Range Extension
The Volt has one other advantage over the Tesla: range. The Tesla can get away with limited range since it is not intended to be a long distance driving car; it is a fun sports car. To appeal to the mass market though, the Volt will need to be able to drive further than the 50-100 mile range typical of pure electric cars when necessary.

The Volt solves this by being a serial hybrid; different from today’s hybrids, like the Toyota Prius, in two ways: firstly, it can be plugged in to recharge the batteries while parked (although plugin Prius conversions do exist, they are not factory fitted just yet); secondly, the gasoline engine is not use to drive the wheels ever – instead it is use to generate electricity for the electric motor, and recharge the batteries.

While the Volt is not the only serial hybrid design out there (see our earlier post about the Fisker cars), it is the only serial hybrid design announced by a major car manufacturer.

Electric Driving
The estimated fuel economy of 50mpg is a little misleading, and unfair to the Volt. While that is the kind of fuel economy you can expect on long drives, for most people’s daily commutes the Volt will never use a drop of fuel, relying instead on its fully charged batteries to get you to the office and home. As plugin hybrids, and pure electrics, become more common, we can expect to be able to plug in our cars when we get to the office too, making that pure electric commute even more likely.

Clean Electricity
Some are critical of the cleanliness of electric cars. The argument is that most of the electricity is generated using fossil fuels (mostly coal). While that is true today in many places, there are already some communities where the electricity is cleaner, and with all the plans to increase solar and wind power in the US that can only improve.

The Volt’s engine is also able to use E85 instead of gasoline, making even that aspect of it greener than today’s hybrids.

It is a little unclear from their article whether the 2,000 gallons/acre annually figure is from cellulosic ethanol, or if that would further improve the yield. Either way though, agave makes much more sense than corn as a source of plant based ethanol. It is happy growing in harsh wasteland areas (and actually improves the soil quality where it grows); it needs very little water and it grows without fertilizers (protecting the local drinking water from pollution). It’s also not “stealing” a food crop to make fuel.

Perhaps ethanol can become a viable fuel for the US market – let’s just hope the availability of margaritas is not affected.

Anybody who’s been following the US election news recently will have heard about McCain’s mocking of an answer Obama gave to a question in one of his campaign stops about saving fuel. Then he half-retracted it.

The truth of the discussion is that ensuring your tires (or tyres, for those English speakers outside the US) are correctly inflated does indeed help to maintain the efficiency. Having a handy little pressure gauge in your glove box and using it regularly will help keep your car running efficiently.

How Much Does This Save?
The estimated improvement in your fuel economy is 3%, but what does that mean? At today’s prices in the US (around $4.50/gallon here in California), it is around 10 cents a gallon saving. If you have to drive to work, then that’s a worthwhile saving for such a simple thing to check.

The US government estimates that 27% of the cars on the road in the US have a significantly under-inflated tire. So get out there and check your tire pressures (hint: if you don’t have a gauge already, and don’t want to buy one, most gas stations have one attached to the air compressor).

Anything Else We Can Do?
ABC News has the following hints in addition to tire pressure, derived from FuelEconomy.gov: keeping your car properly tuned can save you up to 4%, replacing your air filter when necessary will save you as much as 10% and using the correct motor oil in your engine will get you between 1% and 2% savings.

Even better though, how about using public transit, a bike or even just walking instead of driving at all? That saves you as much as 100% and gives you some time to read a book or newspaper, or perhaps catch up on email or your favourite blog(s).

If you can’t avoid the car, think about getting a hybrid (or even a pure electric) when you replace your current ride. And do you need the SUV, or would a smaller car suffice? If you only need the larger car occasionally, then money you save on fuel by switching to a smaller car would allow you rent something larger when you need it.

My December this year they are hoping to be producing 100 cars a month at their San Carlos factory in California (some of the slow production to date has been intentional as they wait for development of an improved powertrain). They also hope to reach sales of 20,000 units for the $60K (est.) sedan.

[Via Max Gladwell]

First up is Shai Agassi’s Project Better Place, which is trying to solve the problem by means of pure electric cars with exchangeable battery packs for range extension. Basically, for typical daily driving you run off the battery which you recharge at night. When you need to drive further, you can pull into a battery changing station and they’ll swap out your flat battery for a newly charged pack. Even better, the car is free (in the same way that your cell phone is free, when you sign a two year contract). Just pay a monthly contract that is similar to the monthly fuel bill you’re paying and they’ll lend you the car for free.

The Pickens Plan on the other hand is promoting the use of natural gas for vehicle power, and wind power for electricity. Natural gas solves the range problem in pretty much the same way as gasoline does today – you pull into a gas station and simply refill. CNG is already in use for vehicles in the US, so this is a well known technology; many taxis servicing the airport here in San Francisco are already CNG fueled, as are some of the buses and even some garbage trucks.

Convincing Pickens
Katie’s question ended up being “Agassi, can you convince Pickens that electric vehicles are a better plan?” While she lauds Pickens for his wind farm work, and wanting to kick the oil habit, she feels that electricity is a better option for vehicular power long term.

Here at Vertography we’d love to be able to drive an electric car (a Tesla roadster would be great, hint, hint), but we’re also somewhat pragmatic. They’re great for short journeys like our daily commute, but it doesn’t help when I want to visit my favourite aquarium down in Monterey as the batteries just don’t last long enough.

Extending Range
Agassi’s scheme for changing the batteries on the fly as a range extension mechanism seems to be a little too out there for us. We’re not talking swapping a few AA batteries here; electric car batteries are large, complex and expensive systems in their own right. I’m not convinced that this is really the solution for extending the range of vehicles, especially not in a country the size of the US where it would take a massive investment in infrastructure, not to mention the little detail that each battery station needs to keep a number of charged batteries in stock at all times for this to be practical. This plan would be analogous to swapping your empty gas tank for a full one when you stop at the gas station, rather than just refilling it.

The Pickens Plan is very much a plan for the US (the main motivation seems to be to keep the $700M spent each year on foreign oil in the US), so it is perhaps not surprising that his strategy for solving the range problem is natural gas. The infrastructure might not be there today, but at least it is similar to the existing gasoline infrastructure in concept. And it doesn’t require fuel tanks to be swapped – you just refill them, the same as you do today with gasoline.

The Vertography Plan
We don’t think that Agassi should be convincing Pickens to switch to electric vehicles. We also don’t think that Pickens is right to go with pure CNG cars. Instead, we’d like to propose that both men are partially right. The Vertography Plan proposes producing a CNG plugin serial hybrid?

Plugin hybrids have the advantage of keeping those short journeys on battery power, and charging points in parking lots at offices and shopping malls can top up the battery for the journey home too. Using CNG to power a small in-car generator means that when the battery does run down, the car can switch on the CNG generator and keep running (as well as charging the battery).

Why not use the CNG to power the car directly? Well, using the CNG to power a generator means that the engine can be smaller, and can be set to run at the optimum operating speed for efficiency. There’s also no need for gearboxes, clutches etc, and no need to handle the transfer from electric transmission to CNG. While we love the Tesla, we do think that for the US market where people frequently drive further than today’s battery packs allow, a serial hybrid might be the best choice, and why not CNG instead of gasoline? Or how about a bio-diesel version too?

What Makes it Green?
The team working on the car has the goal of making the car 95% biodegradable or recyclable. The steel chassis is very easily recycled. The body shell is made from hemp, something Lotus is using on their Eco Elise too. The tyres are made from potatoes and the brake pads from cashew nut shells. The engine runs on bio-fuel and uses bio-lubricants.

That’s not bad at all for a small, fun racing car.

How it works?
So, at slower city driving speeds (below 35 mph), the car runs entirely on compressed air. The air coming out of the exhaust is actually cleaner than the air that went into the car because the engine runs it through a series of filters before it enters the engine to remove anything that could affect performance.

At faster speeds, some kind of fuel is needed to heat the air before it enters the engine. According to their website, this produces emissions of just 0.141lbs of CO2 per mile. They claim that is a quarter of the average vehicle and less than half the emissions of a Toyota Prius.

Zero Pollution Motors is the US representative of Guy Negre’s French company, Motor Development International, who design and build the Air Car. ZPM will be building and selling air cars in the US.

Video

You can see more videos at the ZPM website.

If you do need more than 50 miles range, there is a small gasoline engine in the car that will turn a generator to recharge the battery and run the electric motor.

Performance & Technology

The Karma can hold four passengers, accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in under 6 seconds and reach a top speed of 125 mph. It has two driving modes, Stealth and Sport, the former optimised for efficiency and the second for performance. Reading the features list you wouldn’t really guess that the car was a PHEV at all.

The exterior styling is distinctive, but the interior of the Karma takes things to another level. It is a very futuristic look.

The roof also includes solar panels (this is the third car recently I’ve heard of to include solar panels in its roof, the Lotus Eco Elise and Toyota Prius being the other two), though how much power they provide is unclear. The Fisker website says that the energy from the panels will be used to help charge the battery, and provide cooling for the interior cabin. Fisker will optionally provide a solar charging system for your house allowing you to generate electricity at home during the day to recharge your Karma with at night.

Plugin Hybrids

Fisker is not the only plugin hybrid electric vehicle on the way; Toyota’s next generation Prius will also be a plugin hybrid (and current generation cars can also be converted). There are some differences in the technologies being used though since the Karma always uses its electric motor for propulsion – the gasoline engine is only used to generate electricity when needed. On the other hand, the Prius uses both the electric motor and the gasoline one for propulsion, switching between them based on driving conditions.

Rival Tesla Motors also has a luxury sedan planned to follow its fun roadster, but it is sticking with pure electric as far as I can tell from the limited information the company has made available about their second vehicle.

The technology he’s referring to is Ferrari’s Kinetic Energy Recycling System (KERS), which is part of the requirements for the 2009 Formula One season. This move to make racing more efficient is partly driven by EU regulations forcing car manufacturers to reduce their fleet-average emissions to less than 130 grams per kilometer by 2012.

Still a Ferrari?

In case you were worried that a hybrid or electric Ferrari might not be a real Ferrari, when asked about this the answer was “Yes, of course. It’s the best sports car in the world. It’s still fundamentally a Ferrari.”

And, of course, cars like the Tesla roadster and the Wrightspeed X1 clearly demonstrate that electric power is no impediment to performance and handling. The problem for an F1 car is likely to be the range – an F1 race is about 190 miles long. With a Formula 1 research budget, especially from one of the largest and most successful teams in the sport, and some of the brightest automotive people in the industry on their team, it will be interesting to see what they can come up with. This technology could well trickle down into cars for the rest of us over the next decade too.

For those interested in a cleaner Ferrari, the company expects to have something in a production vehicle around 2015 – giving you plenty of time to start saving up for it.

[Via Inhabitat]

Technology

The cars in the gasoline class are achieving most of their performance through a combination of aerodynamic design, weight reduction and careful driving. Obviously, aerodynamics and careful weight management (for the car, not the driver!) are things that can be taken from the track into production cars. So, the skills these young automotive engineers in the making learn can be applied to the production cars of the future, making cars for everybody greener.

As for careful driving, at first glance that might not be something that is as simple for car manufacturers to control. The most significant trick that these drivers use though is that for most of the time around the track their cars are coasting; the engine is off. That trick is already being used by hybrid cars which shut off their engines when the car is stopped. If it can be done safely while cruising down the freeway as well, why not? Especially if there’s an instantly available electric engine in there too in case it is needed.

Odd

One odd thing about the event though: the press release lists the winning car in the solar class, from Purdue, as achieving 2,861.8 mpg. Assuming this car is a pure solar vehicle, it wouldn’t have used even a drop of fuel, so it would have an infinite mpg score! Also, last time I checked, 2,861.8 is higher than 2843.4 – so even assuming there is some logic behind this odd score, why didn’t the truly eco-friendly solar car win the grand prize?