The City and the Personal Electric Vehicle (PEV)

by Gordon E Dower

Introduction

These pages present a new idea for the automobile; an idea so simple that it can be conveyed in a few words—perhaps only a sentence— yet its implications are so broad that they could fill a book. Unfortunately, they are not immediately obvious because they require a new way of thinking about the automobile, its place in our lives, and its effect upon our environment—not only the air we breathe but the very structure and organization of the city we may live in.

The conventional way of presenting a new idea is to state it first and then show its potential value but this presentation does it the other way round: first it strives to show a need and then offers the idea as a means of satisfying that need. Details of the idea will not be given here for fear they would distract from the main theme which is not just an idea for a new type of automobile but a concept of a future transportation system. It will suffice to say that detailed implementation is perfectly straightforward, posing but little challenge to engineers.

Despair of planners

Cities heavily infested with automobiles are becoming unlivable. Some have reached that stage already. The despair of city planners who would have us use buses and other means of public transportation is that motorists love their cars—not because of the thrill of driving but because most people like their own space. Buses may be clean, frequent, Fig. 1. 1911 Waverly Electric economical, and convenient but you do not know where you will sit, who sat there before you, and who might be sitting next to you. If you are wearing your best clothes you may consider ordering a taxi, although it may not be much better. In a bus, you may be disturbed by chatter around you. You are very limited as to what you can take with you and you have no repository for things you might not wish to take everywhere you go. In addition to all that, you may not feel entirely safe. What if some threatening lout were to catch your eye and follow you off the bus? When the bus pulls away, you are in danger, or feel you may be. It is easy to see why people will, when they can, choose to take their environments with them when they travel about the city. The fun or thrill of driving, of shooting ahead of others, of having the thrust of perhaps 300 horsepower at one's command, of being able to take to the open road, like Mr. Toad in Wind in the Willows, are considerations that are for most of us secondary, if they are considerations at all, despite what advertisements say. Priorities should be dealt with first. These are convenience, safety, comfort, and being able to breathe. To which we might add: value for our money.

Hidden costs

The cost of owning and operating a private car is probably a good deal more than we appreciate because we think of the roads as free. We used to think of parking space as free, too, but not any more. Do we count the cost of accident services, of police, towing trucks, ambulances, hospitals, support of bereaved families, etc., as part of the cost of motoring? Do we think of the cost of traffic jams and rush hour delays? They are not mere inconveniences to ourselves, they represent an enormous cost in the earning capacity of our society and affect what we pay, directly or indirectly, for the services of others who must commute. Then there is the cost of all those engines running and polluting in traffic jams. Furthermore, a car costs us money even when it is not running. Every car sitting in a garage or parked on a street is costing its owners money. If the expensive mechanism of a car could be used by others when we do not need it, some of this expense could be saved. More of that later.

Internal combustion engines have been designed to pollute less but, for every reduction, there has been an increase in numbers and, as cars grow older, they pollute more. Even if a totally non-polluting gasoline or diesel engine were developed, it would still emit carbon dioxide and accelerate global warming. It seems that the problem will not go away unless people use electric vehicles. But electrifying the automobile involves more than replacing the engine with an electric motor and the gas tank with a battery.

The city and the automobile have evolved together. The automobile has evolved to provide a way of life that is exemplified by the modern city but it is a way of life that is becoming one of danger, ill-health, and death. Obviously, a reevaluation is needed. The transition from the private car to the personal electric vehicle (PEV) may provide an opportunity not only for improving the quality of the air we breathe and reducing the accumulation of greenhouse gases but also for creating safer and less expensive transportation and a more pleasant life style.

A gasping call

In the early years of this century, the electric car was a worthy candidate for city transportation: its quiet elegance (Fig. 1) compared favorably to its hand-cranking, noisy and temperamental rival. But it cannot compete with the refined, powerful and protean machine, which now defines our needs in the environment of streets, and arteries into which the city has evolved. The car is the product of 100 years of competitive development and enormous industrial production, and it has molded the city to adapt to it, whereas the PEV has, until recent years, suffered the neglect of an uneconomic competitor. Small wonder is it that its resurgence is in response to a gasping call for relief rather than its "sex appeal" to a public long influenced by the dream-car advertising that extols every virtue, real or imaginary, of the gasoline car. If we continue to think of the PEV merely as a car with a different engine, we may look forward to a gloomy future both figuratively and literally. If, however, we order our needs and priorities to suit present-day technology, we may discover that the PEV can offer features, which outweigh its apparent shortcomings, especially when cities adapt to those features. Let us examine, therefore, not only what we should expect from the PEV but what we should expect from the city, and how the two might interact with one another to enhance our quality of life. This is not a matter of minor importance, an exercise in "what if"-ing. Changes will be forced upon us, so we may as well decide what we really want, in order better to guide those changes. A useful starting point is to recognize that the sporting aspects of driving a car have no relevance in a city environment or as a means of transportation; indeed safety demands that they should be discouraged. If a maximum speed limit is enforced, there is no point in designing a PEV to go much faster. Neither is there any point in making it look as if will go faster. These considerations favor a smaller power plant and more practical design.

The PEV and traffic control

In order to encourage the use of the PEV the city rulers might provide fast lanes and convenient parking spaces for them. There should be no need to check parking meters: the PEV could be identified by the parking space and a charge made to the utility company, and ultimately the user. But this is only the beginning: why control the speed of traffic with fixed signs, as we do now? The command conveyed by a sign is a compromise between speeds appropriate to road conditions both good and bad. Unfortunately, when conditions are good, the fixed limit irritates impatient drivers and encourages disobedience. When they are bad, the posted limit encourages bold and daring drivers to go too fast. So why not have a speed-limiting signal, that can vary according to conditions, transmitted to the PEV? When traffic conditions require slowing below that customary for a particular stretch of road, police could transmit a PEV speed-regulating signal, affecting the line of traffic. There would be no need to post personnel with signs at road works. There would be no need for radar traps or cameras because speeding would be impossible. Objectors to this might say, with some justification, that a transient increase in speed above the legal limit is sometimes needed for safety. Perhaps so, and this could be allowed, with a record being kept of the frequency of use of this feature to give a statistic affecting a monthly charge for insurance! It seems obvious that those who use the road should help pay for it, preferably as they use it. A charge could be made for using the city's streets and it could be proportional to traffic density. This would encourage those who could avoid rush-hour traffic to do so, thereby reducing congestion. But there is more.

It would certainly be helpful for the city's traffic control center (and there should be one) to interrogate PEVs so that it would know where they were traveling or where they were parked. The PEV should also know its position. This would make things difficult for the car thief or joy rider. Traffic controllers could positively identify all traffic, just as occurs within the control zone of an airport. Aberrant or dangerous driving could be detected and the driver, or the police, could be warned. But do we want "Big Brother" looking over our shoulder or, figuratively, sitting in the seat beside us? No, we don't, but think of this: our anonymity is lost whenever we use our credit card, our cellular phone, or we are photographed for speeding. This is an on-going process to which we must adapt, acknowledging the compensations; for the city's motorists there could be many compensations. Speeders, dangerous drivers, drunks, and car thieves make driving more dangerous than it need be. Removing them and lowering insurance premiums would amply compensate, surely, for a reduction of anonymity. Control of vehicular traffic in the city could be as positive as the control of air traffic by an airport's control tower. It is of interest to remark that although the anonymity of the car owner is preserved, except from the police, by not allowing the public to discover the ownership of a vehicle from its registration plate, the ownership of an aircraft can be determined from its registration number or letters by consulting published directories. Does the fact that the control tower identifies each airplane, reducing the probability of midair collision, exact from the private pilot a loss of flying pleasure? Hardly.

It is not difficult to foresee further beneficial effects the PEV might have upon the development of the city's traffic control and law enforcement, as well as on its environment. It might well make driving safer, less stressful, and less tedious. Elements could be laid into the roads to guide the PEV safely along its own lane of traffic. At intersections, the right-of-way could be assigned making it impossible for PEVs to collide. Each vehicle could have sensing devices that would make it aware of other PEVs threatening it. One of the commonest sources of accident involves traffic making left turns at intersections. It could easily be made impossible for a PEV to make a left turn into oncoming traffic. Extending this a little further, the operator of a PEV—no longer the "driver"—could give its computer a destination and it would go there, finding the quickest route and avoiding traffic holdups, of which it would be aware from the city's traffic control computers. The design of the PEV and the city would thus go hand in hand. Compare the present-day capacity of a multi-lane artery with what it might be. Selfguided vehicles require less separation. Normally, when the separation falls below 3- 4 car lengths, drivers tend to reduce their speed and traffic bunches up and often stops. This is an intrinsic characteristic of dense traffic composed of autonomous vehicles. If the vehicles become electronically linked to form a train the phenomenon disappears— trains of linked railroad cars can move at high speeds.

The future marvels

At some future time, people may marvel at a civilization whose citizens were continually exposed to the risk of instant death or terrible injury from large machines that darted about among them, each controlled by an ordinary person of unknown competence, both physical and mental, without any means of external control or means for avoiding collision. They will marvel at a civilization where people would commute in these powerful and lethal machines forming rivers of rapidly moving machinery where only the continuous vigilance of each driver prevented collision. To make matters worse, the machines were not necessarily inspected by authorized mechanics, and they totally lacked external-sensing devices (other than for police radar!). Sometimes, rivers running in opposite directions might be separated by no more than a painted white line, with rates of closure between elements of opposite streams exceeding 160 kilometers per hour (100 mph). A driver in one of these streams might pass within a meter of drivers going the other way—a new driver every half second. If he were to drive that way for 20 minutes, to and from work, he would sweep by about 5000 drivers each day, some of them tired, not fully attentive, emotionally upset, preoccupied, angry, unwell, dizzy, drunk, dazzled, half-blind, or merely sneezing. A lapse of control of less than a second in the attention of any one of them could kill him. It is no marvel that so many were killed. Indeed, the marvel is the equanimity with which such daily hazard was accepted yet, curiously, death from other causes, some very rare and all much less common than deaths from motor vehicles, caused more consternation. The people of the future will marvel at all this because their vehicles will be intelligent and safe; they will guide themselves.

Evolution

"Ah, yes," you might say, "this is all very well but surely it would take a long time for the necessary changes and standardization to become incorporated into our cars and then our cities, and who would pay for it?" This is true but the PEV may point the way. The process of change must be an evolutionary one. As in Nature each evolutionary step must bring some immediate reward or benefit, no matter how important future developments that depend on it might be. Another way of saying this is: each step must itself be economically sound, for ecology and economics are conceptually related. Ecology is after all the economics of nature. The city is a product of life on our planet and is itself a living organism and therefore subject to evo5 lutionary laws. It is helpful to bear this in mind when considering the economic and political aspects of the vast changes that could result directly from the PEV concept. Continuous and increasing public interest will be essential. Although, unlike Nature, the process could be intelligently guided and the public might accept occasional small intermediate steps that do not bring benefits themselves but are seen as necessary precursors to steps which do, the more that economic forces can be directed to support gradual evolutionary changes the more rapidly change will occur. Can we imagine some of these changes?

Climate for change

First, there has to be a climate for change. The climate of a modern city is now perceived as bad enough for us to think of the automobile like the cigarette—bad for our lungs and general health. Second, the technology has to be ready to support the changes we want. None of the potentialities envisaged here is beyond present day technology, either feasibly or economically. This is a proposal of what may readily be done. Third, technology must be made available to the public at reasonable cost. This is problematical for the PEV because batteries are expensive. However there is a way that could lead to a cost incentive .

Limited range

Undoubtedly, the most troublesome shortcoming of the electric car is its limited range, because of the size, mass and cost of its battery, and the time required to recharge it. How can the range requirement be eased? Drivers might accept a reduced range if the battery could be recharged in a few minutes. Unfortunately, this is not possible at present.

One proposed solution, granted a US patent in 1996, would exchange the discharged battery for a fresh one. With sufficient engineering, such an exchange could be accomplished in minutes. It might also solve a possible problem of commuters recharging their batteries in the evening, at more or less the same time, exceeding the capabilities of current generating systems. Battery exchange would allow recharging to be staged. Also it could move the cost ownership of the battery from the owner of the vehicle to the utility providing the exchange service, thereby removing a substantial part of the initial cost of ownership of the PEV.

A cumbersome solution

However, although feasible and offering several advantages, changing the battery seems a cumbersome solution. Even with a reduction of the range requirement, the batteries will be heavy and bulky. The machinery for handling them, described in the patent, appears to be quite elaborate. Furthermore, locating the battery within the PEV so that the exchanging equipment can function calls for a highly specialized, standardized, and inflexible design of the vehicle with which it might be difficult to induce the multiplicity of manufacturers to comply. Also, one wonders about the maintenance of safe and efficient electrical contacts within the vehicle, contacts which are disturbed every time an exchange is made. Their maintenance would be a responsibility and concern of the owner or operator of the PEV; one can foresee problems here. Because of its mass, safety would demand that the battery be firmly secured within the PEV after every exchange; the means for this might also present grounds for concern. Perhaps the greatest difficulty, however, would seem to be the financing of such a large enterprise, which offers limited scope for evolution to a feasible working stage and beyond. Something like this cannot start small, and once in place will not readily adapt to fundamental changes in PEV design—changes that are already crowding in because of the immature state of the art. How will innovations like the fuel cell, new types of battery, fly6 wheels, hybrid generators and new engines be tried out, much less incorporated?

Rent the works!

It has occurred to the author, and forms the basis of a patent application, that not just the battery but the whole running gear could be exchanged if the PEV were built in two parts—body and chassis—like the early motor cars. Why not support the body, unlock the chassis, run it out, run a fresh one under, remove the support, lock the chassis to the body, and drive away? Means for doing this are fully described in the application. It appears to be simpler and safer to leave the heavy battery in situ and use the wheels of the chassis, or "undercarriage", to transport it. Maintenance of the battery and undercarriage would thus go hand in hand, providing safe, uncorroded, connections. Instead of using elaborate battery-handling equipment, exchange could be effected using the motive power of the undercarriage and a passive ramp and rails arrangement (Fig. 2). This could be carried out, automatically, in seconds rather than minutes. In an emergency, the exchange could be made at any level place, using simple jacks.

This notion could be implemented on a small scale with a fleet of vehicles and a few extra chassis. As experience grew, the undercarriage could be leased from the local power authority, or perhaps the city, which would be responsible for its maintenance. As we shall see, such an arrangement could provide solutions to many of the city's problems because it would allow for the development of a transportation system that fully exploited currently available technology to improve traffic control and law enforcement.

Chassis exchange requires standardization of the interface with the body but this need not limit development or lead to dreary uniformity. Quite the contrary. Instead of owning a car, one would own only the body, which could be individualized to a much greater extent than today's automobile because all the machinery would be down below, just as it was in the early days—surely a safer arrangement than placing the passengers in the midst of it!

Private and public parts

What is personal and private about a car? Surely it is the body and its interior. Only someone with a strong mechanical bent would bond to the engine and other mechanical parts. It would be the same with the two part PEV. The personal part of the PEV could be supplied by local and imaginative body builders eager to suit individual needs; they might even supply kits for the do-it yourselfers. This might give rise to remarkable self-expression perhaps as a reaction against the limited individualization— restricted to often not-so-optional options— offered to the car buyer because of integrated body-chassis construction and assembly-line production. The rented chassis of the PEV could be as impersonal as the public road it runs on—one's attachment to it would be limited to its firm but temporary attachment to the body! But, like the body, it might be assembled using local talent and off-the-shelf running gear, motor, batteries, etc., assembled into a simple welded frame, at least for prototypes and early models.

Payment for use of the chassis could be a monthly contribution made to the local electric power utility. Unauthorized use could be prevented by substituting the credit card for the ignition key. The chassis could inform the exchanging agency when its services were required and tell the driver where to go.

New names

The vehicle's two parts call for separate names. The body might be called the carriage, emphasizing its function of providing an environment for the passengers; the chassis might be called the undercarriage. We can imagine that we should choose our carriage as carefully as we might a new car, and then arrange for the city or the local utility company to provide the undercarriage. Think of it: we should not have to bother with oil changes, brakes, tires, muffler, or any of the other inconveniences that the present-day motorist is heir to, and we should know that all such PEVs on the road around us were properly maintained.

Although "carriage" and "undercarriage" appear in the patent application, perhaps they sound somewhat old-fashioned. If the inventor of a new concept might be allowed to add new words to the language: one might think of the undercarriage as a mobile deck, or modeck, which might be shortened to MODEK. The carriage rides upon it, so it would be a RIDON. When the two are mated we have a RIDEK. Economics Because the owner of the ridon would own only the part that was innocent of machinery— save that needed to communicate the driver's needs—the initial expense would be less than for a conventional car. Indeed he might own several: to suit his fancy, the occasion, and the weather. There should also be some saving in the cost of the modek, for several reasons. First, the operating agency, which might be the city, public utility, or private concern, could benefit by ordering in quantity, which would not only reduce the unit price but also allow it to require specifications appropriate to local needs. Second, obsolescence of the modek should be less of a factor than a car. (Most of us change our cars not because the engine is worn out but because the body has deteriorated or become outdated.) Some components might last for decades and decommissioned units could be cannibalized. Specifying that bumpers, sides, and fenders should be less subject to damage and easier to replace could reduce insurance rates. A third factor reducing the cost of the modek to the user would be that it need not stand idle when not required. At first this would apply when use of a modek was not anticipated for a week or more, however, as the city adapted to them, unloaded modeks might find their own way, perhaps using special channels, so that when a commuter did not expect to need it during his time at work the modek could find other employment, its place taken by another ridon for the ride home. Extending this further, modeks serving early-morning commuters might return to the suburbs to ferry later commuters to the city. The process might be reversed for the evening commute. If this proved feasible, one might see unloaded modeks taking their return trips on rail cars. At any rate, the net effect should be that the utilization of modeks would be greater than that of the average car, and therefore the cost might be less.

Good engineering and safety

From an engineering standpoint, the most attractive feature of the modek is that it can be manufactured and modified locally and could form a test bed for a variety of engines and batteries. Some units might use fuel cells, others auxiliary generators, flywheels, new kinds of batteries, and so on. When interurban use is contemplated, gasoline-powered units could be provided. Thus evolutionary change could occur without hindrance. This would apply also to the incorporation of traffic control features. Instead of having to wait for a new generation of cars to provide a mandated (and how long would that take?) change to produce a sufficient density of the feature for it to become effective, the city could immediately modify its modeks, if it were the agency operating them. Even if the city were not, it could easily persuade whatever the agency was to do so. Often such a change might merely affect software and all modeks could be modified instantaneously. This might be spectacularly useful in the event of a natural disaster, such as an earthquake. Because the modeks could be so readily modified, the effects of making a wrong decision about some design feature would not be as drastic as they otherwise might—a comforting thought for a bureaucrat or a banker.

From a safety standpoint, the rented modek concept is appealing. The opportunity for preventive maintenance has been mentioned. The rapid implementation of present-day technology to provide traffic control and safer drivers has been covered. The long lead times of safety innovations such as anti-skid brakes would be a thing of the past. That passengers in the ridon will be above the point of impact between modeks should focus the main part of the crash energy below them. Another aspect of this is the low center of gravity—and consequent reduced danger of rolling over—as the result of placing the heavy parts in the modek. Any hazardproducing faults in modek design could be quickly recognized and corrected because of centralization of the supply of modeks and the data-handling capabilities of the system. Reduction in theft and hijacking should result from the continuous and comforting surveillance under which the modek operates. Another feature of the modek that might be especially appealing to a woman driving at night who needs to serve herself at a gas station in a threatening neighborhood, is that exchanging the modek does not require, or even favor, leaving the vehicle.

Take a new look

The prospect of separating the works from the people invites us to take a new and critical look at the car we love, or loved. Let us consider the fundamentals of car design in terms of what is needed rather than what years of clever advertising have led most of us to think we need.

If you cannot legally drive faster than about 70 mph why be so concerned with aerodynamics that you accept a low roof, a seat inches above the roadway, the sloping windows of a greenhouse, and a degree of difficulty of entrance and exit that only a racing car should require? What elegance is there in jack-knifing one's frame into a groveling environment that one shares with the engine and the gas tank—a position that makes one an easy target for side impact from other lowslung embodiments of the designers' fancy? When, in heavy rain, you open the door to enter, you will find you sit on a wet seat because the doors are cut into the roof. And why are they cut in? Because the roof is so low that otherwise you would strike your head. Flowing skirts are a thing of the past but they would pose no problem to the lady in the Waverly Electric brougham of 1911 (range 25 miles). If you have the opportunity to sit in a 1929 Model A Ford, notice how passenger-friendly it is; observe that you would rarely have to scrape ice off the windshield or rear windows because they are vertical and beneath an overhang from the roof. Compare these with GM's EV1, intended to epitomize state-of-the-art electric vehicle design. It is even lower than usual—very aerodynamic and sporty—but its range is about 60 miles and it seats only two. Of course, the automobile manufacturers' defense will be that they cater to public demand; a car's "sex appeal" sells, and they should know. But they are not always right. The success of the minivan, which saved Chrysler, was a surprise to the industry. Currently, minivans and sports utility vehicles outsell conventional cars and you do not have to stoop to enter them. Perhaps the public is reconsidering its needs and becoming more interested in utility than in bogus aerodynamics. Just how bogus some of the aerodynamic improvements are is typified by the spoilers that appear on the trunk lids of many new cars. These are too small to have any effect at legal speeds.

Instead of following the designs of the stylists, we should do better to take one of GM's most practical and commodious minivans, the Astrovan, as the concept model for our PEV (Fig. 2). The top of a modek, which would have slightly smaller wheels, would be level with the floor of this vehicle. The dimensions of the modek thus defined give ample space for the machinery and battery and afford liberal space for testing innovations.

Conclusion

Thus we see that the PEV as a modek/ridon combination of rented and private ownership, promising cost inducements, scope for evolutionary change, and the capacity to use local industry, offers such substantial advantages over the conventional automobile that the public may not merely adopt it as a contribution to maintaining the earth's environment but enthusiastically welcome it as a solution to many problems not yet fully appreciated. If so, the concept could produce great changes in a few years. Changes that will not only affect the way we drive but the way we live and the cities we live in.

© Gordon E Dower 1997