Ideas to Save the World - Turbine Powered Cars

That car is a Jaguar C-X75 concept car built for the Paris Auto Show last year. This is a profound sort of car and here is why. Now this car is a hybrid, and if you follow my blog you know that I have a passionate distaste for hybrids, but the fact that it is a new sort of hybrid in concept is what is exciting. You see the world of hybrids there are two schools of thought. Prius introduced us in a big way to the idea that you make a car with a battery where the engine sometimes powers the battery, and sometimes powers the car itself. When the car doesn't have enough power to run the electric motors the gas engine kicks on to power the battery and drive the car. Then there is the other logic, the logic behind the Volt where the gas engine only spools to recharge the battery and the only method to power the wheel is by the electric motors. This Jag runs on the same idea as the Volt, using gas engines to charge up the battery. But here is the cool thing. Instead of using an engine with pistons and crankshafts, it uses micro turbine engines, similar to what you would see in a jet plane, or in a gas power plant.

Here's why it is brilliant. Turbine engines are miles more efficient then a gas engines, you can use all sorts of fuels with them to make them spin, gas, diesel, ethanol, butanol, whisky, kerosene. Turbines spin much easier then reciprocating engines, and can achieve much higher revs. The ones on that Jaguar are rated to up to 80,000rpm. That is a huge amount of electricity that can be made out of a very small power plant. Also to make the car lighter which is key in fuel efficiency the turbines are much lighter then a engine block and they don't require cooling systems or cycling oil lubrication systems.

But the design isn't without fault and the fault in this instance is... the battery. That is one of the biggest faults with hybrids. Sure the electric motors use a lot more material to get the spinning but not so much that it will be hard to sustain in the future, but batteries use many precious metals that the Earth just doesn't have a lot of. It will one day become a real problem unless a better solution is developed (Carbon tubes). So why not keep the electric motors, and get rid of the battery all together? Instead of storing power have the turbines produce on-demand electricity to keep the car going? A large capacity capacitor may have to be developed to store power during stop starts. but that could work too. Capacitor discharges to give a burst of acceleration and create enough inertia to get the car going while the turbines spool up. That way no power is wasted, it is simply waiting.

An idea such as this shouldn't be too unreasonable. Control systems on cars are getting more and more advanced so it shouldn't be so hard to do something like this. If VolksWagen through the nameplate Bugatti can make a car that can go 268mph and give it a power train warranty, why can't this work. I mean how hard can it be to make a car that can be fuelled by crown royal, powered by miniature jets engines, and work with electricity without an on board battery?

Ideas to save the world - Death to Hybrid Cars

I HATE HYBRIDS!!!!

Hybrids are the worst idea in the world, and here is why. Instead of using a tried and true method of propelling a car and attempting to make that better society has decided to deceive itself into thinking hybrid cars will save the world. But heres the thing...They won't.

They aren't even a good stop gap, because once the world realizes that they are a truly bad idea, a proper solution wouldn't have been developed because society bet on the wrong horse. Heres some points as to why...

-The nickel in toyota batteries, mined in Canada, initially processed in Germany, then frothed in China and Final assembly is in Japan. For North American these are then sent to the plant in California. This journey to make a battery for a Prius causes the same emissions as running a Land Rover for 3 years.
-Lithium batteries require a large quantity of this rare metal, and there isn't enough of this metal to sustain an increasing demand in the coming years. And the lithium material could be mined from South American mines by workers forced to do it by militia groups.
-For plug in hybrids, it seems like people think that the plug in the wall connects to some magical land where electricity is produced from millions of hamsters entertaining themselves on their wheels, and not from coal and gas fired power plants.
-If you were to drive a well refined V-6 or V-8 in a manner where the it keeps the paces. Not agressively but not slow, and had a Prius keep up with it, the Pruis would consume more fuel as it can only drive slow. The when the battery runs out and you have to run the motor, the motor is so small and has to rev high to keep up and the higher it revs, the more fuel it consumes. The trick is to have a high efficiency motor powerful enough in the low end not to have it rev really high and stay low while cruising.
-For all the effort to make a hybrid battery, think about how much effort it would take to recycle a battery.

Now you may be thinking to yourself, why would the government give rebates for purchasing these cars? Is it cause they are good for the environment and the government is all about making the world environmentally better? No. It is in a vain attempt to reduce oil consumption to try to stabilize oil prices on a larger scale? Probably. Will it work? Probably not. The U.S. government is essentially the oil giants and financial institution's bitch. The auto industry by no means has a lobbyist group that even compares. When the market crashed and the U.S. government was handing out money, they gave money to banks in the form of a blank cheque. A whole new department was created in the government to coordinate how GM and Chrysler manage their government money. But this isn't a new concept. The catalytic converter was an invention in the 70s and it was designed with the purpose of removing nitrogen gases from the exhaust gases out of the tailpipe. You know how else this could have been avoided? The government could have told oil companies to instead process the nitrogen out of fuel. However the oil lobbyist groups protested and the government passed the buck, to the auto industry

Now here is something to consider. In the U.K. you can get a V-6 twin turbo diesel Jaguar that will make 65 miles. 65!!!!!!! That is far better then a Prius. But how can this be and why don't we have it on this side of the pond? Here's the thing... if you were to take that same car and fill it up at a local pump with diesel it would run for many miles and then wouldn't anymore. The reason it wouldn't is the fuel injectors would be clogged up with impurities in the fuel. The diesel we have in this market is fucking garbage. And why? The European markets have demanded better fuel, more bang for the buck. The states haven't and the reason they will tell you is that it would destabilize fuel prices and wouldn't be able to achieve demand. Now lets think about this from the auto industry's prespective. The government demands that for the good of the economy, and the environment I suppose, that automakers must develop more efficient engines (CAFE 20), but will we instruct the auto industry to develop better fuel? Not a snowball's chance in hell. The government gives very little support to North American automakers, and then when they ask for help they get huge criticism from the public.

People have said, "look at Toyota, they were forward thinking and made a hybrid all by themselves." Somehow forgetting that Toyota got 300 million from the Japanese government to develop the tech for the Prius. That of course wasn't disclosed for years after the release of the car.

I think that is the thing that bugs me most about people and the auto industry. People are stupid, gobbling up the shit that is marketed to them and they think that they are doing something good. Really if they did their research they would realize they are doing more harm then good. Sure maybe they are reducing their individual fuel consumption but on that large global scale, more harm is being done. But worry not, eventually the prices of nickel, lithium and other battery metals will reach a point where they will cost more and more and more, and then hybrids won't be an economically viable option. It will be a glorious day when the price to own a hybrid is more then over the life of the car then a well equipped midsize.

There are some solutions and in some coming blogs I will talk about them in the future

Ethanol vs. Butanol
Turbine Powered cars
High compression engines