Yet for some reason the Segway remains a market failure everywhere, AFAIK.
Lol! One of the reasons (and only one) is that its not allowed to be used on the road OR the pavement. Until it can soar through the air its always up against the odds! 
It transports a single passenger, at 12.5 miles per hour for a very limited distance.
The cargo carrying capacity is low to non-existant.
In most of the US during most of the year it is either too hot or too cold or too rainy.
There are regulations against operating it on many public thoroughfares.
People with difficulty standing are not going to be able to use an unmodified one.
City dwellers, the natural demographic will find it tough to park it on the street, and at 100 pounds it’s pretty awkward to get it up to your apartment.
The only place that the Segway, in it’s current form, seems practical, is inside buildings, large warehouses, airline terminals, malls, factories, that kind of thing. Places where the current means of motorized transportation is already electric golf carts.
At present, the plug-in hybrid seems to me to be a much better technological solution than a full-electric car. The reason being that batteries are extremely heavy and expensive. If most trips are less than 20 miles, then carrying enough battery to take you 200 miles is just dead weight that saps performance and costs money. In addition, if you ever forget to plug in overnight, you can’t get to work in the morning. Or if you get home and then have to make an emergency trip before you have a chance to recharge your car. Unless a super-capacitor design becomes viable, I don’t see all-electric as being the answer.
Plug-in hybrids are a better engineering solution, it seems to me. It’s much better to optimize the drivetrain for the 20 mile trip, then add in a smaller gasoline generator to keep the car going on longer trips when necessary.
Make that engine a flex-fuel engine, and you’ve got your environmental solution. If we reduce our gas consumption by 80% by going all-electric for 80% of our trips, then ethanol becomes a practical fuel, even if it costs much more than gasoline (I don’t mind paying $5/gallon if I average 50 mpg on E85 and only use that 20% of the time). So put in a small 50HP engine that runs on E85. So now on 80% of my trips I’m all-electric, and on the other 20% I’m getting 50 mpg with 85% of the fuel I’m burning being carbon-neutral ethanol. Such a car would only burn 3-5% of the oil a current car does.
Since the generator unit doesn’t have to be connected to the drivetrain, you can make it modular. Build standard mounts and electrical connectors, and at a later date you can swap in a fuel cell, or a different type of engine, or even replace it with those heavy-duty batteries and turn the car into an all-electric.
Sounds like a perfectly fine solution to me, even if we never do better than that. And those cars will be on sale in large numbers in 5 years. The first ones will be trickling onto the market in 2-3 years.
You’ll then also see a rise in popularity of accessories like an unfolding solar panel that you could set up to add some charge to your battery while you’re at work. Electric companies can offer evening discounts to push people into charging at night when the plants have excess capacity. Since most electrical plants are sized to meet peak daytime demands, they could actually absorb a lot of overnight charging activity without having to expand the infrastructure. Probably enough to meet the electrical demands of plug-in hybrids for years to come, until they become a major percentage of the auto fleet. So the change can happen gradually, with newer power plants coming online over the period of a decade or more.
And this points out where putting all your eggs in one basket gets you - GM has spent billions on hydrogen fuel cell technology, because ten years ago ‘everyone knew’ that hydrogen was the wave of the future. It’s entirely possible that hydrogen will be completely bypassed and we’ll never use them in cars.
The Zap-zebra
*ZAP Xebra is an electric vehicle that was launched in May 2006 in the United States of America (US) market by the ZAP corporation. It is classified legally as a three wheel motorcycle, but is available in both sedan (model SD) and pickup (model PK) truck variants. It has seat belts. It does not have regenerative braking. The PK pickup has a dump bed, with fold-down sides and tailgate, that allows easy access to the batteries, controller, motor and charger.
[edit] Characteristics
The top speed of the Xebra is 40 mph (65 km/h), with a range of about forty miles at lower speeds. The sedan version can carry up to 4 people. The listed cargo weight for both the SD sedan and the PK pickup is 500 lbs, although PK owners have carried more weight than that.
An optional rooftop-mounted solar panel on the Xebra Xero variant allows for trickle solar charging, which should lengthen the life of the 6 traction batteries; it is also available as a roof over the PK pickup bed.
At a dealer near Seattle, WA, the SD sedan lists for US$10,500, and the PK pickup truck model with dump bed for US$11,900 (December 2006).*
would be , IMHO even better as a 2nd or 3rd car for a family than a NEV. But more expensive. Unless you live in an Urban core and have little reason to drive outside it, I still can’t see how this could be your only vehicle.
Right, I agree. The Plug in Hybrid will IMHO be the wave of the future. Enough zap power to do average trips but can use gas for longer trips or if you run out of zap.
So Sam, since that is the much bally-hoo’ed GM Volt concept car (except that they are aiming for a 40 mile range), do you think that are really going to follow-through or are they just posturing? (Me, I bought some GM stock about two months ago after they announced the intent.)
Plug-in Hybrids (although the Volt, like Sam’s describe vehicle, has the flex-fuel engine serving only to generate electricity to the batteries and not directly power the car, so is not really a hybrid) are clearly the next step. But …various manufacturers claim a 10 minute charge is possible and will be forthcoming without shortening battery life or using capacitors. (The current Phoenix SUV claims 10 inutes using an “off-board charger”, and the promised Zap crossover claims 10 minutes) If rapid charging is possible then having pay charging stations at rest stops becomes doable and likely soon available. I suspect such an option would be a cost and weight savings to the vehicle overall rather than having an entire spare engine on-board to generate power only.
BTW, to return to the question of carbon footprint and coal-produced electricity vs ICEs … Tesla has a few claims in their cite:
(They do cheat a bit and use natural gas as the power plant fuel rahter than coal. In their “white paper” they also perform an analysis representing the real mix of power palnts in America today and it still wins, but nowhere near as handily)
The Prius is next closest at 0.56.
Another advantage to the plug in hybrid is that when it’s plugged in, the efficiencies happen in one place, and it should be possible to utilize the waste. For example, if you charge a nickel hydride battery at 66% efficiency, and you put 10 kw-hr into the battery, enough for 50 miles of driving, you’ll use 15.7 kw-hr and produce 17,600 BTU of heat. I’m assuming the energy lost in a battery charge all shows up as heat.
In my climate, during almost half the year, I could use the heat directly, without any capita expense. For summer, and for hotter climates, a heat exchanger to utilize the waste energy would be trivial. There’s enough heat to raise the temperature of 60 gallons of water from 70 degrees F to 105 degrees F.
You’d plug it in overnight, and when you got up your battery would be charged, and you’d have made enough hot water for your shower. Heck, you’d have made enough hot water for four showers.
You can’t recover the waste heat from an IC engine, it happens out there on the road, not in your garage, and the waste heat from an IC engine is twice that of a plug in hybrid.
Now that’s *cleaner * energy!
Basically then, the hybrid is a ‘nearly here en-mass’ stopgap solution?
Even if you don’t go to the trouble of plumbing a heat exchanger into your water lines, I could see a much simpler use of the waste heat - pre-warming the car/garage in the winter. Use a sufficient thermal mass, and the overnight charging of the car at night could translate into a car that’s nice and warm when you get in on a cold winter morning.
GM got a lot of positive press attention when they announced the Volt, and I think it was unjustified, since they admitted that they would need to develop new battery technology before the car could be manufactured, so it’s not going to be available anytime soon. Kind of how they talk about the fuel cell technology that they want to introduce sometime in the future. But in the meantime, other companies are already selling hybrid vehicles and the California Cars Initiative has already demonstrated how a Prius can be converted to be a plug-in hybrid.
And I read somewhere the suggestion that a plug-in hybrid vehicle could be used as an emergency backup generator in one’s home. Basically, run the gasoline engine and send power from the car instead of to it. While it’s not that simple in reality, it would increase the utility of a plug-in hybrid.
This statement may be correct in some technical sense…but is not really relevant as it only would be if you could find some way to keep the extra water vapor in the atmosphere. As it is, water vapor has a short residence time in the atmosphere (and there are lots of available sources of it), so within any sort of emission rates that we can contemplate at this time, man-made emissions of water vapor will not make a measurable contribution to global warming.
The only way at the moment in which humans can realistically significantly increase the amount of water in the atmosphere is by warming the atmosphere through the greenhouse effect of a long-lived greenhouse gas like CO2. The warmer air then supports more evaporation and higher levels of water vapor…and this is the most important positive feedback in global warming.
I also am a bit skeptical that GM will deliver the product in a timely manner, still GM watchers got a heads up that this is potentially more than vaporware when GM awarded two contracts for battery development, to A123 systems and to Compact Power/LG Chem. In an interview a head of A123 states that the science is already there:
Once again, cost is the big issue. These batteries are lighter and more powerful but what do they cost? Mind you GM only needs enough of them to go 30 - 40 miles on electric alone and with modest accelearation and top speed numbers to make a the car a viable reality. But it can’t be more than one or two thousand more than a comparably performing ICE car to sell well. Can they do it? That’s the question. Tesla produces a beautiful and powerful roadster but when they talk about going “down-market” into a sedan for families with a bit less power and range they are still talking about a $40 to 50K pricepoint. Phoenix and Zap both are contracting with Altairnano for battery technology to produce cars with range, power, and a 10 minute recharge option and that sell for relatively cheaply compared to Tesla (under $50K) which they can only do with substatial economic benefits from reselling Calfornia’s ZEV credits. Tesla is selling some of their ACPropulsion/battery units to ThinkNordic for soon to be released City cars that meet full open road safety requirements, cute little two seater hatchbacks that are just barely highway capable at top speeds and an over 100 mile range … which would be great if its price point was half of the expected over $30K. Those Prius plug-in kits? Sure it is doable, but at this point it will cost you about “$12,500 plus an undetermined installation charge” for one - and that would take a while to pay for itself.
And, oh, GM also currently sells hybrids. Saturn Green Vue, Aura, and others. They claim to plan on releasing plug-in versions too. They just do not get the milage that the Prius gets. No where close.
jshore, didn’t we once talk about this visavis fuel cells producing “new” water? If I recall correctly it was unclear what that water coming out from cars in vapor form does (just that fuel cells would actually practically produce less of it than ICEs currently already do). It might very well be part of local effects and it was unclear if those local effects add up to some significant global consequence.
That link is incorrect, or at least oversimplifying things to the point of being incorrect. I’ve worked for Evergreen Energy, and they generally know what they’re talking about with respect to coal, but the marketing literature you used as a “cite” is appallingly bad, and I will be giving my contact there a phone call next week to see if they really want to say what they’re saying.
You can’t leave out the hydrogen. Coal is a hydrocarbon, and depending upon the rank can contain from 2-6% hydrogen. At the very high heating value of hydrogen, that’s not an insignificant contribution at all. Of course that hydrogen combustion does produce water as well…
jshore, more on the effects of water vapor.
Not a global warming issue, but high local water vapor from ICEs couples with ICE pollutants and light equals high local ozone, right?
As to global warming effects … Sure, water vapor can equlibrate in a few days … if more wasn’t constantly coming in at an even faster rate. Imagine a closed greenhouse. Each have a pond of the same size. One has a fountain in that pond spraying a fine mist. I would imagine that while the mist is on that the greenhouse with the mist has a higher relative humidity, enen if they would come to the same number within a day or so once the mist was turned off. Correct?
Therefore decreasing the mister that is the ICE might have a real, beneficial, and fairly quick effect on water vapor concentrations. And even if it was only a small effect, a switch to production outside of metropolitian areas and to where scrubbers already are operational on power plants would decrease ozone production dramatically.
Comments?
Una I would be happy to be pointed to some sources that you view as more reliable.
I am glad you brought this up because a) I found out that coal is a hydrocarbon. I suppose I could have figured that out since coal originated with organic material, but I didn’t. b) I went back over my original computations.
In any case, in going over my calculations I discorvered a mistake in the amount of water vapor from gasoline. So I’m back to my original contention that plug-in electric cars merely transfer the pollution to another location.
Coal combustion and the heat output are complexas this site shows. Nevertheless, it can be simplified because the things that screw it up are relatively small for our purpose.
If we assume that the hydrogen content of coal is 5% of the carbon content, which is generous, then it takes 0.582 lb. of carbon and 0.031 lb. of hydrogen to produce one kWh of energy for a process that has a thermal efficiency of 0.33. That’s the approximate efficiency from several sources on-line. If it is assumed that everything that isn’t carbon or hydrogen in the coal is water then there are 2.13 lb. of CO[sub]2[/sub] and 0.694 lb of water vapor per 1 kWh of energy. Total greenhouse gas is 2.83 lb.
Making the same, and this time correct, calculation for gasoline (octane), assuming a thermal efficiency of 0.26, 1.84 lb. of CO[sub]2[/sub] and 0.94 lb. of water vapor result for 1 kWh of energy. Again, the thermal efficiency is from various on-line sources. Total greenhouse gas is 2.78 lb.
The advantage of gasoline over coal results from the fact that gasoline, or at least octane, is 16% hydrogen as opposed to coal’s 5% so less carbon has to be burned in the gasoline case to produce the same energy.
This is a result of my basic contention that it takes a certain heat of combustion to generate a given quantity of energy irrespective of the source of the heat.
DSeid’s cite is very deceptive. The two numbers that jump out are 22 lb. of CO[sub]2[/sub] for gasoline and 1.4 lb. for coal. However the gasoline figure is for a gallon of gasoline and the coal number is for i kWh of energy or 1 lb. of coal.
They compare the CO[sub]2[/sub] produced by 6.6 lb. of gasoline to that produced by 1 lb. of coal. Furthermore coal has only about 65% the heat of combustion of gasoline so you only need 0.82 lb. of gasoline to produce the energy of 1 lb. of coal taking into account the differences in efficiencies of the two processes.
Water vapor is the major source of the greenhouse effect because there is so much of it. CO[sub]2[/sub] is important because we have at least a possibility of some control over its emission. However, our combustion also produces water vapor and every little bit hurts.
In any case, coal and gasoline produce about the same amount of total greenhouse gasses and gasoline produces less CO[sub]2[/sub]. I don’t think plug-in electric cars are a help in reducing greenhouse gasses at all.
The critical issue isn’t the amount of water so much as the amount of energy and CO2, and what those are on a national basis. Western coals do (in general) contain more water and have a lower energy content than Eastern coals. On a national basis, the US burned just over 1 billion tons of coal in 2005, and generated just over 2 billion MWhr of electricity. That combustion generated about 2.5 billion metric tons of CO2. This is all from the DOE Energy Information Administration. Doing all the conversions, the US average is 2.75 lb of CO2 per kWhr. For the 5 kWhr car, that’s 13.75 lb of CO2.
“Available” means different things in different contexts. In the utility and pollution control business, an “available” technology is one that’s been proven to work on a day-to-day, revenue generating basis. There are certainly several technologies that are well beyond the concept stage, and have been put into practice at the pilot scale, or even at the relatively small demonstration scale (a demonstration is usually a longer-term evaluation of a technology, often with significant governmental support). But “available” means (to the folks making decisions in this context) that the reseachers and developers have gone away, government financing isn’t needed, and the utility can go out and get bids for the construction of a commercially viable system. The relative costs of sequestration vs. nuclear or renewables don’t really come into play until the actual costs can be measured, and there is substantial work left before we have those measurements. A recent MIT study on the future use of coal noted that significant work remains to be done before we are able to use carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) on a routine basis:
I agree there isn’t a “White Knight” or silver bullet to address this issue. I think that electric cars will have a significant role in future transportation, especially in urban areas. I just don’t see that we’re close to them being economical with the current prices of petroleum. Now if we were to charge the actual *cost * of petroleum, it would be a different story.
Water is a major greenhouse gas, but it enters and leaves the atmosphere very quickly (days if not hours). I don’t believe that there is any significant scientific consensus that would suggest that addressing the water content will make a meaningful difference to climate change. On the other hand, CO2 has an atmospheric lifetime of around 200 years. If we’re going to get a handle on climate change, we have to address CO2.
Relative to the gasoline vs. coal issue, the major advantage of coal-electricity-transportation over gasoline-transportation is that with coal, you only have to deal with a handful of very large stacks that stay in the same place, as opposed to hundreds of millions of tiny “stacks” that are moving around. If CCS systems are successfully developed and deployed, then coal-electricity-transportation becomes a much more viable technology than gasoline. Right now, though, we’re not ready yet.
No matter what fuel is used, by far the cheapest and most effective approach is to increase efficiency. That needs to be the first approach taken by everyone.
Emitting water vapor isn’t a problem, because water is in saturation in the atmosphere. Add more of it, and all you’ll get is more rain. If the earth’s atmophere could absorb more water vapor it would - 75% of the earth’s surface is water that is not being absorbed into atmosphere.
Whenever this subject comes up, I point out that the loss of water vapor from swimming pools in a typical city is on the order of millions of gallons a year. Far more than what is exhausted from other sources. And it just doesn’t matter.
As Jshore said, the only way to get more water into the atmosphere is to warm it up, And of course, that has some global warming analysts worried about a positive feedback cycle where adding a small amount of additional greenhouse gas in the form of methane or CO2 might warm up the atmosphere, which in turn will allow it to absorb more water vapor. In that sense, COS and methane are like the dial on an amplifier - a small change in current in causes a huge change in power out.
I don’t think there’s much doubt that some time in the future ways will be found to reduce the CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions of steam power plants. Maybe have a Coke plant next to the power plant and use recapured CO[sub]2[/sub] to charge the Coke cans. 
Now, though, we seems to be doing a pretty good job on all those millions of tailpipes with the catalytic converter to reduce CO, oxygen and unburned hydrocarbon sensors to regulate combustion air and stuff like that. However, I don’t think that there’s much doubt that sooner or later superior methods on the fixed stacks where portability isn’t important will be developed. In the meantime, buy a plug-in electric because it’s neat but I don’t think you are being particularly “green” in doing so.