What Type of Green Will Your Car Be?

Will you be driving a super-clean, green, hydrogen-powered fuel cell car in the future? Or a lithium-ion battery powered electric car? What about a low-emission bio-diesel? Perhaps an efficient compressed natural gas auto? Or maybe something else (hopefully, not a gasoline powered Hummer!).

Last week, we previewed the future of the robo-car--and any of the vehicles we discuss here could also be a robo model sometime down the road. This week, we'll turn to the shade of green you may be driving.

The May edition of Popular Science has an interesting feature in which they handicap the pros and cons of the automotive fuels of the future, predicting the market share each will have twenty years from now, in 2027.

It's a pretty realistic look at the future, although one hopes the timetable can be sped up through some good government policies.

The clear winner in the PopSci sweepstakes is battery propelled vehicles, including hybrids, which obviously are already on the road and making gains. While current hybrids can achieve gas mileage of 45-50 mpg, we can expect to start seeing mass-market plug-in electrics by around 2011, which offer the promise of as much as 100 mpg (of gasoline--you also have to use electricity to charge them). PopSci forecasts a 30% market share for electrics by 2027.

That's some decent news, but of course if all we do is build a bunch of coal-fired generating plants to charge up all those new electric vehicles, we won't make much progress on reducing carbon emissions. (We will, however, be more energy "independent", unless we start importing Chinese coal.)

So what of those fantastic hydrogen fuel cell vehicles that emit only water as their exhaust? The news ain't so good. PopSci forecasts only 2% market share for such cars by 2027. Technological hurdles abound--not only is fuel-cell technology not quite ready for prime-time, but it is very difficult to store and transport hydrogen efficiently, and the needed infrastructure is a long-way off. Also, the current methods for making hydrogen involve using carbon-based fuels, especially natural gas. Hydrogen can be made from water with electricity--that hydrolysis experiment you did in high school--but we'd need a lot of electricity, so once again we're looking at whether we can quickly boost renewable production of all those needed megawatts. Nonetheless, hydrogen fuel cells look like the technology of our grandchildren, something we can look forward to on trips out of the nursing home.

PopSci doesn't see any other technology making a big breakout, either. They put biodiesel at a 4% market share in 2027, with compressed natural gas (CNG) at 3%, and ethanol at 6%. (We think CNG could develop a niche for larger vehicles--trucks and buses--which would make its overall contribution to lower carbon emissions greater.)

PopSci does see big inroads for regular diesel, taking as much as 20% of the market by 2027. So what, you say? Well, modern diesel engines do emit about a third less carbon than a typical gasoline-powered car, getting 20-40% better mileage. That's some progress, but we'd frankly hope to do a lot better in the next 20 years. Also, putting in a diesel infrastructure is the first step toward more bio-diesel use.

What does all this mean? It means we have a long way to go. PopSci's estimates are probably quite realistic--it takes a long time to replace the whole vehicle fleet, and apart from hybrids and diesels, most of these technologies are barely available today. It means in 20 years we'll still be spewing vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere from transportation, and we'll still be pretty dependent on unstable mid-east regimes for fuel.

The best way to speed up the transition is to raise the price of oil, coal and other carbon emitting fuels. The faster the price goes up, the faster our transition, within reason. If the price goes up too fast, however, it will simply harm the economy, especially the poor. What we need is a steady increase, big enough to be noticed. However, we shouldn't simply wait for demand from China and India to drive up our prices. Either a cap and trade system or a carbon tax will raise fuel prices.

It's time to get going!

Is A Robo Car In Your Future?

Some day, you'll probably be driving--or be driven by--an autonomous robot vehicle.

Rapid progress being made in development of the sensors, computer programs and code, and other technology necessary to power autonomous robot-cars--vehicles that can drive themselves.

In 2004, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency--the Defense Dept's futuristic research funding arm) sponsored a challenge in the desert to see if a robotic vehicle could finish an off-road course within a reasonable time. None of the entrants got more than a few miles before wrecking or otherwise failing miserably. It looked like robo-cars were still well off in science fiction land.

Then, in 2005, DARPA repeated the challenge, with a markedly different outcome. This time, four entrants finished the race course in under the 10-hour limit, led by a car (pictured above) created by a team from Stanford (, which finished the 132 mile course in around seven hours. (Two Carnegie-Mellon robo-cars and one from a private consortium followed closely behind.)

This year, DARPA will move the challenge to an urban environment, or at least a mock one, to see how robotic vehicles perform in a more typical driving environment. Up to 20 entries will compete for a shot at the $2 million first prize for finishing the course fastest (without wrecking or running over a mock pedestrian, of course).

These sophisticated robo-races present an excellent opportunity to develop and prove next-generation technologies likely to be incorporated in your car of the future. Some of the technologies are already appearing in select upscale models, in the form of front, rear and side sensors that can detect when another vehicle is too close, either sounding a warning or even making a course correction or brake adjustment.

Fully robotic cars are, no doubt, still many years away, but we could very well see them in specialized environments within a decade, followed by expansion to the broader population.

Of course, all of us would like to keep our manually driven vehicle while EVERYONE ELSE switches to a robo-car (because we all think we drive better than anyone else).

But apart from keeping jerks off the road--or at least off the steering wheel--one advantage of robo-cars will be their ability to communicate with each other. This could allow greater density of vehicles on the road, as well as elimination of traffic signals. For example, if a vehicle can sense that no other vehicle is at (or approaching) an intersection, there is no need to stop. Even with multiple vehicles at an intersection, computer protocols could optimize the order in which cars proceed, or even vary their speeds so that none need to stop. If vehicles no longer need to stop and go in urban driving, they will have significant energy savings as well.

Robo-cars may also be able to sense and find empty parking spaces, without driving around. Indeed, your robo-car could drop you off at the entrance to wherever your going, and then go park itself. Robo-valet! This will be great, since by 2020 every citizen of our country will be at least 100 pounds overweight and unable to walk more than a few feet at a time.

Here's another possibility: robo-car sharing. Let's face it, 99% of people who own large SUV's and pick-ups do so for the 2% of the time they actually need one. Suppose, instead, you joined a robo-car sharing co-op, which had mostly smaller cars--even tiny single passenger commuter ones--and a few larger ones for the rare occasion you need one. The requisite vehicle shows up on its own at your doorstep at the desired time and off you go.

And, of course, we like the idea of the robo-car that takes the auto thief to the local police station.

The Curmudgeon will be pretty old and even more curmudgeonly by the time this all happens, but we predict our grandchildren may not even learn how to drive. Perhaps that will be a good thing.