Re: Age of the automobile is kaput!

Peter Cole wrote:

As the age of the automobile comes to an end, it will be
interesting to see what the bicycle industry will offer as people
move off of 4 wheels and on to two wheels. Will they make the same
mistake as the auto industry and continue to feature the
impractical CF racing bike that sells at the same price as a car,
or will they offer practical bikes for the everyman (the Surly
lineup comes to mind). And don't give me the electric car line, as
anyone who has fooled with batteries long enough, knows this a
hoax. They'll work for a while, and then not work. When you
consider all the mayhem the 4 wheel vehicle has brought to the
planet in the last half century it is truly amazing this collapse
did not happen sooner.

I think there's a lot more room to make much more efficient cars, so
the mode isn't going to die overnight. Electrics make sense in that
they're one way to get high mileages, but for all intents & purposes
they're essentially (at least currently in the US) coal fueled.

Electrical storage (battery, supercap, or some combo) still has a
ways to go, but some of the technologies are less than a decade old
and nanotech offers some hope for both. That said, it's not a
trivial thing to replace a mature technology on a massive scale with
an infant one and there's never a free lunch.

The real problem, besides engineering/material science, etc., has
been the big fuel price fluctuations. Investors, whether backing
alternate energy projects, of just consumers choosing between a
Hummer or Prius were playing roulette.

I don't get too worked up about boutique bikes. Not my thing, but I
don't see the harm. There are lots of choices, and other than
misleading the customer into buying the wrong bike, choice is good.
Utility cycling is pretty non-existent in the US, but I don't think
that's an equipment problem.

These bicycle alter the focus of manufacturers such that good quality
practical bicycles are no longer built leaving the "transportation"
field with no source of bicycles.

I think that's more than a bit of an overstatement. Bikes have never
been cheaper. Most of the major manufacturers have lines of "city" bikes
& even more common "hybrid" bikes. Both perfectly viable for
transportation use. That's just in the US. In Japan and Europe
"transportation" bikes are the rule rather than the exception, even more
so in India, Africa and most of Asia.

I guess your right on that one:

http://aistigave.hit.bg/Logistics/

Beyond that, bicycles require skill to operate safely and physical
strength that is not everyone's.

From Dutch statistics, perhaps 10%, worst case.

The self propelled enclosed vehicle capable of transporting goods
and passengers is a great boon to society, but it has by its
ability to perform this task well, driven out public transportation
except where cars cannot compete, such as long distance (air)
travel.

I think the continued popularity of high speed rail and the
particularly effective use of the bicycle to solve the "last mile"
problem argues against that. Automobile dominance in the US has a
lot to do with industrial interests and social engineering. As
those interests shift priorities may well shift with them.

Air travel is another interesting problem. Currently, air travel is
roughly the same energy-wise as car travel. The problem is that
aircraft designers have been pushing efficiency much harder and
longer than auto designers. The net effect is that air travel will
become relatively more costly as overall energy costs rise. The
problem of aircraft emissions is pretty much swept under the rug.

The passenger car is disliked for its ubiquitous use for routine
commuting tasks for which competition has been driven out, and for
the hazard it presents to pedestrians and bicycle riders.

The problem with the car is that it doesn't scale well to high
densities. Cities around the world are wrestling with that, no one
has solved it. Cars & trucks work very well in low density
scenarios.

The car will not go away any more than residential housing in
lasting structures will revert to tepees and yurts. Moving to a
different power source in cars does not alter its negative effect
on society.

The car may not even lose it's dominance, but it must change
significantly to avoid that fate. Some effects must be mitigated.
Highly computerized cars may allow significantly denser traffic,
effectively becoming trains on arterial routes. They may even pick
up power from the road. That would still be a "car" in some senses,
but would be a very different vehicle used in a very different
manner than today's car.

It will remain the driver who must make safety decisions. Hoping a
computer will take that duty is not realistic.

The internal combustion engine also will not be replaced by
electric drive, a power plant being for that, assuming electric
storage some day will become available, is not as efficient and
compact as a local small one in the car. An example is the
timberman's chain saw.

The chain saw is a fairly unique application, requiring unusually
high power/energy to weight. There's no electrical
storage/generation system on the drawing boards (except perhaps fuel
cells) that approaches the specific energy of naturally aspirated
combustion. That said, even current technology is good enough to do
a lot of practical transportation with electric power.

OK, there are many applications where the density of mechanism and its
fuel supply make the IC engine supreme.

Energy costs of manufacture aside, electric vehicles can achieve
operational efficiencies difficult for heat engines to match, and
then there's the problem of emissions, both smog & CO2, difficult to
reduce and capture in small engines. Perhaps not insurmountable
problems, but very challenging ones. Modern, combustion driven
power plants operate at around 60% efficiency. Even with
transmission losses, electric motors beat IC motors pretty handily
in overall "well-to-wheel" efficiency.

It is getting the current to the vehicle or machine that is the
problem, not generation efficiency. Electric mass transportation is a
good example.

China & India are following the pattern of government subsidy of
internal combustion driven vehicle manufacture, not so much for the
benefit of their domestic market but to use their domestic market to
get them into the international market, following in the footsteps
of Japan and Korea. If the West abandons the IC vehicle they will
be forced to also because we're their eventual target market. China
is already producing millions of electric bicycles and scooters to
replace gas models because pollution is so bad they've had to ban
them in some cities.

The market is in the long run "the world". Consider the origin of
many of your autos.

Germany is an interesting example of a country wrestling with the
automobile. They have a huge export market and the auto is a very
big part of their economy. While the nation is buying up more of
the world's solar cell production than any other and installing
windmills galore, they still have the highest vehicle emissions in
the EU, half of the autobahn has still no speed limit and large
powerful cars are still popular. In the US, the auto industry
doesn't have but a scrap of the political power it once had, not so
in Germany. The way all this turns out may have more to do with
politics than engineering, particularly in the short run.

Traditions have a hard time dying!

Jobst Brandt
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Age of the automobile is kaput!
    ... And don't give me the electric car line, ... consider all the mayhem the 4 wheel vehicle has brought to the ... Electrics make sense in that ... I think the continued popularity of high speed rail and the particularly effective use of the bicycle to solve the "last mile" problem argues against that. ...
    (rec.bicycles.tech)
  • Re: Age of the automobile is kaput!
    ... move off of 4 wheels and on to two wheels. ... And don't give me the electric car line, ... Electrics make sense in that ... These bicycle alter the focus of manufacturers such that good quality ...
    (rec.bicycles.tech)
  • Detroit Goes for Electric Cars, but Will Drivers?
    ... But Ford was feeling pressure from competitors, and decided it could not afford to fall behind in the rapidly expanding race to put electric cars in dealer showrooms. ... The competition over electrics is picking up speed and players. ... Toyota, which has so far focused its efforts on hybrid models, will display a battery-powered concept car at the Detroit show. ... Industry analysts also note that electric models could be a harder sell than hybrids, which have a gasoline engine to assist and recharge battery packs, freeing them from the need to be plugged in. ...
    (soc.retirement)
  • Re: Detroit Goes for Electric Cars, but Will Drivers?
    ... Inside the Ford Motor Company, ... The competition over electrics is picking up speed and players. ... battery-powered concept car at the Detroit show. ... United States to assemble advanced batteries for its Chevrolet Volt ...
    (soc.retirement)
  • Re: Surviveable bicycle, is it possible?
    ... A car hiting a bike from the rear is going to send a stiff caged ... bicycle flying a long way. ... One number I have heard is that the electricity used to power 3 60 watt ...
    (rec.bicycles.tech)