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Thomas Dafnides
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 247
From: St. Louis, Missouri USA
Registered: Dec 2009

posted August 08, 2012 09:20 PM

but then again, I recall reading back in 2000 that hydrogen powered cars would be in mass production by 2008.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/flow-batteries-0606.html

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Steve Klare
Film Guy

Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003

posted August 09, 2012 10:02 AM

-and I recall hearing in the '70s we'd all be wearing clothing made out of aluminum foil and commuting to jobs on the moon by 2001!

If they really make an electric car work well it will be great: gobs of torque, simple mechanics, quiet operation. The whole thing has always been the battery.

About 15 years ago I was working for a power supply manufacturer, and we took on a custom DC-DC converter to stand in for the alternator in Ford's EV-Ranger pickup. It took the 400V traction voltage and stepped it down to 13.5V for the usual car stuff: headlights, radio, wipers...etc.

One day I was out in Dearborn and I asked the engineer I was working with if I could see one of the trucks, not expecting he would hand me the keys to one.

It operated exactly like a regular car with an automatic: you twist the key in the "ignition" switch, take a "gear selector" and put it in "D" and off you go!

It was nice to drive, the only whacky thing about it was if you accelerated and then took your foot off the "gas". it went dead silent, and your gasoline accustomed brain told you you'd "stalled".

That one got up close to 100 miles between charges, much less in Michigan winters when the battery efficiency fell and you had to snap on the 5,000 Watt cabin heater.

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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...

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Graham Ritchie
Film God

Posts: 4001
From: New Zealand
Registered: Feb 2006

posted August 09, 2012 02:40 PM

Steve

Has battery technology improved over those 15 years. The distance of 100 miles sounds good. The rate we are consuming oil [Eek!]

the electric car should be strong option for the future, or should I say the need for the present.

Graham.

PS. was the costruction of the car fibre glass, these days carbon fibre lightweight but strong [Roll Eyes]

just a thought.

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Steve Klare
Film Guy

Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003

posted August 09, 2012 03:39 PM

Hey Graham,

Yes, batteries are better now, and a lot of research is being done too. It's a hot topic where I work now.

Nope: this was basically a standard Ford mini-pickup with internal combustion components gone and an electric drive train subbed in place. It had a special suspension and low rolling resistance tires.

Here is a view under the hood:

EV Ranger Under The Hood

That's no "engine" under there but various electronic modules for power handling (the big one is the traction inverter). My (welllll..."our" -I only managed the program in production!) module is the smaller one in the middle of the picture, the one that looks like a bread pan turned on its side with a cooling hose running to it.

There is a working radiator behind the grille. All it does is provide cooling water for the electronics.

The motor is back under the cargo bed right next to the rear axle.

The batteries were scads of 8V cells placed in series in a huge case that hung underneath the chassis.

I bet when they were thinking of somebody to run this thing in the factory after R&D had their fun, they said to themselves "Steve loves cars!", but it was a major pain working to auto industry quality standards. Every time somebody sneezed committees had to be formed to generate reams of paperwork. Even after our tens of thousands of units we expected to build turned into about 1,500, Ford notified us we had to maintain production readiness for spares for 7 years. I can just imagine the day all that otherwise useless stuff was shoveled into a skip and sent for scrap!

-these were my brief days in the Auto Industry! It was about the coolest thing I ever worked on, but there were days I had more fun at the dentist!

I expected guys in dark glasses, leather jackets and racing helmets and all I got was auditors and committees!

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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...

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Graham Ritchie
Film God

Posts: 4001
From: New Zealand
Registered: Feb 2006

posted August 09, 2012 10:58 PM

Steve
A very interesting read, but cant understand why there was a need to scrap the vehicle after such an expensive investment. Given time and refinements as they come along, plus the right push it could have taken of, especially for inner city driving. When you think of the "exhaust pollutants" of the internal combustion engine, and they are nasty, the electric car does win out. I guess its using little if any energy while stopped at lights or stuck in traffic etc. Well all we need is another oil crisis in the middle east, and it will happen some day, and that electric car with the experience and technology that would have been gained from it, could have been just the thing.

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Steve Klare
Film Guy

Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003

posted August 09, 2012 11:25 PM

I'm not sure exactly why they scrapped these, or why many manufacturers did the same with their early EVs. A number of the EV Rangers do survive today, but keeping them mobile is a labor of love. The batteries were obsoleted a few years later and getting replacements is tricky.

This program looked promising for a while. Ford sought a contract to use this chassis to build a local delivery truck for the US Postal Service. In the weeks after the September 2001 terrorist attacks a number of people received anthrax in the mail and the budget for Postal EVs was diverted to detecting threats in the mail.

When my company first bid on this converter, the volume was supposed to be at least a thousand a month. We were talking about launching a dedicated assembly line and possibly a seperate plant. It never exceeded a hundred per month and I'm sure we lost money if not sanity.

Around the same time, We got a request from Peugeot to make something similar for a hybrid EV they were designing. They put us through a year's worth of design and prototyping and canceled the program just as it was about to hit the factory. We got paid for our design costs and what we would have made on a minimum production order, but the opportunity to put something else into our factory and make some real money was gone.

It was a sour enough experience that when an RFP came in for a similar program from another auto manufacturer it was treated as if somebody had mailed us a live rat!

About two years later I was layed off from that company, and after I left work that day I went on a hike to clear my mind. As I was sitting on a bench one of the Park Service's EV rangers drove by.

-I thought someone was yanking my chain!

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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...

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Hugh Thompson Scott
Film God

Posts: 3063
From: Gt. Clifton,Cumbria,England
Registered: Jan 2012

posted August 10, 2012 05:29 AM

I don't see the day when the combustion engine will give way to
battery power,batterries haven't the power or the range of the petrol engine, besides the people in the oil industry will just buy
up any threat to them.In the UK we get all this talk of
battery powered vehicles,and we are a small country,so to equip
every petrol station with power points for recharging would not
be cost effective, coupled with the inevitable queues at these
places for folks recharging is not feasible.There was an idea that
cars could recharge from a line placed in the road or when parked at designated parking areas,again the cost is prohibitive.
There again,where's all this electricity coming from? It's a lot like the sci-fi future we were sold in the '60s,a long time coming.

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Steve Klare
Film Guy

Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003

posted August 10, 2012 07:21 AM

I see the real killer being charging time, moreso than power or range. 200 miles on a charge is feasible now. Unfortunately the hours long recharge is deadly where distance travel is concerned.

My car has a small tank, so I get no more than 275 miles on a tank of gas. I can pull into a gas station and be out on the road within 10 minutes. This makes my practical range as long as I can stand to be behind the wheel. Make that 6 or 8 hours and I'm basically no further than Boston before we are done for the day.

My round trip to work is about 60 miles. That's doable with an EV as long as I remember to plug in at home before it's too late. If I have a spur of the moment urge to go to Philadelphia after work, I’m dead before I get across New Jersey!

One upside to the idea of battery powered cars is (generally) the energy needed can be generated much more efficiently and with less pollution than a couple of thousand internal combustion engines. The "generally" is because it depends on the power plant. In China electric cars are more popular than in the rest of the world because they have a lot of coal and coal based power is much cheaper than oil there. The problem is their power plants are very intense generators of pollution so there an electric car becomes a bigger polluter than one using gasoline or diesel.

Another wrinkle is the huge amount of energy stored in a traction battery and the things that can go wrong with it. When I was qualifying the Ford DC-DC converter at an outside test lab the people there told me a story about the GM EV they had tested. The US Department of Transportation requires that an example of every new car for sale here be dumped fully operating into a tank of salt water. No malfunction can happen that will impede the successful escape of the occupants. When they tried this with a GM EV prototype it exploded spectacularly! (-back to the old drawing board!) They've recently recalled the Chevy Volt because weeks and weeks after collision and repair a couple of them have spontaneously ignited in their owners driveways and garages due to short circuits developing.

Of course gasoline powered cars have fires. It's just that this is a whole new set of potential problems for somebody designing a car, and they are still discovering what they are.

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Graham Ritchie
Film God

Posts: 4001
From: New Zealand
Registered: Feb 2006

posted August 11, 2012 01:12 AM

I was reading in the local paper today, there was an article called "Green City needs Green Transport" Its about the rebuild of our central city after the earthquake.

It goes on to mention that the Germans have a target of having a million electric cars on the country's highways by 2020 and a range of incentives to do just that, including tax breaks and free parking spaces for EVs.

Instead of subsidising potential owners into electric cars to the tune of almost $15000 a unit, as in the case in the US, Berlin plans to eliminate the vehicle tax for the first 10 years of a green car's registration.

The article also goes on about German Chancellor Angela Merkel Government backing, and includes a photo of her trying out an electric Volkswagon.

Its good to read about this forward thinking by the Germans, and other countries should take note of what they are doing and move away from the narrow thinking of the past.

Graham.

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Hugh Thompson Scott
Film God

Posts: 3063
From: Gt. Clifton,Cumbria,England
Registered: Jan 2012

posted August 11, 2012 02:36 AM

Like I asked before Graham,where is all this electricity coming from
It all sounds very enviromentaly friendly,but the pollution is still
there one way or another,either in the manufacture of the
vehicles inc batteries or in the power to keep them going.There
is no such thing as a quick fix,the best anyone could hope for
is an efficient public transport such as a return to the tram in
the cities to relieve traffic congestion.It's all a bit of an hypocrasy
really,governments talk of global warming etc,but that doesn't stop them waging wars when it suits,as though devastation
doesn't count.Much like the useless wind turbines that generate
less than one percent of the UKs electricity,but the pollution they were supposed to offset has already been done in their manufacture.As they say in Yorkshire "You don't get 'owt for
'nowt".

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Steve Klare
Film Guy

Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003

posted August 11, 2012 06:37 AM

I see the path to better EVs being in place already. You can't go out on the road without seeing hybrids all over the place these days. This means that the automotive industry itself has a vested interest in electric vehicle technology and that means you have dozens of companies doing research at the same time and the best way will eventually win.

I think the real EV will be more like a plug in hybrid. Whenever you hit the limit of capacity the engine kicks in and you just keep going. In the example above I could drive on battery to work almost all the time, but if I needed to go somewhere on the spur of the moment I'd have the range.

The power would have to come from the existing grids. The idea is the EVs would charge overnight when businesses are closed for the night and demand for electricity is low. Of course that means that if EVs really do catch on it will be a great time to be in the electric power generation business.

We need fusion. I read once that the hydrogen in the top half inch of Lake Michigan water would produce more energy through fusion than all the oil that has ever been refined.

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Joe Balitzki
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 529
From: Charleston, SC, USA
Registered: Aug 2005

posted August 11, 2012 08:30 AM

It will be a long time before EVs become commonplace in the U.S.A. because they are simply way too expensive. Its a nice pipe dream and will remain so for years to come. Its getting expensive to own and operate a car nowadays. In a few major cities, people rent a car by the hour or day to save $. And compared to Europe, the U.S.A. is way behind when it comes to decent public transportation. They were going to build a Monorail system here to relieve traffic congestion. Naturally, it never happened. Until the range is improved, charging time reduced, and the purchase price is made affordable, it ain't gonna happen.

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Steve Klare
Film Guy

Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003

posted August 11, 2012 02:23 PM

I see them being the commuter car a long time before they become the family car. If they want to be that in my household they'd better be able to haul three people, two canoes, three bikes and a camper to Maine without breaking a sweat!

Costs are driven by technologies and production volumes. The kind folks that are early adopters of these are helping to work out those issues for the rest of us.

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Hugh Thompson Scott
Film God

Posts: 3063
From: Gt. Clifton,Cumbria,England
Registered: Jan 2012

posted August 11, 2012 02:52 PM

I suppose if you made a comparison between a petrol strimmer
or weed whacker as our American friends call them, and an
electric one,which one would you choose.The petrol one is far more powerful and faster,and will still be cutting away long after
the electric one has given up the ghost.The same appliies to
motor vehicles,when one sees the size of some of the trucks
these days. how would an electric motor cope with some of the
heavy loads. I honestly cannot see a future for electric vehicles.
As Steve has pointed out, a typical family outing would probably
cause serious harm to the car.

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Steve Klare
Film Guy

Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003

posted August 11, 2012 03:01 PM

Actually I have a gas powered chainsaw**, and given the once or twice a year I use it the complexity of it makes it a pain.

I'm considering ditching it in favor of an electric.

On the other hand if I was using it daily I'd never go that way.

**For the record, you should never admit owning a chainsaw, because when you do every friend you have will wind up needing a tree cut down. Frankly I think my family bought it for me for similar reasons! (Just in case any of you do need a tree whacked down, it's currently not operational!)

As far as cars go, it pays to remember they come in all sizes to do many jobs. My wife drives a minivan. It hauls all the vacation stuff and the groceries and such. I drive a little hatchback. It rarely carries more than myself and my carpool. The second role is where I see electrics working better.

We have these little "Smart" cars running around which are basically two seats, an engine and a roof: good for getting to work or the station, but absolutely deadly for a couple of hours in the saddle. These could be electrics.

I read an article recently that said EV's may need to be fitted with some sort of loudspeaker and "car sound". It seems their silence allows them to sneak up on people and could be a hazard to pedestrians. I'd choose a soundtrack like a Porsche or a Shelby Cobra in that case.

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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...

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Graham Ritchie
Film God

Posts: 4001
From: New Zealand
Registered: Feb 2006

posted August 11, 2012 08:37 PM

Steve

Long ago in Glasgow, trams used be known as the "silent death", folk crossing the road had to have there "wits" about them [Smile]

Back in the 90s we visited the UK, and remember walking along a street in London that had a lot of traffic. The stink from those car exhaust's "carbon dioxide etc" was terrible. The fact is, if we want a better and healthier world for our children we have to change our ways...or else [Eek!]

I can see the need to ban the internal combustion engine from inner city use, and for a small "light weight" efficient electric car fitted out with eg solar panels etc, that you could hire from car exchange hubs on the outer city limits, for inner city use only. With computor controlled technology fitted to maximize the effeciency of the energy used to drive it. As mentioned the 6-8 hours to charge in the evening could make use of the excess power from the grid in the evening. Its an important "fact" that the amount of oil we are using at present cant continue.

Graham.

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