Go Greener, Australia

I don’t normally get excited by prototype cars, and this one would be too big for me and Dave (SUV size), but I’m really intrigued after reading about it: Turn On, Plug In, Drop Out by Joseph Romm.

It’s a plug-in hybrid car. It has a fast-charge battery that can be charged from your home’s electricity, no petrol needed. The disadvantage of the fast charge time is that it discharges quickly too - 64km (40 miles) of driving will use it up. However, 64km is more than most people drive on an average day. If you do drive further than that, the normal hybrid battery kicks in, so you can just keep going with no problems, filling up with petrol if necessary.

Obviously, if your plug-in car relies on electricity, it’s not that much better for the environment than oil/petrol if your electricity comes from coal. But electricity can come from green sources, while oil can’t, so there’s definitely room for reductions in the greenhouse gas emissions created by cars.

What’s interesting to me is that this isn’t a radical new concept, it’s an incremental improvement on already-proven technology. I reckon frequent small improvements can be taken on quickly by the general population (that’s us), and will get us what we want a lot faster than waiting for a breakthrough in hydrogen vehicles, or a magic bullet solution to the emissions from petrol.

Unfortunately, AFS Trinity is not a car manufacturer - the XH-150 Extreme Hybrid SUV is a retrofit of an existing hybrid SUV, with the help of auto engineers Riccardo. This seems to be the latest in a long line of car ideas that have been prototyped, and very few of those prototypes ever make it to market where people can actually buy them. I’d love to see a car company take AFS Trinity’s idea on: it’s practical and a good halfway-point in the transition to fully electric vehicles.

Joseph Romm wrote an article about it at Salon: The Car of the Future is Here and you can see a video of his test-drive . AFS Trinity has their own videos too.

Tags: hybrid, plug-in car, prototype

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 5:00 pm and is filed under transport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.