Cars of the Future?

In the November 5 issue of The New Yorker magazine, environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert reviews two books that deal with the history and future of automobiles. To her credit, instead of simply repeating the techno-optimist line about cool gadgets with no worries, she puts things in perspective:

Consider what’s happening in India and China. As Carson and Vaitheeswaran [authors of Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future] point out, car ownership in both countries has been and still remains, by U.S. standards, almost absurdly low. There are nine personal vehicles per thousand eligible drivers in China and eleven for every thousand Indians, compared with 1,148 for every thousand Americans. But incomes in the two countries are rising so rapidly—the Chinese economy grew by eleven per cent last year and is expected to grow by the same amount this year—that millions of vehicleless families will soon be in a position to buy automobiles.

Assuming that incomes continue to rise, in a few years tens of millions of families will be buying their first cars, and eventually hundreds of millions. (To satisfy increasing demand in India, the country’s second-largest auto manufacturer, Tata Motors, is set to start producing a four-door known as the one-lakh car—a lakh is a hundred thousand rupees—that will sell for the equivalent of twenty-five hundred dollars.) Were China and India to increase their rates of car ownership to the point where per-capita oil consumption reached just half of American levels, the two countries would burn through a hundred million additional barrels a day. (Currently, total global oil use is eighty-six million barrels a day.) Were they to match U.S. consumption levels, they would require an extra two hundred million barrels a day.

It’s difficult to imagine how such enormous quantities of oil could be found, but, if they could, the result would be catastrophe. “Just consider the scale of the potential problem—for instance, the effect on global warming of seven hundred and fifty million more cars in India and China, belching carbon dioxide,” Carson and Vaitheeswaran write.

So, what's to be done? Make people stop buying and driving cars? That's not likely to happen. How about, for starters, making cars more fuel efficient? As Kolbert reminds us:

It’s worth noting that the average new car sold in the U.S. today gets twenty miles to the gallon, which is virtually the same as it got in 1993, when the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles was launched, and—remarkably enough—less than Henry Ford’s Model T got when it went on the market, ninety-nine years ago last month.

And then she adds:

It now seems clear...that car design could be radically improved. Already the technology exists to more or less double fuel efficiency. (A great deal could be accomplished simply by trimming the weight of the average vehicle, which has increased by almost thirty per cent in the last two decades.) The failure of the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles notwithstanding, tripling fuel efficiency also seems feasible. Such gains would have a huge impact in terms of oil consumption—passenger vehicles in the U.S. now account for forty per cent of the country’s oil use, and ten per cent of the world’s—and greenhouse-gas production.

But improving gas mileage will take us only so far. Once the Chinese and the Indians really start driving, doubled or even tripled fuel efficiency won’t suffice.

Oh, boy. Now put this all together in your mind with the problems we discussed last week about global energy shortages and increasing damage to the ecosphere.

In her article, Kolbert sums things up by combining all these issues:

Ultimately, designing the car of the future is such a daunting challenge because it’s bigger even than cars. As anyone who owns a BlackBerry or a cell phone or a flat-screen TV knows, technological change, when it comes, can come fantastically rapidly. But when we charge our video iPod nanos we are drawing power that, for the most part, is still generated as it was in Thomas Edison’s day.

It’s true that hydrogen cars, which the Bush Administration and the Big Three claim to be working on, don’t need gasoline—the “freedom” in FreedomCAR is supposed to represent “freedom from dependence on imported oil”—but they do need hydrogen, which has to be produced using energy from somewhere. If that energy comes from, say, burning coal, as nearly half the electricity generated in the U.S. does, then the puzzle hasn’t been solved; it’s just been rearranged. The same catch applies to plug-in cars and cars that run on ethanol. (Ethanol made from corn takes almost as much energy to produce as it yields.)

If someone, somewhere, comes up with a source of power that is safe, inexpensive, and for all intents and purposes inexhaustible, then we, the Chinese, the Indians, and everyone else on the planet can keep on truckin’. Barring that, the car of the future may turn out to be no car at all.

Will molecular manufacturing arrive soon enough to provide a "source of power that is safe, inexpensive, and for all intents and purposes inexhaustible"? On CRN's Benefits page, we write:

Nanotech makes solar energy feasible.

The main source of power today is the burning of carbon-containing fuels. This is generally inefficient, frequently non-renewable, and dumps carbon dioxide and other waste products (including radioactive substances from coal) into the atmosphere.

Solar energy would be feasible in most areas of the globe if manufacturing and land were sufficiently cheap and energy storage were sufficiently effective. Solar electricity generation depends on either photovoltaic conversion, or concentrating direct sunlight. The former works, although with reduced efficiency, on cloudy days; the latter can be accomplished without semiconductors.

In either case, not much material is required, and mechanical designs can be made simple and fairly easy to maintain. Sun-tracking designs can benefit from cheap computers and compact actuators. Energy can be stored efficiently for several days in relatively large flywheels built of thin diamond and weighted with water. Smaller energy storage systems can be built with diamond springs, providing a power density similar to chemical fuel storage and much higher than today's batteries. Water electrolysis and recombination provide scalable, storable, transportable energy. However, there is some cost in efficiency and in complexity of technology to deal safely with large-scale hydrogen storage or transportation.

Solar solutions can be implemented on an individual, village, or national scale. The energy of direct sunlight is approximately 1 kW per square meter. Dividing that by 10 to account for nighttime, cloudy days, and system inefficiencies, present-day American power demands (about 10 kW per person) would require about 100 square meters of collector surface per person. Multiplying this figure by a population of 325 million (estimated by the US Census Bureau for 2020) yields a requirement for approximately 12,500 square miles of area to be covered with solar collectors. This represents 0.35% of total US land surface area. Much of this could be implemented on rooftops, and conceivably even on road surfaces.

There is hope, then, for emerging technologies -- especially molecular manufacturing --to solve the energy crisis, help build the car of the future, and conceivably even to begin addressing climate change. But it's not going to happen without concerted effort and substantial funding.

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog

Comments

[Brian Wang]

China has 60 million electric bikes and scooters already. The 500 million non-powered cyclists are mostly converting to electric bikes and scooters. The fastest electric scooters can go 60-150mph (killacycle).

72 volt bicycles can go 40 mph.

For China and India the limitations on the construction of roads and parking in cities will limit the number of cars that can be added.

Electric power generation (nuclear, wind and batteries for vehicles can work already. Folding electric bikes would integrate well with mass transit.

By 2012-2015 most of the cyclists in China will likely be converted to electric cycles and scooters. It is the better option for China and one that is already well ahead in being adopted. 6-10 times more than cars.

As batteries get better then bigger cycles and cars could be produced. There should also be better helmets and safety gear. The electric bikes also need to have synthesized noise as pedastrians do not hear them sometimes.

Taipei, Taiwan has already led the way with high scooter to car ratios. It is better for high density asian cities. Traffic would not work otherwise. Plus it is better for the environment.

[Tom Craver]

I think the US could change to do a lot of our commuting via electric-assist bike. But we'd have to remove some roadblocks. We've made it very easy to commute by car - except during rush hour. And we've banned bikes from the highways.

Maybe instead of mega-expensive "light rail" schemes, we could build sheltered all-weather bike-ways.

Build them right next to high-congestion highways, so the motorists sitting stalled in traffic can see the bikes whizzing past.

As eBike traffic picks up, steal lanes from the highway to expand space for the bikes.

[John B]

Brian - Doesn't that 'better for the environment' comment only apply if the electricity generated is cleaner than the internal combustion engines it replaces?

-JB

[Brian Wang]

there are plenty of comparisons of coal generated electricity for electric vehicles vs combustion engines.
http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/writing/Samples/policy/voytishlong.html

NOX and SOX need to be controlled. There are scrubbers for those pollutants.

However, electric bikes and scooters use about 20% or less of the electricity of electric cars.

Plus for china and other places it is better to clean up generation with nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal and hydro.

[Brian Wang]

another study is more favorable to electrics
http://www.electroauto.com/info/pollmyth.shtml

[John B]

Given that there appears to be quite a bit of evidence regarding the environmental problems with coal and oil fueled electricity production, I'm rather skeptical of the latter paper given that it clearly has ulterior motives - a pro-electric car paper from the "Electric Vehicle Association of Greater Washington, D.C" is pretty much expected. An example of this is their note three, quoted here:

> "Bob Brandt goes one step further stating, "There is no emission
> from an electric vehicle and, until there exists an appreciable number of
> them they do not impact in any way the emissions from the power plant
> used to generate the electricity." Bob Brandt, Build Your Own Electric
> Car, (Tab Books, Blue Ridge Summit, PA, 1994), p. 32."

Strikes me as a singularly biased prospective, that.

-JB