What new advances to they have already that can run cars instead of petrol/gas?

Question

What new advances to they have already that can run cars instead of petrol/gas?

Answer 1

Battery technology for electric and hybrid cars is making great strides.  Some are using nanotechnology to come up with better designs for batteries.  

Electric cars have gotten pretty good, though the range between charges needs to improve.  

Tesla makes a luxury sports car, equivalant in performance to Ferrari or Porche and competitively priced with those. They are made by a relatively small company with little in the way of economies of scale of big auto makers.

And yet they are competitively priced like I said.

It has a range of up to 250 miles between battery charges. The Tesla roadster will go 130 mph and go 0-60mph in 4 seconds which is incredibly quick.   I've read accounts of test drives in them.  The acceleration and performance are very impressive, more so than gas engine cars.  The torque is high even at slow speeds.

Phoenix Motorcars has a utility pickup that they plan to market in Mexico.  Right now it only has a 130 mile range, but has a new battery called lithium titanate created using nanotechnology.

Using a newly designed 440 volt charger, it can

be charged in 10 minutes.  Using it's onboard plug in 110 volt charger it will take 6 hours.  These are already useful for around town cars for deliveries or for job trucks for farms and industries where they don't have to travel great distances.  They say they will improve the range in upcoming models.

Then there's Zap electric cars which are made in China for a company (Zap) in northern California.

I really don't know that much about them.

There are others

Hybrids will be much better when we have real plug in models, that you can plug in to house current (110volt). They are coming.

The better of the hybrids right now seem to be the ones that are more electric, with smaller gas engines that are more for charging than for propulsion.

One concept car that I was impressed with is the one designed by GM a few years ago. It's a hydrogen fuel cell car.  They said they looked at designing this car with the idea of starting from scratch and basically reinventing the automobile.  as a result the car isn't based on a mechanical model but on an eclectronic one.  All the systems in the car are contained in the chassis,- fuel cell, batteries, electrical, heating, everything.  The car body plugs into this chassis with a docking station.  It is drive by wire.  There are no mechanical foot pedals or steering wheel, no drivetrain as it has four electric motors, one at each wheel. It uses interchangable car bodies that can be attatched to the chassis via the docking station.  So you could have one chassis and two or three different kinds of bodies, like pickup, sports car, whatever.  That way GM wouldn't have to keep restyling the cars.  In fact other companies could make car bodies to fit it.

And the uniformity of the chassis design would cut manufacturing costs and make it unnecessary to keep changing the chassis design either.

With the drive by wire design, you can sit in either front seat to drive.

Answer 2

The most advanced technology available today!! would be Diesel engines.

A lot of them can be easily converted to burn straight or esterified vegetable oils.

Therefore the expensive conversion to alcohols, such as needed for E-85, is not necessary.

Answer 3

Electric

Air powered

Better to have electric trains, electric planes, ACM's and renewable stuff. read this:

I attended the Focus the Nation at Sierra College on 1-31-08. The event was the 2% Solution, a 2% reduction over 40 years to solve GW. Oil is a nonrenewable resource and we are running out-but not soon - $30 Gal for gas. The 2% Solution is ok for the USA for a 10 year plan to cut 20%. But over those 10 years, we have to be building renewable energy and about that time, we can cut an additional 20%. This should get us from importing any oil. We must have a pollution surcharge where we pay the real price (health effects, GW and cleanup) for oil, NG, coal, cigarettes, Cooling Towers, Cars, trains and airplanes. Humans have to put some of this nonrenewable into renewable energy like small hydro-electric dams, concentrating solar power plants, wind and wave machines, nuks, and geothermal. With the peak of oil in the 1970’s, peak NG in the 1990’s, having mined cheep coal, the peak of ocean fishing in the 1980’s, and the peak of uranium in the 1990’s, humans must stop procrastinating and make real changes to keep earth sustainable including in the energy debate, finance and regulation.

Many of mankind’s advancements cause earth surface to warm, destroy the ozone layer, kill off endanger species, heat cities, and in some way cause more dramatic destruction.  Blacktop and buildings (roads, roofs and parking lots-heat cities), deforestation (air pollution, soil erosion), duststorms (increase hurricanes and cyclones, cause lung diseases), fires (cause pollution, mud slides, and deforestation), refrigerants (like CFC's) and solvents (including benzene destroy the ozone layer raising skin cancer rates) and plastics; cars, airplanes, ships and most electricity production (causes pollution including raised CO2 levels and increased lung and other diseases); these human problems we must fix to keep life on earth sustainable! Humans have destroyed half of the wetlands, cut down nearly half of the rain forest, and advance on the earths grasslands while advancing desertification which increases duststorms.

The result is:  change is on the way, we just do not know what changes (where and when). Look beyond the hype, beyond the weather, beyond a quarterly report and beyond today. President Bush has made a choice of energy (ethanol) over food and feeding the starving people around the world; this is a choice China has rejected. The fact is Bush wants to buy your food to send to starving people since our grain is not available. Now what USA Presidential candidate is give you the facts so you can make an educated decision?

Over the next 90 years carbon dioxide is projected to skyrocket as human’s burn more fossil fuels. The problem is, the oil will be gone in less than 30 years at present rates of consumption without projected increases and shortages. We have to come up with what will take its place. Again we have to cleanup our mess. One of the big problems we have is at some time Yellowstone will blow its top again, as the magma move closer to the surface, creating a nuk winter. After that we will not have to worry about the destruction of the ozone layer, global warming or pollution.

But with that we must understand we have never seen what is now happening before. CO2 has never lead to temperature change, but temperature change has led to increases in CO2. The models have to be made as we go along with current evidence! But again adding a small amount of CO2 to the atmosphere enlarges the earths sun collection causing warming; increase water in the atmosphere and it forms clouds cooling earth but sometimes causing flooding. Even natural events are warming earth and causing destruction. The sun has an increased magnetic field causing increases in earthquakes (more destruction), volcanoes (wow, great destruction), and sun spots. Lighting produces ozone near the surface (raising air pollution levels). The USA Mayor's have taken a stand and I believe are on the right track, we can have control and can have economic growth. The sun is available to produce energy, bring light to buildings and makes most of human’s fresh water. Composting is the answer to desertification. New dams are the answer to fresh water storage, energy and cooling earth by evaporation, we need many small ones all over (California needs 100 by 2012 and has not even started).

Remember knowledge is power and this information is very powerful. Humans have 50 trillion dollars worth of stuff that runs on cheep oil, natural gas, or coal. We need 20 Trillion Dollars worth of renewable energy over the next 10 years if we are to avoid a world wide depression (and right now ethanol does not count)!

That is why I founded CoolingEarth.org, a geoengineering web sight where you can learn more about earth, the atmosphere, and how to sustain life on earth’s surface.