Over the next few years, more systems will hit the market, including:
* Adaptive Cruise Control * Forward Collision Warning System * Skid Warning System * Lane Sensing & Warning * Driver Performance Monitoring * Forward Collision Avoidance (B raking) * Lane Keeping * Road-to-vehicle communication * Intersection Warning System * Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication * Collision Avoidance (Steering) * More hybrid technology * Fuel Cell Vehicles
If youre not careful, the technology will pass you by.
Closing Comments
As of this writing, we are at the frontier of yet another emerging technology. During my teenage years in the 1960s, dual quad carburetors, six-packs and other gas guzzling, big cubic inch monsters tore up the urban streets. Every Saturday night, you could hear the big fuelers screaming down Reynolds Road. Those were the days when big blocks and chrome ruled the roads.
Today, the future belongs to hybrids and the promise of alternative fuels. What was once a race for more horsepower is now a challenge for more fuel-efficient vehicles. At present, hydrogen seems to be feasible.
According to a major oil company, crude will deplete in about 40 years, gas in about 60 years and coal in about 200 years. The worlds oil reservoir is only decades away from depletion.
It is interesting to note that in 1925, Henry Ford commented to a New York Times reporter that ethyl alcohol was The fuel of the future, an opinion that was widely shared in the automobile industry. The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumac out by the road, Ford said, or from apples, weeds, sawdustalmost anything. There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented. Theres enough alcohol in one years yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for a hundred years.
Cultivation of crops for use of fuel requires copious amounts of land that would otherwise be available food production, forests or other uses. Producing ethanol, however, requires the use off fossil fuels to produce the crops and convert them into fuel.
In the longer term, hydrogen is appealing. It is the most abundant element in the universe. Combined with oxygen, hydrogen can power fuel cells. In a fuel cell, hydrogen produces only waterand no emissions. Compared to a gasoline vehicle, a hydrogen-powered vehicle offers the promise of doubling the miles driven for each unit of fuel energy.
If hydrogen is to become a widely used transportation fuel, several challenges must be overcome.
Hydrogen is a combustible gas that can explode. It has safety-related aspects that differ from those of natural gas, but which overall can be placed in a similar risk level as natural gas. Pressurized hydrogen gas is analogous to pressurized natural gas; liquid hydrogen is akin to liquid natural gas. The risk is more related to the amount of pressure (independent on the type of gas). While cars with liquid fuel tanks (regardless of whether hydrogen or natural gas) are allowed in parking garages, they are prohibited when equipped with pressurized gas tanks.
For hydrogen, the lower ignition limit is at 4 percent and the detonation limit at 18 volume percenthence at very different mixturesand that the minimum ignition energy has a low value of 0.02 mJ. Thus hydrogen has a tendency to completely burn up before it reaches a mixture concentration that could explode. In contrast to hydrogen, every carbon and sulfur-containing fuel develops high heat radiation and soot formation during combustion.
Although common in many compounds, pure hydrogen is rare. Like electricity, it is a clean energy carrier, but it must be made from another energy source. One possibility is to produce hydrogen from hydrocarbon fuels such as natural gas.
Even though the electrochemical production of hydrogen and oxygen from water is a quite old technical process, the demand for hydrogensubstantially increased during the last decadesis currently meet mostly by converting coal or petroleum since this is currently cheaper. The electrochemical methods can only compete when the price for electricity is very low. That reason is why large scale electrolysis factories are often found in the vicinity of hydroelectric power plants. The largest such facility at the Aswan Dam of the Nile in Egypt has a production capacity of 40,000 m3 of hydrogen per hour.
All known methods of producing hydrogen today require considerable energy input and are costly, making hydrogen much more expensive than gasoline. Additionally, depending on the energy source, hydrogen can be less efficient and produce more emissions when the complete cycle of fuel production, distribution and end-use is considered.
Location of production facilities is yet another challenge to overcome. The industry could make it in large central facilities and then move it to consumers.
That would require new infrastructure of high-pressure pipelines, storage facilities and retail station pumps because hydrogens properties preclude the use of existing facilities. Or, it is possible to produce and store hydrogen in a smaller installation at a modified retail station.
Hydrogen could also be produced from gasoline on board a fuel cell automobile as the hydrogen is needed, thereby using the existing gasoline infrastructure.
However, getting new technology started can be expensive. And since the government can take risks that private industry wont, perhaps the government should be the driving force rather than market forces. The Internet was supported for 20 years by the military and for 10 more years by the National Science Foundation before the civilian sector discovered it. Without Uncle Sams push, our society may be condemned to rely on increasingly dirty fossil fuels as cleaner ones like oil and gas are depleted. If we dont have a proactive energy policy and soon, we may end up using coal, then shale, and then tar sands. It will be a continually diminishing return until ultimately, our civilization will collapse.
But it does not have to end that way. We still have a choice.
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