Cars

[Lindsey Buckinghmof]

Wait, whaaaaat? No, nonnonono. The big players do, in fact, give money to everyone. EVERYONE. Except maybe one or two complete psychos like Kucinich or Lois Capps.

They just give more to the Republicans. But they are all on the take.

[random axe]

Yahbut if they give one dude $15,000 and another $500, the $500 is more like a tip.  I don't think that really has much push.  I only count bribes that are big enough to matter.

[flipper]

I think Toyota probably pays more in bribes to CA politicos than GM does.  It's all about the Prius.  Kinda like the talk on A/C and it being easy not necessarily right or efficient.

[random axe]

The Prius and some of the other hybrids that have all-electric modes aren't necessarily bad cars, god knows, but they're really dumb designs from an engineering point of view.

The thing is, electric motors and batteries are good at certain things, and gas engines (and specifically reciprocating piston engines) and gasoline are good at certain things.  And there's some overlap, but also some mutually exclusive stuff.  To make a smart hybrid, you minimize the overlap and use each element to its best advantage in a simplified and cost-effective design.  I mean, you use the electric bits to smooth out the weaknesses of the gasoline bits, and vice versa. 

A car like the Prius really doesn't do that.  It's really both a weak, if sophisticated, gasoline car and a weak, if sophisticated, electric car, and in certain kinds of driving it combines them pretty well.  But it's hideously inelegant.  The Lexus hybrids (or the discontinued Accord Hybrid) that use the electric motor just to improve performance actually make more sense.  And the highly efficient high-mileage non-hybrid Civics or Cruze Eco, etc, also make more sense.

The Leaf makes some sense.  It's just an electric car.  If you run out of juice, you're kind of screwed, because it's hard to go get a can of electricity and walk it back to your car.  But it's too expensive for what it offers.  The Volt is actually a much more sensible design, making really good practical use of both the gas engine and the electric motors.  It could still be improved a lot -- it would make more sense if it had an even smaller, more efficient engine (maybe a small turbine, or a Wankel) that ran more and always at peak efficiency, keeping the battery charged instead of sending juice directly to the motors.  But the concept is more sensible.

[flipper]

structural super capacitors and Free electricity from the sky, coupled with low power system on a chip design will be the future.  Until monied interests quash it that is.

[random axe]

Broadcast power sounds sexy, but my guess is that in the foreseeable future it won't be useful for anything other than trickle-charging low-power devices -- and even cell phones aren't really low-power devices by that standard anymore.  There's just a limit to how much power you can reasonably put in the air, and you need a large collection area to grab a significant amount of it.  If you had a cell phone with a big fold-out rectenna umbrella thing . . . it probably still wouldn't work.  And pretty much anything big enough to absorb more charge is also big enough to carry a big enough battery to mostly make the charging capability irrelevant.

Still, you could make . . . electrostatic paper airplanes, or something.  But charging mats and the like are probably more likely to be ahead of us -- casual charging, where there are storage areas in your home (a cubby, a tray, a section of desktop) that automatically recharge devices by proximity, with no plugs.  They already have that.

Structural capacitors are a neat idea but probably not necessary.  Thing is, for most applications, it's an unnecessary complication.  By the time it's practical, advanced materials and advanced will make the extra weight-saving capacity of combining the two beside the point.  I mean, say you're building an electric bicycle ten years from now.  Cheap advanced composites let you build a frame that weighs 250 grams (half a pound), and advanced capacitor technology gives you a 'battery' the size of two D batteries with a capacity of 200 amp hours.  That's already way better than you'll sanely need.  As it is, the bike would be so light that it would take practice to ride.

Scale it up to an electric motorcycle, and the weight issues don't change.  Same goes for a car.  Composites could already make cars weigh less than half of what they do, or even a quarter.  They'd just be too expensive with current manufacturing.  And there are at least half a dozen promising capacitor designs that already work (but, again, are currently too expensive) that make existing batteries -- even the new Toshiba super-battery -- look medieval.  And that's before graphene designs even go beyond the theoretical stage.

If structural capacitors had come to market by now, or five years ago, it would've been a different story, but it just didn't quite happen fast enough.  Of course, I could be wrong.  Futurism makes economics look like ballistics.

[flipper]

Materials science is fascinating stuff.  I'm betting that multiple uses for the same material will be prominent in the not to distant future (10 year out mark).  Structure+power+microprocessing.  Design For Manufacturing will also play an increasing role.

[random axe]

Eh.  If small automated (nano or other molecular) manufacturing happens in that timeframe, I think you'll see components built into (or integrated with, depending on your semantics) structural materials, but I don't think it'll be that common that the structure itself will be the machine or electronics.  But like I said, I could be wrong, and in some cases the distinction is mostly a question of the design philosophy.

Materials science is definitely fascinating, but it's mysterious how certain new things appear and then vanish without a trace.  I'm sure there are reasons, but so often only 100 people in the world know why that cool thing never happened.

Maybe twenty years ago, this lab invented a whole new class of machinable ceramics.  Tougher than comparable temperature-resistant ceramics, and you could put them on a lathe or CNC machine and tool them how you liked.  No need to make a complex form first and then cast it, which was a bigger deal then than it is now -- you could hew a needed part out of a solid billet.  There was talk about this stuff revolutionizing piston engines, and so on.

Then, fwsh, nothing.  Beats me.  And remember when that guy allegedly invented a new good-for-everything almost frictionless cheap magnetic bearing about ten years ago?  But then, fwsh, nothing. 

Mostly because excitement makes a better story than disappointment and fizzle.  But still, damn it, some of us remember your science news article for longer than six months.  You could follow up.  I still wonder what happened to ultra-high-resolution electron micrograph computer displays that could also print like laser printers.  Flat screen display, but if you put a piece of paper against the display, it clings there (static electricity), and whatever was on the screen can be printed directly onto the paper.  There was even an electrostatic tractor feed so you could have a flat 'glass' plate display that could also work like a freaking silent typewriter that automatically advanced to a new sheet of paper when you said to or it filled the last page up.

I'm sorry, but that would have been cool as hell.  But, fwsh, nothing.

[flipper]

The paranoid in me makes me wonder if it's been in place in the military/black ops, and the original inventors were cleaned.

[Lindsey Buckinghmof]

Nano-friggin-everything, at this point, is hype.

[random axe]

That's so true.  There's research, but there are no commercial products I've heard of that deserve the nano-.  Even the research I've heard of is molecular but not really small, at best, and not at the stage of doing anything practical.  Microprocessors are currently much more impressively small.

[mo]

The googles has failed me. My manual on my car says use of gas that contains MMT as an additive voids warranty. So I'm wondering how to know if a particular gas contains that additive, or if it's even specified at the pump, because it's something I've never paid attention to. The EPA banned it at one point, and then the ban was lifted. It is still manufactured. It's banned in California. Most of the articles I find on it are not up-to-date.

Anyone know anything about this?

[mybabysmomma]

It looks like it was reformulated around 2008 so if your car is older than that, the claim might be null and void.  It's an additive to increase octane level and it's supposed to make you engine run smoother and "cleaner".

[Lindsey Buckinghmof]

I got nothin. MBTA and methanol and ethanol are added as oxygenators, seasonally, in a lot of states. Not octane enhancers. I'd imagine this other stuff is something you'd get in a fuel treatment additive at the speed shop and pour in yourself. You're not going to get it in a tank of gas you buy somewhere, I'd bet.

[mybabysmomma]

I  was just repeating what I read.

http://www.epa.gov/OMS/regs/fuels/additive/mmt_cmts.htm