David Automotive

Archive for the ‘Hybrid Energy Efficient’ Category

The 2010 Paris Motor Show has offered a number of interesting first time reveals, vehicles just now hitting the market and others planned for release over the next 3-4 years. Major auto shows are always good indicators where the market is headed and which vehicles we’ll be driving a few years out.

Korea’s Hyundai Motors is on a tear, rising from the eleventh largest automaker in the world in 2000 to the fourth largest manufacturer in 2010. The company has improved its image and has expanded its product lines, building cars which offer more content and are priced slightly less than what its competitors are offering.

Paris Motor Show

In Paris, the two vehicles creating much of the buzz for Hyundai are a pair of concepts. Concept vehicles are just that — ideas — with no firm plans to build them. Yet, Hyundai has indicated previously that several models they’ll be showing at auto shows this year and next will provide an excellent indication where the automaker is headed.

With increasing consumption of limited fossil reserves, there is a need to use abundant and renewable resources as fuel. What can be more wonderful if that resource is water? Yes, today this is possible as long as gas with the car runs on water. With the latest conversion kits, your old car can be converted into a water fueled one. So that you can save lots of money and avoid polluting the planet.

Slotted below the Civic as a subcompact, the Fit recaptures what Honda was like when the automaker first began to sell cars in the U.S. in 1973. And that original Civic was a subcompact with a surprisingly cavernous interior, economical and affordable.

Second Place

Honda isn’t satisfied, however. The Japanese automaker has been playing second fiddle to Toyota in the hybrid market for several years even thought they got their Insight to the market ahead of the Prius. Today, the Prius is by far the best-selling hybrid model on the market, a capable five-passenger sedan with hatchback.

The Honda Civic Hybrid and current generation Insight are the two hybrid offerings from Honda, but neither car is selling very well. The former model is attractive, but just isn’t getting the sales. The latter model is homely, but has been finding buyers willing to overlook its looks — with a base MSRP of $20,000, the Insight is the value leader.

Water is a chemical compound composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. It is very stable compound at normal atmospheric pressure and temperature. To use it as source of energy and see that your car runs on water, it has to be converted in some other form. One way is to obtain hydrogen from it, which can be used as fuel but this is not feasible inside a car. You have to fill the fuel tank with liquid hydrogen, which is used by fuel cell or combustion engine. Other way is convert it into HHO or also known as Brown’s gas, which can be achieved of the help of the car battery charger.

How cool would it be to build your own solar car? That’s what my husband Kelly Hart thought, over ten years ago. He was following all the solar car news, and he noticed that all the attention seemed to be going into racing vehicles. He thought a slower moving, reliable neighborhood vehicle would be very useful. So he built one, with some help from me, and we called it our Sunmobile. We used it to drive around our small Colorado town. We even took it in the 4th of July parade one year!

How did we create this unusual thing? We began by buying the framework, a very sturdy four-person bicycle called a Rhoades Car. We kept one of pedals, so the driver could pedal if needed. We would have kept the one on the left as well, but Kelly’s design needed that space for some of the parts. We joked that we had a hybrid vehicle: solar and human powered!