GeoOrbital Quick Change Electric Bike

How about an electric bike solution that can be installed in 60 seconds?

Weird music, but cool video and product:

GeoOrbital Video

GeoOrbital Quick Change Electric Bike

Electra Meccanica Solo - A New Standard in Personal Transportation?

With Toyota, Tesla and the rest, electric cars have done well in the last few years.  But what about a low-cost practical solution to the typical short range commute? Has Electra Meccanica found that sweet spot in personal transportation at $15,000 and under 1000 lbs?

I guess we'll be finding out in the next few months:

Electra Meccanica

TopSpeed's Review

CES: Motorized unicycle, anyone?

Originally posted on 01-16-12:

I do love a minimalist solution, and these guys I met at CES have definitely created one.

They say it's easier to ride than it looks, which is good because it looks difficult; until they make it look easy.  Still, I wonder how comfortable it is after an hour of standing in such a rigid fashion?

It's right out of the Jetsons, and at only $1495 and $2295!

Cool videos:


SoloWheel


08-16-2016 Another Review and Update


Another one:

Ryno Bike

MPG Record - 26,100

MPG Record - 26,100 MPG

Video

Very cool minimal transportation - a fully enclosed electric / pedal car:

The Amazing Bike-Car Invention

Wheela - A New Standard in Minimal Transportation

Wheela - A New Standard in Minimal Transportation - push or electric, 6 to 9 lbs, $300 to $600.  Be the first one on your block to Wheela:

Arcimoto SRK 8

There seems to be a shortage of good entry level electric cars, perhaps until now.  The Arcimoto is just over a thousand pounds, gets to 60 MPH in 7.5 seconds, go 80 miles on a charge and, sell from under $12K.  If this vehicle can be delivered with this spec and price, it will make a significant advancement for local transportation:

Arcimoto SRK 8

Minimal Transportation

08-09-15 A laptop version:

WalkCar



03-23-15 - And another:

OneWheel

10-27-10 - The Yike Bike has been trumped!  Not as powerful or fast, but quite impressive in it's minimalism.

Video Link

Liquid Piston's New Engine Design

It's fascinating to see the various ways of converting liquid fuel to horsepower.  The Otto piston has long dominated, but is famously inefficient.  Wankel was a nice challenge, but suffered from low compression and its oil squeegee valves burned more than they wiped.

The LiquidPiston guys set out solve the problems of both designs, and they may be getting close with this inverse Wankel approach.  The picture above is of the older X1 design and the text at this link is distracting, but watch the video for a quick visualization:

Autoevolution on the LiquidPiston X Mini Engine

Here's a much better presentation of the technology:

Gizmag on the LiquidPiston X2 Engine

And here is a description of their early prototype:

MIT Technology Review of the X0 LiquidPiston

It will be interesting to see how this technology evolves.

Another weight and space efficient engine:

The Duke Axial

A better movie

Amazing New Air Car - It's NOT About the Air!

Updates:

09-18-14 - Another radical light car for Paris.  This one is 2100 lbs and uses Air/Hybrid to get 141 MPG.  Are the French on a roll?

01-25-13 - Peugeot Cirtoen to Introduce Compressed Air Hybrid by 2016

09-07-12 AIRPod

09-07-12 Tata AIRPod


07-05-11 - Tata Air Powered Car to be Introduced in India

02-26-09 - Yet one more way to use compressed air for braking recovery from ETH Zurich

First posted 01-19-08:







And it's not even about the car!

(note - whoever owned the MDI page when I posted this blog has diverted it to a new investment group and broken some of the links below. I have redirected them to the French or Guy pages as well as possible for now - thanks to Chris from Future Net.)

Every now and then a an idea comes along that will change the world - and gets mostly ignored. Some of you have heard me talking about this new air powered car from MDI (Moteur Developpment International) in France which is now to be manufactured by Tata Motors of India.

MDI did a press release a few weeks back and it was handled like, well, another press release. The automotive press paraphrased a few paragraphs, but I wonder if they actually THOUGHT ABOUT what they wrote?

And when Tata Motors introduced their more conventional yet inexpensive Nano at the Detroit Auto Show last week, it got amazing coverage, but not ONE mention of this new air car to be manufactured by the very SAME company!

The highly touted Tata Nano is a cute little bug that will get more than 50 MPG - cool. But the MDI OneCat which is about the same size will go more than 3 TIMES farther on the same gallon of fuel! Did no one actually READ the spec sheet on the OneCAT?

To be fair, the objective of the Nano is low price, not mileage. And the OneCat is much lighter, which helps, but surprisingly, that's not the key to it's mileage advantage. Here's how they do it...

As almost everyone knows, the standard internal combustion engine is only about 30% efficient under the very best of conditions. This means 70% of the energy in a gallon of gasoline leaves the car as wasted heat.

The only heat that produces power is that narrow band of highest temperature that causes rapid expansion of air when the spark plug fires. Once the piston reaches the bottom of it's cycle, all the lower temperature energy from that cycle is wasted and must be pumped out the exhaust pipe.

If you add MORE heat at the point of ignition (higher octane), you get more power. But Carnot and his second law of thermodynamics limits us from using any of the heat BELOW the temperature of ignition. THAT is the primary reason for the INefficiency of the internal combustion engine. But what if we COULD use ALL of that heat?



CAT - Compressed Air Technology

Guy Negre of Formula 1 fame and his company, Moteur Developpment International have spent the last 14 years developing a new type of engine for automobiles.

Compressed Air Technology has been described as using air as fuel, but that's not quite right. The air works more like a battery. Guy's design actually uses a carbon-fiber air tank with up to 300 times normal atmospheric pressure driving a piston to give the car a range of 100 Km. You can think of this system as a standard compressor motor and air tank - except it's running backwards. The air tank drives the compressor, instead of the other way around.

So far, no big deal. Any advantage is a matter of strength, weight and volume per unit of energy stored in the "battery" - the carbon-fiber tanks helps some. But if a short range compressed air car is all they had, it wouldn't be very impressive. The next refinement is the key and I now believe it was created in response to the problem of freezing the engine as the air was decompressed. Whenever air pressure drops from 300 Bar to 1, the gas laws say the heat in that original volume is now spread out over a much greater area thus dropping the temperature. Guy's "fix" to this problem had a side-effect that I believe to be the biggest advancement in thermal energy extraction since the invention of the Otto-cycle in 1860! It effectively uses "wasted heat".





Bi-Energy Breakthrough

Guy Negre's brilliant innovation is to add a small fuel burner between the air tank and the motor. The heat from this burner not only keeps the engine from freezing up, it also extends the range for the compressed air tank by increasing the pressure of the air even more on it's way to the motor. Properly insulated, this burner could approach 100% conversion efficiency of the burned fuel. Here's the reason...

Small amounts of heat are not enough to turn over a reciprocating motor. But when you add a compressed air tank, it provides a pressure bias great enough to drive the motor on it's own. Now add the burner. Per the gas laws, the pressure increase is proportional to the heat added - it doesn't require a critical temperature of ignition! You could run it tepid or boiling - ANY heat adds power. It's just a matter of how much.

If you double the burn rate, you'll double the added expansion. Since there's no point of ignition, there's no critical temperature before this energy is extracted. ANY heat added by a burner (or other source) will simply add proportional expansion and energy extraction. Theoretically, most of the energy from a gallon of gasoline (or stack of firewood) could be used to drive the motor.



Check the spec sheet above. I assume these are actual measurements. The OneCAT will go 100 Km on air alone, but another 700 Km on only 10.5 (1.5 Liters per 100 Km x 7) liters of fuel! That works out to almost 157 MPG!



More Than JUST an Amazing New Car

MDI has a good chance of creating an amazingly efficient little car, and that's cool. But what's REALLY exciting are all the other potential industrial applications.

Considering generation and line losses when producing electricity, it may even now be more efficient to run Bi-Energy motors at the site of the application instead of buying electricity. Or we could boost mechanical power from solar heating. Or hot sewer water for that matter! ANY source of heat could be used. It's just a matter of degree and effectiveness.

OK. You'll still need electricity to provide the compressed air bias, but the rest of the energy would be more efficiently extracted - the hotter, the better. What about recycling the heat from air conditioners to drive their OWN motors? I'm not talking about perpetual motion here. There's no free ride. It's just that the heat is no longer has to be totally wasted. This approach provides an excellent possibility of dramatically increased efficiency in anything that needs a rotating motor and has wasted heat available. (Note - MDI was WAY ahead of me - I just found this link on their site... Further Applications - WOW!)

These ideas are worth more than just a press release.

It's a whole new way of thinking about energy!


More Air Car Energy Links...

Guy Negre Page

MDI and Indranet

Dr Louis Arnoux Interview

Future Net

ZevCat

Wiki


Others are picking up on using waste heat in this fashion - The VGT RoundEngine

06-20-20 Liquid Air Battery

VW Redefines "Car" With A 261-MPG Diesel Hybrid

As you can read, light efficient cars have been one of my favorite topics for a long time:

07-04-06 1974 VW Dasher

Update 03-06-13:

The Volkswagen XL1 just debuted in Geneva and claims a range of 261 mpg, with a curb weight of about 1,750 pounds. Its coefficient of drag is extremely low at 0.189. It’s powered by a 47-hp, two-cylinder turbodiesel paired with a 27-hp electric motor. VW says it will make 250 examples with a price near $100,000

Autoblog Roadtest

Top Gear First Drive: the VW XL1

Update 01-25-11:

Formula XL1 Concept 

First posted on 02-18-10:

Finally!

261-MPG Diesel Hybrid 

09-16-14 - Renault's 880 pound answer to the VW XL1!

09-18-14 - Another radical light car for Paris.  This one is 2100 lbs and uses Air/Hybrid to get 141 MPG.  Are the French on a roll?

Back to the Future with Motorcycles

When I was a kid, our family had a number of small motorcycles for trail riding.  They were light, agile and got great gas mileage.  My favorite was a 1965 Yamaha Trailmaster 80.  I spend lots of time exploring the mountains of Norther California on that "bike".

Unfortunately, the same thing happened to trailbikes that happened to cars - over the years, they got heavier. Then motors got bigger to carry that extra weight, which made everything heavier still.  Unlike cars, this weight had more impact on handling, especially on rough ground.  It's not easy getting a 300 lb motorcycle over a log.

I'm still waiting for a modern version of the 1978 VW Rabbit which weighed 1880 pounds dry.  With modern technology it should be able to get 100 MPG.  In the mean-time, it looks like Yamaha may be thinking the same thing.  It's only a concept, but it's headed in the right direction:

Yamaha shows retro lightweight 125cc motorcycle that gets 220 mpg

Bring it on!

Minicars Get Maxied

Posted to Car and Driver Forum on 07-04-06

Csaba Csere, you hit the nail on the head with your August Column, "Minicars? I don't see no stinking minicars". But you stopped short of defining the problem. And you didn't clarify the solution. Still, your examples pointed us in the right direction.

Just like the forties changed the way cars looked, the seventies changed the way they worked. The gas crisis gave us the first major advancement in functional body design since the twenties.

Like you, I recall the mid-seventies well. Until then I owned American cars and loved the torque of the small block V-8s. Then I compared my Chevy to the specs for the 1974 VW Dasher. I was impressed. When I traded up, I discovered how much weight was a factor in acceleration, handling, braking and economy - even with less power. I became addicted to the idea of light and efficient cars.

The Dasher was so much fun, I bought a Scirocco when it came out. It was a fantastic ride at the time. Two years later I traded in the Dasher for a 1978 Rabbit for my wife. At 1880 pounds, it got 38 MPG with reasonable performance.

Giorgetto Giugiaro made history with these little cars in creating an excellent light-weight package that still held five people when needed. The VW Rabbit was state of the art in 1978. Unfortunately, art doesn't advance it's state at a steady pace.

Later I bought a 1985 Honda CR-V. It weighted only 2000 lbs and had lots of room. Twice, I actually hauled a standard sized refrigerator (no I couldn't get the tail-gate closed). This car also got mileage in the high thirties, but not better.

And now Toyota, Honda and Nissan are all introducing new economy cars. But they still only 38 MPG! And Nissan will struggle to get that.

What's the deal? Has there been no technical progress in the last 30 years? No, that's not it. Engines and transmissions are definitely more efficient. Could it be the few hundred extra pounds these "small" cars have gained? Yep. The improved drive-train efficiency has been totally eclipsed by the increasing weight of the cars. New does not always mean improved.

Think what could be done if we dropped window lifts, electric door locks and butt warmers. Then scale the whole car back so everything can be lighter. Focus on active safety instead of building tanks that tend to roll over anyway.

If Honda combined the body of the 1985 CR-V with today's drive-trains, they could be getting 50 MPG instead of only 38 in that little fat Fit. Don't get me wrong. Not withstanding a name borrowed from a rabid dog, Honda has done a wonderful job on Fit's package. They get a lot in a reasonable space. It just WEIGHTS too much.

Another "Mini" that's been "maxied" is the one from BMW. A car that small should weight half as much, and get twice the mileage. They could have at least IMPROVED on the original after all this time.

And why did Toyota replace the Echo weighing 2055 lbs with the Yaris which weighs 2326 pounds? Two hundred pounds LIGHTER than the Echo and it would have come in at 50 MPG instead of the high thirties. It may not be obvious, but 271 pounds can make a LOT of difference in such a small car.

It seems these masters of auto technology have forgotten the basic purpose of a car - to move a human from one place to another. How many tons of steel does it take to deliver a 150 pound person? With all the new light-weight materials at hand, we should have an effective ONE thousand pound car by now.

I also owned a 1975 MG Midget (I told you I got excited about light cars). At only 1300 pounds, it was so much fun to drive, I forget the mileage. One evening I left the lights on and had to push start it in a 30' driveway. Yes, I got it started... AND stopped before hitting the garage door. Try THAT with their Yaris, Fit or Versa.

But it's not all bad news. Lotus has shown the way forward in the sports segment with the new Exige. Colin Chapman would be proud to see them living out his creed - "Simplify and add lightness". WHEN will the rest get a clue? And more importantly, WHY haven't they done it yet?

Do they own too much oil stock? Would it upstage their complex hybrid solutions? Are the Fed safety trolls just too hard to deal with? There are lots of good questions at the heart of this problem. And we're about to be in desperate need of some good answers.

Someone has to lead the charge.

Csaba, you have their ear.

Tell 'em who we are.

10-29-09 Here's some good data on weight effects of milage...

Drill into the PDF from the link above. Also included are the weight's effects on performance, as well as showing how much weight DOESN'T matter much once you exceed 65 MPH. Great stuff.

04-28-10 Lotus comes out swinging for lighter, more efficient vehicles 


Finally, someone conclusively demonstrates the key to automobile efficiency is light weight - the video says it all.

09-16-10 Ultra-Light Cars Reap Rewards of X Prize 

06-26-13  New VW Golf TDI BlueMotion is 'most fuel-efficient ever' with 73.5 mpg

03-11-14 Will Citroen be the first to build a fuel-efficient car? 

12-26-14 Suzuki Alto Goes Back to Basics at 1345 lbs and 104 MPG

X-Prize Winner : Gas Powered Edison2

11-10-10 Interesting how the car that won the X-Prize was named the Edison2, yet is gas powered.  They tried electric, but discovered all the had to do was get the weight down to 830 lbs and success was theirs.  So do we really need electric / hybrid complexity?  Or will just doing more with less be the ultimate energy transportation solution?

06-12-13 Finally an X-prize contender headed for production? - Aptera

Wave-Disk Engine Advances Efficiency?

All very nice, but we need more details!

Wave-Disk Engine

Wiki Wave-disk Entry

King Tut and Colin Chapman

This picture made me realize how minimal transportation can be.  In Tut's time, horses were too small for a man to ride.  It took TWO of them just to get pulled around.  Which makes this chariot maybe the best example of Colin Chapman's, "Simplify and add lightness".

King Tut's Ride

Now, if we can just get a modern low-cost car under 2000 lbs.

Pull to the side, Segway. YikeBike Coming Through

Remember all the hype just before Segway was introduced? It was suppose to change forever the way people traveled. Except for a few mall cops and airport security, the future hasn't turned out quite the way they planned.

While not very good for standing around, the YikeBike may actually live up to Segway's hope of useful personal transportation...

YikeBike in Action 09-22-09

YikeBike Review 04-08-10


Engadget YikeBike Review 01-19-11

OPOC Engine

I have to agree, this IS a radically new type of engine. Click through to watch it run. It will be fun to see how it develops. Set your Google to alert.

A radically new type of engine - OPOC

"Simplify and Add Lightness"

I've written here before how lowering weight is the single greatest factor to improve acceleration, braking, handling, price and economy of operation in an automobile.

Here is a great example of what can be done if you follow Colin Chapman's advice and, "Simplify and add lightness". This British movie and review is impressive. Check it out.

Tata Nano Review Film

There is hope for rational design.

The Virtue of Lightness

You've probably heard me quote Colin Chapman when he said, "Simplify, then add lightness".

We are greatly in need of this idea right now for fuel efficiency, but it's always fun to see the concept applied to performance as well. At only 1543 lbs the Aspid has over 400 HP.

Know of anything else that will get you to sixty miles per hour in 2.8 seconds?

Yum!


For best of blog... Sudden.net