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.

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?

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]

Most of the comments seem to be skeptical of the amount of value adding the panels can bring, but Canadian engineer Steve Lapp can provide actual data since he modified his 2001 Prius back in 2005 to include solar panels on the roof. His initial three panel system generated around 270W, but he was hoping to boost that to 360W with the addition of a fourth panel.

Air Conditioning?

The reports from the Nikkei paper suggest that Toyota’s intention here is to be able to help run the A/C in the car using solar power, but given Steve’s data above, they’ll only be able to cover 10%-15% of the power needs of an air conditioning unit.

Perhaps a better use would be to allow those solar panels to charge the batteries all day while the car sits out in the parking lot. Even more interesting though, the next generation Prius is also a plugin hybrid, so having an array of solar panels on the roof would allow all those parked cars to potentially feed solar energy back into the grid through a V2G scheme. A single 300W car might not make much difference, but imagine a parking lot or two of them all feeding into the grid during those peak sunshine hours when our power demand is at its maximum.

[Information about Steve Lapp's solar Prius, and photo via TreeHugger.]

• A cardboard bicycle from a student at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. Created initially in an attempt to reduce theft, the low cost cardboard bicycle which is made almost entirely from recyclable and recycled materials and uses interchangeable mechanical parts.
• Inhabitat reports that Mercedes Benz intends to convert their entire line up of luxury cars to alternative fuels by 2015. That might sound like a long time in the future, but it is only 7 years away!
• SolarLab will be launching a solar powered rickshaw in London next year as a pilot program. If it performs well there, it will be released into other cities around the world too. The solar hybrids are human/electric hybrids combining pedal power and solar electric power from an array of photo-voltaic panels on the roof of the rickshaw. [Via InHabitat.]
• In Austin, Texas, Doug Pelmear claims he has modified a 1987 Ford Mustang engine, perfecting ideas his grandfather had 60 years ago, and his car now achieves 110 mpg. The car produces 400 bhp, and is claimed to go from zero to 60mph in just 3 seconds.

As oil prices continue to rise, consumers will become more and more interested in lower cost alternatives. Luckily for the planet, many of the solutions for reducing our dependency on oil are also good for the environment – a win, win situation.

Only one Toyota Prius was there, and despite being painted in RechargeIT.org colours and saying that it was a plugin hybrid, it was not actually plugged in. Furthermore, we couldn’t actually see any obvious place to plug it in (normally, the after market conversions have a small connector on the rear bumper).

Why a Plugin Hybrid?

So, why buy a brand new hybrid car like the Prius, which already has better fuel consumption figures than most of the cars on the roads in the US, and spend more money on an after-market plugin conversion? Well, Google’s dashboard for the RechargeIT project gives some idea of why:

So, 50% better gas mileage is a pretty good reason for the conversion, and the further reduction in the CO2 emissions is a bonus. But there must be more…

Taking it Further

Why is Google looking at this technology though? Their plans go beyond a 50% improvement in fuel economy for sure. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of what they’re doing is a joint project with PG&E (the electricity utility for much of northern California) to explore vehicle-to-grid technology. That’s an idea that uses the batteries in plugin hybrid cars to store electricity when there is plenty available, and feed it back into the grid when there is more demand than the grid can supply.

During the daytime electricity usage can peak as people switch on heating or cooling systems, and during those times many cars will be safely parked and plugged in ready to supply extra electricity. Any electricity that they supply back to the grid is paid for too, so the owner gets a nice little bonus for plugging in their car all day that goes beyond the mileage improvements.

The other time this technology might be useful is for those who have solar panels on their property. During the day, at least here in California, there is plenty of sunlight for generating electricity. At night though things change dramatically! To solve this, you can either store the excess power generated during the day, or you can buy power from the grid overnight (and sell the excess during the day to them). Now, if you have a plugin hybrid, it can act as your storage unit while it is plugged in, help you get through the night without needing power from the grid and probably still have enough charge to get you to work in the morning without using much gas.

Want to Learn More?

Check out the RechargeIT site for lots of good information and links to other resources. Follow the Google team’s blog, and check out some of their video materials too, like this one explaining some of the benefits of plugin hybrids: