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but pedals on the floor are on the right side of largish divider, which means the driver can't sit square in the center.
I only see a brake and gas pedal so it must be automatic, no matter what you are driving your right foot is either idle, on the brake or on the gas. You never use two feet to operate both, that's a huge safety issue no matter what kind of vehicle you are driving.
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it appears our federal department of transportation is giving hundreds of millions of dollars to company's trying to develop improved MPG large trucks to meet new mandated federal standards.
They don't need federal dollars to make more fule efficient vehicles, anyone in the business always wants more fuel efficiency but the cost of the vehicle has to justify that fuel efficiency. Based on the costs I've seen it's questionable if the increased fuel mileage can justify the increased cost. Big business loves this stuff because it puts the cost of such vehicles out of the reach of the smaller companies.
Those Volts are pretty quick though. Did you know you can use mountain mode (I think it is called) to recharge the battery once the Volt switches to generator only? On a long downhill grade it can make quite a difference.
Only if that is how the system works. Large earth movers frequently use direct systems without batteries in between as introducing batteries also introduces lots of problems for larger vehicles.
Since one of the goals is weight savings, batteries only add to a problem they are trying to mitigate. In this system, there really is no need to use batteries as an added part of the flow. Cars are a different story because they aren't all that weight conscious, just a few hundred pounds makes a lot of difference when transporting goods and many fees are charged by weight.
I'm no expert. I was merely referring to the first line of narration in the video, which begins...
"What you are seeing is the powertrain, which is made up of a microturbine, a battery storage system, and an electric motor. "
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Originally Posted by OpenD
"What you are seeing is the powertrain, which is made up of a microturbine, a battery storage system, and an electric motor. "
I think that this is the reason for efficient use of energy.
Constant RPM micro turbine to drive a generator (which must have a constant fixed RPM),
and then an electric motor to provide power on demand.
Excess power is then stored in the battery system.
Almost every motor vehicle in existence has a battery storage system.
Now lets just look at the application here. The vehicle would weigh approximately 80,000 pounds of more loaded. One of the primary concerns with such transport vehicles is that they run loaded, not empty. Now think about the capacity of a battery system needed to be able to contribute in any significant way to the propulsion of this type of vehicle.
Generators must not operate on a constant fixed RPM nor must a turbine. In fact, generators moderate their RPM to meet the load in most cases.
The design presented seems to concentrate on the other factors contributing to fuel economy and vehicle efficiency than the contribution of batteries.
A battery bank of sufficient capacity to add any real benefit to this type of vehicle would be so heavy as to seriously impact that vehicles ability to transport materials over any long distance in a cost effective way.
More than likely, the battery system would provide the ancillary power for systems normally getting their power from a fueled generator or the main engine.
Those Volts are pretty quick though. Did you know you can use mountain mode (I think it is called) to recharge the battery once the Volt switches to generator only? On a long downhill grade it can make quite a difference.
Yep and I have played around with it, even in Flat Florida. All MM mode does is charge the battery up to 50% so that you can use the extra juice in the battery to keep the vehicle at speeds above 60MPH up a grade. (according to the manual). I also have a hold mode - which we also use. When you get on the highway you hit hold and it keeps the battery at the current charge level and then I go back to normal when we are getting ready to leave the highway so you use the "battery" part of the car in its most efficient manner.
Volt and quick... Ummm.. Not really. 8-8.5 seconds to 60, so it is no slouch. But I count quick as being 7 seconds or less. Some tuners are getting them in the 7s - but the car is quick enough and I like my warranty on the leased car. I also have a better 0-30 than most cars because all the torque is available as soon as you hit the 'go' pedal.
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Problem with a concept truck is that all we have to go on is what we can guess the photos show and what the article tells us. The article doesn't tell us a whole lot either.
Problem with a concept truck is that all we have to go on is what we can guess the photos show and what the article tells us. The article doesn't tell us a whole lot either.
No, but when the official PR video says "What you are seeing is the powertrain, which is made up of a microturbine, a battery storage system, and an electric motor, " and accompanies those words with discrete shots of each of those three components...
...and the everyday understanding of the term "powertrain" is, as the Wiki entry puts it: "In a motor vehicle, the term powertrain or powerplant refers to the group of components that generate power and deliver it to the road surface, water, or air." ...
... then it seems illogical to assume that they mean anything other than that the powertrain consists of a microturbine, a battery storage system, and an electric motor, just as they said.
Here's how Wired described it... "The truck uses a turbine-powered battery-electric hybrid drivetrain, and the combustion engine can run on diesel, natural gas and biodiesel."
I read it a little differently... here are the pertinent quotes, with my emphasis added:
In other words, they are said to have participated in the design. That might reasonably consist of giving Peterbilt their input on what would make a truck better for their purposes, then reviewing what Peterbilt came up with.
Then some PR guy came up with the idea of slapping some Wal Mart logos on the prototype so it looked more like real-life in the photos. Wal Mart paid a fee, and got bragging rights, while Peterbilt got broader exposure to their project, and to their concept vehicle.
I'm guessing that's how it really happened, and if Peterbilt does happen to build a better truck, Wal Mart will probably buy some.
At least that's how it occurs for me.
So what we have here is an experimental prototype ; something celiberately offered as a "radical" advance, but actually incorporating a number of innovative, but not completely proven features in one package.
Nothing wrong with this; some of those features will pan our -- and some won't. And the rate at which they're adapted will vary. A few might even "work" at cross-purposes with other features, and the guys and gals who work "closer to the street" will sort things out. (I've noticed, for example, that the technique of reducing aerodynamic resistance on highway trailers on rail flatcars -- upon which the wheels and axles can't always be detached -- has been enhanced in the past couple of years by placing a deflector directly under the trailer body).
All this is nothing new. Highway trailers were moving by rail in a few markets as early as the late 1930's (Ironically, one of the first promoters was the New Haven, which lost almost all its freight traffic while en route to bankruptcy, a shotgun weeding with Penn-Central, another bankruptcy, and Conrail).
But all variety of differences and disputes emerged: what size and length of trailer, how many of them to a flatcar, whether to give the drag-generating wheels, hubs and axles a "free ride", By the late Sixties the rail consortium known a TrailerTrain had settled on a 2-box 88-foot car -- only to discover that the railroads' freight-fracturing technology allowed for a couple of inches in vertical play at the center of the car when in motion. This writer remembers seeing hundreds of 88-footers gathering rust at a TTX facility in Jacksonville a few years ago.
But beginning around 1980 -- about the same time that the crew-size and deregulation impasses were finally addressed seriously -- an industry-wide effort finally came up with a couple ideas such as the double-stack "well" car, and an articulated flatcar with single trucks (wheelsets) placed between each cargo body. The new arrangements almost immediately began to pay off.
I expect a similar period of trial-and-error, followed by standardization of those measures which prove most successful, to play out here. What unsettles me more is the possibility of an intensifying conflict between freight haulers seeking larger and larger vehicles, and a safety-conscious but technically-underinformed public with the political potential to propose expensive remedies with limited grasp of the full cost.
But that's democracy in action, folks! And the cycle will be repeating itself long after all of us here are gone.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 03-09-2014 at 06:46 PM..
So what we have here is an experimental prototype ; something celiberately offered as a "radical" advance, but actually incorporating a number of innovative, but not completely proven features in one package.
Precisely. I don't know why this is so hard for some people to grasp, but the whole concept of a "Concept" vehicle is to play around with the dominant paradigm and see what shakes out when you shake things up.
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Nothing wrong with this; some of those features will pan our -- and some won't. And the rate at which they're adapted will vary. A few might even "work" at cross-purposes with other features, and the guys and gals who work "closer to the street" will sort things out. (I've noticed, for example, that the technique of reducing aerodynamic resistance on highway trailers on rail flatcars -- upon which the wheels and axles can't always be detached -- has been enhanced in the past couple of years by placing a deflector directly under the trailer body).
Exactly. Peterbilt also has its more conventional but heavily optimized SuperTruck prototype running in open road tests, which boosted its mileage performance to a remarkable 10.7 mpg (vs industry average of about 6 mpg) while hauling a 65,000 load, just a few weeks before this WAVE announcement, but see how much excitement that engendered in the press...
But wait, there's more! It's said that 25% of the energy used by a conventional big rig is just overcoming the resistance created by shoving a rectangular box through the air at 65 mph. Using a conventional diesel powertrain, the AirFlow Bullet truck hit an even higher mpg rating than the SuperTruck, 13.4 mpg, with its radical aerodynamics work, using a very long front nose cone, wheel curtains, and a tapered tail cone, so it shows what's possible with radical aerodynamic improvements.
Personally I do not believe the turbine engine will make the final cut, because I don't think they'll ever achieve the fuel efficiency of a hybrid diesel-powered battery-electric. Turbines were the sexy darlings of the railroad industry after the middle of the last century, until the high fuel costs of the oil crisis of the 70s pushed them all out to early retirement.
There's a lot of experimentation now with diesel-electric hyrids, and it seems to be paying off in measurable, if incremental, mileage AND air quality improvements. Here's an interesting article from a year and a half ago about one such line of research.
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