First, let me preface this blog entry with some pertinent background.  Yes, I do own an ‘06 Toyota Prius.  Now, you can call me a Toyota Fanboy or whatever you like, but if you do any due diligence whatsoever, you’ll have noticed that I have expressed serious safety concerns with the Toyota Prius and especially its Traction Control and the way that it interacts interferes with the regenerative braking, especially in bad weather.  A problem further exacerbated by the incredibly tiny traditional wheel brakes, not to mention the Goodyear Integrity (What a joke!)  stock tires with their horrible traction.  A problem which Toyota has still not fixed in their latest Prius model, in spite of its threat to safety.  And only the most serious of many grievances with the poor design of the Toyota Prius in general, especially at extremes of heat and cold.  Probability is high that my next car will not be a Prius, or even a Toyota.  Not with the way that Toyota has not been addressing these issues.

Now, that said, is it me, or do we have an awful lot of Chicken Littles out there crying about how the sky is falling?

Yes, Toyota had some bad luck with parts.  Yes, there are some faulty gas pedals out there.

Is it a safety issue?  Only if you’re a f___ing moron.

Let’s step back in time a bit shall we…

My last car was a Mercury Sable.  I knew a lot of people who had Mercury Sables.  They were good cars.  Except for when they weren’t.  Each one was plagued by a minor demon.  Each and every person who I knew who drove one all had electrical issues of some kind.  From a windshield wiper that seemed to work in reverse (when it worked at all) to a dash lights that illuminated for no reason.  And hell, each and every one eventually had the same head gasket blow.  What was the special electrical quirk in mine?  Every once in a blue moon, when coming to a stop at speeds well under 10 miles an hour, the engine would suddenly take off like a bat out of hell.  Usually my foot was already on the brake, as I was slowing.  And usually it happened as I was pulling up to a gas pump.  The brakes weren’t strong enough to hold back all those ponies, and if I were a f___ing moron, the car would have gotten away from me and quite likely careened out of control, resulting in an accident.

But did I ever run my car into someone because it was accelerating out of control without my foot on the gas?

No!

And why not?  Because there’s this thing called an “ignition switch”.  Cut the power to the engine and low and behold, the vehicle stops revving like a maniac.  Gee.  Funny how that works.  And not only that, but I also know for a fact that if by some odd reason of monumental stupidity you can’t seem to figure out how to kill the ignition, there’s also a neutral gear, which while not stopping the engine from flooring it does stop the vehicle from accelerating, allowing the brakes to get it back under control, and giving you all of the time in the world to, yes, you guessed it, kill the ignition.  But what if your ignition is a button and not a key to turn?  Simple!  RTFM.  Read The F___ing Manual.  Because even the push-button ignitions can be turned off, and yes, at the simple push of a button.  Some manufacturers prefer the OMG approach where any repeated pressing will disengage the ignition.  Others, like Toyota, take the methodical approach (to avoid accidental killings) of holding the button down for a mere three seconds to kill the ignition.  It’s just that simple.  It intentionally leaves power to your steering and braking for safety purposes.  And I can guarantee that it’s right in your owner’s manual.

Wow.

Really?

Yeah.

And I know for a fact that my ‘98 Mercury Sable was hardly the first car to ever have issues either.  Why the number of stories I know of people from the generation before me who had their engines catch fire is a fascinating study alone!

Let’s face a little something called reality, shall we?  Cars have always had mechanical and/or electrical problems.  Just like every other piece of machinery ever made.  That’s why they also have off buttons.  That’s why there are always safety features and sanity checks.

It happens.  And there’s pretty much always a way to avoid these failures from becoming life threatening.

So back to the present.  The problem here is not that Toyota has some cars out there with theoretically faulty parts.  I can guarantee you that every single car manufacturer that ever was has or has had cars out there with faulty parts.  (In fact, though rarely reported, Honda is actually involved in their own recall on the Jazz/Fit right now!)  And yet, we as a species have survived.

No, the problem here is two-fold.  The first is that Toyota is actually being honest for a change.  It’s a new concept in automobile manufacturers.  Usually recall notices would be kept on the down-low, only affected people knowing, if even that many.  Usually recalls wouldn’t even be considered until at least a dozen incidents because they cost money and businesses are not always exactly honest and forthcoming.  And it was hardly ever newsworthy because that’s just how it always is.  But this time, Toyota jumped the gun.  They saw a possible problem and they immediately acted upon it.  And more than that, they threw out great blanket recalls on cars that we all know, for a fact, are fine.  There are cars being identified for recall for these faulty gas pedals that we know for a fact actually have gas pedal assemblies made by another manufacturer and aren’t faulty.  But Toyota is playing it safe for consumers and being up front.  And there are all manner of cars being identified for recall citing that the mats might get stuck under the gas pedal, that if you look at them, already are clearly cut out around the gas pedal to avoid just that very problem and tie down to the floor so that they can’t possibly shift up into the gas pedal.  (Unless you, the consumer, does something stupid like unclip them from the floor of course.)  Yet these are listed for recall anyway, because, again, Toyota is doing a big blanket safety process, costing them tons of money, all for you, the consumer.

The second problem is society.  We’ve forgotten that we also have responsibility.  We’ve reached a point where all we ever do is blame someone else for our own stupidity.  It doesn’t matter that we’re f___ing morons, because we have fingers and we can point, so it’s not our fault.  We refuse to even remotely share any shred of culpability, regardless of the reality.  We have lawyers set to sue and that’s that.  And if there’s money to be made, all the better.  And what an easy target Toyota has made of itself by being so honest and up front.  So we blame and we blame and we blame and make it the absolute end of the world.

Meanwhile, Toyota has not only confirmed two possible causes, identified their fixes, but has even tested and has had independently tested a simple little postage-stamp sized metal shim that can fix the fault in the gas pedals.  It’s easy to produce in quantity, and can correct all of the woes in record time for a minimal monetary loss to the company but with absolute surety and safety for the lifetime of the car.

But we don’t care.  Because fixing the problem isn’t what we want.  We want blame.  We want blood.

Also in the meanwhile an incredibly simple test for a fault in the gas pedal has been identified.  It is a part that wears over time.  Simply depressing the gas pedal while the vehicle is safely in park, feeling for if there is any kind of grinding, seeing if there is any kind of hesitation for it to pop back up when you release it, will tell you with absolute surety whether or not your gas pedal is presently faulty.  A test that can easily be done with no risk, by the simplest of simpletons, can guarantee you of safe driving before you get on the road.

And we don’t care.  Because identifying whether or not our car is safe isn’t what we want.  We want blame.  We want blood.

So we blame Toyota.  We demand blood.  We turn common sense off.  We claim that if not the sky, Toyota at least is falling.  Because really, what fun would common sense and a little responsibility be?

When Volvo decided to build excitement for their new S60 sedan, they went with a slightly different tact:  They hired a blind artist to paint it.

Enter Esref Armagan, a painter from Turkey who “sees” life in a very different way than most of us, as he’s been blind since birth.

And in its own right it’s a lovely story, documented well in this advertisement:

But if no one else is going to say it, I just have to.  Come on.  It’s a Prius!

Esref Armagan and his painting of the new Volvo S60.

A red Toyota Prius for comparison.

Honestly, I’m not quite sure just what message this really leaves us with.  That, you’ll have to decide for yourself.  But I’m thinking, as beautiful of a story as it should be, it’s the ending that has that fated twist.  Is that what Volvo really intended?  I wonder…

Tesla Motors has issued a statement Tesla To Do House Calls in which it “recalls” some of their Tesla Roadsters.  But rest assured, it’s not for any reason you’d have thought of.  It doesn’t speak badly of Tesla’s electrical drive systems, batteries, or anything of the like.

No.

The problem, it would seem, is that chasis, assembled by Lotus, has been found to occasionally have some “improperly torqued” bolts.  This causes looser handling than was expected.  It’s an entirely Lotus problem, and is even causing Lotus to perform similar recalls on some Lotus Elise and Exige vehicles.

Oops!

Not good for Lotus.

But Tesla is handling it quite well.  They’re actually going door to door to visit each affected customer to inspect the vehicles, only taking the vehicles to a facility to fix if the bolts are found to be “improperly torqued”.  Tesla is also taking the opportunity on these visits to also provide a complimentary full vehicle inspection and perform a software upgrade.  All at no cost to the owner.  Tesla doesn’t have any responsibility to be this nice about things, but apparently they want to keep their customers quite happy.  With service like that, who can complain?

As for Lotus?  Naughty on them.  Wouldn’t you expect a company like that to have better quality control than that?

As I explained before, while electric cars may be the green machine of the future, it is the battery technology that keeps them from replacing standard gasoline automobiles today.  Well, the battery, or the hydrogen fuel cell, which is actually just another type of battery – the same as a lithium-ion battery – to power an all-electric car.  The only difference is that hydrogen fuel cells are “recharged” by adding back in the spent hydrogen where as normal batteries are recharged by adding back in the spent electricity.

The thing is, while we have electrical lines, well, everywhere … we really don’t have hydrogen recharging stations much of, well, anywhere.  In the US they’re pretty much all in California, which is rather inconvenient if you want to own a hydrogen fuel cell car in Wisconsin.  And even if the technology can all be worked out and commercialized in the near future, it is this lack of an infrastructure that really puts hydrogen in last place in the green race.  Even the Obama Administration is now on that page.

So what is a green car manufacturer to do?

Develop better batteries!

Enter two new contenders for better batteries, adding options 4 and 5 to the superbattery list:

Option 4 – Lithium-Sulfur Batteries:

The first is Scion Power Corporation and their Lithium-Sulfur (Li-S) battery technology.  They’ve been puttering around with the idea for a while now.  In theory it holds great potential as it has a much higher energy density (stores more power in the same size battery) than the standard old lithium-ion technology we’ve been using forever.  Their last generation Li-S batteries can hold 350 WH/Kg.  Their newest generation Li-S bring the density up to 450 WH/Kg.  (Compared to Li-ion’s storage capacity of 150 to 200 WH/Kg.)  As you can see on their webpage, when packed into a Toyota RAV4 EV, using the exact same volume for their Li-S battery pack as the Li-ion battery pack they replace and less than half of the weight, they can expand the measly Li-ion’s 27kWh battery capacity to 70kWh with Li-S.  This takes the electric range from 81 miles to a whopping 226 miles!

The downside?

Scion Power Corporation has been having difficulty with the recharge cycles, able to only squeeze out 150 to 200 recharges before the batteries become useless.  To that end, they’ve gone into a partnership with BASF to co-develop the Li-S battery, hoping that BASF’s chemical expertise can uncover a way to the expand battery life in a commercial production line of Li-S batteries.  How soon this partnership can crack the battery life problems is anyone’s guess, but the Li-S technology holds great promise.

Option 5 – The St Andrews Air (STAIR) or Lithium-Oxygen (Li-O) Batteries:

Across the pond in Scotland at the great St Andrews University, Professor Peter Bruce and his team of geniuses had a brilliant idea.  Rather than load a battery full of every chemical needed for the discharge-recharge process, why not use a re-agent readily available in nearly every environment?  And so they sought out to use oxygen as the re-agent, saving loads of weight from the battery, thereby creating the Lithium-Oxygen (Li-O) battery.

As the Li-O battery discharges the lithium ions from the electrolyte combine with drawn in oxygen to form Li₂O₂.  And as the battery is recharged, the lithium ions free the oxygen molecules back into the air.  And so, because of this use of oxygen from the air instead of extra chemicals in the battery, the power density is astounding.  The in-lab estimates for the technology are around 3050 WH/Kg, nearly 20 times the storage capacity of a Lithium-ion battery.

The technology does, of course, have a few minor caveats.  In that it takes in oxygen to work, this would not exactly be suitable battery technology for space use, or likely even submarine use.  (Vehicles would however be fine.)  And because it puts out concentrated oxygen as the batteries recharge, it might be a bit dangerous without good ventilation.  It’d be a shame if your shiny new electric car blew up because it had filled with concentrated oxygen, a highly ignitable and explosive invisible vapor.  But, again, simple ventilation to circulate the air would save the day.

The other dilemma for the Li-O superbattery is that it only exists in a labratory so far.  Commercialization could easily take another five years.  But the potential in energy density is so astounding compared to the standard Li-ion batteries that we use now that I don’t see where anyone would have a problem jumping onto this idea to make it happen.  Where electric cars using Li-ion batteries could have ranges of 200 miles per charge, electric cars based on Li-O batteries could have ranges of 4000 miles per charge.  That would right solve anyone’s range limitation problems with an electric car.

Conclusion:

As time marches on it is becoming more and more clear that not only are hydrogen fuel cell cars becoming a pipe-dream for electric cars, but that new battery technologies may well far exceed any potential that hydrogen fuel cells could ever offer the automobile.  The potential to create an electric car that really can recharge in the time it takes you to fill a gas tank is there.  As is the potential for an electric car that fan far outdistance a petrol or diesel car between refills/recharges.  And, of course, electricity is cheaper and less polluting than fossil fuels and readily available anywhere you go.  As the enthusiasts, universities, and goverments push harder and harder to advance battery technologies in an effort to go green the nails keep pounding into the coffins of both hydrogen fuel cell and petrol-powered vehicles.  The superbattery is now just around the corner.  Are you ready?

The Obama Administration, who are literally throwing money at everything, are going to stop throwing their money at hydrogen fuel cell cars and the infrastructure (AKA gas stations) to support them.  Steven Chu, the Energy Secretary, explained that they were, “moving away from vehicular hydrogen fuel-cells to technologies with more immediate promise.”  Because since former President Bush started funding hydrogen fuel cell vehicles back in 2003 (strangely, alternative-fuel and fuel-efficient vehicles were about the only thing he did for the green world) all that we’ve gotten since then are the Honda FCX Clarity and a supposed Chevrolet Equinox SUV, all in numbers too small not to ignore, with a handful of fueling stations … in California.  Hydrogen vehicles and infrastructure have completely failed to make a presence in the six years they’ve been government funded.

So, according to the Obama Administration, it’s time for a change.

Next year’s budget will see only $68.2m spent on hydrogen fuel cell technologies, and of those, only the actual battery-replacement kind for laptops and whatnot, not for vehicles.

Likely the budget will shift to green vehicles that show actual promise.  This would be the plug-in hybrid where in a larger battery back than a normal hybrid allows one to charge their car overnight and drive with much better fuel economy, at least until the battery goes dry.  The Toyota Prius has had such modifications done in private garages for years now, and easily gets over 100 MPG while the main battery is charged.  And then there’s the plug-in serial hybrids (otherwise known as Range-Extended Electric Vehicles) which only use electricity to drive the wheels, and use generators attached to gas engines to extended their driving range once the batteries go dry.  These plug-in hybrids tend to go at least 40 miles without ever using a single drop of gasoline.  One can only hope that Toyota switches the Prius to this type of technology soon, as it make so much more sense.

But either way, whatever the Obama Administration throws money at next year, it won’t be hydrogen cars, because they’re getting American nowhere.  In the end, hydrogen fuel cells are just batteries.  And (hopefully) the hydrogen is produced by electrolasis, AKA water and electricity.  Plug-in hybrid vehicles offer the exact same green advantages, but anyone can plug one in anywhere.  You don’t have to live in California to use them.