[tiquillo]

GM,

Why don't you create a charging system that converts the kinetic motion of the car into electricity for the battery? Why should I have to plug it in at all?

Is it too far fetched to make a self-contained vehicle for short distance commuting?

For the long distance journeys I like the idea of a gas generator.

--Tiquillo

 

[jjski78]

They already said it's going to have regenerative braking. There's not a whole lot more you can do without adding excessive drag to the car, which would kill it's mileage.

 

[BigRedFed]

GM,

Why don't you create a charging system that converts the kinetic motion of the car into electricity for the battery? Why should I have to plug it in at all?

Is it too far fetched to make a self-contained vehicle for short distance commuting?

For the long distance journeys I like the idea of a gas generator.

--Tiquillo

It's called regenerative breaking. You can't recapture all the energy because no system is 100% efficient. So this is why you have to plug it in. It is possible, that if your journey carried you over a couple of hills, you would use very little if any energy, but if you are driving on a flat plane, if you would have to decelerate as much as you accelerated to recapture all the energy, which is just not physically or practically possible, unless you only move a slight distance. After the slight distance, you have expended more energy than you can recapture from just stopping. There are ideas on how to recapture additional energy besides just regenerative braking, but you have to take into account whether or not such an idea increases the drag or expenditure of energy to the point where it has a negative effect on the amount of energy used, ie you use more energy to go the same distance with your recapture device as you do without it. There are very few ways to have a positive effect, ie you recapture enough that you extend your range even slightly, that are cheap enough to implement. Regen breaking is the most cost effective that there is.

 

[Boggsman]

I think eventually GM should have a hydrogen powered on-board generator that will recharge the batteries whenever and wherever you need to. Forget the plug and the foreign gas!

I would like a portable solar panel that pops out of the trunk to recharge the batteries. Lets face it, If your stranded in the middle of nowhere, you can't call for someone to bring you a can of electricity! Unless of coarse they have a power converter in their gas powered vehicle.

What say you?

 

[hvacman]

For some interesting dialog on the hydrogen option, see this thread -

Some Forum users are convinced hydrogen will be the fuel of the future - cheap, non-polluting, energy-dense, and generated from renewable energy resources. In the short term, hydrogen will be essentially highly-processed natural gas with the carbon stripped from it and (eventually) sequestered so it doesn't contribute to global warming.

From a financial perspective, we all anxiously await to see how the first commercial hydrogen dispensing stations pencil out and what hydrogen will actually sell for.

From an energy perspective, one kilogram of hydrogen will be about equivalent to a gallon of gas.

Because of electricity's diverse power sources, including renewable solar and wind, plug-in will probably always be a more cost-effective energy option than on-board generation.