response 1 of 163:

Apr 1 18:18 UTC 1998

Actually the newest craze you'll see on the market, before electric cars, are
natural gas powered autos.

response 3 of 163:

Apr 1 20:34 UTC 1998

I presume zero-emissions does not include water and carbon-dioxide, but what
does Honda plan to do about the sulfur and nitrogen?
Fuel cells supposedly can burn fuel much more efficiently than internal
combustion engines.  I read about hydrogen powered buses, and possibly
methanol power cars, that use fuel cells.  What has actually been accomplished
already?  Seems like you could generate an awful lot of methane from manure,
and then use it for fertilizer.  Or from city dumps - there is a greenhouse
running off the methane from the Ypsi city dump.  How difficult is it to
generate methanol from agricultural wastes?  Why is more methanol not already
used in internal combustion engines?
        The problem with electric cars is that people want them to also provide
heat.  In California, this should not be a problem, but in the north perhaps
some other fuel, such as LP gas, could be used in a heater?

response 5 of 163:

Apr 1 20:50 UTC 1998

Methane and methanol will not run out, that is the point.  You can generate
them from plants, which get their energy from the sun, which will not run out
of energy for many of our lifetimes.  Batteries can be charged directly from
solar cells.  Methanol is wood alcohol, the stuff that bootleg liquor used
to be adulterated wtih that caused blindness.  Lots of little creatures will
produce the stuff for you at very low wages (just feed them waste, from
agriculture or industry).   I think methanol has less energy per gallon, so
you would have to refuel more often, but is that a problem?

response 7 of 163:

Apr 2 03:32 UTC 1998

Some race cars run on Methanol.  It is not currently a cheap fuel.  I
know one problem is that alcohol burns with an inviable flame and no
smoke, making alcohol fires almost impossible to detect.

During WWII my grandfather, in Germany, had a car that ran on wood gas.
Wood was cooked in a boiler by a wood fire and the gases given off were
then used to run the internal combustion engine.  I saw one of these cars
in a museum in Germany.

I have also seen pictures of busses with large bladders of methane
attached to their roofs.  I'm sure the Ford Expedition and Chevy
Suburban crowd would go for those.  Perhaps an electric Ford Power
Stroke truck or Dodge Ram?

In short, I don't think any of this is going to catch on big-time
unless it makes cars cheaper or more powerful or better looking.

First the mentality of the biology behind the wheel needs to changed.

response 9 of 163:

Apr 2 03:42 UTC 1998

        Klaus, Amhearst has a wood gas pick up truck most years. If you're
interested in going this year, we will be trying to put together some car
pools. We would like to have a visible Mi. presence.

response 11 of 163:

Apr 2 08:03 UTC 1998

I suspect that while a joy stick might be safer in a crash, it would also make
it much harder to control the car, and therefore make crashes much more
likely.

However, that doesn't have much to do with changing the "mentality of the
biology behind the wheel" (in other words, the driver), which is what Klaus
talked about.

response 13 of 163:

Apr 2 17:08 UTC 1998

I drove both the Ford joystick and the wrist twist cars. Both required massive
power boosters to work. Both reduced the "feel" of the road to almost not at
all. When safety issues first boiled to the top the steering wheel was a
killer to be banshed. Then they realized how many lives were being saved by
the feel of the car.

Electric cars have a simple drive, a motor in a wheel. But to control that
motor pushes the complexity into the power control circuits. We have no high
power contol technology that is cheep and easy. Star Wars has not begot
anything good enough to use.Did not thingk of it

response 15 of 163:

Apr 2 19:07 UTC 1998

(Smaller cars *and* carpooling?  I have yet to see a small car that can
fit me comfortably in the back, and I'm not even that big.)

response 17 of 163:

Apr 2 22:25 UTC 1998

Isn't there some way to produce methanol from agricultural wastes, using
fermentation, while preserving the nutrient part of the wastes, which is the
nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, not the carbon and hydrogen?
I found a chapter in Phillip Ball's 1997 Made to Measure, New MAterialsf or
the 21st Century, on different sorts of batteries and on fuel cells and solar
power.  Let's stick to fuel cells, first.  They may be expensive as regards
technology, but so are internal combustion engines.  If you made enough of
the fuel cell type, costs would go way down.  
        In the hydrogen fuel cell, there are two separate cells, one with
oxygen, the other with hydrogen (you can substitute other fuels).  There is
an electrode in each cell.  The gases are bubbled through solution over the
metal electrode, they give up or accept an electron via the metal, and you
have electricity.  (I presume there is some way to join the resulting ions
to make water).  Other cells can burn methane, and produce CO2 and water, but
they operate much more efficiently than just burning the methane (natural
gas).  These cells can be made very lightweight, and you can refuel rather
than carrying a heavy battery.  They were used in the 1960s on the Apollo.
IF you use an acid rather than alkaline electrolyte solution it can tolerate
carbon dioxide impurities in the fuel, and you can even use air instead of
oxygen.  200 phosphoric acid fuel cells can generate 210 kW at 140 volts.
        You can also burn methanol in a fuel cell.  
        A typical acid fuel cell is less than 40% efficient.  "That's still
better than an internal combustion engine".  At the moment they cost twice
as much as a conventional power plant per kilowatt.
        Vancouver put in a hydrogen powered bus in 1993, Chicago was supposed
to have one that can go 200 miles by 1996, and eventually all 2000 buses
should be fuel-cell types.  Ballard was planning full commercial production
by 1998.
        Cars are not designed to carry such bulky fuel, but can instead use
methanol.  (Rane, gasoline fumes are also toxic, is there much difference?)
Methanol generates less CO2 than gasoline.  The methanol is catalytically
converted to hydrogen, and can store more energy in the same volume.
        Reasons to convert away from combustion-powered vehciles include
pollution, noise, and the fact that these fuels will run out.  Simply using
less of them will just postpone this.

response 19 of 163:

Apr 3 00:45 UTC 1998

In my ongoing attempts to cope with the expanding universe, I've looked into
these things myself. I have found:

* Solar power yields 1300 watts per square meter, directly facing the sun.
  The conversion efficiency is probably up to 10% by now.

* An _Impala_ class passenger car requires 25000 watts to cruise at 60 MPH.
  A _Monte Carlo_ I think measured out at around 17000 to 19000 watts. This
  is what must reach the drive wheels.

* Fuel costs as of the early '80s:
        Propane         $1.30 per gallon equivalent of gasoline
        Methanol        $2 to $2.50 per GEG
        Ethanol         $2 to $2.50 /GEG
        Methane         50 cents /GEG
        Wood (purchased)  33 cents/GEG

* The wood gas burner works by burning the wood with insufficient oxygen, thus
  producing carbon monoxide, which is combustable, and feeding that into the
  intake manifold. along with enough oxygen to burn it. The major problem with
  the wood gasogen is that air is mostly nitrogen, which means that your fuel
  is diluted right from the start. The end result of the calculations was that
  a _Delta_ which topped out at 100 MPH on gasoline was expected to barely
  make one-minute miles on wood gas. Other problems included ash particles
  in the wood gas.

  Nonetheless, it was the most attractive option, since not only would it have
  been the cheapest per BTU to buy fuel for, but would also have allowed
  wilderness refueling. So I looked into it a bit more closely than otherwise.
  Unfortunately, I had no place to work on it at the time.

* Electricity from the power company currently costs about 13 cents a kilowatt
  -hour (Detroit Edison) (or around 10 cents/kw-hr from Wyandotte Municipal.)
  Gasoline out of the pump works out to about 2.2 cents/kw-hr.

* The Otto engine cycle running an 8:1 compression ratio has a maximum
  theoretical thermal efficiency of around 65%.

* And finally, fuel consumption accounts for only about 20% to 25% of the
  total cost of running a car. Half or more is in the purchase price, along
  with the fact that the machine eventually wears out and needs repair or
  replacement.

response 21 of 163:

Apr 3 01:31 UTC 1998

Correct that electric rate for electric vehicles to:
3.90 cents offpeak June-Sept, 2.90 cents Oct-May.
Sounds like electricity could be competitively priced quite soon.
Particularly if gasoline were taxed higher to penalize the pollution.

response 23 of 163:

Apr 3 04:30 UTC 1998

Methanol is primarily the fuel used by Indy style cars.  It is less efficient
(The turbocharged CART rules engines burn about 1.8 miles a gallon over the
course of the race, and are capable of worse numbers), and expensive.  It is
less likely to catch fire than conventional gasoline, but it burns clear--you
can't see it.  This has caused the occasional problem in race condition pit
lanes, most notably at the 1981 Indianapolis 500 when Rick Mears caught on
fire along with his car.  Methanol is a usable fuel, but it's not very
practical.

(In the 1994 German Grand Prix, Jos Verstappen's pit stop turned into a very
visible inferno when a connection problem caused less than a liter of gasoline
to spill out over a wide area, including much of the pit crew and Verstappen
himself.  The fire was very visible and caused only minor injuries)