Mercedes To Phase Out Gasoline By 2015

arbitraryaardvark sends in a story a couple of weeks back in Yahoo's Ecogeek blog, reporting that Mercedes will phase out petroleum-powered cars by 2015 (mirror), and notes: "Story is unconfirmed but well sourced." "In less than 7 years, Mercedes-Benz plans to ditch petroleum-powered vehicles from its lineup. Focusing on electric, fuel cell, and biofuels, the company is revving up research in alternative fuel sources and efficiency."

Thank god!

Maybe this precedent (if true) will prompt the other automakers to follow?

Re:Thank god!

Only if the technologies aren't locked up and hidden away by patents. The fact is, we either need a better infrastructure (so electric cars are possible), or a reasonable and standard selection of fuels. If the average consumer has to think too hard about which fuel his car uses, he won't be getting that car. Of course, the real solution is to get urban centers off of a car based infrastructure, and go to a different system, such as good subway or bus system, coupled with a public taxi type system, as in Hominids [wikipedia.org] , by Robert J. Sawyer.

Re:Thank god!

If electric cars can be made to charge from ordinary outlets, isn't the infrastructure already there? I suppose the trick would be to get the cars to charge fast enough and/or to last long enough on one charge that you don't have to stop every 4 hours to charge the car for 12 hours at a time, but assuming we can solve that, replacing all those gas pumps at fuel stations with extra outlets shouldn't be that big of a deal.

Basically, I think electric cars are the only real way to handle this stuff long term, but battery technology has to get better. Today's batteries are too heavy and don't last long enough.

I think better public transit is a good step, but I don't think you can put the private vehicle genie back in the bottle at this stage. People are accustomed to private transport, and the more efficient and environmentally friendly we can make that private transport the better.

Re:Thank god!

Most electric outlets have a 15 or 20 amp breaker. That means on the best of days you're only going to be able to get 1.8 to 2.4 kw or about 2.4 to 3.2 horsepower out of it. Unless your car uses less than an average of 3hp while it's running you're going to have to charge it, or at least your spare battery pack, for a pretty long time to get any range out of it.

Re:Thank god!

If electric cars can be made to charge from ordinary outlets, isn't the infrastructure already there?

Absolutely not. At least in the US, electrical power distribution networks are already are at capacity, and are not even *close* to what they'd need to be:

* Total electrical power consumed in the US - about 12 Exajoules (for more is generated, but most power is lost in generation and distribution).

* Total petroleum power used for transportation in the US - about 28 Exajoules.

The way these numbers are measured, electric cars are significantly more efficient, but still we'd need to distribute *triple* the electrical power distributed in order to stop using gas for transport. That's significantly harder than replacing the tanks and pumps at every gas station.

Re:Thank god!

Never going to happen. Nothing will ever beat the private car for convenience. Its right there, whenever you want it. Its fast, it can be used by almost anyone, regardless of physical health. No wait times to use it, no sharing it with the smelly unbathed guy, the psycho homeless person, or the screaming infant. No stops along the way. And it can be used for trips of any length, to any location, without being forced to walk a mile from a bus stop to the destination. And depending on where you're driving, it can be quite pleasant- driving in the mountains with the top down is *fun*. I've never had a fun bus ride.

On top of that- cars, to a large portion of the population, are freedom. Freedom to go where you want, when you want. Freedom to live where you want. Freedom to just say "fuck it" one day and go on a road trip. Freedom from the clock- I don't have to leave the bar with my friends to make that last 10:30 pm bus, I can stay til closing time (assume I'm sober for this one). There is no substitute for this.

The people will never give up their cars. Don't bother trying to make us- we won't. We'll use every last drop of gasoline first. Find a better way to power them instead, they will never go away.

Re:Thank god!

You missed the key point of my post. I said for urban centers. I was aiming for a system like that for just intracity travel. For intercity, some suburban, and rural transportation, cars are obviously the best option. I just thought that getting people in cities to be less dependent on them (while in the city, when they want to leave, go for it) would save huge amounts of money. I've heard an apocryphal story that New York City has more cars than parking spots.

To summarize:

• If you live in a city, such as Ottawa, Toronto, New York, Buffalo, etc... - take a bus, take a subway, take a taxi-like system.
• If you live near a city, such as a suburb - have park-and-rides to get into the city, make it cost money to get into the city, or have the taxi-like system come out to get you.
• If you live in a rural area - keep your car.

My point is not to get rid of cars, I understand that. My point is to give people better alternatives for urban transportation.

Nobody wants to be the next GM

GM failed to appreciate the coming change.

Good for Mercedes to be acting ahead of the curve. That is how you build technology and establish markets and presence.

Nobody killed the electric car. They killed their own opportunity. [wikipedia.org]

Re:Nobody wants to be the next GM

Don't get too excited. It will be difficult to make a "biofuel" engine that won't run just fine on petroleum. And they won't try. As soon as they have biofuel capability across their product lines they will declare themselves "green" regardless of what the customers are actually putting in the tanks.

I'll wait

As this isn't an official announcement, I'm not holding my breath. Sure Mercedes have been at the forefront of vehicle technology for quite some time, but do you really see their entire truck line going non-petroleum in 7 years? Maybe the passenger cars, but not the trucks.

Mercs run just fine on used chip-fat - TODAY!

Plenty of people are already running their Benz on the stuff the local chip-shop would have thrown away. How hard is it to ramp that up a bit?

unconfirmed

Well if a blog says it's "well sourced," that's good enough for me!

and US car companies ?

are still left in the 70's building 5 litre v8 guzzlers with solid rear axles

though looking at GM and Fords financial statements they wont be building much of anything if they dont change, fast.

Re:and US car companies ?

We can have them going out of business, now can we? Congress will just have the US tax payers keep them floating like we do the airlines.

Gasoline

No matter how we choose to generate power in the future, we have very few options for switching to anything other than gasoline for transporting that power.

Gasoline has a fantastic energy density. A 14 gallon tank of the stuff contains 491.2 kilowatt-hours of energy ($68 in electricity at New York rates [michaelbluejay.com]), and the gasoline itself only weighs 81 pounds. If you fill up the tank in five minutes, you're transferring power at 7.368 megawatts. Can you imagine what kind of electrical infrastructure you would need to transfer the same power over mere wires?

About the only alternative I can imagine that would be comparable would be to hot-swap whole huge batteries at gas stations.

No, I think we'll be using gasoline, or at least a similar liquid fuel, for quite a while.

Re:In other news

Why? Nobody really gives a damn what fuels their cars, they care about cost and acceptable performance (can I make 70-80 on the freeway, or will I have a top speed of 40). If they can solve the problem of refueling infrastructure and sufficient mileage per refuel, there's no reason why not to go with a non-gas car.

The electric car you want is ready now:

Nobody really gives a damn what fuels their cars, they care about cost and acceptable performance (can I make 70-80 on the freeway, or will I have a top speed of 40). If they can solve the problem of refueling infrastructure and sufficient mileage per refuel, there's no reason why not to go with a non-gas car.

you want this [teslamotors.com]

Re:The electric car you want is ready now:

How does a car that costs $109,000 address the "cost" concern? Sure, Mercedes vehicles aren't exactly the cheapest, but few of their models go for over 6 figures.

Re:In other news

"lot of us do care"

With 300 million people in America and 6 billion in the world, "a lot" of people do a lot of things. But the Majority does not care.

Re:In other news

the USA only seems to import the luxury cars from Europe. In Spain and Italy, I have seen Mercedes-Benz garbage trucks, which shocked the hell out of my the first time when I was 15. Trips since then, barely noticed.

But the thing about a lot of Mercedes and BMWs and stuff -- especially the older ones: turbo diesel engines. Can't any diesel engine run biodisel unmodified? That was my understanding.

Lamborghini makes tractors

Mercedes truck division is way bigger than its car division.

And plenty of Italian farmers drive a Lambo [lamborghini-tractors.com] to work.

Re:In other news

You only have to swap out fuel lines on pretty old diesels. The injectors should be no problem.
The only real problem with bio diesel is that it tends to "clean" old diesel engines. You get a bunch of old crude floating around and hopefully clogging your filters.
Any modern diesel can run bio right now. Now straight vegetable oil takes some mods.
So to meet the goals all MB has to do is drop there gasoline power plants.
Of course what people tend to forget is that you can make gasoline from a lot of non petroleum sources including water and air. The only thing that prevents it is cost.

Re:Haven't they heard?

Local temperature been below average for the last two weeks? So much for global warming!

Re:Shifting Focus...

"Until we convert to completely non-combustive and non-fissile energy production..."

Why would we phase out fissile energy? We should be using that for everything. Nuclear power is the best thing we have.

"Besides, the vehicles will still probably depend on petroleum-based products for lubricants."

Not so much, actually. If you have a 100% electrically-powered car, you simply put an electric motor on every wheel. Electric motors don't need much lubrication.

Re:biofuels

Perhaps what the OP meant was that as producing corn becomes more profitable, farmers will switch to producing corn instead of other crops, thus creating a scarcity of *those* grains and raising the price of food in general. A big chunk of world already finds it hard to afford food and hence the conclusion of people starving if prices rose further.