The future of green or hybrid cars

Hybrid cars are all the rage these days so in keeping with the green theme, I wanted to explore the next generation of technology

Ultracapacitors or supercapacitors are possible near term replacements for batteries in electric and hybrid systems. Capacitors are capable of very fast discharge of energy but have only been able to store small amounts of energy. With the new ultracapacitors, they combine the fast discharge of conventional capacitors with the ability to store significant amounts of energy. People have already grabbed the obvious domain names and these new hybrids as well as other applications are already starting to appear.

Fuel cell especially hydrogen fuel cell technology has been talked about for quite a while but the widespread distribution and storage of large amounts of hydrogen still remains problematic. Honda is developing their FCX V3 hydrogen fuel-cell concept car which combines hydrogen fuel cell and ultracapacitor technology. In fact today Honda unveiled the FCX Clarity, a production hydrogen fuel cell vehicle based on the FCX Concept and it will be leased to select customers starting in summer 2008. Because of the widespread press coverage, domain names in the fuel cell technology area are hard to come by.

Alternative fuels have also grabbed the headlines with ethanol leading the way. Ethanol is unlikely to be a long term solution for many reasons and so may not be a good investment for predictive domaining. It is disputed whether ethanol is an energy positive or energy negative fuel meaning if more energy is put into making it than it produces or not. Issues of production (energy farming) including the pollution and land use issues of production will likely make it obsolete.

Looking further into the future, artificial photosynthesis has possibilities. The chemical reaction can be tweaked to produce hydrogen instead of oxygen and that hydrogen could be used as fuel. ArtificialPhotosynthesis.com and PhotoHydrogen.com are already taken so someone is thinking along these lines.

I won’t dwell on all-electric cars especially those powered by Li ion batteries as these have had major press. Biodiesel also seems to have been covered pretty well.If you really want them, there are some tld gaps in BioDieselTechnology.tld.

Other technology that is likely to become more interesting is energy recovery systems. Already these are being used to recover energy usually lost as friction heat when braking. Kinetic energy recovery systems (KERS) is a major area of research and development and are especially important to feed energy back to electric systems to increase time between chargings or even eliminate charging altogether. I tried EnergyRecovery but the .com is taken. However the .info was available and so I picked it up for website development. I think this technology will be more and more essential to future green cars and probably many other production systems.

Perhaps one of the more comprehensive websites for energy efficient cars, the Green Car Congress publication is a goldmine for terms and names of various green technologies associated with cars. Technology institutes and colleges websites give you ideas for more speculative technologies.

Good hunting and keep it Green.

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