alt fuel car perf charcteristics?

Lets say I want to build an alt fueled car. I need to weigh importance of top speed vs trip distance vs accel. I guess it goes without saying that all these must be maximized and purchase price and operating price minimized, but lets plod on a little farther. I dont think top speed is very important. Accel is 'pep' and 'responsiveness'. Even a slowly accelerating car will eventually get up to hiway speed. Just because a car can go 400 mi on a tank doesnt mean much. I bet most folks stop every 2 hrs or so or every couple hundred miles. So you think if my theoretical car would go 70 miles/hr, go 100 miles per trip/tank/charge, and accel at about .3Gs or 6 mph/sec, it would be 'good enough', especially if the purchase price and $/mi was less than current gas cars?

Reply to
BobG
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You want an alternative fuel with good acceleration? Try nitromethane.

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

100 miles per charge is a bit light. Where I live its about 50 mile trip to the nearest town with a Barnes & Noble store, Bestbuy etc. That makes it slightly over 100 miles round trip. With my current car I can do that trip 3 times on one tank of gas with a bit of a reserve.

Since a significant amount of the time needed to get gas is the trip to the station, start the pump, put the gas cap back, pay the cashier etc it generally only takes me a few more minutes to get a full tank as it does to pump in a few gallons.

Like some of the early electric cars it might be feasible for someone who needs to travel only a few miles to the store,work or school, with an occasional longer trip but if acceleration is poor it is a danger on the highways and any long charge time makes it a poor choice in my opinion for regular transport.

Reply to
marks542004

The fuel for an alternative fueled car (cng, propane, whatever) likely won't be available every couple of hundred miles.

Reply to
Tim B

Yes it would - depending on the price.

I commute M-F about a 25 mile round trip, 52 weeks a year (excepting vacations) Occassionally I will do an extra 25-50 miles in one day for errands to and from work. I own my home and it has a garage. I live in a climate where the need for A/C in cars is about 3 months out of the year. I think this is an -extremely- common scenario.

If an electric car, for the sake of argument, were available that brand new cost around $5,000 I would buy it and use it for commuting only.

But, would I think for a second that such a car could REPLACE my need for a 'regular' gas-burner car? Of course not! I would get BOTH vehicles. I've room for them, and the savings on the "commuting only" vehicle mile would be quite worth it.

The problem with this, however, is that automakers simply aren't setup to sell $5000 cars in any mass quantity, they haven't done this for, like around 2 decades.

And unless such a thing was available mass-quantity, I and nobody I know in this situation would buy one. Why? Because of support.

With a regular car from a major manufacturer I am pretty much assured that I can walk into an auto parts store a decade from now and buy a spare part for it. Or drive it into the corner garage and get it fixed. And more importantly, because a lot of other people will be in the same boat 10 years from now, there will be enough of a market for spare parts that there will be competition to supply those parts in the aftermarket - which will cause their price to be cheap.

With a specialty electric car, such as one I design and build myself, or buy from a company that takes regular cars and retrofits them, replacement parts will be sole-sourced, thus will be as expensive as all get out, and there's no guarentee they will be available 10 years from now. Even if the company gives me a guarentee, if it's a small firm it might go out of business.

The first generation of Toyota Priuses are almost past their warranty, and are approaching 150,000 miles. They are getting close to being due for battery pack replacement. It won't be long before people are out there trying to buy replacement batteries, battery control modules, hybrid control modules and inverters. You watch and see what the aftermarket does, I will bet that none of these components will be available anywhere except from Toyota, and they will be so expensive that it will make it not cost effective to fix the car.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

Hybrids seem to fit your model, and of course they would work well with alternately fueled diesels, or even alternately fueled SI engines for that matter. People have been making "artificial" gasoline for about three quarters of a century, though the early methods of making it were anything but green.

Reply to
Don Stauffer

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