While reviewing Technology’s Promise [Halal, W. E. (Ed.). (2008). Technology's Promise:Expert Knowledge on the Transformation of Business and Society: Palgrave Macmillan.], I too find myself desiring to comment on the predictions of alternate fueled vehicles that Halal has commented on. First of all I would like to say that I desire to have the electric car, hover car, and teleportation technologies as soon as possible. However, regarding the automotive technology, there are still some hurdles that need to be overcome. One of the technology areas, and in my opinion, still the largest hurdle at this time, is the power density of the alternate fuel being considered.
A great article from Design News [Murray, C. J. (2008). Auto Industry Working Hard to Make an Electric Vehicle Battery. Design News.], discusses the power density of the existing battery technologies versus what is contained within gasoline.
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In summary, gasoline contains approximately 80 times more energy per volume than lithium-ion electric vehicle battery, and 250 times more energy than the standard lead-acid battery in cars today. This means that in order to extract the performance that exists today with gasoline engines, there has to be an 80 times improvement in the technologies that are used to make automobiles. For example if we use Halal’s assertion that the current gasoline engine is only 14% efficient, to get an electric engine that was 100% efficient would improve efficiency approximately 7 times. We still need a 73 times improvement somewhere else within the automotive technology, such as weight savings, wind resistance, etc.
If you couple this with the acquisition costs of the fuel, (the cost of producing the gasoline vs. the cost of creating the battery), again the gasoline still has the advantage. There are still many hurdles that exist before all electric cars can compete as a total system cost with gasoline vehicles. I believe, and hope, that all electric cars become an economical reality, but I am left to believe that if they become mainstream in the near future with existing technologies, it will not be due to its economical/efficiency advantage, but will become viable due to people willing to pay the extra costs of the inefficiencies for other real or perceived payoffs.
The electric car concept seems like a great idea until I look at my wireless mouse and notice that I failed to charge it last night. Due to my active computing life, my mouse needs recharging every 24 hours.
ReplyDeleteI can only imagine how my lifestyle might change when I need to plan my driving habits around car charging requirements. *grins*