NOVA's Car of the Future

Tom and Ray Magliozzi, better know as Click and Clack from the radio show "Car Talk" on NPR recently teamed up with NOVA to explore emerging technology and innovations that are moving transportation to a more sustainable and healthy future. Instead of focusing purely on what's just around the corner, this program focuses on what is currently under development and available for purchase; the cars that anyone could be driving today, right now... if they can afford it! We've also explored this topic on EV Authority and come up with a few tips and ideas to green your car on a budget.

The story follows Click and Clack who are trying to replace their old broken down '52 MG roadster with something more up to date. They start off by visiting the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. There are a few jokes about the "human" models on the floor and the ridiculous 500 horsepower that one Ford Mustang is capable of. We learn that since 1985 average vehicle weight has increased by 1,000lbs while horsepower has almost doubled. Both former president George W. Bush and Rocky Mountain Institute founder Amory B. Lovins are quoted saying that we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and that our appetite for gas guzzlers is directly linked to emotion which sells heavier stronger cars... If cars were viewed more as an appliance we would all be driving Toyota Corolla's or Honda Civic's.

Digging deeper into the challenges we face as a result of some of the "old timer" cars and heavier less efficient cars we learn that 25% of all carbon emissions come from cars and light trucks and that CO2 stays in the atmosphere for over 100 years once it comes out of the tailpipe of a car, this release ultimately changes our climate patterns and impacts our health. Not only are we going to need other sources of energy to power cars, they will need to become more efficient all together.

Moving away from the Detroit Auto Show, the program takes us to the Alt Wheels Festival in Boston. Tom, who still hasn't found his "dream car" tries out a gas powered three wheeler concept. With only two seats and little to no room for storage, the car gets 100 miles per gallon. This particular car doesn't go in reverse and appears to be quite dangerous at first glance but it's a step in the right direction. The primary challenge alternative car makers face is one of energy storage and weight. Petroleum, which is plant matter and plankton stored for millions of years that eventually gets converted to hydrocarbons, has one of the highest energy densities of any fuel we know, but it's supply is limited and it adds CO2 to the atmosphere that would otherwise be sequestered or "stored away" underground.

One of the more interesting mini segments from the Car of the Future program is a short on hydrogen powered cars and the "chicken and the egg" dilema. Nobody want's to build cars that can't be fueled anywhere, and nobody wants to build a fueling station for cars that don't exist. History shows that gasoline powered internal combustion engines evolved slowly together as resources and technology became available. Iceland, which has 1000 times fewer people and cars than the US and charges $8 per gallon of gasoline, is used as a case study for a location that is looking to completely replace oil with Hydrogen. So far Iceland only has a small fleet of Mercedes produced hydrogen fuel cell powered busses.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe but in order to use it for fuel cells it has to be isolated, it doesn't exist in pure form. This is done by splitting water molecules consisting of two parts Hydrogen and one part Oxygen - H2O, which takes energy. In Iceland both hydro plants and steam power from geothermal plants are used to power the production of Hydrogen for fuel cell busses. There is enough geothermal energy in Iceland to produce all of the Hydrogen it's people would need to drive their cars by today's standard... but it's not so simple for other nations that are not sitting on volcanic landscapes between two tectonic plates. The Netherlands are also experimenting with Hydrogen, instead of geothermal energy however, they use excess wind capacity to produce Hydrogen.

Moving from Iceland to China we are told experts predict that within 20 years there will be as many cars in China as there currently are in the US. As it stands, many Chinese people ride bicycles or walk instead of using cars, this change will increase demand for oil and CO2 output worldwide but China could curb this trend by adopting greener technologies the first time around instead of using oil and then trying to switch like the US.

In the US and other developed nations where oil is already the standard, technologies like E85 ethanol (which is also a hydrocarbon, but produced by living plants) is one alternative that works seamlessly with existing technology and infrastructure. Government studies suggest that Ethanol used in vehicles vs oil produces 25% less greenhouse gasses. In Brazil, ethanol produced from sugar can now provides 40% of the nation's fuel! The real challenges of ethanol however, are that it may take more energy to produce it than it actually provides... all of the fertilizers and machines used to grow corn ethanol run on oil. Additionally, critics argue that there is not enough farmland in the US to grow ethanol fuel for all of our cars, and we still need some corn for food as it is the number one staple in the US. Ethanol will be part of the solution, but it can't be the complete solution. For these reasons, the future of energy in the US looks more like a patchwork quilt than a single standard.

Cellulosic Biomass is explored next by Click and Clack as they visit Lee R. Lynd of Mascoma Corporation. Lee believes that ethanol has more potential if it can be made from corn byproducts, that is, not the seeds that people and cattle eat. Cellulosic Biomass is the woody structure that props up plants, it is the corn husks and stem, it is also in woodchips, paper sludge, wheat sludge and switch grass which grows natively without fertilizers or pesticides. If cellulosic biomass can be grown without using fossil fuels, perhaps by ethanol powered vehicles, then they would have a net neutral impact on CO2 levels! As it stands woody materials are harder to convert into ethanol than corn or sugar beets and require the help of micro organism cells in two or three phases of conversion. What Mascoma and other corporations are studying is how to bioengineer these micro organisms to be able to more cost effectively create ethanol in just one step. Mascoma believes they are just two or three years away from this breakthrough.

Experts believe that we have enough farm land to replace 25% of the fuel we use today with cellulosic ethanol and that if cars were lighter and more efficient, such as hybrids are becoming, that we could replace all petroleum with cellulosic ethanol. Efficiency is a huge hurdle here and one that has been reversed in recent years as mentioned earlier with high horsepower and size winning out. Currently less than 1% of the energy burned by an average car is actually used to move the driver. 90% of the energy is lost between the gas tank and the wheels of the car as heat and friction (almost half as friction of the pistons rubbing against the cylinders), and the other 9% is used to push the mass of the vehicle itself.

Next, Tom and Ray (Click and Clack) visit MIT where they once attended as students. On this visit they are learning about the internal combustion engine and how new advances might make it more efficient. Over the past few decades engineers at MIT Sloan and other labs across the world have increased engine efficiency by over 30%. Unfortunately, much of this increase in engine efficiency has been offset by demand for high performance and size. Fuel economy has responded during times of oil shortage, during the 1970's average car MPG doubled. As oil prices dropped and the public became less concerned MPG's remained constant, in fact they did not change between 1985 and 2007 while truck and SUV sales almost doubled. Safety is one aspect that is often stressed when buying larger cars verses smaller more efficient ones but it's becoming more of a myth as pioneers create lighter materials and smaller cars that are just as safe as larger SUV's.

Moving on, we get a great segment from Amory Lovins who is pushing for smaller, more efficient cars that are also safe. Amory describes the average car in today's world as burning 100 times it's own weight in dead plant matter each day. Surprisingly only 0.3% of that energy is actually used to move the driver. In 1982 Amory Lovins founded the Rocky Mountain Institute - a Colorado based think tank which employs 50 full time researchers including some members directly from the auto industry. Amory's concept for a future "hyper car" uses interlocking hollow carbon fiber composite parts that are stronger and lighter than steel; Boeing is using similar technology in it's 787 Dreamliner which saves 20% in fuel. Race cars use similar technology and regularly withstand crashes (saving the lives of their drivers) taking place under speed conditions upwards of 150 miles per hour. These new carbon composites can be made to be large, spacious and safe without being heavy and clunky which saves oil and increases efficiency. The Hypercar Lovins is working on is still a car of the future, current auto manufacturers continue working with steel, but Lovins is innovating new ways to mass produce his carbon technology to bring cost down and increase speed of production. Every aspect of his car is designed to be aerodynamic and efficient, yet it is just as spacious and safe as a modern day SUV and can comfortably accomodate even the largest drivers.

The Hypercar that Amory Lovins is producing can cruise on the highway at 55 miles per hour on the same power to the wheels that today's modern SUV's use on a hot day just to run the air conditioner.

While carbon fiber is still a ways off in the future, despite Amory and the RMI's best efforts, today anyone can buy a hybrid and immediately increase their driving efficiency. Hybrids run on gas but use battery assist to increase efficiency, they capture energy during braking and run on pure electricity at slower speeds and idle. Hybrid cars do require a bit more energy to be produced because of their batteries and advanced computer systems, however over the lifespan of a hybrid car it will use 30% less energy and produce 30% less carbon than an equivalent internal combustion model.

Hybrids still use gas despite their gains in efficiency and many people are working to move entirely away, to a new energy standard of electricity that can be produced locally with wind or solar that delivers huge gains in efficiency and independence. Tom and Ray visit professor Andrew Frank at UC Davis who invented the plugin hybrid - a hybrid that can run completely off of battery power for extended range and charge directly from a wall outlet instead of just off the gas engine. By comparison, plugins have smaller gas engines, larger electric engines, a smaller gas tank,  and more batteries. With an overnight charge, Andy's plugin concept can go 60 miles without using a drop of gas, that's more than the average American driver's daily commute. When the gas engine finally does kick in the car can travel over 600 miles on a single tank of gas while modern internal combustion cars can usually only travel ~300.

Some skeptics claim that plugins and EV's merely shift pollution from car tailpipes to power plants but studies show that cars powered by electricity from today's power plants could reduce greenhouse emissions by more than 40%... and that number is always increasing because each day households are installing more solar and wind power that feeds into the grid locally, governments are also enacting efficiency standards and mandating improvements on powerplants on an ongoing basis which is much easier than targeting individual cars. The US and other large industrialized nations are also abundant in local supplies of coal and nuclear which means that in the worst case scenario, shipping and drilling emissions from oil excavation (not to mention the cost of war) would be saved. The best case scenario is personal wind and solar, produced locally and used locally by home owners. This significantly reduces the loss of electricity in transport and keeps the environment very clean all while delivering enough energy to satisfy household and transportation needs.

It costs four times less to power a plugin or electric vehicle from the grid than it does to power it on gasoline.

One concern with plugins and EV's is that our current electrical grid won't be able to handle charging all of them. According to one expert interviewed by Nova, our existing electrical system could power tens of millions of cars without any modification, but they would have to be charged during off peak hours such as night time when stress on the grid is low. One company that is helping to foster this movement is ChargePoint a Bay Area company that makes smart grid enabled charging stations that function like parking meters. Anyone can buy one of these meters and install it at their building for roughly ~$3,000. Once installed anyone in the community can charge their car directly from the meter paying for electricity and charging use. The sale of electricity provides profits for the ChargePoint owner and connects directly to an advanced online mapping system that shows utilities who is using power. ChargePoint also offers an "eco plan" that costs less money and only charges cars during off peak hours or when drivers really need the power. This kind of electricity use sensitivity creates an economy for electricity that helps everyone become more efficient just like a any other market system.

Hybrids and plugins are an important in-between step from oil to pure electric powered cars. The more plugins that are out driving around, the more charging stations will be in demand and eventually that infrastructure will be enough to support pure EV's. Martin Eberhard, the founder of Tesla Motors, was inspired to increase efficiency in cars by using electricity instead of gas. While gas cars are in the range of 20% efficient according to Martin, electric cars are closer to 85% which equates to something like 135mpg. This efficiency gain is complimented by performance, the Tesla Roadster can do 0 to 60 in four seconds and go 250 miles on a single charge. The batteries that make this possible are heavy and pricey by today's standard, the Tesla Roadster costs $109 up from $92 just one year ago, but these first few generations (which are completely sold out) are helping to pave the way for more affordable models down the line. A Tesla Roadster requires approximately 6,831 lithium ion batteries which are each about the size of an AA battery. The key with lithium ion batteries is energy density, a lithium ion battery contains about 4x that of traditional batteries.

The adventure concludes with Click and Clack considering the auto manufacturers, individual choice, and government stimulus that all play a roll. Individual actions really do matter and it all adds up. Tom decides he wants to convert his old roadster into a plugin hybrid and begins discussing what will need to be done to get there... EV and plugin custom conversions are currently available from companies like Evolve It Motors. I personally have been to their shop in Salida Colorado and seen Porsche and old Military Vehicles all running on batteries. It's an amazing sight, a bit expensive, but a great option for preserving an old classic or building a custom beauty.