CARazed

Lotus, the sports car company in the UK, who was hired to build the electric Tesla Roadster, has a very active engineering division focused of developing green cars. The latest projects are a hydrogen taxi and hybrid limo. Lotus is one of the leading auto makers participating in a project to bring 50 to 100 zero emissions taxis to London by 2012. Logically the project is called the Zero Emission London Taxi Commercialization Project and it’s backed by Britain’s Government Technology Strategy Board, who is investing $45.3 million.

“Zero emission London taxi commercialization – This project will initiate and accelerate the introduction of commercial fleets of zero-emission fuel cell hybrid taxis primarily for London by 2012 and for other cities by 2014. The project will develop and integrate PEM fuel cell hybrid powertrains into LTI TX4 taxis. The arduous duty cycle of the London taxi will be utilized to provide a platform for accelerated fuel cell vehicle lifecycle testing.” [Source]

The limo will probably be based on a Jaguar XJ or XK but will be powered by a hybrid system not much less efficient than a Toyota Prius. “Limo Green” should have a small electric drive motor, battery pack, and a small petroleum powered generator to propel the car when the power in the batteries runs low. This sounds liek the perfect combination to also permit a plug-in option. Photo is a conventional London taxi from Wikipedia Commons.

Now this is a very unusual approach to green car technology. This latest technology experiment from Lotus is a tri-fuel car which can run on any mixture of gasoline, bio-ethanol and methanol. The real news is that the methanol can be made synthetically from CO2 and hydrogen extracted from the atmosphere. I’m not exactly sure how Lotus has done it but the claim sounds very exciting.

Unfortunately you can’t have it today. In fact this new technology won’t be ready for cars for another 4 to 5 years. Worse than that they expect it to take another 15 to 20 years to build out the supporting infrastructure. Bummer.

Which leads me again to the same conclusion. Any experimental car that uses hydrogen in any form should only be considered a long term solution. The only green technologies we have at our fingertips now are electric cars and gas burning range extended electric vehicles.

Luckily Lotus is onto this and have also started a research division for electric and hybrid cars. It’s cool to hear they are also making great strides in the hydrogen arena but it’s also great to see them staying on the electric car track too.