Eco friendly cars

Kind of old news but I meet some friends who didn’t knew about this.
I’m talking about the solar taxi . Louis Palmer, the inventor of the solar taxi, did a trip around the world using no oil, just electricity form the solar panel of his car.
53451 km,  534 days, 40 countries  during his journey.

The car reached about 55 mph and travel about 200 miles per charge. More details on http://www.solartaxi.com/ .

Luis Palmer plans to do another trip around the world, this time with 6 vehicles in 80 days, using hydro, geothermal and wind energy.

Belgian Xavier Van der Stappen will drive his “Veah” on the Paris-Dakar No Oil Race. Veah (Véhicule Electrique à Assistance Humaine) is electric car/bicycle invented by the belgian, realised all by ecologic materials. It has pedals, a horn and a battery which need to be recharged at 2 hours.

Van der Stappen hopes to make those 6000 km Paris-Dakar in 3 months. Iam really curios how this car will go throug the sand:)

The brown waste grease, known as FOG (fat, oil and grease) of San Francisco  will be converted into biofuel with a $1.2 million worth state and federal grants. BlackGold Biofuels and engineering firm URS Corp are going to do this, recycle the waste formed by oil, grease and used cooking fat.

Half of all San Francisco’s sewer emergencies are caused by grease blockages and cost the city $3.5 million a year in cleanings.

80 buses in Oslo, Norway will be modified (minor modifications) to use biomethane obtained from raw sewage. Two sewage plants in Oslo will be adapted to convert the sewage in biomethane.

Each bus will save 40 tons of carbon dioxide every year.  If this experiment will be a succes, all 400 buses from Oslo will be converted.

Oslo is trying to be the most ecological capital in the world, the target is 0 emissions of carbon dioxide by year 2050.

125 cars are running on a mix of diesel and vegetable oil in Westchester County in Upstate New York.  Another 7 cars are running exclusively on vegetable oil.

The county saves $25.000 for every 10,000 gallons of cooking oil. Restaurant owners are very excited and willing to participate to this program, because it saves them from paying money to have the used oil hauled away.

The county plan to convert another 350 vehicles, at least as a mix.

$4500 costs to convert a car to use just vegetable oil, and $1000 a system that process the  oil.

There is no new ideea in Michelin Active Wheels. From some time, wheels powered by electrical engines got the attention of green cars manufacturers. Michelin succedeed to do a first step with a first finished product and now tries to make it popular with Opel.

Obviously,  wheels with engines means heavier wheels. Subsequently, both suspension and  direction must be included in the wheel body. With an engine of 7 kg, each wheel will have about 43 kg . For testing ,an opel aguila was used.  The car was wheeled with these new wheels, with LI-ion batteries, weighting 900 kg, 75 kg less than the standard configuration. New wheels gave a constant power of 41 hp, but on short distances this can reach 82 hp . The car named Heuliez will reach 100 km/h in 10 seconds and a maximum decent  speed of 140 km/h.

Michelin will officially launch Heuliez Will in 2010 and in the next year  the car will be available in the market. The price will be around 20 000- 25 000 euros . Although not quite cheap, Michelin electrical car has a relatively accesible price.  For the start , there is no cost for fuel.

Opel was not the only choice for Michelin. They had disscussion with Venturi, the manufacturer of the  first serial  electrical  sport car  they intend to use this type of wheel for their next model.

This one I like it very much. A magnetic hybrid motorbike was unveiled in Japan. This magnetic motorcycle can run 112 miles with one charge. The maximum spedd is 93 miles/h, which is very good. The battery can be charged at home, like you charge a cellular phone. And, the noise is extremely low.
The energy efficiency is very high thanks to the magnetic motor, a hybrid between a electromagnet and a permanent magnet, and is a masterpiece. The motor, SUMO(from super moto), is built inside bike’s rear wheel, and the manufacturers said that is seven times more cost efficient than gas-powered scooters.
The company plans to start selling a mini-scooter version of the magnetic-powered bike in 2007.

Well, this is a very interesting project, I hope it will be a succes.
Here is the video with the magnetic hybrid motorbike, and with the scooter version:

This is an older post which got lost while we were moving the site to this new domain.

ZENN Motor Company developed the Zero Emission, No Noise car. This car is based on the Microcar (brand) MC2,in production in France since the early 2000.