The Japan Electric Vehicle Club has exceeded its own Guinness record for longest distance driven without recharging, achieving 1,003.184 km over 27.5 hours.
The club’s Daihatsu Mira EV was powered by a Sanyo battery system containing more than 8,320 lithium-ion batteries and ran at a speed of about 40 km/h at a track in Shimotsuma, in Ibaraki Prefecture.
PC Aero has shown a prototype of an all-electric, single-seater plane in Germany.
The Elektra One has a wingspan of 8.6 meters and it has an effective payload of 90 kilograms. The composite plane weighs 120 kilograms and is powered by a 16 kW electric motor. The manufacturers claim that it has a operational range of up to 400 kilometres at 160 kilometres per hour.
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An MIT-led team has designed a plane that is estimated to use 70 percent less fuel than current planes while also reducing noise and emission of nitrogen oxides.
MIT was contracted ny NASA to evaluate the potential of quieter subsonic commercial planes that would burn 70 percent less fuel, emit 75 percent less nitrogen oxides and take off from shorter runways than todays commercial planes.
The MIT design achieves this in an aircraft similar in size to a 180-passenger Boeing 737 by reconfiguring the tube-and-wing structure. Instead of using a single fuselage cylinder, they used two partial cylinders placed side by side to create a wider structure whose cross-section resembles two soap bubbles joined together. This allows the fuselage to provide some of the lift currently provided by the wings and the design to have thinner wings and a smaller tail to reduce drag.
The team moved the engines from the usual wing-mounted locations to the rear of the fuselage. This means that the engines take in the slower moving air that is in the wake of the fuselage. As a result, they use less fuel for the same amount of thrust, although there is more engine stress. To mitigate theis, the plane is designed to fly 10% slower than a Boeing 737.
The team has also designed an aircraft similar in size to a 350-passenger Boeing 777 using the same "hybrid wing body" principles to dramatically reduce fuel consumption.
Renault has unveiled the final production versions of two all-electric cars - the Fluence ZE sedan and the Kangoo ZE van. Both have a range of 160 kilometres and will be available in 2011.
The Fluence Z.E. is the first production-ready car that can take advantage of Better Place’s battery swapping system and will be the basis of the Better Place network in Israel. It will be sold through dealers in Europe.
Renault Fluence ZE
Renault Kangoo ZE
According to Evan Thornley, chief executive of Better Place Australia, 51 new models of plug-in electric cars are planned to on the world market by 2012.
Mr Thorley believes that the complete conversion to electric cars is inevitable. "We know how the movie ends. Battery prices are going down, petrol prices are going up - that tells you what’s going to happen. It’s just a question of how long that takes," he said. "We think it will take between 20 and 25 years for the entire Australian fleet to transition from petrol to electric because it takes a while for things to transition."
He also believes that there is an enormous opportunity for Australian car makers, with their experience in building large cars, to take a global leadership position in what is potentially the most profitable segment of the electric car market.
Australia will be the third country, after Israel and Denmark, in Better Place’s global rollout, with the first electric charging stations to open in Canberra late next year.
In other recent electric car developments:
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Sanyo has opened a "solar parking lot" in Tokyo where 100 electric hybrid bicycles can be recharged from sunlight-powered panels.
The system uses lithium-ion batteries to charge 100 of Sanyo’s "eneloop" bikes, with enough power left over to also illuminate the parking lot with LED lights at night.
The eneloop bikes are electric power assisted and are available for rent at 300 yen (about $3) an hour. They take about three and a half hours to fully charge.
British Airways has unveiled plans to establish what it believes will be Europe’s first ’sustainable’ jet fuel plant
The plant will produce aviation fuel from plasma gasification of biomass into BioSynGas which is then converted into jet fuel. The facility will process all types of biomass and residue feedstock which will mainly be sourced from local waste management facilities. The process produces no waste products other than an environmentally-benign slag that can be used as construction aggregate.
It is planned that the plant will be fully operational by 2014 and, if successful, it will convert 500,000 tonnes of carbon-based material per year into 60 million litres of jet fuel. This would reduce annual carbon emissions by 145 kilotonnes.
Meanwhile, the US Air Force has said that it has been working on mass-producing jet fuel from algae for a target price of $3 a gallon (80 cents per litre).
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Researchers from Imperial College London and their partners, including Volvo Car Corporation, are developing a prototype material which can store and discharge electrical energy and which is also strong and lightweight enough to be used for car parts.
Ultimately, they expect that the material, which is made of carbon fibre and a polymer resin, could be used in electric vehicles to make them lighter, more compact and more energy efficient. In addition, the researchers believe that the material could potentially be used for the casings of many everyday objects such as mobile phones and computers, so that they would not need a separate battery.
The researchers say that the material will store and discharge large amounts of energy much more quickly than conventional batteries. Furthermore, the recharging process causes little degradation in the composite material, because it does not involve a chemical reaction, whereas conventional batteries degrade over time.
The project co-ordinator, Dr Emile Greenhalgh, from the Department of Aeronautics at Imperial College London, says that “We are really excited about the potential of this new technology. We think the car of the future could be drawing power from its roof, its bonnet or even the door, thanks to our new composite material. Even the Sat Nav could be powered by its own casing. The future applications for this material don’t stop there – you might have a mobile phone that is as thin as a credit card because it no longer needs a bulky battery, or a laptop that can draw energy from its casing so it can run for a longer time without recharging. We’re at the first stage of this project and there is a long way to go, but we think our composite material shows real promise.”
The Chinese Government has blocked General Motors attempt to sell Hummer to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery, a private Chinese company that manufactures heavy vehicles and road-building equipment. As a result, General Motors will now dismantle the brand.
John Smith, General Motors’ Vice President of Corporate Planning and Alliances, said that "GM will now work closely with Hummer employees, dealers and suppliers to wind down the business in an orderly and responsible manner."
The Chinese Government did not give details of its reasons for blocking the purchase but according to Yale Zhang, a China auto-industry market analyst "The purchase of this brand is not a match for China. The Government’s general policies about efficiency and environmental protection … This purchase does not match those."
(Public domain photo via Wikimedia)
General Motors has released the newest version of its hydrogen fuel cell engine and says that hydrogen fuel cells could be cost cometitive with other technologies by 2015.
General Motors’ "second generation" fuel cell is half the size of previous "Project Driveway" stack. Although significantly smaller in size and weight it is capable of generating more electric power than the previous version. The weight has been reduced to 130kg, the number of parts has been cut nearly in half and the amount of platinum catalyst has been reduced from 80g to just 30g.
A GM Hydrogen Fuel Celll Test Vehicle
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Top Gear: Tesla
