Jaguar Land Rover is apparently very protective of its Terrain Response system, a patented technology that alters the behavior of its cars when driving on pavement, grass, gravel, snow, mud, sand, and rocks. The automaker is so protective, in fact, that it has laid down a challenge to several brands under the Volkswagen umbrella to assert that patent, requesting to block U.S. imports of Porsche, Lamborghini, Audi, and VW SUVs which JLR says are using its technology without permission.
Only about 12%–30% of the energy from the fuel you put in a conventional vehicle is used to move it down the road, depending on the drive cycle. The rest of the energy is lost to engine and driveline inefficiencies or used to power accessories. Therefore, the potential to improve fuel efficiency with advanced technologies is enormous.
1488 is a combination of two popular white supremacist numeric symbols. The first symbol is 14, which is shorthand for the "14 Words" slogan: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." The second is 88, which stands for "Heil Hitler" (H being the 8th letter of the alphabet). Together, the numbers form a general endorsement of white supremacy and its beliefs.
Gone are the days when a typical growing American suburb didn’t have a single building over two stories. While the classic images of suburbia remain the single-family home with a spacious lawn and the strip mall on a stroad, a slow but steady change has occurred over the past couple decades. We’ve witnessed the normalization of “suburban retrofit” projects: private developments that attempt to introduce a more urban form to the suburbs, with compact layouts, higher densities, taller buildings, more variety in land use (residential, retail, etc.) and more emphasis on walkability.
Mid-rise apartments tend to sprout up in little pockets of open land along major roads that were left undeveloped, like holes in Swiss cheese, as development filled in around them. In fast-growing places, the “Swiss cheese” effect is a common phenomenon, as landowners may sit on undeveloped land for a long time to speculate on its rising value, wait for the right market timing to develop it, or navigate a slow and complex approval process.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration is confident New York will have 10,000 publicly accessible charging stations for electric vehicles by the end of 2021. The number of places drivers will be able to find those plugs, however, will be far more limited.
Cuomo announced his current 10,000 stations goal in 2018 — his administration aiming to “make ownership of gasoline-powered vehicles obsolete.” But the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, which is overseeing efforts to bring the stations online, says that number refers to individual plugs for electric vehicles, not discrete stations throughout the state — an important distinction if the state hopes to alleviate “range anxiety” associated with the vehicles.
I often wonder if when most cars go all electric, they’ll start including a gallon or two diesel tanks that you might fill once or twice a year, like your windshield washer fluid. Sounds odd that you would need to add diesel to a plug-in electric vehicle but actually makes a lot of sense when you consider the laws of thermodynamics – virtually all electric buses carry a small 5 gallon diesel tank to run the diesel heaters.
An all electric car in cold climates would have much longer range if it relied on a small, efficient diesel heater to provide warmth to the batteries when starting, heat the interior and provide defrost. Diesel is widely used to heat homes – although we call untaxed diesel – heating oil.
While it’s true that an electric car that burns diesel for heat isn’t 100% carbon free, adding a diesel heater to electric cars could reduce carbon emissions by reducing required battery sizes and electricity consumption due to cold battery losses. Diesel heater consumption in an all electric car would be tiny compared to fossil automobiles – as your just heating not moving the car with diesel.
Electric cars could also contain a reversing valve in the air conditioning system to pump heat into the car in cold weather – and that’s more efficient than resistance heating. The problem with heat pumps in a car is you are limited in where you can pump heat from on a cold day – even a large radiator and very high refrigerant compression might not be sufficient to raise temperatures sufficiently without generating heat from the electricity which is very energy intensive. Maybe you can recover waste heat from the motors and battery but there is less than you might think – and as electric cars improve waste heat will only decline.
So I’m thinking low sulfur diesel might be the way to go for heating electric cars in cold climates.
"Dog house" is a name applied to signals that had two columns of yellow and green signals below a single red head. Dog houses are most commonly used to indicate protected left turns.