New range of plug-in hybrids from Volvo and Saab

technology consortium ETC and a government environment agency to bring out a new range of plug-in hybrid vehicles. The eco-friendly notion will span the next two years and a hybrid powertrain as well as an electrical charging infrastructure will subsequently be developed. As many as 10 cars will begin their testing schedule within this period, claims Auto Motor and Sport magazine. Every automaker thrives to do (...)

Cool, I was wondering when these would be on the cards. The steering by wheel differential speed and braking by motor (if thats what it is) are a bit far fetched. Much better to stick with existing tech for now, it doesn't weigh that much.

I think they could also get away with a much smaller petrol motor, small enough, say, to allow it to be easily removed by 2 people without special equip. So you drive the 50 miles round trip to work every day and shopping at the weekend on battery power, then drop in the petrol engine for the odd long journey. It might mean you have to wait 10 mins before it can be driven, or drive more gently while it charges up.

What about solar cells to trickle charge the battery during the day while its parked at work?

-- TonyS

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Um, why, exactly would you want to remove a small gasoline engine? The smaller the engine, the smaller the weight savings when you remove it. That's silly.

And that's even sillier. You wouldn't be able to drive it more than a few feet on the power that on-board solar panels could add during the day.

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Well to be honest I havn't done the calculation, but I did think that and Engine weighing 50kg-100kg would make a signigicant difference to the range of of a an Electric car. Even in Petrol cars it is recommend to not have unecessary weight in the boot like tool kits.

I have done calculations for this for my 940, its not unfeasible to have

500w of solar power on this (although less for a smaller vehicle like the one you posted about). This would give nearly 4KWhr of energy, and of course its mainly restricted to daylight availability not working hours.

A UK normal mains socket can only provide 3kW, using the charge time as a reference the battery holds 9kWhr, 4kWhr or even 1 or 2 is still significant free energy. Although it maybe necessary to integrate the cells onto the body of the vehicle as current external house panels would be quite heavy.

The main problem is price, with 500W of PV costing £2000 (for a house), but then I thought thats why Li-Pos had been avoided for cars. I had estimated Li-Po battery for a car to be £50,000 - £100,000.

The charge is a guess, they could be using 2 mains sockets for example, but I know generally that 500W of power during daylight is not insignificant, and of course PV is improving all the time.

There maybe other problems like durability and weight (500W of house panels weighs nearly 60kg), but these can usually be overcome.

Sure a 2W battery maintainer is going to be 'silly' but then so would a

2000mAhr Li-Po from a RC aeroplane.

-- TonyS

technology consortium ETC and a government environment agency to bring out a new range of plug-in hybrid vehicles. The eco-friendly notion will span the next two years and a hybrid powertrain as well as an electrical charging infrastructure will subsequently be developed. As many as 10 cars will begin their testing schedule within this period, claims Auto Motor and Sport magazine. Every automaker thrives to do (...)

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It depends on the source of the electricity. I live half a mile from a hydroelectric plant, so recharging off-peak would be *very* eco-friendly. Someone recharging from a coal-fired power plant would see much less of an advantage (but supposedly still a small one, from conversion efficiency). Recharging off-peak from a natural gas-fired power grid would be in between. Nuclear is, of course, debatable...

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Electric is generally more efficient, even if the power station was a petrol engine it is not ticking over half the time while driving through a city, and a 200bhp Elect motor is much lighter than an 200bhp engine. Generally electric drive is much more suited to vehicles, its just the storage and control has been the limitation before.

The other big benefit is that converting cars to electric will remove many of the problems of pollution in cities, and generate improvement in the technology. Power stations will always be as efficient as they can be, and have teams of Engineers looking after them. IC car engines are less well looked after and when someone manages to get Nuclear Fusion working it will be a matter of changing the power station rather than having to worry about lots of owners of old IC engined cars. (although we volvo owners do like our old IC engined cars, it has to end sometime).

There are many pros and cons, but on balance I think electric easily has the edge on petrol these days. Even just using petrol IC engine as the power source, electric drive can allow a car to do 100mpg without plugging it into the mains. Why don't we have this now.. well car mfr never where very good with electrical stuff, they just don't know the technology, and people also like their IC engines, they make a nice noise that we asscoiate with supremacy on the road, they are even reluctant to take up CVT transmission because it just doesn't sound right. But eventually the mfrs will get there and people will start to like the new electric whine and quietness.

There is also the benefit of losing dependancy on oil from unstable countries, and the move towards micro generation locally using renewables.

-- TonyS

Because the mains circuits do not need to be powered by liquid fossil fuels like the typical car, they can be powered by eco friendly sources like hydro-electric, geothermal, wind, nuclear, solar, etc. Of course countries that don't have eco friendly mains will not gain much.

Sweden depends primarily on hydroelectric plants and has 5 nuclear power reactors. It has a smaller amount of biofuels production. Sweden wants to be independent of petroleum use by 2020. Accidents at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station (USA) prompted the Swedish parliament in 1980 after a referendum to decide that no further nuclear power plants should be built and that a nuclear power phase-out should be completed by 2010. As of 2005, the use of renewables amounted to 26% of the energy supply in Sweden, most important being hydropower and biomass. The nuclear phaseout is behind schedule. The current sentiment in Sweden is to maintain nuclear power and eventually increase it. Their nuclear plants are of a German design that has a flaw that can be corrected.

The irony is that the Three Mile Island accident proved that Nuclear power is safe. The operators' gross incompetence caused them to make the worst possible decisions when the reactor started leaking coolant in the containment building. The reactor had a melt-down, the worst possible scenario. The containment building easily contained the mess and no danger resulted. The radiation release was smaller than that by the local hospitals.

We were served by the TMI plants and our electric bills went up for a while. Now they are back to normal. The shareholders took the biggest hit.

I'm a cautious advocate of nuclear power. The plant safety is something that has been improved greatly, however what concerns me is the disposal of spent fuel, and the scope of the catastrophy *if* something does go wrong. No source of energy is without negative impact, even so-called "green" sources are not without environmental damage. Hydroelectric alters landscapes and impedes salmon migration, wind turbines kill birds, solar panels use all sorts of toxic chemicals in manufacture, I'm not saying it's more damaging than burning fossile fuels, but none of these are a universal solution.

It's unfortunate that nuclear fusion seems no closer now than it did 20 years ago.

Absolutely!, the more you look at any part of it in detail the more it comes out as very difficult to find a perfect solution. Biofuel's current implementation seems to have a slightly worse CO2 output than petrol, due to swamp lands being cleared for crops. Even Fusion will likely require He3 from the moon, or some very special material for the chamber walls, which will probably cause cancer or sterility, then He3 will be in limited supply and we'll look for something else.

The ultimate answer is that we simily need to use less energy by being less wasteful. Fundamentally Economic activity and population increase are the 2 main drivers of energy consumption, unless we are prepared to control these it probably isn't going to get much better.

Having said all that there are huge leaps forwward in efficiency to be made for cars, houses, industry etc for fairly little cost, and combined with less damaging energy production maybe we can keep the planet habitable for a while longer. As a consumer electronics company we now have 5 new directives on pollution, energy, recycling to deal with. Hopefully we'll get better in enough time before something really bad happen.

-- TonyS

Think of all the heat your car generates. Heat out the exhaust, heat out the radiator, heat from friction, heat from braking...that is all wasted energy. Stationary power plants waste much less fuel as lost heat (often recovering it as cogenerated steam), and transmission losses are only about 10%. Cars have to run under all kinds of less than optimal conditions, while power plants can run at close to maximum efficiency just about all the time. It adds up.

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But they aren't powered by fossil fuels in Sweden where these cars are made and where they are sold. There aren't any of these cars in the US and probably won't be until we get off our butts and get green like Sweden.

Not really. The first plants were among the safest. The problems came about when some countries tried to cheapen the plants to make them more cost effective, ignoring safety concerns. TMI was one of the safest plants in the world, but was brought down in a safe state by the grossest operator incompetence imaginable. The plant would have safely shut down if the operators would have gone to sleep.

The safe storage of spent fuel is trivial except for the people who say not in my backyard. It is a people problem, not a physics problem.

You are perpetuating all sorts of myths.

In New Zealand, and other countries, hydroelectric power doesn't alter the landscape. The hydroelectric plants are underground inside mountains. So it is true that some hydroelectric plants alter the landscape and fish migration, but not all.

Spain is covered with wind turbines and they have killed fewer birds than plate glass windows. They rotate at such a slow speed that birds can easily see them while they sometimes can't see plate glass windows.

The use of toxic chemicals has no relevance as long as these chemicals are either recycled or disposed of safely. For solar plants the most toxic material is hydroflouric acid which is easy to recycle or dispose of safely.

We have three choices,

1) to continue along the path we are on now and disturb the balance of nature to such a great extent that we irreversibly alter the shorelines and flora and fauna forever, 2) improve to minimize our impact while trying to maintain our civilization, 3) stop disturbing our planet and give up on civilization.

There is no possible way to completely not disturb nature and maintain civilization. The only thing we can do is minimize our impact, not eliminate it. Fortunately many countries have already done this. Unfortunately my country (the USA) hasn't. It is too bad my country's leaders don't get it.

Ironically, I did my science fair project in the '50s on nuclear fusion. The theory was well known then, but the application is no closer than it was 50 years ago. We are much smarter about it, but do not have a practical solution in site other than using the free fusion energy we get from the sun.

By the way, solar energy is at least 15 times for efficient of land area than corn. An acre of solar cells in the desert southwest produces more energy than 15 acres of corn fields in the heart of our countries farm land assuming 100 bushels of corn per acre per year and 70 mw of electricity per square inch for 5 hours per day.

You should get your hands on

you won't believe it.

Batteries that last very long already exist. The company was bought by Exxon who killed the company. GM killed it's electric car because there was too little money to be made on parts. It had the best electric car in trhe world.

You really should try to watch this movie. Trust me, you w>my gut feeling tells me we are on the verge of a technological

The technology has been there for a long time. The economics are getting better. Here is a corn/ethanol versus solar/photovoltaic comparison.

An acre of solar cells in the desert southwest produces more energy than

300 acres of corn fields in the heart of our countries farm land assuming 100 bushels of corn per acre per year and current technology mass-produced photovoltaic cells with 15% efficiency.

The photovoltaic solar cells produce 665,000 KWH per year per acre.

Corn produces 2,344 KWH per year per acre.

The US uses 2.9*10^13 KWHs per year. Hence the US would need 10 times its total land area in good crop land to fulfill its needs with Corn. Only 20% of the US is crop land and that decreases each year.

With solar photovoltaic the US would only use 2% of its land area. That is only 10% of the desert and other barren land that is not used.

I saw it, and I thought it was cheesy and filled with flawed information, it reeks of conspiracy nut. I despise the fact that GM destroyed the cars when there was demand for them, it's a horrible waste, but that's corporate politics for you. Still, I can hardly blame them for not putting them into full production at the time, the economics just were not there. GM, like any other company, exists to make money. If a product will not make as much money as another product, or they believe that to be the case, the other product will be favored. I don't doubt that another practical electric car will come along, but it probably won't be from one of the big three. They've had to be dragged kicking and screaming into any more modern technology.

Battery technology has continued to evolve independent of GM, modern lithium batteries are far superior to the lead acide cells that the EV-1 used but cost is still an issue.

I agree it was a bit cheesy and slightly biased but the facts remain the same. GM missed the opportunity of a lifetime. Right now, they could have been a world leader in the production of electric cars. It might have somewhat modified or reduced the rate at which we are destroying the environment..

Btw, I strongly believe it is too late and we will only keep going downhill and fast. But I don't care because I'm not afraid of death. Speaking of death, get your hands on the first two books by Dannion Brinkley. An interesting read. Sorry for being off-topic.

That about summs up GM in general I would think. They've been on the brink of failure more than once, to be rescued and eventually repeat.