By Alexandra Paul Special to CNN

Editor’s note: Alexandra Paul is an actress best known for her four years starring in the television series “Baywatch”. She has been driving electric vehicles since 1990 and is a founding member of Plug in Americaexternal link. Paul can be seen in the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” in theaters this summer.

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) — I drive an electric car. Not a hybrid — a gasoline-powered car that gets some help from an electric motor — but a full electric vehicle. I plug it in at night and can drive 100 miles the next day and go faster than 80 mph on the highway.

So don’t think “golf cart”; these cars have power and pick-up.

While you won’t see many electric cars on the road, they’ve been around longer than you might think.

During 1900, electric cars outsold both gasoline and steam vehicles because electric cars didn’t have the vibration, noise and dirtiness associated with gas vehicles. However soon afterward — with the discovery of Texas crude oil that reduced the cost of gasoline, the invention of the electric starter in 1912 that eliminated the need for a hand crank, and the mass production of internal combustion engine vehicles by Henry Ford — the electric vehicle went the way of the horse and buggy.

The energy crisis in the 1960s and 1970s revived attention briefly. There was another push in 1990, when General Motors Corp. unveiled the (ineptly named) Impact, a sporty, aerodynamic electric car prototype.

In 1998 the California Air Resources Board decided that if a car company could make such a car, it should, and mandated that two percent of vehicles sold in the state in 1998 must be emission-free, with that number rising to ten percent in 2003.

Since California is a huge market, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Chrysler, Ford and GM started building electric vehicles — about 5,000 were manufactured. But by 2005 the mandate had been eviscerated because of pressure from those same car companies, and 4,000 perfectly good electric vehicles were crushed.

But did car companies really want electric cars to succeed? The success of electric vehicles would have threatened the status quo and core business models of two of the world’s biggest industries — oil and automobile. It is more measure for these companies to give lip service to hydrogen in an attempt to appear “green.” But hydrogen is a technology that experts say is decades away.

Because the small print in California’s mandate allowed for car companies to manufacture only as many cars as there was interest in them, the game became to pretend there was no interest. Almost no advertising money was spent to let you know electric cars existed, and even if you did find out about them salespeople actively dissuaded you from getting one.

As with any new technology, an electric vehicle was more expensive than its gas counterpart. In addition, the limited range scared off customers, although the average American drives only 34 miles a day and every electric car could go at least twice that far on a full charge.

These cars had huge potential, but no media covered their subsequent crushing. It is only with the release this summer of the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” that the full story comes out. This film chronicles the rise and fall of the General Motors EV1, an electric car I leased on the day it was released in 1996. Zero to 60 mph in 7.4 seconds, a top speed of 140 mph and a range of 120 miles. GM discontinued this car just a few years later. No car company nowadays makes a mass-production electric vehicle.

My current electric vehicle, a Toyota RAV4 EV, also was discontinued a few years ago. This car costs me the equivalent of 60 cents a gallon to run. I never need to get a tune-up, change spark plugs or add water to the batteries or oil to the motor. The only maintenance for the first 150,000 miles is to rotate my tires. This car is quiet, fast and emission free. I plug it in every night at home, and it charges on off-peak energy.

Even if it were getting power solely from electricity derived from coal — a common criticism of electric cars — my vehicle uses fifty percent less carbon dioxide than a 24 mpg gas car. When I have to get new batteries, which I expect I’ll will be when my car is ten years old, the old ones will be over 90 percent recyclable.

The concern I hear most often about electric vehicles is their range. Well, at 100 miles per charge, my electric vehicle fulfills 98 percent of my driving needs, and I live in a city where everything seems to be 40 minutes away.

When I want to go further, I borrow my husband Ian’s Toyota Prius. I don’t like driving it. Am I supposed to be amazed when a car gets 43 miles per gallon? The average fuel economy mandate for cars in 1985: 27.5 mpg. For 2006: 27.5 mpg. No wonder our expectations are so low. Progress in fuel efficiency has been glacial compared to improvements in computers and cell phones.

There is a solution: The plug-in hybrid. This vehicle will run on pure electric power for up to 60 miles, and then automatically switch to gas (or a biofuel) if you drive farther. For the reason that around 85 percent of Americans travel less than 50 miles a day, this means that the majority people who charge their cars at home each night would hardly ever dip into their car’s gasoline tank.

The infrastructure to charge is already in place (electric outlets are everywhere), and the technology (batteries) has been tested in the field and greatly improved upon for over 15 years. National security experts, including former CIA Director James Woolsey, are advocates for these vehicles because they say these vehicles can help break our dependence on foreign oil. Environmentalists support them because plugging in means getting an average of more than 100 mpg. Consumers like them because they will be saving thousands of dollars in gasoline costs.

Once you have known the quiet smooth speed and the clean efficiency of an electric vehicle, you will never think “golf cart” again.

–Who Killed Electric Car—

Another pages you may interest in reading: Hybrid Fuel, Mileage Hybrid, Electric SUV, and Hybrid Vehicle Research. ===Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification===

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Integrated Motor Assist or IMA is Honda’s hybrid auto technology, released in 1999 on the Honda Insight. It’s a particular implementation of the parallel hybrid car. This utilizes an electrical motor installed between the Internal Combustion Engine and also transmission to behave like an engine balancer, starter motor, and also aid grip motor. In the first generation, IMA couldn’t power the vehicle on electrical energy entirely, and might only utilize the motor to help or start the actual engine.

Integrated Motor Assist History

Integrated Motor Assist

The 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid, nevertheless, can activate the electrical motor even though the auto is coasting with out turning the internal combustion engine along, although contrary to Toyota’s Hybrid Synergy Drive or perhaps GM and also DaimlerChrysler’s Global Hybrid Cooperation, the Integrated Motor Assist features a to a lesser extent powerful motor generator that allows the vehicle to be able to slow or stop it’s charge per unit associated with deceleration to a lesser extent; it wouldn’t operate on without having turning on the engine which can be straight linked to it’s electric motor.

The idea behind IMA is to apply regenerative braking to be able to recapture a few of the energy missed through deceleration, and also reprocess which energy later to aid speed up the automobile. This has 2 effects: it increases the pace of speedup, plus it reduces the work required from the gasoline engine. The speedup rise is very important because it enables the engine being scaled as a result of a smaller but to a greater extent fuel efficient variant without having rendition the automobile excessively slow or even weak. This smaller engine will be the primary reason vehicles built with IMA improve highway fuel consumption rate than their more traditional counterparts.

Additionally, automobiles built with IMA can shut off their own engine if the auto stops and use the electrical motor to be able to quickly spin it back up once the driver emits the brake foot pedal. There is also a standard starter like a backup, which makes it the only output hybrid system which could operate using its high voltage electric system disabled, only using it’s engine just like a conventional vehicle. Nevertheless, because the IMA also works since the automobile’s alternator, finally the 12 Volt accessory assault and battery might require another charge.

Honda Insight and Integrated Motor Assist

Coming from 1999 to 2006, Honda Insight relied on Integrated Motor Assist system from Honda. The Integrated Motor Assist system assisted the electrical motor to perform start and stop sequences using the accelerator engine throughout sealed driving weather condition. This technique besides kept the hybrid battery charged aside turn the engine in to a generator.

The Honda Hybrid still utilizes the Integrated Motor Assist system; however it experienced a couple of improvements which are based in the up-to-date model. The Honda Insight can perform 40 miles per gallon in the city and also 43 mpg on the highway. The combined fuel consumption rate is 41 mpg.

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By: Johan Young

According to Transport Watch, only about 30% of the energy generated by the power plant in fact reaches the vehicle because of losses in the transmission route. Of the energy delivered to the vehicle, 20% is then lost to the batteries and electric motor. This means that most Electric Vehicles are only about 24% efficient. So, if your electric vehicle is charged with electricity from a coal-fired power plant, then the Carbon dioxide emissions to fuel your Electric Vehicle are about double the amount emitted by a diesel engine, due to the inefficiencies in electrical power generation and transmission.

electric vehicle schematic

As a result they assume that the notion that electric cars will decrease emissions is a fiction unless we hypothecate that the UK electricity generating industry will be de-carbonised.

But if we want to consider this issue carefully, we will find a huge advantage of electric vehicles.

And now, let us consider some definitions:

• Hybrid-electric vehicle: This uses an internal-combustion engine for most of its power, but also has an electric motor run from batteries recharged by the engine. Typically the engine shuts off when the car is stopped. Hybrid Electric Vehicles include the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight.
• Plug-in hybrid-electric vehicle: An Hybrid Electric Vehicle that can charge its batteries by plugging into a charger, permitting all-electric short trips. The forthcoming Chevrolet Volt is such a car.
• Battery-electric vehicle: an electric car powered solely by batteries.

All three can charge their batteries using regenerative braking, which recaptures energy otherwise lost as heat when bringing the car to a stop. That’s a huge advantage of electric vehicles.

How much energy is lost getting electricity from the power plant to your Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle? Plenty. In the U.S. right now, about 70 percent of the energy used to make electricity – more than four million gigawatt-hours – comes from fossil fuels. About 70 percent of that amount is wasted generating the power and transmitting it to your door. Other energy is lost when charging batteries and operation electric motors. Overall, electric cars use fossil fuel at 20 to 25 percent efficiency, but dismal as that sounds, it beats an internal-combustion car, which typically operates at about 15 percent efficiency. An HEV uses around 0.48-0.74 kilowatt-hours per mile, while PHEVs in electric mode and BEVs use 0.18-0.46 kWh per mile. By contrast, a conventional car getting 25 MPG uses 1.35 kWh/mile. To put the issue in more familiar terms, a Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle offers fuel economy equivalent to as much as 188 miles per gallon.

Now let’s talk pollution. A huge advantage of electric vehicles is that their energy can come from renewable sources, such as hydroelectric, wind, or solar. Even if the energy source is fossil fuel, installing state-of-the-art emission controls on a few big power plants is way easier than installing ’em on hundreds of millions of motor vehicles. What’s more, since many electric plants use natural gas, Carbon dioxide emissions from power generation are a modest 1.27 pounds of Carbon dioxide per kWh – 1.9 pounds per productive kWh once we account for losses during battery charging and so on. Evaluate that to gasoline, which produces the equal of 3.9 pounds of CO2 per productive kWh.

Not until there are, the battery electric car is far more environmentally friendly than conventional car batteries. For example, Tesla’s Electric Roadster Battery can make the most of the amount of materials that can be reused, recycled, and minimize energy consumption utilized during the transportation and recycling process

They can divide the elements and re-use what can be re-used (cobalt, aluminum, nickel, and copper, etc). So the battery pack saves thousands of gallons of gasoline/diesel over the life of the vehicle, it is less toxic than the lead-acid batteries that are in regular cars, and at the end of its life it is recycled. That’s a huge advantage of electric vehicles.

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By: Johan Young

Internal combustion engine wherein the combustion of fuel and an oxidizer occurs. The combustion chamber is the space where everything happens causing an exothermic reaction that produces gas at a high pressure and temperature. The increasing hot gases will immediately put pressure on solid engine parts causing them to move. Pistons, rotors or the engine itself then begins movement which propels the entire automobile.

history of internal combustion engine

The first internal combustion engine was designed by the Dutch scientist Christian Huygens in 1678; it was to have been fueled with gunpowder, but it was never built. About 1860 a French inventor, Etienne Lenoir (1822-1900), built the first practical internal combustion engine; it burned illuminating gas. 1866 two German engineers, Eugen Langen (1833-1895) and Nikolaus August Otto (1832-1891), developed a more efficient gas engine, and in 1876 Otto built a four cycle engine, a prototype of the so-called Otto-cycle engines used in most modern automobiles and airplanes

The Operation of Internal Combustion Engine

internal combustion engines

The internal combustion engine functions using a four-stroke cycle or the Otto cycle. The cycle involves four phases namely: induction, compression, power and exhaust. All of these purpose to generate an exothermic chemical process to create vehicle propulsion. During induction, oxygen or other oxidizers are introduced into the cylinder to act with the fuel. Compression then creates as the gases start a response that continuously increase temperature and pressure within the cylinder.

When enough pressure is applied on the corresponding engine parts, the engine begins to gain power through movement coming from direct force application. The aftermath of the entire compression process will lead to exhaustion of by products like carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and nitrogen wastes. These gases are freely emitted into the atmosphere. The combustion process is started through engine ignition using the spark ignition method or the compression ignition system.

Where Does Gasoline Come In?

There are electric/gasoline-type systems that use a combination of lead-acid battery plus an induction coil to create a high-voltage electrical spark. The spark will then ignite the mix of air and fuel within the cylinder. The battery is rechargeable even during operation through an alternator or generator driven by the engine itself. Gasoline engines get an air and gasoline mixture to be compressed to less than 185 psi. The spark plug ignites the mixture during compression within the cylinder.

As for diesel engines, these require only heat and pressure produced by the engine during the compression process for ignition. Diesel compression is approximately three times higher compared to a gasoline engine. Diesel engines use air only. Some diesel fuel is sprayed into the cylinder with the use of a fuel injector just before peak compression to start ignition immediately. HCCI engines also require only heat and pressure but take in air and fuel. This process makes diesel and HCCI engines more prone to cold starts.

The Polluting Effects

Combustion products or the hot gases ignited and burnt inside the engine will have higher amounts of energy compared to the compressed fuel and air mixture. After available energy are used up to drive the engine pistons, remaining combustion products will be vented or exhausted through a valve or the exhaust outlet to bring back the piston in its original state also called TDC. Any heat which is not used up will become a waste product due to be removed from the engine via a liquid or air cooling system.

Air pollution emissions then result from incomplete combustion of carbonaceous fuel. Examples of engine by products are carbon monoxide, soot, nitrogen wastes, sulfur and uncombusted hydrocarbons. These also result if the products did not operate near the stoichiometric ratio required for effective combustion. The fuel would not have burnt very well due to factors like cool cylinder walls or lack of air. This is also known as quenching of the flame.

Both gasoline and diesel engines emit harmful gases that can be dangerous to humans as well as the environment. The greenhouse gases start trapping hot air within the atmosphere instead of allowing them to exit to space leading to global warming. The rise of the internal combustion engine finally showed its major flaw which is pollution.

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