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Science Technology

Zero to Rutabaga in 6 Seconds 158

Posted by michael from the I'd-like-a-carrot-juice,-and-my-car-will-have-cabbage dept.
DarkenWood writes: "I found an interesting article over at BBC SciTech about a sports car that runs on rotting organic waste. 0-60 in under 6 sec. Very cool."
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Zero to Rutabaga in 6 Seconds More

Zero to Rutabaga in 6 Seconds

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  • Cost INeffective (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The hemp car website, along with pretty much every hemp enthusiest, touts the benefits of biodiesel, but conviently forgets that hemp is not the best biodiesel producing plant, no matter what metric you use (production/acre, pound of crop, price per gallon produced, etc.) -- soybeans are. Last I checked, soybeans were legal in the U.S., and mysteriously we're still using dead dinosaur diesel. Ergo, laws aren't an inherent barrier.

    Promoting hemp is just a tactic to get pot legalized. I know hemp != pot, but continuing enforcement after hemp legalization would be kind of tough, and the hippies know it.

    Don't buy the hype.

  • Re:hmm... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I heard that the reason some car mfgrs are making sportscars (or powerful luxury sedans - BMW) that run on alternative fuels is as a confidence thing. I guess that makes sense: if an alternative fuel can make a sportscar go very fast or a BMW 7 series drive like normal, people might expect it to be OK for their minivans, sport utes, light trucks, and hondas. And besides, if you were on a car mfgr's alternative fuels proof-of-concept team, making only a handful of cars, wouldn't you want to make it a cool car?

  • Re:practical applications? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Also the article says nothing about the emissions from burning this gas. Are they any better than the emissions that come from fossil fuels?

    Well, one important difference between bio fuels and fossil fuels has to do with the carbon cycle [usgs.gov]. When you burn fossil fuels, you are essentialy taking carbon that has been burried for millions of years and releasing it into the atmosphere in the form of CO2. Now, about the only way to get that carbon back out of the air is for some photosynthetic organism to use it to make more complicated carbon-containing compounds such as sugars, starches, proteins, cellulose, etc.

    When you burn a bio fuel, on the other hand, you are releasing carbon into the atmosphere in the form of CO2, but it is carbon which was just recently removed from the atmosphere by the photosynthetic plant you used to make your fuel. For example, when you burn enough ethanol derived from corn to release 1kg of carbon into the atmosphere in the form of CO2, you can be sure that at least that much CO2 was removed by your corn plants when they were growing.

    This is why, even though the 6000000000 people on the planet exhale a lot of CO2 everyday, one is not contributing to global warming simply by breathing: all the carbon you are exhaling was just recently removed from the atmosphere by whatever plants you ate, or by the plants the animalls you just ate ate (sic).

    Of course, there is more to worry about than just CO2, but it is a huge concern.

  • Biogas in a real world example (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The city of Linköping Sweden (pop. about 132 000) and has been running a large part of their urban buses (57 in 1998) on biogas.

    The biogas is produced from waste and wastewater from the local slaugherhouses and manure. The factory processes 24000 ton of slaugher refuse, 50000 tons of slaughterhouse process-water and 25000 ton of manure per year (the manure is apparently used to "slow down the digestion process"). The process-water from the slaughterhouse was previously directed to the sewage plant. The resulting methane gas is cleaned from carbon dioxide, vapor and small levels of hydrogen sulphide before it's used.

    These 'carcass-gas' buses have worked pretty well and even if there's been some minor problems with overheating probably because these are converted diesel buses.

    The NO emissions are 25% to 50% lower than diesel buses (depending on what grade of diesel is used) and the CO2 emissions are somewhere between 5-15% compared with diesel.

  • Re:Hydroden fuel cells (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I used to work in a biology lab where we were working on genetically engineering some bacteria or fungus (I dont know most of the details... I was just an assistant- washing test tubes, making the swill to grow that crap in) Anyway, the microorganism would eat all the agricultural wastes that would normally be thrown away (corn stalks and husks, that sort of thing) and turn it into methanol. I guess the scientists working on it were making some good progress; they won some awards for it. I havent worked there for years though so I dont know what's been going on with it lately. But, it would get methanol out of stuff that would normally be burned or tossed out, while leaving the corn itself availible for other uses, instead of being 'wasted' on methanol production.

  • no (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03, 2001 @07:04PM (#246839)
    it just sits there till its all done with its vegetables, mister!
  • The fundamental problem with biomass is the sheer amount of land needed to grow the vegetable matter to produce it. Plants are at best perhaps 5% efficient at turning the sunlight that hits them into energy. And then you have to turn the plant energy into fuel, which is likewise lossy. Now, if the biomass is pre-existing and would be landfilled or burned (sawmill sawdust and so on), these aren't big problems, the only issue is the cost per unit of energy. But growing crops specifically for energy may not be as efficient as other forms of energy manufacture, such as wind, solar, tidal, salinity gradient, etc.

    What is really needed is a realistic appraisal of the costs and benefits of various forms of energy, and taxation/subsidies so the price reflects the true cost of each form. But this is a massively political thing, and if we didn't get it with eight years of Clinton, there's no hope with Bush in the Oval Office.
  • Yeah...you're correct- it's the 2000's...your lucky that the .com is still in business by the time you get to the bottom of the hill :)

  • Re:Another good, alternative-fuel car. However... (Score:3)

    by Sabalon ( 1684 ) on Friday May 04, 2001 @04:50AM (#246842)
    Buy a house on top of the hill, find a job on the bottom. If it's an .com job you'll never get to go back home anyway. :)
  • Thank you! I totally agree that Americans (and Canadians) are way too in love with their cars, and this results in a lot of stuff being fucked up.

    Think about this: Lots of companies are spending time developing stuff that lets you browse the web, check your email, or do whatever you want, while you're driving. This is ridiculous. To drive safely, you need to pay attention to the road. Lots of people try to do other stuff during their commute, because it's so long that it would be a huge waste of time otherwise. If they weren't so stubborn about using cars, they could just take public transportation, and do all that stuff they want to get done, and leave the driving to someone who will do a good job. Obviously, a bus crowded to standing-room-only capacity is not great for getting work done with your laptop, but if people designed public transportation so that useful work could be done while travelling, things would be a whole lot better.

    I'm a big fan of bicycles myself, BTW. You can't exactly do a lot of work while on a bike, but it's fun and it keeps me in shape :)
    #define X(x,y) x##y

  • Ouch (Score:1)

    by db ( 3944 )
    Jesus, it takes 220lbs of vegetables to power the car for 62 miles? Thats a little inefficient for practical use. 220lbs of roitting cabbage, where is someone going to run up on that much? Thats like an extra passenger and a half. Not a very viable sports car, if you ask me.

    But, the future may improve things...

    --
    Dave Brooks (db@amorphous.org)
    http://www.amorphous.org
  • But the only thing I wish I knew about it if it is as dirty as gasoline, how much does it cost to convert the fuel and the miles per hour. If these are answered then we can see if it would really be a good solution.
  • You can read more about the Advantige R at Rinspeed's web site. [rinspeed.com]

    Apparently they are using Kompogas [kompogas.ch] for their bio fuel.

  • This car uses a shitload of gas.

    Or gas from a shitload....

  • In fact, in some cities (San Francisco), you can get across town far faster by bike than any other way!

    There is, however, this little issue of all those steep hills in San Francisco. I'm not sure if those messenger bicyclists are willing to go up and down Nob and Russian Hills.

  • Whoopee--yawn. (Score:5)

    by RayChuang ( 10181 ) on Thursday May 03, 2001 @09:15PM (#246849)
    Based on that BBC online article, that's still not a good idea.

    A much better solution is diesel fuel derived from plant sources (biodiesel). Already, BMW is selling the BMW 330d turbodiesel coupe/sedan, which has a top speed of 143 mph and does 0-60 in six seconds--with vastly superior driver comfort. And the 330d could probably be made to run on biodiesel with only some minor engine modifications with no loss in performance.

  • Rotting organic waste? (Score:4)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Thursday May 03, 2001 @07:52PM (#246850) Homepage Journal

    Sure this thing runs off rotting organic waste but a tank full of a certain ex-girlfriend's hash brown casserole would kill it like sugar in the tank of a gas powered car.

    Yes Susan, I only said I liked it to get you in the sack :)

    Gord

  • Swivels as you turn, and sinks down into the car at high speeds. All that, and it's fairly light.

    The 500k pound price tag is probably half due to that.
  • Well, it seems like it could be more efficient. Considering a person who would buy a car like this, is probably more concerned about the environment than going Really Fast(TM). The car is designed obviously to get the most power out of the biomass. If you had a city car, the requirements would be different. Also, one could probably improve the effiency by using a high quality biomass, it doesn't say specifically what it runs on, but some vegetation that has a high concentration of.. uhh.. Chemical X would definately help.

    ---

  • why the fuck does my car/truck still average 19-23 miles per gallon of gas?

    Because that's what you bought, thereby keeping the market for gas guzzlers nice 'n' healthy.


    ---
  • Biodiesel is made from soybeans, not rainforests.

    You can also run a modern diesel (like mine @ http://www.geocities.com/abtgolftdi ) on used cooking oil with minimal fuel cleansing.
    Refer to the "VeggieVan".

    Biodiesel is readily available and usable. I can even buy it from a local distributor.

    At least I know that when the Ford Excursions finish drinking up all the world's oil, my VW will still be able run on a number of renewable energy sources.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • "But mommy, if I eat my limabeans we can't drive to see grandma!"

    Dang, in my house that would have been enough to get my brother to eat _all_ our vegies ;-)



    (Hoping the old bat doesn't take up slashdot).


    --Gfunk
  • That's what i love about slashdot... People who don't feel the need for anonymity, engaging in meaningful, on-topic discussion.

    Oh wait, never mind.


    --Gfunk
  • wow... two identical posts within the space of 60 seconds... what do you figure the odds of that are? :)

  • The car: http://www.rinspeed.com/pages/press/pre-r_one.htm [rinspeed.com]

    The Fuel: http://www.kompogas.ch/e/index.html [kompogas.ch]

    copy and paste the link text for the goatsex-wary...

  • The fact that you can use recycled vegetable oil is pretty cool. In Kaua'i, they have a number of tour boats that use recycled veg. oil--from the local McDonald's or other fast food chain. Sometimes the exhaust smells like french fries--just depends where the fuel came from on that day.

    And from what I understand it's 98% efficient (compared to trad. diesel).

  • "The automobile, while a blessing for many, has also become a curse, especially when our cities are designed around its use. In some cities in America, for example, people sit around in traffic jams for hours because of the fact that they, along with most others in the metro area, need to travel across the freeways or highways to get to work."
    Most cities WERENT designed for cars. Hence the traffic problem.
  • When you can't get ahold of those libyans!
  • Too bad it stinks like crazy... and having dozens of those together in one small area would, well, smell a lot worse then it does now..... *shrug*
  • Please produce an essay outlining the current rate of land usage for producing soybeans. Please produce a map outlining the area whith the highest rate of increased land usage.

    And where you done, please explain how this does not impact the rainforests.

  • The StinkyMeat Project won't be around for much longer...
  • Wouldn't be too bad - a carrot isn't shaped too much different from an Indy car, really... imagine the big green downforce wing :)

    --
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • uhh.. hovertech? [hovertech.com]

  • Ok, say lettuce is roughly $0.89/lb and according to the article the car will travel roughly 62 miles on 220lbs of garbage. From what I can tell you would have to spend $195.80.

    My car gets about 22mpg (the way I drive) and it costs (even at the broom stick up your ass price of $2.00 per gallon) about 30 bucks to fill it up. And with a full tank I get about 300 miles.

    IANAM but from what I can tell it would cost you about $979 bucks worth of lettuce to go 300 miles, that is about $3.26 per mile or (using my car's fuel economy) roughly $71 a gallon! Even with our completely fucked up gas prices (thats Bill, and Gray, and OPEC, George is in there too, the finger to you all!!!) it's still a better deal to get raped at the pump.

    Although this does give a new meaning to dumpster diving

    BTW Offtopic, but oh well, my plan against the gas companies is to get my self a box of hotel card keys, a shitload of super glue, and one night were I insert superglued cards into all of the pumps at several local gas stations.

  • They say "environmentally friendly", but mention nothing about emissions. I'm skeptical that those cars won't stink really badly.
    ------
    I'm a C++ guru ... What's STL?
  • Most cities WERENT designed for cars. Hence the traffic problem.

    LA WAS designed as an automobile city. From what I hear, it's not any better off in regards to traffic.

    The automobile is become more of a problem than a solution. Sure, it's still good for long trips, especially the long trips to visit grandma in her town with a population of 1500 people, but as far as commuting, living in a bigger city, or trips between big cities, it's doing pretty poorly.

    All I can hope is that someone designs a nice mass transportation system that works really well, finds a way to fight past the incredible greed and the amazing stranglehold of the automobile/oil industries, and gets it successfully put into a city.

    Doubt it'll happen though, at least not until commutes start reaching the 4 hour mark for a sizable amount of people. (Obviously 1-2 hr commutes aren't that bad, since people do them, and I think they'd even put up with 3 hr, but I think spending 8 hrs a day driving to and from work will make some people realize how incredibly ridiculous and stupid it is)
    ---
  • One of the bigger problems for young people is that in many neighborhoods there's literally nothing to do, and nowhere to go until they get old enough to drive. The other big problem is that the sprawl tends to isolate poorer people, denying them access to good jobs outside of their neighborhoods.

    Well, they've turned any imaginative and artistic types away from urban planning with the standard ways they do it... put big subdivision here, put big apartment complex here, a couple major roads here, and put all the commercial development along this other big road. Think about it - just about every city of decent size, and the suburbs of the bigger ones, are set up like this. You can't walk from most residential areas to the commercial areas in any decent amount of time - and they often don't even bother with sidewalks because they know that nobody walks.

    It's all designed for the automobile, and it's got this feeling like any SimCity designed for maximum efficiency - sure, it works, but it has no personality, no variety - and in real life, forgets about entire groups of people.

    Sure, I don't want that three-story Woodfield Mall within walking distance of my apartment. But I would like the opportunity to walk, rollerblade, or bicycle around to places without ending up trying to hurry across roads with 6-8 lanes of traffic while walking on that tiny patch of grass right next to cars doing 60 mph.

    America itself is becoming as diverse as the stores we shop at. (ie not very diverse at all, since we've already pretty much got the same stores all over the place)
    ---
  • Which isn't news, really, whether you call it "kompagas" or anything else. However, it does give me an idea.

    There currently being a problem with an excess of liquid hog manure [fayettevillenc.com] in parts of the United States and the pollution it causes, why not adapt the vehicle to this obvious source of organic fuel, and address this issue as well as fuel shortages? Kill two turds with one stone, so to speak.

    The article was unclear as to whether the fermentation took place on the car itself, but obviously the equipment used in gasoline stations could be adapted to store and pump (what would no doubt be) the newly valuable fluid. People would eventually get used to the smell, for the privilege of pulling up to the self-serve pump and topping off their tank with a few gallons of good old #2.

  • Re:Cost effective (Score:3)

    by radja ( 58949 ) on Friday May 04, 2001 @07:18AM (#246875) Homepage
    but smoking several acres of the stuff per joint.. well.. you'll have lung cancer before you're high.

    I'll stick to good old Cannabis Sativa Hollandica, or nederwiet. (no points for that quote)

    //rdj
  • ...shaped the car like a carrot! The design they used looks neat, but hey, it's a one-off car intended to make a point, so grab some attention! (Sure, a realistic carrot would probably not perform well, too much drag, but they could have tried for an aerodynamically-efficient carrot parody.)

    In a sense, this car is reminiscent of a title from the Dead Kennedys, "Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables" (where the provision of power to a vehicle is the fresh fruit... but I guess "for" should be "from"... ah, whatever).

  • Chicken Crap (Score:3)

    by gregm ( 61553 ) on Thursday May 03, 2001 @10:33PM (#246877)
    FYI my chemistry professor in High School was a real weird bird... not necessarily because he powered his car with chicken crap but that didn't help. He picked up chicken crap from the local chicken farm and let the crap ferment in a big washtub in the back of his car. He used a small charcoal fire under the washtub to heat up the crap and speed up the fermentation process while he was driving and he snuffed out he fire when he got to school by cutting off it's oxygen supply.

    He said sometimes when going up a big hill he'd have to pull over and let the methane collect a bit to have enough power to make it up the hill. Now this was back in the early 80s when the environment wasn't a big issue and he was mostly trying to save a buck. The car was an old little import like maybe a 75ish Opal. He had a coil of copper tubing mounted on top of the washtub which piped the gas to the carb. It looked like a still on wheels. He was also a radical Jehova's Witness who didn't believe in deoderant but that's another story. Anyone going to my high school in the 80s will recognize this story.

    That is all.

  • I'd take that over the hemp powered car [hempcar.org]. Not only would I save money, but I could turn over any hemp to friends since I don't smoke

    Is Blogger secure? [antioffline.com]

  • If they could make garbage trucks that use that kind of engine...
  • Now most school kids have a valid way to get rid of their lunch if they don't like it.

    Also, school bus drivers will not have to spend a cent on fuel ever again!
  • Runs on gasoline or "the product of rotting vegetable matter." (Does giving methane a new name make it a new fuel source?) Hmmm. Ok. So they took a Ford "Flexible Fuel" motor or one of it's kin (something that will run or gasoline or natural gas), stuck it in a light weight body so it's got enough power to weight to be quick, and wrapped exotic sheetmetal around it.

    This is news?

    This is almost as exciting as sticking a small industrial diesel in a Harley frame and running it on vegetable oil...

  • Er, i hope you're not serious. I don't see this anywhere.
  • A much better solution is diesel fuel derived from plant sources (biodiesel)

    Yes that sounds like a much better solution. There's acres and acres of rainforest we can cut down for fuel.

  • Great for Families! (Score:3)

    by nihilogos ( 87025 ) on Thursday May 03, 2001 @06:55PM (#246884)
    Because there's no way this things fuel consumption exceeds the waste produced by your average child during a long car trip
  • Looks to me like they are producing ethanol from garbage. Big deal. Much cheaper to ferment corn, sugar beets, and anything else that has a higher content of fruitrose.

    bash-2.04$
  • would SOMEONE tell this guy to REMOVE THE LARGE STICK FROM HIS ASS.
    I found this pretty funny, BTW.
  • I've been around diesel vehicles of one sort or another for quite some time and have never been bothered by the smell. In fact, I dislike the smell of gasoline exhaust more than diesel. But in either case, unless you plaster your nose right to the tailpipe, it's not that noticable.

  • Read the details.. (Score:4)

    by cperciva ( 102828 ) on Thursday May 03, 2001 @07:11PM (#246888) Homepage
    The car runs on rotting organic waste AND gasoline. I'd imagine that when you're accelerating to 60mph in 6 seconds it's running primarily off of the gasoline.
  • Hemp is not Marijuana and does NOT contain THC. Look it up.
  • The first thing I thought when I read your post was, 'My ass - I'll bet the engine is in the back'. Turns out I would have won. [rinspeed.com]

    Can't be bothered looking at the web site? I quote 'The rear-mounted bivalent 1.8-liter four-cylinder engine (16V) produces 120 hp at 5,500 rpm and delivers its maximum torque of 165 Nm at 3,000 rpm.
  • Hey, since the good 'ol USA is one of the worlds leading producers of garbage, wouldn't this make us the next OPEC? Huh, we're going to be a superpower forever! (Sarcasm intended for the slow at humour)
  • mmmm.... rutabaga
  • Why do the hippies want to legalize pot? They have and grow all they want.

    The reason pot was made illegal in the first place was because the fibre was a lot better than the new synthetics coming on the market.

    Having pot illegal is just another reason for the gestapo to read your email and search you before you fly from one state to another.

    If rotting vegetables catch on as a fuel, the oil companies will lobby to have it banned. They can make up some reason. Laetrile was banned as a cancer cure because the doktors said it didn't do anything!

    - James - [IMAGE]

  • Hmmm... In other words... (Score:4)

    by Mr_Icon ( 124425 ) on Thursday May 03, 2001 @06:34PM (#246894) Homepage

    This car uses a shitload of gas.

  • Now I can stop killing my pets with my mother's food that isn't fit to feed a fly. That stuff has a use after all.
  • For a couple months in '92 the city (Madison WI) was running 4 of their older busses on soy oil. The curbside tables at the State Street restaurants and coffeshops have never since been as busy.

    The experiment ended when the new busses were delivered, and the fleet could be held under Federal pollution limits with cheaper diesel.
  • Actually Sunflower tops Soy as an oil crop. Soy has the advantage of also yielding a higher protien seedcake (animal feed.) Soy oil is cheaper because it's a byproduct. Hemp is in the same league, which oilseed crop to plant will vary with local conditions if fuel is the end product.

    Petroleum is cheaper than veg oils as long as we don't consider replacement costs.

    Hemp and other biomass crops actually look better in electric generation than in automotive applications, as there's no need for inefficient conversionto a liquid fuel.

  • hey we are runing out of fuel! - ok just hit those two pedestrians!
  • Thanks to my straight diet of sloppy joes and chili dogs the world's energy problems will finally be saved!!!!!
  • or solved
  • Its purely just a concept car made to show that its possible. Same with the hemp car and used french fry grease car.

  • You smell vaguely trollish, but I'll bite anyway. You don't put any plants in the car -- if you read the article you will find that you take this stuff called "kompagas" which is made from the rotting veggies, and put THAT in the car. This is not Mr. Fusion.

    This is an interesting technology but it seems unlikely this could be the solution to all our fuel problems. It takes 100kg of organic waste to generate enough gas to go 62 miles. Personally I don't think I generate anywhere near that much waste over the 2 days it takes me to drive 60 miles to and from work. So this could be a good way to power some cars, but it couldn't replace all the gas in all the cars. Also the article says nothing about the emissions from burning this gas. Are they any better than the emissions that come from fossil fuels? Maybe kompagas is suitable for usage in fuel cells though. Then I could power my laptop with it -- say sometime around 2005 if we're lucky!

  • Since I've seen this post several times on several threads over the last few weeks, I strongly doubt he is serious.

    Although, in a sick but desperate attempt to bring this post back on topic, I guess if he was he could power the car...

    sorry. If I hadn't checked for a lack of confirmation on news sites I wouldn't have said that.
  • And right now, useless for normal driving. However, considering this is the only the first, I would say there is a lot of leeway to learn how to develop such a vehicle. I do wonder what the exhaust gasses are tho. What byproducs? What wastes? I also dont think it will be great in Western countires. However, in third world countries (sorry if this appears to be flamebait, but it's an observation of present situations in such countires) there is a great deal of waste that isn't disposed of well. I see there could be potential in say India. Not only using up wastes, but even helping to clean up the enviroment. A neat transportand also garbage disposal. Could be a real winner if done right.

  • The point is well made. I'm native to the LA area, and back before the new train systems came in you were royally screwed without a car. I don't know how well the new trains work since I no longer live in the area. One of the big reasons I moved out was the fact that to get anywhere, you had drive at least an hour. There was very little in way of community as well. And, this in an area that came of age with the automobile. If you go into the older parts of LA, like Silverlace, Hollywood, and Century City, the place has a fairly back east feel to it, and there is a sense of neighborhood. However, that's a very, very small part of the region. One of the bigger problems for young people is that in many neighborhoods there's literally nothing to do, and nowhere to go until they get old enough to drive. The other big problem is that the sprawl tends to isolate poorer people, denying them access to good jobs outside of their neighborhoods. And, from a racial point of view the automobile based city can be very segregated. So, yeah, I'm the camp that agitates for a fundamental redesign of the US City around dense development and public transit. Mainly, I just feel that time spent driving is a little bit of my life wasted, and when the commute gets up in the hour + range, it's a lot of my life wasted.

  • When they reported on the vegetable oil car they were reporting on 100 year old tech.

    This is only 60 year old tech.

    Running cars on gas produced by rotting organic waste was fairly common in Europe during WWII.

    If you find a copy of the Bosch book of the Motor Car in it you will find an illustration of a common rig, a complete gas producing 'still' in a trailer towed behind the car burning the methane gas.

    KFG

  • heavy tag (Score:3)

    by STREMF ( 156983 ) on Thursday May 03, 2001 @07:21PM (#246910)
    There is only one in the world and it comes with a half-a-million-pound price tag.

    i hate it when they bundle cars with 250-ton price tags. its really annoying. why can't they just make the material lighter?
  • Since when did Slashdot become Popular Mechanics?

  • Web Page Link with specs, photos, etc (Score:4)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Thursday May 03, 2001 @09:02PM (#246913) Journal
    Apparently the car is done in cooperation with Rinspeed - [English page here [rinspeed.com]] They have a frames menu, but the Advantige R is there under the concept cars, with far more detail (with specs!) than in the original story.

    The Concept car page is here [rinspeed.com] (broken out of the frame).

    Photos too. very much worth checking out.

    Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip

  • Just another reason... (Score:3)

    by doorbot.com ( 184378 ) on Thursday May 03, 2001 @06:41PM (#246915) Journal
    ...not to finish your vegetables!

    "But mommy, if I eat my limabeans we can't drive to see grandma!"
  • They did say it takes 220 pounds of fuel to go 62 miles, right? Think about 62 miles as one moderately long commute, round trip. A bit inefficient, eh? Though I suppose they could make garbage trucks which were powered this technology...

  • you're going to see some serious shit.

  • how do you get rid of the.. umm waste? (Score:3)

    by vectus ( 193351 ) on Thursday May 03, 2001 @06:32PM (#246918)

    Does the car have to take a shit every few miles?

    Would you have to pull over to a rest stop, because your car couldn't hold it?

  • The Sydney Morning Herald posted a very good story about Biodiesel [smh.com.au] last week.

    ...In a shed behind his Dural property he pours the waste oil into a drum before mixing it with 15 per cent alcohol and a dash of caustic soda. The concoction is left to stand overnight. The next day he has 20 litres of biodiesel ready to pour into the tank of his diesel van...

    ...He conceded his van smelt "like a Chinese kitchen" and that making fuel by the road sometimes attracted suspicion. "In Sydney the police think you are making a bomb."...
  • Big deal. I saw a discovery channel show about turbine powered cars developed in the 1950's. Basically, the concept was to put a jet engine down the length of the car (!)

    Not only did they build them, they started handing out the prototypes to random families. People liked driving them. The acceleration was poor, but they were working on that. The exhaust wasn't even hot. And of course, with almost no moving parts, they had no good reason to break down.

    The kicker is that they would run on *any* flammable liquid. They had video of the president of south africa incredulously pouring cognac into the gas tank.

    I saw this on tv three years ago, and my jaw was on the floor for the duration of the program.

    Why didn't they go into mass production? Good question. From what I remember, the car companies simply lost interest in the project.

  • Another good, alternative-fuel car. However... (Score:4)

    by eb7654 ( 202493 ) on Thursday May 03, 2001 @07:26PM (#246923)
    Excellent. Another type of automobile that is powered by an alternative, renewable energy source. This should have some good effects upon the environment, and the economy - alternative energy means more energy overall.

    However, is it really what is best for society?

    The automobile, while a blessing for many, has also become a curse, especially when our cities are designed around its use. In some cities in America, for example, people sit around in traffic jams for hours because of the fact that they, along with most others in the metro area, need to travel across the freeways or highways to get to work. If, say, a million people need to get to work in the space of an hour, and they all drive their own cars across the roadway, there are bound to be traffic problems. Millions of man-hours are lost that could've been spent doing other things rather than commuting.

    Furthermore, the millions of people commuting using automobiles takes up lots of space. Automobile-oriented cities eventually wind up sprawling across the countryside, replacing lots of important open space near the city with highways, strip malls, and tract housing. Among other effects of widespread automobile dominance are the death of a lot of social aspects of the city (people need the automobile to get anywhere, and thus it becomes expensive and troublesome, not to mention time-consuming, to travel between cities), smog (a la Los Angeles or Houston, though this may not be as much of a problem with an alternative-energy car), unnecessary expense on the individual (if everyone needs a car to get around, they need to pay for the car, gas, insurance, etc) and as a result is discriminatory (not to mention age discrimination, as people younger than driving age or too old to drive are effectively confined to the home without means to go anywhere). The list can go further, but I ramble, and the basic point is that the automobile-oriented city is inefficient. The low-density development provided thus is incongruous with a city (which is what the majority of the people still function in). Perhaps mass transit and 'walkable' cities are better.

    At any rate...the point of this whole argument is, when viewed in the grand scheme of things, is this really better? The problem of needing lots of gasoline is solved, but this is only a surface problem - lots of energy is still required to operate these things, and the automobiles still affect their surroundings negatively when there are too many. The only thing that's changed is the fact that a different type of energy runs the car. So, in the long run, would it perhaps be better that it were more expensive to operate a car? The eventual result would be that fewer people would use them (they are more difficult to afford, and thus less widely used), and the structure of the city would change accordingly to one more beneficial to human interaction and transport. We'd also have less energy needed to power our cars, and more energy could then go to preventing rolling blackouts and other fun things. ;-)

    OTOH, would IT be a good fix as well? With more telecommuters, this means fewer commuters, and thus less of a need for massive highways and traffic jams and the like, and also preserves more energy for more important things.

    Of course, this is a neat technology...I wouldn't mind powering things off of my garbage :-)

  • While hemp isn't marijuana, it does contain tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Hemp is the plant; marijuana is the dried flower of a variety of this plant (cannabis sativa L.)

    Did YOU look it up?

    Eugenicists should be shot.

  • You know the saying... (Score:3)

    by vslashg ( 209560 ) on Thursday May 03, 2001 @06:32PM (#246928)
    Grass, ash, or trash. Nobody rides for free.
  • New source of energy, america's break-room fridges, (probably a few home and dorm fridges, too.) I wonder if Spencer Abraham will speak on this in S.F. Probably suggest we conserve by burning questionable ballots.

    --

  • Reaction... (Score:3)

    by MWoody ( 222806 ) on Thursday May 03, 2001 @07:32PM (#246932)
    Having learned of the new vehicle, the American government has entered into a plan to purchase trash from an undisclosed Middle Eastern nation, at a current average rate of 2 dollars per gallon of refuse. President Bush, on an unrelated note, has declared war on several Russian landfill sites, stating that, "We, the American people, must protect our vital energy resources."
    ---

  • Re:Back to the future....... (Score:5)

    by triticale ( 227516 ) on Thursday May 03, 2001 @06:48PM (#246935) Homepage
    The DeLorean was mid-engined; this is clearly front-engined. From the proportions, it could easily be one of the common Lotus 7 derived kits with a new body or even a "Locost" easy homebuilt. There are dozens of Locost websites; it's basicly an open source car hack.

    Biogas has long been a popular fuel, but it's better suited to stationary applications. Methane is effectively 120 octane, you can replace the injectors in a big diesel with spark plugs and use a simple mixing valve for a carburator. Many sewage tratment plants are powered this way.

  • I wonder how long it will be before this type of thing is econically viable.

    A hybrid version of the Dodge Durango is only a $3000 tax credit away from costing the same as a normal-fuel Durango (see here [covacvag.org])

    Unfortunately I don't think that's the kind of thing Cheney (who is the one actually controlling things), with is interest in the oil industry, would let slip.

  • Re:We need it (Score:3)

    by Pandora's Vox ( 231969 ) on Thursday May 03, 2001 @09:25PM (#246938) Homepage Journal
    Gas-electric hybrids don't need any additional infrastructure. They use what exists, ie. gasoline, but in a far more efficient manner than traditional cars through things like regenerative braking and more efficient (but still powerful, think VTEC) engines.

  • about a sports car that runs on rotting organic waste. 0-60 in under 6 sec.

    Of course, because it's so slippy.

    Wait a minute, you meant runs on gas given off by fermenting organic household waste, as one of its fuel supplies?

    oops.

  • Well, it seems like it could be more efficient. Considering a person who would buy a car like this, is probably more concerned about the environment than going Really Fast(TM). The car is designed obviously to get the most power out of the biomass.

    I agree. I mean, right now it can go only 62 miles on a 220lb load of organic waste. Think about it. That's a pile of shit bigger than the average man (though still not a pile of shit as big as me...err...that's not quite how I meant it). I can't imagine that refueling is much fun either. Still, it's a good start.

  • Hempcar (Score:4)

    by Paul the Bold ( 264588 ) on Thursday May 03, 2001 @06:48PM (#246948)
    Obviously, you havent heard about hempcar [hempcar.org], a 1984 diesel Benz modified to run on hemp oil. They plan to take it on a trip around the US and some of Canada.

    I bet it will take a long time. They'll have to stop to get potato chips and Oreos every couple of blocks.

    "Hey, man, can we, like, stop for some munchies again?"

  • Cool! (Score:5)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Thursday May 03, 2001 @06:31PM (#246954) Journal
    Does it travel through time when it hits 88mph?

    Back to the Dancin Santa
  • The article doesn't make it clear, but if you look at the kompogas web site, you'll see that you don't have to tow the compost heap along with you. (Someone previously gave the URL; they seem to be slashdotted, but after 1/2 hour I got through.) Kompogas facilities capture and bottle the methane. You just have to put a big, heavy tank for compressed methane in the car. (And of course, there are a lot of engine tweaks required to run off methane -- a gas -- instead of liquid fuel.) It's really a byproduct of the process for turning organic waste into fertilizer, but far better they capture the methane and use it as fuel than vent it to the atmosphere.

    Incidentally, I think those WWII tow-behind gas generators were not producing methane by fermentation, but either wood alcohol (methanol) by distillation of organic refuse, or hydrogen/carbon monoxide mix by a process of partial burning of coal and reaction with steam (C + H20 + heat = CO + H2). Fermentation (bacterial action) is too slow for a mobile process.
  • I think the turbines were considerably less fuel-efficient than a well-tuned piston engine. The one place where they were used for a while was in race cars, because they did have a great power to weight ratio. As I recall, in the early 70's the Indy 500 imposed a limit on how much fuel you could burn in a race, and none of the turbine cars could qualify. (This was a combination of oil-embargo-inspired political correctness, and the feeling that with overpowered engines and upside down wings to improve traction & cornering, the race was getting too fast for safety.)

    "with almost no moving parts, they had no good reason to break down." Jet aircraft engines are high-maintenance, and they are just a turbine which leaves part of the energy in the exhaust. I don't know if auto companies could re-engineer them for low maintenance costs.
  • That is one badly written article. The Kompogas website was so badly slashdotted it took me a couple of hours to look at 3 pages -- but it's quite clear this car does not carry fermenting compost. (You couldn't get anything to ferment fast enough to handle the autobahn.) Kompogas collects the methane from big compost tanks at fixed sites and compress it at 250 bar. (I didn't find anything about how or whether they filter out the other gases produced -- most of these gases would burn too, and if your fuel doesn't leak, you won't care whether it smells like garbage.)

    The bulk of the compost winds up as fertilizer. Methane is sort of a byproduct. It's certainly better than filling up landfills and letting the methane burp into the atmosphere. However, Kompogas's web site is so perky and technical specification-free that it pretty much qualifies as fertilizer to begin with...

  • How about a veggie-powered linux box? (Score:3)

    by screwballicus ( 313964 ) on Thursday May 03, 2001 @09:50PM (#246962)
    Now if they can just make a veggie-powered computer, coders will be set for life. With all the organic waste stacked around the average programmer's comp (day old pizza, last week's coffee, doritos) he could power the thing for a year!
  • The energy crisis isn't going away, I wonder how long it will be before this type of thing is econically viable. I have the feeling things will suddenly switch the day that gas prices finally top the total prices of rutabega's and retooling... and not a second before.
    Companies have to have some sort of contingency plans, don't they?


  • I still think that hydrogen fuel cells are the way to go. This thing requires 220 pounds of stuff so that it can travel 62 miles? That just doesn't cut it.

    You can produce hydrogen from water and sun light. Hydogen fuel cells have vastly greater power per pound yeilds than this lame power system, and the exhaust is pure water vapor.

    Here's an article [autoweb.com.au] about the Mercedes-Benz NEBUS.

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