What with Earth Day having just passed, there have been a number of magazine articles lately talking up electric vehicles and such, and especially one of Instapundit's faves, the Tesla Roadster. Both PM and Popular Science feature the car this month, and it's been in the news for a pretty long time.
Electric power is great for cars--clean, quiet, max torque available at 0 rpm--but there's one downside, and that's recharge time. I've mentioned it before, but even if your electric car has a 200 mile range, you still have to stop for three hours and let it recharge. This works in some instances such as short hop commutes with long layover times, but not in every instance, like trying to get somewhere 300 miles away in four hours and STILL drive that distance and time at legal speeds.
Despite the environmental drawbacks of fossil fuel vehicles, they are efficient managers of time--if your gasburner has a range of 200 miles, you can "recharge" it and get back to full range again in about ten minutes, assuming you also go inside the gas station to pee and get some Slim Jims.
It's those danged batteries. And it's not going to get better anytime soon, it doesn't look like, because no one seems to be interested in coming up with the one thing that would make battery-powered long-distance travel feasible.
Commonality.
Cordless drills and saws are great, and the construction industry would be a lot less efficient without them, but the only way they're actually usable in the real world is because there are always a couple of extra batteries sitting on a charger being recharged. When the one in your drill gets low, you pop it out and put in a new one, and you're ready to go again. Anyone who hopped on the bandwagon early on and got themselves a spiffy new cordless and DIDN'T buy the extra batteries found out quickly that a dead cordless screwdriver is much more frustrating to use manually than a regular human-twisted one.
The reason this all works is there's (in general) a common enough battery template for these tools that they can work across a wide range of tools with the same type of cell. It would be even better if manufacturers would work to a standard dimension, then everyone's batteries could fit everyone else's tools, but failing that, they at least have a relatively standard array of voltages that the tools operate on.
But car makers, at least right now, are in a wild race to invent better mousetraps, which is great if you're trying to catch mice, but not so great if you're trying to run a car. The battery technology right now is all over the place, with some manufacturers using the old standby lead-acids, to things like the Tesla which use giant grid of what are essentially laptop batteries wired together, to the new GM Volt concept that uses batteries that haven't been invented yet.
What if, though, there was some effort to settle on a workable standard voltage, type, and size, and instead of pulling into a service station to gas up, you pull in to a bay and a friendly-voiced mechanical robot take out the discharged battery unit in toto, and plugs in another one while you wait. The old one is sent to a recharging rack, and you motor away after paying for the exchange of old for new, and you didn't spend any more time than you would have refueling your gas tank.
We're probably be too far along the path we're on now for such a thing--it would require a substantial investment in a recharging infrastructure (both to recharge them and the machinery necessary to pull and plug them back into a car), and somehow you'd have to have a sufficient number of (danged expensive) surplus batteries around to provide power whenever someone needs a quick fill-up, and the disposal problems associated with all these batteries when they reach the end of their lives hasn't really been thought out. But unless there's a way to quickly recharge batteries, the electric car is never going to make major inroads (so to speak) in the vast swath of land between New York and Los Angeles. The distances are too long, and people want to travel without bothersome delays.
If you don't have unpluggable batteries, I think the next best step is another thing I've mentioned before, having your own fuel-powered generator set in the car for when you don't have the time to park and recharge. This is the same thing that Diesel-electric locomotives and submarines use, and the type of powerplant in the generator can be optimized to be efficient for driving a constant-load generator rather than motivating the car. Chrysler's experiments with gas turbines back in the early 1960s (and actually on into the '80s and '90s) were interesting not because turbine power works as a vehicle powerplant--they work best at a constant, high rpm, they take too long to spool up to speed for passing and merging into traffic, and they are thirsty--but that they found that a turbine can swallow just about any fuel, including things like coal slurry.
Obviously, the whole idea of electrics is to try to get away from burning carbon fuels at multiple points, but the good thing about something like coal is that we have plenty of it. The turbine can also run on poorer quality fuels that won't work for powering a car, which frees up some energy for those applications that require better fuels. And again, it works best at a constant high speed, which works best when you're using it only to run a generator, rather than under constantly changing road and load conditions. And this being the greatest country on Earth, there's already been some smart folks who already have stuff like this available. (Although it must be on the pricey side, seeing as how they don't have a price list--but dangitall, that Tesla's gonna set you back a hundred thou, so let's not quibble over small change!)
Anyway, some pretty interesting stuff (.pdf) going on out there.
Posted by Terry Oglesby at April 24, 2007 10:39 AMI might also mention (as you do briefly) the environmental costs of disposing of all those used batteries, not to mention the costs of producing all those battery elements in the first place.
I don't mind the conversation or the effort to get us off fossil fuels - it's the Priesthood of Gaia I could do without, threatening us with Carbon-Neutral fire and recycled, eco-friendly Brimstone.
Posted by: skinnydan at April 24, 2007 11:21 AMI don't think the removable battery pack would work long-term. (I'm roughing it here) A battery pack of 2'x3'x6" would weigh at least 80 pounds. A refueling station would probably want to keep a few hundred on hand, so having storage and handling for something like that would not be feasible.
Although I have not actually examined an electric car, they will probably be made with enough safeguards in place to minimize accidental discharge/arcing. The average shade-tree mechanic will not be able to work on them. Having a removable battery pack may contribute to the chance of accidental discharge.
I believe Li-ion batteries are close to meeting the needs of the electric automotive market now. I spent some time researching a company that had patented the technology for getting around the "exploding" battery problem. After looking at their performance the last few years, it looked like a gamble where investors where wairing around hoping someone like Toyota would choose their battery for something beyond the development stage, so I didn't buy the stock.
The batteries are the biggest cost of the vehicle, and until enough investment comes along to implement battery mass-production (significantly driving the cost down), the electric car will continue to be more of a toy than a solution. I do like your idea of a fuel-powered turbine. People want to be 100% green, but the turbine charging would be significantly less polluting than the current 2 tons of mobile scrap iron, yet give folks transportation flexibility and reliability.
Posted by: Marc V at April 24, 2007 11:31 AMAmen to that, Dan--one thing to remember is that it's never a good idea to listen to anyone's advice about a subject if they harbor an irrational hatred of inanimate objects.
In general, all these eco-acolytes clinging to Father Albert's robes hate everything about cars in the first place, and their desire to regulate how other people live their lives is very strong, as is there desire to curb the ability of Americans to go where we want to go, when we want to go there. It's perfectly acceptable in their mind for celebrities to save the world by flying everywhere on their private jet, but a great sin for you to take your family to the beach once a year, or make a side trip to the grocery store because you STILL ran out of toilet paper even though you cut each square into four tiny pieces.
Efficient use of resources is smart and beneficial to everyone, but Washington or Hollywood are the last places anyone should trust to decide the efficiency or utility of something.
And Marc, the battery-replacement conundrum is a stout hill to climb, but it's probably no more difficult from a technical viewpoint than the proposals out there for the creation of a nationwide hydrogen-fuel infrastructure--i.e., enormously expensive and complex, and of dubious long-term utility.
Posted by: Terry Oglesby at April 24, 2007 11:44 AMWikipedia has (as one might expect) an entry on Tesla Roadster. Note they say there will be a network of service centers widely scattered about--but note the $8000.00 out-of-service-area fee they charge if you don't live near a service center! I suppose if one can spend $100K on a car what is another $8K?
But if they come out with a lower-cost model (I understand the next model is expected to cost around $50K--the "White Star") perhaps their network will continue to grow. If they EVER come out with a model in MY price range I might consider one.
Posted by: Stan at April 24, 2007 12:40 PMI have to admit that I've never considered your concept of service station replaceable battery packs. Yes they would be expensive and heavy and the infrastructure complex. But as you said, no more complex than hydrogen servicing stations. A standardized pack and an automated removal/installation method actually seems like the most feasible concept I've heard.
Hey, if we can build automated, rotating, stacking car park, we should be able to build a system, especially if the battery pack came out the bottom of the vehicle, that disconnects, removes and reinstalls a fresh pack without too much trouble.
Posted by: Nate at April 24, 2007 12:42 PMUggh, don't get me started on the higH2-in-the-sky hydrogen dreamers! That was one of my bigger disappointments with the Bush administration, when the President tried to appease the tree-huggers with his hydrogen automobile support.
Whatever comes about should be market-driven and not government-coerced. It seems a little funny (strange) for the government to be propping up the Toyota Prius market with taxpayer-funded rebates.
Posted by: Marc V at April 24, 2007 01:22 PMStan, the economics might work for Tesla right now because the things are so danged expensive only early adopter sorts would be willing to buy them, but if enough folks do, it could bring some economies-of-scale with it and make for a lower price. Some. But it's still a very expensive way to move around, and you basically can never recover your cost premium over the life of the vehicle.
Which is why even stuff like hybrids have to have some gummint subsidy like Marc says to help move them off the floor. If they work the same and cost the same and use less fuel, it makes sense to get one, but the way things are right now, they simply aren't an efficient way of converting dollars to miles.
And Nate, bottom mount clip in batteries (loosely defined) is how I thought this should work. Something along the lines of GM's "skateboard" Autonomy fuel cell platform, except with batteries instead of the fuel cell machinery.
Nice bit of packaging, that, and if you could make a long, wide, thin battery package, it would be right where it needs to be--low, and central to all the stuff requiring juice, yet accessible enough on the bottomside to be able to drive over something resembling an oil change pit and quickly drop and replace the pack with a new one.
Posted by: Terry Oglesby at April 24, 2007 01:39 PM