Electric and hybrid cars, Difference between electric and hybrid cars

Electric cars, hybrid cars: Difference between electric and hybrid cars. Why hybrid car is better then all electric cars.
Batteries: Hybrid car batteries recharge while you are driving. There is no need for plug in where, as after certain miles, electric vehicle batteries need recharge. Most electric cars need a recharge every 50-100 miles. Speed: Electric cars could go only up to 50-60 miles/hr where as hybrid cars can go much faster then that.
Size: For maximum efficiency electric cars are small whereas we have SUVs in hybrid cars.Price: Electric cars are cheaper then hybrid carsSince long, people have been working hard to improve the batteries for electric cars. Still electric cars can only travel a fraction of distance traveled by gasoline cars. Hybrid car is the result of efforts put by people in developing electric cars and having faith in cars powered by electric motors. Hybrid car development is only a change in tactics due to failure in improvement of efficient batteries. Hybrid cars could be defined as an electric car assisted with a gasoline engine.

Hybrid cars: Why sales are growing at a slower pace.

Every year 15 million new vehicles are sold. Last year 88,000 hybrid cars were sold in United States. This year the projected figure for sales of hybrid cars is 220,000 as per estimates done by J.D. Power and Associates. Why people are not willing to buy hybrid cars in large numbers? Lets take a look at some of the possible reasons:
1. Speed. Hybrid cars are not so fast as cars that run on only gas. Why? Technology Hybrid cars do not have high speed as in gas only cars. They run on battery assisted small engines. Theoretically, I am not sure if hybrid cars could match the speed of the gas only cars in near future.
2. Not enough advertisements/promotion for hybrid cars. You start your TV sets or listen to the radio, you get a lot of ads for monster, gas guzzlers suv and cars run by only gas. The ads ratio could be 1 in 10 for hybrid cars as compared to general cars.
3. Lack of awareness. Govt. is trying its best to promote hybrid cars by making public aware of the benefits for hybrid cars. California and Virginia are allowing hybrid cars in car-pool lanes though there is no federal approval till date for such policy. However, is this enough? Why so delay in approval of such policy. As I think, the following steps could be taken:

a) Federal approval for different incentives for people buying hybrid cars
b) Heavy tax incentives for hybrid cars buyers
c) Higher registration fees for purchase of non-hybrid vehicles.
d) Free parking for Hybrid cars e) Set an example by replacing all the state owned cars to hybrid cars
4. Fuel prices are high but manageable. This could seem vague but I am of the opinion that increase the prices of the fuel to something like $3+. I know I would not have many takers for this but can't help. Extreme steps taken now could prove beneficial tomorrow.
5. Lack of Choice If a person wants to buy a hybrid cars he has got very less choice as of now.
He has to select between a few. Now, if hybrid cars will not go neck to neck with general cars, it will be difficult that carmakers would speed much in research for hybrid cars due to less demand. Now what about something like state sponsored research for hybrid cars.

6. Consider Diesel
Diesel vehicles operate more efficiently than their gasoline counterparts, because they use higher compression ratios and higher combustion temperatures. The efficiency advantage is enhanced by the fact that a gallon of diesel fuel contains about 10 percent more energy than a gallon of gasoline. These two factors help modern direct-injection diesels achieve roughly 50 percent higher fuel economy than gasoline engines. That’s a big reason why diesel vehicles now account for nearly half of all new vehicle sales in Europe. Diesel still carries a black smoke stigma for many American car buyers, but that’s changing. For now, there are only a handful of diesels, some of which are not available in all 50 states because of strict emission standards at the local level. But expect greater choice in diesel engine vehicles in the next few years.

7. Avoid Gas-Guzzling Vehicle Options
After you select a vehicle segment, and a specific make and model, you’re still not done. If you have a choice between two-wheel drive or four-wheel drive versions, opt for the two-wheel drive. When is the last time you drove a stick shift? Going with manual transmission will earn fuel economy points. And remember that anything adding weight to the base vehicle will result in lower fuel efficiency. Rooftop luggage racks, kayak holders, and ski racks add weight and reduce aerodynamics.

8. New Beats Used
As your car ages, so can its ability to squeeze more miles out of a gallon of gasoline. If your budget allows, purchase new rather than used. Newer cars are more likely to use advanced technologies, such as camless systems, low friction lubricants, idle-stop, and cylinder deactivation, which shuts down cylinders when not needed. Of course, late model used cars can also feature many of these technologies—and can be a great value. Older cars should not be dismissed out of hand. Purchasing used simply means that you need to be careful that the vehicle has been well maintained.

9. Plan Your Shift to Low-Resistance Tires
Don’t just kick the tires. Think about swapping them out with a low-resistance option. The tire offered by the manufacturer is a compromise designed for the widest range of customers. Fuel efficiency aficionados know that tires with lower rolling resistance have a big impact on mpg. See if the dealership will sweeten the deal by making the switch for you. Decreasing the resistance by 20 percent could raise mileage by as much as five percent. No matter what kind of tire you use, proper inflation is essential. For every three pounds below recommended pressure, fuel economy goes down by about one percent.

10. Maintain Your Investment with Good Driving Habits
The EPA window labels say “your mileage may vary” for a reason. The way you drive is every bit as important as what you drive. First of all, don’t speed. Driving 65 mph instead of 75 mph will increase your fuel economy by about 10 percent. In addition, avoid "jack rabbit" starts and anticipate stops. Flooring the gas pedal and speeding up to a red light is a waste of gas. After spending your hard-earned dollars on a fuel efficient vehicle, you don’t want to see your investment get wasted on unnecessary trips to the pumps.

Top 10 Tips For Buying

1. Analyze Your Needs
Before you get your mind set on any particular make or model, it’s important to take a step back and consider why you drive. Are you looking for a car primarily to commute to and from work? Or is it a second car for quick errands around town? How many passengers do you usually carry? Shopping for a car that meets—but does not exceed—those real needs is an essential first step toward fuel efficiency.

2. Choose a Right-Sized Vehicle
After an honest self-assessment of how you’ll use your car or truck, it’s time to think about the vehicle size (commonly referred to as “segment”): SUV, Minivan, Pickup Truck, Crossover/Wagon, Midsize Sedan, Compact, or Subcompact. Why is segment important? Because when it comes to fuel efficiency, size matters. Bigger vehicles weigh more than smaller ones—and vehicle weight is the single biggest setback for fuel efficiency. A heavier vehicle needs more power, and thus uses more fuel to accelerate. You’ll be way ahead of the fuel economy game if you “right-size” your vehicle.

3. Choose a Right-Sized Engine
You might imagine yourself as Jeff Gordon or Danika Patrick on your morning commute, but the amount of horsepower required for your daily needs is well below NASCAR standards. In almost all cases, a smaller engine will result in greater fuel economy. Giving up a few horsepower can mean serious gains in fuel efficiency. The key stats are the number of cylinders and the amount of engine displacement. For maximum fuel efficiency, select a four-cylinder vehicle over a six-cylinder, or a V6 over a V8. With engine displacement, as in golf, low scores win.

4. Research the MPG of Specific Models
With a short list of a few models in hand, you can boil down your research to one statistic: the window-sticker MPG rating supplied by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Be aware that EPA numbers are likely to be inflated compared to your real-world mileage. Nonetheless, those numbers are very useful as points of comparison. As you walk through the showroom, take note of the MPG ratings of the various vehicles on your shopping list.

5. Consider a Hybrid
When gas-electric hybrids were first introduced to the American market, they were viewed as science projects. No longer. In 2007, more than 300,000 shoppers are expected to buy a Toyota Prius, Honda Civic Hybrid, Ford Escape Hybrid or one of about a dozen available hybrids. The growing popularity of hybrids is directly related to the technology’s ability to save fuel. In any segment—from compacts to SUVs—hybrids are at the top of the list for fuel efficiency. You’re likely to pay a little bit more for the hybrid system; however, many consumer information organizations, including Consumer Reports, report payback periods on the premium of less than five years for the most efficient hybrids.

Top 10 Safety Features for the Future

In your next car accident, a circuit may be just as crucial to your survival as a safety belt. The seat belt, made mandatory by Congress in the 1960s, set off a revolutionary leap in automobile safety and dramatically reduced lives lost in crashes. Now, a second safety revolution is in the offing. The NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) has implemented a standard making electronic stability control (ESC) equipment mandatory in all vehicles, estimating that the universal adoption of this technology by 2011 will save 10,000 lives a year.

ESC, already standard on many luxury vehicles and optional on a growing number of mainstream models, is only one among a slew of new auto-safety advancements designed to prevent accidents rather than just protect occupants from them. Most of these newfangled features are microchip based and build on the increasing electronic sophistication of vehicles. Not all have reached the state engineers call “technological maturity,” meaning they work dependably and affordably but are still being perfected.

Last fall, Nicole R. Nason, the administrator of the NHTSA, told a Congressional committee that electronic technologies were poised for the first time to make as important a contribution to safety as physical measures such as seat belts and bumpers. “I believe the most promising gains in highway safety are going to come from the deployment of crash-avoidance technologies,” she said. “Today the technology exists not only to ameliorate the severity of a crash, but to help prevent it outright.” Among these technologies, Nason listed forward-collision warning systems, lane-departure warning and blind-spot warning devices. “But the crash-avoidance technology that holds the greatest promise is electronic stability control,” she said.

For all such new ideas, there has been a typical route: invention, adoption and legislation. Increasingly, new auto-safety features will not be thought of as individual options and gadgets but as part of a common set of ears and eyes linked by a brain — or at least the automotive equivalent of the office’s local area network.

The features are already being sold this way. Instead of picking individual gadgets, buyers will generally find it easier to choose full safety options packages. Lexus, for instance, is emphasizing the way its safety features work as part of a common system by marketing its smart cruise control, lane-departure warning and ESC technologies into a single package called Lexus Vehicle Dynamic Integrated Management.

The integration of such systems and the ceding of brake, throttle and — eventually — steering control all raise major questions for drivers and car companies: How much help do drivers want or need at the wheel? Who is in charge?

Ford refers to its high-tech safety systems as “co-drivers”; other companies call them “assistants.” Mercedes Benz says that in its vehicles, technology will never take control out of the hands of the human driver. The company adheres to a systematic design, always offering sight and sound warnings in sequence before computerized controls take emergency action.

As people spend more time in the car with mobile phones and cups of coffee in one hand, we run the risk of undoing the highest technology improvements with the lowest of human failings — simple distraction.

Here’s a guide to the basics of some of the latest developments, beginning with ESC. The first six are preventative measures; the latter four are designed to reduce/mitigate injuries resulting from accidents.

Energy

A passenger railroad, taking power through a third rail

Chemical energy is a common independent energy source. Chemical energy is converted to electrical energy, which is then regulated and fed to the drive motors. Chemical energy is usually in the form of diesel or petrol (gasoline). The liquid fuels are usually converted into electricity by an electrical generator powered by an internal combustion engine or other heat engine. This approach is known as diesel-electric or gasoline-electric hybrid locomotion, that produces greenhouse gases.
Another common form of chemical to electrical conversion is by electro-chemical devices. These include fuel cells and batteries. By avoiding an intermediate mechanical step, the conversion efficiency is dramatically improved over the chemical-thermal-mechanical-electrical-mechanical process already discussed. This is due to the higher carnot efficiency through directly oxidizing the fuel and by avoiding several unnecessary energy conversions. Furthermore, electro-chemical batteries conversions are easy to reverse, allowing electrical energy to be stored in chemical form.
Despite the higher efficiency, electro-chemical vehicles have been beset by a technical issue which has prevented them from replacing the more cumbersome heat engines: energy storage. Fuel cells are fragile, sensitive to contamination, and require external reactants such as hydrogen. Batteries currently used are either not mass-produced, leading to high per-unit prices, or end up being a significant (25%-50%) portion of the final vehicle mass, in the case of conventional lead-acid technology. Both have lower energy and power density than petroleum fuels. However, recent advances in battery efficiency, capacity, materials, safety, toxicity and durability are likely to allow their superior characteristics to be widely applied in car-sized EVs,
For especially large electric vehicles, such as submarines and aircraft carriers, the chemical energy of the diesel-electric can be replaced by a nuclear reactor. The nuclear reactor usually provides heat, which drives a steam turbine, which drives a generator, which is then fed to the propulsion. This energy produces nuclear waste.

History of the electric vehicle

Citroen Berlingo Electrique vans of the ELCIDIS goods distribution service in La Rochelle,France

BEVs were among some of the earliest automobiles — electric vehicles predate gasoline and diesel. Between 1832 and 1839 (the exact year is uncertain), Scottish businessman Robert Anderson invented the first crude electric carriage. Professor Sibrandus Stratingh of Groningen, the Netherlands, designed the small-scale electric car, built by his assistant Christopher Becker in 1835.

The Canadian Dynasty EV 4 door sedan neighborhood eletric vehicle

The improvement of the storage battery, by Frenchmen Gaston Plante in 1865 and Camille Faure in 1881, paved the way for electric vehicles to flourish. France and Great Britain were the first nations to support the widespread development of electric vehicles.
Just prior to 1900, before the pre-eminence of powerful but polluting internal combustion engines, electric automobiles held many speed and distance records. Among the most notable of these records was the breaking of the 100 km/h (60 mph) speed barrier, by Camille Jenatzy on April 29, 1899 in his 'rocket-shaped' vehicle Jamais Contente, which reached a top speed of 105.88 km/h (65.79 mph).

BEVs, produced by Anthony Electric, Baker, Detroit, Edison, Studebaker, and others during the early 20th Century for a time out-sold gasoline-powered vehicles. Due to technological limitations and the lack of transistor-based electric technology, the top speed of these early electric vehicles was limited to about 32 km/h (20 mph). These vehicles were successfully sold as town cars to upper-class customers and were often marketed as suitable vehicles for women drivers due to their clean, quiet and easy operation. Electrics did not require hand-cranking to start.

The introduction of the electric starter by Cadillac in 1913 simplified the task of starting the internal combustion engine, formerly difficult and sometimes dangerous. This innovation contributed to the downfall of the electric vehicle, as did the mass-produced and relatively inexpensive Ford Model-T, which had been produced for four years, since 1908.[4] Internal-combustion vehicles advanced technologically, ultimately becoming more practical than — and out-performed — their electric-powered competitors.

Electric Micro-vans produced by Micro-Vett on the basis off a Piaggio(rebranded Isuzu) vehicle exchanging the internal combustion engine for distribution services in Rome,Italy courtesy greenfleet.info

Another blow to BEVs was the loss of Edison's direct current (DC) electric power transmission system in the War of Currents. This deprived BEV users of a convenient source of DC electricity to recharge their batteries. As the technology of rectifiers was still in its infancy, changing alternating current to DC required a costly rotary converter.
Battery electric vehicles became popular for some limited range applications. Forklifts were BEVs when they were introduced in 1923 by Yale and some battery electric fork lifts are still produced. BEV golf carts have been available for many years, including early models by Lektra in 1954. Their popularity led to their use as neighborhood electric vehicles and expanded versions became available which were partially "street legal".

By the late 1930s, the electric automobile industry had completely disappeared, with battery-electric traction being limited to niche applications, such as certain industrial vehicles.
The 1947 invention of the point-contact transistor marked the beginning of a new era for BEV technology. Within a decade, Henney Coachworks had joined forces with National Union Electric Company, the makers of Exide batteries, to produce the first modern electric car based on transistor technology, the Henney Kilowatt, produced in 36-volt and 72-volt configurations. The 72-volt models had a top speed approaching 96 km/h (60 mph) and could travel nearly an hour on a single charge. Despite the improved practicality of the Henney Kilowatt over previous electric cars, it was too expensive, and production was terminated in 1961. Even though the Henney Kilowatt never reached mass production volume, their transistor-based electric technology paved the way for modern EVs.
After California indicated that it would kill its ZEV Mandate, Toyota offered the last 328 RAV4-EV for sale to the general public during six months (ending on Nov. 22, 2002). All the rest were only leased, and with minor exceptions those models were withdrawn from the market and destroyed by manufacturers (other than Toyota). Toyota not only supports the 328 Toyota RAV4-EV in the hands of the general public, still all running at this date, but also supports hundreds in fleet usage. From time to time, Toyota RAV4-EV come up for sale on the used market, at prices that have ranged up to the mid 60 thousands of dollars. These are highly prized by solar homeowners who wish to charge their cars from their solar electric rooftop systems.
As of July, 2006, there are between 60,000 and 76,000 low-speed, battery powered vehicles in use in the US, up from about 56,000 in 2004 according to Electric Drive Transportation Association estimates

Battery electric vehicle

The Toyota RAV4 EV was powered by
twenty-four 12 volt batteries,with an
operational cost equivalent of over
165 miles per gallon at 2005 US
gasoline prices.





Camille Jenatzy in electric car La Jamais
Contente,1899

A battery electric vehicle (BEV) is an electric vehicle that utilizes chemical energy stored in rechargeable battery packs. Electric vehicles use electric motors and motor controllers instead of internal combustion engines (ICEs). Vehicles using both electric motors and ICEs are examples of hybrid vehicles, and are not considered pure BEVs because they operate in a charge-sustaining mode. Hybrid vehicles with batteries that can be charged externally to displace some or all of their ICE power and gasoline fuel are called plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV), and are pure BEVs during their charge-depleting mode. BEVs are usually automobiles, light trucks, neighborhood electric vehicles, motorcycles, motorized bicycles, electric scooters, golf carts, forklifts and similar vehicles, because batteries are less appropriate for larger long-range applications.
BEVs were among the earliest automobiles, and are more energy-efficient than internal combustion, fuel cell, and most other types of vehicles. BEVs produce no exhaust fumes, and minimal pollution if charged from most forms of renewable energy. Many are capable of acceleration exceeding that of conventional vehicles, are quiet, and do not produce noxious fumes. BEVs reduce dependence on petroleum, thus enhancing national security, and mitigate global warming by alleviating the greenhouse effect.
Historically, BEVs and PHEVs have had issues with high battery costs, limited travel distance between battery recharging, charging time, and battery lifespan, which have limited widespread adoption. Ongoing battery technology advancements have addressed many of these problems; many models have recently been prototyped, and a handful of future production models have been announced. Toyota, Honda, Ford and General Motors all produced BEVs in the 90s in order to comply with the California Air Resources Board's Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate, which was later defeated by the manufacturers and the federal government. The major US automobile manufacturers have been accused of deliberately sabotaging their electric vehicle production efforts.