Deliver Us From Swedish Furniture

Zenn Motors claim 5 minute charge = 500 miles

I am not a fan of Hybrid cars, quite simply they were a botched together marketing exercise/technical experiment, that somehow has been taken on as the solution to all our problems, when in fact driving around in a Prius is really just paying for a bit of a conscience spring clean. I have always been much more a fan of bio-diesel as they can be made to run on locally made produce (generally) and will run in the cars that currently exist with little modification. In Brazil, and other sugar producing nations, they have made a good attempt at keeping themselves self-sufficient by converting their cars to run on ethanol. Admittedly this has some impact on the global price of sugar by increasing the demand for it, but that can’t be a bad thing - I mean you have seen the spiralling diabetes rates right?

Anyway, getting back to the point of this thing, the US has adopted hybrids as their solution of choice. Now, as I mentioned I am not the biggest fan as it is a hugely compromised solution, you need to cart around so much extra weight so unless you drive it in the correct manner you end up getting worse consumption anyway, however if it had meant people were driving around in cars the size of a Prius, then fine, that is actually a real solution - I mean why do people need to drive around in those huge SUV tanks anyway? However ‘hybrid’ has no become code for ‘magically has no effect on the environment whatsoever’ so the same solution is being used on those very same SUVs. So even if you are saving fuel by driving a hybrid ‘properly’ you are still using up more of it because you are still driving a 2 ton tank. Add to this the US government’s decision to promote the use of corn based ethanol, which is nowhere near as energy rich as sugar, so you end up with a fuel source that actually makes matters worse as so much of it would need to be used for the same effect that you would be as well to use traditional fuels.

Electric vehicles also suffer as electricity production is inefficient. You burn an awful lot more energy in a power station than energy you produce, so an electric car per se makes no sense - you simply use more electricity so more raw materials need to be used to create the electricity, then add in the energy losses in converting the power in your battery to forward motion and again you may as well burn the fossil fuels in your engine than a power station.

So I don’t like hybrids, well yes, but if you could actually harness the power to act like a power station rather than a power for the wheels, then there is a solution. The problem is that the best technology we currently have requires a charging time of hours to give you a 50 mile range, which really isn’t that useful. However Zenn claim to have invented a technology that is a step change in this performance. What’s a step change I hear you ask (speak up at the back there)? Well how about 5 minutes charge for a 500 mile range! This is the claim they have made. If it turns out to be right, then you could have a tiny engine in your car that kicks in to charge up the battery when required or even have the whole thing solar powered. They claim the way it works is to use capacitors rather than batteries. Capacitors charge fast but also release power fast, which is what cars tend to need as they tend to either accelerate or do nothing in normal city driving. The guys at Zenn stack them up to increase the capacity via their clever new material that lets them achieve the figures they claim.

There has been a lot of scepticism about this, I mean it is a huge claim, but they have managed to get VC funding from people that put bets into Google and Amazon in their early days. All in all if this proves to be workable it could really revolutionise town cars and city transportation and who knows what next.