[Macworld]

Post your comments for IPhone-controlled car to demo at Geneva Motor Show here

[dan12901]

A 150 kilowatt (200 horsepower) electric motor in your electric car, driven 1 hour a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, would consume 37,500 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. (1 horsepower = .75 kilowatts. A kilowatt-hour is 1 kilowatt of power consumed per hour. 150 kilowatts X 1 hours/day X 5 days/week X 50 weeks/yr = 37,500 kilowatt-hours/year).
To put that into perspective: According to the “2008 New England Household Electricity Data” report, the average household in New England consumes 7,142 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year.
http://www.eia.doe.g...eps/enduse/er01new-engtab1.html
Therefore, a 150 kilowatt electric motor powered car would consume more than five times the electricity the average household uses a year. The battery in an electric car is just like a flashlight battery: it runs out and needs to be recharged.
Where will we get all that extra electricity? Our national power grid is outdated and overloaded, and our electric production facilities are struggling to keep up with electric demand as it is. Wind power? Wind power is predicted to produce about 3% of our needs.

[frenchie16]

This reminds me of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, in which Dr. Horrible uses an iPhone to control a van.

[nielsm]

150 kilowatt is a rating of it's maximum power output (thinking flooring the gas). Assuming that the car would be driven flat out an hour a day is unrealistic & therefore not an accurate measurement of the real world usage of the car. For instance, the Chevy Volt has a 115kilowatt electric motor & a 16KWh battery which provides ~40 miles of range. That works out to about 2.5 miles per kilowatt hour. 40 miles is about an hour in mixed city/highway driving & assuming the iChange is as efficient as the Volt (it's perhaps more so with the adapting body), your numbers are off by nearly a factor of 10. The Volt would use 16KWH/day5 days/week 50 weeks = 4000KWH/year vs 37,500 KWH/year. This doesn't account for battery capacity deterioration nor any line-loss on both the charge & discharge cycles, but gives a better estimate of real world usage. Of course, how you drive will affect this, heavy foot drivers will probably use more power, while eco-coasters will use less. Now this is still roughly half the usage rate of the average home, so it's significant.

[nmpike]

Nielsm: Dirving an hour a day is totally realistic. The commute for most people is at lest 30 minutes one way... and thats with regular traffic. Starting and stopping will obviously affect the life of the car battery as well.
I think the car is a cool concept, but the iPhone part is just BS. If they put that much control on the iPhone (starting the car, etc), its a matter of time before its hacked and this car replaces the Toyota as the number one car to be stolen.
I admire the trying to get away from fossil fuels, but increasing other energy consumption isnt the way to do it at all.

[ElectroTech]

This analysis is based on the car using 100% of max power 100% of the time. It does not take 200KW to move a car at cruise speed and the average power consumption for the average family car is 17 HP or 12 KW. This power is used at about 90-95% efficiency compared to a gasoline powered car at about 35% efficiency.

Unfortunately the previous writer has a bit to learn when it comes to science and physics.

[nielsm]

My comment was NOT that an hour a day is unrealistic, simply that driving an hour a day with the pedal floored is unrealistic. Where I had an issue with your numbers was that you calculated based on maximum power rather than average power to determine your yearly usage. The point was that real-world driving tends to have a lot of cruising, which needs just enough power to overcome friction (air & ground) & parasitic drag in the drivetrain. This matches the idea of highway vs city fuel economy ratings on gas-powered vehicles. That's why I pulled up the Chevy Volt numbers. It's average efficiency is about 2.5 miles/KWH (from the sound of the iChange body adaption, it could be higher). That would be about 4000KWH/year based on 40 miles/day (10,000 miles/year) for the Volt. It's power potential is 115KW, but the issue with electrics isn't their power potential, rather their average power usage (just like gas powered).

What is interesting about that is assuming a 11.4c/kwh (national average Nov 2008) cost for electricity, your yearly energy costs for the electric car would be about $456. At $2/gallon you'd need a 44MPG car for the same annual energy cost.

I agree with you that the powergrid needs upgrades to take on a new drain for transport like this & certainly with more demand, the rate for electricity might go up from 11.4c/kwh. As you noted, changing the form of energy supply on vehicles simply changes the source of the energy. Unless the effort also reduces energy demands or uses energy which is renewable, it is trading one problem for another although there are other potential benefits to not being on fossil fuels.

[rab777hp]

the problem would be that people would get too distracted by the phone and get into accidents.

[dan12901]

Thank you "nielsm" for supplying information about "average" consumption. I couldn't find any source for that data. I have a file on my computer in which I maintain electric car arguments (for and against), and will update it with your information. Do you know where (URL) I could access that kind of data directly?
Another thought: over 50% of our electricity is generated by coal-fired plants. We all know and accept (now that Bush is no longer President) that coal is NOT "clean", and if on-going research is any indication, may never be. Given that coal-fired plants are a major source of pollution, do you not think an electric powered car is irresponsible?

[nielsm]

There are a few sources for the info:

http://gm-volt.com/2...range-modelled/

The 40 mile range is in city driving at the end-of-life of the battery. Although Chevy claims that would be the same throughout the lifetime due to the computer control limiting the range before switching to backup gas engine. If your commute involves more highway cruising, your range could improve.

http://gm-volt.com/2...clarifications/

Here they mention the theoretical battery capacity at 16KWh. Although, I was mistaken in that was the full theoretical capacity, not typical capacity. Typical capacity they rate at 12.8KWh. Actually, this is better than I thought & means the miles/KWh goes from 40/16 (2.5) to 40/12.8 (3.125 miles/KWh). In effect, in our discussion on a typical 10,000 mile/year scenario, the annual KWh usage would fall from 4000KWh to 3200KWh. Of course, these are pre-production numbers so they could change, but they are typical of current battery technology specs. As the Volt is nearly ready for release, I would presume the iChange would be using newer battery & powertrain technology & could have even better efficiency. Future batteries could offer an even better capacity to weight ratio & thus offer a reduced energy footprint.

I completely agree that coal is NOT clean & never will be. It may become cleaner, but until they have a process with no exhaust, clean is not an appropriate adjective for coal.

Ultimately the question of electric car versus gas is one of the pollution per mile. Remember, oil production is also not clean. Refineries release huge amounts of pollutants as part of the process & also require vehicles to transport the raw fuel from the source to the refineries & then onto the stations. So, if the pollution created in generating the 3200KWh, plus transmission pollution (I don't know of any direct, but the fuel for the plant needs to be transported as well) of electricity is lower than the combined exhaust from the vehicle itself, plus the gas production & distribution, then you are ahead of the game.

One could argue that by having the vehicles themselves be clean, the pollution is limited to the areas surrounding the electricity plants, which might be easier to manage than millions of vehicles polluting around the world.

In Europe, there is certainly a greater emphasis on clean production. Far more use of wind, tide & solar, plus nuclear (which aside from meltdown concerns does have a lower immediate pollution footprint). If the US can move more toward those technologies, we'd be in better shape. I remember reading a few months ago that modern solar technology was so advanced that if we used right of way area next to the highways in just a few southwest states for solar panels, we'd have enough capacity for the entire electricity demands of the country. It would also provide an interesting possibility.... pull off the side of the road & recharge directly.

[leicaman]

dan12901 said:

Quote

Where will we get all that extra electricity? Our national power grid is outdated and overloaded, and our electric production facilities are struggling to keep up with electric demand as it is. Wind power? Wind power is predicted to produce about 3% of our needs.

The Sun. Geothermal. Wind. You don't expect wind to remain static do you?

Geothermal is going to be significant. The Philippines gets 25 percent of its electricity from geothermal, and the US has vastly more geothermal reserves available to be tapped.

The Sun is a biggie too. We just have to get the scale of producing it down to a more affordable level. Imagine if we'd spent the money on that rather than Iraq?

[nielsm]

Another one is hydro. We already generate a lot of the energy for Las Vegas & the surrounding area from the Hoover dam. In Iceland for example, 26% of their power comes from geothermal & 74% from hydro. Granted it's a small country, but there are plenty of reusable mechanisms for power generation.

[Darkhorse]

Innovation, engineering, markets and business does not happen over night. It took Edison year to develop a light bulb, but that invention fundamentally changed urban life.
The electric automobile is not the final solution, it is just a good option and the best direction we currently have. Those of us old enough to have lived through the breakup of "Mother Bell" and the advent of personal communication understand this.
By building an auto that runs on stored electricity you take away the many limits of where and what that energy comes from. Electricity can be produced in many ways, as the previous comments have shown, not just one "convenient at the time" method. If the methods we choose for producing electricity today are shown to unexpected negative consequences, we will have options for changing our sources without strapping the our personal transportation system.
Are there problems to be solved? Yes! Will we get better at solving those issues? Yes, solving issues has brought us this far. Will the internal combustion engine be replaced immediately? That's unlikely, given that we that are very good at producing better ones. Will all of this happen over night or without getting started now? No...

[Darkhorse]

P.S. One good thing about linking your car to your cell phone is you are less likely to forget it or loose it... or more likely to be stranded. ;-)