Are there commercially viable solar, wind or nuclear powered vehicles, apart from submarines?

Question

Are there commercially viable solar, wind or nuclear powered vehicles, apart from submarines?

Answer 1

no, but there are a few human powered vehicles around.

Answer 2

If you are suggesting a vehicle that can power itself using solar or wind then the answer no, that is as impossible with current technology as, say a car that can produce it's own petrol.

On the other hand an electric vehicle could be charged from any of the above sources, there are a number of electric cars and motor bikes available the best motorbike at the moment is the Vectrix which can cruise at highway speeds and has a range of 60 miles and has been commercially available for a year, Honda and Yamaha have been selling similar but smaller products in Japan for about the same amount of time.

Answer 3

yeah, to the guy above me, like the guy above u, why not simply say no????? it was a yes or no question.  i feel myself slipping into a coma.  does that happen alot when you are on dates?

Answer 4

If you mean nuclear reactors or sails on the car itself, no. If you mean a plug-in electric car that uses electricity produced by solar panels, wind or nuclear power plants, then yes. It's just that you don't see many plug-in's on the road today. Tesla's working on electric plug-in sports cars. Golf carts are electric and have been around for a while. There are some people that you can pay to have your motorcycle converted to plug-in electric. Wind, solar, and nuclear are commercially viable sources of power, but they aren't as cheap as coal and oil. Electric cars are commercially viable, but not very available yet.  

Answer 5

no

Answer 6

I recall a few years ago a couple of people flew a solar powered airplane nonstop around the world.  But that idea obviously wouldn't work with regular airplanes.  I can't think of any others.

Answer 7

Nothing even comes close to then internal combustion engine. Some day, yes, but not anytime soon.

Answer 8

Those nuclear submarines are all military, no thought at all was given to whether or not they'd be commercially viable (although there have been proposals for converting old Soviet SSBNs into cargo subs none of them have actually happened).

Some ships are experimenting with using wind and solar to augment a combustion engine of some kind but there's nothing that I know of that uses any of those sources exclusively that is commercially viable.

Then there are the Russian nuclear powered icebreakers which have proven themselves to be the best icebreakers out there (and which Greenpeace have been known to charter) and which seem to be paying their way pretty well by clearing a passage for convoys (at least well enough for more to be built).

The N.S. Savannah (first commercial nuclear powered ship) probably would have been viable had more been built (so as to spread the infrastructure costs out) and the ship not been designed as a showboat, during the Arab oil crisis Savannah may have even been more economical despite the design limitations and one of a kind costs.

The US Navy has calculated that it'd be cheaper for them to have nuclear powered amphibious assault ships and that it wouldn't take much to make nuclear powered destroyers cheaper (they aren't commercial ships but they probably would translate pretty well over to similarly sized civilian vessels).

Answer 9

Until you eliminate terrorism, traffic accidents and the like, you will never see a nuclear car.

As for wind...i suppose you could put a sail on yours...but the roof might leak, not to mention you probably won't be able to have one big enough to move it due to low hanging power lines, traffic lights, bridges oh...and that 9foot bar they have at McDonalds drive thru's.

As for solar, they do have solar charging systems you can connect and put on the dash board, but an all solar car would be h**l. Mainly because solar is only a way to charge batteries so far. you'd have to make a car run solely on battery power, then be able to fit panels everywhere from the roof to the side panels just to keep the batteries charged. There probably isn't enough area to sufficiently just run off the panels themselves, not to mention accidents, vandals or bird poo will rob your energy collection efforts.