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Modern society depends on mobility to sustain modern
lifestyles. Personal transportation facilitates individual
freedom and transportation services distribute goods and services all
over the world. Without this mobility the modern lifestyle we
have all quietly become accustomed to would simply not exist.
Most of this mobility has been provided by the efficiency and
reliability of the internal combustion engine which powers the vast
majority of our vehicles. Each day it becomes more clear that, if
we wish to perpetuate a high quality of life on planet earth, we are going to need an alternative to the internal combustion engine.
Internal combustion engines require fuel to burn in order to produce
power. This process has two serious drawbacks; 1. Most of the
fuels that work well in internal combustion engines are becoming more
expensive and the increasing demand for these fuels will eventually
outpace supply, and 2. Combustion produces heat, greenhouse gases and
other pollutants.
Most of the development of new engines has focused on using new
types of fuel to replace the petroleum products that most of these
engines burn. These fuels fall into two categories: 1.
bio-fuels such as ethanol and bio-diesel, and 2. fuel cell engines that
are powered by hydrogen. While use of these fuels will reduce
dependency on petroleum products and reduce emissions, bio-fuels still
produce some emissions and producing hydrogen requires high amounts of
energy. While these fuels offer improvements over the fossil
fuels, they are still are not a complete solution to our long-term
energy needs for vehicles.
Over the past few decades there have been efforts to design vehicles
powered by electric motors. Electric motors are powerful, quiet
and efficient and do not produce significant amounts of heat or
emissions. The big problem with using electric motors to power
vehicles is providing a mobile supply of electricity for them to run
on. Until we come up with a way of effectively collecting
electricity while the vehicle is moving, the capacity of electric
motors is dependent on batteries it uses to store electricity.
This is where the efforts to design electric vehicles have run into
obstacles. The batteries available until very recently were very
heavy and lacked storage capacity. By the time enough batteries
to power a car are installed the car weighs so much that the motor can
barely move it. The few designs that made it from the drawing
board to the road ended up being tiny cars that had very little
power. The ratio between the weight of the batteries and the strength of the motor was so poor that these designs were simply not practical.
Fortunately, the enormous popularity of cell phones, notebook
computers and other portable devices that run on batteries have
attracted more resources to the development of lighter more efficient
battery designs. Until very recently none of these designs was
efficient enough to be practical for use in heavy vehicles such as cars
and trucks.
Coming into the market within the next year or so is a new class of
batteries and electric motors that have been designed for use in moving
vehicles. EEstor of Cedar Park, TX has come up with an energy
storage device (they do not even like to call it a battery) capable of
storing enough energy to power a modern car for hundreds of miles and
can be fully charged in as little a 5 min. This design uses
a ceramic material coated with aluminum oxide and glass in its
construction which eliminates the hazardous chemicals used in most
batteries. While it will still be a few years before this
technology is available to the general public enough real-world results
have been demonstrated that cars are being designed around this storage
device.
Feel Good Cars in Toronto, Canada is already manufacturing electric cars and currently has
a low powered model available that runs on conventional
batteries. The folks at Feel Good Cars are hard a work producing
a full powered model that incorporates EEstor’s technology and expect
to begin shipping the new full-powered models in 2008.
Feel Good Cars expects that full-powered versions of their cars will
be able to drive up to 500 miles on a single charge, which would cost
about $9 worth of electricity at current prices. In comparison to
gasoline this is equivalent to about 45 cents per gallon. The new
engine (more properly called a “motor”) would cost just slightly more
than the average internal combustion engine and produce power on par
with today’s SUVs and performance sedans.
While this innovation may go a long way to solving our energy needs
for transportation there is still more that needs to be done to make
electric cars a complete solution. The vast majority of electric
power plants burn fossil fuels to produce electricity. So even
though electric motors turn out to be more efficient in the long run
than internal combustion engines there still are some
emissions related to their use. However, electric power plants
can be powered by clean renewable sources like solar and wind power,
and there is already a strong movement to increase use of these kinds
of technologies to produce electricity.
One person has commented on this article.  1. EEStorEEStor is fascinating but there are questions. Kleiner Perkins is backing them. This is Silicon Valley�s most successful venture capitalist fund, backers of Google, Amazon, Sun, Netscape, etc. Lockheed Martin is backing them. This is the world�s biggest defence contractor by revenue. Lockheed Martin has toured EEStor and made favorable noises. The specifications they claim are revolutionary.
The selection of the Toronto car company to be have some sort of exclusive rights for using it in cars or as some sort of distributor seems weird. Where is GM, or Toyota, or any other companies that crank out millions of cars who would want this device more than anything that has ever been invented if it proves to be what they say it is.
The other thing is the tiny amounts of money discussed. There is less than $5 million invested it seems. A few engineers. They�re saying they�re working on a production line to crank them out. They�re working on being able to duplicate in some volume what they say they�ve made some test models do, but they aren�t showing what they�ve built publicly.
I want one. Until this thing is proven not to be just about to exist I won�t be able to buy a battery for my electric motorcycle project. This is terrible.
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