Plug-In Electric Cars - the Infrastructure Problem

Like I noted in a previous blog entry, the Chevrolet Volt is set to be available as a 2011 model late next year, making it the first plug in electric plug in hybrid vehicle to be available to the mass public. However, MPG claims aside, I did forget to previously mention a very serious problem to the growth and success of a model (and definitely subsequent competitor models as well).

Ask yourself: If that car was available now, wouldn't you be afraid that you'd simply run out of power? You have a busy day ahead of you, and you find yourself driving an unusually long route without having your batteries fully charged. Then, like a toy car of a much smaller price, the thing dies on you.

Quite simply said, right now you can't really walk up to anyone's house or business and ask to plug in your car. In order to make these cars even feasible for the average person to want to use, there has to be some infrastructure changes. Right now, you can find gas stations EVERYWHERE so it's usually hard to actually run out of gasoline and be left on the side of the road. It happens, but with an electric car, you need some kind of charge station.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/business/22electric.html

Like this article says, it's not as simple as just going wild and building charge stations. Things like this require money, serious amounts of money in order to create the necessary changes nationwide, or at least in highly populated areas.

Just a little food for thought. Honestly, even though an all electric car sounds really darn nice right about now, the hassle of owning one in our current situation could be enough to deter the average person.

Air Travel (Public Transport part 2)

We all know how much of a hassle it is to get on an airplane now. Even the act of getting into the terminal, let alone the actual airplane can be a stressing experience. So the question is, is it worth it?

Well of course, since airplanes are basically the most viable long distance transportation out there. Ever since the air travel industry was born, people have been using it to travel in between cities and later countries, piggy-backing along as technology caught up to demands and then created the commercial system we see today.

Of course, how resource friendly are airplanes anyway?

By nature of the requirements of air travel, jet fuel costs quite a bit more than automative gasoline, as a quick check of jet fuel prices in College Station said the average was about 4 dollars a gallon. But think for a second how big airplanes are.



You are talking about tens of thousands of pounds of jet fuel on commercial sized airplanes, amounting to a few thousand gallons of fuel. Granted, the range and the usage of that fuel will be for much, much greater distances than a car or truck, but the sheer magnitude of the fuel that one plane carries is staggering.

Now it makes much more sense why prices just keep on climbing.

Public Transportation part 1

So most of what I've been blogging about has been focused on private transportation - basically methods that you use for moving yourself, and maybe a few others around. While the future in that aspect is strictly limited by availability of new technologies, lack of infrastructure to support radical changes, and finances, public transportation is a slightly different thing.

Truth is, options for public transportation are out there but they vary from country to country, state to state, city to city. Overall though, the most common, and usually cheapest form of public transportation are buses, which by all intents and purposes are just oversized cars. Universities often give college students a free bus system - Texas A&M is no exception, with the Aggie Spirit system.



The Aggie Spirit system is an example of one of the better bus systems out there, but only if you look locally just in the immediate area most frequented by college students. If someone wants to venture outside of the high traffic areas in College Station, you are out of luck. City buses run into the same problem, especially in large expansive cities. You can't ever hope to have a network that will cover the entire city really well.

This is where public transportation hits its limits. While it is relatively cheap, or free on a per-ride basis, it can sometimes by inconvenient. Trains are even worse in the convenience factor, as they better serve intra-city travel rather than inter-city travel - making day to day trips to the supermarket or work very much impossible using this method unless you have to travel a large distance.

However, even with those convenience factors one must take into account that these services run no matter how many people ride on them. They run on schedules, running their routes constantly to serve the people who do use them. If utilized efficiently, then the net outcome is that overall people are saving gas and natural resources.

Sure that an individual bus or train will use WAY more power and/or gas than an average car, but it's not just carrying 1-5 people. It's carrying dozens of people, and cities are constantly trying to be more environmentally friendly by using gas-alternatives. So just take a minute and weigh the ups and downs of public transportation.

Next time, I'll go into the air travel industry.

New (err old?) Technologies

Fear not, there are some interesting, and entirely plausible technologies that are being developed that could in fact make the 200+ pounds of Carbon Dioxide emissions per fill up a thing of the past.

The first thing that comes to mind, is an all electric car. For years, it was completely cast aside because the technology was not there - there was simply no way engineers could get an electrical battery to produce the kind of power a combustion engine could. And then, once they could do that, it cost a fortune.

Now it's arguably gotten better, with the Chevrolet Volt on the horizon. Sure it's just one vehicle and it won't change the industry (even the Toyota Prius, the face of hybrids hasn't changed the entire auto industry) but it serves as a good example of what engineers are coming up with to simply use less gasoline.



The Chevy Volt is different than normal hybrids because it operates on the concept of series, rather than parallel. It has a battery which, under normal driving conditions, is supposed to power the car, without any use of gasoline, for up to 40 miles. From then on, the gasoline engine kicks in, keeping the car's batteries charged. And once you're home, the Volt then plugs in to an outlet and charges the batteries. All said, General Motors claims that the car will get 230 MPG.

Yes, I'll say it again. 230 miles per gallon. Personally, I'm a skeptic of this, because as we now know, driving habits will make things so much more different in the area of fuel economy, and plus, what is GM's definition of "average driving conditions"? Nevertheless, even if it's a more respectable 100+ miles per gallon, it could theoretically change the industry.

Note theoretically. You would think that people would flock the car, but they won't for one particular reason.

Cost.

It's the curse of every new technology. The Volt is said to be available as a 2011 model late next year, but at somewhere around $40,000. This places well above the mainstream consumer, which becomes a problem for anything to change an industry. More than likely, we will see these cars, and any other cars like it from its competitors, have a slow start and maybe after 5-10 years, will pick up.

New technologies are always an odd bet - by the time one technology matures and becomes mainstream, it almost always becomes obsolete by then. So we will see what happens.

Interesting Facts and Figures, part deux

That's part 2 for non-French speakers!!

So I promised in the last blog that I would tell you how much stuff, specifically, Carbon Dioxide is chugged out by burning gasoline. It just involves a little Chemistry and some background knowledge.

First you take one gallon of gasoline (which has a variable chemical formula based on the additives etc) which on average has about 2,421 grams of total Carbon. The oxidation factor for the burning of gasoline is 99% (meaning 99 percent of it reacts with oxygen in the reaction) and then the resulting number is multiplied by 44/12, which are the molecular weights of Carbon Dioxide and Carbon, respectively. The result is:

8,788 grams of Carbon Dioxide or 8.8 kilograms, or about 19.4 pounds.

It's shocking, isn't it? By burning one gallon of gasoline, you create almost 20 pounds of Carbon Dioxide, which is the leading greenhouse gas pollutant. I admit, I was astounded by this. It literally sounds just as bad as it is - meaning that even my car, which has about an 11 gallon tank, creates over 200 pounds of Carbon Dioxide per fill up, from empty of course.

Now whether or not global warming is a real phenomenom or not is outside the point of this blog, but you have to realize the sheer amounts of CO2 that is being chunked out of our tailpipes, considering there are about 600 million vehicles on the planet. I don't think anyone can really argue that it's a good thing.

Which is why we have quite a few things to look forward to, which hopefully if technology and luck is on our side, are just around the corner. Next time I'll post about upcoming cars and certain technologies that may change things in the area of efficiency.

Interesting Facts and Figures part 1

You can believe the figures here or not, but this is what I've been able to conjure up with a few Google searches regarding fuel economy numbers.
Average Fuel Economy in the US in 2006

17.2 miles per gallon

Average Fuel Economy for Passenger Cars in the US in 2006

22.4 miles per gallon

The entirety of the data can be found here and here.

There are two things possibly wrong in that data, not that I'm necessarily calling out the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. One, the EPA changed all the miles per gallon values in 2008. So you can call them out on that, as it skews every single value before 2008 on fuel economy numbers. Essentially what the EPA did was lower the values for every single car made before 2008, so all the numbers listed on the BTS are wrong by today's standards.

So it regretfully means...the national average is actually even lower. Yikes. But there's hope though. I'm sure you heard of the Cars for Clunkers program that ran this last summer?

That program will probably skew the numbers for 2009 (due to the large number of clunkers traded in for more fuel efficient cars) so things are looking better. However these numbers are to be expected.

For next time, look forward to knowing how much pollutants are created by burning gasoline. The numbers will be surprising.

So what can I do? Part 2

Here's the continuation of my last blog, which detailed two different methods to get better fuel economy without having to buy a fancy new car. Now that we've gone over the obvious first step which is to not to have a ridiculous car in the first place, here are some more things you can do without spending a penny to get more miles per gallon out of the current car you have.

3) Keep your car maintained

It's really easy to lose track of when your oil change is due. Face it, everyone at some point or another procrastinates this little nuisance, even I'm guilty of it. Do this and you'll save yourself a little bit of gas, while keeping your car nice and "healthy" if you'd call it that. Aside from that, use the right kind of motor oil if you change your oil yourself.

You can also improve mileage a little more by keeping your tires properly inflated. You can improve your mileage up to 3.3 percent, according to the EPA's numbers. Not doing this apparantly nets you a drop in .3 percent for every psi your tires are off.

And lastly, keep your engine well-tuned overall. If your engine is making weird noises, don't expect your gas mileage numbers to be good. Even worse, faulty sensors can cause all sorts of problems lowering your gas mileage by almost 40 percent. Yikes, but that's only in very serious situations. So pay attention to your car, and look out for warning signs that something is wrong.

4) Keep your ride (reasonably) clean

If your car looks anything like this, for goodness sake, clean it!!



Even if it's just an average "dirty", all the dirt and such will increase drag coefficients and therefore friction when you're driving, making your car work harder to achieve the same result on a clean car. So pay attention to the wash me's that have been etched on your car, it could save your some money (assuming you don't go all out in washing your car by spending 40 bucks on a wax job everytime...).

5) Avoid unnecessary things

You know that fancy bike rack you've mounted on your SUV? Or the ski rack that you're dying to use for that ski trip? Take them off when you're not using them. It's a little bit of common sense, but those things add weight and increase drag coefficients as well.

Also, decreasing the amount of things present in your car can improve mileage. And no, I'm not asking you to throw out your occupants. You're naturally going to get less mileage if you're lugging around hundreds and hundreds of pounds of extra weight, so anything you don't honestly really need in your car, leave at home.

And most unnecessary of all, simply try not to drive unless you have to. Use public transportation if its available (You can argue that those buses and trains and such waste more gas than cars, but truth is that bus is going to use that gas even if you don't get on, so why not take advantage of it?) and if possible, walk or use a bike.

Of course, these are all suggestions. If your heart so desires to run around in a dirty monster truck that's about to fall apart, by all means do it. Just know that your mileage numbers will probably be in the single digits.