Yeah So...

Yeah so after a vast period of nothingness I've come back to the blog and decided to tweek it slightly. It's all well and good to have somewhere to shout at the internet but I should at least shout at the internet about things which I'm actually a part of/have some connection to, which right now is not a lot.

I've got the other blog http://ORIFLeftLeg.blogspot.com which is talks about my accident and recovery etc. I've got my flickr (www.flickr.com/photos/squareoftheyear) where I put my photos (e-mail if you want to buy usage rights)AND I've got a YouTube channel SquareoftheyearFM where I sometimes put things but not with any level of regularity.

I shall post here again at some point but I'm not sure what it'll be, when it'll be or whether it'll be worth reading.

Take Care

Energy distribution…

During my various pieces you’ll hear me arguing about the distribution of power to electric vehicles. All of the big players in this industry recognise that oil will not last forever and that we need to find an alternative. Annoyingly it looks like the worlds supply of oil will last until the people that run these companies retire so they have little interest in pursuing alternatives but to play lip-service to it.

There have been several alternatives the most successful of which of late has been LPG (liquid petroleum gas or butane/propane mix to our American friends), this fuel does come from oil but it’s normally wasted so by bottling it up it was seen as a way of prolonging the supply. Its not as efficient as petrol but it’s half the price and a normal petrol engine can normally be made to run on it. People rushed to convert their thirsty cars and Vauxhall even produced new cars with built in LPG tanks to take advantage (Duel-fuel cars benefiting from certain tax cuts here in the UK). But this doesn’t solve our reliance on mineral oil.

Then diesel vehicles began to take off (yes America cars as small as your slippers all the way up to trucks) thanks to their much improved MPG’s and lower CO2 outputs (the basis for road-tax in the UK now). Diesel is a genius of engineering, the premise is that you compress a fuel until it explodes, whether it be a heavy mineral oil, vegetable oil or something derived from algae. I had a ‘compact’ car made in 1991 with a 1.8litre Diesel engine that could achieve 55mpg. Regular diesel oil has the same problem as petrol as it’s extracted from crude oil and the price is even higher owing to its popularity and the relatively few number of refineries set up to extract it commercially. We can’t rely on vegetable oil as it works better when it’s been used and we’re already destroying rain forests all over the world to produce enough palm oil for foodstuffs. Algae is an interesting proposition but its a million miles from being produced to a low cost in any quantity.

So we’re left with ‘alternative propulsion’ fuels which at the minute are; Hydrogen; Compressed air; and Electricity.

Compressed air in my own mind is nothing other than a curiosity. You compress air and store it in a cylinder; to convert it to drive you pass the air through a three stage motor that drives a high-pressure, a medium pressure and then a low pressure piston. The rest of the drivetrain is fairly conventional. Another way of providing the compressed air is to produce steam but then we’re getting into the realms of steam cars again (see below).

Hydrogen is an interesting one. You can extract Hydrogen from gas by steaming it or by electrolysis of water. You can then either use the hydrogen like the compressed gas option or by using a hydrogen fuel cell which re-combines hydrogen with oxygen and gives you electricity and water. This electricity is then used to drive an all electric drivetrain. I’m led to believe that this is a fairly efficient process and it has the benefits of instant fill ups and the only emissions are water. I say efficient, the turning hydrogen to water and getting energy out is efficient. Creating hydrogen isn’t very efficient, its storage isn’t very efficient and its distribution doesn’t exist as yet. Currently the storage on board is a bit of a sore point as the pressures involved restrict the tank size and range.

Advocates of hydrogen claim that the production could become more ecologically sound through the use of nuclear, wind, tidal power stations etc. which is true but the government would have to do something about it and we all know they’re too tied up with expenses and immigration to care about the environment or science. So whilst hydrogen IS an interesting prospect I don’t see it as anything other than an interesting taster of what the future could be.

The final option as far as I see is electric vehicles. I’m going to admit now; I’m very much an advocate of pure electric propulsion but stick with me.

When cars were first making it big there were steam, petrol and electric cars. Steam was smelly and required a lot of work, electric was limited to the battery technology and people didn’t trust driving around in a vehicle full of explosives but somewhere along the way petrol won out. In the UK though we’ve always had a bit of a fetish for EV’s, our milk floats are electric, many warehouses use electric forklift trucks and old people are often carted about on small electric personal vehicles. This has meant that electric motors for propulsion have been in development for years and with the advent of reliable battery technologies we’re in a position where they could make sense. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility to produce a ‘normal’ vehicle with electric drive and battery power that can do 70mph with a range of up to 300miles. We’ve already got a power distribution network in place, the national grid. Those who have garages or dedicated parking could charge their vehicles using cheap off-peak power when the grid is well under capacity, those who don’t could use dedicated quick charging stations at work or in town such as the ones that have popped up around London.

My feeling is that supermarkets, service stations and large employers are the people who could push this. Whilst charging at home on a single phase supply might take eight hours, a three-phase supply could provide 80% charge to most EV’s in as little as half an hour. These places already have three phase supplies and even if they needed to upgrade the incoming supply to take account of the higher peak draw it could be quantified and used to decide on how much to charge per unit of electricity.

Car manufacturers don’t seem interested in making the leap, there’s little incentive for business to make any investment if there aren’t vehicles to use the infrastructure.

So what’s needed? It goes against my very nature but I think business should be encouraged to work towards electric vehicles for everyday use, based on existing vehicles. Toyota did it with the Rav4EV and Ford did it with the Ranger SUV, both were done in the 90’s, almost twenty years later what’s to stop them outfitting some of their cars with lithium-iron-phosphate (as opposed to lithium-ion) batteries and a propulsion system based on one of the hundreds of smaller manufacturers who’ve perfected the technology?

God forbid another NGO come along and tell people what to do, but the big manufacturers had floundered long enough. GM have had the technology to produce effective EV’s for twenty years and all they’ve done is throw it away and start again to make it look like they’re doing something.

Maybe the stepping stone we need are hybrids but I’m sceptical as to whether the car makers are using it as a development of future vehicles or as a way of prolonging the old technologies.

How do we solve a problem like electric cars?

Gordon Murray, once famed for designing the McLarren F1 road car, has developed the T.27 an electric car for the masses. Trouble is what he’s designed is a golf buggy with big wheels and a roll-over loop. What he’s actually designed is a manufacturing process that removes the need for steel presses as his cars will be built of bits welded together by computer controlled robots. The process which he’s calling iStream cost 9million pounds to develop of which half was funded by the government.

The idea is to reduce the processes to reduce the emissions and improve sustainability. I’m having trouble with this concept however. In a ‘normal’ car factory a roll or sheets of steel get delivered and are stamped in a dye and spot welded together by a robot, then hundreds of workers go about bolting things onto that. What iStream is going to deliver is lots of steel tube and sheets get delivered and are welded together at which point someone will, presumably, come along and bolt things to the vehicle.

To my mind this plays into the hands of people who see electric vehicles as a joke. The ‘car’ is slabsided, open-topped and a single seater and looks uglier than a New York City meter-maids cart. Please forget the electric drive train and put in a 5hp diesel pop-pop engine and let it die with the other curiosities. If the T.27 had come along 100years ago when EV’s were more common it’d have been blown out of the water by others that were better designed and a damned sight more comfortable.

Murray claims that it’s designed as an urban transport vehicle and that we should still have a station wagon at home if we need to go further. I’m sorry but ecologically having two cars to do the job one does now? People WILL NOT buy it. If I want an electric car but occasionally need to run down to Brighton to see a friend, I’ll buy a Prius or Honda insight. I could even swing by the centre of London and pick a friend up on the way. If I had a T.27 I’d have to leave it at home, forget going through London and would have done the whole journey in my petrol car.

What we need is electric cars with decent ranges with ‘charging stations’ at fairly frequent intervals. Tesla have shown a 280mile range. Smith Ampere is only limited to 100miles because the battery pack is only as big as the diesel tank on a Ford Transit Connect. If a manufacturer like Smith were involved in the development of a vehicle from scratch we’d have this licked by now surely?

Honda motor cars have their petrol tank under the front seats, most cars have it under the rear seats. Okay this is a far out idea but if a manufacturer designed a car so that there was space under the front seats, the rear seats and possibly under the boot where people used to put spare wheels (when cars had spare wheels), it stands to reason that a compliment of lithium-Ion-Phosphate batteries could give a range of 300miles at 70mph.

Coupled to this a charging infrastructure at motorway services and supermarkets. Tesco listen up, if you put three-phase charging stations at your supermarkets you could sell us electricity at a profit! The people who don’t have a garage in which to charge their car up could have it fist charged at Tesco whilst they do their weekly shop. Or if I’m off to see Simon on the south coast I could drive for whatever the range is on my car, stop at a services, and have a coffee while ‘Moto’ top-up the charge in my car.

This isn't rocket science, it’s business. The main stumbling block is that we’re chasing ‘alternative fuels’ because BP, Shell et al. want to sell us stuff to go in our cars. Oil companies partner up with the big firms to supply lubricants for their cars and it’s a relationship that has gone on for years.

Auto manufacturers can do it, we want it, the infrastructure is easy and fairly cheap to put in. I’m sorry Gordon but whilst I commend your idea but Citroen trialled it in the 70’s with little effect and whilst an oversized golf cart is the dream of many pre-teens it’s not what Mavis down the road will want to drive down to the shops of a rainy afternoon.

GM decide not to sell Opel/Vauxhall

Okay, so I for one was over the moon when the sale of Opel to Canadian parts manufacturer Magna International Inc. Magna had shown a rare vision in modern automotive companies, it wants to promote electric vehicles (EV’s). Magna International had already developed EV technology and were buying one of Europe’s largest automobile manufacturers. Within a year or five there was the distinct possibility that we could have ‘normal’ electric vehicles rolling off production lines in Russelheim and Ellesmere Port. This could have been it, forget you’re G-Whizzes and Ford Th!nks, we would have had Opel Astras and Opel Insignias out there on the streets in ordinary peoples hands. That’s how EV’s will make it big, by them becoming the norm, not some little fibreglass go-kart.

Then comes the news yesterday that GM have made more money than they were expecting, US Taxpayers money, and to celebrate GM decided to pull the sale of Opel/Vauxhall. Ordinarily that would seem like good news but Magna had already been in discussions with the unions, had already worked out a way to make the business work after GM had let things get so bad. Now we’ve got GM playing the jealous older sibling “its mine hands off!” “you’re not having Opel/Vauxhall, I want them”. This leaves the staff unsure again what’s going to happen to their jobs, it means a stagnation of vehicle development and the prospect that we may have a version of the Chevy Volt thrust on us.

Don’t get me wrong the Chevy Volt IS a step in the right direction, it’s a 1.4litre hybrid, not a million miles from the old Toyota Prius, but that’s the point, the OLD prius. The new Prius comes with a bigger more efficient engine, it’ll come with a plug soon so you can plug it in boosting your mpg’s to around 150, still nowhere near the efficiency of a true battery electric vehicle but much better than what GM are promising.

That’s what’s going to happen, the Volt will be released with great fanfare but it’ll be released to a world where cars have already moved on. Toyota are miles ahead promising hybrid versions of all it’s cars, Honda have a couple of great cars, Magna Steyr are already developing their own car, Tesla have grasped the publics attention with their sports cars, Smith Electric have developed an EV version of the Ford Tourneo Connect, Ford may eventually bite the bullet and market a version of the focus with either a Magna or Smith drivetrain and Renault have already made a lot noise about the four new EV models they will be releasing soon.

So what of Opel/Vauxhall, well what we’ve got left is European arm of GM who were almost in a position to come out of the darkness and become world leaders in mass produced electric vehicles gobbled back into the arms of the company that destroyed it’s own EV programme for Hummers about ten years ago. What can we expect as the next move? I’m not sure but I’m guessing GM will find a way of stuffing the Volt project up somehow, Ford will flounder a bit longer and the smaller manufacturers will struggle to get enough interest to make the economies needed to get the price low enough to compete with mass produced oil burning vehicles we’ve become so used to.