EDITION: 10.8 | 15 Feb 2010

PHOTO OF THE WEEK: Know what you're looking at? It's the latest evolution in HydroKinetic Lab's HyPEG head design. Developed by EV World's technical editor, the new design, which is intended to turn the power of slow-flowing currents and rivers into electric power. Should be even easier and less costly to build than previous designs. Click here to learn more.

In This Edition:

Recall Hell
I think I have a sense of what the people at Toyota must be going through just about now as they announce yet another recall -- along with accusations of having too cozy a relationship with National Highway Traffic Safety Administration officials, according to news reports last week. Even outspoken MSNBC news commentator Keith Olbermann censured Toyota with a stinging rebuke.

I've recounted this before, but back in the late 1980s I worked for Continental Airlines as a ticket agent, while trying to hone my skills as a writer. On a particularly cold, blustery day one of our flights to Denver was running late because of weather in the Mile High City. (This is a decade before they moved from Stapleton to DIA). Several passengers I was checking in for the flight expressed concerns about the weather in Denver where it had been snowing heavily. I wasn't particularly concerned about it, so I reassured them it would be fine and if they missed their connection, we'd work hard to book them on the next. Eventually the flight arrived, we boarded the passengers and sent the plane on its way west -- largely forgetting about it and turning our attention to the next bank of flights in the afternoon.

Sometime around 1 PM, a fellow agent came up behind me as I was checking in passengers for the next trip and asked to borrow my computer. It was a strange request because there was an unused computer in the station next to me. I moved aside and she typed the fateful words: "There has been a crash in Denver." It was Flight 1713, the very flight I had worked earlier that morning and as I would later learn, several of the passengers I had checked in and reassured were on it for its continuation to Boise, Idaho. For days, weeks, maybe even months, I was angry and bitter, especially with Continental. I even wrote an article that was published in Air & Space/Smithsonian a few months later entitled, "After the Crash," recounting how I and many of my fellow employees emotionally dealt with the aftermath of the tragedy that took 28 lives and injured many more.

I can imagine that many Toyota employees, dealers and customers are feeling very much the same emotions about now -- especially those who have lost loved ones. Of course, knowing that Ford and Honda have also had recalls lately is small consolation and helps a little in the sense of knowing "we're not alone." You aren't, but it still hurts. Now I am confident that Toyota, and Honda and Ford will find technical fixes for their respective problems. Toyota says it's already replaced more than 300,00 accelerator mechanisms. Harder to manage and repair are the intangibles that also now have been broken: confidence in the product, and trust in the company. There is no recall procedure for that; and while it may take Toyota service people 10 minutes to upgrade the software in its cars or a couple hours to replace faulty accelerators, the human "machine" that is the company and its customers isn't as easily repaired nor upgraded; that will take much longer. Perhaps in 12 months, ABC News, the New York Times, and Keith Olbermann will do anniversary pieces on the "2010 Fall of Toyota - One Year Later." Certainly the company will survive -- Continental did -- but the fault lines of suspicion and doubt this has created will long lay buried just under the surface of our collective memories.

It's 2010, Where Are All Those Fuel Cell Vehicles We Were Promised?
On the topic of memories, I seem to recall half a dozen years ago that General Motors would have thousands of fuel cell calls ready for sale by 2010. Well, 2010 is here, where are those cars?

Eight of them are out in British Columbia for the 2010 Winter Olympics, ferrying officials around. The rest of the fleet of around 100 Chevy Equinoxes fuel cell crossovers last September amassed more than one million miles of travel in the Project Driveway program. Still, that's a long way from where GM said it thought it would be back in the early "Oughts." The legions of skeptics will say, "we told you so: it's all smoke 'n mirrors, Bill." To which I respond, "Expensive mirrors, then."

There might not be fleets of fuel cell cars slipping down the road, dripping warm water from their exhausts, but we can't say progress hasn't been made, as GM's latest generation of fuel cell 'engine' demonstrates. It is now half the size of the previous stack, with 40 percent of the platinum and nearly half as many parts, while producing more power. According to GM, it is hopeful that this new generation of fuel cells will be commercially competitive with other advanced automotive propulsion systems by 2015.

It would certainly seem a possibility, though refueling them will be problematic. A new company called SunHydro is proposing to build an 11-station network of solar-powered hydrogen stations between Maine and Florida, each station costing, they estimate, between $2-3 million dollars. How the economics of that work out remains to be seen, but I commend them for their vision.

As for all those fuel cell cars GM promised us back when, actually, for now, I am good with the Volt. It's doable and doesn't need multi-million dollar hydrogen stations.

The Dark Tunnel At the End of the Light
Whatever solutions we come up with to end our dependence on petroleum had better start to happen fast, if you believe the conclusions of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil & Energy Security's 2010 report entitled, The Oil Crunch - A wake-up call for the UK economy.

The Taskforce, which includes the a number of British business notables, including Sir Richard Branson and Ian Marchant, the CEO of Scottish & Southern Energy, are forecasting that peak oil is likely to begin in earnest around 2015, having been delayed two years by the current economic recession and down-turn in oil demand. Much of the report features the views of independent oil-industry analyst Chris Skrebowski and Dr. Robert Falkner of the London School of Economics. Both tend to concur on oil production and demand trends. Notes the report with respect to Skrebowkski's views...

The net flow rate data shows that increases in extraction will be slowing down in 2011-13 and dropping thereafter. Given the long lead-times involved in developing the necessary infrastructure, this trend is unlikely to be reversed within the next 5 years.

He considers the likely effects of tighter supply conditions and rising oil prices on the British economy, particularly focusing on the coming 5 years. He concludes that the economy is not as prey to the price of oil as might be expected at first sight, but there are fundamental issues which could nevertheless spring a nasty surprise on the incoming government.

... expresses a view that the price of oil could rise to a new and sustained, level which is well above US$100/b and that this is very likely to be the case within the next 5 years. In our view, this could have a significant impact on a number of important UK industry sectors. It could also have a significant impact on several key societal indicators such as fuel poverty and mobility.

This will not, however, come easily, as Section 7, Possible Countermeasures indicates. While noting that progress is being made technologically in the developing low-carbon vehicles, they caution...

...there is a real danger that the focus on technological advances in cars is making consumers and government complacent. New technologies in cars - or buses - will not be a complete solution. Central to our transport revolution has to be a package of measures to deliver behavioural change and secure modal shift.

Non-Proft Hybrids
The challenge on the technology side -- and this impacts behavioural change -- is how to make low-carbon, electric-drive vehicles both affordable and profitable. To listen to Bob Lutz, at least from General Motors’ perspective, it isn't going to happen, not anytime soon.

As the Vice Chairman of GM, Lutz is not only credited with having a good eye for design, but also as the catalyst for GM's development of the Chevrolet Volt and its possible successor like the Opel Ampera and Cadillac Converj. He also has a way to speaking his mind and telling it like he sees it, right or wrong. Most recently, he's come out to state that hybrids are never going to be profitable and they are never going to comprise more than a 10% share of the vehicle market, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal.

And if you look at GM's hybrid sales compared to Ford, Honda or Toyota, they simply suck; in January GM sold a total of 500 hybrids -- even with some 8 models available. That's just 3% of all hybrids sold that month. Clearly, GM hasn't figured out how to build a marketable hybrid, though they've tried almost every approach, except licensing Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive.

So, if GM will continue to lose money on its hybrids -- costs that it spreads over it over model lines, he explains -- then how does he reconcile his instigation and support for the Chevy Volt? More critically, what vehicles lines does he intend to spread those costs to when gasoline and diesel prices begin their inevitable climb towards the $5 a gallon here in America and Lord only knows what in other GM markets? Cobalts, I guess.

LEAF Sign Up Ahead
Nissan announced that it will begin takings names, if not kicking asses, for the LEAF starting in April. When I saw that, two dates immediately came to mind: April 1st or what we call April Fools Day here in North America; and April 15th, the day U.S. federal tax returns are due, always a day fraught with recrimination and anxiety. Here's hoping that Nissan picks neither of those two days.

A good bet would be April 22nd, Earth Day.

Vectrix Reborn?
Gold Peak, the Hong Kong battery maker that supplied the packs for the Vectrix electric Maxi-scooter (and whose NiMH cells power our Plug In Conversions Corporation pack in our 2009 Prius) has resuscitated Vectrix after the company went belly-up last year, a victim more of mismanagement than technology, according to a source familiar with the internal dysfunction in the Newport, Rhode Island company's former headquarters.

Gold Peak acquired the assets of the company, such as they are, and last week officially re-launched the company at the Powersports Dealers expo in Indianapolis, Indiana. It announced that it had begun shipping parts to customers. It also relocated the headquarters to the working class town of New Bedford, Massachusetts and away from the yacht club set in Newport.

Pay-As-You-Go Peugeot
Last week I commented on Peugeot's "rent-a-long-distance-car" discount plan for future owners of the Ion (rebadged Mitsubishi i-MiEV) electric car.

Now they've taken the next logical step in their grand electric vehicle mobility experiment: Mu.

The Mu scheme works like this: A customer will pre-pay for a smart card with multiple destinations and trips programmed into it. Peugeot then makes available a range of mobility choices from the Ion electric car to its E-Vivacity electric scooter to Peugeot bicycles. The customer uses the vehicle most appropriate to the type of trip they need to make: take friends to dinner, use the Ion; run to a dental appointment, use the scooter; take a ride in the countryside with a friend on the weekend, hire the bicycle.

I really think this is a very promising model, one that alters the whole concept of car ownership, while at the same time cultivating brand loyalty. To which I say, bonne chance, Peugeot.

Kia's Ray of Conceptual Sunlight
When did Kia Motors buy Pininfarina's auto design shop? They didn't, of course, but to look at the Ray concept car they rolled out in Chicago -- Chicago? -- you'd think they had. The car is Kia's first stab at a state-of-the-art plug-in hybrid -- and they've clearly used a stiletto. Actually, the car was styled at the company's Kia Design Center America in Irvine, California, which is predicting the car will deliver parallel hybrid drive fuel economy of 77 mpg, with a PHEV electric-mode economy equivalent to 202.3 mpg (point 3?). Of course, no announcement have been made about putting the Ray into production.

HydroKinetic Lab's Evolving HyPEG System
HyPEG stands for "Hydrokinetic Powered Energy Generation," it's the best acronym we could come up with to describe what our technical editor has spent the last couple years perfecting -- largely in his head and on paper. The concept is relatively simple: take a water wheel and lay it horizontally several meters deep in a moving body of water; it only needs a couple knots of current to begin turning. At the center of the hub, embed a submersible electric generator geared to handle the high torque. At least that's what the math strongly suggests.

This new -- and patent-applied-for -- head design differs substantially from his earlier designs that utilized retractable 'cups' to turn the generator. This design uses folding gates to accomplish the same task with less risk of damage from submerged objects like trees in rivers or fishing nets in ocean/tidal current basins.

We were so taken by the overall concept that my partners at EV World & Associates, LLC formed a small company to commercialize it called Hydrokinetic Lab. Our web site provides additional information on the system including a description -- along with the mathematical formulas behind it -- of how it works. And if you'd like to learn more, you can reach the inventor at techeditor@evworld.com.