Why not use a combination Ultra Cap and battery. The UC can recharge in 2 minutes at a charging station then bleed the charge into the battery over time. Unless of course the fast discharge aspects of th UC have been resolved.

The Coleman cordless screw driver does not mention how many screws it can drive between re-charging. I think no more than ten or one minute of usage.
But this is still a good tool than a regular NiCd battery which needs constant trickle charge so that you can use it when you need it. With this, you can just stick it into the charger for 90 sec and ready to use. But for $80 it is a bit expensive. I will buy one for $35.

I could have sworn the video said 40 screws per charge.

The ZENN is a Microcar MC-2 with the electric system swapped into it to replace the european diesel ICE.
Here are some crash tests on the Microcar from youtube. Presumably the ZENN would behave in a similar fashion.



No wonder they are limited to 25 mph.

I wonder, what velocity that car is traveling at. The Zenn is not "designed" to travel at high speeds, so you can't really expect it to stand up to a situation that it wasn't designed for. Hey!, Stop picking on the little guy, at least he smart and his mother loves him!

In early 2010, Zenn coming with the cityZenn. This car is "designed" to travel on the highway. It will travel at speeds up to 80mph. This car should hold up better in a crash.

There really hasn't been any "real" new news out about the Zenn that I know of. If you are interested in a site that tries to keep up with Zenn car news this Squidoo page is pretty good Everything Zenn Car News

As near as I can tell, the EEStor announcement is that they are getting closer to being able to produce the dielectric which they hope will make their capacitor possible.

They have not yet actually produced the dielectric, which means they have not yet actually demonstrated a capacitor.

After they succeed in refining the dielectric to adequate purity, they must build and test a capacitor, to see if the dielectric actually works as hoped. Then they have to develop the process for mass-producing the dielectric, and then they must design and build the machinery for mass-producing the capacitors. Only then will they be able to provide capacitors to Zenn to put into cars.

It is pure fantasy to think this can happen in time for a late-2009 release of a car to the market.

Maybe by 2019.

One of the hallmarks of a scam is unrealistic promises. EEStor is making unrealistic promises, and if anyone asked me to invest in them, this would put up a real red flag.

It all just seems reminiscent of Moller's flying car. It would be nice but it will be decades if ever.

petrol not diesel

very easy question

battery: 5 times more expensive, 3 times heavier... the 54 KWH ultracap already weighs 300 lbs... that is enough...two ultracaps could power even a full sized pickup truck better than 30,000 of the best batteries you could buy...

but in actuality, the question should be asked of Toyota, and the answer is that is does make sense and here is there example using hybrid technology along with batteries AND ultracaps

The Dark Horse in the Race to Power Hybrid Cars: Scientific American



but the eestor announcement is old news. i posted this previously. since this announcement, both eestor and Zenn have gone into information lockdown mode. there has been nothing new at all. this announcement was basically due to an independent lab verifying that eestor's process to design a particle of a chemical that would be used to create the ultracap can be done on a large scale.

the ultracap HAS BEEN BUILT... but up to now only as a smaller capacity prototype. as we all know, having a prototype means nothing unless you can mass produce it cheaply and reliably. (remember the diesel electric hybrids built by the Big 3 in 2000???...)

for the cap to work safely in the larger form factor, the particle must be of a uniform shape and size on a nearly nanometer scale. this is necessary to increase the breakdown voltage (goal is like 600 v which is more than 400% safety margin) in order to insure 1)longevity and 2)a relatively uneventful failure...iow... no fireworks should something go wrong. with its nanometer scale, its supposed to work something like a billion tiny capacitors instead of one very large one. so as you can imagine, the preciseness of the manufacturing process rivals a hard drive or microchip factory setting.

**OFF TOPIC WARNING**

there is a new technology that is just beginning the scientific stage... it is still DECADES away, but it involves nanometer antennas... now as we all know, antennas absorb radio frequency waves and converts then into another form of energy. they have a efficiency rating that is very high,(mid to upper 90's %) especially when compared to other devices that convert energy ala solar photovotaics (the best currently go maybe 20-25% efficient...the "affordable" ones run around 10%)

the problem is that the antenna has to follow the "quarter wave rectification" rule that states the length of the antenna has to be ¼ the length of the wave it is converting....

well, visible light is very very short, which would require an antenna that is by all respect, invisible to the naked eye. well, the reason why scientists are pursuing this is that solar is wonderful, but only available during the day... BUT

1) what if the infra-red radiation could be captured, converted to electricity and then used to charge your EV?? EVEN AT NIGHT?? get the picture?

this reduces ambient temperature of the Earth and gives us another source of energy. but like i said, still decades away...but just gives an idea of what nano-scale technology can do...

Thanks Dave, very cool post.

This makes no sense, Dave. Capacitors are measured according to their capacitance, and prefixes such as "super" or "ultra" refer to the category of amount of capacitance. An ultra-capacitor is one with a really huge capacitance. If it's "smaller" it's not "ultra."

EEStor believes that a really really pure form of their dielectric will achieve the level of capacitance that would qualify it for the term "ultra," and with that, be big enough to make an EV running on caps possible. They are making progress towards the level of purity they think they need. But until they do achieve the purity, they cannot build an ultra-cap to test. This is why I am suspicious of them: They are advertising a release date for the car when they have not yet demonstrated that their theory is correct. They have not demonstrated that the dielectric will provide the capacitance they need.

The amount of solar radiation that hits the Earth's surface during the day is immense. I suspect that the amount of infrared radiation bouncing around at night in miniscule.

Additionally, though I am getting into an area I do not understand well, so the following is a suspicion rather than hard fact:

Antennas work because electrons free to move around in a metal will move perpendicular to an electromagnetic field. Thus in a wire exposed to radio waves there will be an alternating electric potential at the ends of the wire. I suspect that this becomes progressively less efficient as the wavelength approaches the size of the atoms in the antenna wire.

I know that the problems of working with VHF are much greater than the problems of working with HF, and that UHF is harder still, and I believe that in applications where visible or near-visible light is used for communications (fiber-optic cable) the detector is not an antenna, but rather a semiconductor analogous to a PV cell.

I conclude that at such wavelengths, antennas are not the most efficient way to go after all. PV cells are.

And you could build PV cells that would capture IR light. maybe current ones already do. The problem is that in the IR range, there just is not very much energy out there. Oh, and of course, each photon of IR has much less energy than one of visible light: longer wavelength = lower frequency = less energy per photon.

Nano-antennas for utilizing IR light sounds to me like a scam.

Meanwhile, there's enough sunlight out there to provide all the power we need. All we have to do is break the political stranglehold that Big Oil has on our country and our world.

We need a technological breakthrough in energy storage. We already have the technology to capture energy from the sun.

A little more EESTOR news here (they've signed a new licensing deal):

EVWORLD NEWSWIRE: Light Electric Vehicles Signs Exclusive Agreement with EEStor

Highlight of the press-release is:

"EEStor EESUs are expected to provide over 450 watt hours per kilogram and over 700 watt hours per liter, charge in minutes, and, for all practical vehicular purposes, last indefinitely."

If that was true, a 50 kg EESU (ie the same weight and size as the existing Prius NiMH battery), would provide 22.5 kWh of energy, or enough for 100 miles EV range.

I'm reserving judgement until a third party actually gets their hands on a working unit!

that would be about right... actually test system is nearly 300 lbs 54 kwh...so weight about the same as most EV's (mines has 6 batts at 81 lbs each or nearly 500 lbs)