excuse me, i have one argument against this

winter

i like how my engine give me heat

Horses.

I'm 6'4" and there are still plenty of cars here I can fit in, although that's just looking at how I sit as a passenger; I don't have my licence yet but I'm learning in a Yaris (less than 1.7m wide) without a problem. If all those freakishly tall Scandinavians and the Dutch cope, I think Americans can too. The fatties will have to start walking till they can fit in their cars

Electric jacket, microfiber liners.

NEXT.

Make me an alternative fuel truck with lots of torque plz now.

uh no

warm air so you don't get the pneumonia effect from cold air

What cold air?

MICROFIBER.

There is plenty of riding gear that keeps cold air from getting to your body.

The only thing that sucks about riding in the cold is that you eventually have to go somewhere else to warm up, because you can't create heat faster than you lose heat while riding.

But seriously, it's not that bad. Stop being a nancy boy.

Scarf, wrap around face.

Or learn to breath cold air.

And yeah, a good set of wool or capilene long underwear will help.

I would just like to take this opportunity to air some of my concerns concerning the Tesla Roadster.

There are quite allot of people who seem to think the Tesla Roadster is the future of automobiles. I'm not going to argue, I'm not even going to point out the problems the Tesla Roadster has already encountered. I would like to talk about the batteries.

*** Please note, these are all back of the envelope calculations using google numbers, I make no guarantee of their accuracy, but I hope they serve to demonstrate a point ***

According to their own documents, the Tesla Roadster uses 6831 '18650' form factor Lithium-Ion Batteries.

Unfortunately, it's not easy to look up the amount of Lithium in a Li-Ion battery as it varies from manufacturer to manufacturer, but the ballpark is .3 * the A/h rating of the cell. 18650 cells are usually rated for around 2200 mA/h or 2.2.



Lithium is toxic. Google puts the concentration of lithium which is lethal to humas at .0015 Mol/l. The atomic weight of lithium is 6.941 g/mol. So we are looking at 0.010412 grams / liter.



114,394 gallons! Improperly disposed of, the battery pack from ONE Tesla Roadster could contaminate up to 114,394 gallons of water to a level that is lethal to humans.

Of course, by these same back of the envelope calculations, your average laptop battery (9 '18650' cells are pretty standard) can contaminate 13 gallons of water if improperly disposed of.

The point of this? Lithium based batteries MUST be disposed of properly, and the cost of disposal and processing (both monetarily and environmentally) must be taken into consideration at all times.

Thank you

[Edit] Tesla Discusses the safe disposal process for their battery packs here. I am not pointing a finger at them, but just using them as an example of the absolute necessity for proper disposal, and the secondary costs involved in Lithium based batteries. Additionally, these batteries wear out over time, and will need to be replaced regularly (probably every 2 or 3 years would be my guess), can we be sure that EVERY battery will be disposed of properly?

It is worth noting that they call their battery packs "Non toxic" only because it does not contain Lead, Mercury, Cadmium, or a handful of other severely toxic chemicals specifically identifed in the RoHS directive.

when's the last time you were in -40 weather?

i know i was this winter

The efficiency isn't massively important, and depending on the situation it's definitely a good idea to harness renewable resources. Iceland are annoying high and mighty gits because they use the most energy per capita in the world and get pretty much all of it from geothermal sources by virtue of sitting on top of a crap load of lava. The UK could reasonably make a lot of its energy from off-shore windfarms. And so on. And yeah, nuclear is better than pumping more carbon into our atmosphere, but it's not exactly a permanent solution either.
To an extent, the people who want cheap gas are going to have to change their priorities somewhat. Supply and demand both need to change. There's a lot of micro-generation that could be harnessed: latent heat storage, solar water heaters (depending on climate) etc. Photovoltaic cells and small wind turbines are useless at that scale against their costs. As well as reducing the energy demands through passivhaus standards, recuperating exhaust heat from boilers, reducing ventilation loss etc.
All these small changes add up to a lot once most people are trying to implement most of them. These aren't pie in the sky, unbudgeted ideas either, many of them are viable but their break even points are often 5 years or more and no one likes paying down the £500 for extra roof insulation. And that, I think, is the main cause for inertia in that regard.
Until they can create, electric or air cars with a decent enough range to travel much further no one is going to use them. Both electric and air would not take much of an adjustment for current petrol stations to adapt to them; whether installing a compressor or an electrical outlet. The list of potential improvements are endless but they are going to need govt. input to get started.

ARGH I'm tired, I'm sure that rambled. Apologies.

Like 6 years ago, on the back of a dirtbike.

It was AWESOME.

exactly, 6 years ago, we get that and near that weather regularly in winter here so i rather enjoy cars that can produce heat and allow me to not freeze to death

I would think that if you deal with it SO FREQUENTLY you wouldn't cry as much about it.

-40 is enough to cause frostbite to any exposed skin (including your face and eyes) within 60 seconds.

stupid.

I guess it's a good thing I wasn't exposing any skin. :\

Live somewhere that isn't so ****ing cold. :/

GET A HORSE [/color]

No. Ice riding is a hell of alot of fun!

That's what some people fail to realize when looking at wind or solar. Yes, the technology isn't as efficient as other means of generating power, but we're not burning a finite resource.

Sad as it is, one of the biggest barriers to more wind and solar production in California in the past decade has been aesthetics.

I bet more people would like wind power if they made it legal to slingshot rabbits at the giant blades.

u suck


I really wanna have a closer look at that compressed rotary engine.

Awesome stuff.

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Walk

Why not use wankel engines!

I was thinking about this thread on my ever so exciting bus journey into work today and I thought some people are missing the point here and there, anyways these are my thoughts after watching the video and reading the thread;

If I had to choose between the 3 emerging technologies to replace oil, the compressed air one seems at the outset to be the best of the three and here's why I think that, if I miss something do bring me up on it.

Fuel Storage

Hydrogen fuel cell cars need hydrogen to run on (duh..), storing hydrogen is no easy matter and is in fact bloody difficult and requires some rather expensive bits of equipment. Also hydrogen has a tendency to go boom...I would really be worried about crashing a hydrogen fuel cell car.

Electric cars use batteries that are not only heavy but also toxic as West pointed out. They will need replacing after 3-4 years and the disposal of them is not only costly but dangerous.

And so that's left with "Air Car", well, I tried to think of something bad about the storage, yeah it can explode if the canisters are punctured but the carbon fibre tanks on show in the video look like they might help solve that. Other than that, it all seems pretty safe on the grand scheme of things.

So, storage wise, the "Air Car" wins.

Efficiency

Now I haven't got time to go do any proper research into this but instead I'll nab a few quotes from wiki

Hydrogen Cars



Whether this includes the efficiency at the power station i don't know, I guess not.

However the above is using what I believe is a rather common and easier to make setup. There are "fuel cell" engines that can reach 80-90% efficiency and the technology is being worked on for use in car vehicles. I assume this is the engine itself and doesn't include the whole power-plant-to-wheel efficiency calculation.

Electric Cars

Damn wiki uses kW·h/mi unit as a scale of efficiency...loves to do comparisons but no clear measure of efficiency.

So, using what is said in %, the total charge and discharge of the battery is ~81% efficient. There are no numbers I could see on battery to wheel motion efficiency, but if memory serves electric motors are quite efficient but they also generate a lot of heat, so I'm gonna say around 75%. (Do correct me here if I'm wrong). The production of the electric in power stations is on average 40% efficient (not including this, common to all and I'm not sure it was included in the fuel cell car) I don't have any numbers off the top of my head for transmission loss over cables, but lets say its 90% efficient, what with heat loss in the transformers and resistance in the cabling, I'm probably being generous here.

So in total you are looking at about a 51% efficiency from power plant to wheel, with a good +/- 10% either side for any dodgey number choosing by me.

"Air Car"

Well, West pointed out earlier that air compressors can have an efficiency of only 10%, but that is a worst case scenario that was mentioned in one of the first search results in google when searching "air compressor efficiency", a .pdf from a US department on saying how to improve efficiency in gas compressors.

The reason I actually looked this on up was that I couldn't quite believe they were that bad...and there aren't. Most gas compressors now can achieve efficiencies in the range of 60-75%, some even go as high as 90% but those are rather expensive compressors. As to their efficiency in converting their electrical input to compressed air, I couldn't find any numbers but I would assume >50%.

Efficiency in terms of an air compressor comes from this btw



I'll nab these two quotes from wiki

Kinda matches up with what I've said, charging and discharging a battery is actually pretty efficient, 81%. Compressing air looks to be about 30-40% efficient.

Not looking so good. But lets not forget that electric cars use those good ole toxic batteries.

There is a whole list of good and bad points if you want to go read them. Scroll halfway down the page.

So taking the above to be correct and my rough guess on electric car efficiency you are looking at around 15-20% efficiency for an "Air Car" but with very little downsides in terms of toxic ins produced.

-------------------

K, this is going on longer than i thought....

------------------

In regards to the production of electric and also thinking about the production of petrol, diesel.

I'm not sure the amount of energy that goes into refining oil, but I bet it is a hell of a lot and not to mention all the other costs involved in mining and extracting the stuff. Also, it has never grabbed me as a particularly efficient industry but I have no numbers to back this up, just a personal opinion.

Until battery technology comes on to the point where there are no toxic chemicals (or at least very few) in them and their lifetime drastically improves, I'm not a big fan of electric cars.

Fuel cell cars on the other hand might be ok, but using hydrogen as the fuel is both a dangerous, expensive and technologically challenging problem that is far far from being finished.

Air cars, technologically wise, it's done, working and pretty cheap. Improvements in the whole system efficiency are greatly needed but those will come in time as they did with combustion engines.

It is pretty clear we need to move away from using oil as a means to power our cars, it is a dwindling source that is getting more expensive to use, harder to find and wars have already started over securing it's supply, more will surely follow.

--------

Power generation, would just like to add that with all the renewable's sources coming that is all well and good but none of them are 100% reliable.

I've personally been to see a fusion reactor, a working fusion reactor that is producing more energy than is needed to power it, it is called JET. I made some thread about it a few years ago.

It is the forerunner to a much larger reactor called ITER that is being built at the moment, *if* ITER does what it should (and I have no reason to doubt it after the success of JET) the world should have a working fusion reactor design within 20-30 years.

Yes there are issues with efficiency, it still uses the "oh so crap" method of every other major power station of heating water to steam to turn a turbine...I mean come on. But, per kg of fuel, it is undeniably the most efficiency means of energy we know and (I say this with confidence) it will be a reality within our lifetime.

------------

meh, I've been writing this too long and I'm just gonna stop now.

i wonder if you could combine the rear axels with generators and have that run compressors while you drive, or even manual compressing

Or you could plug a generator into a generator so the first generator was always generating for the second generator.

Or use MAGNETS for 1000% efficient PHYZICS

In the video it said that with the French version you can just plug in the car and it'll compress the air for you.

You work at CERN and yet you think about lowly technologies such as this?

In future maybe you should walk to work, then you can use the extra time to solve the problem of breaking even with tokamak fusion reactors

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i don't know if you're joking or not but the wankel rotary is still a gas engine. no benefit there, but an intriguing design anyway.

I was making a joke about how inefficient they are.

I don't see the big difference between a compressed air car and an ordinary electric car. They're just two different ways of storing energy. We could even use a large spinning cylinder if it wouldn't make driving uphill difficult.

Edit: I would say the biggest difference is that the car itself becomes many times simpler and would require much less maintenance. But, still, it's just a different kind of battery.

Arguably, a much better, cheaper kind of battery. It's not what is, it's what it does.

There are some companies looking into flywheel tech (I think NASA has done a fair bit of the groundwork making precision gyros), they used to need large masses because we didn't have the bearings to support high enough speeds. Now they talking about suspending them in a magnetic field in a vacuum and running them at insane speeds. Apparently they can take months to slow down if left alone. Pairing them or sticking them on gimbals can cancel out gyroscopic effects so the main problems to overcome are dealing with bumps, vibrations, more sudden changes in velocity etc that could cause the wheel to hit its surround and also crash proofing it because one of those flywheels bursting out at 10,000 rpm and flying down a busy road would be insane.

You forgot the most important thing against air cars: Hollywood.

Gasoline cars explode.
Electric cars electrocute.
Hydrogen cars explode crazy.

Air cars don't. Producers will not like it.

Since when has hollywood cared about what ACTUALLY happens to things when they get shot? They can make one of the air tanks get ruptured and shoot a jet of air out whih causes the car to spiral through the air wildly, as the body of the car shreds into little metal pieces, finally slamming into a wall or pole or something and creating a huge cloud of cement dust and shrapnel.

Awesome. Someone get me a producer.

For those of you who said it still takes energy to refill it with compressed air, the video said it took about $2 worth of electricity to recharge. Which seems pretty good to me.

I think this has a lot of potential. It'll be interesting to see how the oil companies try to squash it though.

Die Hard 5: Hot Air

hahaha

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