|
Your enthusiasm is contagious. But you're way off on much of this. All of what you are suggesting has been thought of, tried, and discarded because it is not effective. The BMW i3 was the closest to your ideas for a production version of a hybrid electric with only a small gas generator to provide electricity for the electric motor when the battery ran out, and it was a terrible, awful car - as well as being incredibly expensive for how bad a car it was. Short range, because the battery was pretty small, and a small 2-cylinder motorcycle engine to regen the battery and/or power the car as needed. Even though it was such a light car due to a ton of carbon fiber being used - performance once the battery was low was terrible. And the combined MPG if actually using the regen motor instead of plugging in close to 100% of the time turned out to be nowhere near good enough to deal with the poor usability.
Any car with the bare minimum of required safety technology and able to carry people and luggage (even small people, and not much luggage), is going to be 3000 pounds or more right now. Any car that people will purchase needs to be able to accelerate from 0-60 in 10 seconds or less. That means that whatever drivetrain you want to use, it needs to have somewhere between 100-150 hp. And that same car - needs to be able to travel at highway speeds at great efficiency, which at 70 mph requires ~20 hp for an average sized / average aero car. So the drivetrain needs to be efficient making 1/5 to 1/10 of its peak power. Gasoline engines with effective transmissions have been the best at that for a century, with continuous improvement over that time period. But nothing lasts forever, whether that's cheap gas, or tolerance for emissions, or any other of the factors that are driving these shifts we are seeing.
|