LincVolt - Repowering the American Dream

SECURITY AND JOBS ARE GOOD FOR AMERICA

Today we often hear radical conservatives being negative about electric cars for political purposes. Whose side are these people on anyway? Lincvolt is an electric car that takes advantage of the great skills of American companies producing electric motors, batteries, power train designs, and fuel. It is an example of what can be done here in the USA when we put our hearts and minds into an endeavor, knowing we are going in early and need to do a lot of things for the first time. We need to show ingenuity and guts. That is what this country is good at.

UQM from Colorado makes the two electric motors in Lincvolt. One is for the power train and one acts as a generator to charge the batteries. Both of these reliable military grade motors were designed and built in the USA by hard working Americans with families to feed.

A123 Systems from Detroit Michigan makes powerful batteries that move our big SUV/Truck-weighted car for over 50 miles without a charge. That is 15 more daily miles than the average USA commute. The power to go that far every day costs about $2.50 for the electricity in California and that is more expensive than the majority of states. That makes good sense. And some months Lincvolt will not need liquid fuel at all. Only if we go on a long trip will we need to fill up.

When we do fill up, guess what? We use domestic fuel from POET Ethanol in South Dakota. They have a new plant there being built by American workers where hundreds will have jobs making America's future strong with good clean fuel from the land. Just like Henry Ford wanted it when he started out dreaming of ethanol powered cars, and electric cars with his friend Edison. But this fuel is different. It is made from the waste of farming, the waste of conventional ethanol production, and it has by-products: food for animals and gas for replacing the Natural gas used in the processing of conventional ethanol. That's why American farmers like this idea. Because its good for America's independence. It's what America needs; Independence and jobs for security. It's not from Canada's oil sands, where the dirtiest fuel on earth is found. It's made from waste, biomass, right here in the USA and it is part of the future. It's called POET Cellulosic Ethanol. And by the way, it has 111% less greenhouse gases than gasoline. Even if you don't believe in global warming and thousands of scientists there is nothing wrong with efficiency. POET Ethanol is good for America.

From Detroit Michigan, under the hood is a powerful 4 cylinder custom-made Ford engine, adapted by Ford Motors to turn an electric generator and charge the A123 batteries while burning POET Cellulosic Ethanol. It won't run on gasoline. It doesn't want to and it doesn't have to. It can use E 85 if cellulosic or conventional ethanol is not available. This is an American motor made by American workers to make the country stronger, more efficient, cleaner and most importantly, safer. All of this is accomplished while employing hard working Americans who have families to feed.

So Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh and the rest of you, whose side are you on when you criticize and exaggerate and mislead the public about problems with American made electric cars? Why do you attack the Chevy Volt and the workers who take pride in building it? Do you have no vision? No guts? Are you never going to look ahead to the future? Have you forgotten that being first means taking chances? Do we do nothing because we are afraid to fail? What about ingenuity? Do you want America to stand by while China succeeds at this? What do you stand for? Whose side are you on?

For all of those who have followed and supported our project, we thank you. Stay tuned for more news as we close in on our goal.

JUST PASSING THROUGH

Lincvolt is enjoying a lot of attention at Brizio Street Rods these days, but she is just passing through. Soon the car will be taken to Camilleri Auto Works in Sacramento to be painted in its original ivory color and chrome work will be done restoring Lincvolt's massive bumpers and trim. Work will continue at Brizio Street Rods on details preparing for the return.

One more trip back to AVL in Orange County is planned to finally install all of the power train that was developed there. Lincvolt will then be under electric power with a cellulosic ethanol generator. An electric-only range of 50 miles with the additional ability to recharge under way will make it possible for Lincvolt to travel unlimited distances under electric power.

Anyone who has driven a powerful electric vehicle knows that this is the superior way to travel. Control is absolute and responsive at all speeds. Response is instant, seamless and smooth with no transmission and plenty of torque for quiet, efficient motoring. An electric car is like no other. It is the future.

After AVL, it's back to Brizio Street Rods for the final assembly, marking the completion of a very memorable 5 year journey and the beginning of a new life on the road for this 1959 Lincoln Continental convertible, spreading the news around the country about the benefits of clean powerful electric transportation.

Shakey Pictures will continue the filming of this story as we cruise the interstates and back roads of North America. A live video feed from Lincvolt will be streamed from Lincvolt.com. Stay tuned.

Thanks for your support.

THE LONG RUN

If you are one of the folks who has been following this project, thank you for your interest and support. It means a lot to our team to have you with us.

Our goal is to build a big electric American car that can commute with no gasoline and take long journeys at anytime using domestic green fuel to power a generator. We are doing it. We are succeeding. We are building our dream, which means repowering the American dream itself. As you know, we have had a lot to overcome. We have learned a lot and we have never hesitated or wavered in our endeavor.

Now we are so close. We have seen our car, Lincvolt, cruising with its new series hybrid power train by AVL. What a great feeling to see Lincvolt rolling again, almost a year and a half after a fire that required the car to be totally rebuilt! It was that fire that changed our direction and gave us a chance to begin anew. Today the 1959 Lincoln Continental convertible is almost ready for the big road. Looking at the car and knowing its history of setbacks and changes, we are still totally engaged! That is what a big dream is all about.

We have recently added ABS brakes at AVL and upgraded our suspension to handle the tremendous forces encountered using regenerative braking with a 6000-pound vehicle. Because of what we learned watching our vehicle under extreme regenerative braking on the AVL dynamometer cell, we have adapted Lincvolt to accept the road proven suspension of a VW Touareg, a 6000-pound SUV. The results present a very solid and safe ride.

We want to show that large SUVs can be electric long-range vehicles, utilizing planet friendly fuels for power generation. We are almost there. POET, an American ethanol company pioneering the production of cellulosic ethanol for consumers, will be supplying our domestic green fuel. This fuel is the lowest carbon footprint of any fuel we have ever seen. It presents a 111% reduction in GHG emissions over gasoline.

If this concept can be done with a car this size, it can be done with any type of car or truck. We are extremely close to our goal and we want to thank you for being there with us for the long run. We will soon be on the road traveling around America, demonstrating this green transportation technology and completing our film. It's going to be a fun summer.

Stay tuned for more updates as we finish the project and head for the road to demonstrate the unlimited possibilities of electric transportation in a big car or truck.

DYNAMOMETER RESULTS!

Initial results from the AVL dynamometer are complete.

Lincvolt's custom "Ford Built" ethanol generator is capable of charging the battery pack fully in 40 minutes.

Lincvolt has an all electric range of close to 50 miles, more than enough for all electric daily commuting after either an overnight charge or a quick and convenient "green charge" from Lincvolt's generator.

Lincvolt's POET Cellulosic ethanol fuel creates 111% less GHG compared to gasoline and Lincvolt uses a little less than 2 gallons to charge fully depleted batteries.

At 80 MPH, Lincvolt's 145 KW generator is still charging the battery pack. This makes long range traveling comfortable, clean and safe with none of the range anxiety sometimes associated with electric vehicles.

ABS BRAKING SYSTEM

Lincvolt is now being fitted with an ABS braking system for maximum braking safety. ABS brakes add to the safety of the regeneration system by ensuring that regeneration does not lock up the wheels in extreme conditions. The brake conversion at AVL will take approximately 5 weeks.

FINISH

Lincvolt will return to Northern California and exterior painting will be done at Camilleri Auto Works in Sacramento. Then the instrument panel, restored and modified by Classic Instruments and programmed by Paul Perrone of Perrone Robotics, will be installed and final fitting of the leather interior, convertible top, and finish will be completed at Brizio Street Rods in South San Francisco.

ASPHALT TESTING!

Lincvolt is outside now on a vast parking lot near AVL in Orange County Ca. Testing has been ongoing for 2 days and the next phase will see Lincvolt on the AVL Dynamometer cell, an amazing piece of technology that the industry leading developer of electric car technology uses to test its ideas and prototypes. This device is a huge driving condition simulator that the car is attached to and then is tested for all road conditions, severe stopping, turning at high speeds, energy consumption, regeneration, to name just a few. We will have limited footage of this exclusive AVL device available on our web site and in our film. Car manufacturers from around the world have used this legendary AVL technology and Lincvolt is very fortunate to be able to use it as well.

We are testing a new type of electric car, the long-range electro cruiser. Lincvolt is designed to be economical and clean on commutes, using only electric power. Lincvolt, a series hybrid, always uses electric power turning an electric traction motor because the onboard generator is capable of delivering more electricity than the car uses at highway speeds. GM’s Chevy Volt is not a series hybrid because it uses gasoline to directly drive the wheels when the battery completely loses energy. The Fisker Karma is the only series hybrid car on the market with a similar approach to ours, but it burns gasoline and provides no other option for cleaner fuel, while Lincvolt burns cellulosic ethanol, a fuel that has a 111% reduction in GHG compared to gasoline. This new fuel is domestically produced from the waste that is left when regular ethanol is created. Lincvolt can also use gasoline or any blend of gasoline and regular ethanol.

Testing will continue next week at AVL and we anticipate the car will return to Brizio Street Rods in South San Francisco next weekend. Some work will be done at Brizio Street Rods before Lincvolt goes to Sacramento for painting. Then Lincvolt will return to Brizio Street Rods for assembly of interior, controls and final trim detail.

Stay tuned for this exciting part of our journey, then follow us around the country with our live webcam and video updates as we visit cities and towns found on North American highways in Lincvolt, one of the cleanest running cars ever made. This promises to be fun and we will try to make following our trip as entertaining and informative for you as we can.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Thanks for being with us. We are now in our fifth year and will have completed five years in September of 2012. As most of you long termers know, we have had to be persistent in overcoming many setbacks. We are a few months away now from having Lincvolt back and better than ever before. Our experiences with this project have led us to the conclusion that a series hybrid propulsion system fueled by bio fuel is the cleanest way to move around our big car. Our Poet Cellulosic Ethanol Fuel source provides an 111% reduction in green house gases compared to gasoline. We can drive over 40 miles on a charge. Our generator is cleaner than the grid. Plugging in is an option, but not the cleanest one. Our car's range is limited only by fuel capacity and availability in the USA. Lincvolt at 75 mph is recharging while driving.

We plan on touring the USA and going to Washington to lobby for Green fuel support with our friends in the government. We want the USA to regulate Bio Fuels so engine manufacturers can build engines for green cars, knowing what the fuel is going to be. We want states like California to wake up to alternative fuels and make laws supporting their use, not inhibiting their use.

Our 1959 Lincoln Continental is the American dream of old, running on the fuel that was Henry Ford's vision for America. Did you know that the USA's second largest supply of fuel is ethanol, produced right in the USA by American workers? Did you know that Petro fuel is now the largest export of the USA? Did you know that laws exist to stop citizens in California from using pure ethanol in their cars? Did you know that laws exist to stop conversion of cars from gasoline to Ethanol? Did you know that the amount of corn America uses for food has flat-lined for decades, making the argument that ethanol takes food from our tables completely false and misleading? Do you know who is behind this misleading information? We want to show you what we have learned on our journey. Stay tuned this year as we tour the USA and Canada telling our story.

Happy New Year from the Lincvolt Team!

POET SUPPLIES FUEL!

POET is the clean, green, high tech and homegrown fuel company for the future. Cellulosic ethanol is this future. In the coming years we will be dispelling the myths of negativity around ethanol that have been spun by the oil giants and their friends. We will be making an example of how America can have its own fuel, independent and free. Stay tuned.

Learn more at poet.com.

The Lincvolt team thanks you for your support.

A VEHICLE FOR CHANGE

It has been over more than four years since the Lincvolt project began. We have been continuously searching for a way to make people aware of electric transportation as a vehicle for change. With the new Lincvolt generator fuel, Cellulosic ethanol, we have a combination of electricity and bio-fuel generation that is very clean, so clean that it actually has a 111% reduction in carbon emissions when compared to gasoline. Regular Ethanol has a 59% reduction. We want our fuel to come from the first American plant that creates it and is itself powered by renewable fuel. We will be reaching out to the manufacturer, POET during the coming days and will keep you posted on our progress. We want to make Lincvolt the poster child for Cellulosic ethanol, a fuel made from waste. We have a lot of waste that is largely unused. This is the opportunity we have been searching for.

Learn more at DrivingEthanol.org.

Stay tuned.

The Lincvolt team thanks you for your support.

LINCVOLT AT AVL

Today Lincvolt leaves Brizio Street Rods and moves south in a carrier to AVL in Orange county. At AVL the high voltage systems will be installed and tested. We will be bringing you all the news from AVL as it happens.

Stay tuned.

The Lincvolt Team thanks you for your support.

BALANCE

Lincvolt is at the alignment shop being balanced over the weekend and will return Monday for a couple more days of work before getting on a carrier and going south to AVL in Orange county. After Thanksgiving, Bruce Falls at AVL will install the High Voltage system and test it on the AVL Dyno between Christmas and New Year's day. When Lincvolt returns to Brizio Street Rods it will only be for a short time. During that time the car will be made ready to paint at Camilleri Body Works in Sacramento. Paint and chrome will be done there, and then Lincvolt will be ready to re-install the new High Voltage system for the last time, either at Brizio or AVL, depending on AVL's decision.

We are getting closer to the goal. Seeing Lincvolt roll out of Brizio's shop last week, a full year after thermal runaway, is a testimony to the enduring energy behind this project. Better and stronger than ever before, Lincvolt will soon be ready to take to the highways of North America. We will all be there with the car on the journey with live streams from across the country on Lincvolt.com

We will keep you posted!

The Lincvolt team thanks you for your support. Hold on, its going to be good!

GETTING CLOSER...

Lincvolt will be going South to AVL in a carrier and return with a fully functioning power train by the end of the year. AVL will be doing the installation of the batteries and charging systems, and testing Lincvolt as a series hybrid. Before Lincvolt leaves Brizio Street Rods in 10 days for the trip to AVL in Southern California, final preparations will be made here to the body to make it totally ready for the installation. At the point the car returns to Brizio Street Rods, it will be ready for painting. When the painting is done, final assembly will begin, including interior and instrument panels, final finish. This will take an amount of time that is unknown at this point, but will be an exciting, focused and energetic push to get Lincvolt back on the road again. At that time, final testing will be done and our trip around the USA will begin. This process will be a rewarding one, with much effort and care taken. We look forward to these next stages!

Filming and Post Production of the Lincvolt movie continues at Shakey Pictures.

Thanks for your support. - The Lincvolt team.

REVENGE OF THE ELECTRIC CAR

A new documentary by Chris Paine, is playing in theaters.

Learn more about the film and view a trailer here.

LINCVOLT AND THE FORD LEGACY

Back in the early 1900s Henry Ford was thinking about the future and receptive to building electric cars.

As time passed, news reports had Ford's EV coming in 1915, then 1916. Details varied: It would cost somewhere between $500 and $750 (between $10,000 and $15,712 today) and would go somewhere between 50 and 100 miles on a charge.

Thomas Edison, Henry Ford's partner and friend, in an interview with Automobile Topics in May 1914, divulged no details and made his best "It's coming, just be patient" speech. "Mr. Henry Ford is making plans for the tools, special machinery, factory buildings and equipment for the production of this new electric. There is so much special work to be done that no date can be fixed now as to when the new electric can be put on the market. But Mr. Ford is working steadily on the details, and he knows his business so it will not be long."

Edison also said "I believe that ultimately the electric motor will be universally used for trucking in all large cities, and that the electric automobile will be the family carriage of the future. All trucking must come to electricity. I am convinced that it will not be long before all the trucking in New York City will be electric."

Edison was himself no stranger to electric cars. He built a battery-powered front-wheel-drive electric car in 1895, and the famous industrialist owned some of the very expensive electric cars then in production.

Like many of the great ideas in history these dreams and plans were not to be, at least not at that time.

Henry Ford also wanted to build ethanol-powered cars, envisioning ethanol as the fuel of the future for the USA. John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil had muscled petro-fuels into the market place. President Theodore Roosevelt had pushed through legislation that greatly reduced the power of financiers like Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan by outlawing monopolies, but gasoline stations were springing up everywhere and the Oil business was firmly entrenched in American life.

A vigorous debate of the pros and cons of alcohol-based fuels vs. gasoline raged on the pages of the New York Times and the country's leading newspapers. Much of the same arguments we are hearing today were being voiced back then. Henry Ford had a love affair with country life and the farmers of America. His vision of America's fuel of the future still lives today, further empowered by the political and economic problems we face and new scientific methods of deriving bio-fuel.

New technologies are making ethanol fuel production from cellulose and biomass feasible and a real possibility for the future of America. Some of these abundantly sourced fuels will come from biomass: waste of industry, waste of food production and waste of consumption, and will not displace food production from our agricultural land. Other sources will come directly from science and new development. The latest government regulations call for a transition away from ethanol derived from corn to ethanol derived from Biomass. This is America's target for the future of Bio-fuel. Blended with other fuels, or as a stand-alone fuel, Bio fuel has an ever-increasing part to play in the future of the world.

We will never know how Henry Ford's vision of the future would have turned out if his dreams of bio-fuel powered cars had come true in the early 20th Century. However, today we are seeing that we must change and do something other than consume costly and environmentally damaging oil from foreign sources. What would it have been like if we had not powered our cars with gasoline? A classic Lincoln Continental convertible originally produced by Ford Motors in 1959 may just give us a glimpse. Re-powered as a series hybrid with a 200KW prime mover and a Ford Hybrid 2.5L Atkinson engine as a generator, Lincvolt may be like Henry Ford's dream car of the future. Lincvolt's 2.5L is fueled by E 100 Ethanol or E 85 ethanol, both originating from biomass. An A123 Battery pack stores the power for silent running up to 40 miles. The Lincvolt Electro-Cruiser, built with American components, will be on the road in late 2011, living many aspects of Henry Ford's dream.

The innovation will not end there. Building on the tradition of user-friendly technology, Lincvolt will feature the world's best sounding audio system, PureTone. Taking full advantage of Cloud based libraries of recordings by your favorite artists, Lincvolt will simply sound like no other car on earth. Lincvolt passengers will enjoy PureTone "Studio Quality Sound," the actual sound heard by the artists and producers when they created the original recordings, making Lincvolt audio sound superior in quality and digital resolution to any music ever heard in a car.

A film of the making of Lincvolt and the car's trip around North America is already in production. The many twists and turns will make this quite a story.

Parts of this article were derived from the writings of Bill Kovarik, Ph.D., who wrote a defining paper on the subject "Fuel of the Future" (1998).

CAPSTONE AND LINCVOLT

Capstone Turbine Corporation and team Lincvolt will be working together gathering data from Lincvolt’s travels for analysis by Capstone. With the goal of designing a microturbine engine specifically for long-range hybrid electric vehicles, the collaboration will involve thousands of miles of data generated by Lincvolt while traveling on freeways, highways, back roads and main streets throughout the USA in 2012.

While electric vehicles are perfect for commuting and are more efficient in energy use than conventional vehicles, there is a need for cars to be able to go long distances without stopping to recharge. Quite simply, people want electric vehicles without the limitations in range associated with pure electric vehicles. The perfect solution is a car that is clean and economical for daily commuting while being able to travel an unlimited distance at a moments notice.

At highway speeds, a significant amount of energy is consumed and the need for an APU (Auxiliary Power Unit) is well known in the electric car development field. The inherent clean burning available in a Capstone MicroTurbine® engine makes it one of the natural solutions for a next generation APU in electric vehicles.

The power required under different circumstances, the fuel type, and the technology utilized to keep the energy as clean and efficient as possible will all be gathered as part of the Capstone Lincvolt project. This input will be analyzed by Capstone’s team of developers and ultimately used to help define the next generation of small and efficient Capstone microturbines designed specifically for electric car APUs.

Lincvolt has logged thousands of clean, vibration-free miles with the Capstone C30 microturbine APU. It is truly an amazing source of smooth vibration-free power and has been a unique pleasure to drive Lincvolt with microturbine power. Now, with a new APU of higher power output, we will be able to overcome the obstacle of limited range and truly be limited only by fuel capacity, enabling Lincvolt to travel coast to coast without ever stopping to recharge. During our journey, Lincvolt’s computers will be logging parameters, sharing with Capstone, and broadcasting to the internet.

Lincvolt thanks Capstone for their continued support in this new program.

A GHOST FROM THE PAST

Lincvolt is a constantly evolving vehicle. We have just announced our new A123 Battery system, far superior in every respect to the previous battery pack. We have made many more changes in design and we will be announcing them as the weeks unfold. The work will be done in California, home of the greatest hot rods on earth, both in Northern California and Southern California. We will be telling you more about that too.

Here at Lincvolt.com, you have seen Lincvolt at Brizio Street Rods In South San Francisco for the last couple of weeks. A bare metal body, painstakingly restored at Camilleri’s in Sacramento, is now covered with primer and ready for the rebuild. What you can’t see is that the suspension and parts of the power train have been put in place or prepared for placement under Lincvolt’s massive and beautiful uni-body during the last weeks.

Lincvolt has been redesigned in and out. When all of the new components are installed and tested, as a final stage, an aerodynamic covering will shroud the underbody, reducing drag and allowing Lincvolt to cut through the air more efficiently than ever before at high speeds. As an example of the forces encountered at high speeds, Lincvolt uses 29 KWs to travel at 65mph and 40 KWs to travel 70mph. That is 11 KW more for a 5mph increase at high speed. We expect the under-shrouding to have more of an effect the faster the car travels. These measurements allow us to see how much energy is consumed for highway cruising. A typical 400-500 mile day at highway speeds of 70 mph or more on changing terrain is nothing for a Continental, so she has to be ready for that challenge. Many of the changes we are about to announce are designed to make long trips at highway speeds a reality. This is what the Ford Motor Company’s Lincoln Continental was designed for, not just arriving in style like a 50s dream. That is why Lincvolt is destined to be a Continental Electro Cruiser like the world has never seen, like a ghost from the past, arriving smoothly and silently at every destination.

Stay tuned for more news. We appreciate your support.

The project Lincvolt team

A123 - THE BATTERY OF CHOICE FOR LINCVOLT II

We have completed our search and decided on A123 batteries for Lincvolt II. A123 is a US based company. A123 Systems delivers advanced batteries and complete energy storage systems. With breakthrough technology, A123's robust systems integration capabilities and demonstrated products in the field were deciding factors in our choice.

A123 has built and deployed more lithium ion hybrid systems for transit buses than any other lithium ion battery manufacturer in the world, with units on the road since 2007. A123 systems have been put to the test in real world conditions, meeting and exceeding performance requirements with the most rigorous duty cycles. That experience was very important to us.

A123's advanced lithium ion energy storage solutions enable higher performance and increased efficiency. Proven engineering expertise and extensive knowledge of electric drive-train technologies allow us to work with a company that we have total confidence in. A123's consistent power over a wide State of charge range allows longer driving range and that is one of our big demands for project Lincvolt.

Our friends associated with Fisker automotive introduced us to A123. They told us that "Fisker Automotive selected A123 because of the company's ability to meet our performance needs. Fisker is committed to developing environmentally friendly cars that don't sacrifice style or performance. A123's technology will ensure the Karma delivers." We liked that a lot!

Thank you Fisker and A123!
-- The Project Lincvolt Team.

LINCVOLT BATTERY SEARCH

Batteries store energy used to power Lincvolt. This energy is originally generated by Lincvolt's Capstone C30 Micro-Turbine generator or captured from the USA Power Grid before it is stored in the battery pack. When the stored energy is introduced to Lincvolt's UQM 200 KW prime mover, turning the wheels and moving Lincvolt down the road, the feeling of exhilaration and clean raw power is unbeatable. Flying down the road in this big convertible with nothing but the sound of wind and tires is an amazing experience! What a ride.

The average commute in the USA is about 35 miles. On a trip of more than approximately 50 miles, the battery pack's energy storage eventually is depleted. This condition causes Lincvolt's Intelligent Dashboard to start up the micro-turbine and introduce more power to the battery pack. Cleanest power is generated when the Micro-Turbine burns bio-diesel or another renewable fuel and least expensive generation is directly from the Grid.

Battery efficiency is an extremely important part of any series hybrid system like Lincvolt's. Whether the power originates from the grid or the turbine, it must be efficiently stored. Some batteries can store a lot of power but do not like to get anywhere near totally depleted, resulting in a total of less usable power compared to the capacity. Some batteries can be almost depleted before a recharge is essential, yielding more usable power by using most of the battery capacity. All of these factors must be evaluated. Weight of the batteries is very important. So the lightest batteries with the most usable power are desirable, but safety is a consideration that supersedes all others.

We have been talking to numerous battery manufacturers, and our search is almost over. We will be ready to announce our new battery manufacturer soon. We have been researching and talking to companies from around the world to locate the best battery system for Lincvolt. Reliability, efficiency and safety are key ingredients for the Lincvolt choice.

Stay tuned. We will be announcing soon!

Thanks for your support - The Project Lincvolt Team.

PROJECT LINCVOLT PROGRESS 2011-LV2

The disastrous fire that almost destroyed LV1 has offered us an unbelievable opportunity to make improvements throughout the car in the LV2 version. These improvements will allow LV2 to boast superior performance and be even cleaner than LV1.

January and February have been busy months for the LincVolt project. We are restoring the body of LincVolt by carefully and selectively replacing damaged body parts in the original car. A 1958 donor car (a gift from my wife) with many identical parts is parked alongside LincVolt. Under the direction of famed California hot rod builder Roy Brizio (Brizio Street Rods) LincVolt's 1959 body is being painstakingly restored at Camilleri's Auto Works back to its original condition.

In LV2 the dashboard's original Lincoln Continental instrument cluster is being repurposed to monitor the functions of the new 200 KW electric drive and 30 KW Capstone Micro Turbine power generation systems. We found that the original Lincoln instrumentation layout was superior in user friendliness to the one we had installed in LV1. Now we have a chance to improve that.

We are also adding a midline control console in LV2 that runs between two new front bucket seats. The console will house an additional multi-purpose touch-screen control monitor.

We are in discussions with wall charger manufacturers. Soon we will be making our final choice. We are being very careful because the wall charger was most suspicious as a potential cause of the fire that destroyed LV1, although we are still awaiting more analysis to determine the exact cause. An identical charger was found responsible for the fire that destroyed a Canadian entry into the X-Prize.

Battery system technology has improved greatly during the last 4 years and continues to improve. We are dedicated to getting the best and safest batteries available today for LV2. We have found companies from the USA and Canada that offer battery packs that we think are superior to the Chinese batteries we utilized in LV1 and we expect a dramatic improvement.

The direction of our project remains the same. We believe it is more efficient to go with the flow than to go against the flow. People want big cars and will resist losing them as a choice. Re-powering the American Dream will not be an easy task. With each day that passes we are joined by more people who share our goal. We feel that new cars and the energy sources that power them should not just be aimed at "economy" and a "smaller is better" philosophy. North America is big and it needs big cars and pick-up trucks. These vehicles are on our roads everywhere and cannot just be written off as unrealistic. People need choice. People want big and small energy efficient cars and trucks as part of the American life style.

Fisker is one manufacturer going a long way in the direction we believe in. The GM Volt also represents a step forward for Detroit. Neither car offers freedom of choice in the fuel they run on like Lincvolt does, but we think they still are great cars even though they are powered by gasoline. When they are "plugged in" they provide cleaner transportation that costs less than a conventional car of the same size and they both have an electric range that meets today's average demands. Both the Volt and the Fisker have range extending generators that allow for long trips and eliminate electric car range anxiety. We think that is an important feature. It is one feature that many would find essential.

Where Lincvolt is unique, aside from the way the car looks, the emotions it stirs in the hearts of those who remember another time, or its immense size, is the choice of fuels it can burn to generate electricity. LV2 uses bio-diesel. It can use regular diesel or any blend of the two and burn the fuel cleanly in the onboard Capstone Micro Turbine. When the turbine burns Bio Diesel Lincvolt is twice as clean as the USA average grid per KW generated. This means LincVolt, an immense luxury cruiser from 1959, can run as clean as a 2011 Nissan Leaf and run further without "plug in" recharging.

We are planning to be on the road filming again with LV2 in late summer 2011. We will then complete our film, an immense 4 years in the making. Shakey Pictures post production and editing with Ben Johnson, son of the late Larry Johnson, original Project Lincvolt team member, has begun and the film is looking great. We have a story to tell.

To our sponsors and readers, thanks for your continued support.
-The Project LincVolt team.

PERSEVERANCE

December 11, 2010

Lincvolt Rebuild Underway

This is a long story about perseverance in the face of adversity. As Lincvolt rises Phoenix-like from the ashes, she still lives. The spirit of Lincvolt will not be stopped. The reason for Lincvolt's existence is still right in front of us and even more important with each passing day. We continue to compromise the earth's fragile defenses by building cars that are spewing Greenhouse gases.

Lincvolt will be the same car with new configuration of components, re-invigorated for the long road ahead.

This week Lincvolt will have the UQM prime mover and the Capstone Micro-Turbine removed and tested to make sure they are both in excellent shape. While the fire did not appear to harm either motor, both will be tested by their respective manufacturers while Lincvolt undergoes an extensive body rebuild in Sacramento California. Lincvolt's body will be completely straightened to new condition and primered before returning to Brizio Street Rods in South San Francisco in February, 2011. 475 hours of work are scheduled for this stage of the rebuild.

During this time, the other Lincvolt systems will be planned and purchased, many with improvements made possible by the extensive nature of the rebuild and the fresh start it provides. Every detail we have learned along the way will be taken into consideration while laying out the car's schematic. We will be openly sharing the schematic and its evolution here on the LV site.

We are now in discussion with a major Canadian Energy company to receive batteries for Lincvolt. The batteries, integrated with their new battery management system, will be mated with a Battery Charger by the manufacturer and delivered to us as a package. We will be announcing details and test results during these next 3 months.

The car interior will look different with a console running through the center and bucket seats for the driver and front passenger. The original Continental instrument cluster will be retained and customized to accommodate the electric instrumentation. This will retain the original look of the dashboard and controls.

One of the great things about this rebuild is the fact that it will all be done under the direction of Brizio Street Rods. Everything is being planned in advance. The wealth of our experiences, good and bad, will be applied in every way possible.

Driving tests are anticipated for the summer of 2011.

Stay Tuned for updates. Our web camera will be back.

Thank you from the Lincvolt team.

For Immediate Release

NEIL YOUNG'S LINCVOLT SURVIVES WAREHOUSE FIRE

November 16, 2010 -- (Burbank, CA) - Reprise recording artist Neil Young releases this statement to the media today: We are thankful that no one was hurt in the fire at our warehouse last week. My wife Pegi and I would like to thank the Belmont-San Carlos Fire Dept for doing such an exemplary job. A lot of archival items were threatened and the fire department did a first class job protecting them. We are lucky to have these professionals in our area. Rest assured that we have the very best fire rescue and protection with the Belmont-San Carlos Fire Dept.

However LincVolt suffered a disastrous accidental fire stemming from human error. The car was plugged in to charge and left unattended. The wall charging system was not completely tested and had never been left unattended. A mistake was made. It was not the fault of the car.

So now we pick up the pieces.

We are rebuilding. The reason we started this project has not changed. As a nation we are still excessively burning fossil fuels, doing damage to our planet that will hurt our children's lives and future generations as well. Our project is to demonstrate alternative energies for transportation that are clean. We're still in a race against time. On a project like this, setbacks happen for a reason and we can see that very well from here. "Barn's burnt down. Now I can see the moon".

LincVolt was presented well at SEMA less than a week before the fire. We are glad we have a film of that to share.

Additional films and footage here. She was just about to emerge into the world to show what she could do. LV is smart for a car, as she likes to say in her blog.

Now she's back in her staging area and pieces are being assembled. We have done this before and know much more now. Our accumulated knowledge will help this process. We have a solid committed team. This is an opportunity.

Our rebuilding LincVolt at Brizio's is beginning now. We have already started the preparation process.

Cleaning LV continues in preparation for bead blasting her down to bare metal. Once that is done we will be ready to begin the build. LV will be built using parts from two other Lincoln Continentals.

My lovely wife gave me a parts car just like LincVolt for my 65th birthday a couple of days ago. This donor car, which we have nicknamed "Miss Pegi" in her honor, will roll in and park alongside LincVolt today, at the staging area. Parts will be contributed from Miss Pegi and placed on trays for assemblage. Miss Pegi is a 1958 model with the same metal as a 1959 in the areas that need replacing. The Uni-Body construction will enable replacement of panels warped from the heat of the fire. Miss Pegi is in perfect shape to contribute these large body parts. Quarter panels will be removed and readied for re-introduction into LV's timeless form. Even as injured as LV appears, beauty shines through.

Another car, a 1959 model, will be used to harvest detail parts that are unique to LV. In this way, old forgotten cars get a chance to live again in the timeless beauty of LV, re-powered and ready for the future with "GREEN CHARGING."

We are in talks with a Canadian battery supplier and have most of the control components for the rest of the car in house or on order.

The Capstone Micro-Turbine and its engine compartment under the hood appear to be totally intact and undamaged. The UQM prime mover under the former rear seat also looks to be uninjured. Testing will be done to confirm this is correct. The underbody of the car appears to be essentially unchanged. The engines are both made in the USA. These are encouraging signs.

LV is ready for the next chapter, and the next ride. The mission unchanged.

Stay tuned.

Neil Young

Nov 16, 2010

For further Neil Young information, contact Rick Gershon at Warner Bros. Records Publicity 818-953-3473 / rick.gershon@wbr.com

www.neilyoung.com

www.lincvolt.com

For Immediate Release, November 10, 2010

NEIL YOUNG DELIVERS KEYNOTE SPEECH AT SEMA SHOW
IN LAS VEGAS

SEMA INVITES LEGENDARY ROCKER AND ACTIVIST TO PRESENT HIS ELECTRIC LINCVOLT CAR BUILT TO RUN ON CLEAN ENERGY

DATELINE -- Burbank, CA -- Neil Young attended the SEMA Show in Las Vegas this week to present his Lincvolt car and deliver the keynote speech about his green-minded ideas for automotive technology.

Lincvolt is the world's first Micro-Turbine powered Bio-Electro-Cruiser. Designed in 1959 to make long distance trips and local commutes in style and grace, this timeless, beautiful and spacious Electro-Turbine Series-Hybrid now draws its power from a multi-fueled Capstone Micro-turbine generator, a UQM 150KW prime mover and super-safe Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries.

In 2008, Young assembled a team to modify his 1959 Lincoln Continental to enable it to run on electricity. The goal was to inspire a generation by creating a clean automobile propulsion technology that serves the needs of the 21st century, reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a new low while delivering performance that is a reflection of the driver's spirit. By creating and demonstrating this new clean power technology, Lincvolt hopes to show a way to reduce the demand for petro-fuels enough to eliminate the need for war over energy supplies, thereby enhancing the security of the USA and other nations throughout the world.

A few interesting facts about the Lincvolt:

• Lincvolt, a 1959 Lincoln Continental Convertible weighing 6200 lbs, now converted to an electric series hybrid, can be cleaner than the cleanest hybrid.
• Lincvolt's micro-turbine generator gives the driver "FREEDOM of CHOICE". Freedom to choose the fuel you use to charge the battery bank. You decide how green you want to be.
• Choose from these sources :
  -100% Bio Diesel in the turbine generator to charge (Green Charging)
  -Plugging into the USA Electrical Grid to charge (Most Economical)
  -Petro-Diesel fuel in the turbine generator to charge (Convenient)
  -Any blend of the above.
• The Pure Bio-Diesel Fuel choice, called "Green Charging" is the cleanest. "Green Charging" is even cleaner than plugging into the Grid.
• Lincvolt, with a 50 mile all-electric commuting range and a 400-mile extended range, proves that a plug-in Electro-Turbine Series-Hybrid and "Green Charging" can deliver the driving spirit of a full size highway cruiser, while achieving lower emissions than the best hybrid in either long range or commuter range.
• Lincvolt, as an all-electric commuter car, charging from the USA power grid, can be more economical than most conventional hybrid vehicles.

The SEMA Show is the premier automotive specialty products trade event in the world, drawing more than 100,000 industry leaders from more than 100 countries for unlimited profit opportunities in the automotive, truck and SUV, and RV markets.

Young's keynote address was filmed and is available here: Lincvolt at SEMA (full length version).

Just added:

Lincvolt Damaged in Warehouse Fire

My wife Pegi and I would like to thank the Belmont-San Carlos Fire Dept for doing such an exemplary job at our recent warehouse fire. A lot of archival items were threatened and the fire department did a first class job protecting them. We are lucky to have these professionals in our area.

We are thankful that no one was hurt in the fire. Rest assured that we have the very best fire rescue and protection in San Carlos and Belmont.

Lincvolt was severely damaged in the fire. We are still investigating the exact cause although it appears to be an operator error that occurred in an untested part of the charging system.

We do know that the car has been operating perfectly for almost 2 thousand miles and the system in question would not be in use while driving the car. We are investigating the components involved with plug-in charging.

It is interesting to note that all of the components except the battery systems in Lincvolt are made in the USA. The only components we could not get domestically were the batteries and battery associated systems. We are still looking for a domestic source.

There is a computer in Lincvolt. It may function like a "black box." It may be useful for gathering data. We will be removing it today and sending it to Lincvolt team member Perrone Robotics.

While this is a setback for us we are planning ways to continue. We will begin cleaning and inspecting Lincvolt today.

We had just returned from Las Vegas where we did a presentation of Lincvolt at SEMA. We made a 4-part film of the presentation there that was originally to be released on the day of the fire.

Part 1 is now available and parts 2, 3 and 4 will be posted in the next 24 hours.

For more about the Lincvolt, please visit www.lincvolt.com.

www.neilyoung.com

For further Neil Young information, contact Rick Gershon at Warner Bros. Records Publicity: 818-953-3473 / rick.gershon@wbr.com

FROM LAS VEGAS

By The Passenger

November 7, 2010

We're sitting in a booth at Zingos Cafe in Bakersfield, California - the driver and me. Working through hot links and eggs watching the locals pour in for breakfast - cowboys and businessmen, moms and entrepreneurs. Lincvolt's in her trailer heading back to San Francisco. We're going there too but first, sustenance. A couple works its way across the parking lot - walking with no joints moving except for knees and ankles - stiff but in no apparent pain. Bee-lining it to Zingo's.

I mull over the past few days at SEMA (Specialty Equipment Market Association) - the biggest automobile expo imaginable. That's where our Lincvolt journey took us this time out. And we were in good company rubbing shoulders with the best of the 100+ MPG vehicles from the Automotive X Prize; the graduate students in the Clemson University ICAR Deep Orange project; the guys at Watt-Shocks who have designed regenerative shocks that create electricity as vehicles go through a normal range of motion; electric motorcycle manufacturers and racers; Dr. Zupcic and his amazing hydrogen SUV. All of them yearning for the same thing we are - a world free of oil addiction.

I had no idea what to expect on the way to Vegas. We rolled in from the mountains up highway 15 through the longest line of headlights I've ever seen. The election was looming and I felt the whole future of alternative fuel was in jeopardy. A lot of people still think global warming is just an opinion. Nevada Senator Harry Reid - one of the good champions - looked like he was in trouble. The whole scene was surreal. And the Giants were marching through the World Series. I was scared and invigorated all at once - like we were standing on the edge of oblivion but everything was still right there within' our reach.

At the exposition the driver stood tall in front of a spartan audience of automotive movers. He shared his passion - his Lincvolt dream - his fierce belief that we can change things through positive outreach and singular actions. To me he was Sir Galahad in seersucker, giving light and marking the beginning of the end of the internal combustion engine. LV stood by shining like a white vision in a feel good dream.

We delivered the message. Celebrated, first the Giants and then Harry Reid's and then Jerry Brown's victories. We shook hands and shared stories with a lot of people who feel the same as us - we can do this.

Back at Zingos Cafe, the driver and I settle up our bill. We're filled with the wonder of possibility. Content in knowing for certain that doing something, anything is way better than doing nothing at all. And we are glad to be back in California. Governor Jerry Brown's California. The move forward will start here. We feel it. Proud that we're already planted firmly in the future.

JUMPSTARTING THE REAL ELECTRIC CAR REVOLUTION

by Dr. Winfried Wilcke, IBM Research, huffingtonpost.com, October 24, 2010

GM's Volt. Tesla's Roadster. Nissan's Leaf. The era of the electric car is finally arriving, when we can depend on plentiful and cheap electricity to get us to where we want to go, rather than relying on increasingly expensive and scarce oil.

As exciting as this new auto age is, though, all you have to do is study the numbers to realize we're still taking baby steps. The Tesla Roadster gets around 200 miles between recharges, but it also costs $129,000. The Volt and Leaf are more affordable, but only get around 40 miles and 100 miles respectively per charge. For most Americans, these mileage and price limitations are deal breakers. Rather than a mass-market replacement for the family car, the first generation of electric cars is an interesting innovation for early adaptors.

The real electric car revolution won't happen until we solve questions about range, how to recharge them and make cars that everyone can afford.

At IBM, one way we're tackling these challenges is the ambitious Battery 500 Project. The goal? Develop lightweight, rechargeable batteries that can power cars for 500 miles without being recharged and that don't break the bank either.

With the Battery 500 Project, we're completely rethinking the power source for the electric car. The current generation of electric cars runs on lithium ion batteries, the kind of batteries that power laptops or iPhones.

Manufacturers are slowly improving the performance and reducing the costs of lithium ion batteries. But these batteries are still too heavy and expensive for electric vehicle cars to go mainstream. When it comes to energy density - the amount of power a battery can deliver for its size and weight - even lithium ion batteries are pipsqueaks compared to a tank of gasoline.

So researchers around the world are working on new chemistries such as Metal-air batteries. These batteries already power millions of very small devices. The challenge is to make them rechargeable and big enough for cars. Metal-air batteries have much higher energy densities than lithium-ion batteries -- which could translate into 500 miles of range per charge using a reasonably sized and hopefully affordable battery. But make no mistake, this may be as big a technical challenge as the moon landing once was. We are making good progress in our laboratories. This is only our second year of work on Lithium/Air batteries at IBM Research, yet we're getting cautiously optimistic and expect to show a large laboratory prototype within the next two years.

The pay-off, if successful, could transform economies and have major impact on our oil use because 70 percent of all oil used in the United States is burned in cars and trucks, whereas virtually no oil is being used in generating electricity.

Cheaper, lighter car batteries, though, are just one part of the equation. For electric vehicles to proliferate, we also have to have a system for charging them.

The good news is that a powerful 600 gigawatt electrical grid is already in place and for the next few years, the grid can easily handle electric cars. But the long term presents challenges.

The current model of gasoline cars, where one drives up to a station and leaves a few minutes later with enough gasoline aboard to drive several hundred miles, cannot be transferred to electric cars. It would take a huge, multi-megawatt power-line to do an equivalent feat for an electric car. But there is an alternative: 54 percent of all U.S. households have access to a garage where a slow, low-cost overnight charge is feasible. Combined with a long range battery, this will provide a user friendly experience, and the electric grid needs to be only mildly upgraded for at-home charging since the demand for electricity at night is so low.

For the remainder of the population it will be necessary to install new charging stations - at work, shopping malls and parking lots. But higher stress on the grid during the day could make this difficult, expensive and restrict driving ranges. Smarter management of grids will help to deal with these issues. Fortunately, time is on our side.

America pioneered the car culture, but it must change significantly over the next two decades. Now we have the opportunity to stake out a new future for the automobile that will improve our lives, create new industries, reduce dependency on oil and improve the lives of people around the world. It is one of the biggest opportunities of our lifetime - let's make good use of it.

SEMA PREVIEW: NEIL YOUNG'S LINCVOLT WILL BE READY FOR ITS CLOSE-UP

by Sebastian Blanco, green.autoblog.com, October 21, 2010

If you've been hankering to get a good look at Neil Young's LincVolt behemoth, you'd best make plans to get to SEMA in a few weeks. We got word today that the 1959 Lincoln Continental convertible with a brand new biodiesel and battery-based powertrain - and young Neil himself - will make an appearance at the specialty show. Young is scheduled to take part in a vehicle technology panel with Jim Campbell, vice president of General Motors Performance Vehicles and Motorsports, the Automotive X Prize's Peter Diamandis, Scott Atherton from the American Le Mans Series, Azhar Hussain from TTXGP eGrandPrix, Imtiaz Haque from Clemson University CU-ICAR, Patrick Reininger from R. L. Polk, and Bryan Krulikowski from Morpace.

It'll be interesting to see if Young and Diamandis talk about the past, considering that Young and his team dropped out of the X-Prize in mid-2009. It seemed to be an amicable split, since the LincVolt team said it was focused on the main goal of getting the car finished and didn't have the problems with the competition the way some others did. "We have always been in a race against Time," the LincVolt webpage said at the time, "not a race against other contestants to win a cash prize."

HOME

We glided into Wixom Michigan. Home to the legendary plant where Ford built some the greatest nameplates ever for 50 years. From 1957 to 2007 proud Ford workers kept the lines moving and nearly 7 million Lincolns, Thunderbirds and Ford GT's rolled out onto the open road. Back in the day over 5000 people worked here. People who built the American dream. Now Wixom sits empty.

Lincvolt was born in the Wixom Plant. She was the pride of the fleet. When the men who meet us at the security gate laid eyes on her their chests expanded. These men bleed Ford blue. It was love at first site. We spent two days with our new friends. They treated LV like a long lost child come home at last. They helped us at every turn and in the end, when we finished filming, they misted up at the parting. We all did.

Once we wrapped in Wixom the Lincvolt team scattered. The shooter and the fixer headed back to California. Lincvolt was loaded into her trailer for the journey back to Roy Brizio's Shop in South San Francisco. She'd come back to her roots at the old Ford factory and she met the leaders of the new Ford in Detroit - good men with vision. She was happy and so were we.

The driver and I charted a course back to our roots. Back to Ontario. Much better for this journey through Lincvolt's past. We set out on our own. But as we turned to wave goodbye I felt the spirit of thanks rush over me. Partly for what we'd just come through and partly because it's Thanksgiving in Canada and, just like Lincvolt. we were going home.

Happy Thanksgiving friends.

LINCVOLT VISITS FORD

GREAT LAKES CRUISE

Wisconsin - The Farm. It's pretty clear by now - we really need to give farmers all the support we can. So please buy the good food they grow. The farmers who help feed my family have become friends through the years. And I can't help but feel that it might be their ancient skills that save our sorry high-tech, high-consumption, factory-farm-fed fat asses.

Mid-day - the Lincvolt team eases into a driveabout. South at first, down the western shoreline of Lake Michigan. Then east on what started out as a Chicago Sunday drive through. At a systems check we meet a guy in the street who calls Lincvolt "peanut butter over cream." I think she's flattered by his mellow tones.

It's right there on windy city's south side - while staring into the traffic choked street of mostly one-passenger cars - that I'm filled with the familiar but overwhelming certainty that we have got to change - fundamentally and quickly.

Our pace quickens on the ride into Michigan. Lincvolt's determined and driven. Like a salmon running upstream. Relentless in her flight. Our course is set on Motown - still mighty to me. Magic even. Detroit used to build dreams. Lincvolt stands in shining proof of the power of those dreams.

She was born at the Wixom plant. 52 years ago. Now LV's come full circle. Reborn, repurposed, redefined. The past, present and future all rolled into one big white package - peanut butter over cream. But I'm older than her by a decade. Born in a black and white world and I feel the grains of timesand rushing through the portal. There's much work to be done.

We'll reach our destination in the morning. In the crisp dark of the Michigan night I spirit walk. Home to my wife and my children - I float above them and look for a long time into their sweet faces. Soft, sleep, breathing.

We gotta change.

HURDLES

by The Passenger, October 2, 2010

The leg begins in Bowling Green in the morning. Home of the Vette - one of the world's great cars. The fixer's eating breakfast in the Kentucky morning sun. He's got a list of items that require action. The Lincvolt Team is pretty well tuned now. Long days on the road necessitate regime. The shooter repositions cameras. The driver checks out the car and finishes a coffee. Lincvolt is straining - like a thoroughbred - we can all feel her deep need to run.

A speedometer anomaly popped up on our last drive. The fixer's on it. There's new software to download too. Soon we roll. Kentucky countryside drifts past. Fields that can grow bio fuel - many soon will.

Sunset's a beauty. For the first time we can feel autumn air. It's cool against our faces. Lincvolt stretches out. We run smooth into the wind through hardwoods and farms; villages and towns; cities and empty spaces - straight north.

It's dark when the headlights first flicker. A 12 volt system glitch puts us roadside for repair. The trooper who stops to see if we're okay walks around the car smiling. Then he speaks up, "I have never seen anything like this." We answer all his questions. He grows more involved. The fixer makes things right and just before we roll the trooper shakes hands all around and speaks again, "One of two things will happen here. Either you will be legends to garage mechanics everywhere or y'alls lives will be in danger from the Big 3." We wave goodbye.

Later in the deep dark somewhere in Indiana Lincvolt comes about abruptly - a full bore u-turn and hard right into a parking lot. There she sits face to face with a cop car - a Nash cop car. Just like the one that pulled her over 50 years ago in the summer of 1960. And like long lost friends with many road tales to tell they sit grill-to-grill as the crickets turn up the night sounds.

Next day: we're getting set to cruise into Wisconsin. Beautiful farms all around us. Just before we roll I set the driver's iPad onto the rear deck of the car. Then distraction sets in and we roll. 15 miles later we stop for a wheel check. The driver finds the iPad. 15 miles and it was still there. Twists, turns, railroad tracks and it was still there right where I set it on the rear deck - outside. The driver got behind the wheel looked over and said, "You're a lucky man." Then he laughed and we rolled again. I fought down the adrenaline, thought about the whole scene and from way down inside I felt Lincvolt's heart beating. She kept that iPad right there. She had my back. I have hers. I smiled inside. The driver's right. I am.

AFTER THE GULF

by The Passenger, September 29, 2010

Show's done. We slip out of Pensacola in this shiny fine machine. Wheel covers polished. Top up - the air is cool. The Gulf part's over. Florida neon pools on the road ahead. That's the direction that feels best - ahead.

We drift out past the lighthouse, past the lights - running silent, turbine standing by. The numbers are all good. Our cells are strong. A car filled with family, warm. Back at a roadside bbq we lived a piece of the dream. All of us were there. Fathers and sons and brothers and comrades on a quest - sharing around the campfire - just like it's always been driving through America. Our laughter hung low from the forest canopy. And we remembered one who started but won't finish this journey. We miss our friend.

We came to the Gulf to learn about what happened here. And to talk. We found warm hearts eager to share story and experience. Much of what we heard was hard. People are afraid. Of the fish. Of the water. Of what's next. Many stuck in hard places - paid to help clean-up, obligated to secrecy because of that. Afraid of what they know and what they've seen. Of the aftermath. Planes kept spraying at the end. Unprecedented levels of chemical dispersant. Saturation that took everything dirty to the bottom of the Gulf.

From the dunes it all looks real good. But it isn't. People are getting sick. And if the next hurricane hits just right, all that nasty oily shit down there is going to blow right up onto these beautiful shores.

There's consensus in the cockpit of Lincvolt after The Gulf. We are filled with hope that The President will hold those responsible accountable. That there will be no corporate weaselry tolerated this time. The people down here deserve nothing short of what's right - not for BP, not for the economy but for them.

We're glad we came. Hopeful our deep respect for the people of the Gulf showed. We needed to help. To feed some hungry people and to demonstrate that possibility is an option. This car - no oil required - cruising into the hills of Alabama is both a possibility and an option.

The driver sets a course north. Onboard navigation is loaded. Turbine-fired we're taking her right up the middle. To the heartland.

Lincvolt Chronicles #1

HAUNTING QUESTIONS

September 29, 2010

Why do we hear stories from the Gulf of Mexico that we have never heard on National TV news? Why do we hear about chemical dispersants from aircraft in the night? Why do we hear from citizens who are so upset? The ones living on the Gulf of Mexico shores who voted for president Barack Obama, believing in change?

Why do they tell these horror stories? WHY ARE THEY WORRIED SICK ABOUT WHAT IS ON THE OCEAN FLOOR? WHY ARE THEY SO SCARED about what is coming with the next hurricane? Why do they dread the streets of Mobile covered in oil? Why will they now not eat the fish from the Gulf of Mexico without very carefully inspecting each one? Why do they say they are so scared?

These are the haunting questions that come to us from our interviews in our visit to the Gulf of Mexico in the wake of the BP oil disaster. Why do residents on the coast hate the BP commercials so strongly?

NIGHT RIDE

by The Passenger, September 27, 2010

We roll out into the southern night sometime after midnight in the wake of the Harvest Moon. A clean getaway. Deep South night air warm, thick, on you - blue light from stars and moon and the rich scent of sandalwood and sea mixed with delta and decay and soil making - it's primal here. And we're rolling in this wondrous car - family and friends together on a night ride that feels like we're floating. No engine noise, no fumes, no need to stop for gas - we're free like sailors only on land with southern breeze blowing our hair straight back, content and secure in the knowledge that we're making this journey together.

We roll out into the countryside past giant malls and good American homes where air conditioners are cranked and pools pumps are churning - cars and trucks filling driveways - we roll out beyond. To where there's no more ambient light. It's just us in this dream car floating over fields of stars and laughing.

The Driver hits the turbine and she (the car is definitely female) fires up for some power generation - the numbers on the screen tell us things we need to know in a language we're starting to understand. Bus volts, cell temps., turbine rpm (all 86,000 of them), output.

She's educating us on her needs - how to charge her, how to keep her that way on the open road, how to cruise the future - she's smart. And she's loved - The Driver loves her, I love her, we all love her. People we pass in the night wave and honk and yelp when they see her. They love her too.

We hit a stretch that runs beside an empty beach along the Gulf of Mexico -glistening silver this night - through fishing towns where boats have been idled. BP's oil mess has really hurt these people. No-one wants to eat their catch. No one came to walk their beautiful beaches. Good people are going broke here. They’ve been whacked in the gut first by successive hurricanes – stronger and more destructive than any before then by an oil spill catastrophe that dwarfs all others. Good people hurting. We don't talk much.

But the beauty and the open road swirl around us. By and by we come to feel free - for now anyway. Love-filled, bio-fueled, powered by the conviction that we can help make some difference. Comforted in knowing that we could just roll on forever - travelers living the good old days right now in this big beautiful American classic being embraced by the sweet southern night air - and that would be fine with me.

LINCVOLT ROCKS SEMINOLE HARD ROCK

September 25, 2010

As she loves to say on her Blog, LV is smart for a car. She was looking very good at the Seminole Hard Rock when the Hard Rock celebrated her "coming out" with a press conference on the Harvest moon, September 23. Many of our great sponsors were there. Hard Rock is the sole platinum sponsor, but we sure appreciate all the help we are getting from each one of our sponsors.

Next for LV is the Farmaid concert in Milwaukee on October 2. The car will be shown on the concourse. Then we plan to go to Detroit to visit the plant where Lincvolt was built in 1959 as a Lincoln Continental convertible. Following that LV will be trucked back to South San Francisco where refinements to the Capstone Turbine system will be implemented with a prototype water cooling system, allowing us to boost the output of the turbine by 10 KW. This work will be followed by the install of LV's new computer automated fuel management system, allowing an initial start-up on Petro-Diesel, quickly followed by an automated switch to Bio-Diesel as the main fuel as soon as the turbine is at running temperature. The Lincvolt Fuel Management System will heat fuel tanks and lines to enable LV to use renewable fuel in cold climates.

Stay tuned...

HARD ROCK SPONSORS LINCVOLT

September 7, 2010

Hard Rock Cafe is our newest and biggest sponsor and things are going great for the Lincvolt project. Thanks "Hard Rock"! Here is what we are doing now:

Paul Perrone and the Perrone Robotics team are at Brizio's this week to tune in the software for Lincvolt's trip along the Gulf of Mexico. Lincvolt is going for test-drives regularly as the departure date approaches. Today the electro-cruiser traveled 45 miles and still had lots of power left in the batteries. The car performed very well, running smoothly and quietly in commuter mode on battery power alone. This next week we will be testing the Capstone Micro Turbine generator while underway. The generator will allow us to extend range up to 400 miles.

Ben Young was onboard for a test-drive on Monday, and Pegi Young was onboard on Saturday as a navigator and data keeper. The whole Lincvolt family is beginning to taste success and all of our hard work over the last three years is finally beginning to pay off. Team member Will Mitchell has been onboard for every trip and is doing a great job for the project, monitoring the initial charge cycles and keeping data. It is getting down to the wire and the excitement is building.

We want to thank you for reading and following along on our many adventures and misadventures. We are sure that the many hard-core followers of Lincvolt are enjoying the ride.

Lincvolt continues to speak out in her blog. She is getting quite vocal and as she often says, she is smart for a car.

The Brizio's team has been doing an excellent job. They strive for success and perfection and never like to do anything twice. The energy of Steve Lord, Roy Brizio and the whole team at Brizio's for our project has been really inspirational and as the deadline approaches we see the quality of the workmanship paying off big time.

Richard Hilleman, whose beautiful electro turbine car "Blackbird" has been a major and defining influence on our project, continues to supply unbelievable support and knowledge as we integrate the Capstone Microturbine.

Riding in Lincvolt today is like a dream. It has been a long time coming and we are making such huge progress! This is a really special car, bound to be an inspiration to all of those who see her. Maybe we can make a difference in helping to show the clean and green way for the future of big luxury cruisers and pick up trucks.

We look forward to meeting our newest and largest sponsors, "Hard Rock Cafe" in Florida and speaking about Lincvolt and all of our great sponsors, including Oracle and Capstone, at a special Lincvolt event at the Hard Rock in Hollywood Florida on September 23rd. We are so thankful for their encouragement and support. It has made all the difference. Stay tuned.

LINCVOLT VISITS CAPSTONE

Thursday August 26th Lincvolt will be visiting Capstone for a few days, attending a press event and being viewed by shareholders. At that time the Capstone Turbine will be started for the first time in Lincvolt. Testing will be done to ensure that the installation has been successful in all respects. Over the weekend, more testing of cooling systems will take place and late Sunday Lincvolt is scheduled to return to Brizio's in South San Francisco for drive testing, installation of more software, and refinement of the bio-fuel control system.

We will be keeping our web-cam active over the trip so look for us at Capstone tomorrow in Los Angeles. Thanks for your support. Stay tuned.

LINCVOLT THANKS CAPSTONE

August 18, 2010

Lincvolt's Capstone Turbine is the primary difference between Lincvolt technology and the Chevy Volt or Fisker technologies. While the GM car and the Fisker use gasoline and pollute the atmosphere just like any conventional car, the Capstone Turbine has been instrumental in helping us create a clean and green full sized car. Lincvolt is demonstrating that today's big pickup trucks and SUVs can actually be better for the environment than a Prius or similar hybrid on the road today. Through the use of our Capstone turbine generator, UQM 150 KW electric motor and Lithium Iron Oxide battery pack, we are proving that we are cleaner and greener, with less greenhouse gas emissions and NOX emissions than any gasoline powered car getting less than 80 mpg.

Capstone is one of our primary sponsors and we appreciate the support the company is making available to us. Capstone has seen the benefits of their turbines to the environment and views our use of the Capstone Turbine as a good example of the potential for those benefits in transportation.

We will be using biodiesel as the fuel in Lincvolt's Capstone Turbine. Biodiesel can help meet national goals for the net reduction of atmospheric carbon. As a renewable fuel derived from organic materials, biodiesel and blends of biodiesel reduce the net amount of carbon dioxide in the biosphere. A study by the US Department of Energy has found that biodiesel production and use, in comparison to petroleum diesel, produces 78.5% less CO2 emissions. Carbon dioxide is "taken up" by the annual production of crops such as soybeans and then released when vegetable oil based biodiesel is combusted. This makes biodiesel the best fuel currently available for heavy-duty diesel applications to reduce atmospheric carbon.

Capstone's turbine design takes full advantage of the opportunity bio diesel provides and the clean burning Capstone C 30 Turbine also greatly reduces NOX in the atmosphere, reducing smog in the air we breath as well as greenhouse gases that threaten the stability of our way of life.

Come and see Lincvolt and the Capstone Turbine at SEMA in Las Vegas in November and at FARMAID in Milwaukee in November. The Lincvolt team thanks Capstone Turbines for their support as we pursue our mission.

BAY AREA TO INSTALL OVER 5,000 EV CHARGING STATIONS

by Candace Lombardi, cnet.com, August 11, 2010

The San Francisco Bay Area is set to receive $5 million to install charging stations for electric vehicles throughout the area, the Department of Energy announced Wednesday.

The $5 million will cover the installation of 50 fast-charging EV stations along highways, 2,000 public stations for public parking lots and participating company-owned parking lots, and 3,000 residential charging stations.

Approval for the funds came through last week from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District Board of Directors, a panel that oversees air quality concerns for the nine counties that make up the Bay Area. The funds will be distributed as grant money as part of its "Spare the Air" program.

"In the Bay Area, the transportation sector accounts for more than 50 percent of air pollution. Significant emission reductions from the transportation sector will help the Bay Area attain and maintain state and national air quality standards," the board said in a statement.

The announcement is something of a milestone for the region when one considers that as recently as February 2009 it was big news that the city of San Francisco was installing just three EV charging stations as part of a pilot project.

But the infrastructure change does follow an ambition plan that was set forth two years ago by three area mayors.

In November 2008, the mayors of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose publicly announced that they were setting a goal to make the Bay Area the electric vehicle capital of the U.S.

Installing thousands of stations was not on the list at that point. Instead their nine-point plant toward reaching their EV capital vision included establishing EV station standards, and "identifying a roll-out plan" for those stations.

LINCVOLT COMMUNICATIONS TEST #1

July 25, 2010

Tonight we conducted the first test of some new communication technology that we hope to integrate into Lincvolt. Our test site was somewhere on the TransCanada Hwy, near the Saskatchewan/Manitoba border.

As predicted in a previous Gazette article, there were flaws and interruptions in our test. Perhaps some of you readers watched this in real-time on the Lincvolt Ustream channel.

This new technology is based on utilizing and optimizing cell networks and one thing we know that will be paramount to streaming data and video from Lincvolt is strong and constant cell coverage.

Unfortunately, during tonight's first run, our test vehicle was in an area of extremely poor coverage. Only one of the available cell providers in the area was passing traffic and it's capacity was severely restrained.

Perhaps ok if you were a traveller who needed to make a phone call, but virtually unusable if one required Web access.

Some backdoor adjustments finally got us on the air for a brief time under what turned out to be the most challenging of test environments.

Under the light of the full moon, viewers got a glimpse of the road passing beneath our wheels. We then concluded broadcasting for the night.

Expect more tests this week and further explanation of the technology at work. Look for announcements here and on the Lincvolt Facebook page for the times of the tests and live transmissions.

LINCVOLT COMMUNICATIONS TEST

July 21, 2010

We plan to test Lincvolt communications during the next few days from the road in Canada. This will be the first test of our new communications system. Communications and webcast tests will be from an alternate test vehicle in varying locations. Tests will be seen on our U-Stream Lincvolt channel. We will describe the technology during the tests.

We will keep you informed and updated on the times of the tests. Announcements will also be made on the Lincvolt Facebook page so all of LV's friends can come along for the ride. As usual, we will not be preparing in advance. That means you will be seeing a test, which may have flaws and interruptions. We will all see this test together and you can watch us improve our system over the next 2 months as we prepare for the Lincvolt North American Tour.

In a stroke of genius, we have decided not to announce the date of the Lincvolt North American Tour at this time because we have never met a deadline in our three-year history. Stay tuned.

WILL IT FIT?

July 16, 2010

Fitting the turbine into the engine compartment will be a big focus during this next week. We will try different approaches until we find the right one. Steve Lord of Brizio's is leading this effort.

I must admit, seeing that turbine in place today, hanging off the crane, was a real positive feeling. It just looked right. I think our long journey has come to a good place now: Clean emissions from the Capstone turbine and renewable domestic bio-fuel. The big question is "where are we going to put the turbine control package" It is big and we are going to be tight. Keep watching us, as we find a way./NY

STILL ON GASOLINE?

July 5, 2010

It seems impossible that a gallon of gasoline, which weighs about 6.3 pounds, could produce 20 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) when burned. However, most of the weight of the CO2 doesn't come from the gasoline itself, but the oxygen in the air.

When gasoline burns, the carbon and hydrogen separate. The hydrogen combines with oxygen to form water (H2O), and carbon combines with oxygen to form carbon dioxide (CO2).

A carbon atom has a weight of 12, and each oxygen atom has a weight of 16, giving each single molecule of CO2 an atomic weight of 44 (12 from carbon and 32 from oxygen).

Therefore, to calculate the amount of CO2 produced from a gallon of gasoline, the weight of the carbon in the gasoline is multiplied by 44/12 or 3.7.

Since gasoline is about 87% carbon and 13% hydrogen by weight, the carbon in a gallon of gasoline weighs 5.5 pounds (6.3 lbs. x .87).

We can then multiply the weight of the carbon (5.5 pounds) by 3.7, which equals 20 pounds of CO2! Source of this information: www.fueleconomy.gov

CO2 is the Greenhouse gas that is killing the planet slowly.

Still on Gasoline? Time to try another fuel folks.

LINCVOLT RETURNS!

July 2, 2010

Lincvolt will be back at Brizio Street Rods in South San Francisco on Tuesday for a month of installation and testing of the Capstone Turbine. All parts are in place and we will keep you posted.

Thanks for your support!

LINCVOLT CAR CARRIER MAKES UNEXPECTED DETOUR!

June 30, 2010

Minneapolis? Yes that's where LV is today. An unannounced and surprising detour to that city was discovered yesterday when the car carrier failed to arrive on time at Brizio's in South San Francisco. There were apparently brake problems with the carrier. The driver elected to go home and think it over for a few days. LV now expected Tuesday or Wednesday of next week in South San Francisco. Schedule has been adjusted.

Team not thrilled with this new development. Turbine to be delivered to Brizio's at the end of this week. Stay tuned.

THANK YOU VIRGINIA TEAM

June 27, 2010

Lincvolt would like to thank the folks in Virginia and other companies listed here for doing such a great job building a strong foundation for the future and making Lncvolt so intelligent and robust! Lincvolt is now on the way back to California for her turbine installation. We could not have done this on time and so well without your help! Thank you very much from the whole Lincvolt team!

• Paul Perrone of Perrone Robotics managed and co-ordinated project activity in Virginia. He also designed the system architecture and software implementation of the LID system. Paul performed systems engineering work on UQM configuration. Thanks Paul!
  
  
• Sean Nitchmann (EC Linc), performed all wiring activity, ruggedized wiring for LID components and installed new emergency switches and cabling. Thanks Sean for giving us all your energy and helping bring the job in on time.
  
  
• Brian Geiger and Jim Ryan of Perrone Robotics provided LID hardware, software, and robotics/automation expertise. Thanks to both of you for helping us bring it in on time.
  
  
• QNX, a company that provides real-time operating systems, provided their OS to LincVolt free of charge. Thanks very much QNX.
  
  
• Atego provided a real-time Java virtual machine (a.k.a. "Perc") to run on QNX and also provided their Java system free of charge. Rhoda Quate helped us tremendously here. Thanks Rhoda!
  
  
• Jonathon Tillack of Key-Square rapidly pulled together a fast booting embedded computer upon which we run our LincVolt control software processes and helped integrate the QNX and "Perc" solution onto an embedded computer providing us fast boot and reliability. Thanks for your great work. We appreciate it very much.
  
  
• The Comtrol company provided us with an industrial Ethernet switch, industrial Ethernet-serial, and industrial Ethernet-USB devices for free! Thanks Comtrol for your generous contribution to the Lincvolt project.
  
  
• Oracle/Sun Microsystems funded the software development time for creating the controller software based on their Java platform. Thank you for your continued support and sponsorship. Oracle/Sun Microsystems support has been behind the Lincvolt project for 2 years now. We really appreciate this vote of confidence!

The Lincvolt team thanks all of the above for supporting us and enabling us to stay on schedule to make our trip across the USA this Fall!
Stay tuned.

LINCVOLT UPDATE

June 24, 2010

Yesterday in Virginia LV went out on a drive with Paul Perrone, testing the new regenerative braking for the first time. Lincvolt was first driven with mechanical brakes only in the rolling countryside near Paul's home shop. When that test was completed, the regenerative braking was introduced, with various levels of regenerative power available from the shifter. Drive, Drive1, and Low positions were utilized and tuning began.

All of this control of the motor's power regeneration was done with Lincvolt's new embedded computer. A totally safe and ruggedized installation has finally been completed! This is a huge step forward for Lincvolt's safety and a giant step towards completion. Now we have safe, robust, intelligent control of how much regenerative power is created during braking and coasting in the different "gear positions" on the shifter. Many other motion controls are now possible. This is a huge accomplishment for the project. Paul Perrone and his team are doing important work here. I only wish we were there with them to film and drive. I think that if Larry Johnson was still with us we would not have missed the opportunity to film this episode for the movie. However, we do have a live Ustream report from Paul Perrone and our team in Va. that we will be using instead. I saw it yesterday as some of you did as it went out live from our Ustream connection.

Lincvolt will be doing more testing at Perrone Robotics in Virginia for a couple of days and then return on a car carrier back to Brizio Street Rods in South San Francisco for the install of the Capstone Turbine generator. That generator will replace the rotary that we struggled with for 2 years and finally abandoned. That part of our effort was stressful and time consuming and revealed very little progress. It is rewarding to know that we are now finally succeeding at the goals we set in 2007 and 2008. The amount of work we have done is staggering and the end is finally in sight!

We plan to be testing Lincvolt on Interstate 10 in late August and into September, doing a tour of the Gulf of Mexico along the coastline devastated by the Deep Water Horizon Oil disaster. We will tour the area in a car that is cleaner than a plug-in electric in emissions and uses domestic green renewable biodiesel fuel!

While it is true that we never have attained our lofty goals of 100 mpg and we could not get a successful result with the water based fuel displacement theories we worked so hard on with Uli Kruger and Johnathon Goodwin, we feel absolutely great about our ultra low emissions and domestic fuel source, created by integrating our onboard computers, Capstone Turbine generator, Thunder Sky Battery pack and UQM electric motor.

Lincvolt, an electro-turbine series hybrid, will be clean with ultra low emissions as we make our way along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, visiting the devastating environmental disaster area caused by America's addiction to oil and seeing the damage up close. In fact, as we tour the Gulf Coast, Lincvolt will be cleaner, with lower well-to-tailpipe emissions, than any production plug-in electric car or internal combustion powered car made today. That is something to be very proud of.

Our future will include the continued filming of the Lincvolt story, taking it to its conclusion as we make our way up the East Coast towards Detroit, where Lincvolt was originally built, and continue home to California. Oil companies have launched an all out attack on the USA-leading green standards of that state, trying to get all of the environmental protection transportation laws cancelled and rolled back until the economy recovers back to a place where it may not be for years. This is the new frontier.

Stay tuned as we prepare again for our trip across the USA, where we plan to be broadcasting our mileage and emissions statistics and video feed live on the internet as we go. Watch for our new sponsors to emerge, helping us make the final miles. For those of you who have been with us since the beginning, and those of you who have recently joined us, the Lincvolt team sends gratitude and appreciation for your support.

NRG PLANS FLAT-RATE DEAL FOR UNLIMITED CHARGES FOR ELECTRIC CARS

by Elizabeth Souder, The Dallas Morning News, June 23, 2010

NRG Energy Inc. is about to offer Texans the first all-you-can-eat electric vehicle plan.

The power company, which owns Reliant Energy, will introduce an electric vehicle refueling service early next year. The service will include unlimited charges at home and at charging stations throughout Houston. It will cost around $60 to $80 a month.

By midyear, the company aims to offer the same service to drivers in Dallas, said Michael Harrigan, NRG's new vice president of electric vehicle services.

The idea is to offer electric vehicle buyers "a very clean, easy experience fueling the vehicle," Harrigan said after a Dallas Regional Chamber panel discussion Tuesday.

Undercutting gas

Harrigan said he wants to keep the cost of refueling an electric car below the cost for a gasoline car. And he hopes that by making refueling easy, he can expand the market for electric vehicles beyond environmental enthusiasts.

The monthly rate will include leasing and installing a home refueling station, charging at stations around town and emergency charging, in case a driver runs out of juice.

If a driver is within 25 miles of the city center, he will always be no more than five miles from a refueling station.

The stations will be at national retail chains, such as coffee shops and electronics stores, he said. At-home refueling will take a few hours, but charging at public stations will take about 15 minutes.

Service contracts will probably be around three years long, Harrigan said.

At first, electric vehicle customers would have to buy their household electricity from Reliant to get free vehicle charges at home.

Harrigan said NRG might negotiate deals with other retail electricity providers to offer the service.

Competition coming

NRG competitors are developing their own electric vehicle service offerings. TXU Energy will offer a service once Nissan and Chevy roll out their electric vehicles next year, said TXU's vice president for public affairs, Brian Tulloh.

Tulloh said he isn't ready to describe TXU's service. It will probably involve charging customers less to juice up at night than during the day. He said it's challenging to decide what service plan customers would prefer because people don't have the cars yet.

"It's one of those things it's tough to research with customers because they don't know what they want," he said.

TXU Energy is working with policymakers to eliminate issues that might deter customers. For example, he said TXU is urging local governments to adopt uniform, simple permitting for residential charging stations.

Expanding the consumer market for electric vehicles means more business for such services. It also means more demand for power. NRG is the second-largest power generator in Texas, and TXU's sister company, Luminant, is the largest.

The electric companies aim to grab market share from the oil companies. Harrigan said it's symbolic that NRG leased offices in Houston for the electric vehicle unit in a defunct Hummer dealership.

DEADLY EXPLOSION AT REALM INDUSTRIES

June 19, 2010

Tyson Larson, a young man who demonstrated a water fuel technology to the Lincvolt team about 2 years ago for the Lincvolt film (see article below: Review of an Earlier Goal) was killed when an explosion rocked the Realm Industries facility in Southern California. (read news story here)

Our heartfelt condolences go out to the Larson family. Realm Industries is on the cutting edge of water based fuel technology. Converting water to hydrogen gas through a process involving electricity is at the heart of the Realm Industries technology. The gas is then compressed and used to power an engine. It was during the transfer of the compressed Realm gas to a vehicle for testing that young Tyson was killed.

The Larson family has been committed to furthering this technology for humanitarian purposes for years now. We wish them all the best at this sad time.

FEDERAL STANDARDS FOR CHANGE

June 13, 2010

The need for a standard electric connection cannot be ignored. We agree with Business Week.

Also the need for federal regulations of biofuels is the biggest obstacle to their acceptance. It is one thing to have a biofuel-drinking electro turbine Lincvolt that has lower (well to pipe) emissions than a Prius, but that can't get any traction without the engine manufacturers recommending biofuels. They cannot do that until federal biofuel quality regulation takes place. Currently there is a wide variance in biofuels being sold. Some are so impure that they can harm an engine, while some are clean as a whistle. Because of the irregularities, no manufacturer can safely approve bio in an engine.

Again, standards and regulations are required before real change can take place. If Obama wants change, then the government must regulate the quality of alternative fuels and interface types for electric plug-ins. That will enable change and create new opportunities.

Lincvolt's Capstone Mini-Turbine running on bio-fuel charges the battery pack and puts out one third of the emissions as the CA grid (CNG) per KW. The US grid average emissions (coal) are 9 times higher than CA per KW. So Lincvolt will have considerably less emissions per KW than the grid across the USA. That is amazing.

Using a calculation of Lincvolt consuming 3 times the KWs of the Nissan Leaf to do the same job, LV will still be considerably cleaner than the Leaf and other plug-in electrics in the great majority of the USA. And equal in CA.

Of course Lincvolt, using bio or petro-fuel, costs more to drive because it uses more fuel. Big car owners accept that. That cost would be acceptable to a large car (truck) owner, especially if their large car is as clean or cleaner for the environment than the smaller pure electric plug-in car. Imagine that.

REVIEW OF AN EARLY GOAL

June 10, 2010

When the Lincvolt project started, we became aware of a small company in California that was able to idle a Land Rover engine on water. The water had been changed into a gas and then compressed.

In a demonstration at the company, when the Land Rover ran on gasoline, the familiar fumes emitted from the tailpipe. Then the fuel source was switched over to the compressed water gas. The water gas changed the sound of the engine into a quieter one and the fumes coming from the tailpipe had no odor. What appeared to be steam was emitting for the pipe. It seemed to be totally clean. We were very impressed that the Land Rover appeared to be running on water gas. We are still impressed by that.

We tried to strike a deal with this company to explore uses of the gas in Lincvolt. We never could reach a deal. They wanted us to make the engine accelerate and decelerate under load on the water gas. They were willing to pay us but not willing to share any of the technology. We wanted to use the gas in Lincvolt. We thought that we could achieve a steady state usage because the generator only ran at one RPM and did not need to accelerate or decelerate. This conflict of goals was never resolved. We researched and found that this idea was not new and that several others had indeed appeared to have tried this before.

We had an investor visit the company and when he heard the story of how the gas could power many different things, he asked why they were not powering their facility with it. There was no answer. The investor left unimpressed.

We decided to take our own approach to using water as a fuel source. We spent a couple of years developing a water gas generation device that could make gas from water as it was needed onboard the vehicle. That way we could eliminate the compressed gas tank, which we thought was cumbersome and dangerous. We made one that ran on 12 volts and one that ran on 24volts. Once during testing in Wichita, we achieved a run away effect where the engine, a Mazda rotary, took off just on the gas and we had to disconnect the fuel to stop the out of control RPMs from destroying the engine. That could never be duplicated again. The engine was slightly damaged and we repaired it and tried to get it back to the place where we could duplicate the run away effect but were not able to make it happen. That runaway effect demonstrated a lot of power from the water gas.

That was enough to kindle our interest though, and many hours and dollars were spent on the project. In the end, it was never proved. It was never really taken to a conclusion. Our engineers were always distracted by other parts of the car and we lost our focus and our money. So this is unfinished business. We still have all of the components and are trying to figure a way to complete this job. We are aware that it is considered borderline quackery, yet we still are fascinated by the concept. Perhaps that is one of the joys of ignorance. Perhaps not.

JOHNATHAN GOODWIN MOVES ON

June 3, 2010

It is with great appreciation that we wish Johnathan Goodwin well on his new projects in Wichita. Goodwin was the driving force for the first 2 years of the Lincvolt project. When the car moved to California to have a lot of components replaced and redesigned for safety and the long haul, Goodwin found himself unable to continue with the same intensity while commuting to California on a regular basis.

Goodwin pioneered the rotary generator concept along with Uli Kruger, focusing on water gas from electrolysis as a major displacement fuel source. The rotary generator project was never completed to our satisfaction, being too noisy and unreliable. The testing was not completed on either the rotary or the water gas concepts. We had to abandon that direction to get a reliable car that was clean and efficient. Those 2 goals were never met by the rotary concept. It is possible that had the work been completed there would have been success and a good use for the water gas. Johnathan Goodwin is continuing this direction on another project, possibly utilizing some of the Lincvolt technology. If he succeeds, we will then implement the displacement fuel source on the Capstone Turbine, should that prove to be feasible. We wish Johnathan the best.

Work we are doing now on Lincvolt at Roy Brizio Street Rods and Perrone Robotics, with the cooperation and support of Capstone Turbines, we think will result in a 1959 Lincoln Continental that has similar emissions to a Prius and operates quietly and efficiently while maintaining the power expected from a large luxury car.

Our goal is to illustrate that the large American car still preferred by many today can be clean and green while delivering the performance expected, with increased control and maneuverability.

Stay tuned for our live internet test drives.

LINCVOLT AT PERRONE ROBOTICS

May 29, 2010

Lincvolt continues her education at Perrone Robotics. Soon she will graduate from the orientation stage of autonomy 1, ready to learn more when the next session begins. After graduation, its going to be Regenerative Braking install and first tune, then back to Brizio Street Rods in California for the installation of the new Capstone Mini Turbine generator system.

Watch our webcam to see the work now being done at Perrone Robotics in Virginia.

Stay tuned.

THINKIN' LINCOLN

May 20, 2010

Lincvolt is now in a car carrier on the way to Perrone Robotics in Virginia. There she will get an extensive software and wiring upgrade, laying the foundation for autonomy and internet connectivity. While at Perrone Robotics, Lincvolt will be fitted with sensors and computers that will be capable of real time responses to situations the car encounters. Safety is the number one priority. This process of laying a foundation for autonomy has been planned for 2 years. The implementation of this first stage will take a month or more with a crack team of 4 software programmers and wiring experts under the supervision of Lincvolt team member Paul Perrone.

Last week Lincvolt successfully completed what we loosely called a "Crash Test." There was some concern that the regenerative rear end was the only thing stopping Lincvolt, and that the brakes alone would not stop the 6300 pound 19.5 foot electro-cruiser should the power fail completely. Without power there is no regen. That means the mechanical brakes and steering would be the only control the driver would have in that emergency situation. To test this scenario we disabled regen completely and took Lincvolt out for a test drive. When the car was in a safe place the test began and Lincvolt screeched to a stop at 50 mph with mechanical brakes alone, completely debunking any theories that the car would not stop safely should power be interrupted for any reason while underway. This proved beyond any doubt that the mechanical braking system installed and designed by Brizio's was completely up to the task. Great appreciation goes to Roy Brizio, Steve Lord, Jack, and the whole team for an excellent job. Tequila was contemplated at that time but a decision was made to wait until more team members were present and even more work was behind us.

While at Perrone Robotics, a potentiometer will be introduced to the Lincvolt mechanical brakes and the regenerative braking system approach will be redesigned and adjusted for maximum regenerative power with less stress on drive train components. Prior to this, the regen was causing extreme wear to the differential and U-joints. This re-design is expected be more in line with the accepted implementation and use of regeneration, although we do have some new tricks up our sleeve. We expect that there will be similar efficiency results to our previous brute-force method, without the undue laboring of and damage to components in the drive train. Driver control will be much increased with this more elegant method and the ride will be decidedly more luxurious, as one would expect from an electro-cruiser.

Lincvolt is scheduled to return to Brizio Street Rods in South San Francisco as soon as the work is done at Perrone Robotics. The Capstone Mini-Turbine will then be installed by the great team at Brizio's. Also on hand to consult during this process will be Richard Hilleman, whose Blackbird electro turbine supercar has been a great influence on Lincvolt. Richard has been a friend of Lincvolt for a while now, consulting and doing hands on work over the last 3 months.

After the Turbine is installed, extensive chassis dynometer testing, short range and long range testing will begin.

BILL RANKIN, UQM CEO, VISITS THE LINCVOLT GARAGE

May 10, 2010

With Johnathan Goodwin back in Kansas and Paul Perrone still working on software in the Lincvolt Garage, the testing continues. Major concerns over regenerative braking were addressed during a visit with Bill Rankin, CEO of UQM, the designer/manufacturer of Lincvolt's 150 KW motor.

We learned a lot about problems we are experiencing on the Lincvolt drive components from regeneration and are in the process of developing solutions to this, now our biggest issue. Further evaluation of braking and suspension will be done in the coming days.

Thanks to Paul Perrone for his efforts on software. Major steps have been taken and Lincvolt now has functioning gauges for most of the controls. We did not do any work on the generator controls because next week we are pulling the rotary for the last time and beginning the installation of the Capstone turbine.

Thanks to Steve Gillette of Capstone for his support in scheduling the arrival of Lincvolt's new turbine. The support we are getting from Capstone is awesome.

Thanks to Bill Rankin for his helpful visit. It is really good to have had the continuing support and cooperation of UQM.

These two great American companies hold the keys to a bright future for automotive success in big American cars and trucks.

Stay tuned...

UPDATE

April 28, 2010

Johnathan Goodwin arrived from Kansas for testing and tuning Lincvolt's systems this week and next week. Lincvolt is going on short trips in the local area, checking the systems for any problems. Paul Perrone arrived again to fine tune the software for recharging. Goodwin and Perrone will be working together with Richard Hilleman on the charging systems. Richard's supercar "Blackbird" is the turbine electric car that the Lincvolt team has been influenced by, although it must be said that a turbine was always the alternative for a generator that the team wanted. Reviewing the old Shakey Pictures footage of Lincvolt in Kansas, we found the team talking about the eventual use of a turbine instead of the rotary. Hilleman was instrumental in making our connection with Capstone Micro Turbines.

After a few road tests, the LID (Lincvolt Intelligent Dashboard) is being installed and tested by Perrone and Goodwin. Lincvolt is waiting for final word on the arrival of the Capstone Turbine range extending system. This date will determine when Lincvolt resumes her trip around the USA and Canada. In the meantime the rotary generator is in use to test the complete system.

We anticipate some road filming on USTREAM and some time in a dyno shop before the next 2 weeks are over. But you know how we are with schedules.

Stay tuned

PAUL PERRONE LEADS WIRING AND SOFTWARE PUSH

April 18, 2010

Paul Perrone, Lincvolt team member, has put together a crack team of electrical engineers that is working hard wiring and programming Lincvolt for the next stage. The goal is to make Lincvolt a complete and working EV by the end of this push.

Paul Perrone's company, Perrone Robotics, has already built a couple of cars that are totally autonomous. That is not the goal of Lincvolt at this stage but it is an eventual goal of the project to make Lincvolt capable of traveling on her own to a destination. Many cars today are starting to use robotic concepts and we want Lincvolt to be able to do some things that will make the project get a lot of attention, drawing notice to our important goals of clean green motoring.

Lincvolt will use renewable domestic fuel for charge sustaining while on the road with less pollution than a typical plug in EV (PHEV) creates when it plugs in to the grid and charges overnight. That will make Lincvolt the cleanest car on the road. The Capstone Turbine in Lincvolt will make this possible, but it takes a lot of engineering and people working together to make it happen. That is what Lincvolt is all about. It is with special thanks to Paul Perrone and new team member Kevin Deierling that we are making so much progress towards these new goals.

The next gazette article will focus on Richard Hilleman and the huge help he has provided to the Lincvolt project. His "Blackbird" turbine powered electric supercar has been a big influence on our new direction. Richard has aided us tirelessly with his hands on expertise and experience over the last few months.

For now, Lincvolt will still be using the old rotary generator for Aux power until the Capstone turbine arrives in 16 long weeks. We will be testing all the systems so that the car will be totally ready when the big moment comes and Lincvolt gets her new Turbine. At that point, all of the electrical and software preparation for controlling the generator will be already accomplished.

Stay tuned.

LINCVOLT MOVES UP TO CAPSTONE MICRO TURBINE GENERATOR

April 11, 2010

After 2 years working on a Rotary solution, we have elected to change direction and move up to a micro turbine. The Capstone 30 KW Micro Turbine is a clean and efficient solution to our needs that will yield reliability and the future promise of better fuel efficiency than the rotary.

One big reason we decided to lose the single rotor rotary is noise. It is an obnoxious sounding engine. Single rotor engines have been in use on aircraft for a long time and the efficiency and reliability had proven to be very good. The noise was another matter. No matter what solutions we tried, we could not get rid of that sound. For Lincvolt, the quiet running UQM 150 KW electric traction motor is a joy, but when the rotary came on to turn the UQM 75 KW generator it was truly the opposite! We found it unacceptable.

On the other hand, the Micro Turbine has a futuristic Jet engine sound that is vibration free and pleasant to hear, running at such high RPMs that the sound it makes is mostly out of human hearing range. The emissions from the turbine are lower than any other option we have seen and we are well below all of the emissions standards. The Capstone Micro Turbine is clean and mean, sounding much like the Batmobile, a sound which is completely harmonious with the post modern lines of Lincvolt.

While 30 KW Capstone Micro Turbine is less powerful than the 75 KW rotary powered UQM, the fuel economy is in line with our new goals with no compromise in the normal operating range of the car. We will be publishing a fuel economy finding in comparison to the Chevy Volt, using the same method GM used to get 230 mpg, as well as a more realistic EPA method of measurement. These results will appear on lincvolt.com and also be available in real time from Lincvolt when we hit the road this summer.

We are proud to be using a clean and efficient Capstone Micro Turbine as the charge sustaining power for Lincvolt. We anticipate 60 to 70 miles on an overnight grid battery charge before the Turbine fires up to sustain the charge as Lincvolt continues on longer journeys.

An overnight California grid charge will have a higher NOx emission than the charge from the Capstone Micro Turbine although the Turbine will cost more to completely charge the Lincvolt batteries. One of our goals is to find a fuel mixture that can ultimately make the turbine a lower cost than the grid. We have asked Capstone to help us with that research and hope to have some help from the company in the future. The Capstone Micro Turbine runs on a wide variety of conventional and renewable fuels.

When Lincvolt completes the Design Qualification Process set forth by Capstone, installation of the new Capstone Micro Turbine will be covered here on Lincvolt.com and brought to you live on USTREAM by Shakey Pictures. Stay tuned.

MINI E

April 3, 2010

Driving an Electric Wave

Produced by Stefania Rousselle & Lawrence Ulrich,
New York Times

They have identical cars but in two different settings. Tom Moloughney lives in the suburbs and Adam Moore in the city. They tell us all about driving the BMW Mini Electric Cooper.

See the video story here.

At that point, work will resume on the final tuning of the Lincvolt Rotary motor, which is uniquely configured for fuel economy. Located outside of the car for now, on its own dyno, this motor will ultimately be used to turn the 75KW UQM generator. This time fuel for the rotary motor will be a turbocharged mix of hydrogen, ethanol and water. The fuel mix will be further refined during this process. When the stage is completed, the ECU (engine control unit) and turbocharger will be moved to Lincvolt's engine compartment and installed on the rotary already under the hood. The 75KW UQM generator charges the batteries and is capable of performing this function whether Lincvolt is travelling or stationary.

Numerous safety systems will be installed, checked and re-checked.

The Lincvolt Intelligent Dashboard computers will be programmed and come online, monitoring all of the sensors and feeding information to the instrument panel and main screen located in the dash. This screen is tucked away in the former glove compartment unless needed when it slides out and is easily viewed from the driver and passenger seats. The Lincvolt Intelligent Dashboard will allow Lincvolt to broadcast a complete set of stats live to lincvolt.com and the Lincvolt App, allowing those interested in following Lincvolt's progress to be right with us when the car is being tested on a chassis dyno and following that, as we travel North America.

When this work is done, Lincvolt will begin Chassis dyno testing and further system checking and tuning. These systems will allow the 5700 LB Continental Electro-Cruiser to travel hundreds of miles without stopping for refueling or recharging. As always, we envision some delays for unknown reasons, although considerable preparation has gone into this stage of build.

Stay tuned. The Lincvolt team thanks you for your support.

V2G CONCEPT TAKING HOLD

by Karin Zeitvogel, AFP, February 19, 2010

SAN DIEGO, California - US researchers unveiled a vehicle Thursday that earns money for its driver instead of guzzling it up in gasoline and maintenance costs.

The converted Toyota Scion xB, shown at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science here, is the first electric car to be linked to a power grid and serve as a cash cow.

"This is the first vehicle that's ever been paid to participate in the grid -- the first proof of concept vehicle," Ken Huber, who oversees technological development at wholesale electricity coordinator PJM Interconnection, told AFP.

The presentation of the box-like, unassuming looking Scion was the researchers' way of introducing the "vehicle-to-grid" (V2G) concept as it begins to gain momentum in the United States and around the world.

V2G projects with hybrid cars that use electricity and gas to store energy in their batteries and feed it back into the power grid are up and running in the United States, and the drive now is to produce all electric vehicles to plug into the power grid.

"This makes the car useful not only when it's being driven, but also when it's parked, as long as you remember to plug it in," said Willett Kempton, who is leading a V2G project at the University of Delaware.

A V2G car is connected via an Internet-over-powerline connection that sends a signal from inside the car's computer to an aggregator's server.

The aggregator acts as the middleman between the car owner and power grid management companies, which are constantly trying to keep electricity output at a constant level.

When the grid needs more power due to a surge in demand, power companies usually draw from traditional power plants, which in the United States are often coal-fired and leave a large carbon footprint.

When V2G becomes more widespread, the power could be drawn from millions of vehicles plugged into sockets in home garages or from commercial fleets, such as the US Postal Service's vans, for a much smaller footprint than that of the power plants.

Grid management companies like PJM Interconnection currently pay around 30 dollars an hour when taking power from a car.

V2G is still a new concept, but it is gaining ground in the United States and Europe.

"Ten years ago, this was just a plan. Today, it's a real project and in 10 years, we'll be producing tens of megawatts of power this way," said Kempton, adding that V2G will readily find applications in countries that are rapidly ramping up reliance on wind and solar energy, such as Denmark and Britain.

Huber said he will be meeting in the coming weeks in Paris with heads of European grid management companies about V2G.

"We're going to try to determine how we can work together on this. It's a technology that is very good at meeting a need we have, and there's growing interest among auto companies to develop V2G vehicles," he added.

AC Propulsion of California has designed an electric drive system for V2G, and car manufacturers including Renault/Nissan, Mitsubishi and BMW are producing all-electric vehicles with an eye on the V2G market.

POETRY IN MOTION: WHY NEIL YOUNG'S LINCVOLT MATTERS

by Karen Barry, blogcritics.com, January 25, 2010

So I'm writing to you from behind the wheel of a car I've never seen. In person, anyway. But this car, she's beautiful. And smart. And completely irresistible. I've kind of fallen in love with her. I'm sitting here behind the wheel of Neil Young's LincVolt (in my mind), just drumming my fingers on the steering wheel, and thinking. I'm trying to figure out why she matters so much to me. LincVolt is a 1959 Lincoln Continental Mark IV currently being converted to an eco-friendly vehicle that will achieve more than 100MPG with zero emissions.

She is the most unlikely eco-friendly vehicle you will ever see. At more than 2.5 tons and 19.5 feet long, she has been lovingly referred to by her owner as "The Flying Brick," an apt moniker. The '59 Lincoln, designed at a time when American cars were at the height of tail fin and heft absurdity, was chosen by Neil for that very reason: If this car can be earth-friendly, then surely yours can be too. That's cool, right? Move on. Right? I can't! I keep thinking about her. I'm in love! I had to find out why.

Maybe LV (that's what I call her) matters so much to me because I love Neil Young so much. Well, yeah, sure, that's part of it. Anyone who knows me would tell you I'm the Number One Fan of The Man From Tennessee, uh, Omemee. I'm pretty sure there's a wanted poster with my picture on it in his manager's mailroom. But it's more than that, somehow. Maybe it's Kevin's fault.

Kevin, my older brother and only sibling had one passion and one passion only: cars. I spent my childhood playing with not dolls but Matchbox cars, whiling away the warm September evenings not hand-in-hand with a boyfriend but trailing after my brother and best friend, trolling the lots of every car dealer in town, inspecting the new models the day they rolled off the trailer. Family road trips meant, for my brother and me, one of our two favorite games: Name That Car!

The year, make, and model of the other cars on the road shot out of our mouths as if our lives depended on it; if I could beat my brother to the punch on even one, I had won. The latest fashions in tail lights, tail fins, and bumpers were as familiar to me as the painter's pants, Earth shoes, and maxi skirts I tried to keep up with in the hallways of our big public school. (The other favorite game of ours, well, uh, his, was Car & Squirrel. You can imagine how that one went down. You know. Who played the car and who played the squirrel? Ugh. Sometimes it's hard to be the youngest.)

But I'm going off the road here. Maybe, maybe LV matters so much to me simply because I'm such a fan of The Earth and this is the world's coolest green vehicle? No, no, no. It's more. So much more. If I am ever to get to the bottom of this, I need to go back to the beginning, when Art and Science first shook hands, and became friends: The Age of Romanticism. Come with me.

During The Age of Romanticism, Wordsworth suggested that imagination was the faculty that not only allowed us to truly perceive the world around us, but also, to create it. To create it. Coleridge took it even farther, calling the imagination "intellecutal intuition," with the unique power to join reason and feeling. [1]

The Age of Romanticism was, of course, imagination's golden age. And LincVolt is, of course, its modern day, heavy metal embodiment, representing the most graceful intersection of art and science, where imagination invites reason to dance. Ah. And here is where I begin to unravel the mystery of LincVolt's place in my heart, I think; why this old-new car is more important to me, and to the world, than a passing fancy. By way of its very existence, LincVolt defies conventional wisdom, and leaps the guardrail of mainstream thinking. LincVolt's engagement of our imagination, with its unique alchemy of past, present, and future, moves us beyond thinking, all the way to feeling. Beyond understanding to knowing. To the place where all great scientific discovery, all revolution, really begins: the heart.

According to Gerald Holton, a Professor of Physics and Professor of The History of Science Emeritus at Harvard University, Albert Einstein believed wholeheartedly in the power of the imagination, and "intellectual intuition." In a famous speech of 1918, Einstein suggested that "the elusive, additional element needed for high achievement in science is a 'state of feeling' in the researcher, which he called 'akin to that of ... one who is in love.'" [2] Hmm. I know that feeling. Leave it to Einstein to hit the nail on the head. This is exactly what I am trying to get at with LincVolt. I'm drawn to her. I feel that something is very right here, but I am no scientist. I would be hard pressed to tell you exactly what. But the very sight of her fills me with wonder. Excitement! Hope. I can feel it.

Holton has well explored the art of the scientific imagination, and in fact talks much about how scientists "feel" something before they can prove it. How they just "know." About the scientist's "willing suspension of disbelief, analogous to that which Samuel Taylor Coleridge identified as the task of the poet, and not far from what John Keats referred to as the 'Negative Capability' of great authors (their ability of 'remaining content with half-knowledge.')" [3] In other words, just as poets feel something before they ever put pen to paper, so do scientists have a powerful feeling before they ever set out on their path of great discovery.

Remember that Einstein's theory of the expanding universe -- something that Einstein knew but could not prove more than 90 years ago -- was proven just three years ago, with Einstein long dead. In 2007, Gravity Probe B, one of NASA's most complicated satellites, confirmed to a precision of better than one percent that an object such as the Earth does indeed distort the fabric of space and time, the newly identified "dark energy," eerily resembling the "cosmological constant" which Einstein felt, but could not prove, existed. [4] In conversation Einstein often referred to his inner voice, and indeed seemed to rely more heavily on it than any facts that did or did not present themselves. Albert Einstein had a passionate belief in his own intellectual intuition.

Perhaps the same might be said of us all. That sometimes, important times, we just know something before we can explain or articulate it. This could be, should be one of those important times. Change is afoot. So far traditional methods to change the behaviors of the people and policy makers to bring about significant and necessary change to save our planet from imminent disaster haven't been working, last month's Copenhagen climate talks the most recent, most expansive, most disappointingly horrifying case in point. Things have to be done differently. We need more power. It's time for imagination and reason to start dancing again.

Scientist-philosophers are useful at a time like this, and scientist-philosopher Hans Christian Oersted has become a sort of hero of mine vis a vis this car, not only because of his unique relationship with electricity which laid the groundwork for the discovery of a useable electric current (LincVolt is currently part electric, and may wind up all electric before she's done), but also because in his time he was, to quote Gerald Holton, "a striking example of the fruitful interaction of science and the greater culture, which nowadays is rarely attended to but which is all around us." [5]

When science interacts with the greater culture (LincVolt), big things can happen (in Oersted's case, a useable electric current!); one thing leads to another. But unless science is interacting with the greater culture, as it did during the Age of Romanticism, The Age of Wonder, no such connections can be made, everyone is essentially working in a vacuum. Who knows what kind of idea and change LincVolt out there on the road may spark? It could, quite literally, ignite the fire that will change the world. LincVolt rolling across America with Neil Young behind the wheel is the practical application of the Romantic ideal: By connecting science and ideas to the world around us, and to popular culture, the marriage of imagination and reason is tantiilizingly tangible, and suddenly even greater than the sum of its parts.

I know I'm biased, being in love and all, but LincVolt is greater than the sum of her parts; she is no artist's folly. From the beginning, her development team has been focused on tackling two of the biggest challenges electric cars face, limited range and eventual battery replacement. Currently configured with powerful lithium ion iron phospate batteries and an efficient 75KW generator system to recharge those batteries while underway means that LincVolt is ready for the real world, able to take people on their daily commute or across the continent. As new technologies have become available and discoveries made, LincVolt has evolved, but her original design concept, the electric hybrid, has stood the test of time.

But now, after more than two years of development and many iterations (90 percent of her systems have been completely overhauled since the original proof of concept stage), it seems that LV is at a turning point; her team now weighs the pro's and con's of her current configuration against other possibilities, and their impact on the environment, one last time. Should she be all electric, with a range of 150 miles or so, or an electric hybrid with a back up generator enabling longer trips? There are advantages and disadvantages to both. But it's not only LincVolt that's at a turning point. The whole world is at a turning point, the environmental outlook is bleak; we're in dire need of change. This is the point of no return for us all; it's time for the world, too, to step back, and weigh the pro's and con's of its possibilities one last time, and then, to act. It's time to do things differently, and we need more people who think differently in order to do it.

I know that Bill McKibben, American Environmentalist and Scholar-in-Residence at Middlebury College [6], shares this view of the world; he frequently writes about global warming and alternative energies, and has authored several books on the subject of the environment, including The End of Nature, published in 1989 and widely regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has worked tirelessly for years to impress upon us that "already we've passed the point where we can avoid serious change, and with it the need for a real re-thinking of how we're going to live on this planet." So I decided to ask him what he thought of all this. Did he think, as I do, that LincVolt, and projects like her, projects that represent the intersection of art and science, are criticial to the revolutionary kind of behavioral change our planet needs if it is going to surivive ecologically? It's inspirational, sure (hey, Neil Young's eco-friendly car is so cool! I want one!), but it's more somehow, I tried to explain. It speaks to me, I said. It creates in me something I can feel, rather than think. It speaks to my heart, as well as my brain, and therein lies its magic. All revolution begins in the heart, doesn't it?

McKibben was familiar with LincVolt, and he was intrigued ("What a good article to be writing!"), agreeing that indeed LincVolt matters: "I think in a celebrity culture it's important for celebrities to try and lend their particular talents to things that are already going on, as well as dream up their own things, like the LincVolt." Indeed. LincVolt might well consider becoming part of things that are already going on, like 350.org, the international climate campaign Bill McKibben founded, by, say, driving 350 miles on three gallons of natural fuel, or three charges, or some such, as a part of that organization's 2010 initiatives. Or, LincVolt might consider doing her own thing, perhaps an old-fashioned/new-fangled road trip, a Crossing The Continent in The Heavy Metal Continental Tour. After all, the nation's very first transcontinental highway, and very first named highway, was called the Lincoln Highway. Did Neil Young know that when he chose the Lincoln for this project? Maybe he felt it.

Bill McKibben went on to say that although generally he might worry about celebrity involvement in these issues because it runs the risk of trivializing everything, he didn't have that concern here: "Neil Young doesn't trivialize much!," he said. "He's the real deal. I'm glad he's hooked in." High praise for Neil Young and LincVolt from one of the world's leading minds on how we are going to save the planet for another day. Neil Young is indeed "the real deal," no argument here. And he is perhaps uniquely well qualified for this particular project -- there is a bit of the mad scientist in him. If you've ever seen him play the electric guitar live on a stage you will know what I mean; I don't think I am overstating it when I say that the man has a unique and intimate relationship with electricity, the likes of which you are not likely to experience anywhere else, ever.

We need people like Neil Young, and projects like LincVolt, things that are going to make people feel something, to push our environmental agenda forward. Things that are going to force people to think differently, things that are going to give people permission to abandon their safe haven of reason and rational thought and step into the unknown, to light a candle inside themselves and wander into the dark corners of their imaginations and their hearts. It's time to do things differently.

As author Richard Holmes puts it in his elegant new book Age of Wonder, "The old rigid debates and boundaries - science versus religion, science versus the arts, science versus traditional ethics - are no longer enough. We should be impatient with them. We need a wider, more generous, more imaginative perspective. Above all, perhaps, we need the three things that a scientific culture can sustain: the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe." [7]

To me, this is what LincVolt (and Neil Young) represent: Wonder. Hope. A questing belief in a future for the globe, and us all. It doesn't matter if the car gets 100 miles to the gallon or 150, if the car is all electric or a hybrid, if it crosses the continent on that old Lincoln Highway or just drives Neil Young to his next gig. What matters is that the car IS. An old car that can do new things. Whatever the limits of its abilities and technology in the end, it remains a wonder. A spark.

Artists have the spark that lights the fire that lights the world. LincVolt is a spark. You know, Camus said that a man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. Maybe LincVolt is one of those rediscoveries, for me. When I look at her beautiful, ridiculous, two and a half ton, 19.5 foot long, heavy metal body, it tugs at my heart. When I look at her, I know that here, Neil Young's imagination asked reason to dance. And when I look under the hood, it's a comfort, somehow, such a comfort, to know that sometimes reason says yes.

References
1. A Guide to the Study of Literature: A Companion Text for Landmarks of Literature, Brooklyn College
2, 3. "The Art of The Scientific Imagination," Gerald Holton, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus, PhD 1948, Harvard University
4. "Einstein was right: space and time bend," Anushka Asthana and David Smith, The Observer, 15 April 2007
5. "Oersted and the Romantic influences on scientific achievement: Scientist-'Romantic' sparks interest," Alvin Powell, Harvard University Gazette, 2 May 2002
6. Bill McKibben
7. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, Richard Holmes, Pantheon, 2009

TURNING POINT

January 18, 2010

Well we're at a turning point now. Time has passed and things have changed. We've done lots of things, tried many ideas. Some even seemed to succeed, like natural gas as a fuel. We did well with it and seemed to get good mileage. But that fuel is not so clean really. If you burn it all it's clean, but if any escapes unburned its real dirty and hurts the world. It smells bad for a reason.

We have experimented with ethanol fuel and E 85, gasoline, biodiesel, hydrogen gas from water, and now we have come to a turning point. A friend says "if you need to go a long way, don't take a car. Take a plane or a train. Try to just use electricity because it is the cleanest." Yes, some of it comes from coal, some from Nuclear and some from Wind and the Sun. Electricity, unlike fossil fuels, is getting cleaner all the time with all the new sources of power being harnessed to make it.

So now we have to decide what is best for us going forward. Will it be just electricity with a range of 150 miles or so, or will it electricity with a lesser range and a back up generator to use if you run out on a long trip and aren't near a charging station? That's where we are now. We are doing the final tests. We have even created hydrogen from water and we will be seeing this week or so whether that method of creation took as much power to make the hydrogen as it produces from the hydrogen. We will find out and make our decision what to use now. What combination of fuels to use or maybe no fuels at all. Just electricity. Maybe that is what Lincvolt will be. Its all happening right now and we will know soon.

We will know whether the rotary generator will stay or go and be replaced by more batteries. The newest batteries are great and if you take your time and don't overcharge them, they can really last the life of the car.

The car is coming together for the last time. It is a safer and stronger car than it has ever been and after re-doing 90% of the "proof of concept" version she is now ready for the long haul. Stay with us. It will be a good trip.

WHAT WE ARE UP AGAINST

January 14, 2010

There is still a lot to overcome if electric cars are to become part of the clean future we need. We're up against a lot.... the entire middle-east, the U.S. Government, all 50 State governments, the entire auto industry, the oil industry.....

Today there are 162,000 gas stations in the U.S. The states take in about $30 billion in fuel taxes annually, the Federal Government about $25 billion annually. No politicians are talking about this issue and how to address it.

Never mind the oil industry. Most of the automakers' business plan is wrapped around a 50X markup on parts electric cars don't need. If the US taxpayer is paying to keep these companies going it is past time for them to change. No one said it was going to be easy.

The Lincvolt Development Team is targeting the biggest electric car problems. Limited range and eventual battery replacement worries are the two biggest hurdles that electric vehicles face in the consumer market.

Lincvolt will never run out of power and leave passengers stranded. Lincvolt's batteries will last for the life of the car. Powerful Lithium Ion Iron Phosphate batteries are one of Lincvolt's silver bullets. Lincvolt's efficient 75KW generator system will re-charge these batteries before they get near the limit and dramatically extend their life.

On long-range journeys the Lincvolt generator system will cycle on and off while the vehicle is underway, automatically making sure that Lincvolt is charged and ready for any power challenge.

On daily commutes, Lincvolt's 75-mile all electric range will allow zero tailpipe emissions. The electric grid is getting smarter and cleaner every day with renewable energy sources coming online. That is Lincvolt's nightly power source. Today that is wasted power that is generated all night long.

Last week the Pope chastised world leaders for not protecting God's Creation with bold action at their Climate Change summit in Copenhagen. It is going to take some hard choices for the change we believe in to become a reality. It is really time for world leaders to step up and act.

The future is in your hands too. Think twice the next time before you turn the key. Is your fuel renewable? Is your fuel domestic? Is your car clean running? Is it electric? Is it Hybrid? Is it efficient? Can you afford to change? Can you afford not to change?

RECHARGING AND OTHER CONCERNS KEEP ELECTRIC CARS FAR FROM MAINSTREAM

by Peter Whoriskey, Washington Post, December 24, 2009

It was dark and rainy, and the battery on his nifty Mini E electric car was almost gone.

Paul Heitmann rolled quietly through the suburban New Jersey gloom, peering through the rain on the windshield, not sure what he was looking for, anxiety turning into panic. He needed juice. He spotted a Lukoil gas station, which was closed, and beside the point, anyway. But beyond the pumps, there was a Coke machine, and it was lit up.

"I thought 'Finally!' because I knew if there was light, there would be electricity," he said. "I managed to find the outlet behind the Coke machine and plugged in."

As many of the auto companies tell it, next year may be the year that the massive U.S. auto industry really begins to go electric.

Timothy Gill juices up his Mini E. When it got cold, he found that the battery didn't last as long.
(photo: Helayne Seidman For The Washington Post)

The all-battery Leaf from Nissan is scheduled to go on sale in November. General Motors will begin selling the Chevy Volt, a primarily electric car (with a small auxiliary gasoline engine that kicks in to boost the car's range). Ford has plans to produce an electric commercial van. The Obama administration has doled out $2.4 billion to companies involved in producing batteries and other parts of electric cars.

"We have to get on with the electrification of our industry," William Clay Ford Jr., chairman of Ford, said during a visit to Washington on Monday.

"I know we have to have an electric car," GM Chairman Edward E. Whitacre Jr. told reporters last week.

But overshadowing prospects for the transition of the vast U.S. auto fleet to electric -- and the billions of dollars the automakers have invested in the switch -- is the question of whether anyone beyond a sliver of enthusiasts will soon embrace the newfangled cars, which force drivers to rethink their habits and expectations of convenience.

For now, the only major automaker with a fleet of new all-electric vehicles priced for mainstream consumers is BMW, with its 500 Mini E electrics in what the company describes as a test of the technology. To judge from interviews with drivers and more than a dozen of their blogs, it has also proved to be a test of consumer adaptability.

The electrics pose two primary challenges to convention: When fully charged, electric cars generally cannot travel even half the distance that a conventional car can go on a full tank. And once the battery is depleted, there are few places to recharge besides home, and the charging process can take hours.

Heitmann, for example, sat in the dark beside the Coke machine for one midnight hour to make sure he had enough charge to make it the four miles to his mother's house.

"I sat there looking at the gas pumps that said $2.45 a gallon," he recalled. "And I thought, 'What I wouldn't give to be able to use that.' Two and a half dollars, and I could have gotten another 25 miles."

Many of the Mini E drivers are rhapsodic about the car's performance and the promise of environmental benefits, as is Heitmann. They have been, after all, willing to join a select group that pays about $850 a month to lease the cars and have a recharging wall box installed at their homes. But when Mini E drivers get together, their talk often turns to the art of maximizing the number of miles they can get with a single charge.

Their tricks: They slow down -- driving fast takes more power per mile because of aerodynamics and other factors. So some poke along at 55 mph on the highway as other drivers zoom past. In a pinch, they turn off the heater or the air conditioner, tolerating a chill or a sweat to get another mile. And they have learned that in very cold weather, they must further restrict their travels. When temperatures dip, the normal 100-mile range can shrink to as little as 80.

"I was shocked," said Robert Hooper, 44, a computer manager from New Jersey, when he realized how much his range shrank in the cold. When he considers the prospects of the 70-mile trip to his fiancee's house in the cold, he said, "I'm nervous."

Timothy Gill, 59, a software engineer from Maplewood, N.J., learned the hard way.

With a round-trip daily commute of 85 miles, Gill figured he could easily live within the official 100-mile range of the Mini E. And he did, until the first cold snap.

His next blog entry tells the story: "Towed! After only 87.8 miles. . . . Sheesh!"

The car companies staking investments on electric cars argue that such difficulties will soon be minimized. They say that the cars, now pricey, will be manufactured more cheaply as they are produced in greater numbers. Battery innovations will provide greater range at lower cost. The problem of the cold will diminish as heating systems are better-developed.

Perhaps most critically, they say, public charging stations will become far more common.

There are about 117,000 gas stations in the United States.

By contrast, a database of public recharging stations maintained by Tom Dowling, an electric-car enthusiast in California, lists 734 public charging stations in the United States, with the vast majority in that state.

Dowling said the comparison to gas stations isn't completely apt because most charging can be done at home.

But the lack of public charging stations is a widely recognized hurdle for the electrification effort.

In conjunction with Nissan, a company called Ecotality has a $100 million federal grant to set up about 7,000 stations in five states.

Given these hurdles, some automakers and environmentalists have cast a wary eye on the enthusiasts.

"I would argue that the case for the electric car is not proven," said Jim O'Donnell, chairman and chief executive of BMW North America, which built the Mini E. "We're not quite sure people are willing to go for it. We're asking consumers to pay more and get less. Our view is: Proceed with caution."

John DeCicco, a University of Michigan lecturer and former senior fellow at the Environmental Defense Fund, said that the expectations for electric cars were similarly high in the '90s, after California passed a zero-emissions mandate.

"What they were saying about electric vehicles then is about what they're saying now," he said. "They were banking on battery breakthroughs then. They're still banking on them."

Nevertheless, the enthusiasts remain optimistic, many hoping to lead the way to weaning the U.S. from foreign oil and others concerned about the environment. By DeCicco's reckoning, the carbon footprint of the Mini E is about half that of the gas version of the Mini Cooper.

"The car is a joy," said Gill, the Mini E driver whose previous car was a '93 Toyota Corolla and who long ago began bringing cloth bags to the supermarket for environmental reasons. His new license plate says "WHY GAS."

"The range of the cars and the infrastructure has to improve," he said. "But that will happen."

WORK CONTINUES.....

December 19, 2009

In South San Francisco at Brizio Street Rods, the new Lincvolt Garage, work continues with the excellent team there as the holiday season begins. Installation of the new electrical components, addition of safety systems, wheel design and final installation will be done during the next few weeks. Early in January, we will be installing the new dashboard, which is fed from Lincvolt's computer, programmed by Paul Perrone.

When that work is done, Johnathon Goodwin will return to California to "tune the system in." At that point Lincvolt will be moving to a chassis dyno for more testing. Late in January or February, we hope to be driving Lincvolt again. It has been a long haul and the Lincvolt project is now in its third year, with new faces, reorganization, and new energy.

The Lincvolt Garage Auction is going well, providing much needed financial support for the project. Next year we will be opening our new sponsorship program. Watch the site for more details on that. Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukah!

HYBRID ELECTRIC SUPERCAR WITH MICROTURBINE TECHNOLOGY TO DEBUT AT LA AUTO SHOW

By Jason Hendler, allcarselectric.com, November 30, 2009

Capstone Turbine Corporation, producer of ultra low emissions micro-turbines, has embedded their micro turbine technology in a hybrid electric supercar, the CMT-380, which was designed by Electronic Arts Chief Creative Director Richard Hilleman. In the description below, it sounds very much like a series electric hybrid, or extended-range electric vehicle, like the Chevy Volt. No price or availability was provided, so I assume it is intended to demonstrate the potential for the use of micro turbines in HEV's.

Moller International has a competing product line of rotary and compound rotary engines with the same ultra low emissions benefits, which you can see here. (see next story)

PRESS RELEASE:

CHATSWORTH, Calif., Nov. 30, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Capstone Turbine Corporation (www.capstoneturbine.com) (Nasdaq:CPST) is pushing traditional hybrid electric vehicle barriers with the introduction of the CMT-380, a high performance hybrid electric supercar powered by traditional batteries and an untraditional ultra low emission range extending microturbine, which is essentially like having an ultra-clean and quiet jet engine under the hood. The supercar, which is in the design and test phase, was developed in partnership with Electronic Arts Chief Creative Director Richard Hilleman.

The prototype hybrid electric supercar with microturbine technology will debut at the LA Auto Show Dec. 2-13.

"The sleek-looking, low to the ground, high-performance supercar definitely raises hybrid's cool factor on several levels," stated Jim Crouse, Capstone's Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing. "The CMT-380's design performance numbers speak for themselves: 0-60 mph in 3.9 seconds, 150 mph top speed, and an unheard-of driving range of up to 500 miles on a single tank of fuel, all with ultra-low exhaust emissions that rival any hybrid on the market today," added Crouse.

The concept for the high performance hybrid electric microturbine vehicle was developed by Electronic Arts Chief Creative Director Richard Hilleman, creator of popular video games, with support from Capstone Turbine, the world's leading clean technology manufacturer of microturbine energy systems.

Capstone and Hilleman's microturbine enabled hybrid supercar features a Capstone C30 (30-kilowatt) microturbine that runs on diesel or biodiesel, which is housed inside a sleek Factory Five Racing GTM body. The Capstone C30 microturbine is so clean it does not require any exhaust after treatment to meet stringent clean air requirements of the California Air Resources Board or EPA 2010.

The CMT-380 features lithium-polymer battery cells that can be charged at home or at a public recharging station. While driving, the sports car can operate on 100 percent battery power in zero emissions mode for a range of up to 80 miles. When the batteries reach a predetermined state of discharge, the Capstone C30 microturbine quietly fires up and recharges the batteries on the fly to extend the driving range up to 500 miles. The diesel fueled C30 microturbine requires less maintenance than traditional combustion engines and produces ultra-low exhaust emissions.

"Capstone's CMT-380 is just now finishing up the conceptual design and first article testing stage," said Darren Jamison, Capstone President and CEO. "We plan to finalize very soon a limited production plan, in part, based on interest received at the LA Auto Show. We anticipate customers will be a select group of individuals who appreciate its many innovative high-performance and high-technology driving characteristics, long driving range and ultra-low emissions," added Jamison.

Not only does this car look great and is fun to drive, but its low-maintenance, high-efficiency turbine engine makes it a stress-free, no compromise hybrid," said Richard Hilleman, CMT-380 co-creator. "The CMT-380 is perfect for people who want it all. These kinds of customers value a high level of driving performance but also are concerned about social issues such as reducing greenhouse emissions and limiting our country's dependence on foreign oil," added Hilleman.

Hybrid Electric Cars One of Many Applications of Microturbine Technology Worldwide

Capstone Turbine is the world's leading producer of clean-and-green, highly efficient and reliable microturbines. Capstone's 30-kilowatt microturbines have been installed in hybrid electric buses, trolleys and transit shuttles around the world, including hybrid buses operating today in U.S. cities like New York, Baltimore and Charlotte, and internationally in London, Tokyo, Paris, Rome and Auckland, reducing greenhouse emissions and extending the range of these state of the art hybrid electric vehicles.

"The vehicle market is not a new market for Capstone," Jamison said. "In fact hybrid electric vehicle applications have always been part of Capstone's vision since the company was founded back in 1988. The first microturbines Capstone designed and built were integrated into automotive applications. But like all new technologies, timing is everything and our initial hybrid design for cars was ahead of its time and the company turned to the more mature stationary power markets. Now, more than two decades later, hybrid electric vehicles are gaining interest in the market and people are taking another look at microturbines as electric vehicle battery chargers and for public charging stations," added Jamison. Earlier this year, a C30 liquid-fueled microturbine was successfully integrated into a Ford S-Max people carrier in the United Kingdom by Langford Performance Engineering Ltd. You can see more information about the Langford Whisper hybrid electric microturbine vehicle at http://www.capstoneturbine.com/news/story.asp?id=512. "The Capstone CMT-380 is a fun hybrid car with tremendous performance. Although it is not in Capstone's business plan to start manufacturing complete cars, the limited production CMT-380 and Langford Whisper hybrid demonstration vehicle are intended to showcase the technology and demonstrate value proposition of microturbines as electric vehicle range extenders," added Jamison. "Both Capstone and Langford have been in discussions with automotive industry companies, and these concept and demonstration vehicles help showcase the technology and generate public awareness of the benefits of microturbine technology."

Capstone has shipped over 5,000 microturbines worldwide which are able to produce energy ranging from 30 kilowatts up to 5 megawatts and are supplying power at sites around the world, including office buildings, hospitals, hotels, universities, oil and gas applications, landfills, waste water treatment plants, farm digesters, industrial manufacturing operations and others.

Capstone microturbines can run on a variety of fuels, including natural gas, waste methane from landfills, biodiesel, diesel, kerosene and propane. Microturbine efficiency increases when used in Combined Heat and Power (CHP) and Combined Cooling Heat and Power (CCHP) applications that utilize waste heat energy produced by the microturbines to recapture and heat water or buildings, or run through an absorption chiller to create air conditioning.

What is a Microturbine?

The CMT-380's 30-kilowatt microturbine features an electric generator and turbine components mounted on a single shaft, which is supported by air bearings -- so there are no liquids to lubricate or cool the microturbine. It uses a patented combustion system to achieve extremely low exhaust emissions that do not require expensive exhaust after treatment to meet stringent California Air Resources Board and EPA 2010 requirements. Even more efficiency comes from its patented recuperator (or air-to-air heat exchanger), which extracts energy from the exhaust stream and recycles it to preheat air coming into the combustion chamber, thus greatly increasing efficiency. Capstone microturbines are well-known for several reasons:

• Air bearings support the entire rotating assembly. No oil or other lubricants are needed, so maintenance is extremely low and the need to dispose of hazardous materials is eliminated.
• Capstone microturbines operate at extremely high speeds, up to 96,000 rpm, which results in a very high power to weight ratio.
• Microturbines have a smaller footprint and lighter weight compared to traditional combustion engines.
• Continuous combustion and lean premix operation allows for extremely low exhaust emissions.

FOR THE VOLT, HOW'S LIFE AFTER 40 (MILES)?

by Lindsay Brooke, New York Times, November 19, 2009

SITTING behind the wheel of a 2011 Chevrolet Volt prototype on Wednesday, I found myself confronting what may be the greatest fear that future owners of electric vehicles will face: a battery-charge indicator showing just a few miles of remaining range.

If I were out on a desolate Interstate in a vehicle powered solely by batteries, I'd be praying to the god of electrons for a place to pull off and plug in a charging cord. But my drive is at General Motors' proving grounds here, and I'm about to experience what the Volt's vehicle line director (and my passenger), Tony Posawatz, says is the car's trump card: a gasoline-powered generator under the hood.

Like other reporters, I had already driven Volt prototypes in the battery-powered mode, and they were predictably smooth and silent. But for eventual Volt owners, a crucial -- and so far unanswered -- question is how the car will perform when the battery's charge is depleted and all electricity is provided by an onboard generator, driven by a gasoline engine, that has no mechanical connection to the wheels.

Will it be a slug? How annoying will the noise of the generator's engine be in an otherwise mute car?

G.M. engineers say that a fully charged Volt is capable of 40 miles of purely electric driving before the computer calls for the generator, which has an output of 53 kilowatts (about 71 horsepower), to start and sustain the battery's minimum charge level -- the "extended range" operating mode.

So what is life after 40 like in the Volt?

It takes a few laps of Milford's twisty, undulating 3.7-mile road course to deplete the remaining eight miles of battery charge. With the dashboard icon signaling my final mile of range, I point the Volt toward a hill and wait for the sound and feel of the generator engine's four pistons to chime in.

But I completely miss it; the engine's initial engagement is inaudible and seamless. I'm impressed. G.M. had not previously made test drives of the Volt in its extended-range mode available to reporters, but I can see that in this development car, at least, the engineers got it right.

I push the accelerator and the engine sound does not change; the "gas pedal" controls only the flow of battery power to the electric drive motor. The pedal has no connection to the generator, which is programmed to run at constant, preset speeds. This characteristic will take some getting used to by a public accustomed to vroom-vroom feedback.

A few hundred yards later, as we snake through the track's infield section, the engine r.p.m. rises sharply. The accompanying mechanical roar reminds me of a missed shift in a manual-transmission car. For a moment the sound is disconcerting; without a tachometer, I guess that it peaked around 3,000 r.p.m.

I asked what was going on.

"The system sensed that it's dipped below its state of charge and is trying to recover quickly," Mr. Posawatz said. "The charge-sustaining mode is clearly not where we want it to be yet."

Immediately the engine sound disappeared, although it was still spinning the generator. A few times later in our test, the generator behaved in similar fashion -- too loud and too unruly for production -- but there is time for the programmers to find solutions. Volt engineers are revising the car's control software, which will have the effect of "feathering" the transition from the nearly silent all-electric mode to the charge-sustaining mode, when the generator will be operating.

"We're designing a software set of rules, which will just require more seat time for the engineers to finish," Mr. Posawatz said. "We have nine months to work this out."

The sound of the generator running at steady highway speeds is something Volt owners, and others who appreciate the flexibility and efficiency of this type of hybrid system, may have to accept.

Unlike many electrics, including the Tesla Roadster, the Volt's electric drive has no whine. The car feels solid and planted on the road. Clicking the Sport button on the dashboard releases a bit more oomph than when in Normal mode; in terms of efficiency, there isn't much difference between the two except at peak power.

The Low mode-- Chevrolet plans a flashier name for it by next fall -- is unique in the electric-car world, and a useful feature. While coasting, it applies electric motor braking, then smoothly blends in the regular brakes.

Even beyond the regenerative function, Low mode offers one-pedal driving in slow speed, stop-and-go, and downhill environments. The regenerative braking, whether applied through the Volt's foot pedal or by pulling the shift lever down into Low mode, is both progressive and predictable. This is in stark contrast to the harsh, abrupt regenerative braking delivered by BMW's all-electric Mini-E, for example.

There is minimal body lean in the tight corners. The low-rolling-resistance Goodyear tires created specifically for the Volt provide excellent grip.

Throughout my test, the prototype behaves admirably. At its current state of development, the Volt is an extremely refined vehicle.

PROGRESS

November 14, 2009

Lincvolt is feeling good. Now an ethanol fueled, turbo-charged, single rotor engine turning a UQM 75KW generator is in place under the hood. This week the new design Lincvolt battery enclosure will be built in Wichita, KS. A lot of progress has been made and we are almost ready to place the electrical components. We will keep you posted.

Meantime, Lincvolt's second rotary engine will be set up for further tuning and fuel blending next week. As we make efficiency gains, we will apply them to the onboard rotary, which is now being programmed into the Lincvolt system.

Thanks for your support!

Take your foot off the Gas America

GENERATOR INSTALLED IN LINCVOLT

November 12, 2009

Lincvolt is feeling good. Now an ethanol fueled, turbo-charged, single rotor engine turning a UQM 75KW generator is in place under the hood. Next week the Lincvolt battery enclosure will be built in Wichita, KS. A lot of progress has been made and we are ready to place the electrical components. We will keep you posted.

ROTAPOWER'S HYBRID ENGINE FOR ELECTRIC CARS READY FOR PRODUCTION

November 10, 2009

ELECTROMOTIVE

October 30, 2009

Lincvolt now has a single rotor engine running on renewable fuel to turn a 75 KW generator. The engine is controlled by Electromotive's WinTEC 3. Beginning next Monday tuning and fuel blending experiments will continue.

Stay tuned. Thank you for your support.

RUNNING LATE

October 4, 2009

Lincvolt is being updated with a new battery configuration and the drive train is in place ready to test on a chassis dyno. The new Lincvolt Battery Management System (BMS) is scheduled for installation the week of October 12. Wiring will be re-routed to accommodate the new battery configuration and BMS. New components will be waiting to be installed and tested with the generator running, looking for spikes that have somehow gotten around the filter in previous tests and caused damage to previous components.

The rotary motor that will turn the generator is still causing problems for the team. We are working on our fifth rotary motor with tuning set to commence again on October 6. We are attempting to turn a 75 KW UQM motor with a single-rotor engine that gets about 65 HP. Three weeks of attempts by Uli Kruger and Johnathan Goodwin have not been able to attain the results we are looking for. The rotary program has been plagued with failure since the beginning and now, after 18 months of experimenting with different fuels, we think we are finally on the verge.

At the recommendation of Roy Brizio, we have brought in a professional tuner who will start on the 6th at Brizio's Street Rods in South San Francisco, California. Uli Kruger will be on hand to describe the goals of our testing for the tuner. This will be a "make or break" for the rotary. Since the car is completely set up for a rotary we may have to fall back on a naturally aspirated gasoline powered rotary to use as a placeholder while we finish the rest of the Lincvolt system. The rotary type motor we have chosen to turn the generator may be the wrong one and we will find another approach if that is the case. We may have to proceed with the naturally aspirated gasoline powered rotary in the meantime. This will enable us to completely tune in the rest of the car. We are all excited about that!

Team member Paul Perrone will be on hand when Lincvolt moves onto a chassis dyno this month newly rewired, reconfigured, and with a working generator system. Paul is an expert in robotics, and will be programming the cycling of the generator system, i.e. programming the onboard intelligence that decides when the generator starts up and shuts down with the car in motion. This has to be done on a chassis dyno. The Lincvolt team is ready for this next stage to begin.

Needless to say, we are running late. We are still weighed down by simple problems that seem unrelated to the tuning process and we have been unable to complete the task of experimenting in a meaningful way with different fuels. If you have been watching us, it is easy to see how frustrating 18 months of pursuing the rotary motor concept has become. But it is just starting to get really interesting!

Yet, we still remain optimistic that we will succeed. We have seen a lot of indicators that the rotary motor holds some great possibilities for fuel economy.

The week of October 5-12 will be critical to making a run at our scheduled trip to Las Vegas on November 2. Stay tuned.

In the event that we do not make the trip, we will continue with the development until we are satisfied that we have exhausted all of our alternatives.

The Goodwin Young Lincvolt team thanks you for your support.

TEST RUN

September 20, 2009

We are targeting a test run from San Francisco to Las Vegas at the first of November. We will be attempting a run with no plug-ins, recharging while under way with the latest Lincvolt generator system. In preparation for this, we will be tuning the generator motor for maximum efficiency. This begins with Uli Kruger and Johnathon Goodwin doing the tuning at Brizio Street Rods. When that is complete and the rotary is installed in Lincvolt, we will be running the car on a chassis dyno to further tune the charging system, calibrating the run times and KW settings. During this time a Battery Management System and new safety components will also be installed and tested with the Lincvolt intelligent dashboard.

Shakey Pictures will be covering the tuning process over the next 6 weeks or so. The web cam will be active and we will resume our live updates as the process evolves. We are behind on our schedule as originally envisioned, yet we are enthusiastic and optimistic about our chances for success! As we move ahead, thank you for your continued support.

The Goodwin Young Lincvolt team.

SILICON VALLEY SAYS DETROIT MUST START OVER TO SURVIVE

September 19, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -- For those who think billions of dollars in federal money has saved the American auto industry, Silicon Valley's venture capitalists have a different view to share.

The U.S. auto industry, they warn, can never become competitive again. It remains too wedded to a dying business model and too out of touch with the sources of innovation, they say.

Instead, they look for a new group of upstart companies to shoot to prominence and profitability, overtaking the automakers once known as the "Big 3" just as Google Inc. came from nowhere a decade ago to eclipse established technology companies.

"I do not believe that the U.S. auto business can be competitive," said Ray Lane, a managing partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. "I don't see any of these new car companies based in Detroit."

Lane is backing plug-in hybrid carmaker Fisker Automotive, which is planning to launch a $39,000 model. He"s also slated to be chairman at V-Vehicle Co., an auto company unveiled in June that plans to build "environmentally friendly" vehicles in Louisiana with backing from billionaire T. Boone Pickens.

Detroit has lost its entrepreneurial spirit, Lane said. "For years they have been led by accountants and lawyers, not engineers and entrepreneurs," Lane said. "That's OK if the industry isn't changing."

"Start over"

So what do Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group need to do to regain marketplace dominance?

"Start over," said Marc van den Berg, managing director of VantagePoint Venture Partners, which backs upstart electric carmaker Tesla Motors and electric-vehicle infrastructure firm Better Place.

The U.S. auto industry has been hit hard by high fixed costs from health care obligations and 27-year sales lows in the past year. After demand did not reach 10 million units in the first half of the year, the cash-for-clunkers program brought July's light-vehicle sales rate to 11.1 million units and August's to 13.7 million. But 2009 sales remain down 28 percent.

GM and Chrysler have restructured in federally sponsored bankruptcies, receiving $60 billion in government funding. Even Ford, which has avoided federal emergency aid and bankruptcy, is counting on government support in the form of nearly $6 billion in low-cost U.S. loans to develop fuel-efficient vehicles.

Business model redesign

But the only way the Detroit 3 can succeed is by completely overhauling the business model, moving beyond just designing attractive cars, Silicon Valley venture capitalists say.

"There is room for business model innovation and technology innovation," said Vinod Khosla, managing general partner of Khosla Ventures.

Khosla said U.S. automakers need to embrace innovation at all levels. He pointed to Better Place, which is building charging infrastructure and battery-swapping stations for electric vehicles.

"Better Place is saying, 'Don't let the consumer buy the batteries,'" Khosla said. "That's a business model innovation."

"There's lots of such innovation possible," he said.

The Silicon Valley financiers have high stakes in the transportation sector and are looking to herald the next wave of innovation in cars. Khosla, co-founder of computing company Sun Microsystems, is backing a number of biofuels makers, including Coskata.

His former firm, Kleiner Perkins, a prolific fund that backed now-household names such as Google and online retailer Amazon, has set its sights on the green technology sector with bets like Fisker and fuel-cell maker Bloom Energy.

Kleiner Perkins' Lane said the success of Google and Amazon stemmed more from their unique business models than their technology.

"It was nifty technology that Google had developed, but there were 10 others that had technology," he said. "It was innovation in the business model that produced the value in Google."

New names

Raj Atluru, managing director of another Silicon Valley venture capital fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, said big carmakers will continue to exist. But new names will herald change in the industry.

"Tata Nano is going to change the entire supply chain. They are changing the economics," Atluru said. "Chery has gone from a start-up automotive company to $6 billion in revenue."

Chery Automobile Co. is among the growing ranks of Chinese firms to have held talks with European or U.S. brands without making any commitments, while India's Tata Motors has made headlines with its $2,500 Nano small car.

Draper Fisher, which has brought industry-changing companies like Internet phone company Skype and e-mail firm Hotmail to the marketplace, is betting on low-cost Indian electric-car firm Reva.

Kleiner Perkins' Lane said a number of changes in the auto industry, including efficiencies in power train and electrification, "will set us up for the next 50 to 100 years in a totally different industry than the one that was created in the last 100 years."

THE CHEVY VOLT GETS 230 MPG? ONLY IF YOU USE BAD MATH

Category: Bad Statistics

by Mark C. Chu-Carroll, scienceblogs.com, August 11, 2009

Here's a quick bit of obnoxious bad math. I saw this myself in a link to an AP article via Salon.com, and a reader sent me a link to the same story via CNN. It's yet another example of what I call a metric error: that is, the use of a measurement in a way that makes it appear to mean something very different than what it really means.

Here's the story. Chevy is coming out with a very cool new car, the Volt. It's a hybrid with massive batteries. It plugs in to your household electricity when you're home to charge its batteries. It operates as an electric car until its batteries start to get low, and then it starts running a small gas motor to power a generator. It's a very cool idea. I'm honestly excited about cars like the volt - and Google helped develop the technology behind it, which biases me even more in its favor. So you'd expect me to be very supportive of the hype around it, right? I wish I could. But GM has decided that the best way to promote it is to use bad math to tell lies to make it look even better than it really is.

Chevy has announced that for city driving, the Volt will get gas mileage of 230 miles per gallon.

That's nonsense. Pure, utter rubbish.

The trick is that they're playing with the definition of mileage. In city driving, the Volt is primary an electric car: it's powered by its batteries which you must recharge every night, not by gasoline. On average, you can drive it for about 40 miles on a full charge before it needs to start using any gasoline.

The "mileage" figure, as it's presented, is really meaningless - because it's being presented for a situation in which the gasoline engine almost never runs at all.

They compute it by basically saying: "If I fully charge the car battery every night, how far will I drive the car in typical city commuting conditions before it's consumed a gallon of gas".

What if you drive your volt around the city all day? Your mileage will drop to around 50 miles per gallon once you've driven more than 40 miles. If you drive your car 100 miles in a day, you'll consume a bit over a gallon of gas. That's very impressive. But it's absolutely not what you'd expect after being told that it gets 230 miles per gallon.

The method that GM used to produce that mileage figure is extremely dishonest and completely uninformative. The "real" effective mileage (excluding the cost of charging the car - which will be significant!) varies depending on the length of your commute.

My wife could commute in a Volt, and never put gas in it: her commute is about 12 miles each way - so she'd effectively have infinite mileage according to GMs method. If I commuted in a volt, I'd get something around 288 miles per gallon. (My commute is 24 miles each direction, leaving me with 8 miles per day running on gas; so about 6 days of my commute would consume a gallon of gas; that's 288 miles.) If one of my friends, who commutes 45 miles each direction per day, were to commute in a Volt, he'd end up burning a gallon of gas per day - getting around 90 miles per gallon.

Plug-in hybrids are a new class of car. You can't really describe their efficiency compared to a conventional gasoline-powered car using a single familiar figure. You could present energy efficiency in terms of a unit like "distance per kilojoule", but most people won't have a clue of what that means. The honest way to describe it is to say "Up to 40 miles without consuming gas, and then 50 miles per gallon". That's not so horribly difficult, now is it?

But it doesn't sound nearly as impressive as "230 miles per gallon."

GM SAYS NEW VOLT TO GET 230 MPG IN CITY DRIVING

By Kimberly S. Johnson And Tom Krisher, AP, August 11, 2009

WARREN, Michigan - General Motors Corp. said Tuesday its Chevrolet Volt rechargeable electric car should get 230 miles per gallon (98 kilometers per liter) of gasoline in city driving, more than four times the current champion, the Toyota Prius.

The Volt is powered by an electric motor and a battery pack with a 40-mile (65-kilometer) range. After that, a small internal combustion engine kicks in to generate electricity for a total range of 300 miles (480 kilometers). The battery pack can be recharged from a standard home outlet.

GM is marketing the 230-mile (370-kilometer) figure following early tests using draft guidelines from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for calculating the mileage of extended range electric vehicles.

The EPA guidelines, developed with guidance from automakers, figure that cars like the Volt will travel more on straight electricity in the city than on the highway. If a person drives the Volt less than 40 miles (65 kilometers), in theory they could go without using gasoline.

Highway mileage estimates -- which are generally higher than city ones -- for the Volt have yet to be released using the EPA's methodology.

"We are confident the highway (mileage) will be a triple-digit composite," GM CEO Fritz Henderson (pictured at left) said.

If the figure is confirmed by the EPA, which does the tests for the mileage posted on new car door stickers, the Volt would be the first car to exceed triple-digit gas mileage.

EPA said in a statement Tuesday that it has not tested a Volt "and therefore cannot confirm the fuel economy values claimed by GM." The agency said it applauded "GM's commitment to designing and building the car of the future -- an American made car that will save families money, significantly reduce our dependence on foreign oil and create good-paying American jobs."

GM has produced about 30 Volts so far and is making 10 a week, said during a presentation of the vehicle at the company's technical center in the Detroit suburb of Warren.

Henderson said charging the volt will cost about 40 cents a day, at approximately 5 cents per kilowatt hour.

Most automakers are working similar plug-in designs, but GM could be the leader with the Volt, which is due in showrooms late in 2010.

Toyota's Prius, the most efficient car now sold in the U.S., gets 48 miles per gallon (20 kilometers per liter) of gas. It is a gas-electric hybrid that runs on a small internal combustion engine assisted by a battery-powered electric motor to save gasoline.

Although Henderson would not give details on pricing, the first-generation Volt is expected to cost near $40,000, making it cost-prohibitive to many people even if gasoline returns to $4 per gallon.

The price is expected to drop with future generations of the Volt, but GM has said government tax credits of up to $7,500 and the savings on fuel could make it cost-effective, especially at 230 miles per gallon (98 kilometers per liter).

"We get a little cautious about trying to forecast what fuel prices will do," said Tony Posawatz, GM's vehicle line director for the Volt. "We achieved this number and if fuel prices go up, it certainly does get more attractive even in the near-term generation."

The mileage figure could vary as the guidelines are refined and the Volt gets further along in the manufacturing process, Posawatz said.

GM is nearly halfway through building about 80 Volts that will look and behave like the production model, and testing is running on schedule, Posawatz said.

Two critical areas, battery life and the electronic switching between battery and engine power, are still being refined, but the car is on schedule to reach showrooms late in 2010, he said.

GM is simulating tests to make sure the new lithium-ion batteries last 10 years, Posawatz said, as well as testing battery performance in extremely hot and cold climates.

"We're further along, but we're still quite a ways from home," he said. "We're developing quite a knowledge base on all this stuff. Our confidence is growing."

The other area of new technology, switching between battery and engine power, is proceeding well, he said, with engineers just fine-tuning the operations.

"We're very pleased with the transition from when it's driving EV (electric vehicle) to when the engine and generator kick in," he said.

GM also is finishing work on the power cord, which will be durable enough that it can survive being run over by the car. The Volt, he said, will have software on board so it can be programmed to begin and end charging during off-peak electrical use hours.

It will be easy for future Volt owners living in rural and suburban areas to plug in their cars at night, but even Henderson recognized the challenge urban, apartment dwellers, or those that park their car on the street might have recharging the Volt. There could eventually be charging stations set up by a third-party to meet such a demand, Henderson said.

Chrysler Group, Ford Motor Co. and Daimler AG are all developing plug-ins and electric cars, and Toyota Motor Corp. is working on a plug-in version of its gas-electric hybrid system. Nissan Motor Co. announced last month that it would begin selling an electric vehicle in Japan and the U.S. next year.

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