HoodaThunk?

I’m a huge fan of electric vehicles. I love the idea and the recent advances in the technology have begun to indicate that we might actually see some real, functional EV’s coming up soon. If you’d like to see a report on one that’s going to be hitting California’s roads soon, check out Wired Magazine’s test drive of the Aptera. Sure, it’s weird-looking. But hey – that’s not a bug, it’s a feature! (Hat tip to Instapundit for that one.)

The problem with EV’s is simple. While they can deliver similar performance to gas-powered cars in terms of torque (actually, way better than gas), acceleration, and top speed, they lag woefully behind in terms of range. My Toyota Matrix can take me over 300 miles on a tank of gas, carrying 4 people and a decent amount of luggage. The Aptera, linked above, can give you about 100 miles with 2 people and their bags. That wouldn’t necessarily be a killer until you examine what happens when either vehicle type hits the end of their range. With my Matrix, I pull into a gas station, fill up the tank, and hit the road again in less than 5 minutes. The Aptera requires no less than 4 hours to recharge and that’s assuming you have 220-volt, 30 amp power available. Drop that to house current and you’re looking at an overnight recharge rate. That’s pretty inconvenient if you’re out in the middle of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

The fix to that is to provide some ability to charge the batteries enroute or to supplement their power delivery to the electric motors. Toyota’s Prius does this with a hybrid electric/gas engine system delivering motive power to the transmission in tandem. Chevy’s new Volt will do that with a “range extender”. That’s basically a gas-powered engine built into the car that does nothing but provide electric power for the motors to run on. I don’t know the details of Chevy’s system, but it sounds like a pretty standard small internal combustion engine. That’s OK, but it’s not the most efficient engine out there.

Enter ETV Motors and their micro-turbine. Turbine engines are used in the aviation field because they’re reliable, fuel efficient, and actually simpler in terms of mechanical action than a piston engine. The reason you’re not using one in your car today is that its advantages only accrue when running at a fairly constant speed. The accelerate-decelerate cycles common in driving don’t do a turbine any good. However, for providing electic power to electric motors at a constant rate, the turbine is tops. ETV’s turbine looks positively tiny and that’s a wonderful thing in a small vehicle like a passenger car.

I have high hopes for this one and I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.