Today, I read an preview of the Mercedes Benz vision for the future.
Link- Road and Track
Second link- Drive.
The car is appears to be a plug in hybrid driven by in wheel electric motors. The electricity comes from a hydrogen fuel cell and a lithium sulfur battery, with inductive charging to charge the battery. 100km can be traveled on battery power alone.
This appears an extremely viable vision of future motoring.
Electric propulsion and inductive battery charging seem to be inevitable. Hydrogen power to replace today's internal combustion engines as a way to deliver long range makes real sense too. So is this future car a hydrogen fuel cell car with additional 'plug in' hybrid power, or an electric car with hydrogen fuel cell range extension?
Well, either, depending on your perspective. Which refueling is more convenient? If you have a garage or other dedicated car space, then the car will automatically top recharge the battery whenever the car is parked. If you drive less than 100km per day, then you never need visit a refilling station, and never use any hydrogen. However on a long journey only 10% of the range comes from the battery. In reality for most people, I suspect the over 100km days will be the exception and over a year the car will be more than 90% battery powered, which is good because this is the greatest efficiency.
But it started a thought process.... if cars may actually use battery power for over 90% of power, then you need way, way less fuel stations!
At least this will make the challenge of creating the hydrogen refilling stations that much easier, but we may have to travel further to find one.
The interim step to this 'plug in' hydrogen car, is the the 'plug in' diesel of gasoline car. The same rules of usage can apply and again and if cars get to drive mostly on battery power then a whole range of fuel stations will convert to apartment blocks. Now this process somehow seems to have started already, but it could really accelerate!
No comments:
Post a Comment