Brad Ideas - Car design changes due to Robocars - Comments

Electric Cars

Giochi di Ben 10 — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:33:42 -0800

Do you guess that in the future will be used only cars with electricity power? Or will be there a regulation for only electric cars?

Electric Highway

Joel Upchurch — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:52:19 -0800

I actually blogged on this topic here: http://www.anupchurchchrestomathy.com/2009/09/electric-highway-part-1.ht...

I got started on the idea by a South Korean project that was running the cars by inductive power transfer and actually quite safe. There was actually an extensive discussion about it here: http://www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=1843&st=0&sk...

I kind of ran out of enthusiasm for the idea after I calculated how much power all the electric cars would consume during afternoon rush hour. Assuming 10kw per car, I came up with 170GW. Since afternoon rush hour coincides with peak electrical power consumption, there is no way to supply that much power without building a lot of new power plants. I guess I should post parts 2 and 3 and close out the topic, but I discuss all the details over in the Energy from Thorium forum. The trouble was the power plants would have cost 10 times what the road would and that was using the cheapest Natural Gas peaking power.

From an environmental point of view it wasn't clear to me that this would actually be beneficial compared to running the cars off CNG in the first place.

I'm now interested in development work on the lithium-air battery. If we can develop a reasonably priced battery that store 1 KWh per KG, then it is a whole new ball game. That would use similar amounts of electricity, but using off peak power, wouldn't require new power plants immediately, although in the long term you would want to build nuclear power plants to reduce CO2 emissions.

Acceptance hurdles

brad — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:13:32 -0800

While I think it’s possible to design it safely, people will actually be pretty scared of electrification of roadway, even roadway that pedestrians are not allowed on.

I also don’t think you could do it for $200/foot. That’s just a million per mile and highway work tendsd to be way north of that.

Not too big, though

Iain McClatchie — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 09:52:13 -0800

According to Rough Guides, the US road system has over 5.7 million miles of roads. Doing anything to a system that size is, as you say, big infrastructure, and takes forever.

But look at this, especially page 2: http://downloads.transportation.org/Kane-2006-03-10.pdf

There are just 15,300 miles of urban interstate highway. 24% of travel in the US occurs on just 1.2% of the road system. Some very high fraction of longer trips use the interstate system along part of the length. This is a huge lever.

At $200/foot, it would cost just $16 billion to put electrical track into the whole system. And note that there is no reason to do it all at once. 250 miles ($264 million) would open a large market in the San Francisco Bay Area. Twice that would open a much larger market in Los Angeles.

Consider the size of the market. The Bay Area population is 7 million people. A the average rate of US car ownership, that's 5.7 million vehicles. Vehicles have a life of around 16 years, so that's 356,000 new vehicles a year required in the Bay Area. If 10% of the market purchased cars with electrical pickups, the infrastructure would be serving over 260,000 vehicles in 8 years, at an infrastructure cost of under $1000/vehicle. For comparison, the minimum avoided cost of a 16 kW-hr battery (minimum for all-electric government designation) is $3600 (lead-acid, 100% of cycle, totally impractical).

I think your vision of the future of transportation being a lot like the present (individual cars) is compelling, and I agree that increased robotics in the car is inevitable. I think the powered roadway idea solves some of the biggest transport problems that we have (pollution, oil imports, global warming), on a shorter timeline and with less acceptance hurdles than robot cars.

Big infrastructure

brad — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 11:58:28 -0800

While such things are possible, I doubt they will happen because they require “big infrastructure” and anything involving that happens very slowly and is rarely highly innovative. It’s one of the reasons I think robocars are the likely answer because while they require lots of impressive innovation they require no infrastructure. Once you have a robocar one person can buy it and use it to go anywhere that it’s legal to take it. Magic highways only work where you raise the billions to build the magic highway for those with the special car.

Infrastructure changes do happen of course, but so slowly that anything that can be done by small but clever innovative teams wins.

Powered highways

Iain McClatchie — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 11:21:20 -0800

Most trips over 10 miles involve the use of highways.

Highways are a tiny fraction of the road miles in the United States.

The power and energy storage requirements for electric vehicles are dominated by the problems associated with highway driving.

Highways almost never have people walking around on them. People walking around on highways are already at very high risk of being killed, and this risk is widely understood.

Therefore, it would be reasonable to deliver electricity from metal strips flush with the surface of the highway to the cars on the highway. Cars with pickups underneath (similar to the overhead pantographs on electric trains) would not need batteries anywhere near as large as cars without, and would have unlimited range.

The same pickups would be used in garages where users would install charging devices into the floor.

An APS system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-level_power_supply) could be used in a few areas where pedestrians are possible, but either cars need large amounts of power (San Francisco's hills?) or range boosting (El Camino Real, down the spine of the San Francisco Peninsula).

That's an Aero-rider

brad — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:47:56 -0700

I don’t have one, it’s an electric tricycle. It’s an example of a super efficient ultralightweight, which uses about 100 btus/mile, of 250 at the power plant, which is 10-20x as efficient as cars or transit systems.

It’s just an example of the type of vehicle that might be designed when you can design a vehicle for a specific purpose (in this case efficient short urban trips for a single person.)

Brad. If I wanted a car

MonsterBlonde — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:39:08 -0700

Brad. If I wanted a car like this I would take a L'Eggs Pantyhose container, enlarge it, and glue it to my bike.

I truly hope this is not your car. You are much sexier than this thing!

It is yours, isn't it (((hangs head in shame)))

I will be forced to find a different guru.

Car design changes due to Robocars

brad — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:45:24 -0700

Robocars will suggest a great number of possible changes in the way we design and market cars. I now encourage you to read:

Automobile design changes due to Robocars

The big green benefit of robocars comes in large part from the freedom they offer in redesigning the automobile, in particular the ability to specialize automobiles to specific tasks, because they can be so readily hired on demand. Or to specific fuels in certain areas, or for sleeping, and much more.