Jones Beene <[email protected]> wrote: Why is this any different from any electric car, such as the Leaf, or the > Tesla? > > > > > > Typically the battery pack (in the Tesla for instance) is a large > expensive LiFePo unit which is engineered as a sealed monolithic block (for > fire protection) with special cooling channels built into the chassis. This > is much larger capacity than what is needed for the situation where an > electrical generator is available. You cannot simply remove a percentage of > that large capacity without waste. >
So, you are saying that after removing that flat battery pack from the design and adding in some sort of cold fusion generator + a smaller buffer battery pack, they will have space left over. That does not sound like a problem to me. Just make the passenger cabin bigger. I can see that the geometry of a cold fusion generator might be different from the battery pack, so things may have to be rearranged somewhat. Surely the cost of engineering that change would be trivial compared to the cost of engineering the cold fusion generator plus electric power train in the first place. I expect the generator will cost on the order of $1 billion to engineer and begin manufacturing. That is what the Prius R&D cost. See: http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/17/news/companies/mostadmired_fortune_toyota/ I agree that companies such as Tesla which have experience selling fully-electric drive trains would have an advantage. I wrote that all car companies can probably make an electric car nowadays. Still, the ones who are already selling them will have an advantage. I am not sure that electricity output will be the best way to go. That would be a series hybrid. (A cold fusion/electricity hybrid.) I suspect the first generation cold fusion devices may be steam turbines that produce torque for both vehicle propulsion and for a generator, in a parallel hybrid design similar to the Prius. The hard part might be condensing the steam. We are back to cooling channels. - Jed
