Auto show spotlight: ‘Forget mpg, think kilowatts per hour’
January 14, 2010 by Tom GuayPosted in: Latest News & Views, News, Technology
The hot news from Detroit’s big auto show this year: electric cars! Half of the new vehicles on display this year run on electricity.
The other hot news: small trumps big.
Of the 41 new autos on display, 20 were electric vehicles (EVs), from golf carts, to one- and two-person urban vehicles to standard sedans, such as the coming GM Volt and Ford’s new all-electric Fusion.
And, in a major change of fortunes, the EVs this year were on the prime-time viewing floor — on the specially designated Electric Avenue. In years past, the EVs were relegated to the basement level of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.
The Korean automaker, CT&T, made trade press headlines with its $15,000 E Zone EV. It’s good for getting around town, but it’s not highway rated.
Then there’s the narrowest car ever, the electric, single-person vehicle, The Tango, made by Commuter Cars Corp. It has the look of a cartoon car that got pancaked trying to pass between two 18-wheelers on the highway.
Ford ended up winning awards from this year’s auto show. The Fusion Hybrid sedan won Car of the Year while the Ford Transit Connect van was selected as Truck of the Year.
The big American EV news: Ford introduced an all-electric version of the Fusion that will hit the sales floors later this year. Ford plans to build 12 to 15 different Fusion models off the same Ford Focus platform, including a gasoline-hybrid and a gasoline powered Fusion.
But, as the New York Times points out, despite all the hoopla over the hybrid Fusion, which should get 39 miles per gallon on a mix of highway and city driving, the car is expensive at $33,000. The gasoline-powered Fusion costs less and gets nearly the same mileage, 2 mpgs less than its hybrid brother.
Tags: E Zone EV, Electric Avenue, electric cars, Ford Fusion hybrid, hybrids, The Tango
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January 21st, 2010 at 2:36 pm
Tom, Tom, Tom,
Me again.
“Kilowatts per hour”??? Kilowatts is already per hour (per second actually). A kilowatt is a kiloJoule per second and a kiloJoule is a unit of energy like BTU or calorie. I think what you want is kilowatt hours per mile or miles per kilowatt hour.
A 100 watt light bulb uses 100 watts whether it burns for one minute or one century. It is always using 100 watts. That’s power. The amount of energy it uses increases with time; 100 watt hours per hour or 0.1 kWh per hour.
I used to tell my eighth grade students that a jelly doughnut gives off as much energy when burned (that’s kilowatt hours) as a stick of dynamite does. A jelly doughnut takes about 1000 seconds to burn and a stick of dynamite takes 1/1000 of a second. The dynamite burns one million times faster so it has one million times the power (That’s watts)
In case you are wondering, it’s been slow at work.