In times of crisis folks tend to look for radical change rather than steady improvement. Before you know it, Steve Jobs is being (wrongly) touted as the saviour of the auto industry, recent authors are expounding on the Googlification of the industry, and GM is staking everything on the Volt. And I’m not even going to get into the theological implications. But like the old fable of the rabbit and the hare, the steady improvements will be what saves the industry. A study by Carnegie Mellon at Green Car Congress shows that plug-ins with smaller capacity than the Volt’s 40-mile EV range are a more cost effective strategy than the Volt moonshot. Go figure.
Also from GCC comes a necessary reminder that there’s a lot of work still to be done on the good old internal combustion thingy. MCE-5 Development will be showing a 1.5-liter four cylinder with a two-stage turbocharger at the Geneva Auto Show that develops 220 hp and 310 lb·ft of torque at 1,500 rpm while getting 35 mpg on the NEDC course. That’s just using the firm’s variable compression technology. When they get direct injection, optimized combustion chambers and advanced thermal management (2010) they say it will do 270 hp, 339 lb·ft and 39 mpg. One step at a time.
…which is the whole reason why Toyota is ascending the list of the planet’s top automakers. As much as I dislike and don’t buy their cars (though I own their stock), persistent, incremental, improvement is their entire philosophy.
–chuck
But that’s not fast enough! We need 42mpg by, oh, next week. We’d already have it if the automakers would just put their super-awesome-secret-fuel-injector in the cars and stop being in bed with the oil industry….
I agree with this completely. However, for environmental extremists this isn’t good enough, and the government (fed and state) seem to be paying them an awful lot of attention lately.
And it will produce 730 HP and 720 lb-ft torque and 80 MPG with the new ExaJoule Flambar Oscillator(TM) that runs on camel crap and exhausts Ben&Jerrys Chunky Monkey.
Totally agree. Nothing good ever happens fast.
Hybrids are a transitional technology for a transition that may take 20 years. Gas is not going away, nor are ICE vehicles. I don’t understand why anyone is talking about all-electric vehicles. Not only is the tech not there, but it just isn’t necessary. There will still be gas stations, filled with gas, for as long as anyone reading this will be alive. Yes, it will get more expenseive and yes, we should try to use a lot less of it. In time, a PHEV with a 20-40 mile all electric range would be all anyone needs for years, maybe decades. The ability to do 90% of your driving without gas, but the freedom to go where you want without concern for plugging in. Apartment dwellers, the disenfranchised minority in all these discussions, could use the car in “Prius mode” until a plug-in infrastructure catches up.
But there is no need to get there tomorrow. Batteries will get cheaper, ICE more efficient, and the systems will merge on a reasonable schedule.
I don’t get why manufactures and so many commentators alike treat this like an all or nothing deal.
“…1.5 liter four cylinder with a two-stage turbocharger…that develops 220 hp and 310 lb-ft of torque at 1,500 rpm…”
Wow! That’s better than a lot of 400 cubic-inch V-8’s could put out just 30 or so years ago.
Of course, performing maintenance or repairs on one of those engines was easier than baking a cake. Try rebuilding one of MCE-5’s motors, yeah right.
Luther: Too bad. I’m more of a Cherry Garcia guy myself.
Did you mean tortoise?
Also Steve Jobs would be a guy I would use to revive a niche brand. Look at apple products; trendy, look pretty, but have 5% market share.
I guess that back in the horse and buggy days they were hoping for horses that shat less and moved faster, incrementally.
Jobs ran Apple into the ground. His sporadic production of a “good” product in no way hides his massive failure overall.
I wouldn’t use Steve Jobs for anything other than fertilizer.
GM doesn’t need the Volt as badly as GM needs flexible manufacturing systems.
They’re getting their heads handed to them on the fundamentals of the business, not in the whizzy sectors of the market.
While it’s true that GM ceded the hybrid market to Toyota almost entirely uncontested, Toyota’s hybrid sales run only to some 200K units/year and while Toyota claims they are profitable, it’s doubtful that they have quite the same margins as other vehicles. Toyota’s hurting GM in mindshare but this wouldn’t be a fatal revenue problem for the General.
With the Volt, GM throws itself into the fray with a car that they know will not make money for years and will sell in inconsequential quantities.
With flexible manufacturing, GM could embrace the radical idea of building what the market demands, rather than what GM finds convenient to build.
Who knows? They might find it profitable.
I’m still trying to puzzle out the significance in the difference between the rabbit and the hare.
But I am one of those who think that we have pretty much wrung the towel with the internal combustion engine. Electric cars are the way to go. Their potential will take us into the future.
On the other hand, I agree with RetardedSparks that we will still use gasoline and internal combustion engines for years to come. I’m working on a serial hybrid design that uses a diesel engine to drive four in-wheel motors.
If we could shift to those kind of designs, I think we’d see car technology start to change dramatically. Instead of the current slow change, like breeding tortoises, we would see rapid evolution, like breeding rabbits.
Holy Shit, a viable variable compression design:
http://www.mce-5.com/mce-5_technology/index.htm
That’s seriously huge. And something Saab tried but failed at.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_ratio
Apparently new companies can replace old ones.
The expectation of electric car enthusiasts must get across the divide of the southern and southwestern states in the USA, and plenty of other places around the world, where it is hot.
An electric car that goes forever on a charge will not have an occupant for 6 months out of the year, until somebody, probably at Toyota or Honda, figures out how to operate a car AC on a battery. May not be a problem in the UK or Canada, but it will be a big problem in the areas everybody seems to be moving.
We still have a good bit of potential left in the I.C.E.; especially on the materials side. If we can develop a practical ceramic engine block we should see a major jump in the efficiency of the engine. Once you combine the higher combustion temperatures with the elimination/reduction of the cooling system fuel economy should easily improve by 20% or more.
no_slushbox said:
Apparently new companies can replace old ones.
They cannot, if the government keeps on handing out $1M/per job bailouts to the old ones.
“Cost effective” are the key words. We’ve all heard of astronomical mileage claims (either real or imagined), but their downfall were things like cost, safety (hypermiling), or emissions. Or else they didn’t actually work.
The Volt moonshot (love that term!) fails in the area of being cost effective. I’m not interested in a car with a 10-20 year payback, which is what the Volt has when compared to a regular car. It will be a very hard sell to anyone that can add.
I think Chevy would be better off just powering the Volt directly with their 1.4 L engine, and then call it the “Cruze”. Oh, wait….
I agree with the Tortoise vs. Hare analogy, and would take it one step further.
The world does not need, and will never benefit from, electric cars and hybrid vehicles. The sudden push for these goofy golf carts comes from (1) The oil bubble, which is now over even though millions don’t believe it yet, (2) The natural swing of the political pendulum over to the Left, as frustration and disillusionment with “the old way” boils over. (I will avoid commenting on the Church of Global Warming at this point.)
When everybody calms down we will return to slightly more efficient dino juice-burning cars, which is progress, while we wait for our landfill-powered hover cars. Have a little faith in the human race… we didn’t get this far by being stupid.
grifonik :
February 27th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Jobs ran Apple into the ground. His sporadic production of a “good” product in no way hides his massive failure overall.
I wouldn’t use Steve Jobs for anything other than fertilizer.
And this is the alternate universe interpretation, I take it?
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:AAPL
Set the chart for 96-09, see what you think.
That said, I have no idea why Jobs should be called on to run anything in Detroit.
Much as I disagree with Rick Wagoner on most things, I have to agree with him that: “The internal combustion engine is an incredibly efficient source of power, but we’ve wrung the towel.”
To switch metaphors, there’s no low-hanging fruit left to pick with internal combustion engines. Not much high-hanging fruit either, and it’s hard to get.
tesla deathwatcher:
Have you seen this? There is still some fruit in the tree. At least the Europeans found some.
http://www.mce-5.com/mce-5_technology/index.htm
Most future cars will probably be hybrids, but these guys just made the IC part of the hybrid a lot better.
Not to mention things like the VW TSI.
Despite what Wagoner says, even at GM the Volt will be a massive failure, while the Cruze, with a 1.4 liter turbo, will be rather successful. Or at least it will be if the rest of the car is as good as the engine (which isn’t exactly likely with GM).
so pretty much the ice has a lot of potential.
Too bad the “Gee Whiz Greenies” have the run of the show for now.
This situation is so screwed up……
You have G.M spending millions of dollars on the Volt to show that they are “with” the new wave….
only to certainly have these cars sitting on the lots unsold!
The best and brightest might enjoy this but I think that If G.M wasn’t under so much pressure to make this silly car that wont sell,they could get back to making cars that WILL sell!
Leave hybrids to Toyota…let THEM eat the losses!!!
With oil at what..$36.00 a barrel….
@arapaima:
When I first started working as an engineer, I worked in a little research facility in Detroit owned by Cummins Eng. Co. There we did some interesting work: Benchmark testing; development and driveline prove-out of the 6BT5.9 engine for the Cummins Turbo Ram p/u and we did government work.
One of the gov’t jobs we did was a sub-contract for A.D.Little Co., the basic development of an adiabatic diesel engine … goal being coolantless diesels that revised the 30/30/30 rule to make more of two of those 30’s contribute to power (rather than heat and exhaust losses), lower thermal imaging signature, and invunerability of cooling systems to being punctured … we had a bunch of ceramic components, cylinder liner, Japanese-made piston (first one slipped as I placed it in the cylinder and it was chipped, oops!), wrist-pin, roller-bearings on the big-end of the con-rod, etc.
We had at least two consecutive contracts of over 100k USD each, before the project transferred back to Columbus, IN.
For the last 25 years, I’ve wondered what happened to that basic research, and why at least some of these adiabatic improvements have not found their way out of the lab…
p.s. I should mention … by the time my involvement with the project ended, we had only dry-tested the engines to study the interaction of the piston with the cylinder wall to look for scuffing (as one of the characteristics of the ceramic piston was that the rings were mounted deep on the skirt rather than near the crown.)
@ RetardedSparks
I think you have it.
@ no_slushbox
Apparently new companies can replace old ones.
Sometimes, and at this time, in some other alternate universe apparently.
@ tesla deathwatcher
we have pretty much wrung the towel with the internal combustion engine
True enough. (Why doesn’t CarnotCycle post anymore?)
The future is in combining drive trains, with the principle aim of energy recovery to access the easy ‘low hanging’ kinetic energy (a concept that seems to continuously escape the ‘golf cart’ posters).
While things are changing it might be a good idea to defend against the provable certainty that fossil fuels will get more and more expensive.
@ arapaima
If we can develop a practical ceramic engine block we should see a major jump in the efficiency of the engine.
We could do that, or we could use Stirling Engines instead, but no-one could afford it, and there maybe even less rare earth materials for ceramics than there are for fuel cell electrics or batteries.
No, no-slushbox, I had not seen that. Very clever. As you say, some people are still finding some fruit in the tree.
But looking just at efficiency, we seem to have bumped up against limitations like the Carnot cycle. As someone pointed out, a ceramic engine block lets you up the temperature and get greater thermal efficiency. But 5%, or 10% at best, are big efficiency gains for internal combustion engines. That’s all that’s left.
By contrast, electric cars give us a tree that has yet to be harvested. Some of the diesel engines in European cars claim 60% thermal efficiency. Put that kind of engine to work just making electricity. Then use that to drive four in-wheel electric motors. You might get efficiency gains of 300% or 400%. A car like the Lotus Elise could get 100 miles per gallon instead of 25.
That’s just a start. Using a larger battery pack lets you store energy captured from braking and from going down hills. You start to pay less and less of a penalty for accelerating or going up hills. Instead, wind and rolling resistance start to be bigger factors, and you can focus on those.
In a couple of generations, I would not be surprised to see a sports car like the Elise get 250 miles per gallon. The “cars” in the SAE Supermileage university contests get in the 1,000s of miles per gallon. That kind of thing becomes possible with electric cars. Not with cars powered by a gasoline engine.
I don’t understand nor agree with the belief that hybrids and plug-ins have little promise and won’t be needed. Oil will get increasingly expensive and uncertain in supply, and suffer from at least the risk of severe supply interruptions. There’s still lots of development work to do with solar and more work to do with storage for both solar and wind, but the benefits in cost and absence of harm to the climate give these options unbeatable advantages. Within five years we’ll almost certainly have plug-ins that are very satisfactory for substantial segments of our use.
“Holy Shit, a viable variable compression design:
http://www.mce-5.com/mce-5_technology/index.htm”
Hilarious. Wanna buy a bridge?
Apparently GM shelved the R&D on the Saab Variable Compression (SVC) system due to cost when they took over (wiki). Compared to the MCE-5 system, I think the Saab SVC is a more elegant and simple approach to variable compression, though it looks like the MCE-5 produces more power. They also seem to be making a strong effort to use components that will translate easily into mass production.
Steve Jobs is a visionary businessman who has built 2 great companies, Apple and Pixar (now part of Disney). Unfortunately, for him and for us, he is also a very sick man, who is no longer well enough to work.
tesla deathwatcher:
I have always said that plug-in series hybrids that don’t even have any physical connection between the IC and wheels are the future. But in the short term there are gains to be made. The VW 1.4 TSI and GM’s 1.4 turbo are (in the case of the TSI) and will be (in the case of the GM) making huge improvements over the standard power plants.
Greg Locock:
Variable compression is one of the major challenges in improving the internal combustion engine. Serious engineering companies like Saab and Lotus have put huge efforts into developing variable compression engines without coming up with anything as impressive as this design. So you can keep your bridge, and possible tell me where your engineering degree is from.
“Luther: Too bad. I’m more of a Cherry Garcia guy myself.”
No matter…We would still be relying on the middle east for the fuel anyway.
How much torque at 1000 RPM? I bet this lags and then blasts off better than the 90s Saab turbos.
You have to admit MCE-5’s bit about the sides of the piston+rings causing so much friction is a good point.
The ICE design Does cause side-side slap of the piston & is not as linear as it could be.
-But I wonder where the inefficiencies mostly come from. Friction, or incomplete/inefficient combustion?
Speaking of new designs, this one looks interesting. Gets at the whole side-side slap willman was referring to and inefficiencies in the current crank arrangement.
http://www.revetec.com/development.htm
Slow and steady can be the way to go. Look at emission standards. Slow, incremental improvements over the last 40 years have been remarkably effective because a long term approach was used. No moonshot here, just continual evolution. A few posters above have slapped the usual right wing “greenie” BS as being the problem, but those “greenies” that framed the approach to the emission problem had the right approach. The answer is to keep the standards evolving, not allowing stagnation and changing commodity prices to circumvent the process, which is precisely what happened with mileage standards. Anybody who thinks a magical device (born from American free enterprise and ingenuity, of course) is going to pop on the scene an result in 40 mpg Explorers two years from now is living in the Land Of Oz.
Good lord, the idiocy.
1. Toyota ALREADY HAS a system that can run the A/C off the battery. It’s in the 2004-2008 Prius already. Yes, it works. No, not for an hour, but it works long enough that you can run with the A/C on all day long and still get high 40s without much effort.
2. For the geniuses who think we don’t need hybrids now; what happens when gas hits $4.00 a gallon again?
3. The only ‘church’ is the agnotologists working overtime for the know-nothing rump of the Republican Party.
For the geniuses who think we don’t need hybrids now; what happens when gas hits $4.00 a gallon again?
I’ll let you know when it happens in 2036.