THESE CLEVER POWERTRAINS PROMISE LEANER, GREENER FUTURE
Cleaner and greener, these amazing technologies will power our cars over the next 10 years
Whether we like it or not — or, more to the point, whether recalcitrant old gearheads like me like it or not — cars will have to become cleaner and greener over the next 20 years.
That said, the impending revolution won’t be as rapid or easy as many visionaries have led us to believe. But even if salvation isn’t quite just around the corner, new powertrain technologies are coming. Here are the technologies Motor Mouth bets will be the front-runners over the next 10 years:
DENSER, SMALLER, FASTER CHARGING BATTERIES
The truth is lithium-ion has been a failure as a motivator of cars. Yes, it has propelled the electric vehicle out of the gate, but its limitations are now the roadblocks to widespread adoption. Even the most generous estimate puts the floor for a 500-kilometre battery/electric motor combination somewhere around US$12,000, far more than the $5,000 a combustion engine and transmission cost.
Discounting the usual phantasmagorical — aluminum-air, sodium-ion! — chemistries that fanaticists suppose are just around the corner, solid-state batteries are the electric vehicle’s best step forward for the near term. Certainly any automaker — Honda, BMW, VW, Mercedes-Benz and, one has to assume, Tesla — looking for EV leadership is developing its own solid-state technology or has partnered with a battery developer to engineer its own proprietary design.
Automotive designer Henrik Fisker said he will have solid-state battery production ready this year, but more reputable companies such as Toyota, which Electric & Hybrid Vehicle magazine thinks is the industry leader, say the solid-state solution is still five years away. Nevertheless, with faster charging and higher energy density, solid state promises a lighter, more compact future that won’t be spent in a constant search for a charging station.
CHEAP, SAFE HYDROGEN
Yes, I know all you battery devotees — OK, mindless Elon Musk maniacs — will try to deride any challenge to Tesla’s favoured Panasonics, but the simple truth is that battery power is simply not viable, logistically or economically, for large swaths of the transportation industry, most notably commercial trucking. Fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs), essentially EVs with a fuel stack replacing the battery, are just as clean and their electric motors can generate the monstrous torque that semis need. And they’re equally adaptable to computerized autonomy, which, unfortunately for truckers, will probably happen to eighteen-wheelers before cars.
The downside is the high cost of producing raw hydrogen gas. For FCEVs to remain a zero-emission vehicle from well to wheels, H2 needs to be produced by electrochemical water splitting and that is currently very expensive. An electrolyzer capable of producing 200 kilograms of hydrogen daily — about the recharging equivalent of the high 350-kilowatt stations currently being touted — costs about $5 million. That’s simply not feasible — unless someone can take a serious chunk out of that capital cost.
Researchers at Australia’s Queensland University of Technology have developed a new process for hydrogen extraction that requires no precious metals, using cobalt and nickel alloys instead. In fact, research head Anthony O’Mullane said hydrogen can be made so cheaply that it “could feed fuel cell-generated electricity back into the grid during peak demand.” Which would mean it would also be plenty cheap enough to fuel automobiles.
As for the safety of hydrogen, we really do have to get over the whole Hindenburg thing. Most experts now agree that hydrogen is safe, “safer (in fact) than gasoline,” said Ad van Wijk, professor of future energy systems at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. And anyone thinking handling a two-megawatt charger — that’s how much power would be needed for battery/electric vehicles to emulate the three-minute fill-ups enjoyed by gas- and hydrogen-fuelled cars — is going to be easypeasy has been tooting a little too much on Justin Trudeau’s favourite herb.
IMPROVED PISTON POWER
That’s right. Piston power is not going anywhere — not soon, at least. And if we really want to minimize our carbon footprint over the next 25 years, we are going to have to continue to develop the internal-combustion engine (ICE).
The first priority is probably having more engines adopt the Miller cycle. It’s nothing revolutionary, but it will cut consumption — and therefore emissions — by a couple of points.
Further down the road is something called the homogeneous charge controlled ignition (HCCI) engine, essentially a gasoline engine that works like a diesel. High compression being the root of all internal combustion efficiency, HCCI is the ne plus ultra of ICE development.
Mazda’s new Skyactiv-X engine, scheduled for a Canadian introduction by the end of the year, uses a variant of this technology and promises a substantial improvement in fuel efficiency and emissions reduction.
Finally, we seem to be creeping ever closer to the promised, but never delivered, electrically operated valves.
Rather than the camshafts that evolved from ancient Greek water-driven machines, the camshaft common to every automobile engine could be replaced with an electronic version that would be completely controlled by a computer.
Combine HCCI and electromechanical valves and you’d have an engine pushing far beyond the 40 per cent thermal efficiency that Toyota’s Prius boasts as the peak of ICE development. Throw in 48-volt mild-hybrid electrification (which makes all that electric valve actuation easier) as well as cylinder deactivation and those electromechanical valves and, according to Engine Technology magazine, the camless engine could be good for a 20 per cent improvement in fuel economy, along with a 15 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions.
Electrification cometh, but there’s still some life in the old mare yet.