Efficiency? Think Racing Cars, Not Hybrids

Gordonjcp writes "A renowned racing car designer has said that car manufacturers should be looking at making cars lighter to improve efficiency, rather than adding complex drive trains. In this article on the BBC News website, Professor Gordon Murray explains that a weight saving of 10% in a normal car would make more difference than switching to a hybrid engine and motor combination. Could this be the next nail in the SUV's coffin?"

In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[kalidasa (577403)]

Because they're afraid they'll be crushed to a fine pulp when they get hit by a big honking SUV.

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[cephah (1244770)]

And their fears aren't exactly unfounded. Only way to get the majority of people to stop driving heavy cars is to increase gas prices to the point where lighter cars are the only option, or having a flag day where everybody agrees to switch, i.e. not gonna happen in the near future :)

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[pohl (872)]

Amory Lovins, in his excellent TED Talk on Winning the Oil Endgame [ted.com], makes an argument that weight savings need not lead to descreased safety. An example that he cites is a hand-built McLaren that has a couple of woven carbon-composite cones in the front that absorb the energy of a crash. Well worth a listen.

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[Scootin159 (557129)]

Worth mentioning.... the aforementioned McLaren was designed by Gordon Murray... the author of the article. He's also been a very successful designer in Formula One.

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[Sensible Clod (771142)]

Mod parent up! Not only is the 12-year-old McLaren F1 still one of the quickest and fastest cars ever built, it does it without resorting to 4 turbos [wikipedia.org] and 1,001 horsepower simply by being lighter.

Not only that, but Murray also worked to finalize the design of the (already nearly complete) Caparo T1 [wikipedia.org], which is even quicker (0-60 in 2.5 seconds), and with less horsepower than the F1. How? It weighs about half a ton.

A different hybrid drive train can lower weight

[VernonNemitz (581327)]

Current hybrids include storage batteries that weigh a lot. They can be replaced with a much lighter flywheel that also has a higher efficiency than batteries, at storing and releasing energy (and also works with regenerative braking). Do not confuse this with other decades-old ideas of using flywheels to fully replace the car engine; we cannot make them strong enough to hold energy for 300 miles of travel. But we can easily make them able to hold enough energy for a few bursts of rapid acceleration. The only reason a smallish car has a 100HP engine is to get rapid acceleration. Any hybrid can replace that with a much lighter 15-20HP engine, which produces plenty for cruising at a fixed speed, plus some extra to charge up the storage unit for the desired rapid acceleration. A hybrid that uses a flywheel might weigh about the same as the ordinary car, but it will get better gas mileage because of the smaller engine.

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[flyingsquid (813711)]

-light

-safe

-cheap

Pick any two.

You can make a safe, lightweight car, such as a Formula 1, but it's going to cost you. Carbon composite isn't cheap. You can make a safe, cheap car. Just add a few hundred pounds of metal to the frame to strengthen it. But your fuel efficiency is going to be lousy. You can make a light, cheap car. Just strip away the frame until there's almost nothing left, but if you get into a serious crash, it's gonna be a coffin on wheels. There are other compromises too. Comforts like well-padded seats, and sound insulation that keep noise down, also result in increased weight. A larger engine is going to increase weight. And so on.

That's not to say that we couldn't find some relatively inexpensive, safe ways to improve mileage. We may not be able to fill the highways with cheap cars that get 50 mpg and survive like a tank in a crash, but shaving a few mpg off every new car produced over the next 5 years would do a hell of a lot to reduce consumption and emissions. And of course the other question is, are there other ways to get to our destination other than driving?

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[ceoyoyo (59147)]

The crash statistics alone indicate that feeling safer in an SUV is a false sense of security. Could have something to do with many soccer moms not being able to see over the dashboard. That and the tendency to roll over when driven like a sports car.

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[element-o.p. (939033)]

The problem with this approach is that the light cars need to be at approximately the same height as the vehicle they hit.

More specifically, it's not the SUV's I worry about so much, it's the huge jacked up pickup trucks where their bumper is at approximately the level of my head in the Talon TSi I used to drive. All the crush space between my bumper and me will do me absolutely no good if the first thing to hit the other vehicle is my windshield pillar because the rest of the car goes *under* the other vehicle...

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[afidel (530433)]

That's why those vehicles are illegal, but try getting a cop to actually enforce those laws instead of mild speeding violations!

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[jank1887 (815982)]

in a car-on-car collision, though, don't forget that there are two kinetic masses that must come to a stop.

I remember a lecture from one of my profs who used to work with the NTSB. He mentioned crash fatality studies where moving from a car-car collision to a car-suv collision made little change on the probability of death to the SUV driver, but significantly increased the probability of death to the car driver. thus, according to that metric, the bigger vehicle only serves to increase the other person's chance of dying without making you any safer.

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[khendron (225184)]

I can just envision an Apple commercial for the switch

SC: I'm a smart car
SUV: And I'm an SUV
SC: You look a little thirsty, SUV.
SUV: I am. Ever since the price of gas went up, my owner started rationing my gas consumption.
SC: Aww, that's too bad, SUV.
SUV: Tell me about it. I mean, I was thirsty enough before. I could drink gas like there was no tomorrow.
SC: Well, SUV, if you kept drinking gas like that, there probably would be no tomorrow.

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[dingen (958134)]

And their fears aren't exactly unfounded. Only way to get the majority of people to stop driving heavy cars is to increase gas prices to the point where lighter cars are the only option, or having a flag day where everybody agrees to switch, i.e. not gonna happen in the near future :)

Gas prices increasing to the point where driving a light, efficient car is the only option is not going to happen you say? I beg to differ. Here in The Netherlands, it's already happening. There has been an extreme increase in gas pricing the past year. You now pay E 1.65 per liter, which is about $ 9.21 per gallon. Yes, you read that right. For a full tank in a small to medium sized car (40 liters), you easily spend over 60 euros. That's $ 100 for a tank of gasoline.

Over here, even in the rich suburbs people are selling their SUV's and buying small cars like Mini's and Fiat Panda's. The number of SUVs sold is dropping rapidly. It was recently in the news that last year, the amount of SUV's sold was only 1/5 of the year before that.

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[berashith (222128)]

This made me laugh. There is quite a range of types and sizes of cars in between giant SUV and sub-compact. There are also now giant SUVs coming in hybrid flavors, which I would think help to satisfy some people in your position of actually needing the Utility provided in these beasts. The problem where all of society fears lighter weight cars due to the number of giant cars is brought on by the millions of 110 pound women who will never carry more than a few gallons of milk "needing" to drive SUVs.

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[Sancho (17056)]

This made me laugh.

Giant SUV hybrids tend to get 2-3mpg more than their non-hybrid counterparts. They're a joke. And lots of midsize cars don't get much better gas mileage than SUVs. I drive a pickup truck which gets 15mpg. My wife drives a midsized GM car (I forget the model.) She gets 3mpg more than my truck.

The options for efficient cars really are pretty limited, and those which do exist are pretty highly sought after these days. There are waiting lists at all of the major dealerships within a 50 mile radius of me for any car which exceeds 30mpg.

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[by Anonymous Coward]

Safety devices in cars are the major reason that fuel efficiency hasn't significantly improved since the 70s. Since the 70s and 80s up to 500 kg have been added to cars in the form of safety devices. For example, a 1979 Honda Civic had a curb weight of 680 kg. A 2008 Honda Civic has a curb weight of 1180 kg. A 1980 Toyota Camry had a curb weight of 1000 kg. A 2008 Toyota Camry has a curb weight of about 1500 kg. This 500 kg rule applies across a broad range of vehicles.

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[mclearn (86140)]

I did a UI course back in 2002 and we happened to be talking about steering wheels as the UI input device. The prof happened to be a Psychology/Comp. Sci. cross, and he went off on a tangent wrt a certain thought experiment:

The hypothesis says: the higher the chance of death, the lower your speed. If the chance of death in a moving car were 100%, no one would drive. If the chance of death were 0, then everyone would drive as fast as the car could go.

What happens if you put a spear sticking out of the steering wheel aimed at your chest?

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[swillden (191260)]

What happens if you put a spear sticking out of the steering wheel aimed at your chest?

Sales of hacksaws would increase dramatically?

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[Thomasje (709120)]

I find it hard to believe that a few air bags add 500 kg to the weight of any car. Rather, in the eternal bigger-is-better orgy, car manufacturers feel compelled to make every iteration of any model a bit bigger than the previous one. That 2008 Honda Civic, for example, is larger than a 1979 Honda Accord, and let's not even talk about the fact that the smallest engine you can get it with (in the U.S.) is a 1.8 liter 145 hp monster...

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[OldeTimeGeek (725417)]

Not necessarily, if you design the cars in the right way - with a strong inner shell and everything else disposable.

A good example of this is an F1 car - they are designed with crashes in mind. They have strong central component to protect the driver with everything else breakable to take energy away from the tub that the driver sits in. Take Robert Kubica's accident in the 2007 Canadian Grand Prix, for example, After contact with Jarno Trulli, his car hit a bump, lifting it and rendering him unable to steer. His car hit a safety wall at approximately 28G decelaration and then tumbled down the track, finally coming to rest against another safety wall on its side. Most of car was strewn along the track, but the tub protected the driver. He not only lived to race again, but suffered little injury.

Noted, these are very, very expensive cars, are single seaters, don't have doors (making the carbon-fiber tub that the driver sits in much easier) and not really designed to run on the street, but the concept of sheddable body around a strong central area still could apply

Of course this makes the car more costly to fix which will annoy insurers and leaves a nasty very sharp mess on the street if you use the baked carbon fiber that they use on F1 cars, but if you want to make cars lighter and still protect the driver and passengers, it's worth looking at...

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[llamalad (12917)]

Because with greater vehicular mass should come greater driver responsibility.

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[llamalad (12917)]

It seems to me that there's got to be a reason that pedestrians have the right of way. Maybe it's that in exchange for being granted the privilege of driving an automobile on a public road these drivers assume responsibility for remaining in control of their vehicles and are accountable for the consequences of failing to do so.

You get in a Mazda Miata, drive off the road at 30mph, you run through a mailbox and crash into a light pole. You do the same thing in a Ford Excursion at 30mph, you go through the mailbox, pole, the two kids in their plastic wading pool, grandma whose watching them from a lawn chair, and crash in to the house, maiming mom and dad who were watching tv sitting against the wall you just drove through.

Bigger car = more potential for harming others.

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[NeutronCowboy (896098)]

In order for the miata to have the same energy-of-impact as the excursion, it would only need to be going 40% faster.

Odd - slashdot managed to eat my post during preview.

In any case, here's the equation you want: E=0.5m*v^2. Know that the weight of a Miata is 940 Kg and that of an excursion is 3261kg. For the Miata to have the same kinetic energy as the Excursion at 30 mph, the Miata has to drive at 55 mph.

Who is the idiot who is driving 55 in a 30 mph zone?

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[everphilski (877346)]

I bike commute to work, the only close shave I've had is with a school bus. But then again we are both speaking with anecdotal evidence.

Re:I am also an avid cyclist...

[by Anonymous Coward]

I bike commute to work, and the only close shave I've had is with the new Gillette Fusion(r) Power razor. Truly, the best a man can get.

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[raygundan (16760)]

I used to bike commute, and my only wreck was with a tow truck. But it was my own stupid fault, not his, and if you're going to go over your handlebars, I highly recommend doing it onto the flatbed part of a flatbed tow truck. Saves the long fall back to the pavement.

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[Lord_Frederick (642312)]

The flaw in your argument is that these days almost NOBODY gives a flying fuck about anyone but themselves. It's not restricted to SUV owners.

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[BlueParrot (965239)]

Sadly you can remove "these days" from that claim. Your point would still be accurate and as a bonus it wouldn't come out as "Get of my lawn!".

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[initdeep (1073290)]

As an avid motorcyclist, i can say that a large majority of the time I've been nearly turned to a small spot on the road is due to morons driving cars who are on cell phones.

These morons (or cagers as we motorcyclists car eto call them) come in all shapes and sizes and so do their vehicles.

in fact i can provide anectodatal evidence of everythign from a fucking little college girl who ran a buddy off the road while merging off an off ramp, to the time a farmer pulled his combine onto the road directly in front of a group of 20 bikes.

None of that means a shit to anybody but the people who were there, yet i can say that i'd much rather we prosecute idiots who arent paying attention than go after a specific type of vehicle.

FYI, this isnt exactly a new situation for motorcyclists. We've been complaining about this longer than SUV's have been a mainstream vehicle.

How about instead of trying to lump people by the type of vehicle, we instead start issuing "distracted driver" tickets to all those morons deserving of them.

I'm fairly certain every state in the union has a distracted driving law on the books.

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[by Anonymous Coward]

Tell your city to build us some bike lanes, then. You think cyclists *like* riding around egomaniacal crazies like you?

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[somersault (912633)]

I carpool to work every day, in my tiny 93 accord

Heh.. only an American (okay, there's also Canadian, Mexican or Australian) could make such a statement :)

In the UK Accords are 'family' sized cars towards the large end of the spectrum. I know the 93 version is a little smaller than a modern Accord, but it's still pretty big by our standards. If you want a proper example of tiny, consider the original Mini, or more modern "super minis" - which are actualy still larger than the original Mini. I'd hate to see one of them get into a fight with an SUV..

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[antifoidulus (807088)]

How much fossil fuels do bike rider use? How many people are killed per year by cyclists(excluding themselves)? None of those are 0, but they are a HELL of a lot less than SUV drivers. Stop warming my planet, stop killing my people just because you have a microscopic penis.

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[Anarke_Incarnate (733529)]

My personal belief is that it is a sense of entitlement for the elitists who can afford things to demand preferential treatment. Oh, the evidence is there, but hard to compile into a scientific theory :)

Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars

[0100010001010011 (652467)]

No. Diesel is popular in Europe because it gets better mileage. Every company and their brother has a diesel vehicle in Europe, if you don't you're SOL in the market. Manual transmission too.

I have a 1998 Jetta VW that can haul 4-5 people. A weekend of luggage and still get 45 MPG. Even with diesel pushing $5/gallon it's still cheaper per mile than any gasser OF THE SAME SIZE.

"Heavier Diesel". You talk about it like it adds 2 tons to the vehicle. A diesel engine may add a few hundred pounds at most.

VW has a PRODUCTION car that they sold that got 78 miles per US gallon. There is nothing more frustrating than hearing about the 'amazing' 30 MPG that some small cars get while in Europe they're doing double that.

Re:Why the safety assumption?

[Bill_the_Engineer (772575)]

The SUV safety myth was created by marketing pure and simple.

Unfortunately it's not a myth, and it wasn't created by marketing.

The crash compatibility topic (big car vs. small car) was first brought up by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in a 1998 news release that stated:

The basic findings reinforce whatâ(TM)s long been known about vehicle size and occupant death rates. As vehicle weight decreases, the number of occupants killed in crashes increases.

and

Lighter vehicles have higher occupant death rates in two-vehicle crashes, and within each weight class, cars and pickups have similar occupant death rates.

Here is the link http://www.iihs.org/news/1998/iihs_news_021098.pdf [iihs.org]

It's a question of weight ratios

[bugnuts (94678)]

... but how many coconuts can an SUV carry?

Re:It's a question of weight ratios

[Opportunist (166417)]

American or Japanese?

What about 10% weight savings in the driver's seat

[PrimeWaveZ (513534)]

I'm just saying...

It might be helpful.

Surprising

[Nodamnnicknamesavial (1095665)]

So aerodynamics and weight make a difference when trying to propel an object?!

This is going to revolutionize everything!

Maybe if we drove cars in space we wouldn't have those pesky problems.

Who knew?

[voislav98 (1004117)]

Lighter cars use less gas? What's next? Telling people that they shouldn't live 200 miles from where they work? I heard a kind of a funny fact this morning on BBC, average energy consumption per capita in North America is double that in Europe. It's not like the standard of living or climate is that much different, it's all about the culture.

Lotus Elise

[Quila (201335)]

The original Lotus Elise got almost 30 mpg with 1.8l, 120 hp, and it was a high-performance car.

Put a little 1 liter, 60 horsepower engine in there and it'll probably get 50 mpg, but have regular car performance.

The secret? Weighing only about 1,650 lbs.

Regenerative Brakes

[hardburn (141468)]

Hybrids get their benefits in two ways: reclaiming power that would otherwise be lost during braking, and the fact that electric motors have a flat torque band. You generally can't do either that with an internal combustion engine alone.

However, there are a few ways to do both the above without an electric motor. One way is to have a flywheel connected to a CVT on the drive shaft. When you hit the brakes, the flywheel spins up. You can then release that power again when you accelerate. The flywheel will also act as a gyroscope, so you need to have some way of tilting it so you can go through corners with it spun up (which has the side effect of increasing handling). This method is being put on F1 cars soon.

The other way is to have an air compressor, which again is run off the drive shaft when you hit the brakes. On acceleration, the compressed air could either run the drive shaft, be dumped into the intake to increase boost, or dumped into the exhaust manifold to eliminate turbo lag. This is probably easier to design than a tilting-flywheel system, though it won't make handling better.

The compressor could also run off turbines using inlets around the car's body that are opened when braking. This particular use is probably illegal for F1 and other types of race cars (which often ban variable body shape systems), but could easily be used in road cars.

Both the above don't require any particularly exotic materials (though carbon fiber or nanotubes would be nice for the flywheel), and shouldn't be as heavy as an electric motor/battery system.

Water Powered Car - no joke!

[Adeptus_Luminati (634274)]

With gas prices sky rocketing, I'm surprised more people aren't paying attention to inventors who have *already* created water powered cars that actually run. People, this isn't about 1 or 2 fringe scientists coming up with some hoax in their basements; this is something being discovered, built and used by people all over the world already. From US to Japan to Australia and beyond, if you don't believe me, just watch the videos below.

"A closed mind is a good thing to lose"

Main Website: http://waterpoweredcar.com/ [waterpoweredcar.com]

Videos:
Genius US Inventor (water car): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZOsOB3z3IE [youtube.com]
From Australia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXzK-zrWDgI&feature=related [youtube.com]
Water Car Inventor Murdered -news channel report: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6yRn4IAsrU&feature=related [youtube.com]
Ford Conversion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-piMEZ2WcQU&feature=related [youtube.com]
From Japan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1OWDcWoXHs&feature=related [youtube.com]
Company selling water cars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4mz7MPSquU&feature=related [youtube.com]

WAKE UP AMERICA, your government lies to you! Well, ok, so does every other government, but this particular issue (water car) is worth fighting for.

Re:Two things

[LoudMusic (199347)]

Cars need to be lighter and more aerodynamic [aptera.com]. The drag on a standard automobile is just ridiculous. Rear ends today are typically vertically flat! Who are these designers that aren't familiar with the teardrop shape?

Well, the teardrop shape is less space efficient than a box, and most vehicles don't go fast enough often enough to make use of quality aerodynamics. If it's just a mom driving her kids to school, and around town, she's rarely going to get over 35mph and likely not waste much fuel in wind resistance. But the fact the vehicle is boxy means she can get more kids / stuff in the back end and much easier. To have the same space but a slopey backend would required adding several feet to the overall length of the vehicle.

Kammback

[raygundan (16760)]

A truncated teardrop with a flat back (like the Prius or the Insight) is actually more aerodynamic than the teardrop. It's called a Kammback [wikipedia.org], and it's named for the gentleman who noticed that if you chop off the back of the teardrop, the air keeps flowing the same way, except without the drag of sliding along the surface of the parts of the teardrop you just chopped off.

Re:Partially right...

[Pope (17780)]

I like being able to see OVER traffic.

This amuses me to no end, and I've heard it repeated from people at the Budget rental place as well as talking heads on TV. What possible use is seeing over traffic if you're still stuck in it? Are you following too closely and not paying attention to your surroundings or something?

Re:Partially right...

[mhamel (314503)]

The funniest part of the "seeing over the traffic" rant is mostly that it is an ego trouble. What if the others also want to see over the traffic? They'll get a higher car? Then what?

You have to understand that getting a higner car to see the traffic has the effect that everybody around you sees less of the traffic.

It harldy sounds like a solution to me.

Re:Partially right...

[LurkerXXX (667952)]

Great. Of course you realize since no one in a smaller vehicle has a chance of seeing through the windows of that huge thing you are driving in, you are effectively blinding them to what is on the other side of you, which could lead to accidents (which might also include you).

Re:Partially right...

[eln (21727)]

Most people drive SUVs because they like the way they look, and then they rationalize it by coming up with other reasons.

Most smaller cars have a lot more head and foot room, especially for the driver, than you give them credit for. I'm 6'2" and drive a 2001 Toyota Corolla. I have plenty of head room without slouching over or anything, and leg room is not an issue either. Heck, I have two kids and they fit just fine in the back seat of the thing, so the hauling kids excuse is silly too unless you happen to have 5 kids or more. It makes me crazy when people with 2 kids say they need an SUV to "haul the family around".

As for seeing over traffic, I have no problem seeing the traffic ahead of me so long as I keep a safe distance between me and the person in front of me (2 second rule, remember?), and have only even been close to having an accident (which I was able to maneuver to avoid) once in my 15 years of driving.

The hauling stuff excuse may be valid for some people, but you have to ask yourself how often do you really need to haul around so much stuff that you require an SUV. Most people haul stuff like that so rarely it would be far more cost effective to simply rent a pickup truck when they need to do that rather than spend all that money on the SUV full-time. Even small cars like mine can fit a surprisingly large amount of stuff in them.

I wish people would just admit that they really wanted an SUV, so they came up with reasons why they should get one, rather than insisting that no other type of car could possibly work for them.

Re:Partially right...

[prefect42 (141309)]

I like being able to see OVER traffic.

And there's the reason I end up staring at bumpers in my (33 US mpg) Corolla.

I'm entirely unbothered by what you want; having cars that are taller than average for the purpose of getting a better view is antisocial.