SPACE AGE CARS DRIVER
Pesaran said that the one-in-a-million chance of battery failure has not hit EVs because so few of the vehicles are on the road currently, but that is expected to change in the coming years.ĪCC works as follows: Rather than just blindly maintaining a speed preset by the driver in conventional cruise control, ACC beams a laser or radar from the front of an equipped vehicle to detect other vehicles in the road ahead. Along the way, EVs will get a safety boost as well. Pesaran and colleagues who work for NASA recently teamed up to build a more reliable lithium ion battery per the space program's need to power the suits of spacewalking astronauts. "One of the issues with all lithium ion batteries is internal flaws in the battery (from) manufacturing that can lead to internal shorts," said Ahmad Pesaran, Energy Storage Group Leader at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. Lithium ion cells, however, do carry a slight risk of "thermal runaway," when a battery uncontrollably heats up and in rare cases can even explode. Prior battery chemistries simply could not pack enough energy into a small- and light-enough space for passenger cars. The advent of lithium ion batteries has led to fully electric vehicles (EVs) such as the Nissan Leaf that can travel about 100 miles before needing a recharge. In the meantime, an already well-established means of giving cars their go – lithium ion batteries – is benefitting from aeronautical synergy. "The problems are all solvable - it's just a question of time and investment." "Today for fuel cell vehicles, the average customer can ride in a fuel cell bus, but they can't buy a fuel cell car," said Dana Kaplinski, manager of transportation business for UTC Power. The company is optimistic such vehicles will be on the road this decade as costs drop and the technology improves. The company has received federal funding to continue developing technologies for proton exchange membrane fuel cells that can be used in passenger cars and commercial vehicles.
SPACE AGE CARS PLUS
UTC Power, which was the sole supplier to NASA for Apollo and the space shuttles, has had fuel cell-powered transit buses on the roads since 1998 12 next-generation models will be on California roads before the end of 2011, plus four more in Connecticut. For fleet craft, such as buses that return back to a centralized depot every night, fuel cells make sense.