MOTOR MOUTH
SYNTHETIC FUEL? WHAT WILL THEY THINK OF NEXT?
With our laser-like focus on electric vehicles and cars that drive themselves, it’s easy to forget that innovation comes in many forms. No stranger to the “now why didn’t I think of that?” self-recrimination, Motor Mouth looks at some head-smackingly obvious inventions I wished I had thought of.
PUT CARBON TO GOOD USE
This one may be old but is still so painfully obvious that one feels literally moronic as soon as you read the abstract. To wit : We have too much carbon dioxide, but we don’t have anywhere near enough carbon fibre so why not create one from the other?
That’s exactly what some researchers at George Washington University have done, developing a methodology to extract carbon fibre from the CO2 in our atmosphere. And guess what the other byproduct of this electrochemical process is? Oxygen.
Yes, Stuart Licht, a chemistry professor in Ashburn, Virginia, claims to have found a way to convert CO2 into pure nanoscale carbon fibre filaments and replace it with the oxygen we breathe, thus both purifying the air and producing the lightweight man-made material destined to take over from steel, aluminum and magnesium in the building of our cars.
Not only that, Licht claims that, if renewable sources of electricity are used, there’s a net reduction in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so much so that he estimates that, given an area of constant sunshine 1/10th the size of the Sahara Desert, his system could remove enough CO2 to return the global atmosphere back to pre-industrial-revolution pureness within 10 years.
Indeed, Licht and his fellow researchers claim the process could be applied to coal-fired electricity plants that would emit no CO2 at all. Licht et al have formed a startup — C2CNT — that is developing a commercial process for the conversion. Closer to home, a Calgary company, Carbon Upcycling Technologies, has figured out a way to combine CO2 with waste products to create additives for concrete, plastic and batteries.
SAVE A MOTORCYCLIST
This one hits close to home because a) I am a motorcyclist and b) whether it’s legal or not, I have been known to split a lane. For those not aware of what “splitting lanes” is, it’s the motorcycling art of squeezing in between two rows of cars so that one might get ahead of the traffic jams caused by “cagers.” In California, where it’s legal, filtering, as it is sometimes called, can take 30 minutes out of what would otherwise be an hourlong commute.
Of course, there’s the danger that one of the car drivers you’re squeezing by might not see you and change lanes right into your front wheel.
Enter Ford’s latest patent for Detection of Lane-Splitting Motorcycles. Essentially, what the Ford system does (or would do if it ever makes it to production) is use cameras like those in rear cross-trafficalert systems to spot motorcycles white-lining. If the car driver tries to switch lanes as the motorcyclist approaches, the on-board Advanced Driver Assistance Systems would automatically prevent steering into his, or her, path.
According to CNET, this is quite important to the future of self-driving because current autonomous systems “have difficulty detecting motorcyclists in traffic” and Ford’s patent “could mean a big leap forward for autonomous four-wheeled- twowheeled vehicle relations.”
WATER VERSUS HIGH-TECH
It turns out that, according to a study by the International Carwash Association (ICA), car washes and the modern computerized automobile don’t always get along. Almost 80 per cent of car wash owners report damage to automatic “rain-sensing” wipers because they sense, well, a soapy thunderstorm in the making. Some newfangled transmissions don’t like being dragged through the wash either (they engage their hillor auto-hold mechanisms). More troubling is that almost 40 per cent of the association’s operators have reported problems with Automatic Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) being applied during the wash cycle. Even keyless entry systems seem to go haywire when hosed down.
Thankfully, this all comes with a relatively easy solution: The ICA recommends that all automakers simply install a “car wash” button that would deactivate all these Fancy Dan electronics. And as ADAS technology becomes more common, sensors could wirelessly communicate with car washes so the computers were automatically deactivated.
CLEANER FUEL FROM C02
Synthetic gasoline is not a new idea. The theory behind synthesizing fuel from coal was put forward way back in 1913. The difference, 105 years later, is that Bosch is trying to accomplish the same task using the carbon dioxide we’re all trying to reduce in the atmosphere. According to Bosch researchers, they get their hydrogen from the electrolysis of water and the carbon from captured CO2. In theory, if renewable energy were used for the entire program, the process could capture and synthesize as much carbon dioxide as is released in the internal combustion process.
Maybe we don’t have to give up on internal combustion engines quite yet.
Author’s note: The technologies noted above are very much still in their infancy.