WHAT'S RIGHT WITH IT

And there are still other advantages. EV's could (conceivably) eliminate what is surely America's greatest energy waste, the estimated 2 million barrels of oil a day that are ultimately used to heat the brake linings of 140 million motor vehicles. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is concerned with the irreversible degradation of energy into heat, which is exactly what happens in this most wasteful of braking methods; and with inexorable predictability, this point has escaped Amory, Barry, and the other Second-Law Priests who use thermodynamics as a kind of liturgy for their anti-capitalist religious services.

To brake a vehicle, not by storing its energy of motion for later use, but by turning it into heat in the brakes is a blot on 20-th century technology. In theory, it could be avoided mechanically (e.g., by pumping air into a pressure storage tank and releasing it through an air turbine when needed), but the practical difficulties have proved prohibitive. Storage via an electric generator (flywheel or charging batteries) is likely to be less difficult.

One way is shown above, a conceptual design worked out by Lawrence Livermore Lab engineers in 1977. The kinetic (motional) energy of the car is transferred to the kinetic energy of a spinning flywheel: The wheels of the vehicle to be braked turn the motor, which becomes a generator and revs up a flywheel via a motor on the flywheel shaft. The flywheel thus stores the energy shed by the vehicle. On accelerating again, the spinning flywheel provides the electricity to drive the car via its regular motor. The LLL engineers estimate that the flywheel would almost double the range of the vehicle; that is, half the energy of a car is wasted by heating the brakes instead of storing it. (If so, then four, not two, million barrels of oil per day go into heating American brakes.)

The reason for making the flywheel axis horizontal is not known to this writer, but its gyroscopic effect would tend to resist left and right turns. A vertical axis would affect only the very slight up-and-down changes of direction.