Driving range

LPG. LPG could be a principal alternative transportation fuel if its other uses were displaced by natural gas. A significant number of LPG fueling stations are located throughout the United States. LPG is a Hquid fuel and does not suffer the same driving range problem as natural gas. Because LPG vapor pressure is high, the storage tank has to withstand 2800 kPa (400 psi). 

Driving range Greater than 300 mi. High-energy storage capacity... 

Hydrogen powered cars need to hold enough fuel to get the 300 mile driving range of today s IC cars. Hydrogen service stations are few, so refueling becomes a problem. About 12,000 fuel stations in the hundred largest cities in the U.S. would put 70% of the population within 2 miles of fuel. At a cost of one million dollars per station, 12 billion would be needed to provide a fuel infrastructure. This is less than half of what it would cost to build the Alaska pipeline in today s dollars. 

Early electric cars were popular for a while but they would lose their popularity to the wider driving range of the gasoline car. The lack of good roads outside the cities forced most of the early traffic on local streets. While cars kept within the city limits, the shorter range of the electric car was not a problem. 

Individual drive motors on each of the vehicle s four wheels allows a fuel cell powered all wheel drive system. Three tanks hold Hy-wire s hydrogen fuel, compressed at 5,000 pounds per square inch. These were developed by Quantum Fuel Systems, the company that developed the industry s first 10,000-psi tanks, which could allow a fuel cell car to have a driving range of 230 miles. 

The Sequel is almost the size of a Cadillac SRX. It has a 300-mile range on a refueling of hydrogen and accelerates to 60 mph in less then 10 seconds. Other fuel cell cars have a driving range of 170-250 miles and cover 0-60 mph in 12-16 seconds depending on whether they use a battery. 

A fuel cell vehicle must have enough hydrogen to provide a reasonable driving range. For a range of 400 miles, 5-7 kilograms of hydrogen may be required, most fuel cell prototypes hold a little more than about half this amount. 

Besides fuel-cell (electric) vehicles (FCV), there are other vehicle concepts under development, which are also based on electric drives ranked by increasing battery involvement in the propulsion system, and thus extended battery driving range, these are hybrid-electric vehicles (HEV), plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles (PHEV) - which both incorporate an ICE - and, finally, pure battery-electric vehicles (BEV), without an ICE. While electric mobility in its broadest sense refers to all electric-drive vehicles, that is, vehicles with an electric-drive motor powered by batteries, a fuel cell, or a hybrid drive train, the focus in this chapter is on (primarily) battery-driven vehicles, i.e., BEV and PHEV, simply referred to as electric vehicles in the following. 

Conventional fuels and drive trains today show some system-inherent disadvantages in real operation, such as unfavourable fuel consumption at partial load (e.g., during urban driving) for ICE or limited driving range of electric vehicles... 

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