tailieunhanh - ZENN and the Art of the Electric Car

Work on the Vehicle Repair Rule (previously entitled Vehicle Standards Compliance (Repair)) was initiated in early 1993 with a call for industry suggestions on what the rule should contain and achieve. A working party, comprising representatives from the insurance industry and from the vehicle repair, manufacturing, importing and in-service inspection industries, was established to discuss the proposed rule in June 1993. It was initially convened by the Land Transport Safety Authority (LTSA) but was subsequently run by its own convenor with the LTSA as a participant. In 1995 an independent technical writer was commissioned to produce what was in effect the preliminary (red) draft of. | TORONTO LIFE From the January 2009 issue ZENN and the Art of the Electric Car The race to build the car of the future is on and Ian Clifford founder of a fringe company called ZENN Motor is betting everything on a revolutionary new battery. If it works he could be the next Henry Ford By Alex Hutchinson Go car go the new CityZENN will have a top speed of 125 kilometers per hour a range of 400 kilometers and a recharge time of less than five minutes Image credit Amedeo de Palma Even before the market chaos of the past six months it was obvious that change was coming to the auto industry. SUVs were out compacts were in and hybrids were selling like hotcakes. Yielding to unprecedented consumer demand manufacturers revived an old idea the electric vehicle. This mythical car of the future has had more false starts than any other innovation in the history of the automobile-the most famous being GM s EV1 the inspiration behind the hit documentary Who Killed the Electric Car Released in 1996 the EV1 became something of a cult enviro-hit but was discontinued four years later spawning conspiracy theories about the influence of big oil. Now virtually every major company is promising either a plug-in hybrid like GM s Chevy Volt or a fully electric car Nissan s Nuvu and the first mass-market versions are optimistically slated to arrive in 2010. In the race to develop a successful gas-free automobile first prize will be a dominant share of what the veteran industry analyst Dennis DesRosiers calls one of the fastest-growing highest-potential markets the auto sector has ever seen. The challenge for manufacturers is energy storage. Gas tanks are a surprisingly efficient way of carrying energy. Even cutting-edge lithium-ion batteries which most carmakers are depending on for their proposed electric cars provide about 20 times less energy per pound than gas. The huge battery packs required for a car of even average performance don t leave much room for a back seat. The high cost of .