By Popular Mechanics •
October 7, 2009
Who said water and electricity don’t mix? At the Wye Island Marathon, the pairing of the two is celebrated as racers push more than 23 miles into 20 mph headwinds, 2 foot waves and rough chop, propelled only by DIY battery packs that can fail at any time.
This post is an excerpt of an article from Popular Mechanics. You can read the full post on their website. Written by Tyghe Trimble.
At the 8 ½-mile mark, Jim Campbell is at the head of the pack, in control of the race. The two-time defending champion has every reason to be confident—he knows the course inside and out, he owns the most time-tested vehicle and he still has a few tricks to pull out, including a parasail, which on this windy day could be a potent weapon. But when he grabs his remote control to adjust the speed, Campbell, his boat and its cargo—400 pounds of lead-acid batteries—suddenly stop.
“I think my nylon gear picked up static when rubbing against the plastic hull of the canoe and my electronics died,” he says. Campbell does the only thing he can—he whips out his emergency jumpers and charges 12 volts back into both of his motors. Then he adjusts his speed, dropping from about 4 knots (4.5 mph) to just less than 3 knots (3.3 mph). The race is no longer a sure win.
By Jerry James Stone •
August 15, 2009
Car companies like Tesla, Toyota and Nissan are all scrambling for a piece of the EV market. Heck, even cities like San Francisco and Portland want some. But they all just got pwned by these kids. These vehicles run on everything from solar to soy!
Luke Laborde turned a 32 mpg gas-burning Bradley GT II kit car into a [...]
Who needs a gas station to fill your tank with ethanol? Not you. GreenHouse has just announced the E-Fuel MicroFueler, a portable in-home micro-refinery system that turns organic waste into ethanol. The first installation of the E-Fuel MicroFueler was in the home of none other than basketball great Shaquille O’Neal, who lives in Pacific Palisades a subdivision in LA.
The E-Fuel MicroFueler coverts the organic waste into ethanol for about two-thirds the cost of gasoline. The final product is E100 (100 percent ethanol) which burns cleaner emitting significantly less emissions into the air. The only vehicles designed to run on E100 are the IndyCars which in 2007 became the first motorsports league to sanction a renewable fuel.
Eighth-grader David S. Dixon–along with his dad David G. Dixon–has built a street-legal quadricycle powered by a solar-charged electric motor. The bike not only carries his dog and three friends, but it has also has an iPod dock and GPS. Ya, it’s that cool!
Coined as the Solar Human Hybrid (SOHH), the vehicle was launched as part of David Jr.’s middle school project for the Novato Charter School.
Robert Riley’s XR3 kit car is an amazing three-wheeled plug-in diesel hybrid. The trike gets a jaw dropping 225mpg on combined diesel-electric power and 125mpg when using only the 23hp diesel engine.
And hey, it kinda looks like that Back to the Future car!
Introduced back in June of 2008, the two-passenger car was designed so it can be assembled using readily available parts. Fully constructed, the car weighs in at 1480 pounds and has top speed of 80mph. And while you can only get 40 miles out of its li-ion battery pack, it can be plugged into any standard wall socket.
For all intents and purposes, the automobile has remained largely unchanged in the past 100 years ever since the first Ford Model T started rolling off of assembly lines. Four wheels, an engine, transmission, and as the old saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But with summer around the corner, so are high gas prices (which have shot up 20% in the month of May alone) and some people are taking another approach to personal mobility, such as an 8th grade project dubbed the Solar Human Hybrid Vehicle.
Tony Parker Has Built An Electric Bike Made From Junk. He Also Made A Solar And Wind-Powered Charging Station For The Bike.
Tony Parker has built an electric motorbike completely from found junk.
Why? The laid-off worker found himself with a lot of time and just began tinkering around the house.
Jeremy Clarkson, the outspoken host of Britain’s Top Gear auto show, made a spectacle of racing a Prius vs. a BMW M3, in which the latter recieved better gas mileage. His point was that is isn’t what you drive, but how you drive. Nothing emphasizes this idea more than the Aerocivic, a simple yet highly publicized Civic whose owner, Mike Turner, utilized basic hypermilling techniques such as coasting down hills and shutting off his engine at stop lights to maximize fuel usage. He then took his very basic car a step further by applying an aerodynamic body kit to reduce drag at high speeds, and now he is using the power of the Interweb to give further insight into the how and why of his car, the Aerocivic.
By Nick Chambers •
December 8, 2008
A company based in California has announced that starting in February, they can convert your 2004-2009 model Prius into a plug-in hybrid electric car that can go 40 miles on battery power alone, or get 100+ miles per gallon when driven in “enhanced Prius” mode.
Jungle Motors is already the largest electric vehicle conversion shop in Orange County, California. They can take virtually any car and convert it to all-electric, but specialize in converting old Porsches and PT Cruisers. They’ve actually been converting Priuses into plug-in hybrids for a while using lead-acid batteries. That’s old hat at this point.
By Nick Chambers •
November 4, 2008
A Texas-based company has announced the “world’s first mini-refinery” for consumer use that can produce both ethanol and biodiesel from the same small machine at the same time. It’s capable of generating up to 120 gallons per day of ethanol and 450 gallons per day of biodiesel.
Consisting of two pieces of equipment — an ethanol boiler and the mini-refinery — the whole system can fit into an area of less than 30 square feet with 8 feet of clearance and is completely automated.
