Personal Transport of the Future

Lugging tons of metal around with us in the form of a car is an incredibly inefficient way of getting around. Future technologies allow the development of very small, lightweight fuel efficient vehicles. Let us not forget that the point of a car is personal mobility. If we can get mobile without all those tons of metal, so much the better!

15,000 Miles to the Gallon

Watch this futuristic fuel sipper go!

Nissan Land Glider

Here is a new electric car concept from Nissan - the Land Glider. It is an all electric vehicle. Small and lightweight, it will not waste energy moving around thousands of pounds of metal. Recharging can be done by parking over special plates in the ground. This is the sort of vehicle we need to cope with a future of scarce, high priced gasoline.

Futuristic Solar Powered Transit System

Super futuristic transport system.

Hydraulic Hybrid Ingocar

Here is another concept for vehicle propulsion: hydraulic power. Valentin Technologies is developing the Ingocar which it hopes will achieve a gas mileage of 170 MPG or only 0.590 GPHM (gallons per hundred miles). The vehicle is light and aerodynamically streamlined, but the real secret is in its hydraulic drive system.

The idea is that a normal gasoline burning combustion engine is used not to provide propulsion, but to pressurize a reservoir of hydraulic fluid. Each wheel of the car will then have its own hydraulic drive which will convert that pressure into motive revolution of the wheel. This system can run in reverse during braking. The wheel drive motors act as pumps, converting the kinetic energy of the car back into reservoir pressure.

Whether this technology will prove out or not is unknown, but it is good to see that we have many options under development. We are going to sorely need a way to drastically increase our fuel economy in the decades ahead as the global oil supply becomes ever more expensive. Each idea under development gives us one more arrow in the quiver for the hunt to save on gas.

Extreme Record Setting Gas Sipper in Action

This little gas sipper goes through fuel slower than paint dries. The secret is low weight and very good aerodynamics. Of course it is barely big enough for one person and can't carry any luggage, but I am glad to see contests organized around fuel efficiency. The best part of the interview comes at the end, where the speaker says that his laboratory is also working on fuel economizing technologies for real scale cars.

Aptera in the House

The Aptera is a highly streamlined and lightweight electric car. It has a range of 100 miles after a short two hour charge. It gets up to 60 mph in 10 seconds and has a top speed of 90 miles per hour. And best of all, you can buy this futuristic beast today!

Terrafugia Transition

The Terrafugia Transition is an airplane which can drive on the road like a car. They call this a roadable aircraft. On the road at highway speeds it only uses 3.33 GPHM, which is pretty good. That good fuel economy is due to the aerodynamic streamlining required to fly coupled with the low weight also necessary for an airplane. In flight it burns 5 gallons per hour (airplane fuel usage is given in terms of volume per time, not volume per distance because the ground track speed depends on wind) at a cruise speed of 115 miles per hour. Flying in still air, it thus uses 5 gallons per 115 miles, or about 4.35 GPHM. Even flying, the fuel usage is better than for a typical SUV! Considering that flight allows for some impressive distance saving (straight line shortcuts) via route selection, the Transition could represent more than the futuristic flying car made real. It could actually save on gas!

Aptera : How About 0.3 GPHM

The Aptera is a futuristic hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) which looks like an airplane without wings. It can achieve an incredible fuel economy, using only one third of a gallon of gas to travel 100 miles. It has a top speed of 90 miles per hour and can accelerate 0 to 60 miles per hour in under 10 seconds. What is the secret? Mainly aerodynamics and weight reduction. The body is made of strong yet light carbon fiber composites. At highway speeds the greatest contribution to resistance is air drag. Plane-like streamlining on the Aptera allows it to avoid most of this drag. Unlike many futuristic gas sippers with stratospheric price tags, the Aptera will sell in the US for about $30,000.

Ladies and gentlemen: the Aptera!

CNN Shows It's Picks for the Cars of the Future

The Big Three US automakers are struggling today. Their structure, philosophy and product lines date from the era when crude oil was plentiful and cheap. Now, facing a future of stagnant or shrinking crude oil production rates and rapidly growing consumption, they are in danger of disappearing. They might be able to adapt, but often what happens in industry is that the old giants cannot change their ways in time to adapt to new circumstances and a new generation takes over. CNN Money reviews six small car producers that they think might form the seeds of this new generation. Amongst them we find:

• A company converting the Prius to run on only electricity; that is convert it from a hybrid (HEV) to a fully electric vehicle (EV).
• A company making electric delivery vans. Delivery vans are a perfect concept for being replaced with electric vehicles because they can be plugged in overnight in their depots which removes charging time concerns. Also their predetermined routes mitigate against range problems.
  
• A boat company which converts motorcycles into small open three wheel neighborhood carts.
• A company that is planning to make a lightweight plastic and aluminum police cruiser.
  

Whether any of these small companies will have success in the years to come is impossible to say. Their products may well be crowded out by the Aptera or even the Tata Nano. But it is becoming more and more obvious that leadership in the automotive world is passing out of the Detroit camp and into new territory.

Shell Eco Marathon

The Shell Eco Marathon is race where the goal is to use the least fuel while completing seven laps of a racetrack. Normal racing goes for the least time and who cares how much fuel you spent.

Shell Eco Marathon

The Shell Eco Marathon is an automobile race, but instead of covering a given distance in the least time, the winner goes the farthest on a fixed amount of fuel. The idea is to build a vehicle that is as fuel efficient as possible. Most efficient vehicle wins. Included in the rules is a minimum speed: contestants have to average at least 15 km/h. The event serves as a testbed for trying out and displaying the fuel saving technologies and strategies of the future. I think we will be seeing more and more of this type of competition as gasoline gets more and more expensive.

Super Lightweight Car

The more weight that a vehicle has, the more kinetic energy it needs to reach a given speed. Kinetic energy that is all lost again when the vehicle brakes to a stop. Weight reduction is one of the most important and effective ways to make a car more fuel efficient. The University of South Australia developed an ultralight car that has space for two people. The car has a mass of only 64kg, which corresponds to a weight of only about 140 pounds! Imagine that. In a normal car, almost all of the weight is just the car. In this case, the majority of the kinetic energy is going to move the passengers and not the car. And after all the point of a car is to move people, not metal.

This low weight was achieved by building the car using panels made of layered fiberglass and aluminum. These panels were used to build a basic box like shape. Then an aerodynamic form was constructed by layering styrofoam cut to an aerodynamic shape on top. A layer of fiberglass was then placed over the styrofoam to secure and protect it.

This is another example of a vehicle that would be perfect for neighbourhood driving or one person commutes. The heavy steel cars we drive are overkill for a lot of uses to which they are put. This overkill has a cost that shows up at the gas pump. Choosing the smallest, lightest vehicle that can serve a given function is one of the best ways to save on gas.

The Aptera Guided Tour

The Aptera is a highly aerodynamic electric powered vehicle made from lightweight composites. It is designed from the ground up to be a gas sipper. The Aptera is built like an aircraft rather than a normal car or truck. That includes careful attention to safety. The Aptera has crumple zones, airbags and hardening against side impacts. The Aptera is a tricycle wheeled vehicle. That was done to reduce the contact area of the wheels with the ground, which reduces rolling resistance. The Aptera also boasts solar powered air conditioning. That is a little less energy that you would otherwise have to load into the batteries. The use of carbon fiber composites lets the Aptera get away with about half the weight of a typical car. Composites also permit the construction of the sleek aerodynamic body. The same body built of steel would be much more expensive. The composites don't sacrifice on strength: they are 10 times stronger than typical car steel.



The video gives you a guided tour of an Aptera. Take the tour and then plug in an Aptera and save on gas!

High School Students Build a Solar Car

This video shows how a group of high school students build a solar powered car. Solar power is the ultimate in saving on gas. No gasoline used. No electricity used. The car they built looks like a box on wheels, but it uses 0.00 gallons per hundred miles travelled. It is impossible to beat that!

Aptera : Electricity Meets Aerodynamics

The Aptera is a futuristic gas sipper brought forward into our time. It is available today. The Aptera combines extreme aerodynamics with efficient electric motors to use only 0.33 GPHM while delivering enough performance to do 0 to 60 in about 10 seconds. Top speed is 90 miles per hour. It has a range of 600 miles. Looking at the shape, you can see it is basically an airplane without the wings. Another secret to its very good gas mileage is its low weight. It uses lightweight but strong composites in its body panels giving it a weight about half that of the typical car.



The Aptera is a two seater and obviously has less cargo space than a Ford F150. But for many purposes, that is all you need anyway. One of the best pieces of news about the Aptera is the price tag. Unlike some electric futuristic gas sippers with price tags in the $100,000 range, the Aptera sells for around $30,000. Little by little, the gas sippers of the future are becoming today's reality.

Wind Powered Cars and Sail Trucks

Imagine running your car off of wind power. Like the sailing ships of yore that circled the Earth without using a drop of fuel, you would be able to go forever and spend nothing. Perfect freedom! Except of course that you are then forced to wait for the wind. While a sailing car may not be practical for everyday use it is an interesting engineering challenge to build one.

The Greenbird is an example of a wind powered (sail powered) racing vehicle. Looking at the picture, you can see that the "sail" resembles an airplane wing sticking up vertically. The rest of the craft is basically a needle with a blister at the back just large enough to hold the body of the pilot. There are outriggers on each side, necessary to keep the sail from simply toppling over sideways. Looking at the picture of the man seated on the outrigger gives a good idea of the scale. Like these record setting gas sippers the Greenbird is too small to carry cargo or passengers. Its small size is necessary to reduce the aerodynamic profile and increase the top speed. After all, the goal is to set a speed record, not bring home the groceries. It is made of carbon composites so it can be light yet strong.



It was designed to set a new world land sail powered speed record, which it successfully did. It reached a top speed of 126.2 miles per hour. The record was set on March 26th 2009, a high wind day. The top speed of the Greenbird can be 3 to 5 times faster than the wind speed. This depends on resistance coming from the ground. Smooth, hard surfaces are better than rough or loose packed ones. To understand how it can reach top speeds greater than the wind speeds, you have to take into account the apparent wind.

Although a wind powered car would not be practical for local trips around the neighborhood or city driving, we can imagine a future where they have a role. In the current world, gas mileage is not the most important factor. As a result we use the same vehicle for everything. In the future when gas mileage is more important, maybe even the most important factor, I think we will begin to use different types of vehicles for different purposes, choosing the most fuel efficient for each. For example, local trips could be taken in a personal Neighborhood Electrical Vehicle or NEV. Long haul trucking could be done by giant sail powered trucks, something like the sailing cargo vessels of old. Special highways or lanes could be set aside for them, and they could glide along at constant speeds set by the wind. Most long haul freight can be done without strict time limits, so the sail trucks could simply use whatever wind there was. Sail truck highways could be built along the windiest routes.


The picture to the side is an imaginary representation of the idea of a sail truck. A real sail truck would likely have the same general characteristics. A long, light needle shaped body with one or two airplane wing like sails on the back. The most important feature missing is that a real sail truck would need some kind of outriggers to keep it from being blown over by a crosswind. Another option would be to have a low, wide body which fills in the area covered by the outriggers with cargo space. That would have greater air drag and thus a lower top speed and lower threshold wind necessary to move at all but correspondingly greater cargo capacity.

Another option is to build long outrigger free needle like bodies and secure them to the highway with a special kind of runner. This would replace the keel of a sailboat with an attachment to the ground. It would of course require specially built highways. The highway could have a deep groove in the center of each lane and the sail trucks could have a "keel" which descended into the groove. The keel would have something like wheels which ran on low friction rails set into the side walls of the groove. This would require a bigger investment in highway infrastructure but would permit more aerodynamic sail trucks that could thus reach faster top speeds and operate at lower threshold wind speeds.

I think this kind of innovation will be necessary to keep us moving cheaply in a future where oil and gas prices will be very high and rising. Better to start early, because the sooner we start the sooner we save on gas!

Lightning Hybrids

I found these pictures of a futuristic amphibious car that adjusts its wheels for driving on land, ice or water. Following up on it, I found Lightning Hybrids an automotive research and development company that is designing two high fuel economy models, the tricycle LH3 and the normal quad wheelbase LH4. This company is an example of the future that Detroit should have taken.

The LH4 will get 100 miles per gallon. That is 1.00 GPHM or 1 gallon per hundred miles. Read this website to learn about why GPHM is better than using MPG for fuel economy numbers. It is a sporty little number, able to go 0 to 60 in 5.9 seconds. There is room to seat four people. The price tag will be in the $40,000 to $60,000 range, so they are not exactly what you would call cheap. According to the plan, they will be on sale in 2010.

Gas Sipper Extraordinaire: 8,923 MPG

Can you imagine getting 8,923 miles per gallon?! That is enough to go around the entire planet Earth on about 3 gallons! The Microjoule is a French vehicle designed to run on normal gasoline. It was built as an entry in the 1985 Shell Eco-Marathon, which is a contest to see who can build the vehicle that gets the best gas mileage. It is a lightweight single-seater, so no carrying the kids and the groceries. You can see in the picture that it is about the size of a man. Kind of a driving coffin, if you want to look at the bad side of things.

The Microjoule has a reverse tricycle wheelbase. Three wheels with the point of the triangle towards the rear. No alien technology here, the secret to the unbelievable mileage is the clean aerodynamic shape. Three cheers for French technology! Now if only Detroit had half the brains of the French, maybe the US automakers would not be going down the crapper.

Futuristic gas sipper

We all know that one way to save on gas is to drive a car that gets better mileage per gallon. Case in point: the Feds are sure in love with that idea ... they want US automakers to improve fuel efficiency by 40% as soon as 2016. This will be a tough challenge for the automakers. We will see how it all works out. Meanwhile, on the home front, most of us just cannot go out and buy a newer fuel sipper. Unless you are rich, it is just not practical to change cars like you change socks.




Even though for most of us it is not an option, it is fun to see some of the new gas sipping concepts popping up nowadays. Take a look at this one: the 2010 MDI AIRPod. It is powered by compressed air. Although tiny, it holds three people. One person has to sit facing backwards. It can go 130 miles between "fill ups" and has a top speed of 40 mph. It carries an air compressor, so you can just plug it in to any outlet, wait 4 hours, and then you are filled up and good to go.

Here is what the manufacturer MDI has to say about the Airpod.