I have never owned my own car due to my eyesight and likely never will, but this does not make me exempt from having to worry about what fossil fuel run vehicles are doing to this planet, our planet. As a fan of science fiction I like to imagine someday we will be able to explore and live beyond our solar system, but lets face it , this is highly unlikely. If it ever does happen it will not be for a very, very, very, long time. So here’s the deal, we need to take care of the only livable planet we have. When transportation takes up a whole 28% of greenhouse gas emissions, and of this, 34% is passenger cars and 28% is light duty trucks, just changing the efficiency of these two transportation methods would make a huge impact on reducing greenhouse emissions. I have to wonder if we shouldn’t be putting in a little more effort to bring this number down , way down.

 

Clearly we should all ride bicycles but that just isn’t going to happen and I admit I much prefer going for a nice long car ride.

Just today I saw a commercial for the Nissan Leaf, a not entirely unattractive electric car. This is not the commercial but it certainly makes it’s point when a polar bear makes a sad journey from it’s melting home and hugs the nice environment-friendly-Leaf-owner-businessman. .

http://youtu.be/BNeEVkhTutY

“Please, Mr. Polar bear , don’t eat me.”

Alright, now I have to ask , how exactly does this car work? Is it entirely electric? Is it a feasible option for most people ? It certainly cuts down on emissions.

Edmund’s says  “Introduced just last year, the Nissan Leaf was the first full-electric vehicle to be marketed to mainstream American buyers.” The base SV version costs $ 35,000, which appears to be a little over the “average” new car price of 2011 , but it still seems rather expensive to me. In fact the non- electric Nissan Versa is listed on   http://autos.yahoo.com/hatchbacks/all.html as only about 14,000. However, the difference appears to be the Leaf’s 92/106 Mpg versus the Versa’s 31/26 mpg.  I wonder just how you measure a mpg for an electric car?  We can not fail to take into account though  how much the Leaf will pay for itself over time in savings, as it is estimated to cost a small 3.5 US cent per mile to drive. Wikipedia states that  “the US Environmental Protection Agency official range[for the Leaf] is 117 kilometres (73 mi), with an energy consumption of 765 kilojoules per kilometre (34 kW·h/100 mi) and rated the Leaf’s combined fuel economy at 99 miles per gallon gasoline equivalent (2.4 L/100 km).^[8][9] The Leaf has a range of 175 km (109 mi) on the New European Driving Cycle.^{“/////////////////////n bbbbbbbbb.;l}

This is a huge increase in MPG’s! Why drive hybrids when we can drive fully electric vehicles that get us high MPG’s, is cheap to driv,e and gives off 0 emissions?

The downside here is the charging time. It takes about 8 hours to charge to full (that is, about 5 miles of range per hour). In our textbook  Smoke and Mirrors Burton Richter addresses this issue by mentioning a company that has suggested having stations with charged batteries ready for exchange( for a fee of course) (page 1337 kindle edition). Charging stations like this would certainly make these electric cars far more feasible for long distance travel.

Here is a review of the Nissan Leaf and another electric car, the Ion, by Top Gear.

I find that I tend to agree with Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson when he states that he does not think the Nissan Leaf, and the other electric vehicles of its generation are the cars of the future, but rather more of a gateway into the future. These electric cars are playing an important role in introducing a world changing( and bettering) technology to the masses.

I just hope the car of the future doesn’t end up looking like this.

But maybe it doesn’t matter if it saves some polar bears.

I find that I digressed and I did not answer the base question here, what is the automobile industry doing to increase Miles Per gallon? In the realm of  cars, aside from electric vehicles, like the Nissan Leaf and the Saturn Ion, there are (according to Wikipedia) plug-in hybrids, liquid nitrogen vehicles, hydrogen vehicles, compressed air vehicles, flywheel energy storage, solar powered cars and tribrids.

I haven’t even heard of a few of these and there are more than I expected. Some don’t seem very practical, like the solar powered vehicle. I think solar power makes a good supplemental source of energy in this case but certainly not a primary source. I like the idea of hydrogen fuel-cell powered vehicles though the writer of our textbook, Dr. Richter seems to hold his own reservations on the subject.

In a hydrogen fuel-cell powered vehicle the hydrogen that is injected into the car is combined with oxygen creating electricity. This means instead of having to plug your car in and charge it for hours you can just, in theory, fill up at a hydrogen station much like filling up on gas, except unlike gas you get 0 emissions. The Honda Clarity gets 68 MPG and looks just like any other four door sedan.

This is a great site to really get a good look at planet friendly vehicles if you want to find out more.

They list: Hybrid, Electric, Ethanol, Hydrogen, Natural Gas, plug-ins and biodiesel.

http://www.greencar.com/

When you do a search for cars of any make that match the criteria of 50+ MPG, 5 cars come up all of which are hybrids.I think this goes to show that hybrids are our best bet in the near future, especially as far as public acceptance goes. I don’t think the automobile industry or the public are going to decide that switching over from gasoline is important until a shortage or an environmental crisis makes it abundantly clear that we have to, which we do.