Researchers must be a lot like milk: if you leave them alone for long enough, all sorts of crazy stuff develops. Although in milk’s case, most of it would give you severe digestive wrongness, scientists’ work can often make you feel better about things.
According to those clever folk over at Associated Press, those clever folk over at GM are already working on new ways to recycle the heat from the evil that is car exhaust into something that can make your car run more efficiently.
The prototype works, powered by raw science, by taking all the heat wasted through the exhaust, recapturing it, turning it back into electricity and powering all your in-car gadgets, like your GPS or your in-car DVD player. (You don’t have an in-car DVD player? Greenbang neither. But she doesn’t have a car either.)
Here’s how it works, explained by AP:
The thermoelectric generator works when one side of its metallic material is heated, and excited electrons move to the cold side. The movement creates a current, which electrodes collect and convert to electricity.
According to a GM researcher by the name of Jihui Yang, the boffins have come up with a metal device for your exhaust pipe that can improve fuel efficiency by five percent.
Said Yang, who may not have been watching Anchorman recently:
The take-home message here is: It’s a big deal.”
The device will be tested out on a GM motor next year.
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It was truly amazing to see the power that a really big stick can wield. When petrol was affordable people still used vast quantities of it. Hummers were popular. And, cheap holidays were the order of the day.
Over the weekend, a panelist on a BBC Radio 4 debate commented that the UK government had made a mistake by not increasing the tax on petrol, suggesting that it should have reduced income tax slightly instead to ensure green measures were kept in place.
The suggestion is probably right. The green car market has picked up a lot in previous year, with the Smart Car and Prius bucking the industry sales trend - by not plummeting.
And now, Mitsubishi wants a piece of the Prius action. In fact, it wants it so much that it will be increasing the size of its planned battery factory by a factor of five.
Apparently Mitsubishi is confident that the i-MiEV is going to be really popular. Not a bad assumption considering the popularity of the Smart Car, the fact that the i-MiEV is the vehicle of choice for renewable charging station testing, and the small matter of Japan’s postal service itching to go all-electric for their fleet. I wonder if their UK survey brought back signs of high demand as well.
The plant will be open in Q2, 2009 and will produce 2,000 batteries per year. But, the increase will come shortly after and the factory is expected make 10,000 per year there after.
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Greenbang always secretly wanted to be a boy racer, revving suped up custom versions of really rather rubbish cars with fat exhaust pipes and ginormous spoilers round the car park at Netto, doing burn-ups and handbrake turns. It was something about the noise emanating from exhausts the size of a dustbin that did it.
In these days of electric and hybrid fuel cars there’s not much chance of getting that kind of petrol-fuelled racket out of your Toyota Prius. Until now, that is.
The engineers at Lotus have developed technology to make electric cars louder. Not so you can now go and join the local teenagers down at the Netto car park, but because they fear electric cars are so quiet they are dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists, who can’t hear them coming.
The Lotus engineers, quite possibly taking a leaf out of the book of a generation of kids who fixed a piece of card by the spokes of their bicycles in the, frankly, misguided hope it would then sound like a motorbike, have come up with a waterproof speaker that sits under the bonnet of electric and hybrid fuel cars.
Dubbed ‘Safe & Sound’, the clever little speaker even changes its loudness and pitch in time with the car’s speed. Vroom, vroom!
Just like Greenbang’s favourite eco-friendly celeb Natalie Portman, the Smart car is small, upmarket, perfectly formed and boasts an environmental conscience. Greenbang would like a Smart Car but probably wouldn’t get its lardy ass in one.
The eco-toting car is also a relative bright spot in the badly hit car market for top end UK car retailer Inchcape, which has just reported like-for-like sales in the UK up by 1.2 per cent for the first six months of the year.
In a report in London’s Evening Standard, Inchcape’s chief executive Andre Lacroix said:
“The premium sector has been outperforming the rest of the market for four or five years because of its willingness to innovate and stimulate the market and cars like the Smart, a good example of this, are doing very well.”
Yet another sign that hard times and the spiralling price of oil is forcing people to look at greener alternatives – a good thing for sure, even if it’s only being done for selfish financial reasons.
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Greenbang has written about the Prius several times before. It is the original and most well known of the hybrid powered cars. Indeed, the car has even made appearances on South Park.
And, with petrol prices rising, interest is being sparked in green technologies. Indeed, the green car sector has bucked the current economic trend and its sales have increased.
This is backed up by Toyota’s move to increase its production to 480,000 units per year. That’s a 70 per cent increase on current supplies. It’s also 280,000 higher than originally predicted in May.
According to Treehugger, the company will be rejigging its production facilities with the manufacturing of its Wish minivan moving, freeing up space at its Tsutsumi plant, where the car is already made.
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Greenbang’s Rowan Horncastle attended Nissan’s FCV launch at Imperial College last week. If you’ve ever wondered how a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle works Nissan’s Jerry Hardcastle explains in this video.
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Since the age of five, when Greenbang walked downstairs to discover Santa had left a Raleigh Striker, she has loved her bikes. Within the last week she has bought a brand new road bike and is already in the process of naming her. Sadly, the new bike is a replacement from her stolen Giant road bike which she was very attached to.
Greenbang has been talking to another self confessed bike nut, Craig Brophy who runs the Sweat n Gears blog. Apparently, the self proclaimed ‘world’s biggest quality bike company’, Giant, will be launching a range of electric cycles this Autumn.
Whilst this in itself is nothing new, Greenbang and Sweat n Gears both think the technology might be unique. According to the press release:
Giant’s engineers have designed a machine which integrates a state-of-the-art power system harmoniously with your pedaling power to provide a seamless output of energy.
What this, very marketing, phrase is trying to say is, when you pedal the batteries recharge and lithium ion technology has been used for the batteries.
This should hopefully solve two problems generally associated with electric bikes. They’re very heavy and they have very little range. Giant claim the batteries will give 70 miles in economy mode and it only takes four hours to recharge.
Sadly, it won’t sort the other problem, price. Whilst people with a love of road bikes will happily spend thousands to gain a one second per mile advantage, people that buy electric bikes probably won’t. No price is listed on the press release but Sweat n Gears has given a US price of $2,000 and expects UK prices to be higher still.
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Greenbang doesn’t get excited very much anymore. He stayed up once too often on Christmas Eve waiting for Santa Clause but never saw him. The experience has slightly jaded his view on life in fact. As such, he has always been a bit dubious of events in the calendar.
That said, there is still one that has him bouncing around the room like the Easter Bunny (another being he stayed up for but never witnessed) The British International Motor Show.
The show rolls into London’s ExCeL centre this week and Greenbang’s reporter Rowan Horncastle has been lucky enough to gain access a day before the show opens, bringing you all the latest green orientated car news first.
This years show has got a “Greener Driving Pavilion and EV Village” showcasing all the latest alternative fuel technology. This includes the UK’s first electric taxi as well as other alternative fuel cars such as the Nissan X-TRAIL FCV, reviewed by Greenbang last week.
Greenbang will also be wandering around the other manufacture stands, green wash detector in hand, to try and see what the car firms are implementing to make themselves that little bit greener. First stop will have to be at Morgan, to see the deliciously designed Morgan LIFEcar.
The LIFEcar is fuel cell-powered electric vehicle with an exterior which has already caused a bigger argument in the Greenbang office than God vs. evolution ever managed elsewhere. In a similar approach to the Tesla, Morgan has tried to produce an environmentally responsible sports car with impressive performance.
To see what it is really like you will have to wait until later this week.
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It may not exactly be the prettiest of cars available but it is Greenbang’s first hydrogen-powered drive. Greenbang’s newest reporter Rowan Horncastle travels to South Kensington in London to sit behind the wheel of Nissan’s new X-TRAIL FCV.
A Greenbang exclusive video of the FCV will also be available from next week.
Greenbang has finally been offered the chance to get behind the wheel of a hydrogen powered car and he’s impressed. He had expected it to just crawl along and when you put your foot down a 30 second lag would occur. He can now safely say he was wrong.
The test ride was part of the launch for Nissan’s fourth generation X-Trail FCV at Imperial College, London.
The new hydrogen-powered X-TRAIL FCV has many developments from previous generations. Most notably its cruising range and performance are now similar to the average petrol car. Donning his driving gloves Greenbang got behind the wheel and started it up.
The biggest change was the lack of noise. When starting the car, there is a slight whirr from the motors but that is all. The car is completely silent when at idle and when driving normally. Even with the foot to the floor there is only a small whine.
Greenbang has read reports that people were walking in front of hybrid and electric cars because of their lack of exterior noise. He can confirm the danger is valid; two people carelessly strolled in front of the car on the South Kensington test route.
The lack of noise also added danger in an unexpected way. Greenbang found he had no sense of speed. Indeed he was not the only one. According to one of the Nissan reps a journalist had tested the car’s limits at the French launch; and got a 150Km/h speeding ticket to prove it. Greenbang is still wondering how the journalist managed 95mph in Paris.
If hydrogen is to take off then it needs to be similar in range and performance to a petrol car, and Greenbang can confirm that Nissan has achieved this. One fill of the hydrogen tank allows the car to travel up to 500km (300 ish miles). 0-100kph is a little under 15s which isn’t bad for a 4×4.
The car is still a way off becoming commercially available. The prototypes cost a prohibitive $1.6m. That said, Nissan believes that this price can be greatly reduced if the car was to make it into production.
With only one hydrogen filling station in the UK the infrastructure also needs to be built up before we gain access to technologies such as this.
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Researchers must be a lot like milk: if you leave them alone for long enough, all sorts of crazy stuff develops. Although in milk’s case, most of it would give you severe digestive wrongness, scientists’ work can often make you feel better about things.
