Electric vehicles

The Japanese are working very hard on thermoelectric energy harvesting from tiny forms for use on hot running electronics components the 1.5 kW versions for use on furnace flues etc.

For the next decade, the largest electric vehicle sector will be industrial and commercial electric vehicles on land. In great contrast to the hybrid and pure electric cars that come next in market size, industrial and commercial electric vehicles are almost never bought by private individuals. That means that they are almost never bought on up-front price, the criteria being cost-over-life, reliability and performance with any extra life over conventional versions much appreciated.

This article shares some of the research in the new IDTechEx report, "Range Extenders for Electric Vehicles Land, Water & Air 2013-2023" which covers all such vehicles, on land, on/under water and airborne.

Life is good for supercapacitors manufacturers and developers.

In this article we will briefly look at implementations in the rail transit sector, and the kind of technologies that are making their way onto trains, railways and waysides in order to reduce power consumption, maintenance costs and reliability of train services.

The market for electric taxis will be a huge 345,000 vehicles in 2017, surpassing $10 billion in business as early as 2019 as forecasted by new IDTechEx research in its recently published report, Hybrid and Electric Buses and Taxis 2013-2023: Forecasts, Opportunities, Players.

IDTechEx projects that 119,000 electric taxis will be sold giving a $1.8 billion global market. Most of the commercial electric vehicles, including the taxis, are and will be pure electric. That will even be true of large commercial vehicles, notably e-buses, set to exceed a $20 billion market as early as 2018 and dominated by demand in China.

IDTechEx find that pure electric car sales in 2013 will be 70,000 vehicles rising to 2 million in 2023, versus 2 million hybrid vehicles this year rising to 7.6 million in 2023.

Questions arise as to how much supercapacitors can improve if organisations more like NASA took over. After all, if supercapacitors can replace many batteries when, as today, they store one tenth of their energy, what will happen in the marketplace if they approach the theoretical ten times the lithium-ion battery figure while acting as a near-perfect "battery"?

All electric vehicles have at least one traction motor, so the market for electric vehicle traction motors is one of the largest markets for electric vehicle parts and a primary determinant of the performance and affordability of a given vehicle. Indeed, IDTechEx Research finds that in 2013 44.6 million electric motors will be needed for vehicles, rising to 147.7 million in 2023.