Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum The 100-mpg car is coming

"Toyota said Tuesday said it would offer a gasoline-electric hybrid with bigger batteries that could be recharged at any outlet, further stretching the gasoline the car uses. Though production is years away, experimental models built by independent mechanics have already demonstrated 100 mpg results."

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/SavingandDebt/SaveonaCar/The100mpgCarIsComing.aspx

Coming soon to a neighborhood near you!

what would be nice is to fix your garage with solar panels to charge up the batteries, possible with a second set of batteries to charge it up over night for those who are away all day. big companies might offer solar powered chargers for those who work at offices and drive a lot.

Oh please Uncle Al, please Uncle Al, I've been asked to play nice here by Kate so I won't respond to dehammer but please pretty please apply a bit of math to the above flight-of-fantasy.

Thanks Al.

what is wrong with that. the batteries would have to be charged up before the car could run, yet when it returned it would likely set for hours. at the rate gas and other fuels used for making electricity are going up, it would likely only be a few years before the cost of the solar panels dropped in price relative to the cost of it being produced in a plant. its not like your trying to run your house on it. just to put the charge back in that was used up and not replaced by the gas powered engine. It would not totally replace the fuel, only supplement it. companies would get tax incentives and possible would still charge the user for the electricity to cover the cost of the solar panels. There is a major difference between doing this and running your home on solar panels.

Thanks for the self-restraint Dan!

Yes, the article is a bit tabloidy but has several interesting points. One, the "independent mechanics," who are really demonstrating the democratization of technological innovation and design. Hacking a Tivo is just the start! I expect a variety of customized hybrid cars will emerge in the future - likely from backyard boffin's garages. There's no reason to believe that major innovations won't stem from this "tinkering".

Two, the market will decide in the end. When oil hits $200/barrel, expect innovation to go into overdrive.

It's easy to poo-poo this sort of thing, particularly with all the fudged figures about bio-fuels and never-realized promises of increased efficiency solar cells, but I expect innovation will triumph in the end.

one thing i expect to see is someone making solar panel cars. Laugh if you want, but they have cars that run in the race in austrilia that are just solar panel powered. they may have their draw backs, such as short range, and higher cost per mile, vs the cost of gas in the last few years, but as the price at the fuel pump goes up, there will be a bigger and bigger niche for them. as the cost of batteries and the improvement to the batteries improve, they will become a better and better deal.

Hey man its AUSTRALIA and over here we can make fuels outta sugar cane (ethanol i think) and we can still have v8s that most aussies love, not bloody quite little things with no go...

sorry for the misspelling, ive been having trouble staying awake. can you tell us anything about the solar panel races they hold there. i understand its to push the development of solar panel cars. ive heard they hold it there due to the fact that that highway has the best solar/light days ratios in the world. they would need that for a sunpowered race. of course sugar cane (ethanol) powered cars would not be allowed to race since they have much more power to them.

Unless you are a taxidriver or a traveling salesman a hydrid car will never pay back its incremental cost. The expensive battery pack only lasts about three years. The savings in gasoline cost is not that large - work it out - since your other costs like interest, insurance, and registration are pro-rated on car purchase price. If everybody plugs into the grid, the grid goes down. Check out what a little hot weather did nationwide.

60 mi^2 of solar cells will produce 1 GW, or 0.6 W/ft^2. 100 hp is 75 kw. If you drive 100 hp for three hours/day and get three hours of direct sunshine (do you have two-axis solar tracking for your solar panels?) you will need 125,000 ft^2 of solar panels to charge your car assuming 100% efficiency. Giggle. If you get 30 hours of direct sunshine/day you only need 12,500 ft^2 of solar panels.

You may ignore Uncle Al and do it anyway. Enviro-whiners will be cheering you on! Physical reality is Uncle Al's ally, and a powerful and unforgiving ally it is.

incase you have not notice the price of batteries are going down and the price of gas is skyrocketing. perhaps today it would not work as well as we would like, but its not available right now either. if things keep going the way they are now, the price of gas will be around 6 bucks and the cost of the batteries will be about 60 percent of what they are now.

also there is something i saw on tv about a new way of doing the solar cells. instead of having them in flat panels they have strips of solar sells with cheap lens above them. this means two things. one they dont have to follow the sun, and two they get more power per cell than normal ones. the square footage of the array is about half larger but the amount of the space the solar cells take up (which is the main cost) is about half. they are still working on making it easier to manufacture, but once that is done, it will decrease the cost considerable.

another point is that it would not be necissary that you could only charge up the car for those three hours. if you had two sets of batteries (yes i know they are compariatively expensive) you would only have to replace them every 6 years, and the batteries would have the full 6 hours to charge.

assuming that you get half the charge at night
assuming that the efficency of the cells does not increase
assuming that the new technologies do work.

you would need a space about 125 x 125 to charge your car.

lots of places would not be able to do any thing about this. say inner cities. BUT lots of places could. I live in the panhandle of texas. we have lots of room for things like this. personally i have room to put up the once your discussing as being needed now, and the space on my place is nothing compaired to a lot of places here. perhaps i could make money leaseing some of my land to people who lived in the inner cities that needed the space to put up panels. Texas law would force the electric companies to allow the electricity to be sent from one place to another (for a small fee of course) so they could charge up their cars at their home. I could lease out to 5 or 6 families.

another point that you are forgetting is that they can just as easily lower the hps needed for smaller cars (for one thing the engine weight would be considerably less)

if a gas powered car gets 30 miles to the gallon and the cost of the gas is 6 bucks a gallon, thats 20 cents to the mile. assuming that you are right about the power requirements, the cost of a 75 kilowatt hour per hour car is (at 10 cents per kilowatt like is current) is 12.5 cents per mile (assuming it runs at 60 miles per hour) if your solar cells did nothing but charge your car for about 20 years you would pay it off with the difference in the price of the gas when it reaches that level. gas is expected to reach that price sometime before next summer. tell me again how useless it is.

another point that you are overlooking is that the car they are talking about is a hybred system. that means you dont have to charge the system up enough to drive it for the full 3 hours. you only need to charge it up for the amount that it used accelerating. or running at high speed depending on which version they are discussing. one uses the gas engine to charge the batteries for the long haul, the other used it for the accelerations. I forgot which they were discussing in the link. either way, you need a considerable less amount of space for the solar cells as they are not the only sourse of power.

While this is a nice idea, I prefer the Tesla solution (www.teslamotors.com). No gas involved:)

Preferably in a sedan model, but I understand they have to recoup the developement costs.

im sure there are many different thread of thought people are racing down. may the best thread of thought win.

actually it still uses gas, just it uses the gas at a power plant.

if you used a solar panel array to get part of that {say half from solar cells, half paid}. (assuming al is right about the numbers {0.6 W/ft^2}, assuming that it uses 400 kwh to charge, assuming that you sell the electricity to the electric company during the day, and buy it back at night to charge {peak hours pay 2x low useage hours}, assuming that you have 5 hours {what i have here is 5.5} of useable light, you would need about a 200 foot square of solar panels.

now your getting 250 miles per charge, and the best a gas powered car now gets 40 miles to the gallon (i think ive heard of cars that high) but the average is still around 25 miles to the gallon. that means it takes 10 gallons to get the same distance. by the time you can buy one of these cars, the price per gallon will likely be 6 bucks. that means you would be paying 60 dollars for the same trip. lets say your traveling this distance 5 days a week. lets say you set a side 10 dollars of this a day to pay for batteries. thats leave 250 dollars a week to pay for the solar cells. in 30 years that the solar cells last, that will save you right around 350-400 thousand dollars. that of course assumes that the price of gas stops at 6 bucks and does not continue to climb. 200 thousand dollars can buy you an array of this size at todays prices. at today's electric cost it might not pay to install solar cells for the home, but it looks like it could pay for the savings in gas for the car.

Who said anything about solar panels?
I just want to stop using mideast oil. Terribly unstable area of the world and the sooner we don't need to rely on that region the better.

Not sure about your power plant, mine doesn't burn oil though. Actually, all my electricity comes from wind turbines. But even if it was all coal, it would still burn less carbon than the oil.

You raise a good point though, this is not a 100% 'green' solution as carbon is burned somewhere. However, it is a heck of a lot better than the current oil burning cars:)

a large part of the electicity produced in this country is produced in oil fueled generating stations. not as much as it used to be, but still a good bit. increasing the demands on electic generating plants would cause them to use more oil. on the other hand, bringing about these would encourage people with the money to put up the panels.

like you my power comes from coal, which keeps the price around 10 to 12 cents per kwh. at that price, its not feasable to replace it with solar panels. where it is produced from oil, the price is higher. as i pointed out before, the cost of gas would encourage people to use solar panels for part of it, reducing the amount of fuel needed during the day, thus making better use of the plants we have and the fuel we are using.

Thank you for that information!
I was not aware that any electrical producing plants used oil. Would I be correct that it uses a grade of crude that can't be refined into gasoline?

While solor panels work well for some, I prefer to keep solar out of the equation for my own electrical generation. I prefer wind. Far more reliable where I am at.

Now if I lived in Arizona solar would be better:) Still not perfect of course, but better.

don't know exactly what they used, just they don't like to use it for the cost, part of which is due to the pollution they create. on the other hand, it has be a few years since i read about those, and they could have all been shut down by now.

wind is good too. if i had the money I'd try for a hybrid, wind/solar. i have a believe that vertical axis windmills could be the wave of the future. much higher electric production per footage.

Just found this forum while looking for something else.

What I always wonder is why US cars have such poor fuel consumption in the first place. The cars that Ford sell in the UK do 40-50mpg, so why do US ones do half that? Surely it must cost them more to make a separate, poorer design of engine or something.

Im not positive, but ive heard it has to do with the additives the us goverment has them put into the gas. It reduces the mpg while supposedly decreasing the polution.

Or possibly its the add ons to the cars the goverent demands

Another possibility is that americans want more on/in their cars, that people in the uk dont demand.

beyound those possibilities i dont really know.