CAR - Powered-Up Future in Traverse City - Management Briefing Seminars - Day 2
As promised we start the day with discussions of advanced powertrains. OEM representatives from GM, Toyota and Ford shared the podium with DENSO and Bright Automotive (a start-up company seeking to revolutionize delivery vans) to talk about one of the central challenges in the automobile business today - that is, what are the next advances in automotive propulsion.What we’ve heard repeatedly at other industry conferences is that plenty of life remains, and improvements are to be made, in the traditional internal combustion, piston engine. We’ve seen over the past half-dozen years, for example, substantial improvements in the guise of direct injection, turbo and supercharging, intercooling, electronically controlled valve timing, heat management and other technologies.
Simultaneously, we’ve seen more transmissions with sophisticated dual clutches, more gears and electronic management that contributes to economy, plus some advances in continuously variable transmissions (CVTs). I’ve not been a fan of most CVTs, though they offer some significant efficiencies. They just seem too wheezy to me. There are some, Lexus comes to mind, that are so nicely controlled that we can’t tell the difference.
With each of these innovations come incremental improvements in fuel economy and when added together they become mighty significant. If you read our product reviews here at TAC you’ve probably noticed raves about new models offering more power and better fuel economy usually with little if any extra cost. As a non-engineer I’m regularly astounded by what the auto industry has accomplished.
But where we are going, and at what pace, are big questions that everyone would like to answer with some measure of accuracy in order to have the advantage in coming years.
How about fuel cells? For years we’ve been hearing, and we continue to hear, that hydrogen powered fuel cells will power our personal vehicles, and probably commercial ones as well, in the long run. How long a run? Probably decades at the least.
Toyota, though, is promising to have an “affordable” and “available” fuel-cell vehicle in selected markets (those few markets where infrastructure is available) by 2015. Considering they have a just a few in practical testing now makes me wonder if that might be an overly ambitious prediction. Our experience with Toyota makes us a bit reticent about challenging that prediction.
Hydrogen Powered Auto - News
For the past eight years, the auto manufacturer has been collecting, cleaning, and compressing methane gas from a landfill near its Spartanburg, SC, assembly plant, and using the clean fuel to power more than 50 percent of the facility's total energy
The company even said it would build a hydrogen-powered version. The rotary engine design, it turns out, is ideally suited for burning hydrogen fuel. As if to prove that point, Mazda later rolled out a hydrogen-powered RX-8 prototype in Japan.
Produced for thickness of 10 microns, coating has multi-layer microstructure and composition that contains carbon, hydrogen, and tungsten. Receive similar stories and other customized news to keep you in the know on the products shaping industry.
We won't expect to see hydrogen available here in the Midwest for many years it comes to major urban markets. On another topic an impressive panel this afternoon talked extensively about the federal government's roll in guiding the auto industry.
A range of vehicles will be available for delegates on the ride-and-drive course – from hybrids and highly advanced internal-combustion vehicles to those powered by batteries and hydrogen-fuel cells. Among the scheduled speakers will be Graham Hoare,
Toyota succeeds in cutting the production cost of their new hydrogen ...
The auto industry has been hard at work developing efficient, low cost fuel cells. Their efforts have translated into a number of advancements in fuel cell technology, but manufacturers have yet to solve the massive expense of fuel cell units. Toyota has announced a breakthrough in their fuel cell technology, allowing them to reduce the price of their flagship hydrogen vehicle, the FCHV-adv. While the lower price may not put the vehicle within the grasp of the middle class, it reflects the efforts of the manufacturer toward that ultimate goal.
Toyota’s aim for the fuel cell sedan – which is to be released in 2015, making Toyota one of the diminishing numbers of companies not releasing hydrogen vehicles in 2014 – hovers at $50,000. Currently, the FCHV-adv is priced at $129,270. The vehicles cost is almost exclusively due to the fuel cell powering it. Thus far, the company has been able to cut the vehicles expense by experimenting with different hydrogen storage tanks, but Toyota will soon have to turn their sights to the fuel cell if they wish to meet their own standards.
The fuel cell being used by Toyota is akin to other conventional models in that it uses a large amount of platinum to function as a catalyst for chemical conversions. Platinum is an extraordinarily expensive metal and is, perhaps, the single purpose for the expensive production of fuel cell units. There have been experiments with alternative catalysts that have yielding promising results, but Toyota has yet to adopt these new catalysts into their efforts.
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@ Awesome! Hydrogen powered electric vehicles seem to be natural evolution of auto, like Honda FCX Clarity Hydrogen Powered Auto - Bookshelf
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