DailyDirt: Charging Up Your Car In The Future
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Charging an electric car battery can take hours, so it seems somewhat inconvenient compared to a few minutes at a conventional gas station to fill up a tank. Electric cars also have shorter ranges than conventional vehicles. There are a few solutions to these problems, but many of them aren’t quite ready for consumers. Here are a few possible technologies for cars that don’t run on gasoline.
- A battery startup called Sakti3 claims its battery could double the range of a Tesla S to nearly 500 miles. However, this battery isn’t commercially available yet, and it’s uncertain whether any electric vehicle would accept a battery from a third party manufacturer. [url]
- Supercapacitors could be made into structural parts of a car, storing energy without taking up unnecessary space. The researchers working on these supercapacitors have done some mechanical testing, but it might not be a great idea to store a lot of energy in a part of a car that might experience extreme structural failure in an impact… [url]
- One of the problems with using hydrogen as a fuel for vehicles is that it’s hard to store and transfer significant volumes of hydrogen safely and easily. Using ammonia instead might solve some of the problems and offer vehicles that are similar to ones powered by liquid natural gas, but ammonia as a fuel also introduces a few more engineering challenges. (Ahem. A corrosive, toxic gas under pressure might not be too safe for the general public to handle.) [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: ammonia, battery, cars, electric vehicles, energy, energy storage, fuel, hydrogen, lng, supercapacitor
Companies: sakti3
Comments on “DailyDirt: Charging Up Your Car In The Future”
Tesla batteries
Tesla batteries are tightly integrated into the car, so I doubt it would be worth the effort for a 3rd party battery maker to try to reverse engineer a Tesla battery….
Tesla may freely license its patents, but that doesn’t mean it’s any easier to build a “knock off” of their technology more cheaply!
I for one am proud to use electricity from a coal power plant to power my car instead of using petroleum-based fuel to power my car. #fortheenvironment
Re: Re:
If you live in the right parts of the country, you’re not using power from coal plants, but are going with things like hydroelectric.
Batteries, batteries
The next breakthrough in batteries appears to be like the next breakthrough in nuclear fusion – for the last 5 or 10 years, batteries with much higher capacity have been only 2 years away. Call us when you have a commercially available, proven product.
Why not just electrify the major routes? This is what we do with trains instead of fitting wagons with batteries. With wireless conduction technology we needn’t even set up obstructive overhead cables.
It might seem far fetched but I think it’s worth looking at, especially for major commuter routes.
Re: Re:
Wireless conduction is incredibly inefficient, requiring the generation of a lot more power than will actually get used for transportation.
Don’t forget the planned quick-battery-swap (90 seconds) in Tesla stations in the future: http://www.teslamotors.com/batteryswap
future parking
yes, maybe we charge the cars in the future and apparently we do not even need to bother about the parking anymore, i learned here:http://smart-magazine.com/space/the-parking-wizard/
it is incredible how quick all these new inventions develop…
This is a good new for our world future. fossil fuel is become less and less used. with the new technology human invented to replace the old way is helping us reduce using resource that one day will be completely depleted. I think in just 3-4 years we will drive cars that require no fuel at all.