Porsche goes green

[martinreinhardt]

Personally I think there is NO future in Hybrids or Electric cars, they have been around in the past and went away again.

I agree with Jad, it's just a fashion statement and it helps to finance the research for better and more fuel efficient engines. The future is most likely in more fuel efficient or alternative fuel like Bio Diesel engines NOT Hybrids or Electric cars. Hybrids or Electric cars pollute just as much if not more, the electricity has to be produced somewhere too and there are many more fuel efficient cars than Hybrids.

[Dan Chambers]

Actually, from a Green point of view, more emissions are dumped atmospherically by old-fashioned coal-burning electrical power plants per mile travelled than a tank of gas in a direct-injected computer controlled internal combustion engine. If the "E-cars for clean air" fans calculated out the emissions to generate 1 KW of electricity from coal-burning power plants (soot, sulfur, CO, HcL, etc.) they'd all buy a gas-powered car, and burn kerosine lamps for lighting, burn wood for cooking, and take cold showers. Only a 100% solar-electric or hydro-electric/geo-thermal powered car will achieve the kind of "clean air" that certain people are looking for.

Coal-burning power plants outnumber Hydro-electric and Solar/Geothermal power plants by a huge margin. The US still has the oldest coal-burning power plants in the world and its too expensive to upgrade them to meet Federal clean air standards, so they pay a "pollution tax" (fines) that gets passed on to the rate-payers (uh, that's be you and me) .

Electric cars are not "green" in America, they're sooty-black.

I think Martin's right. Efficiency, alternative fuels, and better design are currently a better path to travel than electric cars.

[Gary Burch]

Almost every power tool I use is battery powered, Hell, almost everything we use has a battery . Look at the advancement in battery technology in just the last 5 years; lighter, more power, faster charging, plus the recycling of batteries is more efficient. If we have to charge them with coal or nukes I agree it's a dead end, but...

With the promise of the Bloom Box hovering on the horizon, maybe electric cars are not so ungreen after all. If the Bloom Box works out, you can reverse the process and produce hydrogen, now that's a fuel we could definitely use.

[gocart]

I believe the push for electric cars is a conspiracy by the electrical producers to sell more. That way they can sell as much electricity at night, when all those cars are recharging, as they do in the day time.
The "zero emission" tag is total B.S.
Right now it must cost more to buy electricity than buy gas to power a car, although no one who has an electric car will admit it.
The engineers say that a gallon of gas contains about 40 times the energy that a car battery can contain.
That being said, I think electric cars have a future, but it will be a LONG time,if ever, before they replace internal combustion.
What we really need is for someone to produce cost effective solar-electric panels, then who knows?

[Cajundaddy]

The promise:
Induction motors make marvelous power plants. They are very efficient, light weight, have a nearly flat torque curve from zero to max speed, and they run maintenance free for a very very long time.
Regenerative braking looks attractive. Currently we throw away nearly as much energy when we brake from 60-0 as we used to go 0 - 60. We just turn all that good kinetic energy into heat and warm up our pads and rotors. As regenerative braking technology improves it may be possible to put 50% of that lost energy back in the tank/battery bank/flywheel/whatever. Solving energy recovery issues could be huge in terms of efficiency.

The Problem:
Batteries are lousy at storing large amounts of energy. They are heavy, expensive, require a lot of space, recharge slowly, are sensitive to heat and cold, have reliability issues, and are an eco-disposal nightmare. Current battery technology won't get the job done for a performance car (see Tesla). For a truly breakthrough electric/hybrid we need a better energy storage system that can be recharged/refueled quickly and will accept large doses of regenerative braking energy without overloading. If we can develop this at a reasonable cost... Game on!

** Fortunately in California the electric generation matrix is only about 8% coal so a plug in electric car would be burning plutonium, hydro, natural gas, wind, solar, geothermal and only a touch of coal for flavor.

[Jad]

The hybrid technology I do like it the autoshut off in traffic. I think all cars should have about a 100 yard range so sitting in traffic doesn't waste tons of gas idling. I took our Audi to Disneyland and saw 38.9 mpg on the way up there, sat in traffic for 45 minutes trying to park and the overall mpg fell to ~30 mpg. 25% of the gas used was for the last mile?

I am not against electric cars, I think they certainly have their place already, not at the track yet, and you should get a few solar cells for the roof. I just think the waste, expense and complexity of the Prius style car is ridiculous except that it is making green cool. There are several people in our neighborhood that use small electric cars to wait in line to drop the kids off at school and other soccer mom duties which is FAR better than the Escolade. I would have one, but I have no place to park it and they are not ready to be primary vehicles yet.

[rshon]

I don't think we should gloss over the point Dan is trying to make. Pure electric, and even hydrogen cars, need electricity from some other power-generating source, and some of them are not very clean, and very few of them are inexpensive. Also, every time there is a conversion (say from a heat source like coal or "nucular" to heated water to electric turbines, or from electricity to hydrogen via electrolysis) there is a conversion loss.

Dave also makes an important point. We lose a lot of energy when we slow the car down by converting motion into friction/heat at the brakes. Besides a KERS-type energy recovery (which is a commendable attempt), I remember a long time ago someone was working on flywheels spinning in vacuum chambers as a way of storing kinetic energy (but there were a lot of technical challenges). Energy recovery is an important area that I think needs more attention.

Turning off cylinders (as well as the whole engine) in traffic also helps (when I was a poor college student --running on fumes--, I used to draft semi-trucks, and even turn the engine off going down hills!), but I hate to say it, if we're really serious what we really need is for people to use more mass transit, or at least carpool. If you drive down any of the major freeways in Los Angeles during the day and look in the cars, you will see only one person in over 2/3's of the cars.

I can't wait for the "Electric Car Revisions" to the competition rule book. That should open up a whole new can of worms on this board...

p.s. The concept car looks like an R8 had its way with an unsuspecting Boxster. Could VW be responsible?