AUGIWorld Magazine - September/October 2008 - (Page 30)

On The Page Back The End of The ICE Age I’ve often said that the best gas-saving device we have is our right foot! Everywhere I’ve been this summer, I find that people are driving slower. It seems that $4 per gallon is what it took to get people to ease off the accelerator. Gas pricing is tied to demand: the higher the demand, the higher the price. Late this summer we saw reduced demand cause gas prices to drop for the first time in months. What would happen if we reduced our national gas consumption by over 25 percent? The Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) car has a limited future. Battery-electric vehicles, or EVs (not hybrids), have been gaining more of the public’s attention in recent months. New EVs are coming soon from big car makers and independent startups, but any new car will be relatively expensive. According to the Department of Transportation, for personal transportation the average driver logs under 60 miles a day. In the near future, one of your cars could be easily be an EV. 2) Start with a pile of coal for the EV and a tank of crude oil for the ICE, each with a potential of one million BTUs. In two columns, factor out the various losses for refining, electrical generation, vehicle efficiency, and charging until you get to fully charged batteries for the EV and a tank full of gas for the ICE. You should find at least twice the available miles remaining in the EV column than in the ICE column. See table 5 in the “Debunking” document referenced below. David Kingsley have driven their gliders for several thousand miles. After researching the websites of several glider clubs, I’ve determined that the owners report the cost of a full charge to be about $4-$5. The EV’s fuel cost per mile equates to $0.75-$1.00 per gallon of gas. A well-designed glider has a range of at least 60 miles. A new independent EV Is there a “glider” in your future? The elsewhere emission myth One of the most common misconceptions about EVs is that generating more electricity to power them will simply move pollution from the tailpipe to the power plant. Here are two points to dispel that myth. 1) Generating more electricity does not necessarily mean generating more CO2. Currently almost a third of our electricity comes from a mix of non-CO2 emitting sources such as wind, hydro, solar, geothermal, and nuclear. About 10 percent of power plants are fired by relatively clean natural gas. Well over half are fired with coal, which is the major source of CO2 emissions. With the current power plant mix, if we were to magically swap all ICE cars for EVs, net CO2 emissions could be reduced by about 20 percent. Furthermore, we could clean up several hundred existing coal power plants by deploying existing scrubbing technology. In effect this would centralize vehicle emission control by reducing the emissions related to all EVs served by those power plants. Thousands of people across the country have converted old ICE cars into EVs. Enthusiasts in this field call these “gliders.” I started researching the possibility of converting our trusty old 1992 Toyota pickup it to an EV. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it might not be as difficult a task as one might imagine. A typical glider project takes a worn-out car and removes all the ICE stuff. The advantage is that you now have a DOT-certified chassis (with a VIN) and suspension system to build on. The amount of ICE hardware removed from the car is pretty impressive. Some people have had salvage yards remove it for them for free. From a mechanical perspective, EVs are far simpler. Hundreds of moving parts are replaced with one. This simplicity translates into higher reliability. A skilled mechanic with basic metal working skills can do it in a regular auto repair shop. Key components are available from numerous suppliers specializing in glider components. Costs range from $10k for a basic conversion to $20k for a higher performance vehicle (more batteries). You must add about 40 hours of skilled labor costs to this. There are numerous websites documenting glider build experiences. Some A Colorado company, Electric City Motors (electriccitymotors.com), is offering an all-new EV, the “Current,” for under $30k. After getting quotes in the tens of millions of dollars to design a custom electric car, they found a small Chinese auto manufacturer with a DOT-certified chassis (read: importable) that was willing to modify its existing design to meet ECM’s specifications. The bare chassis is imported from China and the propulsion and battery systems are installed in the US. The biggest hurdle they had to jump was getting the first VIN number, which is a purely bureaucratic effort. The first 24 pre-production vehicles have been pre-sold and are currently being assembled. References • For an interesting perspective, rent the DVD “Who Killed the Electric Car?” • Azure Dynamics (azuredynamics.com) Motor/transmission sets designed for retrofit into the engine compartments of small sedans • Unique Mobility (uqm.com) Electric propulsion systems for custom electric vehicle designs • Debunking the Myth of EVs and Smokestacks (evadc.org/pwrplnt.pdf) • Nilar, an advance in battery technology. (nilar.com) • Electric Vehicle Conversion Help (evhelp.com) • Book: Build Your Own Electric Vehicle, Second Edition, by Seth Leitman and Bob Brant David Kingsley served from 1999-2004 on the AUGI Board of Directors and is the Director of Electrons at CADPlayer Web Courseware. He can be reached at djkingsley@cad-tv.com. w w w. A U G I . c o m 30 http://electriccitymotors.com http://azuredynamics.com http://uqm.com http://evadc.org/pwrplnt.pdf http://nilar.com http://evhelp.com http://www.augi.com

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AUGIWorld Magazine - September/October 2008 Contents The CAD Manager 2008 Salary Survey Save Time with Impression Blocks In the Family Way Structural Stairs Autodesk University 2008 Preview Action Recorder How to Embrace Third-Party Data On the Back Page

AUGIWorld Magazine - September/October 2008

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