GM Fuel Cell Car Takes 300 Mile Trek

 

Auto manufacturers see the ability to drive a vehicle 300 miles without refueling as the minimum for a vehicle to be considered for every day driving. GM says it has eclipsed that range for the first time in a real world trip in a fuel cell vehicle.

The Chevy Sequel went 300 miles on public roads across New York according to GM's Larry Burns, who called it "one of the highlights of my career." Burns pointed out on the GM blog that since the hydrogen used was produced by hydroelectric energy from Niagra falls, the trip was essential carbon free.

Those concerned with climate change will see the removal of greenhouse gases from transportation as the ultimate goal, but whether electric vehicles or fuel cell vehicles will be the first cost-competitive solutions remains to be seen. Electric vehicles have the biggest advantage of an existing distribution network. So will it be the battery or fuel cell that sets us free?

 

Energy White Paper outlines funding for low carbon vehicle innovation

 

To achieve the kind of fuel efficiency improvement outlined in the Energy White Paper published by the Government yesterday the Government acknowledged the need to provide the frameworks that support and stimulate private sector investment, as well as encouraging a successful entry to market of low carbon technologies. Accordingly, the DfT will contribute an additional £5 million per annum to the low carbon transport theme of the Energy Technologies Institute.

In conjunction with the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), the DfT and EPSRC will help finance and develop a new Low Carbon Vehicle Innovation Platform providing critical coordination and up to £30 million of support from 2008/09 for UK technology research aimed at accelerating the development of relevant technology. Assuming the Innovation Platform develops successfully the Government would envisage extending the programme to run over a number of years;

With initial funding of £20 million, the DfT will develop a new programme of public sector procurement to promote and support low carbon vehicle development, including small fleet demonstrations to provide early markets for new innovative lower carbon vehicle technologies; and, to ensure that Government leads by example it has set a fleet average car procurement target of 130gCO2/km by 2010/11 for new cars purchased by Government and used for administrative operations. We will keep the target under review and look to extend its scope following further analysis.

The the Government asked consultants E4tech to examine how the innovation system was functioning for some of the key transport carbon-reducing technologies, including more advanced versions of hybrids, including “plug-in” hybrids, fully electric vehicles, second generation biofuels, and hydrogen fuelled vehicles, whether powered by an internal combustion engine or a fuel cell. The Government says its funding steps outlined above will help more of these options become commercially and technologically viable, but adds that the success of hydrogen or electricity-based technologies in delivering low carbon transport will rely heavily on the UK's future elecricity generation mix.

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U.S. electric vehicle research funded

 

WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of Energy has selected five next-generation vehicle research projects to share in $19 million in government funding.

The projects are designed to further development of hybrid electric vehicles and fuel cell vehicles. Combined with industry cost sharing, the selected projects will receive total funding of nearly $34 million, officials said.

The projects will focus on reducing the cost, weight and size of electric drive and power conversion devices, while increasing vehicle efficiency.

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Tanfield to double electric vehicle output

 

Electric vehicle maker Tanfield Group Plc plans to double output this year to meet growing demand from emissions-conscious customers, its chief executive said on Tuesday.

Tanfield assembles five vehicles a week and will make 10 a week by the end of the year and 30 next year.

Exports, which make up about 15 percent of its electric vehicle division sales, are also expected to rise and account for 40-50 percent of sales next year.

"Our customers are increasingly concerned about high oil prices, energy security, air quality and their carbon footprint," Darren Kell said on the telephone.

"At the same time, new technologies have improved the performance of electric vehicles, so they make better commercial sense, as well, so they tick all the boxes now."

Tanfield's 7.5-tonne Newton truck, launched in December with a price tag of 60,000 pounds, has a range of around 130 miles before recharging and a top speed of about 50 miles per hour (80 kpm).

The group has also recently launched a 9.0-tonne variant and a 3.5-tonne vehicle, aimed at the small van market. It is scheduled to shortly launch a 12-tonne vehicle.

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Banning the G-Wiz sums up Labour

By Boris Johnson

I mean come off it. Are we men or mice in this country? I have just overtaken two girls in the cleanest, greenest, sweetest four-wheeled self-propelled invention to hit the London streets since the first horseless carriage arrived at the end of the 19th century.

This machine is so simple and yet so revolutionary that it restores one's faith in scientific progress. Not since the windmills sprouted on the roofs of Notting Hill has there been a gizmo so deliriously trendy and yet so gentle to the upper air.

I am talking about the G-Wiz electric car. In case you have yet to spot one of these mobile rabbit hutches, they are manufactured in India out of plastic and rubber bands, and since they are powered by a battery they emit no more CO2 than a small dandelion. They are at once as green, and as hopeful for the future of capitalism, as a dollar bill.

You simply recharge them overnight like a mobile phone, and then you can pootle around town with the blissful satisfaction that you are not only saving money - at 1.3p per mile, the G-Wiz's efficiency is only exceeded by the bicycle.

You are saving time, since you can park almost anywhere you like. You can stick its little rump at right-angles to the kerb, and because it is electric you don't even have to pay to put it on a meter, and indeed you can hug yourself as you watch the traffic wardens sniffing around the car like baffled hyenas.

Above all, my friends, if you drive a G-Wiz you are saving the planet. It is a joyful contraption; it costs less than £7,000; it is eco-friendly, and gaining rapidly in popularity; and how, therefore, do you think it is viewed by the emanations of the British state?

They want to ban it, of course. No, wait. It's even wetter than that. They want Brussels to ban it for them! Some brainbox at the Department of Transport has spotted one of the 750 G-Wiz machines now on the streets of London, and has sucked his teeth. Hmm, he has said to himself. That looks too good to be true.

So they have done some tests, and "proved" that the G-Wiz would not be safe in a violent collision with an Eddie Stobart pantechnicon. How about that, eh? Unsafe? Of course it's unsafe. You don't have to use a test-crash dummy to see that. Just look at the thing.
To call it a golf cart would be an insult to the relatively cheetah-like qualities of the average golf cart. It has less grunt than a Flymo. It's a Fisher-Price toy of a car, a glorified Airfix model, and that is why it is so light, and that is why it can be driven by a battery at a roistering top speed of 42mph, and that is why it is no more noxious to the atmosphere than a baby's breath.

As I have lately discovered in my capacity as ace test-driver for GQ magazine, it is a wonderful machine, and it is almost as if the Government cannot bear the populace to have their hands on anything so wonderful and cheap and simple.

Transport minister Stephen Ladyman yesterday denounced the G-Wiz, and said it was not in conformity with EU regulations. This is not a car at all, he said. It must be reclassified as a quadricycle, and he wants Brussels to kick it off our streets.

Well, folks, how pathetic is that? It's as though we have got into some weird S & M relationship with the EU, in which ministers go around asking for correction. After years of ritual humiliation at the hands of Madame de Bruxelles, the fabled dominatrix, the man in Whitehall has become addicted to discipline.

Oooh, yes, they say. Tell us we've been naughty. Tell us we were wrong to let it on our streets. Tell us we should have classified it as a quadricycle! Madame de Bruxelles will obligingly crack her whip, and what is the result? The EU's vehicle homologation committee will meet. It will decide that, if the G-Wiz is to be classified as a car, it will need to undergo complete rigidification of the chassis. It will be fitted with airbags and side impact protection systems, and special pedestrian-friendly bumpers, and at the end of this horrifying surgical procedure - a kind of reverse liposuction - it will have doubled in weight, just as every other car on the roads is now far heavier than they were 10 years ago.

And these absurd and pointless safety measures will in turn generate two absurdities. The new obese G-Wiz would still be crushed like a beer can on collision with a cement mixer, and yet it will be so laden with safety equipment that it will be far more dangerous, on impact, to pedestrians.

Worse still, of course, it will be far harder and more expensive - and much less green - to make it move by battery alone. In fact, the whole concept will be more or less wrecked. That is why Mr Ladyman - Girly-man, more like! - should stop this drivelling appeal to Brussels to ban a brilliant invention.

He should listen to Oliver Letwin's excellent speech on Tuesday, in which he explained the Tory view of the relation between the citizen and the state. It is not just about taxing less, and running the economy efficiently - vital though those goals are. It's about seeing the catastrophic fiscal impact of having a bossy, regulatory approach, by which new laws and new interdictions endlessly necessitate the creation of new taxpayer-funded officials to enforce those laws.

It's therefore about treating people like grown-ups, and letting them take their own risks, without endlessly and expensively substituting the judgment and protection of the state. You have only to take one look at the plucky little G-Wiz to see that is no less (and no more) dangerous than a bicycle. We don't need the Department of Transport to tell us that, and we certainly don't need Brussels.

The customer can see that it is vulnerable; but he also knows that the G-Wiz fleet has travelled 20 million miles without a bad accident and with negligible CO2. Let him weigh it up himself.

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