The Rabbit And The Hare
In times of crisis folks tend to look for radical change rather than steady improvement. Before you know it, Steve Jobs is being ( wrongly) touted as the saviour of the auto industry, recent authors are expounding on the Googlification of the industry, and GM is staking everything on the Volt. And I’m not even going to get into the theological implications. But like the old fable of the rabbit and the hare, the steady improvements will be what saves the industry. A study by Carnegie Mellon at Green Car Congress shows that plug-ins with smaller capacity than the Volt’s 40-mile EV range are a more cost effective strategy than the Volt moonshot. Go figure.
Also from GCC comes a necessary reminder that there’s a lot of work still to be done on the good old internal combustion thingy. MCE-5 Development will be showing a 1.5-liter four cylinder with a two-stage turbocharger at the Geneva Auto Show that develops 220 hp and 310 lb·ft of torque at 1,500 rpm while getting 35 mpg on the NEDC course. That’s just using the firm’s variable compression technology. When they get direct injection, optimized combustion chambers and advanced thermal management (2010) they say it will do 270 hp, 339 lb·ft and 39 mpg. One step at a time.
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Speaking of new designs, this one looks interesting. Gets at the whole side-side slap willman was referring to and inefficiencies in the current crank arrangement. http://www.revetec.com/development.htm
Slow and steady can be the way to go. Look at emission standards. Slow, incremental improvements over the last 40 years have been remarkably effective because a long term approach was used. No moonshot here, just continual evolution. A few posters above have slapped the usual right wing "greenie" BS as being the problem, but those "greenies" that framed the approach to the emission problem had the right approach. The answer is to keep the standards evolving, not allowing stagnation and changing commodity prices to circumvent the process, which is precisely what happened with mileage standards. Anybody who thinks a magical device (born from American free enterprise and ingenuity, of course) is going to pop on the scene an result in 40 mpg Explorers two years from now is living in the Land Of Oz.
Good lord, the idiocy. 1. Toyota ALREADY HAS a system that can run the A/C off the battery. It's in the 2004-2008 Prius already. Yes, it works. No, not for an hour, but it works long enough that you can run with the A/C on all day long and still get high 40s without much effort. 2. For the geniuses who think we don't need hybrids now; what happens when gas hits $4.00 a gallon again? 3. The only 'church' is the agnotologists working overtime for the know-nothing rump of the Republican Party.