Reply #11: Are you talking about a car with no internal-combustion engine?

[jmowreader]

There are several power options for a car that either make no sense or make sense in limited applications.

The biggest limited-application powertrain is pure electric with no engine. (An "engine" and a "motor" are different.) In town this makes a lot of sense. If you generate your electricity using wind, hydroelectric, solar or some other no-fuel method, you're not remoting your pollution problems or your fuel use like you would be if you were generating with coal, oil, natural gas, garbage or nuclear. You can "tank up" with green electricity and run fifty or sixty miles. Your only pollution is a possible: when the batteries, tires and lubricants are replaced, what happens to them? However, it's not a universal solution for one big reason: pick two towns 60 miles apart and try to get from one to the other on one charge. If you can afford two cars, an electric would be fine, but all us one-car types can't consider them.

(The usual retort is "well, learn to stay close to home." My answer is simple: We're Americans. We're brought up to have wanderlust. It's how this country was expanded. If Americans didn't wander, we'd all be living within 10 miles of the Atlantic coast. Americans are going to travel, and they're not going to buy only cars that won't let them do it.)

I don't like hydrogen either--you've got three ways to produce hydrogen and both are bad. The first is to extract it either from petroleum, methanol or water then carry it in a high-pressure cylinder on the vehicle. The second is to install a methanol reformer on the vehicle. And the third is to use cryogenic extraction and pull the hydrogen from the air. All of them are lossy, and if you're extracting from petroleum, why the hell don't you skip all the intermediate steps and just put the petroleum in the car?

Hybrid is a great way to go, and probably the best way to do hybrid is with a diesel. So far there's not one. IIRC there are four companies that have hybrids out there: Toyota, Honda, GM (the hybrid Silverado) and Ford (the hybrid Escape). Toyota and Honda don't sell diesel engines. GM fucked up when they designed this truck--it's a half-ton with a six-foot box. Contractors would be lined up around the corner to buy this if it was a 3/4-ton with a long box. There are 110-volt power outlets in the bed! That's a GREAT feature--you can plug your saws into the truck and not have to drag a generator around. The only thing that would make a contractor happier is to be able to push a button and have a table saw rise up out of the bed floor. But no! Let's make the truck too light with too short a bed and sell it only in blue states where everyone buys 4-wheel-drive because they need it (but let's make it 2-wheel-drive). And in case you're wondering why GM is having to lay off 100,000 people, Making Shit No One Wants is real high on the list of reasons. Ford makes diesel engines (or, more precisely, buys them from International) but those engines are too big for the Escape. (I think Ford did a good job of figuring out which vehicle to make hybrid first. The Escape is a truck young people buy. Hybrid is a technology young people buy. Add the two together, you've got a real winner on your hands.)

Okay. Back to basics. Hybrids are all made in the same basic way. You've got an engine and a transmission. The engine turns fuel into rotational power, the transmission sends it to the wheels. In the transmission is a shaft that's directly driven by the engine. It has some gears on it. There's a second shaft with one gear; it's tied to the wheels. You mesh a gear on the first shaft with the gear on the second shaft and, if the engine is running, you go. To make a hybrid car, you attach an electric motor to the other end of the first shaft. (This is highly simplified, so don't ask about all of the generators.) Every time you make power go through a gearset, you lose some of it to friction and slippage. The ideal thing would be to completely get rid of all the gearsets, which is what directly driving the wheels from the end of the electric motors would allow.