Automobile Industry

The Chevrolet Bolt Drivetrain Is Incredibly Simple

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The Chevrolet Bolt Drivetrain Is Incredibly Simple

The world of battery electric vehicles might seem like black magic. Electricity turns into motion with the help of controllers and inverters. However, as John Kelly from the WeberAuto YouTube channel explains, EV's are sometimes mechanically simple. Well, at least that's the case for the Chevrolet Bolt. Kelly tackles the Bolt EV’s brilliantly simple drivetrain in the latest video for his WeberAuto YouTube channel.

Electric cars are the future just because they will eventually prove much simpler to build and maintain. Gas motors with their cam shafts and transmissions are such a throw back to an earlier era of pre computers. It's so much easier to manipulate a 3 phase sine wave than have a series of gears and cam shafts to manipulate a gas motor.

California emissions standards don’t make sense everywhere. 🏭

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California emissions standards don’t make sense everywhere. 🏭

Areas with non attainment have emissions inspections but other areas often emissions equipment is clunky and works rather poorly. Automakers lobby for one standard but the problem is that one standard wastes fuel, reliability and performance in areas when the equipment is not neccesary.

One Photo – The 1959 start up of the Chevrolet Corvair | Hemmings

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One Photo: The 1959 start up of the Chevrolet Corvair | Hemmings

The rarest of the rare. That's what's so special about the particular Corvair depicted in this Chevrolet-issued public relations photograph. When the photo was taken, however, it was just a typical production-line image of a new car being assembled. But due to early production changes, modifications were made to the Corvair shortly after it was released to the public that rendered early production models—as this Cascade Green sedan—much sought-after. And it's all because of those three little slots on the front valance.

Jaguar Land Rover Sues to Ban VW Group’s SUV Imports to America

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Jaguar Land Rover Sues to Ban VW Group’s SUV Imports to America

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.

 

Gasoline Vehicles

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Where the Energy Goes: Gasoline Vehicles

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.

New York faces a long road on electric vehicle commitments

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New York faces a long road on electric vehicle commitments

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.

Diesel cars

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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.