Future Car Technologies

Main energy sources

Andrew A. Frank argues that hybrid cars that can be plugged into the electric grid (plug-in hybrid electric vehicles) will soon become standard in the automobile industry. This is confirmed by the current PHEV mass-production race, especially among Toyota, GM and Ford. Other technologies include the following:

* Dual-mode vehicle or vehicles able to platoon that use relatively small electric motors and fuel supplies or battery reserves for door-to-door service off electrically powered arteries. Some swap battery packs to avoid waiting associated with recharging. This also avoids deep discharge that shortens battery life and makes a smaller and lighter battery pack with logistically infinite range using incremental energy sipping through frequent fully automatic battery exchange at speed. The monorail mode provides superior safety at very high speed.
* Battery electric vehicles have the potential of using locally available sustainable energy resources while at the same time reducing vehicle energy requirements by 1/2 to 1/4 when using batteries to store electricity. A new high-performance electric sports car, the Tesla Roadster has attracted much media attention since its release in June 2006.
* Hydrogen cars could eventually be produced that use sustainable energy resources and water. The resulting hydrogen could be burned in an engine or converted back into electricity by a fuel cell and its support systems instead of a battery to be powered as an electric vehicle. Due to the additional conversion losses and added distribution and support logistics overall efficiency is currently not as good as current ICE (”internal combustion engine”) vehicles. Rather it is far simpler and more efficient (by a factor of three to six by some estimates) to transmit locally available sustainable electricity directly into the batteries of a battery electric vehicle.
* Alternative fuels are being proposed: alcohol fuel, water, highly compressed air, garbage, hemp oil.
* Powering electric vehicles directly from the grid would use the least of any kind of fuel because utilities obtain much higher efficiencies than cars. Vehicles also do not have to carry the weight of the many components between the filler cap and the tip of the exhaust. Electrification of highways and arterials is greatly simplified if vehicles form into trains