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Toyota Mirai – Hydrogen Fuel Cell Electric Car

Posted on August 12, 2021  Comments (1)

I am curious, even skeptical, about the potential for hydrogen fuel cell versus battery passenger cars. I do respect Toyota and so am wondering if they do indeed see something that most others are missing.

The current production Toyota Mirai has a range of 650 km.

I do think hydrogen fuel cells may provide a better option for larger vehicles (maybe even shipping), but I have done next to no research on this so I may be wrong.

It seem unlikely to me that hydrogen fuel cell passenger cars are going to make it but I would be happy to be wrong. Perhaps the advantages will overcome what seem to me to be challenges that are going to prevent them from being successful. I am confused about how committed to this strategy Toyota is (which makes me question my belief that hydrogen fuel cell passenger cars are not going to be successful).

Related: Toyota Engineering Development Process – Toyota Develops Thought-controlled Wheelchair – How to Develop Products like Toyota (2011) – Innovation at Toyota – Electric Cars (post on our blog in 2007) – Toyota Scion iQ: 37 MPG (2011) – Toyota Engineers a New Plant: the Living Kind (2005)

Wiring a Thermometer to Your Van to Turn on AC as Needed as You Sleep

Posted on July 8, 2017  Comments (4)

You may well not be familiar with the growing vanlife community, but I learned of it and see it as an intriguing lifestyle possibility. It allows you to travel and stay in National Forest and BLM land for free (in the USA) and relatively cheaply at campgrounds etc.. People also live in them in cities while traveling stay at welcoming businesses like Walmart. Anyway you can read more about the vanlife in posts on my Freelance Lifestyle, Finance and Entrepreneurship Blog.

This video shows a cool way to wire a thermometer to your car/van so that the van starts when the AC (or heat) is needed. This is some cool home engineering.

Most pursuing the vanlife now use solar energy, which is great in many ways. It is difficult (expensive) to create a solar based system that can run an AC. The option in the video is intriguing. And it is a cool illustration of home engineering. I hope you enjoy it.

Related: Home Halloween Engineering: Gaping Hole Costume (2010) – Home Engineering: Bird Feeder That Automatically Takes Photos When Birds Feed – General Relativity Einstein/Essen Anniversary Test – EZ-Builder Robot Control Software

Super Awesome Micro Project – Full Size Lego Car

Posted on July 24, 2016  Comments (6)

Here is an interview with Steve Sammartino (Australia) and Raul Oaida (Romania) on their efforts to build the car. The project built a fullsize car out of lego ($60,000 worth of legos) with a lego engine that works on air. It really is an interesting interview.

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Car Powered by Compressed Air

Posted on May 12, 2015  Comments (3)

I wrote about cars powered by compressed air back in 2008. Turning such innovative prototypes into products of sustainable businesses is quite difficult.

This new attempt to produce cars powered by compressed air has an innovative design with a joystick instead of a drivers wheel. The AirPod is being developed in France. Compressed air has been used to power trams in France since the 19th century.

The AirPod has a range of 150 to 200 km and a top speed for 80 km per hour. The cost will be about US$10,000.

They claim the cost per mile is about 1/3rd of that for electric vehicles. It is nice that we have engineers around the globe continually working on new uses of technology to provide us better options for living.

I hope such cars can be a success. It does seem to me electric cars seem the more likely large scale success but it is good to have people seeking out innovative solutions.

Related: Compressed Air Powered Car Webcast (2008) – Self Driving Cars Have Huge Potential for Benefit to Society – Engineers Save a Life, With Safe Car Design – Toyota Scion iQ (2011) – Car Style Mass Transit Mag Lev System (2009)

Self Driving Cars Have Huge Potential to Benefit Society

Posted on September 6, 2014  Comments (4)

Self-driving cars was something that seemed very far-fetched when I first read Google was seriously investing in pursuing that idea as a commercially viable product (Google’s Self Driving Car – 2010 post). I quickly became convinced they were right. I still think it is questionable if they will succeed (the political issues may well be even more difficult than technical ones). But the chances of success seem reasonable and the investment in research could provide a huge payoff.

Google’s self driving cars have driven 700,000 miles without an accident already; which is amazing. Warren Buffett stated that “self-driving cars are a real threat to the car insurance business” (His company owns the GIECO car insurance company) at the 2014 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting in Omaha.

There are some people, stressing that this is not ready for mass market use. They are right. But, I think it is funny to see people thinking that a very early stage huge innovation in transportation not being ready today is a reasonable criticism. I am amazed that this huge innovation may actually be available before 2020. That would be incredible.

Certainly even then it will have limitations. And certainly there will be accidents. The current transportation system with humans driving cars has thosands of accidents a day and tens of thousands of deaths a year in the USA alone every year. Every year 1.2 million people die worldwide in traffic-related incidents, and over 90% of those accidents are due to human error.

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Segun Oyeyiola Converted a Volkswagen Beetle to Use Renewable Power

Posted on May 17, 2014  Comments (2)

This Nigerian College Student Built a Wind- And Solar-Powered Car From Scraps

The engineering senior at Nigeria’s Obagemi Awolowo University spent a year retrofitting a Volkswagen Beetle into a wind and solar-powered car, partly made of free scrap parts donated by friends and family. Everything else cost under $6,000.
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Not only did Oyeyiola install a giant solar panel on top of the Beetle; he also inserted a wind turbine under the hood. As Preston explains, that allows air to flow into the grill while the car is moving, subsequently turning the turbine’s rotors and charging the battery at the back of the car. Oyeyiola also built a strong suspension system to deal with the weight of the battery itself.

It’s not perfect. The battery takes four to five hours to charge, but Oyeyiola says he’s working on that. The biggest challenges, he says, came from finding the best materials to use, and the people telling him he was wasting his time.

Super cool.

OAU student builds a solar-powered car

Another thing that distinguishes my car from the common ones you see around is that you can know the state of the car through your mobile phones. I wrote a software that you can install which will give you the basic information about the car while in your room.
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My message to my fellow students is that Rome was not built in a day. It is better to start anything you want to do now and don’t never, I repeat, never expect someone to believe in your dreams because they may not understand it as you do. Endeavor to follow your heart and do what will make you happy and that which will not affect your fellow being negatively.

It is so great to read what creative engineers all over the globe are able to accomplish.

Related: Oyeyiola Segun on Twitter – Promoting Innovation in Sierra Leone – Inspirational Engineer Builds Windmill from Trash – Clay Water Filters for Ghana – Help Science Education in Tanzania

Engineers Save a Life

Posted on April 19, 2013  Comments (7)

photo of car resting in river

This photo was taken by the driver’s parents when they arrived. It doesn’t show much of what it went through to get there, but it gets most of the point across. The picture was taken 200 feet away and looking down from the road.

I got into a major accident today that I was able to somehow walk away from. I lost control of my car and went off of a cliff into boulders, and after flipping a few times, settled in the river. I walked away with cuts on my hands from the broken glass and a bruise that runs from my chest over my left shoulder where my seat belt held me in place.

I shouldn’t be alive discussion on Reddit.

swapsrox: Time to send a letter to the manufacturer thanking them for their safety design! I guarantee your letter will be put on an engineer’s wall, and they’ll know there is a reason they go to work every day.

cmdshftn: Great engineering saved your life. The vehicle’s safety systems from the seatbelt to the crumple zones to the design of the seat kept you safe and alive despite all hell going on around you. Please write a letter to the manufacturer thanking their design team, but above all, follow up with whoever you need to in that jurisdiction to find out why there isn’t a guard rail on that road! Vehicle safety helps, but great road design to prevent an accident like yours helps more!

Related: Electronic Stability Control Could Prevent 33% of Crash Deaths – Driver Thanks Engineer Who Hit Him on Purpose – Smokeless Stove Saves Lives – Toyota Scion iQ: 37 MPG – Engineer Tried to Save His Sister and Invented a Breakthrough Medical Device

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Toyota Scion iQ: 37 MPG

Posted on December 6, 2011  Comments (2)

I posted on the Toyota iQ a few years ago. It has been successful in Europe for several years and is now available in the USA also as the Scion iQ. Sadly it only gets 37 miles per gallon (the same for city and highway, as it is optimized for city driving). The earlier post discussed the Toyota iQ diesel which achieved 59 MPG (now the UK Toyota sites quotes 64 MPG).

The UK gallon (the imperial gallon) is 1.2 USA gallons – why are we not using the metric system yet 🙁 37 MPG would be the highest yield, for a non-hybrid, in the USA, still it is disappointing when compared to the diesel Toyota iQ figures (64 imperial MPG equates to 53 USA mpg).

The base price for the Scion iQ is $15,595. The car is obviously built for city driving: the small size makes it great for finding parking and navigating small streets.

A fully electric Toyota iQ is being planned for 2012 that can be recharged by 4 hours with a normal electric plug. It can be 80% recharged in 15 minutes with a special adapter. It will have a range of about 65 miles.

I really like the management of Toyota and own stock in Toyota.

On another front, sadly, the company behind the aptera concept car (230 MPG) announced they were closing down.

Related: Companies Sharing Engineering Resources Across the Globe – Bigger Impact: 15 to 18 mpg or 50 to 100 mpg? – Global Installed Wind Power Now Over 1.5% of Global Electricity Demand

Companies Sharing Engineering Resources Across the Globe

Posted on December 2, 2011  Comments (1)

Swapping batteries for diesel engines

Car companies, like aircraft manufacturers, are sharing engineering skills across borders to speed up and cut the costs of technological development. It happened with Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. The American aircraft maker outsourced some of the engineering to Japanese suppliers, admitting that it does not have all the necessary expertise. Likewise, Toyota has agreed to work on hybrid trucks with Ford, and electric vehicles with Tesla, the Silicon Valley sports-car maker. BMW is working on improving the current generation of lithium-ion batteries with France’s Peugeot Citroën. Nissan, as well as joining forces with Renault, has joint projects with Daimler.

There are many reasons to pursue such efforts (as well as drawbacks). My belief is companies would rather not take on the complications of such partnerships but the advantages overcome those desires. The high cost of research into these efforts is a big part of what pushes such collaboration. Also once a company has success they often can build up quite an advantage. The costs of trying to engineer a different solution (that doesn’t violate someone’s patents) often makes buying that technology or partnering attractive.

I really like this webcast, from 2008, on Toyota’s engineering development program.

Related: Wave Disk Engine Could Increase Efficiency 5 Times – 59 MPG Toyota iQ Diesel Available in Europe (2008) – Toyota Cultivating Engineering Talent

Driving Via Direct Signals from the Brain

Posted on October 7, 2011  Comments (5)

Last year we learned of Google’s Self Driving Car, which is actually making great progress in the real world (cool). And a few years ago I wrote about Toyota’s wheelchair you control with your mind. Now Nissan is looking at cars that you drive aided by accessing brain signals.

This idea is a bit scary to me, the self driving car is less so. But it is great to see us pushing the engineering boundaries forward. It is such a shame that the huge economic failures in the USA, Europe and Japan are rightly grabbing much of the attention these days. If we just reduced the waste and corruption in the political and financial systems it would allow us to take more joy is the great time we do for awesome engineering breakthroughs. Still, if we can try to block out those painful economic realities, these types of breakthroughs are really cool.

The webcast shows the work of the Artificial Intelligence Group of the Freie Universität Berlin in Germany (BrainDriver).

Related: Nissan’s Cars Will Read Your Mind – Researching Direct Brain Interfaces for Text Entry – Wave Disk Engine Could Increase Efficiency 5 Times

And Nissan is collaborating with the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland (EPFL) on a car that uses your brain signals (along with signals the computer gets via its own sensors) to aid in driving.
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Wave Disk Engine Could Increase Efficiency 5 Times

Posted on April 8, 2011  Comments (2)

Norbert Müller’s group has received $2.5 million from the U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) in 2010 to build and develop the wave disk engine, which uses turbo combustion “shock wave” technology to convert either liquid fuel or compressed natural gas or hydrogen into electrical power. With this engine, fuel efficiency for hybrid vehicles could increase 5 times compared to internal combustion engine vehicles on the road today (and 3.5 times less than current hybrid cars), while reducing costs by 30%. The goal of Müller’s team is to produce an engine that would give hybrid vehicles a 500-mile driving range and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 90%.

In the video he says they hope to have the engines in production vehicles within 3 years. My guess is he is being quite optimistic, but we will see. The new engine would allow 1,000 pounds to be removed from the weight of cars (by removing the need for drive train, radiator…).

Related: $10 Million X Prize for 100 MPG Car – Economic Benefits Brought by Investing in Engineering – 59 MPG Toyota iQ Diesel Available in Europe (2008) – MIT Hosts Student Vehicle Design Summit (2006)