The car of the future?

A flying electric car, dammit.

Not to say that I necessarily agree with Newsweek, but I’m sure that 100 years ago people were saying, “The automobile is the wave of the future? You must be joking! My horse can live for 15 productive years on not much more than oats, hay and water! Who wants to have to buy smelly and dangerous gasoline?” ... etc.

So… it’s possible.

What we need is cars that teleport and are therefore not subject to road rules.

Can’t you just see “aircars”? you have an auto crash in mid-air and who is at-fault? there would have to be some type of order or it would be the autobon of the air.

With the infrastructure that they are planning and the innovations in nanotechnology, no one will be driving at all. Imagine hurtling down the road at 400 miles per houir perfectly distanced from the opposing traffic all the while working on a computer screen that is your windshield blacked out because the stress of seeing the world at 400 miles an hour would be too stressful. The nanotechnology embedded in the billions of supercomputers within the finish of the paint interacting within a worldwide matrix of machines and responding to something as minute as a scratch in the finish of the vehicle and repairing it at the molecular level. The automobile as we know it will probably be a novelty of the amusement park ride in that day which is rapidly approaching. Controlled driving within the existing framework will be the future and eliminating driver error will be the goal. Flying cars would be insanity with the amount of traffic and lack of control over boundaries.

All-electric travel is simply too impractical right now. The vast majority of our goods are shipped by tractor-trailers, and there is no way that you’re going to get those to run on batteries- they simply don’t have the strength and the range. We would have to completely redesign our approach to transportation.
I would fix the Nashville-to-Seattle scenario by adding rail travel to the mix, to be used the way that ferries are used today: drive the car onto the train, let the train do the traveling, then drive your car off on the other end.

@Symbeline
Ah, but that raises the issue of telefragging. By all accounts, two cars trying to occupy the same space would result in a messy explosion.

@Nullo Don’t see how that’s so different from the actual road situation…XD

There are batteries under development than can be charged in three seconds if you can supply the amps to do so.
There are EVs like the Tesla Model S with a 300-mile range (better than some gas-burners). (Granted, that is an option; the base model only gets 160 miles/charge.)
There are vehicles that can replace the battery pack with a charged one in less time than it takes me to fill the 12-gallon tank in my Corolla. (The Tesla Model S can change it’s pack in 5 minutes.)
There is talk of certain models being able to rent “endurance packs” for long distance trips.

And when you work out the $/kw and the kw/mile, you will find that the $/mile is pretty damn good unless your electric company is raping you. As a Seattlite, I pay a reasonable rate so I can charge a Model S for under $4. Try going >150 miles on $5 worth of gas.

I thought the car of the future would be powered by a gas turbine engine, use a stick instead of a wheel, have a fighter jet-like canopy, and groovy tail fins?

If several million people plugged their cars in every night at the same time to recharge, what would that do to the power grid?

@mrentropy Very little. They are not as power-hungry as you think. If we can handle people turning their lights on at sunset or businesses starting up heavy machinery when they open in the morning, we can more than handle the demand.

@jerv When I lived in NJ I remember people on the radio saying that everyone in NYC could expect brownouts because of the hot weather and everyone turning on their air conditioners. Was that just fear mongering?

@mrentropy
No it’s not fear mongering. At certain times the grid can only create so much electricity so when they can anticipate a certain use it’s almost inevitable when they know that there’s not enough juice on hand. It’s rare but it happens.

@mrentropy No, but air conditioners are notorious energy hogs. They suck down more juice than a charger. There is the added fact that most A/C use in hot weather is during the day; peak hours when all the stores and factories are open. Electrical demand is always higher during the day.

My money (the little that I have) is on Hydrogen.
Just imagine all the infrastructure that would have to be built and once you have that, the massive increase in electric energy consumption. Where do you think the electric energy would come from? Mainly from fossil fuels. It is expensive and impractical.
With hydrogen you would just have to convert the various petrol stations to carry hydrogen, you could refill your car with the same routine you refill your petrol/diesel powered car, no fancy battery-change robot, no dangerous high voltage powerlines and outlets exposed to people.

Hydrogen all the way!
until then, 200+ mpg clean diesel cars

How much does an electric car battery weigh?

Okay, just to weigh in with some sense after all of the nonsense… for automobiles and whatever succeeds them for the next 50 to 75 years—and I’m sure that something will, because I think we’d give up our guns before we give up our cars!—I expect we’ll be primarily using some form of liquid fuel. That should be a combination of gasoline, diesel, methanol and ethanol. There are relatively simple conversion kits available for some hundreds of dollars, which will permit existing gas-driven engines to be run on any mixture of gasoline, methanol and/or ethanol. Anything from pure forms of one of those fuels, to any combination in any amount of those three fuels. And bio-diesel is not difficult to make from ethanol and methanol, either. So with the engines in place and most of the fuel distribution and dispensing methods familiar to all, what we really need are better ways to produce ethanol and methanol—which I expect we’ll be hearing about within the next few years. This is where I’d bet nearly any amount.

Not much infrastructure would need to be converted, since we already have liquid fuel dispensed from existing gasoline stations. They’d have to add storage and dispensing systems for methanol and ethanol, but that can be done incrementally (even though the cost is not inconsiderable). The big drawback there is “where does the methanol and ethanol come from?”, because corn-based ethanol is a losing proposition (unless you’re a corn farmer). But without a government subsidy that’s already a loser. The delivery mode (by truck) is already on the road, and is also not a difficult issue to resolve.

Electric cars for inter-city and short commutes may be a possibility, but until the batteries get far cheaper (and lighter and smaller), they’ll be a niche market. Infrastructure for daytime charging stations (and payment systems!) are a considerable drawback for wider acceptance, as well as the problems of battery disposal and long-haul trips.

Natural gas as a fuel is not inconceivable—it’s already used as a fleet fuel for some city buses and for various industries who care to invest in the conversion for their automotive fleets (natural gas storage on a vehicle is not quite as straightforward as gasoline storage—even though gasoline is equally dangerous as a fuel, if not more so). Pressurized containers have risks in and of themselves, not to mention the contents. The infrastructure to make fueling stations for consumer use is not in place and would be a huge investment. Even home fueling, which would be another option (at least for commuters) represents significant challenges to marketing, building codes and consumer acceptance.

Liquid natural gas is also a potential option, but the costs and dangers of storage are quite considerable, and probably as politically difficult to achieve as nuclear-powered steam driven cars. I don’t expect we’ll give serious consideration to this.

@ragingloli, if you want to have any money, then don’t bet on hydrogen. Unless we learn of a magic trick to extract the hydrogen from the water molecule—that doesn’t lose energy in the process—then we won’t even attempt to handle the huge (monstrously huge) issues of storage and fueling personal vehicles. (And the risks with hydrogen over natural gas are very considerable, since that hydrogen molecule is such a slippery devil—and dangerous—and not even as good a fuel as natural gas.) Hydrogen fuel cells are fine for space exploration, where a few billion more $$ is an acceptable investment—and there are few other alternatives—but we won’t be using it as an earthbound fuel for many generations, if ever.

@CyanoticWasp
Hydrogen can easily be won by electrolysis powered by solar energy (not to mention that the energy wasted is considerably less than any other method of making fuel (sun shines on plant, plant uses a tiny amount of the energy to do photosynthesis and produce sugar which is then converted in a lengthy process to alcohol by humans. Or it is used to make the plant grow, then it dies and over millions of years and countless amount of energy in the form of heat and pressure is being wasted to turn it into oil, mineral gas, or coal, whereas when making hydrogen you use a lot of the sunshine to turn it directly into electricity with solar panels (current record efficiency is at over 40%) or use the heat to heat water and power steam turbines to produce the electricity). and when it burns, the result is water, as opposed to carbon dioxide when you burn natural gas, ethanole or methanole, which would also have to be produced by wasting large amount of farmland that could otherwise be used to produce food. I will make any long term bets on anything that involves fossil fuels of any kind, because that will run out sooner or later, likely sooner.

Hydrogen fuel is not about saving money. It is about ridding ourselves of fossil fuel, and keeping current automotive manufacturing in the loop.
As are most alternative fuels.

I think electric is the most practical. An electric car will snap your neck off the line and will blow the doors off of most high performance cars.

Currently if you need to travel more then 150 miles in a day. You will still need a second car.
Once we get more efficiency out of solar cells and battery life that will change.

If you buy/build an electric car. It can pay for itself over time.

@CyanoticWasp
Okay, just to weigh in with some sense after all of the nonsense…
You lost me after the first sentence. Look into the Transportation industry closer and you will see that the personal enjoyment of the average NASCAR fan is not high on the agenda. Saving lives of which 43,313 were lost in 2008 on the roadways is key. The number of deaths relative to the population has decreased 35.46% from the 1979 peak year to 2005. That was achieved as a result of mandatory seat belt laws, air bags, helmet laws and ABS brakes. All things whose aim is to protect humans from their own foibles. High speed transport which maintains efficient use of resources while eliminating driver error is what it’s all about. It’s just another thing that will be more effectively accomplished by machines.

P.S.-Every hour of every day more energy is released from the sun to power all of the world’s energy needs for a year. It’s just a matter of harnessing that basically endless supply.

@john65pennington Variable. I’ve seen them between 187 lbs (racing pack for the _White Zombie) to 2800 lbs (lead-acid pack for a home-brew truck conversion). So it’s hard to say really since there are many other variables.
However, given that the Model S can do 0–60MPH in 5.6 seconds, weight isn’t really an issue as far as acceleration goes.

@SeventhSense, you are absolutely correct in what you say, but I don’t look for machines with that kind of intelligence for more than 50 years from now, despite the advances that we’re making in programming, hardware, memory, information transfer, guidance, processing systems and the vehicles to put all of that into. Aside from which, the roads would have to be much better than they are, and there won’t be nearly enough money for that any time soon. (Either that, or the driving machines would have to be orders of magnitude more capable than humans already are—and would still need to be able to interact with the millions of humans who will still be on the roads, whether as drivers, cyclists, with horse-drawn carts—or on horseback—and pedestrians.) As soon as they make those machines capable of something as relatively simple as running a NASCAR race, then we may be only a decade or so away from field deployment. In any case, none of that addresses the issue of locomotion / powering the thing.

@ragingloli, it’s true that we can acquire hydrogen from solar power, but if the net effect of using that solar power is to get less energy available from the fuel that is so synthesized, then it’s going to be an unlikely proposition except for places that have no other alternative. In a case like that we’d be better off using the solar power converted directly to electricity for immediate use or for storage in high-density batteries. Despite the relatively benign outputs from hydrogen combustion, that is not at all a user-friendly fuel. When I said “slippery” earlier, I didn’t explain that because of the size of the hydrogen molecule it leaks extremely easily past (and through) most storage devices. Ethanol / methanol are not fossil fuels, and when used to create bio-diesel and bio-gasoline (if we decide to do that), will eliminate the need for fossil fuels for personal transport. But that won’t happen soon, either.

A couple of weeks ago I read an interesting article in a German newspaper. The concept includes two types of electricity sources in a car: a battery to cover short distances and an external source becoming part of the asphalt of interstates and other larger highways. I tried to find something on the web, but no luck so far.

@mattbrowne I’ve heard similar things for the last couple of decades, but the cost of such a “gridlink” system would be a bit high, especially considering that we can’t even get the road crews to fix potholes!

@mattbrowne
Yes apparently it’s something that can be embedded within the existing infrastructure.

Well, at $300 a barrel or more cost comparisons will look different.

@mattbrowne True, but if you look at the cost per lane-mile of highways , you’ll see that it might take oil gettting closer to $3000/barrel. At $300/barrel, you’d have a hard time convincing people to drive something more economical than a 7-seat SUV.

Okay, maybe not quite that bad but Ford has a peppy little 65MPG diesel that they won’t bring over here from Europe because they are afraid it won’t sell. And considering how averse we Americans are to doing anything Europeans do (universal healthcare, eating right, learning to drive proficiently, educating our youth, working smarter instead of harder….) they are probably right!

@jerv – I think the calculation is a bit more complicated. But yes, it could turn out that putting power lines into asphalt is not the best way forward. We don’t know yet. All ideas should be explored. If there are better ones, I’m all for it. But it seems pretty clear that with just the growing middle class in India and China oil drilling will eventually face its limitations. And there’s the risk of pumping too much CO2 into our atmosphere.

We need innovators. We need inventors. We need young people who think math and science and technology is cool.

@mattbrowne I think that the real issue is that bean-counters aren’t always good at looking forward and figuring cost-over-time, especially not for costs that cannot be measured in dollars.

@mattbrowne
More practical, I think, than a gridwork would be to make use of railways. Roll the car on at Point A, roll it back off at Point B. Like a ferry.
Modern freight trains can pull a lot of weight inexpensively (a regional rail freight company boasts thousands of pounds over hundreds of miles per gallon of fuel – no doubt there’s some statistical gimmickery there, but probably still cheaper than a car). Given that Europe has more railway than pretty much anybody else, they could make it work.

@Nullo – You mean this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorail

@Nullo I gotta admit, it would’ve been nice if I could’ve brought my old car with me when I moved from NH to WA, but at 23MPG I wasn’t about to drive it the whole way. Of course, that also makes sense, so America not only will not do it (we all know that anything Europe does is wrong), I’m not sure we can!

@mattbrowne
That would be it.
@jerv
We have a fair amount of infrastructure; what we lack, apparently, is the ability to make the trains run on time.

@Nullo – I think the motorail service in Europe has only had limited success.

@ That’s because cars have tremendous potential at present. Pare that back, force everybody to drive cars with a 100km range, and ruin the rental industry, and you’ll have cars lined up at the station.

I’m sure we’ll come up with something in the future better than electric cars that are more cost effective. The hybrids now are just a bridge to the next step in automobile evolution. I just hope I am still around to see what the next big step is in vehicles!