Moved all of my alternative energy and electric car stuff.
Clicking on either of the two diagnostic flowcharts below will bring you to the full size versions on my new website.
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Hybrid cars are all the rage now, and you'd think that they were first conceived and developed in the last couple decades. I've done a little research, and the first hybrid car patent I could find was filed in 1898.
Patent # 653199 includes a schematic for the battery circuitry and recharging through an internal combustion engine, though the inventor prefers the term, "internal explosion engine." Electric cars were actually very common in the late 1800's for several reasons. They were quiet, didn't scare the horses as much as the noisy horseless carriages, didn't smell, and importantly, didn't require a crank start which could lead to a broken arm. But the cruising range was limited to a few hours, as long as 5 hours on a full charge but at fairly slow speeds since they were so heavy.
John Munson describes in his patent how to build a hybrid vehicle that could recharge its batteries without needing to be hooked to the grid, or brought to an electric charging station. As onboard recharging reduces the requirement for a large number of batteries, it lowers the weight and cost of the car and increases the top speed. One interesting feature that he includes that I'm not aware of any current hybrid designs including is an automatic shut-off that allows the car to run until the batteries are charged while in the garage. I can imagine the legal liabilities today. The design allows the gasoline engine to power the car in a sort of "limp home" mode should there be some accident that knocks out the electrical system, though only at very slow speeds. Unfortunately for Munson, his patent expired around 100 years ago, though I suppose it can't bother him much today, wherever he is.
Some years ago I put aside my ambition to build my own car and took a long vacation from engineering to start writing books instead. My goal when I started grinding away at that engineering education some 25 years ago was to someday see "Rosenthal" in raised letters on a valve cover, but I've come to question whether or not cars should have valve covers, valves, or pistons for that matter. In other words, I believe the age of the internal combustion engine has passed it's tipping point and is going into decline, and as much as I've enjoyed working on the things, I'd like to help dig that grave. For years I've been writing books and posting web pages about things I know how to do, but now I'm hoping to turn the process on it's head. The plan for these web pages is for the writing of them to teach me enough to start building my own car, and I don't mean ordering up all the parts for some model and bolting them together. If the plan succeeds, then maybe I'll be able to teach you how to build your own car as well, and we'll kill two birds with one windshield.
When engineers set out to design a new product, they usually start by surveying the state of the art, borrowing whatever isn't locked up by patents and inventing their way around what is. Not surprisingly, new products in general, and new cars in particular, end up looking and acting an awful lot like old cars. The working assumption is almost religious in nature, that our fathers approach to building cars merely needs tweaking to meet modern challenges, like expensive fuels that have negative environmental impacts even when everything goes right. I'm all in favor of four wheels, I don't want to build a car that looks like a tricycle or a mars rover, but the rest of the design package needs to be reconsidered on it's merits. I've got plenty of time to do this because I'm on the road until February, after which point I'm going to start shopping for a farm or other large property in New Hampshire where I can put together a serious little design shop and start my new career as a mad scientist. In the meantime, I'm going to start with a skeleton site full of assumptions and flaws about what I need to know to build a new car, and start filling in the blanks with an approach that I hope will favor innovation over imitation. So take everything written on these pages with a shaker of salt and remember that the idea is to start over again from the point cars required horses to pull them about and see if there isn't an alternative path.
I haven't put together design criteria yet, but it's already clear that I wouldn't build the same car for myself as I would build for my mother. I never drive locally (I'll walk a half hour to the laundromat), I almost never carry even one passenger, and all I care about is operating expense. My mother's car rarely travels more than 10 miles a week (or 5 miles at a time) and never on the highway, the insurance costs about a dollar a mile despite her pristine driving record, and she wants as much sheet metal around as possible because it makes her feel safe. To build a car incorporating these two extremes would create a tremendously inefficient compromise vehicle, like something that's currently being manufactured. On the other hand, we do have some common points, like low overall yearly mileage (under 5,000/year for me, closer to 500 a year for her), limited cruising range (say 50 miles for me, 5 miles for her) and an indifference to styling. Sounds like I might end up building an electric car after all:-)