The Green Optimistic

Dean Kamen, a UK inventor, has just released to the public a modified electric Ford Th!nk, hacked in his DEKA labs. DEKA is his company located in Manchester Millyard. Kamen’s modified electric car has a Stirling engine onboard, into the trunk. He uses the stirling engine mainly to defrost and heat the car, because the systems doing that are huge power consumers.

Here’s a video we’ve been expecting for so long: a real image of a real car, expected by so many electric vehicle enthusiasts. Enjoy…

The French piece of electric cake is called “Volage Roadster”, and is being developed by Venturi, also a French company. Primary performance analysis with today’s presumptions about immediate future technology says that Volage will be capable of reaching 160mph and going about 200 miles with the onboard battery.

Unlike the Americans or the Europeans, the Chinese know their way into the cleaner future everybody dreams of. They probably began understanding a long time ago and now bringing into practice the cleanest possible way of transportation: a solar powered electric car.

Toshiba has developed an advanced type of Lithium-Ion batteries, the SCiB (Super Charge ion Battery). They say it has the capacity of charging within 5 minutes at 90% of its capacity, and it is being able to bear 5000 to 6000 charges until it starts losing capacity. They used the battery to demonstrate these on a laptop.

Since the idea of economy started in humanity’s mind, everybody wants to reduce the expenses, mostly on energy dependence. Nowadays, when hybrid cars and, generally, electric vehicles are starting to play a huge role in car industry, and electric technology is starting to get cheaper yearly, there still are scientists that get inspired by the old explosion engine principles, albeit they are being used for more than a hundred years and their power source is mainly based on fossil fuel.

I guess that the Chevy Volt has been one of the most hunted electric cars from the beginning of this year. GM has done all their possible to keep the secret from the press(?), but it seems that several images and specs have “leaked”, acting as a teaser for the information thirsty public.

The Tesla Roadster just got better: its manufacturers equipped it with a new gearbox, a more efficient one, that has about 30% more torque on a single gear ratio and achieves 10% more mileage on average.