AFS Trinity Discloses Info on 250 mpg Plug-in

AFS Trinity Power Corporation today filed its patent application disclosing the company's new technology for an Extreme Hybrid(TM) car capable of carrying the average American motorist more than 250 miles on a single gallon of gasoline or ethanol. Gasoline and electricity cost expected to be $8 per week for the average American driver driving 300 miles per week. At $3 a gallon, gasoline costs about $48 a week for a conventional 20 mpg car and $36 if the car can get 25 mpg. The most efficient conventional hybrids get about 50 mpg which means $19 a week

The Extreme Hybrid(TM) will plug into a house's electrical current overnight to run without gasoline or ethanol for the 40 miles that the average American drives each day. For longer trips, the vehicle will operate as a conventional hybrid that efficiently burns gasoline or ethanol.

The AFS Trinity patent filing discloses that Fast Energy Storage(TM) technology, including ultracapacitors, controllers and power electronics, will enable the Extreme Hybrid(TM) to overcome the limitations of the energy storage components of conventional hybrids and other plug-in designs.

An earlier post in Green Car Congress revealed that the car will use Li-ion/capacitor based energy storage to provide greater efficiency in energy capture and energy release thereby extending the operational range of the vehicle in the all-electric mode.

AFS Trinity CEO Edward W. Furia said "This technology will permit a car to travel the entire 40 miles of an average American's daily driving in all-electric mode, without giving up rapid acceleration or the ability to travel at highway speeds, all without burning a drop of gasoline,"

"The Extreme Hybrid(TM) won't only cost less to operate on a daily basis, it will also be the first hybrid that will save enough money from reduced operating costs to more than offset the higher purchase price of the car," added Furia. "In fact, over five years, we estimate that the XH(TM) owner will be $11,000 ahead and, over 10 years, $22,000 ahead."

"The advantages to the environment and our independence from foreign oil are obvious, but the reason we believe consumers will want this car is because they will save money and because the performance of the XH(TM) will be no different than that of conventional cars," Furia said.

"To recharge the Extreme Hybrid(TM) for your daily driving you will need to plug in your car to house current every night, but the average American will only have to fill up with gasoline or ethanol once every 10 weeks or so unless they take a longer trip."

AFS Trinity plans to build the XH(TM) drive train with the help of Ricardo, a leading supplier of automotive design and engineering to the world's major carmakers. AFS Trinity and Ricardo have signed a mutually exclusive Technology Partnership Agreement to work together to develop plug-in hybrid technology. With sufficient funding they expect that XH(TM) demonstration vehicles could be in the hands of fleet owners in two years and could be licensed for mass production by car makers in three years.

AFS Trinity was formed through the merger of American Flywheel Systems, Inc. and Trinity Flywheel Power in 2000. The company is headquartered in Bellevue, Wash. with an Engineering Center in Livermore, California. AFS Trinity's research and development has been funded mostly by private sources, but also through contracts with NASA, U.S. DOT, U.S. DOE, as well as Army, Navy and Air Force prime contractors.

Ricardo technical expertise lies in powertrain and driveline, vehicle engineering, hybrid and fuel cell technologies, controls and electronics, niche volume manufacturing and advanced simulation software.

Resources:

AFS Trinity Power Corporation, Medina, Washington
AFS Trinity Today Files Patent Disclosing Technology For 250 Mpg 'Extreme Hybrid' Plug-In Car, Press release, May 4, 2006

Technorati tags: vehicles, plug-in hybids, energy, technology

Comments

[Dbe2200]

Maybe I missed something, but they don't seem to be figuring in the cost of the electricity. The consumer might spend less on gas, but how much more on electricity? Still, I welcome all advances in this area.

[DG]

dbe2200 - It does seem to mention it here: "Gasoline and electricity cost expected to be $8 per week for the average American driver driving 300 miles per week. "

My guess is that their giving themselves the best-case scenerio, i.e. a person does all of their recharging at night and lives in an area where the off-peak rate for electricity is 2 cents per kwh.

I keep hearing about plug-in hybrids and next generation vehicles, but I have yet to see them actually mass-produced and marketed. Personally, I'd love to have a car like this and get solar panels on my roof to generate the electricity for it, but I want to know when it will be a reality and how much it will cost.

[Rich]

The estimates are in-line with other PHEV estimates.

http://www.calcars.org/vehicles.html
It's like having a second small fuel tank that you always use first -- only you fill this tank at home with electricity at an equivalent cost of under $1/gallon. Another way of thinking about this: at $3 for a gallon of gas, driving a non-hybrid car costs 8-20 cents/mile (depending on MPG). With a PHEV, all-electric local travel and communting can drop to 2-4 cents/mile.

[Harvey D.]

The AFS Trinity PHEV will require a 15+ KWh on-board electrcity storage device to get an average 40-mile on electicity mode only. Is it going to be a combo Lithium based battery pack + Super Caps?

Will they show the way to the major car manufacturers. Let's hope they (the majors) follow up with a mass production equivalent model soon.

This vehicle would be ideal where night time electric energy is very cheap.

[bde2200]

Electricity for $.02 kwh? Where do you get that? For all the ways to power an automobile, gas, diesel, ethanol, biodiesel, CNG, wood fired steam engine; electricity has to be the most expensive. Something doesn't compute here.

[amazingdrx]

7.5 kwh would most likely take one 40 miles in this vehicle on all electric power. That would cost around 75 cents at the current rate of 10 cents per kwh.

With one's own power from home based wind and solar, once the system pays itself off in savings in a few years? Zero electric cost, zero emissions. And you can sell enough power back to the grid to offset any charging away from home.

And even sell enough back to offset the little CO 2 used by ocasionally burning liquid fuel.

I know it's going to be hard to accept for many people, but the real solutions are here now.

This design with the new 5 minute charge to 90% lithium ion nano phosphate batteries would be even better.

2 cents per kwh electricity? Yep, from windpower. That is the current estimate.

Face it, the internal combustion engine is near death. And a well deserved death it is!

70 pounds per equivalent, 7.5 kwh in electric battery storage weight to one gallon of transportation energy with infernal combustion's planet killing cough, wheeze, and choke 14% efficiency. That has sealed the doom of gas guzzlers.

Vroom vroom macho cars, RIP..ieces, in the scrapyard. Until recycling with wind power melts them into clean energy products.

[Mike G.]

"Face it, the internal combustion engine is near death."

YOU WISH... and so do I but not quite as close as we would wish.

This car is still not in production. And how much is it going to cost? They haven't said to my knowledge and I would imagine there guesses would be on the low side of reality.

As to how much it will cost to drive/charge. Forget all the figures being thrown around. Electicity is cheaper than gas hands down. Forget calculating how much per mile the vehicle will cost over its life span. People don't buy stuff that way only businesses for the most part.

One of the biggest selling points of EV's to me is the potential for a vehicle that has extremely low maintance. Electic motor are just so much more dependable than gas engines.

People (including probably you) will buy this car when the cost is competitive (same or a percentage more) with the price of "regular cars" of similar design/class.

Sure some people will buy a car that will take 10 years to reach the break even point, but not many.

[Engineer-Poet]

Off-peak may be 2¢/kWh, but the figures I'm seeing for wind power are around 4.5¢.  That's still equivalent to gasoline at 25¢/gallon in a 15%-efficient drivetrain (at the plug, batteries increase that a lot).

If we get serious cost reductions in the A123Systems cells, or EEStor delivers product, or even if Firefly Energy can crank out batteries at the per-kWh cost of our current lead-acid cells, it's game over for both the internal combustion engine and the oil industry.

[Alex]

Imagine the ad campaign: I'm thinking oil sheikhs begging in the gutter.

[Thomas]

I'm really looking forward to getting rid of smog and engine noise in towns and cities, where future cars will run on battery alone.

I can't help but think about what you'd get, if you got rid of the gas engine, gearbox, clutch, complicated interface, etc. and just installed a larger battery..? It's probably too soon, but I might be great for delivery vehicles.

Another thing, if you can charge your batteries to 90% in just 5-10 minutes, who much battery range do you really need? If every gas station had an electrical outlet for charging, how much range would be enough for your first EV? (car size = Toyota Prius)

Let's take a poll:

50 miles
75 miles
100 miles
150 miles

I imagine the vehicle (all-EV) would have a top speed of about 100 mph and acceleration 0-60 in 9-10 sec.

What do you think folks?

-Thomas

[amazingdrx]

Time to celebrate Thomas! That's what I think. Excellent!

And time to push the political path to get these inovations main stream right now and into mass production.

Rumor is that Bush and friends maybe dropping nuclear bunker busters on Iran soon. If so that means 10 dollar gas overnight.

We can only hope that someone stops this, but who is left? A bi-partisan effort in congress is the only hope.

Iran, Venezuala, and other anti-bush oil exporting nations are already converting to Euros. The world has had enough and is going to kill our dollar over Bush waring for oil.

That means national bankruptcy. Then these new technologies will have to rise from the ashes of a once great nation.

This energy revolution is ready to go into overdrive. Worldwide depression may slow it down a bit, but really the only way out is to ditch oil and internal combustion.

The question now? Can the bush war machine be stopped in time to avoid a cataclysmic mistake?

[earl]

Yes why would we pick on mahmoud hitler minding his business in Iran.Read future jihad by walid phares and you will realize we face an ideology more dangerous than Naziism.
That having beeen said ,we indeed need a domestic energy supply to avoid fighting oil wars for the energy that is the lifeblood of our nationhood.
A distributed electric supply would be easier to keep secure {from terrorism,storms,etc.}.It is also easier to make cleaner at thousands of production sites as opposed to tens of millions of tail pipes.
Investment in these alternatives has been hastened by the 2005 energy bill{delayed 5 years by dems}.It can be accelerated by the bipartisan Enhanced Energy Security bill.
Working together towards a secure and clean energy future needs to supersede the desire to engage in polemics.We will need left,right and center to buy into this concept.
I have Ted Kennedy {dem} and Gov. Mitt Romney repub}working together to kill the Capewind project in my state.Political ignorance and corruption are equal party empolyers.
Contact your senators and support S.2747 Enhanced Energy Security Act and we can lead them towards the energy future we desire.

[amazingdrx]

"Yes why would we pick on ..."

To distract from Bush ally Saudi Arabia's funding of 9/11 and the "islamic bomb" in that other infamous bush allied nation, Pakistan, that is harboring Osama?

Or maybe to distract from the catastrophic Bush designed mess-o-potamia next door?

But mainly to discourage any other anti-Bush oil exporting nations from switching to Euros for their oil transactions? Whoops too late for that.

Or to distract from the upcoming, possibly record hurricane season that FEMA is unreadier for than ever before?

Or to distract from countless scandals within the administration?

Or to distract from the price of gas rapidly rising towards 4 bucks per gallon?

All these distraction in order to try to win these mid term elections? That is my guess why "we" are doing it.

Oh, and it revives and retores credibility in the nuclear bombing industry in the form of "nuclear bunker busters".

[unsure]

Re: 5-minute battery charge.

I've heard that the magnitude of electricity required to flow through a line in order to charge one of these batteries in 5 minutes would be phenomenal - and dangerous. The connection of such power, I've heard, isn't the sort of thing that you would want every idiot who is allowed to drive a car to do.

Has anyone heard of a way to make this sort of power flow safely (other than replaceable batteries)?

[Engineer-Poet]

It's done every day.

Lots of people handle 440 VAC on a regular basis.  Arc welders use cables carrying hundreds of amperes; if those same cables were insulated well enough (and properly ground-fault protected) they could handle 440 VAC.

If you want to charge an 80 kWh battery in 5 minutes, you need 480 kW of power.  480 kW is 440 volts at less than 1200 amps.  You might need a mechanically robust connector to guarantee that magnetic forces don't move it during the charging operation, but actually carrying the power isn't all that big a deal; that's maybe twice the current that a V8 starter motor takes at stall.

[hamerhokie]

E-P: agreed, but it takes such a battery out of the realm of 'home recharging.' Home electric panels are generally rated at 220 V, 225 A mains. So we are back to 'filling stations.' No real problem there - use a lower rated connection for overnight recharging, and save the high-capacity stuff for trips.

I would expect a charger that robust to be rated higher voltage and lower current to cut down on copper size, but who knows. There are high current connectors rated in the 6000A range currently available, and ones in the 1000A range rated at up to 5000V with quick disconnect.

[Robert L Howe]

Hi I'm new here.

An 80 kWh battery that can recharge in five minutes? Wow!
First surely it would take 960 kW to recharge not 480.

Yes you can home charge it, you simply need a pulse store with enough capacity, one that can charge slowly, hold 80 kWh and release the energy in 5 minute bursts without melting. Either a battery or something like a gyro would probably work quite well. It occurs to me though that a really big CHP diesel/ethanol engine might be a better source since it wouldn’t have to heat hundreds of miles of power cables transmitting all that power, and in a five or ten minute pulse could be reasonably efficient. If the pulse store is efficient enough then you could even use a (big) wind turbine to keep it charged instead - there’s an idea.

Thinking about a 480 - 960 kWh supply system it has lots of problems. If touched anywhere its pretty much instantly lethal. If anything goes wrong the whole thing tends to explode like a bomb. Its far more vulnerable to lightning because of the high current carrying capacity. Its in the energy band where electrical fields can harm people directly just by induction. And as I said before transmitting that kind of power long distances can waste a lot of energy so its generally better to use local generation like a small throttleable gas turbine generating station. The alternative is will probably involve special power lines and a dedicated sub-station (at least here in the uk), so installing this kind of system is pretty expensive to.

[Alex]

If anything goes wrong the whole thing tends to explode like a bomb.

Yep, that's a real disadvantage compared with a tank full of a toxic, volatile liquid that gives off explosive vapour and is specifically prepared to burn well!

[Robert L Howe]

960 kW is enough power to magnetically levitate about 100 tons of metal or for a whole subway train, or a 1300 horsepower petrol engine at peak power - imagine 1600 volts at 600 amps. There's a special name in the electricity industry for working with that kind of power - "brown trousers".
This new battery has a huge potential but its going to take some serious technology to make use of it.