Environmental News, Eco-Friendly Gadgets - FreshAirTimes.eu

Eco Factor: Zero-emission car powered by electricity.

BRUSA Elektronik has developed a new electric roadster, The Spyder, which offers speed, performance and styling without polluting the environment with even a gram of CO2 emission. The Porsche 550-inspired roadster comes with two real-wheel-mounted 100KW electric motors which churn out an amazing 270HP and 324 foot-pounds of torque.

The car, with a 16KWh lithium-polymer battery pack, does zero to 62 in less than five seconds and can power the car for 100KM on a full charge. The company claims that its enormous battery pack can be recharged in just four hours when plugged into a 16-amp 220V line. Since the car’s power house is mounted on the rear wheels which eliminates the need for a differential lowering the weight of the car to just 2,000 pounds for maximum efficiency.

Via: Autopia

Now it is nothing new to hear that Paris Hilton has done something that made her and all around her go green. But this is totally different. It is actually for the first time that she has done something ‘green’ and it is something that both she and everybody around her can be proud of. The star of ‘Simple Life’ has finally decided that she wants to go all green and in her typical ‘loud’ style, she has decided that she’ll let the world know about it.

Of course anything she does has some amount of style attached to it. She has decided to revamp her lifestyle, starting from the car she uses so that she takes the green path forward. She is joining her more illustrious Hollywood co stars like Cameron Diaz and Leonardo Di Caprio in making sure that her mode of transport is eco friendly. The heir to a fortune has decided that she would use a hybrid electric motor to power he vehicle. She has decided to make an eco-conscious decision by switching her lights from conventional ones to the ones that save energy.

(more…)

Reaching a blazing-fast top speed of nearly 40 mph, the Dutch Nuon Solar Team just won the yearly Panasonic World Solar Chalange (car race) in Australia. Every once in a while, I’ll get a comment asking why there aren’t solar powered cars on the road. And though it’s extremely impressive to carry the body of man 3000 km using only the power of the sun, it’s also obvious why we haven’t seen solar powered cars yet.

One seat, long, low, slow and expensive, solar cars aren’t what most people are looking for. Though the solar cars do have to deal with traffic, bad weather, kangaroos on the road, etc. we’re quite a ways away from solar cars that use more energy than a vacuum cleaner (the Nuna 4 does not.)

But don’t let that get you down. Advances in solar technology are moving quickly. This year, the square footage of the solar panels allowed actually had to be lowered by a third because, last year, the vehicles were limited in speed not by power, but by the speed limit!

More than just the solar power, advancements in light-weight materials, aerodynamics and “genetic algorithms” (which measure efficiency while varying engine performance to find the most efficient speed given road and weather conditions) all add to the abilities of this vehicle, and in the future, we’ll see them in all vehicles.

Via EnvironmentalResearchWeb