Gas 2.0 |
- Honda “Lacks Confidence” in Electric Car Business, Adopts Wait and See Attitude
- An Electric Car Test Drive—In 2020
- Car Hacking: In the Future, Will Your Car Catch a Virus?
- MIT “Double Bubble” Plane Uses 70% Less Fuel
- Survey Says: 65 Percent of Americans Want Government-Enforced 50 MPG Standards
| Honda “Lacks Confidence” in Electric Car Business, Adopts Wait and See Attitude Posted: 19 May 2010 12:04 PM PDT
Having dipped their feet in the waters of electric vehicle sales in Japan once before, Honda’s president of research and development, Tomohiko Kawanabe, said that they still “lack confidence” in demand for electric cars, according to a report from Bloomberg. "It's questionable whether consumers will accept the annoyances of limited driving range and having to spend time charging them," Mr. Kawanabe is quoted as saying. "We are definitely conducting research on electric cars, but I can't say I can wholeheartedly recommend them." |
| An Electric Car Test Drive—In 2020 Posted: 19 May 2010 11:19 AM PDT With the Nissan Leaf, the Chevy Volt and other plug-in cars entering the market, potential buyers wonder: How will recharging stations work? What will a “fill up” cost? To answer those questions, Popular Mechanics talked to dozens of experts and spent a day with a hypothetical EV driver from the future.
Santa Monica, California, 12 AM, August 4, 2020. At midnight, your car wakes up. The hefty, 15-pound charging cable tethering the front of the vehicle to a 220-volt outlet in your garage goes live, pulling 5 kilowatts of power from the grid. In just 5 hours, it will nearly double your home’s average daily electrical consumption. Across California, hundreds of thousands of plug-in hybrids and pure electric vehicles are doing the same, sipping electricity from a power network at rest. Some of those vehicles have different charging regimens, communicating more with the local utility, or even allowing that utility to actively control when and how to recharge their batteries. But yours follows a simple pricing scheme, automatically charging during what is typically the cheapest time of the day, between midnight and 5 am. That’s when the utilities have power to spare, when the office buildings in downtown Los Angeles have gone dark and sweltering. In the daily rhythm of the grid, this is off-peak. |
| Car Hacking: In the Future, Will Your Car Catch a Virus? Posted: 19 May 2010 10:52 AM PDT
It’s clear that one of the most important selling points and design features of future cars will be the driver interface. In a world of increasingly connected social media outlets and smartphone apps, the car is becoming an extension of all that. Google has announced a collaboration with GM, Ford has its collaboration with Microsoft… I wonder who Apple will partner with? Come on, don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it. But all this nifty integration and connectedness may come with a dangerous price: opening your vehicle up to the whim of a hacker and his viruses. |
| MIT “Double Bubble” Plane Uses 70% Less Fuel Posted: 19 May 2010 10:22 AM PDT
Air travel is often hailed as the safest form of travel, and there is something to be said for getting where you need to go in a hurry. Of course, to cruise six miles or more above the Earth going hundreds of miles per hour requires high octane jet fuel. Lots and lots of it. A Boeing 747-8 can carry up to 64,000 gallons of jet fuel and, depending on how fast it flies, can burn through over three-thousand gallons of fuel per hour. No matter what you say about efficiency-per-passenger, that is a whole lotta jet fuel. Everybody knows it, including NASA, which enlisted six research teams to design a more efficient aircraft. A team led by researchers at MIT came up with a plane they call the “double bubble” that is supposed to reduce fuel consumption by 70%. |
| Survey Says: 65 Percent of Americans Want Government-Enforced 50 MPG Standards Posted: 19 May 2010 10:14 AM PDT
The consequences of our almost hopeless relationship with oil are clearly on everybody’s minds these days — and for good reason. The disaster on the Deepwater Horizon and its incomprehensible effects on both the ocean ecosystem and people’s livelihoods, for likely decades to come, has hit the message home that our oil addiction holds us all at its mercy. And that’s just no way to live… being at the complete mercy of something else somehow seems un-American, no? Aren’t we the society that sculpts its own destiny? Don’t we ‘boldly go’? If the results from a new survey done by the Consumer Federation of America are accurate, it seems we haven’t lost that mentality. |
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