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How to Learn to Love Stoplights and Your Electric Car

October 5, 2015 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

By Llewellyn King
 
Ever thought you’d be pleased to wait at a stoplight?  Well, the day is coming when the stoplight may also be a refueling point for your electric car. It won’t be the key point, but it might give your car a little boost until you get home, or to your parking garage or the supermarket.
 
Electric cars are much in the news these days, as the big automakers like Mercedes and General Motors try to catch up with the space, and notoriety, that Elon Musk and his Tesla Motors occupy.
 
But the bugaboo for electric cars, whether they are the super-refined Tesla or the more utilitarian Nissan Leaf, is charging. Batteries are getting better all the time, but they still need frequent charging. You wouldn’t want to try to go any distance without planning ahead for where you can plug in, whether it’s a high-speed, high-voltage charging station or a wire coming out of a kitchen window, which would need about eight hours to get you ready to speed off with that legendary electric car acceleration.
 
Electric cars have been the dream of automakers since the first cars, some of which were electric, but the limits of lead-acid batteries doomed them to very narrow uses. When I lived in Britain, milk delivery vehicles, called milk floats, were electric; and Harrods, the great London department store, used electric delivery vans for decades. In this case the slow-moving, use-specific and very distinctive vehicles possibly were as much for advertising as anything else. Customers wanted to have them pull up at their homes, suggesting that they could afford the substantial prices that are still part of the mystique of Harrods.
 
Over the decades, many new battery types have been tried, including some very far-out ideas like the aluminum-air battery. But the best, so far, is the lithium ion battery, a version of which you have in your cell phone or your computer, and which powers both pure electric cars and the electric component of hybrids like the Toyota Prius. 
 
But there’s still the pesky issue of charging. A Nissan Leaf has a range of about 100 miles, and a Tesla Model S Performance car’s range is 265 miles. The test comes on a cold, wet night when you’re throwing everything at the electric system in addition to propulsion. Get it wrong and your only way home is by tow truck. 
 
But the technology is on the way. The limits, as in so many things, are not on the technology, but the institutions that will bring it to market. Anyone want to make a business of car charging?
 
The technology, where the power is delivered by magnetic field without a direct connection to the wires, is called induction charging. You probably use it if you have an electric toothbrush, or a phone that charges in a cradle. Scaled up, it can be used to charge cars without a hard wire: a car, or other vehicle, drives over a plate in a parking lot or at a stoplight in the road and, miraculously, charging begins. 
 
The Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., is working on induction charging; and in South Korea, the technology already is in use for buses. The South Korean buses charge, among other places on their routes, at bus stops. While the bus is loading passengers, it is also fueling. Very cool.
 
Nikola Tesla, after whom the car is named, was the Serbian-American genius who briefly worked with Thomas Edison before selling several patent rights, including those to his alternating-current machinery, to George Westinghouse. Tesla claimed he’d found a way of distributing electricity without wires. But how he’d planned to do this remains one of science’s biggest mysteries because he left no plans when he died in 1943.
 
It’s fitting that Tesla, in some small way, may be vindicated as electric vehicles named for him could be among the early beneficiaries of wireless charging. — For InsideSources.com

 

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: batteries, electric cars, Harrods, induction charging, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Nikola Tesla, Nissan Leaf, South Korea, Tesla Model S, Toyota Prius, U.S. Department of Energy

Crime and Art: A Young Man’s Christmas in London

December 10, 2009 by White House Chronicle 6 Comments

It was Christmas, exactly 50 years ago. It was also when I masked petty crime with arguments of social justice, and when life exactly imitated art. Really.

Fortnum & Mason, the London food emporium, has been dispensing Christmas cheer in Piccadilly since 1707. It is a British tradition as famous as its rival Harrods, located about a mile away in Knightsbridge.

But whereas Harrods is a department store with a great Food Hall, Fortnum & Mason is mostly a top-of-the-line — very top — food store that flourishes at Christmas as at no other time of year.

Fortnum’s specialty is its Christmas hampers. They are capacious wicker baskets stuffed with comestibles from around the world: candied fruits and honey, dates and figs, goose foie gras with truffles, jellies and preserves, shortbread and rare teas, smoked salmon and caviar, Stilton, fruitcake and Christmas puddings. You get the picture: a cornucopia of goodies, or conspicuous consumption, depending on your point of view.

Well, all these goodies do not get into the Christmas hampers and snuggle in the wood shavings all by themselves. Nor do they stretch the cellophane and tie the bows themselves.

No, that was my job at Fortnum’s where I and a small crew of disparate young men worked, held together by the reality that we were all far from home, broke, cold and our immediate prospects were not great.

I had arrived in wintry London a month earlier from sunny Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, expecting immediate journalistic success. Instead I was broke, owed rent on my room, lacked a warm coat and had a hole in one shoe.

Then I learned that Fortnum’s was hiring packers for the Christmas season. I signed on at the glorious store in Piccadilly, but that was the last I saw of it. Instead, I worked in an unheated warehouse at the Elephant and Castle in South London.

The wages were 6 pounds a week (about $25) — a reminder that England was still a poor country in 1959. Poor, that is, except for those who sent and received fabulous Christmas hampers.

Some customers sent hampers like Christmas cards to lists of friends, usually titled people, from earls and marchionesses all the way down to lords and ladies. Worse, some recipients were on multiple lists. So heavily laden, how could the hamper fairy make her deliveries to the stately homes?

Although I was a staunch conservative, I found myself dreaming of revolution. All of the hamper packers seemed to be hungry all the time. Our pay was spent after a few days and then we starved — starved while packing the world’s finest foods.

Stealing a few items seemed reasonable, but the security people checked for empty wrappers and other incriminating evidence of consumption. But I came up the solution, the perfect crime: We would selectively eat the food and ship the empty cans and boxes out to the better-fed.

What is more, I explained to my fellow packers, no one would complain to their friends that the hamper was wanting in some areas. More, the chance of recipients ever touching the hampers was slight, particularly if we pilfered only from those going to a family that was on several lists.

The butler, I calculated, would simply tell his employers that hampers had been received from, say, nine friends. And the servants would almost certainly be given the hampers the day after Christmas: Boxing Day in Britain, when the leftovers of Christmas are boxed for the servants and the less fortunate. We were just getting our boxes early.

So we gorged and rationalized our thievery, the way people do.

On our last day the foreman, a permanent employee of the store who earned the princely sum of 8.5 pounds a week (about $34), came to us at midday and in his gentle, world-weary way said that as a Christmas treat, he was taking us to lunch.

This was terrible. We had already had our fill of rich Christmas cake, gooseberry jam spooned out with our fingers and piles Scottish shortbread.

Nevertheless, we accompanied the foreman to a workmen’s cafe that served up vast portions of such dishes as sausage, egg and chips (French fries), bubble and squeak (reheated potato and cabbage) and rissoles (ground, fried, leftover meat). The wise ordered the sausage, egg and chips.

We ate like marathon runners on the 25th mile, doggedly, dutifully and desperately. We lied in our thanks and longed to throw up. We chewed out of decency.

It was all out of an O. Henry short story. Or was it Dickens?

This soothed my conscience: Life was imitating art.

 

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Christmas hampers, Fortnum & Mason, Harrods, London

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