New Green Car
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
The Riversimple Urban Car will have a far smaller fuel cell than in current industry prototypes and thus needs less hydrogen to be stored on board and in fuelling stations.
The vehicle is no bigger than a Smart car, weighing just 350kg, and has been developed over three years by teams at Oxford and Cranfield universities. It can reach 50mph and travel in excess of 200 miles, consuming the equivalent petrol energy of 300mpg in hydrogen.
Power comes from a 6kw fuel cell, which is tiny compared to the 100kw system powering the Honda Clarity. it is very important to keep the weight down on this car as it allows the speed of the car to be heavily increased.
There is a bank of ultracapacitors to store this electricity, which in turn provides most of the accelerating power, allowing for a small fuel cell.
One of the really good things about the design to this new car is that once it is all ready it will be made available online for any car manufacturer to take into their own.
The cars themselves will also be leased over 20 years, with fuelling included in the leasing cost, and the materials will be recycled at the end of each car’s lifespan.
The head of Riversimple actually stated that we must push forward with the technology rather than get left behind. The sale of cars still rewards the maximisation of resource use – whereas we now accept that we must minimize resource use.”
“The Riversimple Urban Car represents a major step towards practical 21st century personal transport and towards the fulfilment of my great-grandfather’s ambitions for accessible personal transport but this time combining his other passions: light weight and high efficiency,” said Piech.
The real question to ask is will they be upgrading things like used cars to make them greener? If you have recently gone out and purchased a Audi R8 then you are not going to be pleased when you cannot upgrade it to make it a bit greener. Audi Carsare just one of the brands that needs to be looked into.
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