BMW Megacity Electric Car

[flynfrog]

Why you giver up flyny-frog, you no likey debate?

There is a 'Green Party' in the UK with a whole raft of policies. True the media is in the pockets of the main three parties and has not given fair coverage to 'green' issues, or any other issues as it happens, so the general public remains to the most part in ignorance but there is nothing unusual in that.
The nuclear lobby feeds off this ignorance and further destabalises progress.

It is nice to see very old steel cars in an historical sense but I wonder just how much energy and materials have been used to keep steel from rusting in the world vehicle park since the 19th century. How much to crush, re melt and process the scrap cars. The 'waste' is in the culture that has developed alongside the technology. The 'throw away' society. BMW using carbon fibre is just another extension of this culture at the moment, their real aim is to look green (lie), not attempt any of the major technology changes needed to actualy become green.

because its not a debate with you. You preach your opinion as if it was fact then if some one disagrees with you they are confused by the fill in the blank lobby. If that doesn't work you change the subject or provide some irrelevant anecdote.

I would say me driving my cars that have been built over 10 years ago is much greener than a prius yes I might use a little more gas but look at the impact of building a new car. Common sense is what is missing from the whole green power debate.

[WhiteBlue]

All true. But its a market economy and the buyer decides what "dead weight" goes in the car. BMW can't sell cars with manual windows or seats if the market asks for electric.

[flynfrog]

All true. But its a market economy and the buyer decides what "dead weight" goes in the car. BMW can't sell cars with manual windows or seats if the market asks for electric.

I was reading a book about an old Detroit car designer. He said the perfect car was unattainable because the public didn't know what it wanted. The joke was something along the line of 0-60 in 4 seconds 50mpg seats 6 looks great and will survive any crash. It also most handle like a race car ect ect.

Most the weight in new cars is from the crash safety stand point. Look how the mini keep ballooning in weight. Or how a new 3 series weighs way more than an older 5 series.

[marcush.]

this is complete and utter nonsense.

how many people have a clue of Aerodynamics , turbocharging,Emission controlsystems ,passive and active safety ,let alone anything technical...

In fact you buy what you perceive is the car that suits your needs.

But who actually was making the potential car buyer aware of the good things of aero but at the same time talking down or ignoring the much bigger potential of not adding weight to the cars.
Avoiding accidents is the solution to the safety issue not building cars that lessen the consequences of incidents...

So this is really an issue of the car industry coming up with advances ,be it speed ,acceleration,safety ,bigger than ever windows ,electric anything a normal thinking man or womon would never ever think would feel a need for if not thumped on by the marketing guys...

Cars don´t sell on themselves they get sold with marketing tools.It is not the
objective need for these cars but the desire to own something special or suited to
their view of themselves .And this is made by marketing sand not the other way round.

Only if you actually know the bag of rice has faallen over somewhere in china ,you will actually feel the consequence.We are looking at the fate of thousands of people who died in public ,because it was broadcasted but we have no feelings bad or good about those who die every day (and not because of age),simply because the media happen not to think it´s worth informing us.

[Just_a_fan]

All true. But its a market economy and the buyer decides what "dead weight" goes in the car. BMW can't sell cars with manual windows or seats if the market asks for electric.

True, but as the cost of providing the additional kit goes up (as it surely must as resources / energy to make them becomes more expensive) then we'll see a move away from some of the less necessary kit.

For example, why does one need electric windows in a car with aircon? My cars have both, of course, but I so infrequently need to open the windows that lugging 4 electric motors plus all of the wiring around is rather silly. I can see the idea of a driver's window being electric as useful e.g. toll booths etc. but other than that?

Also, I can see the appeal of powered memory seats for drivers - if two people share the car then getting your preferred driving position sorted each time can be tiresome. But why does the passenger need a powered seat? And how about cars with electrically adjustable rear seats too (admittedly currently only the top end sector but no doubt they will trickle down in to the middle and lower sector ranges). Perhaps once people realise that operating all of this kit actually costs money (because the electricity is generated from the expensive fuel in the tank) and that the cost will increase (because the fuel gets more expensive by the week) they'll shy away from some it. Or maybe not, knowing the stupidity of people...

Safety kit is also heavy, but the irony is that a nice light car can probably look after you without all of the various bags because there is so much less energy to dissipate in the first place. If they can build a 800kg Focus-sized car (i.e. c.0.5 tonne lighter than the Focus) then they can probably absorb the energy nicely in the crumple zones without resorting to 10 air bags around the cabin. A virtuous circle, if you will.

[marcush.]

exactly.

my company car has a nice box under the interior mirror and driving throu the tollstations in italy is just a beep and open is the gate...quite convenient I have to say.
I would as well say with GPS and what have you it should be quite easy for todays electronic wonders to make a modern car only travel as fast as is allowed on the
road you are currently travelling or stop in front of a red traffic light..If you choose to override ,so be it...it´s your decision but for most drivers this would not only be the correct but as well the logic and convenient solution.

but then we need those big windows ...and still they manage to produce a rediculously big dead angle view on all four corners of the car..mega big rearview mirrors were one rear view camera would help aero and safety....with todays big displays the extra cost is not really that much...and a mirror is not actually cheap..at least when having to buy one for a repair.

looking in Cf and other exotics when you are looking for weight savings is surely not leading you anywere useful.
It was and it will be quite simple :keep it simple and reduce the amount of parts
and the weight will drop miraculously ...having 4 wheelnuts instead of 5 is saving money and will reduce the weight ..but then you had to go to 5 only because the weight was creeping up in the first place..create parts that make themselves useful or carry themselves instead of inventing a set of brackets or mouldings..
with the current approach of how cars are developped the savings found with CF structures would be eaten up by new features needed in no time...

[Edis]

the future is in the past...for decades the buzzword was aerodynamics..not a mention of weight ...until a Golf had reached 1200kilo curb weight thats a cool 505 increase from where the Golf started...thats development at its best...
then we had the Airbag and safety hype ,very good thinking to carry 15 kilos of pyrotechnics in all cars to help save the life of those who actually get involved into an accident where the bag is actually needed.
On a sidenote ,just look beneath the cover of a current passenger car seat or the
hard plastic mouldings of the passenger compartment...i bet if you start the design of components under the aspect of avoiding them doing harm to the passengers you could possibly do away with a lot of these questionable inventions.

light cars... you do not even need a reverse gear for this.. :
http://www.stefan-arold.de/pics-fifties ... ittger.jpg

A Golf may have grown 500 kg over the years, but it have also grown a size. So a modern Golf is more of the size that a Passat used to be, and a modern BMW 1-series is about as large, if not larger, than a BMW 3-series from 1990.

So the trend over the years have been to make each car slightly larger than its predecessor. In addition to that, the body structure have been made much stronger to increase crash safety and reduce noise and improve handling (higher stiffness), more sound insulation have been added to reduce noise, and lots of extra equipment have been added to the cars; AC, electric window openers, electric seats, stereos with double digit number of speakers and so on. All this increase weight which in turn increase weight even more since it require a more powerful drivetrain and better brakes. So essentially we get a bad cicle of weight increase were a weight increase in itself require more weight.

So if you damage the monocoque in an accident, will it be repaired or thrown away?

Probably thrown away, but usually you use a subframe to absorb energy in a crash. That way you can avoid damage to the monocoque in minor accidents where the vehicle can be saved.

A Koenigsegg, the McLaren MP4/12C and the Mercedes SLR McLaren

Nah Uranium will run out long before that happens.
Of course we could use Plutonium but I am already involved with setting up mental hospitals for people with that idea.

No, it won't. There are at least 5.5M tons of uranium availible for conventional mining and the current rate of consumption is about 65000 tons a year, that's 80 years worth of uranium. However, if we add unconventional sources such as phoshates, probable conventional sources and extraction from seawater, the amounts availible are much larger.

Plutonium is already used as a fuel. Infact, there is where the plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons end up.

I knew you as a sensible person. Whoever dreamed up plutonium for the energy sector must have been out of his effing mind.

Plutonium are already used as a fuel. However, today it's mainly the 0.7% of uranium that is U-235 that are used to power a nuclear powerplant. But if a reactor can produce more plutonium out of uranium 238, the most common isotope, than it consumes, we can get 50-100 times more energy out of a kg of uranium. Enough to be fossil free for 100,000 of years.

Also, I know there are popular myths about nuclear powerplants and nuclear weapons, but, the plutonium produced by nuclear powerplants contain too much Pu-240 to be usable as a weapons material. The fuel cycles required for power production are simply too long, and honestly, there are simpler and better ways to produce weapons plutonium. That's why all nations with nuclear weapons have produced their weapon material in military reactors.

Nuclear power costs far more in cleaning up its waste than it gives in usable energy.

Prove it.

Just walk to Chernobyl my friend, to see how much of the planet is unusable because of your nuclear god.
Take a trip to East Germany and see the other nuclear power stations of the same type still there and not producing one milli amp because of that disaster.
Ask those who lived in the old Soviet Union what the main reason for its collapse was and then you are on the road to your proof.

Chernobyl used RBMK-type reactors which were a flawed design. They had a large positive void coefficient which meant they increased their power output when they overheated. The control rods also had graphite ends which meant that the reactor increased its output shortly when the emergy stop button was pressed. Due to their large physical size, the Soviets didn't use containment buildings either, just a biological shield in a common industrial building.

In the western world we have much safer reactor designs. Most of them use light water as a coolant and a moderador, meaning that they will reduce power output if they overheat. The reactor will in other words stabilize itself. The reactor is also built within a containment building, so if everything goes wrong and the fuel core melts down, the radioactive waste produced will stay inside the containment building, not be released into the atmosphere as in the Chernobyl accident. Some of the latest designs also got passive safety features, meaning that they don't rely on mechanical pumps to remain cool after shutdown, instead they rely on gravity and natural convention (thermosiphon principle).

Still, there are many Soviet built RBMK reactors still in use, infact, there were even one in EU that was shut down as little as five months ago. However, still lacking a containment building, the RBMK was modified so the thermal runaway that occured in Chernobyl, could not have happend in one of the modified reactors.

As for logic about safety, here's one for you. In terms of loss of life, nuclear power costs about as many years as wind power and compared to the approx. 1 million deaths that fossil fuels cause each year, even Chernobyl was just a small incident. There have also been accidents with hydropower that have caused 20 times, if not more, losses of lives in a single accident. Assuming about 10,000 deaths caused by Chernobyl.

As for your cleaning up the waste argument, there is no scientific basis for such a statement. Quite the opposite. Lifecycle assessments on light water reactors using centrifuge enriched uranium have concluded that the energy return on investment can be over 50:1. This is with all the steps from building the powerplant, producing the fuel and then take care of the plant aswell as the used fuel. The CO2 emissions can be less than 3 g/kWh for the same cycle, even wind power can't match that. Nor can it match the cost of electricity, wind power which is the cheapst renewable aside from hydro, is some 30-100% more expensive than nuclear and currently not possible to build on commercial grounds alone (it requires subsidies).

[autogyro]

Monetary cost again, such a narrow concept.

[marcush.]

waste which waste? who cares about the world in 100000years...ah by the way we assume our concept will safely retain the waste for this time ...all scientifically
claculated long before it was possible to simulate the movements of ash clouds above europe...

I will adjust my electrical rearview mirrors to memory position 2 and set the AC to automatic .Unfortunatelly the electric window winders will not allow me to close the window after starting the car..so I may have a date with the dealership...to get the new software flashed...you are welcome...

[xpensive]

But now, the limitation for a rational electric car will always be storage and charging of the electric energy. Even if the electrical motor is three times more efficient than the ICE, you would still need the energy of 20 liters of gasoline to make it a useful vehicle, right?

It would take a 5 MW charge for 2 minutes of a 600 MJ battery to make it the energy-equal of less than 18 liters of gas. Imagine the power cords to that recharge station, not very realistic is it?
And a 600 MJ battery, remember the cost of last years 400 kJ KERS batteries?

But we love our eight nuclear reactors in Sweden, and we will replace them with bigger ones, produces 50% of our electric energy and we have more uranium in the ground than Norway has oil and gas. If it wasn't for the "environmentalists", we would be nuclear-sheiks all of us, but we have no illusions of using it for cars as we know them today.

[Tim.Wright]

Sorry to stray off topic guys...

But it seems Daimler are set to look seriously into composite manufacture as well. They have recently announced an agreement with Toray who are a Japanese composites manufacturer.

Tim

[xpensive]

Look at this numbers. The largest planned solar plant today, scheduled to begin construction this year, will produce 550MW, about a third of the Olkilouto plant.

Right, on a sunny day, just like those stupid windmills will produce power on a windy day, that is not reliable energy for the future when every invested MW must be equalled by the very same investment in something reliable for a cloudy day or dead calm.

[machin]

This is the way to go in the future - reduce weight. Less energy is required to achieve the same performance. Smaller tyres required etc. etc.

Lighter cars will have accidents with less energy. Roads full of heavy cars have a lot of energy to dissipate when they do hit each other.

You might argue that it would be quite easy (ish...)to design a light car with good safety features - giving it good passive safety. Additionally the active safety of a light car is better (less mass to stop/turn in avoidance).

I'm totally in agreement here, if you look at the bigger picture and look at what the car is actually doing in most cases (transporting one person to and from work), the energy efficiency of doing that task is terrible... Take the humble bicycle as a reference point (the greatest machine ever made? -look at how much quicker it is to cycle than it is to walk, whilst using the same power source!). Its aim is to do exactly the same job as the car (get one person to and from work).

Whilst playing around with heart-rate monitors, exercise bikes and real-world riding I took a few numbers (hey, I'm a geek!)... to achieve 20mph my power output was somewhere in the region of just 120-140watts (calculated by monitoring heart rate whilst riding and comparing this to heart rate vs power output figures obtained on the exercise bike)! Compare that to the power required to do the same task in a car....

Obviosuly cars can go much faster than bikes... but not in towns where the legal limit is pretty much 30mph throughout the Uk -in fact where I live there are 20mph limits cropping up. Mix in traffic congestion and it is quicker to cycle!

It would be great if city centres were spaces in which only vehicles below a certain weight and power output were allowed... it would be much safer as RH1300S says because impact energy would be much much lower, it would be much greener, and if more people got out on bikes we'd also be a fitter nation... win-win-win?

I get the feeling that BMW's "city car" is going to be pretty lame considering what would actually be possible to reduce emissions whilst retaining the same average speed through a city.

[Pandamasque]

@ machin. I'm all for cycling but there are a few serious drawbacks.

- if you're lucky enough not to be killed by a bus or a taxi, you arrive at work sweaty and smelly
- you arrive tired (especially if you have Chernobyl-bashed health)
- even if you're lucky to a have a place at work to leave the bike, which is unlikely, you'd be even more tired after pulling it up the stairs. parking would be another problem if you want to go shopping or visit a fried or basically go somewhere right after work, not that they'd want to smell your armpits anyway.

You have a point though. There are so many big cars on the streets with just 1 person in them. I'm especially annoyed of women who buy huge 4x4s because they acknowledge the fact they can't drive properly, so they want to be the one in the tank in case of crash.

[flynfrog]

This is the way to go in the future - reduce weight. Less energy is required to achieve the same performance. Smaller tyres required etc. etc.

Lighter cars will have accidents with less energy. Roads full of heavy cars have a lot of energy to dissipate when they do hit each other.

You might argue that it would be quite easy (ish...)to design a light car with good safety features - giving it good passive safety. Additionally the active safety of a light car is better (less mass to stop/turn in avoidance).

I'm totally in agreement here, if you look at the bigger picture and look at what the car is actually doing in most cases (transporting one person to and from work), the energy efficiency of doing that task is terrible... Take the humble bicycle as a reference point (the greatest machine ever made? -look at how much quicker it is to cycle than it is to walk, whilst using the same power source!). Its aim is to do exactly the same job as the car (get one person to and from work).

Whilst playing around with heart-rate monitors, exercise bikes and real-world riding I took a few numbers (hey, I'm a geek!)... to achieve 20mph my power output was somewhere in the region of just 120-140watts (calculated by monitoring heart rate whilst riding and comparing this to heart rate vs power output figures obtained on the exercise bike)! Compare that to the power required to do the same task in a car....

Obviosuly cars can go much faster than bikes... but not in towns where the legal limit is pretty much 30mph throughout the Uk -in fact where I live there are 20mph limits cropping up. Mix in traffic congestion and it is quicker to cycle!

It would be great if city centres were spaces in which only vehicles below a certain weight and power output were allowed... it would be much safer as RH1300S says because impact energy would be much much lower, it would be much greener, and if more people got out on bikes we'd also be a fitter nation... win-win-win?

I get the feeling that BMW's "city car" is going to be pretty lame considering what would actually be possible to reduce emissions whilst retaining the same average speed through a city.

I dont know what kind of city you live in but we have freeways that travel 65+ here. So you want to put a huge parking lot where people have to park there car and switch to there city car? So now we need to build two cars for each person. One that wont get smooshed on the freeway and one to drive around town? How do you plan to get groceries for a family of four on your bike. I could probably do it doesn't mean it would be safe or a good idea.