Revision as of 22:53, 20 April 2011

Current situation

Severe injuries from road accidents = 36,000 jumbos crash landing — this is reality of road transport. Likelihood of being killed on the road is something like 1 in 200 (need to find ref). Number one killer of young people [1] and by far the leading cause of accidental death [2].

• 28% of greenhouse gas emissions [3]
• Land use in cities. Roads cover a huge percentage of urban land (need to find figures, probably about a third). A more space-efficient transport network (like PRT) would allow for more greenery
• According to Wikipedia, within the EU, 44% of goods are transported by roads and 85% of people

Financial cost of road traffic accidents estimated at over $120 billion in the US and over $193 billion in the Europe Union. (Found in slideshow from Delphi Automotive Integrated Safety Systems - need to find source).

Options

• Trains
  • Light rail
    • [4][5] Trains could be a lot cheaper to build if high-tension
  • Maglev
    • Gravity vacuum maglev (almost no energy required)
  • Possibility of shared vehicles. (Similar to the schemes that exist with bicycles in many cities - DublinBikes etc.) The winner of the 2009 Buckminster Fuller challenge was a system of small electric cars and scooters which would be docked at points around a city (where they could charge). You swipe a card and one of the vehicles unlocks and you drive it and drop it off at another dock. There are plans to bring this in for several cities [6].
• Aircraft
  • Personal aircraft. Flying cars . VTOL would be best
  • Sub-orbital passenger craft
  • Autonomous helicopters already exist like this mini-helicopter designed at MIT. Impressive video of small, autonomous, quadrotor helicopters. Think of the possibilities of little helicopters to deliver packages; like an automated FedEx. Hummingbird Unmanned Rotorcraft is autonomous and has a much better fuel-efficiency than any other helicopter and also goes at a higher altitude, which would be better for solar power. Other unmanned helicopters include the RQ-7 Shadow. Bell Eagle Eye is an unmanned tilt-rotor vehicle.
  • Spacecraft etc.

• Free flight

• Human powered - International Human-Powered Vehicle Association is a dynamic organization of hobbyists designing and testing human powered land, air and water vehicles and even submarines. Some of the stuff there is pretty amazing: somebody flew 74 miles in a pedal-powered plane, somebody else broke 82mph in a recumbent bicycle. What's more, the community of people doing this are very much in favour of free and open design. Human powered vehicles will probably remain something people do mostly for fun, rather than as part of an economic infrastructure.

http://www.aerospace-technology.com/projects/skycat/

Cars

We now have the technology to make self-driving, very light, electric cars that use a fifth the energy of conventional cars. These can be much safer than normal cars.

Efficiency

Most cars get less than 40 miles per gallon. Range about 400 miles

• X-tracer. 205.3 MPGe. Battery-powered. Weighs 1436lb. Over 100 mile range (depending on battery size). Carries two people. Top speed over 120mph
• Edison2 Very Light Car. 102.5 MPGe. Runs on 85% ethanol, 15% petrol. Weighs 830lb. Seats 4 people.
• Li-ion Wave II. 187 MPGe. Battery-powered. Seats two people with large boot.
• Aptera gets 164.3 MPGe. Lithium ion battery. Seats 2, with a four-seater version planned. 100 mile range. 90mph top speed.
• Trev is a battery-powered car. Two seats and a boot. Weighs just 300kg. 150km range, 120km/h top speed, 1/5th the energy of a conventional car
• Tesla Roadster is powered by lithium ion batteries, cheaper to run than an ordinary car, 125mph top speed, 0-60mph in 4 seconds, 3.5 hours to charge. Official range is 244 miles, record is 347.2 [7]. Model S seats five, comes in 160, 230 and 300 mile range versions and charges in 45 minutes from an ordinary electric socket.
• Most electric cars still have inferior ranges to petrol cars, but some (like the Tesla Roadster) seem to have overcome the problem.

Record range for a battery-powered car is 623 miles [8]. One car drove 375 miles on a single charge and recharged in six minutes [9].

Energy storage: Nanowire batteries expected to be commercialized in 2012, are likely to have 8-10 times the energy density of lithium-ion batteries and much faster charge times. This, or a similar technology, will certainly bury the range problem in the next few years.

Ultracapacitor technology is getting better, but still is nowhere near the density of petrol.

Fuel cells have high energy density; ultracapacitors have high power density, so perhaps a hybrid (like the one Riversimple are working on) is the most promising.

Regenerative braking technology can reduce energy needs 10%. Carbon fiber is 4 times lighter than steel and 5 times stronger. It is 14 times more expensive, but you would make that back in fuel costs coz it's lighter. Carbon fiber is progressively getting cheaper and being used more and more in cars.

Third generation photovoltaics in windows and paint will allow cars to produce their own energy on-the-move.

Open-source cars

• OScar
• "c,mm,n"
• Riversimple's open-source, carbon fiber, fuel cell Urban car (plans here)and their much sexier LifeCar.
• List of open-source cars

Self-driving cars

A lot of progress was made on autonomous cars in 2010. The technology exists and is fully tested; it just needs to be introduced on the ground. 4 unmanned cars drove from Italy to China delivering goods [10]. Google has a fleet of modified Prius cars that have driven 140,000 miles without incident, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_car#Fully_autonomous

Center for Automotive Research Stanford (CARS) doing a lot of work in this area, including cars that are driven by humans, but have smart systems so they "cannot crash"

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80MlnZcXCwo
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exdUD02JryI
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YUjlKA6tVU

Impressive video of an autonomous car doing controlled high-speed parking

Safety

Computer-controlled cars will have less accidents.

Stronger materials will make cars safer.

The huge reductions we can achieve in the mass of the vehicles will make a collision a much less serious event.

Vehicles that tilt like the Audi Snook concept or the X-Tracer can take corners much tighter