Hybrid World Rally Cars

[Mirek]

Still, dear Mirek, you are wrong about nothing being done about ships and planes. There is plenty done in both fields.

CO2 is not the worst emission with ships. They have NOx and SOx emissions far worse than cars due to the fuel they use and the slow speed of the engines. That's why loads of time and resources are put down on developing ways to combat this. I can go on for hours about this as this is my field of work... Should you be interested.

You are of course right and I have never mentioned CO2 as the particular problem. I meant emission as a whole. I do believe new engines are better but the problem is that while under the banner of ecology we start baning ten years old cars the lifecycle of ships and planes is a lot longer. I don't have numbers but for sure a high percentage of planes and especially ships is more than 20 years old and as such they were designed with very little respect towards ecology. The best way how to reduce the impact of the traffic is to limit the non-essential traffic to minimum. That however goes directly against the economic model of our society and that's the main problem. We like to look ecological bu we are as far of that as we can be (together with ecological standards of our factories and business activities in third world countries where we don't give a fuck about ecology at all).

Regardless... The car will at some point be too expensive for the common man to run on standard fuels ad we know them today. I am 100% convinced that the car of the future will be powered from the grid, like most other personal appliances.

Could be and I don't see that as a bad thing.

Sorry for this grumbling but I find our way of dealing with ecology as perfect example of hypocrisy.

[Rally Power]

So we have nice emissions of cars in our rich world and we don't care how the batteries are made in China and Korea.
We try to make the emission of cars smaller but we encourage the growth of car industry to ridiculous levels because it's good for our economy.
We create more and more complicated cars with very short livecycle but we pretend that buying a new car every five years is good for ecology.
We claim how we care about environment but we create lots of obstacles for second or third hand use of such cars to enlarge production.
We like to show how our factories and power plants are ecologic but we don't care that most of the sub-suppliers make their parts in China, India, Indonesia etc. where nobody cares about ecology.
We care about emissions of cars but in the same time we spent billions to promote diesels in passengers car about which everybody knows they are a lot worse for ecology than petrol cars.
We speak about cars emission but we don't care much about airplanes or ships.
We like to claim how we enhance ecological aspects of the traffic but we don't speak about the level of completely unnecessary transportation of goods which can be produced and spent on local basis. We created a colossal nonsense called subsidies which leads to insane transport of agricultural goods from place to place for thousands of kilometers. Than we created just-in-time ideology which again creates incredible traffic.
We can continue for a long time but I don't see anything ecological in all those ecological plans as nobody cares about basic things. It's like fighting a well known arsonist by buing better equipment for the firebrigade.

Jesus, You almost looked like those radical US right wingers that still are denying global warming...

It's not only in the eco movement that hypocrisy can be found...in today's global society probably all governance systems are somehow incoherent or imperfect, simply because they are made by humans! It's in our nature...as it's having the ability to recognize faults and try to do better. Seeing today's degree of civilization it seems the human system is still working!

Btw, congrats to Germany, UK, Norway, The Netherlands and all the other states for their leading effort on the 0 emissions target. It may be shocking for petrolheads like us, but even with alternative techs there will be fun and fast cars (or spaceships) for all!

[AL14]

Jesus, You almost looked like those radical US right wingers that still are denying global warming...

It's not only in the eco movement that hypocrisy can be found...in today's global society probably all governance systems are somehow incoherent or imperfect, simply because they are made by humans! It's in our nature...as it's having the ability to recognize faults and try to do better. Seeing today's degree of civilization it seems the human system is still working!

Btw, congrats to Germany, UK, Norway, The Netherlands and all the other states for their leading effort on the 0 emissions target. It may be shocking for petrolheads like us, but even with alternative techs there will be fun and fast cars (or spaceships) for all!

He's far from those fanatic americans. He's saying that 0 emissions speeches are empty words since you still try to enhance the growth of production of cars (just to make an example). Do you think that with electric cars you solve the problem? You know that you still need energy for them and you can't pick all the energy needed from sun and wind?
Mirek said that traffic should be reduced into minimum indispensable. Are they working on it? Or just making useless statements? UK was killing innocent people for oil just a couple of years ago...

You're congratulating with countries like germany and uk...You know the overshoot day? They're leaders in reach that day at the beginning of the year.

[Rally Power]

You know the overshoot day? They're leaders in reach that day at the beginning of the year.

I really didn't get this paragraph...about the rest, it's sounds totally demagogic to bring the killing of innocent people into this discussion. Are we also going to blame Colombo and start missing the way of life of our prehistorical ancestries?

For sure the emissions problem should be solved in less hypocritical ways, but the real issue is finding that those ways aren't suitable to our way of life.

Restricting traffic, limiting flying, expanding products life cycles, etc, it all seems reasonable on paper, but then we would have less revenues to lots of business (the big corps but also the small and medium companies), more unemployment, more social unrest, etc.

Finding a way to keep the global balance, using the tech at our disposal, it's logic, not hypocrisy.

[itix]

You are of course right and I have never mentioned CO2 as the particular problem. I meant emission as a whole. I do believe new engines are better but the problem is that while under the banner of ecology we start baning ten years old cars the lifecycle of ships and planes is a lot longer. I don't have numbers but for sure a high percentage of planes and especially ships is more than 20 years old and as such they were designed with very little respect towards ecology. The best way how to reduce the impact of the traffic is to limit the non-essential traffic to minimum. That however goes directly against the economic model of our society and that's the main problem. We like to look ecological bu we are as far of that as we can be (together with ecological standards of our factories and business activities in third world countries where we don't give a fuck about ecology at all).



Could be and I don't see that as a bad thing.

Sorry for this grumbling but I find our way of dealing with ecology as perfect example of hypocrisy.

You're not wrong at all about the hypocrisy part of the entire economic system.

Actually, you are not wrong at all in this post and I am pretty cynical myself about the "ecological" measures taken by society.

You get these marketing campaigns where they brag about small ecological gains they have made but you look at the entire structure and you realise that it's a drop in the Nile, all the while their other operations has gotten worse etc etc.

Buy, use, throw has become norm and stuff is produced in ever greater numbers, number of people on the planet increase etc etc..

But now I am getting off topic...

[itix]

of course it does. water has much simpler and less electricity conductive structure, like lack of metal ions for one.

If you took human vs water of the same size... Say an arm and a plastic pipe of the same shape filled with water and measured their conductivity, I'm pretty sure that the pipe would come out on top but I haven't read this experiment anywhere so I can't say for sure.

I am sure that you know that the greater the cable area, the lesser is the resistance and a car standing in water has an almost endless cable area. That's why resistance will for sure be less in the water than a human being.

... And we haven't even looked at the path electricity has to take to pass a human being. It would have to go through the water to the body shell, to one hand of the human, back out the other side of the the human, back to the body shell and to the other battery terminal.

That's, quite frankly, a ridiculous path for the electricity to take. It follows the path of least resistance so it would travel through the body shell where it can and and through water where it has to.

Only if you held one end of the terminal or something connected to it and the other terminal was submerged you would be the conductor... and why you would rip off one of the cables going to the motor generator unit and hold the live part while helping a rally car is beyond me.

I just can't see how anyone would get fried this way sorry. You also have all sorts of breakers, over current protectors, fuses etc etc that would give up long before anyone reached the rally car. If you design the battery case to be of high IP class and have internal fuses, as soon as the rest of the electrics would be shortened the fuses would give and the electrics would be dead. All the components would have to be pretty waterproof regardless due to water splashes etc etc.

So... nah, sorry, I just can't see how this would happen.

[stefanvv]

I am sure that you know that the greater the cable area, the lesser is the resistance and a car standing in water has an almost endless cable area. That's why resistance will for sure be less in the water than a human being.

You contradict Yourself, less resistance means more danger, anyway this presuming human body have less resistance than water for which I'm certain, so when You touch wet car with both hands, seems quite dangerous to me.

[Franky]

And it is enough for one fan to get properly shocked to have major complications for the whole sport.

And if we'd leave aside safety and the very valid points abut ecology you've brought up in the discussion, then the technology is still far too expensive. Do we really need even more expensive car?

What's the situation with hydrogen?

[itix]

You contradict Yourself, less resistance means more danger, anyway this presuming human body have less resistance than water for which I'm certain, so when You touch wet car with both hands, seems quite dangerous to me.

I don't contradict myself, I know full well what I am talking about.

Less resistance in the water means it will travel through the water rather than through that of more resistance (I.e. A human).

If I can't explain to you why you are wrong, just trust me...

I can draw you a wiring diagram when I have access to a computer and enough time to make one (I.e not this week).

Seriously, people don't understand electricity. Nothing personal at all... I don't expect you to but this isn't worse than a regular 12v battery transformed to thousands of volts at the ignition coil.

[tommeke_B]

Jesus, You almost looked like those radical US right wingers that still are denying global warming...

It's not only in the eco movement that hypocrisy can be found...in today's global society probably all governance systems are somehow incoherent or imperfect, simply because they are made by humans! It's in our nature...as it's having the ability to recognize faults and try to do better. Seeing today's degree of civilization it seems the human system is still working!

Btw, congrats to Germany, UK, Norway, The Netherlands and all the other states for their leading effort on the 0 emissions target. It may be shocking for petrolheads like us, but even with alternative techs there will be fun and fast cars (or spaceships) for all!

Didn't the Netherlands just started using new coal plants to make electricity? I lately read some article that claimed electric cars to be at least as polluting as a petrol car (for example they compared a Tesla with Volvo V60). And that's just the driving part. Apparently the production of a electric car pollutes around twice as much as the production of an average petrol car. If you know that the production of an average new car pollutes as much as 14 tonne CO2 (more for the bigger cars), and let's say average emission for a new petrol car is 125g/km. Then theoretically you drive 112 000km before you polluted as much by driving as by the manufacturing of the car. I know many people buy a new car earlier than they reach that amount of kms, and many governments are supporting it by their tax rules. So actually the governments are only supporting the economy, wile making the environmentalists believe it's a good thing they do... IF governments want to do something for the environment, they would tackle the industry (not just car industry, all industry), but that would only work in a good way if the same rules are being applied all over the world at the same time, and it's not going to happen.