Finally! I have waited for so long! An electric drive vehicle with a small gas engine to extend the range beyond battery power. Sound like the Chevy Volt? Nope! I get to keep driving a Chrysler Mini Van! Woo Hoo! That is all I have driven since 1985 and I love them! Chrysler says they should be available by 2010. I think the Volt was saying 2015.
Unfortunately, I just bought a used 2009 Mini Van... duh... but I did not see the price on these ENVI guys (say "envy")... so I might have to save pennies for a while anyway. Maybe there will be a tax credit from Uncle Sam! Hey, if we are borrowing money from China to buy oil, why not send that to millions of US families to buy ENVIs!
A few thoughts:
- The vehicle has a single electric motor driving the front wheels. I would prefer 4 wheel electric drive. You do not need a transmission or differential/transaxle with separate motors. I am sure that will come later.
- One of the big opportunities with electric drive is regenerative breaking. This was invented 60 years ago on electric street cars. Some engineer realized that they could save a lot of brake linings by letting the drive motor become generator and dissipating the heat via a bank of resisters. Then, duh... someone finally said, "Ah... boss, why do we waste all that energy to heat when we could charge a battery and use it to accelerate later?" The boss probably got very rich... or maybe his boss... The ENVI system uses RB! Double Woo Hoo!
- Just like the Chevy Volt, the ENVIs have about a 40 mile electric range. So, for my normal day I will never hear the gas motor turn on. I just drive to work, then home, and plug it in. Hummm... I wonder how long that gas will stay good in the gas tank? Will it sludge out? Rust out? Ugh, always something.
- 60 mph in 8.7 seconds ain't bad for a Mini Van! With over 100 mph top speed, I will have just a little extra for highway passing acceleration, ya know?
Check it out:
https://www.chryslerllc.com/en/innovation/envi/specs/chrysler_vehicles.php
definitely looks cool... but I wonder.. why a minivan as their first release in this series? WHy not put it into a sweet car or something?
ReplyDeleteIf you click around on the Chrysler site, there is also a Jeep "humvee" looking EV and a Dodge sports car EV that looks like it could shred a few tires...
ReplyDeleteI suppose if you knew that the power to your home - the power that you use to charge the vehicle's battery - came from a green power plant instead of an oil or coal burning plant, then this is great! Unfortunately, most folks don't understand how power gets to all of those little pluggy things in their home... it's just magic electricity!
ReplyDeletethe point about green electricity is valid, though we have to think of it in terms of actual energy consumption efficiency. The bottom line is that a gasoline engine wastes so much of it's fuel through heat, warming up and being overpowered for what it needs to do.
ReplyDeleteConsidering that most trips in a car are with one person for 2 miles or less, an electric engine has a huge efficiency gain over a gasoline engine. So no matter the source of the electricity, electric drive trains provide a much more environmentally friendly option.
On the other hand, long trips with many people or cargo are far better off with high efficiency diesel or gasoline... hands down.
I give my previous comment an adamant thumbs down after doing a little research myself (typical of me...). For some reason I was under the impression that fuel consumption was roughly the same for a fuel powered vehicle and electrically charged vehicles that derive their power from a petroleum power plant. Thus, I concluded that the only truly efficient answer was nuclear power and electric vehicles. Perhaps this is still the more efficient (albeit not necessarily more green) solution...
ReplyDeleteI agree with wilderrick and Theo. I have 2 kids that are 29 and 25 now that made this discovery when they were 12 and 8, or so. As I recall, they were discussing how we could have cars that we recharge from the wall so that we would not pollute with our inefficient gas cars - pretty cool for kids that age! Of course, dad had to get involved and I asked where the energy in the wall came from. They talked back and forth for a bit and then concluded that there were lots of polluting ways to generate the energy in the walls too! There is nothing new under the sun...
ReplyDeleteI was all excited a few years back when I learned about the sodium borohydride work being done by GM and others. Basically, you process borax into borohydride, mix it with water, put it in the gas tank, pass it over a catalyst to release H2, burn that in the engine, and you are left with borax in water... laundry soap... that you can recharge! The solution carries about 10 times the H2 as in liquid H2! Cool! Until you think about all the distribution changes, engine changes, and the electricity to make the borohydride... wait a minute... just put that power into the existing distribution lines and get me an electric car! http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/new_cars/1266796.html?page=2 (near the bottom of the 2nd page), http://www.hydrogencarsnow.com/hydrogen-on-demand.htm,
oh well... http://www.hydrogencarsnow.com/blog2/index.php/fuel-cells/funeral-for-millennium-cell/
Then on top of that, every time I have to stop at a traffic light or stop sign I cringe thinking of all that energy being wasted to accelerate, then dump it as waste heat in the brakes, then accelerate again... over and over! At least the regenerative breaking that we can get with EVs will recover some of that.
There are a zillion ways to generate electricity and those methods can be big or small and can be expanded and improved to be more green and take advantage of whatever consumable resource is available from tides, to wind, to coal, to space mirrors, to nuclear, to.... on and on. I think that is the way of the future. Nuclear Solutions has ways to process nuclear reactor waste to draw out additional energy and significantly reduce the waste problem, they are also working on nuclear batteries. I think the possibilities are almost endless!
http://www.nuclearsolutions.com/addtech.html
About 80 years ago Nicola Tesla was building huge towers with big "Tesla Coils" on them. The idea was to put energy into the atmosphere from 12 (?) sites around the world. The system would make energy available to anyone anywhere any time. All you had to do was ground one side of a device and pull the energy out of the air. Every person on earth was going to have a small hand held communicator device (btw a few years ago Tesla was given credit for inventing radio. I bet most schools still teach that it was Marconi). http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/04/01/8403349/ (one of many)
ReplyDeleteTesla was building one of the towers in Colorado Springs but he was kicked out... something about horses not liking electrical sparks from hoof to ground! I wonder how many of us would have been like bugs in a sapper?
i think that my favorite nuclear method is the one that wraps the little pellets in balls of graphite. I'm no nuclear physicist but it appears that doing so solves 2 problems. 1 the nuclear engine could never over heat, the graphite insulates the pellets enough. 2 the waste has no problems with being buried in a lead lined vault even if water infiltrates it and leaks out the graphite is so tough that it will always keep the nuclear waste from leaking out of the little ball.
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