Google Spends Money to Jump-Start Hybrid Car Development 352
slugo writes "Internet search giant Google (GOOG) hopes to speed the development of plug-in hybrid cars by giving away millions of dollars to people and companies that have what appear to be practical ways to get plug-in hybrid automobiles to market faster. 'While many people don't associate Google with energy, analysts say the fit isn't all that unnatural. Renewable energy, unlike coal or nuclear, will likely come from thousands or tens of thousands of different locations. Analysts have long said that one of the big challenges will be managing that flow into and out of the nation's electric grid, and that companies that manage the flow of information are well placed to handle that task.'"
google.ORG not google.com (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why hybrids? (Score:5, Informative)
Batteries can be r-e-c-y-c-l-e-d.
Re:Why hybrids? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why even bother with Hybrid Cars (Score:5, Informative)
At current, one of the biggest problems with making a mass-market electric car is that they take too long to charge up. You can easily make an electric car with a range that matches a car with a full tank of gas, but once that power is used up, it takes too long to charge up. Even if you build a car with lithium ion or lithium polymer batteries which charge faster than standard NiMH batteries (and are also more expensive and don't age as well) the charge time is still a decent amount of time. Plug-in hybrids could potentially solve this allowing you to run your car as an electric car for your everyday driving around stuff and then being able to run on gas in situations where you wouldn't want or be able to spend the time to charge up your car. This would provide a way to get electric cars on the road and in wide use without waiting for other technologies to develop (i.e. better batteries, smaller/denser ultracapacitors, hydrogen fuel cells, etc.).
Re:Why hybrids? (Score:3, Informative)
Diesel is a great start to help us get there in the meantime.
Re:I'm betting ... (Score:1, Informative)
Google maps' data comes from Geographic Data Technology or Nav-Tech.
In-car nav data comes from Geographic Data Technology of Nav-Tech.
It's the same data....
Wrong! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Why hybrids? (Score:3, Informative)
GM had an exhibit for awhile that placed all of the parts in a mainstream car, all of the parts in a hybrid car, and all of the parts in a hypothetical fuel-cell car. the first was a good twice the length of the second, which was a comparable length to the third.
Re:Why hybrids? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:PHEV already exist (Score:5, Informative)
Clearly, there is something lacking with getting a plugin Prius to market, but it isn't technical.
Re:Google-EV1 (Score:5, Informative)
In contrast, lithium is a fairly rare and expensive, volatile "metal" and is combined in lithium-ion batteries cathodes [nec-tokin.com] with other moderately rare elements from simple raw molecules through chemical and mechanical processes. It is therefore reasonable to expect that the process for recycling lithium-ion batteries would be substantially more productive, lucrative, and worthwhile.
Apples, oranges.
Plastics are somewhere in between the two. They are often created from a finite non-renewable resource (for which cost is increasing, but nowhere near the cost of lithium) but based on moderately long complex molecules using processes which usually aren't easily reversible. So often, like with paper, you can't go back to the source materials you used to create the plastic. Thus, as the price of oil increases through greater scarcity, plastic use will substitute with types or plastics that can be created without oil (and hopefully which also can be broken down more easily), or substitution will occur with other products that can be more cheaply produced or recycled (aluminium, cardboard, tinfoil hats...)
In the long run, the increasing price of oil will be good for the environment, although it will cause a lot of pain on the way as economies adjust to increasing average costs for energy.
Re:I'm betting ... (Score:5, Informative)
Don't get your hopes up; this is a google.org initiative, so I'm not sure they are looking to make money off it.
Re:It's nuketastic (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why hybrids? (Score:4, Informative)
Have you ever driven a hybrid? Mine is plenty fast and gets great gas mileage.
I will say that the current cars are only the start, and the technology will get better with each new generation.
Re:Why hybrids? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/659/ [ecogeek.org]
Re:Google-EV1 (Score:2, Informative)
Some notes on plastics production and recycling, as a plastics materials engineer.
It is possible to break down plastics to their original components, but it is often economically not feasible. I know a plant in China that is cracking nylon-66 to it's two monomers, and selling these monomers back to nylon producers. It is generally much easier to recycle plastics directly, saving a lot of energy and resources in the process.
Secondly, plastics are made nowadays primarily out of oil. But there are processes in existence (developed largely by nazi Germany because they needed oil to run their war but didn't have any natural sources) to create oil and gasoline out of any carbon based material, most notably coal, but anything will do, including wood. The coal-to-oil process is not used these days as oil is too cheap to make it worthwhile.
And finally the amount of oil (including energy) needed to produce the current plastics demand for the world is nothing compared to the energy use for transportation, the single largest energy consumer.
Re:Why even bother with Hybrid Cars (Score:2, Informative)
Fission: there hasn't been a new fission plant built in the last ten years, and there were only a handful built in the late 80's and early 90's. Furthermore, outside of military applications, nuclear research in the US has been all but abandoned since about that time. Hey, it became unprofitable, because it became unsaleable. Beyond that, we just love sending viable fuel to be buried in vaults. Hey, I'm all for it, but apparently fuel costs haven't risen enough to get people to take their heads out of their asses.
Hydro: we can only put so many up, plus they're potentially very devastating to both the local and regional environment, and to endangered species, and they tend to fuck up rivers and stuff.
Re:Why even bother with Hybrid Cars (Score:5, Informative)
1. The grid can handle the new load.
Re:It's nuketastic (Score:3, Informative)
I wouldn't be so sure about that... many environmentalists are starting to consider nuclear power [washingtonpost.com] as a way to address global warming. I expect the movement towards nuclear power will continue as the climate change problem gets worse, unless some better power technology appears.
Re:Why hybrids? (Score:3, Informative)
And a metal tin with a mixture of petrol, petrol vapour and air is *what* exactly? From one of the linked video clips, the pressure in the tank is only around 4300psi (300 bar or so), which is about the pressure in a normal LPG tank when it's full.
Re:Hopefully not (Score:2, Informative)
Europe already started this: by 2009, 4% of the all diesel fuel sold must be coming from bio-sources.
Also, we have to note that people's inertia can be high. Citizens adopt only well-proven technology. They are concerned about recharging, battery life, and so. You can't convince the crowd with logical, technically correct arguments - they would buy electric cars only if the highways would be already full of electric cars.
Electric cars seem to be the ultimate solution, but we need a temporary, quick solution which can be implemented asap: and biofuels look like the promised land.
Re:Charge time is the issue (Score:3, Informative)
The max time spent: less than 15 mins.
Max effort spent: Lifting up the hose and inserting it into my car.
Anything beyond this effort is NOT likely to succeed because for 50 years that's what we have been trained to do.
Humans are loathe to accept change especially when it drastically changes daily routines.
Tesla can't succeed much more because it expects a garage with a power supply for overnight charging.
Not many have their own garages.
I live in CT in a huge apartment complex where we have to park our cars outside on the road every night.
Although i love to buy a Tesla, i can't because it expects overnight charging.
Now, two things need to happen:
1. Cars need to be recharged in a max of 4 mins.
2. Gas stations should have one more tower called "Power" for electric cars where cars arrive and recharge and leave.
Until both happens, Tesla will remain on the fringe.
Re:Hopefully not (Score:3, Informative)
I blame the "Green revolution", which is time in the 60's when we introduced artificial fertilizers into farming, doubling food production. Since then, we've been loosing farms around the country, especially on the East Coast. Since the 60's, the US has grown more trees than it has cut down, simply because farms are closing down. This is good for CO2 reduction and wildlife habitat, but those poor farmers have had it rough. Giving them a decent price for soybeans would have some impact on our food prices, but the winners would be the guys who actually farm the land, not the "corn industry". It's a bit like the tobacco industry. Here in NC, Big Tobacco buys tobacco from farmers at the lowest price possible, and then lobbies the government for favorable treatment, allowing them to become the giants we have today. They don't actually grow any of the stuff, and no matter how rich they get, our poor farmers are well... poor.
Re:Why hybrids? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:PHEV already exist (Score:2, Informative)
Oh, but it is.
The battery. It has only so much cycles in it. Basically, more you use it - faster it degrades. Read Tesla's blogs - if you add a plug to regular Prius and use it all the time your battery will be dead in 15 - 20k miles.
Re:It's nuketastic (Score:2, Informative)
It's that kind of inorance of economics, science and engineering of nuclear power plants that has kept this relic of the cold war going with subsidies from the taxpayer for so long. Lets get something straight here, I have been a long time supporter of IFR to deal with plutonium, but I recognise that even Generation 4 reactors are totally infeasible without significant advances in material sciences.
If current generation reactors are so safe why do they have to be underwritten by the taxpayer and why won't insurance companies insure them. Why? because insurance companies are very good at assessing risk, in fact that is thier business, and even they assess nuclear power plants as too risky. That isn't fearmongering, thats called being pragmatic.
You mean Yucca Mountain that hasn't received any nuclear waste, you mean Yucca mountain that got the waste dump because Nevada only had one representative to vote on the placement of a waste dump and every other state had two, you mean yucca mountain that has a complex geometry made of pumice instead of granite, you mean yucca mountain that scientists call "NASA before challenger", you mean Yucca mountain that had a earthquake of 7.4 on the Richter scale in the early '90's. Yucca mountain does not nearly have the geological characteristics for a waste dump that has to last at least 500000 years, have a look at the Swiss approach. That's not fearmongering, that's called understanding what a political solution looks like.
Oh, so you'd prefer radon 220 that causes lung cancer, or what about radium 226 that causes bone cancers - it has a quite modest half life of only 1600 years, or thorium which cause birth defects, or what about the benign noble gases like xenon, argon or krypton that decay into something deadly or iodine 131 or ceasium. Did you know that pressurised water reactors are allowed too purge these gasses into the atmosphere 20 times a year as part of normal operations as officially permitted by the NRC or would you prefer to maintain your illusion that the ageing nuclear reactors in the U.S will be a squeaky clean source of electricity for your EV-2. That 's not fearmongering, thats understanding the operational issues.
Yeah, like the way they had to cool down av reactor housing with garden sprinklers because the river levels were so low during the heatwave, such forward planning and preparation for an event that can induce a meltdown.
sure, sure they will go on forever and ever, they don't ever rust or fatigue and will never wear out. Like First Energy "safe" who persuaded the NRC to delay inspection of safety components past the due date only to find that a pressure vessel had corroded through 6 of it's 6 1/2 inch thickness. If you are going to operate these devices safely into thier old age then you have to increase the safety inspections, and that is not profitable for the operator. profit vs safety what a great tradeoff. That is not fearmongering, that is called considering yourself lucky if you were in Toledo on new years day 2002.
The best till last eh? every nuke fanboy's wet dream eh? A generation 3 Pebble Bed Modular Reactor, with high pressure 900 degree helium gas keeping it nice and cool. Enriched uranium oxycarbide spheres covered in carbon, silic