Personal Transportation – Designing Ultra-Efficient, Low-Emissions, High-Performance Vehicles
ByIt’s a beautiful day for a drive just north of San Francisco in Marin County, California. Rays of the late-afternoon January sun, beaming between purple-gray clouds like stage lighting, frame stunning vistas of majestic Mount Tamalpais. But behind the wheel of the Toyota Prius that he’s converted to a plug-in hybrid, Ron Gremban isn’t paying attention to any of it. “Look at that!” he says, pointing to the mid-dashboard graphic display showing how much kinetic energy from the car’s brakes is going to recharge its batteries. “Thirty-five amps of regenerative braking. That’s all energy that’s not being wasted.” Elsewhere on the screen is the most important number: on the current tank of gas, the car’s getting 79.5 mpg. Back in 1968 as an engineering student at California Institute of Tech¬nology, Gremban helped design and drive an electric battery-powered Volkswagen bus, the “Voltswagen,” from Los Angeles to Boston to win the /’ Great Electric Car Race against a team from MIT. Today he’s leader of technology development for the California Cars Initiative (CalCars), a nonprofit group of engineers and marketers working with auto and com¬ponent manufacturers to promote the plug-in hybrid—a standard gas-electric hybrid like the Prius, equipped with extra batteries and a plug-in module enabling the use of household electricity to charge them. Unlike regular hybrids that use a gasoline engine in combination with an electric motor most of the time, plug-ins can run on purely electric power—delivered in an overnight battery charge from a standard home wall socket—for the first 25 to 30 miles of local driving speeds. That means virtually no gasoline burned for driving around town, which con¬stitutes the vast majority of vehicle use around the world. “GAS OPT,” reads Gremban’s license plate. The technology delivers dramatic cuts in hybrid vehicle fuel consumption—50% to 70% better than a standard Prius, which is already pretty stingy. And if the extra battery charge runs out or you forgot to plug it in, the car operates like a regular hybrid, with the gas engine charging the battery and kicking in for power when needed. So there’s no limited-range problem, a deal-killer for the all-electric vehicles (EVs) on the market in the 1990s that never grew beyond a small niche. A number of technology innovators and political leaders have even talked about pairing a plug-in hybrid with flex-fuel technolo¬gies (a fuel tank that can run on a mix of up to 85% ethanol and 15% petroleum-based gasoline). In this type of vehicle, you might drive up to 500 miles before burning up a gallon of petroleum-based gasoline. That makes it, if you will, a true “hybrid” hybrid—and one that we see as one of the greatest potential breakthroughs, and business opportunities, in vehicle efficiency. Welcome to today’s world of clean-tech transportation, a world full of vast business and investment opportunities and fraught with high risk. Designing ultra-efficient, low-emissions vehicles to serve the mobility needs of the carbon-constrained, high-oil price years and decades ahead is truly one of industry’s biggest challenges. These trends have already shaken up the global automobile industry, which cranks out 65 million new vehicles a year, in a major way, rewarding sellers of efficient vehicles and even opening the door for start-up clean-car companies in one of the world’s highest entry-barrier businesses. Motorized transportation is a broad and diverse industry, comprising aviation, boats and ships of all sizes, passenger and freight locomotives, light rail, buses, long-haul trucks, and many other forms of conveyance. But we believe that the most compelling opportunities for clean tech— and many of the biggest challenges—come in the world of personal trans¬portation.
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