-
Current Rating:
(3 votes)
- Bookmarks:
A Future Shade of Green – How inventive 'car guys' are keeping the future clean
To get some idea of how fast the ‘green car’ landscape is changing, its helpful to visualize science channel time-lapse movies of a tree growing; first a tiny green shoot pushing its way up through the ground, then a twig, then a sapling, then leaves, branches flowers and fruit as it grows into something sturdy, something capable of surviving into the future… decades compressed into seconds through the miracle of technology.
That seed was planted in 1975 when Honda debuted the CVCC engine, the first high-tech automotive powerplant ever designed for reduced emissions. The next major steps were the introduction of the catalytic converter, fuel injection replacing carburetors and on-board computers controlling the optimum fuel/air mix. And they’re still fiddling with the gasoline engine to produce less emissions and more miles per gallon, but now there are new technology trees sprouting up, like gasoline/electric hybrids, which started with the Honda Insight in 2000; now there are ten on the market - including a Cadillac Escalade hybrid – and a dozen more (including a Porsche Cayenne Hybrid) are scheduled to be introduced in 2009.
Plug-in hybrids and electric cars are just over the horizon, and ‘clean’ diesels that produce ‘only’ the same emissions as a conventional car, but are 20 to 40% more fuel efficient are now coming into vogue (three from Mercedes, naturally, and even one from Jeep?!) And General Motors, a wounded giant perhaps, but still a technical force to be reckoned with, has announced a major new ‘biofuels’ initiative that uses tailored microbes and a bio-reactor to turn garbage into low-polluting ethanol fuel that costs $1 per gallon.
All interesting, you say, but where does that leave the well-to-do-but-still-environmentally-concerned reader of CarDevotion.com? Driving a little tin box with industrial-grade vodka in the gas tank? No, actually, the automotive future looks pretty bright, as the following examples clearly indicate.
Honda, the same company that started it all, has taken yet another technological leap with the world’s first production fuel cell vehicle, the FCX Clarity, a sleek, low-slung, high-tech sedan with a fuel cell under the hood that turns hydrogen into electricity and produces no emissions at all.
- 1
- 2
No Comments found
