[cut n paste from my blog]
I have also been thinking about the electric car today. Whats the biggest draw back to the electric car? I dont know about others but to me it would be the batteries running out when I am 40 miles or so from home and one of the reasons the batteries wouldnt last so long is that they have to be used for: Running the car motors, heating when needed, fans and/or air conditioning, windowscreen wipers well you get the picture. Anyway I read about an electric car that has the drive motors on the back wheels and on the front wheel it has three alternaters.
now this is good and the article said that the car was capable of 500 miles per charge (sorry cant find the article for the moment will post link if I find it again). We have the hybrids that everyone is talking about now but as good as they are I dont think its the total answer. So why has no one thought to put a 50 cc petrol or even better diesel (we could run it on bio-diesel then) generator? How much is a 50 cc engine going to cost to run? it wouldnt even have to run all the time but when it was running the exhaust and engine coolant could be used to run the heating for the car and vise versa when it was needed to heat the car it could be used to keep the battery topped up. The engine could be controlled by a computer to automatically start and stop as needed it could even be left running while the car was resting to make sure the batteries where kept fully charged (if thats even necessary). The bonus to this is that we could shove a bigger, more powerful motor into the car and god forbid we had an occasion when the batteries drained down so far we had to pull over you just leave it running and go for a coffee then come out to a battery with more charge than we left it.
So car makers how about it I would buy one if it was cheap enough.
Comments?