CARazed

When I first wrote up the post on the XH-150 plug-in hybrid I didn’t quite get the most important part of the technology AFS Trinity has put into this 150 MPG conversion. In addition to the stock motor and additional batteries on board the XH-150 there are capacitors.

What’s a capacitor? It’s a little dude on a circuit board right? You know like a resistor and diode right? I looked it up because I couldn’t remember anything from the electrics 101 class I never took in college. A capacitor is commonly a tiny thing soldered onto a circuit board that stores electricity. They are commonly used for evening out electrical current and storing electricity for short periods of time, like to change a battery on an electric device. To a layman like me its basically a little battery that charges and discharges at will; and I bet if you cracked open any electrical device in your home you’d find one.

AFS Trinity has taken capacitors to the next level. They aren’t describing them as ultracapacitors yet but it sounds like they are working on that too. The capacitors in this plug-in hybrid conversion simple temporarily store electricity for immediate use, or theoretically for longer term storage in the on-board batteries.

When you stand back and think about it, this is a great idea. Batteries aren’t that fast to recharge so there must be a big efficiency gain with capacitors. For example I bet a system like this recaptures more electricity from regenerative breaking than a battery could.

For more see this article on Economist.com

Velozzi is one of the fifty Automotive X PRIZE contendors. They are entering two cars, one to the mainstream category and another to the alternative division. Both cars will drive their wheels with an AC electric motor powered by on-board lithium-ion batteries. When the battery charge runs low a multi-fuel charging system (motor and generator) that burns your choice of ethanol, methanol, bio-diesel, gasoline or diesel. At night you’ll be able to plug your Velozzi super car into the wall and recharge the batteries.

They expect fuel economy to be between 100 and 200 miles per gallon. Actual performance figures are still to be final but they are looking to achieve 0 to 60 acceleration in under 3 seconds and top speeds near 200 MPH. To achieve these lofty goals composite body panels and carbon fiber honeycomb chassis technology, much like a Formula 1 car, is being used.

Although this looks like an interesting experiment in pushing plug-in hybrid technology to the limit, it doen’t look like a potential X PRIZE winner to us because the car they descibe on their website is so extreme. But we love the idea of coupling the plug-in hybrid technology with a multi-fuel engine. The idea of having extreme flexibility at the pump is compelling. In fact that should be the real story here, not the super car performance.

We hope the Velozzi team is at the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) this week to sizing up the competition. Their natural conclusion should be to build an affordable car that leverages their multi-fuel engine and plug-in hybrid drive. If they could deliver that package they’d steal the X PRIZE away from people like Aptera and Fisker.

Citroen cars are not imported into the US but this idea seemed simple and novel enough to report on. As the name of the system, Stop and Start, would suggest this little Citroen’s engine does exactly that when the car is at rest, which in a big city like London, England might be 25% of the time.

It is widely known that cars sitting in traffic, at stop lights, and waiting in fast food drive-through lines still burn gas and emit exhaust. Most of us usually think there is just nothing for it, part of life, reality. To start and stop our cars would be too inconvenient, probably use more gas, and wear our our starters.

Some of that might be true, some is dead wrong. This little French car proves that if a stop and start feature were added to a car fuel efficiency goes up. This car for example gets about 50 MPG on average and reduces CO2 emissions by about 10% in urban driving. Visit NewCarNet.co.uk for the full article.

We found a very handy tool for finding cars that don’t burn gasoline. It happens to be on a government website, fueleconomy.gov. Try the tool out and search for cars that don’t need gasoline. This website also provides a lot of useful information on tax incentives, the best and worst fuel efficiency, why and some explainations for gas prices are so high.