thoughts on the future of personal transportation vehicles

i went to a conference last week, in newport beach CA. Man, it was beautiful. The sun, the breeze, the OCEAN!! and the traffic and 8 lane roads (not highways) and the endless driving. so yeah, not my ideal place to live, but sure a great place to visit.

anyways! a guy from toyota gave a really good talk about fuel cell cars (FCV) and hybrids (HEV) and plug in hybrids (PHEV). a few key points:

1) there's been a lot of hype about PHEVs getting 100mpg. However, 3+ tests with tens of cars and thousands of miles in the US and Japan have shown between 45 and 55mpg, comparable or worse than a plain HEV. Also, looking at the life cycle analysis, net CO2 emissions per mile driven are barely reduced from the HEV to PHEV when the power comes from typical American electricity sources (ie mostly coal).

2) Even if CO2 emissions from PHEVs were super extra awesome awesome, look at this.




Diminishing returns! sure, 100mpg is cool, but the real place to look for carbon savings is in the truck/RV/van side. Small, light cars and hybrids are really quite carbon-cost effective already.

2.5) so, combining points from 1) and 2), this guy's opinion was that plug in hybrids are kind of a waste of time and money, for both consumers, research dollars and focus. That time and money and effort could be going to improving fuel economy where it'll matter most, and into FCV.

3) FCV are also pretty cool! There was one at UMD last week but I didn't get to drive it :[ Toyota (and other manufacturers) have the technology, and are close to production-ready with cars that have a 300-500 mile range per tank, ~8minute refueling time for pure H2 at 70MPa, and a 25 year lifetime. WOW! The longest I've managed to keep a fuel cell alive is one week. ha. anyways! A couple interesting things - one of the most expensive components in the car is the switching valves that control the H2 flow. So expensive that they are redesigning the entire layout of the car to reduce the number of H2 tanks so that they need fewer valves [this is really inconvenient and expensive - more, smaller, distributed tanks are easier to fit in around other components, and maybe safer]. For the whole infrastructure, another huge cost is the H2 compressors that filling stations need to get the H2 up to 70MPa, which means fewer stations. So complicated! Yay systems engineering.

4) range is important. there's this number out there, that 80% of trips are 40 miles or fewer. But looking at this,



although 80% of trips are less than 40 miles, the remaining 20% of trips consume 65% of the total energy used. So really, you do want to work on higher efficiencies over longer ranges. [I have numbers on ICE (internal combustion engine) vs HEV vs FCV thermal efficiencies somewhere, will look for those later]

5) so toyota's working on cars, but looking forward, they also see a coming shift in personal transportation, and they're getting ready for that too. looking at a future where mid to long distance everyday travel is done by public transit, and there are tiny shared cars to go the 'last 5 miles'. example. person A has a car, drives it to the train station X, parks, rides train to work. Person B takes the train to station X, takes A's car, drives to work. At the end of the day, B brings car back to the station and leaves it there and takes the train home, so the car is waiting for A when he gets off the train and he drives home. Each person is responsible for charging/filling the car before they drop it off. Or other variations on zipcar, etc. He also mentioned Better Place [article is long, you can watch the video instead].

ok. that's what I remember, more analysis later when I'm more awake and un-sick.

ps yang stop slacking and talk to diana