You will find articles organized by categories, along with recent comments, along the right hand column of the website. If you are just getting started with the idea of converting a gas car to electric be sure to check out Your First Electric Car .
Welcome and enjoy!
-Jerry
- If you are in the Santa Monica area this weekend be sure to swing by and check out the Alternative Car Expo in Barker Hanger, December 9th & 10th, with free admission. Among the exhibitors you’ll find the fully-electric Electrum Spyder. Drop us an email if you go.
- A new world record has been achieved in solar cell technology: 40% efficiency. This using a concentrator set-up, where the sun is focused on a small section of solar cell by a larger lens. As a reference, current solar cells are in the 8-15% efficiency range.
- The first street recharging stations for electric cars are going live in London.
- Lithium Technology Corp developed a new Lithium Ion Battery system for the Hybrid Car Project. The base car was a Smart w/3 cylinder turbo diesel teamed up to 2 permanent-magnet electric motors powered by Li-ion batteries.
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- Since most of the Electric and Hybrid car news focuses on Lithium batteries I figured it’s time for a few lithium links: Is lithium-ion the ideal battery?, wiki lithium ion entry, operating principles of lithium batteries.
- Genetically engineered blood protein might offer new technique for splitting water into hydrogen.
- GM says its top priority is to build a plug-in hybrid they aren’t really saying when.
- A bit dated, but Honda rolled out another concept hybrid car at the recent LA Auto show. Even if you don’t like hybrid cars all of this attention and product engineering can only mean good things for electric cars: improved technology and batteries, and presumably lower costs as they become more mainstream and more manufacturers are competing.
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- Secret battery info on how they power a Tesla Roadster to its 4 second 0-60mph performance. A good read about some of the battery choices they made and the trade-offs for performance/life expectancy.
- Phoenix motors has started installing and testing their new lithium battery pack. No pricing mentioned, but someone in the comments hazards a guess (a wild one at that). More info on Phoenix Motors new All-Electric SUV.
- This year’s Toyota Camry Hybrid has been named the Green Car of the Year at the LA Auto Show.
- Be sure to head over and read Darren’s latest gas saving experiment, going alternator optional. As usual an excellent article with lots of data and information.
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Battery undervoltage warning circuit · 29 October 06
Hello everybody,
Jerry has asked me to support him on this site by posting articles. This is my first time so please be patient while I get my act together.
There are big wires, big batteries and big currents in an EV. Sometimes things can go wrong and the sooner you know about it, the better.
Last year when I was a green EV-er I just thought it was OK to connect all my cables to the battery terminals without checking them or even cleaning the oxide off the lead. Everything was OK – for a while. then there was a pop and a fizzle on day and one of my terminals had melted and dropped molten lead onto the battery plates below. I was barely able to make it home and had to spend some time patching the hole in the battery and fishing bits of lead out.
I have been thinking ever since about some sort of device which will give me early warning about either weak cells and weak connections, that is, a high resistance link somewhere in my 16 long battery string…..
- Samsung has developed a high contrast (1500:1) LCD for in-car dash instrument use.
- Got an email from the folks at Peak Energy Solutions claiming they have a thermally stable, lightweight, high power density Lithium Iron Phosphate battery. No clue, from email or web site, on the size, availability, or pricing yet.
- Mitsubishi is stepping up their electric car research. Looking at the diagram it shows a “household charger plug” along with a separate “quick charger plug.” To take advantage of the quick charge you, or your office, will need 3-phase, 50kW/200V.
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Hi! · 13 September 06
Man, sorry for such a long quiet spell.
Well, lessee, last we talked my father had passed on and I drove out to the midwest to take care of things. Well, as it turned out things weren’t so good and required a whole bunch of taking care of.
Since then I’ve been living off and on in New Hampshire and Nebraska, doing my normal full-time job remotely, managing his radio station full-time, and working on some of the other estate items. If you do the math that comes out to…oh, about zero hours free-time per day.
Of course when I’m in Nebraska that means Eve is about 2,000 miles away and not being worked on. Maybe she’ll be this winter’s project? We’ll see.
The good news out of this whole thing, or at least interesting and pertinent from this site’s perspective, is that in the middle of all of this I bought a Toyota Prius. When you have to drive 2,000 miles to get somewhere, and do it a few times, you really want to get great gas mileage. And I have been. Interstate driving, at around 70+ mph, I’ve been averaging 47 miles per gallon. Around town and short highway trips clock in around 54mpg.
I haven’t spent much time trying to optimize these, but I do have a number of observations and opinions about the Prius that I hope to share in a future article (if time permits). Bottom line though is that the Prius is probably the BEST car I’ve ever owned and I hope more car manufacturers take a cue or two from it and start building modern, smart cars like this.
Hope you are all well.
Oh, and if you are interested in buying a 100KW FM radio station in the Panhandle of Nebraska drop me a line.
-Jerry
p.s. the photo is one I took of a Red Tailed Hawk in Nebraska
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- A couple new electric cars in the news lately, both on the higher end of the price spectrum. There’s the Obvio! from Brazil featuring lithium batteries and a 200-240 mile range, which will be sold in the US by Zap for around $50k. And if you haven’t heard about the Tesla electric car then you probably haven’t been paying attention. Checking in from $80-$100k it purports to have sports car performance and (or?) 250 miles per charge. Nice looking vehicle created by Lotus. Oddly enough the gallery shows a photo of it with a gas cap on the side…for the plug? Still, you’d think a purpose built electric wouldn’t have a gas cap looking thing on the side…
- Biofuels: Think Outside The Barrel – video presentation on biofuels with Vinod Khosla.
- Speaking of which, Saab has unveiled their new bio-fuel hybrid prototype. (no news if they’ll ever make it though) ““A hybrid system is not cheap,” points out Mr Elliot.”
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- Record flight set in airplane powered by 160 AA batteries. The aircraft stayed in the air for 59 seconds and flew a distance of 391 metres (1,282 feet). (thanks for the link Jerry)
- Over at OmniNerd they are taking an in-depth look at how to modify driving style, vehicle, and even fuel to optimize mileage (on a jeep).
- Lengthy article entitled The Oil We Eat. Interesting perspective on crops as energy storage. “Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1.” contrasted with, “In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only ten…”
- Not yet ready to slip into your car yet but work is being done on heat powered air conditioning.
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