Nanotech Battery Claims to Solve Electric Car Woes 320
rbgrn writes "A123 Systems claims to have invented a Lithium Ion battery that not only can discharge at very high rates of current but can be recharged very quickly without damage to the cells or overheating. From their website: 'A unique feature of A123Systems' M1 cells is their ability to charge to high capacity in 5 minutes or less. That's a significant improvement over traditional Li Ion, which typically requires more than 90 minutes to reach a similar level of charge.' Using this technology, General Motors has announced a plug-in hybrid SUV and Venture Vehicles is developing a fully electric 3 wheel vehicle. Politics aside, the main technological hurdle to mass adoption of electric cars has been a fuel station replacement when driving distances beyond a single charge worth of range. Will we finally be seeing high current recharge stations in the next decade?"
conservation of energy (Score:2, Insightful)
The power itself is made from something, usually not nuclear because "oh noes it's unsafe!" [note the sarcasm] but instead things like coal. So now we're gonna have to burn more coal (whic
Re:conservation of energy (Score:4, Insightful)
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Oh, and marking it in some sort of universal language so that in the event civilization collapses and we revert to a new stone age some hapless hunter gatherer doesn't try to eat it.
Who cares? We should spend billions of dollars in order to ensure that one poor hunter gatherer far in the future doesn't go digging around in one location? The damage we're doing to the environment by burning fossil fuels far outweighs the possible hazard to anybody from a nuclear dump. There's lots of ways to make yourself dead if you go digging around in something.
Re:conservation of energy (Score:5, Interesting)
Another feature is that it is a passively safe design; meltdowns simply aren't possible. Anyways, the interviews in the external links of that wikipedia article are very interesting and informative.
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Ah, yes, but America is the Saudi Arabia of coal. The whole idea is to wean America off the Saudia Arabia of oil, which is Saudi Arabia.
Re:conservation of energy (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, of course you have to recharge you car from the grid. The amperage required is not any more than typical household service, particularly if you are willing to let it charge overnight. 220 volts is even better than 110 for charging cars, and it really doesn't take more than your house already has.
As far as the generating issue, it is much cheaper and easier to clean pollution from a large single source than it is millions of mobile sources which are poorly maintained by their owners. Coal might not be that clean, but new coal-fired plants are better than old ones, and they are probably better than the number of gas powered cars it could replace. It is also more efficient, even with transmission losses, than the gas cars. Finally, if you want to make your power plant cleaner at some point in the future it is a bit easier than retrofitting a large number of cars.
These things have been discussed to death all over the net, you obviously have not read anything about this subject at all.
http://www.electroauto.com/info/pollmyth.shtml [electroauto.com]
Re:conservation of energy (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, the power plant is not sitting in traffic on the street next to sidewalks and apartments full of people. Even if the only benefit were to relocate pollution, even if none of the other advantages existed, there'd still be a benefit.
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The point of the tech this article presents is that the battery only takes 5 minutes to recharge. You could just install a power outlet at the fuel station. Plug your car in, browse the shop during those five minutes (regular refueling isn't really faster than that anyways), and you're back on the road.
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Re:conservation of energy (Score:4, Informative)
First, you forget that a car doesn't use all of it's power constantly. A gasoline engine has a huge margin over what's needed to maintain a car's speed just to enable quick acceleration. Second, Watts are a power measure, not an energy measure. The only reason you need to worry about power when it comes to batteries is that they can only release so much power at a time.
Still, due to the wonders that is the efficiency of a electric motor(90+%) and regenerative braking, you can generally get by with 1/2 - 1/3 the horsepower rating for an electric vehicle over a gasoline one. The problem has always been one that the amount of energy you can stuff into a gas tank is orders of magnitude than a similar size or weight of batteries. Electric - Great motor, lousy storage, Hydrocarbon - Fantastic storage, lousy motor.'
Another wierdness is that gasoline engines are rated by their maximum horsepower, whereas an electric motor is rated at it's continous duty cycle. That means that you can 'undersize' the engine even more, because it's quite possible to run many motors at 300% for short periods of time. This is because the main problem with overdriving an electric motor is simply the motor's capability to disperse heat. You can safely overdrive it for short periods, as long as you don't fry the engine. Larger engines use heavier wire, reducing heat generation and increasing heat dispersion capabilities. Larger motor's are also more efficient on average though, so reducing below a certain level doesn't gain you much.
So an electric car can get by with a much smaller engine than a gasoline one(just overdrive during acceleration, controlled by the computer).
As for the wattage required, the tesla roadster takes 110 watt-hours [stanford.edu] on average for a kilometer. As the article noted, the roadster is 'performance tuned', not 'economy tuned'. Still, it's a smaller vehicle, incabable to holding the cargo average users would ask of a primary car.
That would be
I think they're counting on an activly cooled extremely high voltage battery, that's still more efficient than stuff on the market today.
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Shit man I can think of lots of reas
Re:conservation of energy (Score:5, Interesting)
> 220 volts is even better than 110 for charging cars, and it really doesn't take more than your house already has.
Yes it would add a hell of a lot of load to the grid if everyone had an electric car cooking at home every night, but that problem is probably managable, since night time is normally lighter loaded.
The big question nobody wants to look at is Interstate recharging. Take a look at a big fscking Roadrunner station with twenty plus 'pumps' recharging batteries in five minutes and run those numbers. Put the sucker out in the boonies between cities and ask yourself where they are going to get the power from? Now imagine everyone is running away from a hurricane/terrorist attack and those 'pumps' are going to have to be able to hammer away for 12 plus hours with a line at every pump. Onsite storage isn't an option for that kind of demand and the grid as it currently exists simply can't do it either.
Everyone wants to think it just because 'big oil' doesn't want electric cars that the infrastructure hasn't magically appeared. It isn't. Even if the demand existed to justify it, nobody currently knows HOW to build it. These are hard problems, but we do need to keep trying to solve them because buying oil from our enemies isn't the brightest idea even if you think 'global warming' is a communist plot.
Re:conservation of energy (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how much charge a tanker-truck sized truck could carry as cargo? This might actually be cheaper than maintaining lines if the losses were lower than line loss. (Don't know how to figure that?) (And depending on how expensive the batteries were.)
Also, the obvious way to go, if one can work out the mechanics, is to charge the vehicles by swapping batteries. It might not be the best...but also it might. This would, however, require:
a) standardization of size, shape, and connections, and
b) a meter built into the battery which would display how many watt-hours it was storing.
This probably won't happen because any economic benefit would probably be marginal, and also because getting companies to agree on a standard is...dubious.
range problem solved-been solved for years now (Score:2, Interesting)
See? Range problem solved. Call it the modular hybrid approach, instead of normal hybrids that tote TWO engines (ICE engine AND electric mot
Nope (Score:5, Informative)
Umm... what? You're just wrong here.
Long-distance (100+ miles) electric transmission is quite common throughout the US. Link [wikipedia.org]
In most states, you're rarely more than a hundred miles away from the nearest power plant, of one kind or another. Another link. [wikipedia.org]
Yes, a commercial recharging station on a major interstate would probably need it's own substation. But the paper mills in northeastern NC I drive past on the way to visit my parents every few months have their own substations. The electric load from those is much higher than any electric roadrunner would ever need. It's not a particularly hard problem, or one that hasn't been solved before. It would put more demand on the electric grid, that's true. And if everyone in the US bought an electic car eventually, we'd definetely need to build more power plants.
But it's not lack of a technical innovation,nor a conspiracy, that is preventing that from happening - it's the chicken/egg problem. Few people will buy electric cars before the infrastructure exists, few companies will set up infrastructure while there's few customers.
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While the rest of your points are pretty good, this part at least has an easy solution. Large stations within cities would more than likely run their own dedicated power lines, which would hook into a private generating plant. This would be the perfect way for moder
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Re:conservation of energy (Score:5, Informative)
Batteries also have come a long way and are fairly efficient for storage. It's much better than, say, hydrogen powered cars.
The main drawback right now for electric cars is the cost, and even so they remain popular. I know a couple of people at Tesla Motors and they have already sold out their allotment of cars for the first two years, and these are going for $100K each. It sounds like they will be coming out with a 5 passenger vehicle at around $50K around 2009. With the rapid rate of battery evolution I expect they will become more and more affordable.
One final note, the cost per mile for an electric vehicle is much less than gasoline, even without the large deductions EV owners can typically make. Last I looked, it worked out to something around $1.50/mile even with the very high cost of electricity where I live (where I often pay over $0.20/kwh).
The solution I see for our energy needs is to not only continue to invest in solar and wind, but to also build nuclear breeder reactors and nuclear power generation. The breeder reactors will significantly increase the amount of nuclear fuel available and eliminate much of the nuclear waste which they want to bury in Nevada. And modern nuclear power plants are far safer than the ones of the past. Solar and wind alone will not solve our energy needs though they will help. Hydroelectric is mostly tapped out, though there's still a lot of room for geothermal.
Remaining nuclear fuel (Score:2)
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Re:$1.50 a mile? WTF (Score:5, Informative)
I live in quite cold climate(last week's high was -15F), and getting gas powered cars to start and warm up is a challenge. The number ONE problem we have is batteries going dead overnight in the cold. You can trickle charge them or put a warmer on them to prevent it, but if the entire car runs on battery I would imagine the battery life to be very poor.
Then, tack on the heater issue... Sounds pretty infeasible around these parts. Although, a possible solution would be to do what is currently done with gas cars, and pipe whatever excess heat is made by the motor into the cab. I'm not sure how much that would produce, but it would increase the efficiency a bit.
I've seen a few cold weather tests for hybrid and turbo desiel around here. The hybrids seem to crap out about -10F to -15F and a few of the TD seem to drop out about -35F. The gas, assuming it starts, don't have issues running in cold.
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TIP: if your in a traffic jam and your engine overheats, turn on your heater.
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The only piece missing from either all-electric or "real hybrid" is a good* battery. Every Other Problem is a question of just putting existing technology into practice.
(By "good", I mean a battery that will let the vehicle run for at least 20 miles between charges, without adding unreasonably to the battery weight.)
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You know, this point always gets brought up as an argument against electric cars.
But it fails to consider that centralized energy sources can still be more effectively controlled with regards to pollutants than independent mobile sources, and, more importantly, it is far easier to incrementally upgrade such centralized facilities over time to progressively use possible newer and cleaner methods of energy production when it would be impractical to distribute said measures effectively in a majority of vehi
Why not have a pooled battery swap system? (Score:3, Interesting)
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What advantage would such a system have over a system where you plug your car into an electrical outlet for five minutes?
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At less than $5 for a 'full' charge capable of going 300 miles, the restraunt could just fold it into the bill, or even offer it free with meal purchase.
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Sure, I could buy a really long extension cable and run it down the street. Wonder how much I'll get sued for when someone trips over it ? Probably won't last that long though - the passing drunks who usually swing on wing mirrors will find it far too tempting...
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First why would you cherry pick the efficiency of the most efficient plant, surely the least efficient would be the next one to get turned off? That is, you need to consider the marginal (or perhaps average) efficiency of the powerplant.
A diesel is around 40% efficient, of which maybe 75% gets to the ground.
The real reason that electric cars use less energy is that they are designed around a limited energy storage system. This biases the design towards high efficinecy. An
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For petrol, you are right - down around 30% - but for diesels (which most modern cars are in high fuel cost places like Europe) you are wrong.
Modern fuel diesel ICEs are 40-50% brake thermal efficiency.
Quote from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_autom obi [wikipedia.org]
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I'd think that it would be interesting to also consider the energy spent in moving the fuels from their sources to the consumers when computing efficiency. In many cases, oil and gasoline are transported long distances to reach the consumers, and that could certainly be computed into the efficiency metric.
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Nowdays most cars have gas gauges. I think VW was the last to get one, and that was in 1962. I think that in all the years since them, I've run out of gas once. Because I was a moron and pushed my luck. If I'd had to pay $100 for a service call, it would have served me right.
You really think we need to have our transport system designed so that people who are being idiots won't be put to any additional expense?
Just the beginning (Score:2)
In fact, I will probably invest in solar/other technology to supplement my use of electricity for the vehicle(s) as well. There are a couple of tax cuts for this, and I would like to not
EEStor (Score:3)
Personally, I would skip the solar for a residence. They really do not make sense. For starters, you are generally at work with your car during the time that Solar is working. That means that you will send the majority of
Another three wheeler (Score:2)
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Run you car from your roof. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Probably not (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, overnight charging of the batteries (when power stations have spare capacity) is an extremely good idea, and indeed the dual hybrid concept good at good write up last year.
So my suggestion is: Yes, this is a really good idea, yes it is progress in terms of better flexibility of power supplies, yes it goes some way to resolve the problem that you cannot easily store electrical power by allowing it to be stored in a big distributed network of vehicles - but ten years is for too soon for it to take over as a technology.
The progressively replacement of gasoline engines by Diesel in Europe has been going on for over 20 years now, and that's probably a realistic timeframe. 20 years to get market penetration of battery vehicles, and then, only if renewable fuels turn out to be a failure, the progressive development of very high power charging stations.
Charge a flywheel over night (Score:2)
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Make you car run on the Sun. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html [blogspot.com]
I doubt it will work for that. (Score:2)
The root problem is this: it makes far more sense to store surplus energy in batteries than in some intermediate, but that implies relatively slow battery charging since otherwise you have fluctuating high loads. Your solution would mean that, at any moment, the flywheels are being char
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And to me, for the near future, pure electric cars aren't going to be practical. Give me a high-efficiency plug-in flex-fuel/diesel hybrid. Overnight charging covers most driving, and the hybrid is good for longer trip
Good Idea (Score:2)
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Less like a gas station than like a substation (Score:3, Interesting)
Every electric drive system I've seen from the Prius to electric dragsters winds up at a design optimum of 200-400 volts. We're therefore talking 2500 to 5000 amps, which is out of wire territory and into busbar territory, before allowing for inefficiencies.
Which may be the real problem. Pump a megawatt through something, and every percentage point o
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From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline#Energy_cont e nt [wikipedia.org] we see that a litre of petrol yeilds 30 MJ energy. Filling a tank of a small car with 40 litres of fuel takes perhaps 2 minutes to put 1.2 GJ into the the tank, which works out as a power input of 10 megawatts. A bit surprising for something so familiar, but there it is. If you are charging your car at home, you are unlikely to match that.
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Most of that energy is wasted by the internal combustion engine. Most are between 20 to 30% efficient. Even more is lost in the transmission. Every time you brake in a conventional vehicle, you are throwing kinetic energy away by converting it to useless heat in the brakes.
So an electric vehicle does not need to go full hog. You probably need something like 10-20% the energy in that gasoline at best.
regenerative braking (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for this particular development. But the sort of power you are looking at to charge batteries at that rate is enormous. Figure it out. If you have a battery that can, say, deliver 50KW for one hour, then to charge it in five minutes will require to deliver about 20% more than you get out (conversion efficiency) or a charge rate of 720KW. That's nearly 1000 horsepower in Library of Congress units. You aren't going to be passing that through a handy, easy to use electrical circuit
Hybrids will be the bridging tech (Score:5, Interesting)
The solution is to build hybrids with fast charging batteries. Then car buyers can invest without fear of getting stranded. Once a large fleet is on the roads, service stations will start to convert.
BTW, this all asumes that TFA and similar techs are not vaporware.
add charging stations without removing pumps (Score:2)
Gas stations are already so afraid of fires and the ensuing liability that they put up cell phone warnings - even though those are almost certainly urban legend. I doubt that they - or their insurance agents - will let a charging station anywhere near their gas pumps. So they are stuck with an either/or decision.
High current recharge stations? (Score:2, Insightful)
"...Will we finally be seeing high current recharge stations in the next decade?..."
Personally, I doubt that will ever happen in USA and here's why:
Huge influential oil companies like EXXON-MOBIL made profits of close to US$90 million per day in profits last year. Racking in almost US$33 Billion for the year. Now, who in their right mind can allow such a revenue stream to get suffocated by so called new technology?
I am of the opinion that we'll begin seeing this in "more pragmatic" Europe than here in these United States.
Re:High current recharge stations? (Score:5, Informative)
hell, quite a few oil companies don't even own refineries anymore. A lot of the gas people buy today comes from independant refineries.
I don't think we will outgrow carpet, plastic bags, and the millions of other items that currently use oil.
Plus, they have all that land now, think about it, ready made recharging stations
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Who says it'd be the oil companies pioneering this? There are many other companies who'd love to get into it, such as power companies.
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Congratulations, you've just won both the "Really stupid comment" and "Fear-mongerer Extraordinare" awards with a post that clocks in at under 500 characters. You are a truly talented individual.
You'd have to be totally ignorant of how capitalism works in order to make such a silly comment. It's almost as bad as all the dumbasses who claim that drug companies have developed the cure for cancer, but won't sell it because of the amount of money they're making by selling the current crop of cancer-figh
Cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
While this is interesting, I have to wonder about the cost of these batteries. I've seen many of these stories before, about some wonderful electric vehicle that's going to replace the gas-burner real soon. Except that the batteries needed cost more than any vehicle currently on the road. But it'll be practical "as soon as we get the costs down!"
I'll get excited when someone announces a reasonably priced, high-density, quick recharge battery. Until then, I'm going to regard it as yet another prototype - an interesting idea, but one of many.
And replacement cycle! (Score:2)
That means humongously expensive and wasteful replacement cycles; Lithium-ions are not so environmentally friendly for dumping in landfills, and not so economically useful for recycling. This is bad enough with cellphones and laptops, how bad will it be when t
The real deal (Score:5, Informative)
They do perform extremely well, with about 2/3 the energy density of Li-Po, but with the dis/charge abilities of a good Ni-Cd. They are also supposed to have a very good service life, over 1000 complete charge cycles. At about 1/2 the price of Li-Po's I'm looking at picking some up for an upcoming EV project.
http://www.a123systems.com/html/home.html [a123systems.com]
http://www.a123racing.com/ [a123racing.com]
My EV project:
http://www.easyracers.com/pod/ [easyracers.com]
Gabe
The BESTsource for emerging battery tech... (Score:5, Informative)
Check 'em out,
http://www.rcgroups.com/batteries-and-chargers-12
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Not even three years of overnight charging? For a car that's not very inspiring...
You Don't Need to Replace Gas Pumps (Score:3, Interesting)
Plug in, order amount of electricity, go do your shopping/etc. and come back to a car ready to go. Employers could also do this at their offices, at first offering it as an employee perk and down the road as an additional revenue stream.
This could create competitive advantage in the near team and additional revenue long term for many companies.
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Sure, you can charge some EVs from a "normal" power socket - OVERNIGHT. When was the last time you went to shopping/movie/restaurant overnight ?
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You can insert sarcastic comments here about how it always takes me a full tank of fuel to get to the cinema or go to work or drive to the shops.
In reality the cinema is often less than 20kms away (,mine is only 2kms), which is takes less than a movie to re-charge. This means the grandparents suggestion is totally suitable.
don't cross the streams (Score:2, Offtopic)
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don't cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Dr Ray Stantz: Total protonic reversal.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That's bad. Okay. Al
Interchangeable batteries (Score:4, Insightful)
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Pedestrian safety? (Score:3, Interesting)
How are electric cars going to impact pedestrian safety? They run very quietly; you can get hit by an electric car without knowing it's right behind you, whereas with classic cars you can at least hear the combustion engines from some distance away and take notice. What about kids? Blind people? Even animals might have problems - they stay away from noisy roads, but if the roads aren't noisy anymore...
On a sidenote, it would be pretty cool not to have noise pollution. I imagine a city with electric cars and without smog would be a very nice place to live in for humans and small animals, such as birds and squirrels. Perhaps we'd see more rare bird species in such a city. The quality of life would definitely improve.
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Not in this country... (Score:2)
Seems to me that the biggest hurdle to the adoption of electric cars in this country is the compelling need to haul around 6000-lbs of vehicle with you at all times.
Who Killed The Electric Car? (Score:4, Interesting)
Go watch it.
Lithium is supposed to be mellow (Score:2)
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Solar: distributed energy: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user s -selling-solar.html [blogspot.com]
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I don't think exchanging a half-ton battery pack is going to be all that simple.
It has to be an all-weather solution. It has to meet peak demands. The charging station needs to be a "drop in" replacement for the gas station. The exchange has to be as fast and reliable as the self-service pump.
How much land does
Re:Or The Station Can Refuel Overnight As Well (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes they'll be additional efficiency losses, but initially these stations will only have to service a few people that normally get their charge
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Second, we already have the gas delivery infrastructure - all those filling stations, refineries, and tanker trucks. You may be correct that aluminum electron pipes may be cheaper than big-rig tankers, but we don't have the aluminum pipes or the power plants to supply them yet.
The U.S. used 390 million gallons of gas per day in 2006. This means t
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Its all very doable -- your analysis of the slow turn-over in the vehicl
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