It would be good if we had infrastructure to carry the stuff, transport it to filling stations, store it there and then put it in the car. Pipelining can be done with hydrogen is a gaseous state, but if you want hydrogen to become reality you need some cheap and safe way of converting it to liquid or solid and then back again inside the car.
In the future we'll see mobile phones with genuinely good cameras. Imagine that! Oh, and I'm already looking forward to GTA 5. Erm, probably should add something vaguely useful to the thread: Stem cells. If we can get these working they'll revolutionise science and medicine. I don't fully understand the technicalities ( ) but I understand that it could be just one 'eureka' moment away*. Which would be nice. *Currently stem cell cultures are associated with chromosomal abnormalities. This is probably due to the growth medium, and this limits the useability dramatically. If 'they' can get this sorted, we might see stem cells sooner rather than later. Who knows?
Yeah, so are perpetual motion machines. Battery tech is going to have to come a long way if it's going to take care of real fuel needs by 2050 or so.
so.... if a Toyota RAV4 EV has an autonomy of about 130km to 190 km with standard NiMH batteries..... with standard lithium it could go up to 250km, but for sake of conversation lets consider that it goes 190km, with the new batteries that are appearing that use nanotechnology and that let you get 10x the capacity of standard lithium batteries you would get a range of about 1900km with one of these things.... or make it lighter and still increase the range. considering that the RAV4 is not the most aerodynamic car i have seen, and that you can design very aerodynamic, beautiful and spacious cars with light materials.... basically you can get a car that has 1000km of range, can carry about anything your current car carries, has higher torque at lower RPM and will pollute the environment less, is safer and, above all, is cheap to fill up and maintain (it has less moving parts). as for mass transporting hydrogen with pipelines and trucks.... i prefer to have a nuclear power plant near my house than that. PS: on the light battery part, we could do what we do here with bottled gas, we purchase a steel (now they are starting to use light material ones) container of butane gas that is enough for 2 weeks or so of cooking and showering, when the gas is depleted we return the steel container and buy a new container of gas, in this case we only pay for the gas and a little bit for the "maintenance" of the containers.... This idea could be applied to batteries for electric vehicles, were you could fill your car battery in a very fast manner.
Rubbish - you can not get a car that goes 1000km on batteries. Firstly, I'd be curious where you get that information from on the RAV4, although I am prepared to take at face value that you can get a 4x4 loaded with enough batteries to take it around say, on average, 93 miles. That's currently maybe, what, 1/7th of what large capacity efficient cars are getting? So let's be generous, and say that we need a 500% increase in battery capacity. 93 miles per "tank" is useless for a large percentage of the population. But that's not the only problem. You can be damn sure that to fit the batteries for 93 miles of propulsion, you need to have a large chassis. Think you're going to get enough batteries to do that in a Ford Ka? I doubt it. Next, we have perhaps the biggest problem. Charge time. It takes 5 hours to charge a RAV4. It takes 60 seconds to refill a fuel tank. Now this might just be workable for some people, with a 93mile range - if they carry out all their life within a small area and can charge every night. But for most people that's going to create real problems. And finally: cost. The batteries alone cost over £10,000/€15,000/$20,000 for this vehicle. A significant proportion of the regions those currencies apply to barely earn that in a year. As for your exchange idea - you think any company is going to hand over $20,000 of equipment to you "in a very fast manner"? Or that exchanging the fuel system for an entire vehicle to power it to travel it's puny-93 miles is going to be a minor task? Let's not talk about new batteries that use nanotechnology that give you a capacity that you just pulled out of your ass, if you want real solutions to real problems, use real figures. Oh and I have a gas tank outside my house which is steadily pumping extremely explosive gaseous hydrocarbons into my kitchen where they're ignited and burned at hundreds of degrees. I'd be no more worried about hydrogen transport than I am about that, which is to say, not at all. Not that I'd be worried about living near a nuclear plant either.
True, and an LPG-type or fuel cell hydrogen storage may be more feasible in the short run. However batteries and efficient electric motors are coming along nicely also. Think of where combustion tech was 50 years ago.
lets divide your argument into pieces people used to say that about flight and going to the moon. all the information i considered comes from here, here and here. google tells me that 93 miles is about 150km, with the technology above i could get it to do 1500km, right? either that or less km with less batteries, but at the same time make it lighter and cheaper. considering that about 80% of Americans drive 60 miles a day , so a car that does 93 miles and recharges during the night is very useful, plus the fact that in California, were these cars appeared, you had these parking spots that were reserved for EVs and had recharging paddles. So even if you were working, your car would be recharging it self for free outside. (they were feed by solar panels) 1 picture = 1000 words and yes, that is all the batteries. in theory you could have a automatic system that replaces your standard battery pack with another similar standard battery in a very fast way, maybe faster than 60 seconds, i remember seeing an animation of that some time ago... with mass production stuff tends to go cheaper.... and if take into account that you don't need to produce the other complex parts of a standard ICE car that an EV does not need.... gas tank may be expensive, but the rest of the car is much cheaper. Also, by your ideas a diesel powered car would sell very badly, here they cost more than a gasoline car... ow wait, diesel car sales are trough the roof and gasoline cars are falling around here.... i wonder why.... and the price of the diesel cars are getting higher due to demand...... the exchange idea is plausible as long as you buy the original battery (it comes with your car), use it, go to the exchange station, the automated system removes your battery and runs some fast tests on it, tags the battery (with its previous owner data) and sends it to be recharged, at the same time your car is being fitted with a full battery that is compatible with your vehicle, you are on your way. with the previous system i see the problem with battery degradation, the problem of people recharging it at home, etc.... these points are solvable as long as you have inteligent batteries that log their life with you, you go to the exchange station and you pay X (were X is the electric power in the battery + monetary value of the degradation that you submitted your battery to + margin of profit), the battery you had will be recharged and its log is then erased, it is ready for its new owner, that or it is sent to be recycled. with this method you always have a "fresh" battery and your recharge speed is very good. it works for us at least..... with gas. and about the values out of my ass... look above. hydrogen is a very interesting gas, it is odourless, tasteless, colourless, it escapes very easily, burns violently and with an indivisible flame. And my gas canisters are inside the kitchen, and when it leaks i know it is leaking. edit: another picture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Battery_EV_vs._Hydrogen_EV.png and a question: how much does a hydrogen fuel cell cost? how much time does it last?
The reason i think psychology is going to be the next big one, is that there is such rapid progression being made. I agree with all your statements, though it may not seem that way. I just used some extrapolated and oversimplified wordings to explain my point Confusing words cheesecake The main point in my poorly put arguement is that Philosophy is the starting point of most sciences. It is therefor all of the above, including a primitive ancestor. I'd say the way Aristophanes or Heraclites explained the stars and the sun are primitive ancestors of our current view on the cosmos.
Firstly Agreed. Now onto the boring refutations. The ability to produce a prototype low-capacity small lith-ion battery which can mostly charge in one minute does not mean that large high-capacity NiMH batteries will be able to do the same. As for the nanowires link, please notice the "to enhance" part of the headline. You could make a headline saying "Fusion to revolutionise power production" - sure, batteries will improve one day and there's plenty of interesting research going on into that right now, but you can't present possible avenues of research as rock-solid guarentees like you're doing. It's intellectually dishonest at best. I'd be curious to see how your 60 miles per day figure was calculated, but even so, where does that leave the other 20%? Or people who want to go on a day trip? Where do 100 mile batteries that take 5 hours to charge leave truckers, or ships, or aircraft? A hydrogen economy has plenty of problems, but it can answer the preceding quetions. Right - it does need a significant amount of the bed of the chassis to hold all the batteries. They also don't look particularly hot-swappable to me either. Good. So you're basically admitting that it's a problem and it hasn't been solved yet. Sometimes, not always. It depends on the supply of materials required. If the entire world needs batteries that contain fairly rare materials, the cost may stay around the same. I don't understand why you think I'm saying diesal cars would sell badly, havn't a clue how you extracted that from my current line of arguments but you do so wrongly, however you do it. No it's not. No company is going to hand over $20,000 of equipment in 60 seconds. There would be far too high a risk of someone exchanging faulty batteries and making the electronics spoof the system that it's ok. There'd be an entire industry that'd grow up around batteries being stolen, and with such a high turnover rate between vehicles stopping the use of stolen batteries would be nigh on impossible. The system would be a complete nightmare to implement and I doubt very much you'd find rural "gas" stations wanting to have to hold a few million pounds of batteries in places where they can be accessed within 60 seconds by anyone who drives into the station. I did, they were. Propane is a very interesting gas, it's odourless, tasteless, colourless, it escapes very easily, and it burns violently. You know your gas is leaking because we add stuff to the gas to make it smell, DXR. You can do that with hydrogen too, y'know?
I'm sure urban types could get by on ~60 miles per day I know i only do about 10 a week, the gf does about 40 a week going to and from uni. The problem is much worse extra urban be that suburb comuters or folk who live rurally. Most of my travel is by bus to work, with occasional trips to the local edge of town shopping place, so with batteries the problem becomes how do you get enough on a bus when it does hundreds of miles a day? In Edinburgh any way, the solution wouldn't be giving everyone little personal transports, there isn't the space on the roads nor is there sufficient space for a full scale tram system so Diesel/Hydrogen still seems to be the only way of providing local but long range mass transit. (out of interest spec how far are you form Inverness?)
About 20 miles, depending on the route you take. 171 miles from Edinburgh. 185 to Glasgow. 119 to aberdeen.
i reckon hydrogen to be honest... because it will change the entire world as we will not need to rely on fossil feul for transport, for energy etc
Philosophy is the starting point for all sciences, but also an integral part of it (just as we are our ancestor genes). Philosophy evolved and thus did scientific discipline. This is in part why we come up with better scientific explanations now, which are more based on fact and less on lore.
I provided you with a 3 year old link, i would think they have evolved by now, and who is talking about NiMH? i say that lithium based batteries are the way to the future. Lets see if i get this strait... you are considering that the stuff on nanowires is less possible as a solution than almost infinite energy produced from a fusion reactor (or somewhat limited fision reactor) to produce hydrogen? As for batteries with nanotechnology.... don't look for A123.... they have something called nano phosphate batteries, and if A123's site was up i would give you a link, and yes they are being sold and there are some DIY designs using them for power (they are currently sold as power packs for dewalt tools). you could also check this link to find out some interesting things.... and here is a study from last year And i think it is a bit on the strange side you saying that i am saying "intellectually dishonest" stuff on a thread that has gone from psychology advances to hulk type "humans".... especially after i give links from technology that is being developed and sold right now, and some technology that worked in 1997 for a range that is more than enough for most people that commute.(and those bloody things are still running good) the source for that data is the "U.S. Department of Transportation.", says so on the graph. about the 100 mile battery.... that's 100 miles for a 11 year old battery on a car shaped like a brick and made from heavy materials (its a converted RAV4).... i think they might have evolved battery and car making technology in 11 years... don't you think? as for ships and aircraft... you could feed them with advanced fuels taken from human waste.... consider that this is a relatively old car... and relatively old batteries, i am going to go on one foot and say that with current battery technology you would need less room for the power supply system, and that an electric motor is smaller, simpler and lighter than its ICE equivalent. (i have seen an interesting design by volvo, were the motors are inside the wheels) the batteries dont look hot-swappable maybe because they were not designed to be hot-swappable.... edit: i forgot about the trucks: maybe its here were the hot-swappable battery system could be used. and hydrogen is without problems? lithium, titanium, carbon and sand and some other materials vs something containing platinum and other exotic and standard stuff.... your words: "And finally: cost. The batteries alone cost over £10,000/€15,000/$20,000 for this vehicle. A significant proportion of the regions those currencies apply to barely earn that in a year." considering the above phrase i took the liberty of looking at current types of vehicles and doing an analogy. Here diesel cars are a fair bit more expensive to buy than a gasoline car (some times twice the price for an equivalent car), their price has also gone up, as has diesel, but thanks to diesel being cheaper than gasoline, diesel cars lower consumption and their higher toque (we are an inclinated island) their sales have never been higher (when compared with gasoline cars). With this i am saying that: given the chance to buy one of 2 cars, one is an EV with 250km range on it for [Y x 1,5]€ or a hydrogen powered car for Y, and that the fuel cost for the EV was lower for the same range.... or maybe free (or negative) if i got those "cheap" thin film solar panels (1$ per watt once it gets mass fabricated) and sold the power to the grid.... yes i can do that, and they buy the power from me at 6X the price they sell me the power. You have a good point there. On the other hand i don't see much practicality on having thousands of cubic meters of highly explosive compressed hydrogen around... plus the cost of the equipment used on this and the fact that the most cost effective way to produce hydrogen is from fossil fuels (at least that is what i have read). if Altairnano are to be trusted, you will soon have batteries that recharge in few minutes, last 20+ years and have 3 times the capacity of current batteries, if by this they mean that you will get at least 3x more range than 1997 battery technology, i can consider that a car similar to a RAV4 EV would have a range of 93 x 3 = 279 miles, or a light weight sedan that would go further... (and with this i am being ridiculous because battery technology has become better during the last 11 years) this makes my idea moot and relatively stupid... (i only found Altairnano today) show me the numbers i pulled out of my ass. it is called Ethanethiol and i knew of that , but i was considering that it would be a little on the strange side to have your exhaust smell like farts (about the same smell a leak would smell like) when you drive, and your fuel cell would feel a little sick, considering that you have to feed it hydrogen with the least amount of impurities for it to function correctly. as a last point: i want to ask about safety, considering the test videos from A123 cells (they can be found on youtube), were they are punctured and damaged, and the volatile nature of hydrogen, which is safer in the case of a car crash or accident that involves the rupture and leak of the inwards of the battery/gas tank? ^wall of text , sorry
Firstly, I never said that. Do not put words into my mouth. I do not see how you can consider fission power limited, however, given that at the very least we have thousands of years of it left before uranium starts to run out. And if you think providing old evidence and saying "things must have moved on by now" is a good way to prove an argument, you've got a lot to learn. If you want to be convincing, link recent evidence, not outdated. I've been on the A123 website, and while I see claims of mile per gallon (I can only assume that they mean energy efficiency from fossil fuel generated power, but really it's not very clear) I don't see any specific claims of distances reached by any vehicle. You seemed to be presenting information that I sincerely hoped you knew to not be concrete, as concrete and current. You pretty much saying "Well this research promises 10 times more power" and then saying "so basically you can get a car that goes 1000km on a charge" is a load of rubbish. You simply can not make statements like that if you want what you're saying to be taken seriously. I wasn't after the source, I was after the method of calculation. The average american supposedly travels around 50 miles per day. But I don't know if that means, if you take the average american's daily road trips it'll be under 50 miles, or if you take their weeks journeys and average them out over 7 days it'll be 50 miles per day, or if it means that if you add up the total mileage done by all americans and then divide it by each one, the average is under 50 miles per day. There are a huge number of ways you could calculate data, and I'm not to keen on relying heavily on those numbers untill I know what method was used. Advanced fuels from human waste? And what might those be - please do tell me all about them? You're not suggesting we're going to power all our ships and aircraft with methane, while arguing against hydrogen power, are you? I didn't say that. In fact, I wrote in one of my previous posts that hydrogen power does indeed have problems. The cost is not analagous. Diesel cars, at least here, are a proven method of transport and cost is recooped by cheaper running costs. I know I know, right now you're thinking to yourself "But electricity is practically free for charging cars!". Perhaps, perhaps not. What isn't free though, is an array of advanced batteries which costs at least €15,000, and only lasts for a few thousand charge cycles. You are very right to bold that "if". It is in Altairnano's interests to make people believe that they are very close to a breakthrough. Doing this creates interest, it gets people to invest in their company, it ensures media attention. I've been hearing about battery technology which is going to make my mobile phone last for months, my laptop run for 20 hours at a time, and my mp3 player last me weeks at a time for, well for around as long as I've been reading tech news now. Every few months you see some new piece of battery technology which is "only a year or two away", and a year or two later? My mobile phone still lasts a week, my laptop still lasts 3 hours, and my Ipod still runs out of battery by 5pm. Do you see my point? Q E D A small price to pay for being able to drive 150 miles in a single day. Not that it would appear especially neccesary to make vehicle fuel smell. Household gas obviously would want to be smelly, but then again that's simple sense, and already exists with propane and the various other household and comercial gases used. Not that you're going to enjoy reading this, but safety comes secondary to functionality, affordability, and possibility.
I reckon this thread needs a poll, with all the suggestions presented here as options. As i earlier suggested, i predict that breakthroughs in bionics, hydrogen, bio-diesel & electricity will be the most popular & commonly used future developments. Nanotechnology is another big thing that many are waiting for to develop, but i think nanotechnology will still be too expensive for a while yet to be commonplace, so it won't be the next big thing for a few years at least anyway, and even then it would just be used on a small scale - disturbingly awful pun intended The poll might stop the wall of text wars, but it would be good to see i think.
i like discussing with you, spec, you can always find a hole in my arguments, and that forces me to improve, thanks! i don't mean to put words in your mouth. i agree to use nuclear fission, as long as security measures are in place to prevent events like Chernobyl... and i do agree that in the human time frame, fission power is unlimited, but the question remains: is it economically and energetically viable? given that you have a car that has old technology (steel frame, old motor, old batteries, brick like aerodynamic profile, etc..), take current technology (light material frame, new brushless maglev type motor or in hub motors, new A123 batteries (look at several conversions involving their stuff, including their dewalt packs) or other battery fabricator, better aerodynamic shape, better controller technology, on-board computer, etc...) and you will get a car that runs better and further than the RAV4 EV.... how much? i don't dare to speculate. they do sponsor the insane Killacycle.... they are also going to power some interesting EVs and plug-in hybrids in the future, like the Volt... i will present here my line of thought: today lithium batteries have more capacity than nickel batteries -> a study from a well known University has managed to make a way to increase the autonomy of lithium by 10 fold -> a 1997 model RAV4 EV with NiMH (by wikipedia) gets from 130 km to 190 km -> since lithium batteries have more capacity than NiMH batteries (based on wikipedia again) then it is safe to say that a RAV4 EV with lithium batteries would go the same distance (or more) -> since 10 X 130 km and 10 x 190 km would give me insane numbers, i considered it safe to consider that you could put less batteries in your car to get those 1000km. i am trying to do an example by extreme, if a car can do X km, as a maximum, then it can logically do less with less capacity. i think it was more of a survey... as in ask X amount of random people how much they drive and then register the results..... and then plot it. i was thinking more of liquid ethanol and diesel from plant waste, in-land cultivation of seaweed in closed vats that are feed by sewage and captured CO2 to accelerate their growth (they are starting to do something similar in Porto Santo).... everything has, especially humans, darn strange species..... i think it is more easy to recoup your investment with an plugin electric then with a hydrogen car, as with the diesel vs gasoline, hydrogen will be inherently more expensive than direct electricity from the grid, and i am not considering the scenario were you gain money from selling your solar energy to the grid or that system that uses your charging car as a buffer for the grid. lets say that (from wikipedia) you could get 1200 cycles from a standard lithium, Altairnano says it gets more than 9000 cycles from its battery and A123 says its M1 cells get more than 1000 cycles. If a person recharges its car every day when he gets home then its cycles/365 days (i am considering this scenario as the most logical these batteries will get, without considering that the range would be enough for more than 1 day), so we get: 3.2 years for the standard, 24.6 years for the Altairnano and 2.7 years for the A123. the cost per year per each, considering your €15000, would be 4687€ (13€/day) , 609€ (1,67€/day) and 5555€(15€/day), respectively. this considering a price of €15,000, that maybe would come down with mass production.... shave part of the building process (seen this on a TED video some time ago, i will find it and post it tomorrow) and you get a car that is "moderate" in price. "sadly" you have a big point. Lets see what happens in the future.... by the way: http://www.science.uwaterloo.ca/WWSEF/07Awards/2007ReportGerwinAndrew.pdf if this study exists then it is probable that Altairnano batteries are real and functional... lets see if i can show you were i got those values: 1500km: was more or less a miss interpretation of your words, what i interpreted was that you considered that an EV was able to get 93 miles with current battery technology, inserted it into google to convert it to km, got about 150km + that article about those nanowires that says they can increase the capacity of a lithium battery by 10x.. now i see your reasoning was another.... sorry. and by the way, the RAV4 EV has a range larger than 93 miles..... 1900km: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_RAV4_EV maximum range + that article about those nanowires that says they can increase the capacity of a lithium battery by 10x. 1000km: i explained my reasoning for this one above make the city smell like farts (i am considering that the fart smell would come from another chemical, because Ethanethiol is relatively dangerous)... great.... and in the process destroy your fuel cell. I think it is safer to make gas, from a gas powered car, smell, it is safer, imagine that your car was leaking hydrogen and you did not know, considering how volatile it is.... there would be alarms and hydrogen sensors for it.... but i think i would prefer to be on the safe side and know that something is leaking, just by sniffing it out, and that i must get the hell out of there and call for help. .... so screw air bags, seatbelts, crumple zones, children seating, safer car interior design and helmets on bikes!! its cheaper, functional and inside my possibilities..... safety first? that's for idiots! again, if i pulled something out of my ass, please point it out.
Well hand it over to Sheldon, Leonard, Howard and Rajesh, it'll happen in a decade. 12 years top. Wait.. are we talking real world here?
What is quite interesting is what designers can do nowadays with flexiable screen panel generator tech, plug your car into the wall while your waiting for things (say for instance at work, solar panels inside the car will continue to charge the car, as well as recieving some from the grid. now whats interesting is the panels on the car, when the car is full, you can sell that back to the electricity company. the other large technilogical advance no one has mentioned is the ability of large liquid capacitors which can be charged really quickly. we just need to stop using bloody biofuel grown on land, sharpish.
