3,086 lbs

Lotus has made light weight cars over the years and this is a key factor in mileage. With new small cars coming to market perhaps people will see this is all the car they need for around town and commutes.

Most people want utility, the one vehicle that can do everything, hence the SUV. If they have a car like this and want to go on a long trip, rent a luxury sedan and put all those miles on that car. Plus, you get to try a different vehicle now and then.

The farm lobby pushed to make FFVs run ethanol for obvious reasons. California had 200 Taurus running M85 in the 1990s, it worked out very well and then we heard nothing about it. This was about the time that GM sold NiMH to Texaco and called back all their EV1s. The 3 big U.S. car makers forgot PNGV and made large SUVs.

Once the farm lobby realizes that they can make methanol with corn stalks and sell the grain, then they may come around. It is inertia, once they get going in a direction they keep going. Then hedge funds double the price of corn and ethanol distillers go broke. We have to quit messing around and get with the program or suffer the consequences.

Methanol is easy to make from natural gas right near where it is used. As long as your community has a natural gas main, you can make methanol very close to the fueling stations.

Butanol would be good, it is a drop in replacement and if we could make from trash for one dollar per gallon, I would be all for it, but we can not.

I think people might put up with less range per tank than have larger tanks. My car gets almost 500 miles on a tank, so I could put up with 250-300 mile range. I would fill up more often, but the fuel would be cheaper. On a mile per dollar basis it might be about the same, but there is NO imported oil required with methanol and we could make right near my city.

A methanol-ethanol blend is very easy to make with a catalyst and NG, or the output of a gasifier.. and no need for the energy expensive step of drying the product. It could be a low cost 100% American made fuel. The CO2 emissions implies an mpg of 110.

The toxicity of methanol is overstated by many people.

A methanol-ethanol blend is very easy to make with a catalyst and NG, or the output of a gasifier

It's even easier to just leave the NG alone and combust it in the range extender. Also NG doesn't break down over time which should be considered in an EREV. The more complex liquid fuels sometimes have a half-life, making them unusable if you let them sit in your tank too long - and isn't that the goal of having an EV?

"Adsorbed natural gas is the technology that uses a filler material inside the gas canisters that allows it to hold more natural gas at the same pressure or the same amount at a lower pressure. Although most of us are familiar with compressed natural gas (CNG), the cylinder pressures (200-250 bars) involved make some folks a little nervous, even though the cylinders are very safe. Fill that cylinder with the right material and you can lower the pressure (30-70 bars) and still have the same amount of natural gas. Even better, with the lower pressures involved, you can use other shapes besides cylinders which obviously makes fitting them into odd places a lot easier."

http://www.energtek.com/

ANG is good, but you add the weight of the activated carbon in the tank. This may not be much of a problem with small tanks that you replace in scooters, but you could have several tanks that you fill in place on a car each weighing more than 200 pounds empty.

The tank weighs less due to lower pressure, but weighs more because of the carbon. The natural gas has to have the impurities removed or it reduces the carbon capacity to store and release gas. Most of the natural gas in U.S. pipelines contains sulfur, propane and other substance that much be removed before compression.

If I recall reading the link given by ai vin it said that 3600 psi (245 bar) compression could use up to 35% of the energy in the gas that goes into the cylinder. Maybe motorists could get a low pressure fill for say 100km range and a high pressure fill for 250km range. Remember what happened to the shark in Jaws and scuba tanks are usually less than 3000 psi. Also when you run out of hydrocarbon fuel on the highway it would be easier to hitch into town and get a can of methanol.

I don't see compact PHEVs having both a big heavy battery and a big heavy fuel tank.

what is the life of a 245 bar CNG tank?.. will it have to pass inspection every year?.. no thanks!, give me a conventional thin gage steel tank for my alcohol fuel.. and I dont care about the energy density.