SUVs driven by every other suburbanite will vaporize it.
     
  21. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    The top 10 most fuel-efficient cars of 2007, as reported by www.Edmunds.com :

    1.) Toyota Prius

    2.) Honda Civic Hybrid

    3.) Toyota Camry Hybrid

    4.) Toyota Yaris

    5.) Honda Fit

    6.) Toyota Corolla

    7.) Mini Cooper

    8.) Hyundai Accent/Kia Rio

    9.) Honda Civic

    10.) Nissan Versa

    Although Detroit sucks, at least one (7) is not from Asia.
     
  22. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    Heres a bit more technical detail on Stanford's silicon battery I mentioned a few posts back:

    http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/1217/2

    "Although improvements in laptop computers and other electronics continue at a torrid pace, the batteries that power them have made only modest strides in recent years. A new advance in nanotechnology could change all that. Lithium ion batteries made with tiny whiskers of silicon can store as much as 10 times the charge of conventional rechargeables, researchers report. In principle, the new technology could result in laptop batteries that run for days and electric cars that cruise for hundreds of kilometers on a single charge--but it must still clear some key hurdles to make it to market.

    The advance centers on increasing the charge that a battery's positively charged electrode, or anode, can hold. When a battery charges, positively charged lithium ions grab an electron provided by an electrical outlet and migrate to the anode. As the battery discharges, the lithium ions give up their extra electrons--to power whatever device the battery is connected to--and migrate through a conductive gel to a cathode, the negatively charged electrode. Today's anodes are made up of sheetlike layers of carbon atoms, and it takes roughly six of these carbons to hold onto each lithium ion. Silicon has the potential to do much better, as each silicon atom can hold four lithiums. But when researchers have constructed anodes made from silicon films or particles, the large number of whizzing lithium atoms pulverizes the silicon and breaks some of its contact with the underlying metal substrate, sapping its strength.

    Anodes forged from whiskerlike wires of silicon fare much better, report Yi Cui, a materials scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and colleagues. The researchers used a standard technique for growing a forest of silicon nanowires directly bonded to a stainless steel substrate. They then added a common electrolyte and top electrode and cycled their battery through a series of test runs. The silicon nanowires still swelled and contracted but did not break away from the substrate, Cui and his team report online this week in Nature Nanotechnology. The key, Cui says, is that the nanowire shape allows the lattice of silicon atoms to expand and contract radially across the whiskers to relieve any built-up strain, thereby keeping the silicon nanowires firmly attached to the metal contact. As a result, Cui's team found that their anode materials were able to hold up to 10 times the charge of conventional graphite anodes.

    "It's a really nice proof of concept," says Gerbrand Ceder, a materials scientist and battery expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Making lithium ion batteries capable of holding 10 times the charge of conventional versions still requires a cathode that holds 10 times the charge, too, Ceder says. However, he adds, incorporating a silicon nanowire-based anode could allow batterymakers to reduce the weight and volume of the anode and add more cathode material in its place, which could give lithium batteries a power boost. That could make life a little easier for all of us."
     
  23. MetaKron Registered Senior Member

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    5,502
    Exactly right. "There's no conspiracy going on but we want it to look like there is" doesn't cut it with me.
     
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