Mark Visbeek Blog » Sustainability

Why electric driving is a matter of life-and-death

Mark Visbeek — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:09:05 +0000

The extreme growth of the world industry in the past century can be attributed mainly to the fast improvement in ease and efficiency of the transportation of products and people over increasing distances. This high degree of mobility made us independent from the location of certain activities. All over the world, we eat fresh grapes from Argentina without even thinking about it, and a business meeting in Copenhagen is not even a problem if you have to be back in Amsterdam the next morning. Increasing mobility makes the world smaller, and makes things possible that would otherwise be unimaginable. The big problem, however, is that as fast as our mobility improved, our dependency on it grew, too.

Movement takes energy, and we are in the middle of an energy crisis. We still have some of the natural resources left to extract our energy from, but not long from now everything will simply become perished or unattainable. So far, this is not a new or particularly shocking story. However, to witness the complete lack of realization that we do not have an unlimited amount of oil –to name one of our most important resources today– at our disposal, is astonishing.

What should we do?

For one thing, the solution lies in reducing our need for movement and transportation. Communication technology plays an important role in this. Teleconferencing obviates the need for above-mentioned roundtrip to Copenhagen, and a thorough literature research can be conducted without needing to visit a library at some university at the other end of the country. Also, the deliberate development of local solutions for local problems contributes to reducing our dependency on mobility. Why get grapes from Argentina when you can perfectly well grow them in your own country?

On the other hand, this dependency on mobility is difficult to counter. Therefore, it is important to make sure the unavoidable movement and transportation is done as efficient as possible. Here, ‘efficient’ does not necessarily mean ‘in a way that takes as little energy as possible’, but more ‘in a way that ensures we can continue to use mobility for as long as possible’.

The difference is in which energy source to employ. No matter how clean and efficient your combustion engines are, oil is going to run out, be it in 50 or in 500 years. We need a renewable source of energy, and to take an extreme stance on the subject: Truly renewable energy sources do not exist. Of course you can make bio-ethanol from sugar cane crops, but sugar cane does not grow automatically; without farmland no crops, without sunlight no photosynthesis. Lacking an infinite source, we need to find the source with the longest lifetime. At this point, that seems to be our sun. Our sun emits energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation. A fraction of this radiation hits the earth, about 174 billion megawatts. That is 11.000 times the energy we are consuming on earth, today. If we manage to capture 0.01% of this energy, we have more than enough to meet our needs.

Ok, so how can we use this?

Back to mobility. It turns out we need to equip the sun as a source of energy for our mobility. But how do we turn this energy –that manifests itself in the form of light, warmth, wind, tides, biomass, etc. – into propulsion? Light, warmth and wind are hard to move or dose, so they need to be converted into a more flexible form of energy. This flexible form is electricity. Electricity is relatively easy to transport and direct, and also easy and efficient to convert into mechanical energy. At first sight, an electromotor seems to be the ideal solution to convert energy from the sun into propulsion.

Unfortunately, it is not that simple. Inherent to mobility is movement, and an electromotor requires a constant feed of electricity to keep working. Therefore, the source of electricity needs to be present and connected during the full duration of the transportation. Extremely long extension cords excluded, this means that you need to either make the conversion of solar energy to electricity happen directly in the vehicle, or you need to be able to take the electricity with you in a portable form and then subtract it from this storage gradually in the dosage required.

Storing electricity is one of the biggest challenges we are facing at the moment. The most popular way to store electricity is in a battery. Batteries are currently undergoing massive development and innovation, and this is especially true for lithium batteries. Lithium is one of the most abundant resources on earth, and the lightest metal, making it very suitable for mobile use. Lithium batteries also have a very high energy density and a very low self-discharge rate (loss of charge during storage).

Fuel cells are another hot issue. In a fuel cell, electricity is generated by making molecular hydrogen (H₂) react with oxygen. The large disadvantage of fuel cells is that the required dihydrogen is not at our disposal in nature, and therefore has to be produced. This production requires a lot of energy in the form of electricity, making hydrogen propulsion nothing more than an extra step in converting energy, with extra energy losses.

Will this save us?

The big disadvantage of all current methods of energy storage is that they all still require the use of non-renewable resources. Even with direct conversion in the vehicle, resources are used up in the creation of, for example, photo-voltaic panels. As long as we are dependent on resources that cannot be renewed exclusively with energy from the sun, we will not be able to create truly sustainable solutions.

However, we are at the tipping point today. The point that we need to switch energy sources for our mobility. Such a transition requires enormous amounts of time, money and resources, and we cannot wait until our current energy sources are depleted. To prevent that we are, literally, coming to a halt, we need to start today with the transition to the most sustainable solutions that are available today. We simply have no time left to wait for batteries with a bigger capacity, to wait for cheaper PV-panels, to wait for cars made of renewable seaweed, to wait for oil sheiks. We are in an awful hurry, and we need to move towards the alternatives that, with the smallest relative investment of time, money and resources, give us the largest amount of extra time to develop towards true sustainability.

WCIT2010: The Dream of Autonomous Driving

Mark Visbeek — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 10:24:08 +0000

This blog post was originally written for and published by WCIT2010. Read it here.

Imagine getting up in the morning, putting on your clothes and immediately stepping into your car. While you start driving off to work you make yourself some breakfast, check your e-mail, read up on the daily news, and make some last minute changes to the presentation you are about to give that morning. Just when you’ve finished your second cup of coffee, your car pulls to a halt, for you have arrived at the office.

While this may sound very futuristic and Jetsons-like, autonomous driving is in fact right around the corner. The latest developments in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) provide us with technology that can take over a lot of driving tasks during a typical commute. While it may be a long shot to dream of living room vehicles operating entirely automatic – picking you up at exactly the time it needs to by synchronizing with your online agenda, calculating the exact duration of travel by processing live traffic information – the technology may in fact already be here to start working towards such a goal.

Working our way through a jungle of abbreviations, we will see that some of the most advanced safety systems currently found on the market, can form the basis for development of truly autonomous driving.

Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC)

Already available in some luxury vehicles for over 10 years, ACC is a system that measures the distance to the car in front of you and automatically adapts your speed to keep a certain distance. Where these systems were first only able to adapt within a certain small range of highway speeds, Toyota introduced an ‘all-speed tracking function’ in 2006. This system would work in the full range of 0 to 100 km/h, and was designed for city- and congestion driving.

Lane Departure Warning System (LDWS)

Where ACC controls the linear forward motion of the car, development of autonomous driving also calls for computer control of the lateral motion. Starting in 2000, several cars were introduced that could warn the driver when the car threatened to leave the current lane without signaling. Newer systems, especially coming from Japanese carmakers, apply several techniques that not only warn the driver, but actually keep the car in the appropriate lane. The Honda Inspire has a Lane Keep Assist System (LKAS) which provides additional steering torque to keep the car in the right lane, and the Nissan Infiniti equips the vehicle’s stability control system to apply brake pressure to some of the wheels to adjust the vehicle’s course.

Lane Change Assistance (LCA)

Fully autonomous driving would require automatic and safe lane changes, so the car needs to detect other cars around it and their speeds. Volvo has developed the Blind Spot Information System (BLIS), which utilizes a camera to detect vehicles in the driver’s blind spot and provides an audible and visible warning. The 2010 Infiniti M by Nissan will not only warn the driver but also counter steer when detecting a potential hazard during a lane change.

Traffic Sign Recognition (TSR)

In order to drive autonomously without giving its owner a heart attack or a pile of speeding fines, the car needs to be aware of the traffic rules and regulations. The easiest way to do this within the current infrastructure is to make it read traffic signs. Mercedes and BMW have been equipping their high-end cars with TRS for over a year now. However, TRS currently only recognizes speed limits, but it’s easy to see the possibilities for more advanced sign recognition.

Automatic Parking

Already seen in a variety of cars are automatic parking systems (no abbreviations here), these systems range from assisting the driving in parking, to actually autonomously parallel park without requiring the driver to be in the car. The latter was only seen in last year’s Volkswagens, but is expected to become more common very soon.

Automatic Navigation and Traffic Message Channel (TMC)

Nowadays, everyone is familiar with in-vehicle GPS navigation systems, and the importance of a navigation system to autonomous driving is obvious. However, what happens when unexpected situations occur, like detours, closed roads, or accidents? It is important to have live and accurate information about traffic and traffic flow on the intended route. Using TMC, the traffic supervising authority can easily broadcast information to navigation systems, warn about possible detours or delays, and even provide advice on a new or quicker route.

Vehicle to Vehicle Communication (V2V)

What’s really important in autonomous driving is tying all these systems together and turning them into active control systems rather than the passive safety systems they currently are made to be. A great help in making this an active system would be continuous and real-time communication between every ‘intelligent’ vehicle. By applying this V2V, vehicles can make each other aware of their position, their speed and their active safety systems, to make action selection easier and accurate. General Motors has been testing a fleet of cars equipping V2V since 2005, and while developments are slow, the possibilities are promising.

Platooning and swarming

Building upon V2V, there are many possibilities for improving the flow of traffic. On a small-scale, V2V would allow platooning. A platoon is a train-like formation of multiple intelligent and communicating cars, driving extremely close to each other. The continuous communication between the cars in the platoon ensures that they will brake simultaneously when needed, and does not have to take into account human reaction time. Driving in a platoon has aerodynamic advantages, thereby cutting fuel consumption and allowing for much higher speeds at the same efficiency.

On a larger scale, V2V could allow swarming. A swarm differs from a platoon in the sense that it can contain a larger amount of cars, a much larger distance apart. In fact, a swarm could contain multiple platoons. The swarm is a network of all the intelligent cars on a road, that is used to exchange information about traffic flow. If you take into account the fact that traffic congestions are a wave-phenomenon generally caused by an occurrence multiple kilometers ahead, the importance of knowing what is happening several kilometers down the road becomes evident. A swarm controls itself and its flow by keeping its ‘members’ up to date with the bigger picture.

What does the future look like, then?

Fully autonomous driving vehicles are not likely to hit the market soon, but the technological developments look promising for movement in that direction. In the meantime, it also provides designers and engineers with new inspiration, dreams, and fields to explore. Will we ever commute to work in a mobile living room like the ATNMBL? It’s not at all impossible.