by frog
AFS Trinity Power Corporation claim to have developed a hybrid technology that gets 150 miles per gallon. That’s mighty impressive given that the US light vehicle fleet averages in the low 20s. What really presses my button about this particular claim is that they have done it with off-the-shelf parts. This means that the new technology is really in the controls and that rolling it out on a mass scale can happen much more quickly than most of the bright ideas that come along. The FAQ page is worth a read.
I don’t really believe in silver bullet technical solutions, but if this pans out, I’m excited. Unfortunately, it takes us about 20 years in New Zealand to change out our vehicle fleet. Given that the the vast majority of our ‘new’ imports are actually Japanese has-beens that no longer meet their standards, I suspect that we’ll start seeing these beauties arrive in real numbers around 2020. We can then expect to catch up by 2030 or so, assuming that we have fully electric vehicles coming in along side them.
I know that this sounds pessimistic. But actually, it’s the first sign of a medium term solution to the current oil supply crunch that I have seen. Not only that, if the Americans get these into production fast enough, the peak oil plateau may last a year or two longer – a real bonus to help with the transition to a post fossil fueled world.
Published in Environment & Resource Management by frog on Sun, July 6th, 2008
Tags: AFS trinity, car, mpg, oil, peak
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
I like this from the faq:
Who is this car intended for? This technology is intended for the
average consumer. That is the reason we are demonstrating it in an
SUV to show that it could be available in any size vehicle with
performance equal or exceeding today’s vehicles.
Performance equal to or exceeding today’s vehicles!!! How is that 150mpg.
What i predict is we can expect lots of start up companies to appear telling us how they have a car that will run at 200mpg and will run on water and hydrogen on demand etc.
You should take everything said by a company with a large glass of good old fashioned skepticism. Until an independent group audits it at 150mpg then it aint 150mpg.
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i have long thought/hopd ‘solutions’ would come from adapting existing technologies/vehicles..
everyone having hydrogen cars..is a long way down the road..
phil(whoar.co.nz)
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Doesn’t that support the Julian Simon camp?
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turnip, Preformance refers to the acceleration in full hybrid mode. In the all-electric acceleration is pretty leisurely.
The 150 mpg is calculated by assuming the car is recharged from the mains overnight, does it’s coldstart urban cycle and half the highway cycle in the full electric mode with the remaining half of the highway cycle in full hybrid mode. Based on travel studies this combined cycle would occur for both the journey to work and the journey home. The total distance for the EPA urban/highway is 44 miles on the odometer, 4 miles more than the all-electric range of the AFS Trinity. The gas used on the hybrid-mode portion of each journey is then divided by the total miles to get the mpg. So it wont get 150mpg if you live in the country or drive to the bach but it will average 150mpg in daily commuting. Especially for peak period freeway commuters who won’t notice the leisurely acceleration in all-electric mode
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Here’s something else for bp to
about
http://www.leftlanenews.com/tesla-to-provide-lithium-ion-batteries-to-mercedes-benz.html
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The cost of electricity there is much lower than here. The price quoted is 6 cents / KwH, while prices here are just over 21 cents / KwH. So we would pay about $26 / week for the power – per car. Many families have several vehicles as people work in dfferent places and public transport either doesn’t exit or isn’t practical.
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Or this design from F1 designer Gordon Murray. It will return 81mpg and emit just 78g/km of CO2. It will weigh just 550kg and is designed around a 51bhp 3-cylinder petrol engine, giving 93bhp per tonne, as much as a conventional 2.0-litre saloon and with equivalent performance.
‘This has been my toughest challenge so far,’ says Murray. ‘It is far, far more difficult than designing a Formula One car. It will be a whole new beginning, but it will also be funky, iconic and fun to drive.’
http://www.carmagazine.co.uk/Green-Cars/Search-Results/Green-First-Pictures/Gordon-Murray-Design-T25-2012-first-pictures/
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Indeed.
Licensing the technology will provide scale. A lot of car manufacturers are rolling out alt technology in 2009-10.
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>>about $26 / week for the power
And your point is?
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The 150mpg claim is a bit deceptive when a lot of the car’s energy comes from an external source. If you were silly enough to recharge the car at night using a diesel generator … well you can see the point.
From an environmental point of view, if the mains electricity is generated by burning coal, the CO2 emissions will be significantly more than just from the petrol used by the car. There is a FAQ on this issue on the linked web site, but it isn’t very informative. A question I have is: what are the CO2 emissions if electricity generated from burning coal is used in a hybrid car such as this, compared to existing efficient small diesel or petrol only vehicles?
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South Korea has announced the first in a series of measures intended to tackle the cost of rising fuel prices.
Thousands of public sector vehicles will only be allowed on the road on alternate days and government buildings air conditioning will be restricted.
Prime Minister Han Seung-soo said that if oil prices continued to rise, more extreme measures would be taken. ….
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7491882.stm
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I’m impressed that they have a full page on their website dedicated to peak oil. Couple of things:
Anyone know how scalable lithium ion battery production is? I’d heard that Prius production has been constrained by a limited supply of batteries.
Why an SUV? For electric cars reducing weight is critical to getting longer range.
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Blue Peter: You appear to miss many of the points being made. Why do you read blogs if you don’t understand what you’re reading?
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OutinFront
Perhaps you’d like to explain why $26 p/w spent powering a car is worse than the amount we spend now on petrol, which is considerably more?
Or am I missing your point?
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Indeed. Believe it or not I’m with BP on this one. $26 per “fill up” is mighty cheap compared to petrol. Besides, the 6 cents is US cents. It probably represents a night rate. Only those ?fortunate? enough to live next door to a nuclear plant can get a retail price that good during the day.
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As far as I can make out the interesting AFS Trinity tech is actually the ultracapacitors they use. They give rapid power delivery, while lithium batteries provide power “stamina”. Putting those in a small hybrid SUV is about US marketing, not a technical advance.
When they start building an all-electric SUV, that’s when I’ll start cheering.
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Prius is still using Nickel-Metal-Hydride last I heard. They WANT the Li-Ion but they haven’t got it nailed to the required levels of reliability. Li-Ion is fairly easily built but is not so easily maintained… you can’t charge as fast as easily. There’s other issues as well, but its mostly the sensitivity of the things. Nice batteries,,, but not as easily made robust enough to run a car.
I would never expect an “all-electric SUV” on current tech.
I do expect that we will see a lot more methane/CNG/LNG conversions. That makes much more sense for us in the short term and bridges the 20 year fleet replacement gap. The other things we need (in terms of making grunt work possible) are some sort of (again methane) gas-turbine-electric drive trucks… and tractors.
respectfully
BJ
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So, I’m getting infinite MPG on my bicycle? Cool. Now, add an aero shell and an ultracapacitor brake energy recovery and drive system on a carbon-fiber frame for the same price and weight, and I’ll be three times as infinite. Super-cool.
Of course, I hear electric rail also works quite well. One can do similar things with an electrified road system and lightweight cars with pickups and small batteries, at least for the cities, as long as the country folk stop complaining about all the new wind farms and we get a bit more rain.
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Sorry, tussock, you do not get infinite MPG on your bicycle.
It is powered by the food you eat and for example 40% of the price of a load of bread is fossil fuel. Someone at Auckland University calculated that a cyclist was about as fuel efficient as a fully laden Honda.
It is interesting to see the recognition that the world economy can switch over to mass produce new vehicles very quickly. Few of the advocates of rebuilding our cities to create walk/cycle environments (if it were possible) recognise how long that would take and how much it would cost. We are talking about razing whole cities and replacing them with new structures and simultaneously abandoning whole areas of existing housing stock and infrastructure – schools, roads, sewage, water etc.
Test your own city. Look at current replacement rates of housing stock. Then figure out how long it would take to replace the whole stock.
How does this compare with investing in new transport systems?
It does not take long to come to a conclusion.
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Look at how long its taking to rebuild New Orleans.
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“We are talking about razing whole cities and replacing them with new structures and simultaneously abandoning whole areas of existing housing stock and infrastructure – schools, roads, sewage, water etc.”
Curious – who the hell wants to do that?
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StephenR,
You are right that here in NZ we are less plagued by the lunatic fringe than in US where people like Kunstler just yearn to see the whole of suburbia rot into the ground and everyone live in slabs using public transport.
There are whole blogs and newsgroups devoted to this new Extreme Smart Growth ideology where people are convinced that when gas is $10 a gallon the whole US urban lifestyle will cease to exist.
I have to remind them that in NZ we have had $10 a gallon gas for about two years and the changes are at the margins and not much more than you would expect.
The US extremists are convinced that $5 a gallon gas will begin the Kunstler revolution but again I point out that we have been paying that price for about as long as I remember. (I acknowledge that my memory may not be the best any more.)
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Those margins are getting bigger though…
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Owen, If you feel like revitalising your memory I have a graph of petrol prices since 1920 on my website. The first two increases on the graph were asked for by the motoring unions in order to get better roads. Note what the price was when they asked for those user fees to be added. I’m not sure what the median price was for those 88 years but it looks like it would have to be somewhere between $1.50 and $2.00. You can also find stats on the site that you compare traffic growth and fuel prices. You probably wont be surprised at what it reveals. The engine size of new cars is a better indication of how people actually respond to fuel price fluctuations, rather than shifting modes or houses or jobs.
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