In 1994, the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) founded the Hypercar Center to help prove its technical feasibility and commercial reality. The concept was placed in the public domain to maximize competition in capturing its market and manufacturing advantages. In 1999, RMI took this process a step further by launching a for-profit venture, Hypercar Inc. This independent company, in which RMI has a minority interest, is now taking the lead in advancing key areas of Hypercar research and development. In 2004, Hypercar Inc. changed its name to Fiberforge to better reflect the company's new goal of lowering the cost of high-volume advanced-composite structures by leveraging the patents of David F. Taggart, one of the founders of Hypercar, Inc.
People like energy policy expert Amory Lovins, designers at a company called Fiberforge and even automotive engineers at Volkswagen have been hard at work trying to create cars that are incredibly light and ultra efficient. The result: hypercars. With advanced materials and alternative fuel systems, hypercars don't have to sacrifice safety, performance or luxury in the name of fuel efficiency.
If you think automotive technology is ready to evolve after staying basically the same for the last 50 years, then this article will explain why you might be right. Instead of steel-framed multi-ton vehicles powered by internal combustion engines, we're going to show you cars made of carbon-composite materials that are lighter and stronger than steel, with sleek aerodynamic shapes and incredibly efficient engines. In fact, some of these cars are so efficient that you could plug them in and return power to the grid for a discount on your electric bill. This isn't just pie in the sky futurism, either. We'll show you some hypercars that are on the road today.
A wide variety of measurements and terms are used to describe road vehicle efficiency. "Fuel economy", "fuel consumption" all purport to measure how efficiently a vehicle uses energy under some standardized conditions. In the U.S. and U.K., the typical measurement is miles per gallon. On the European continent liters per hundred kilometers is common. A different measurement of watt-hours per mile or kilometer is commonly used for electric vehicles including fuel cell electric vehicles. However watt-hours per distance is also well-suited to describing the energy efficiency of internal combustion vehicles, and it allows meaningful comparisons across vehicles with different types of propulsion and energy sources. In the calculations below a U.S. gallon of gasoline is standardized to contain 36,650 watt-hours of energy, and there are 3.78 liters per gallon. (So there are nearly 10 kWh per liter of gasoline.) Internal combustion engines typically waste about 80% of the energy in their fuel as useless heat.
Hypercars use some of the same technology found on modern race cars to create safety cells that make difficult crashes survivable. GM's Ultralite met all corporate and government crash standards thanks to advanced carbon fiber composite sandwich construction also found in high-performance aircraft. Hypercars can use some of the same technology that helps race car drivers survive crashes such as the use of carbon fiber, Kevlar, Aluminum honeycomb, and other advanced materials and design techniques.
Supercars rely on older technology and ideas such as large engines to produce high performance at the expense of comfort, convenience, efficiency, weight and cost. In contrast, hypercars offer high performance with far greater efficiency through the use of advanced materials, superior aerodynamics, and technologies such as regenerative braking, electric power and hybrid drivetrains.
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