lisa! in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

so this is going to be a long and nerdy post. just an fyi. most of you probably don't care and those that do, maybe you can give me answers to my questions.

so a few years ago i came up with an idea for an electric car that is regenerative. what that means is as the car is using it's batteries to propel the car, it also recharges the batteries which means it will require less stops to recharge the batteries. when i proposed this idea to my brother and my dad a few years ago, they essentially told me i was an idiot and that i had just invented perpetual motion. true. if i had claimed that the car produces 100% + of the energy it was using. unfortunately for them, that is not what i was saying and they were too close minded to understand what i was saying. what i was actually saying was to use the cars forward momentum to supplement the charging of the batteries. it would increase the range of the car, but eventually you would still have to stop and plug in or recharge the batteries in some way.

i have done some research online about this subject and have found that others that have this idea are also met with people telling them they have invented perpetual motion. i say again, open your mind and hear what we are actually saying. not 100% in and out. 100% out, maybe 80% in as opposed to the almost 0% in currently.

so if you just hooked an alternator up to the car, it would basically take 100% of the energy from the motor to push the car forward. this means there is then no energy left to turn the alternator. if you get the car moving and then engage the alternator, you are essentially counteracting the motor with the alternator and the car would come to a stop. so you use regenerative braking systems like in hybrid cars. meaning the alternators do not spin while the car is in motion so that all of the power from the motor is used for propelling the car. when it is time to stop the car, instead of having standard friction brakes that convert forward momentum into heat in order to stop the car, you have the alternator that is designed to counteract the momentum of the car. so pretty much when you hit the breaks you are actually turning off the electric motor and engaging the alternator which will take the forward momentum and turn it into rotational movement and create electricity. the car stops, the batter charges. unfortunately, what this means is that if you wanted to keep your car charged while you are using electricity to propel it, you have to constantly start and stop. aka, driving on city streets. on the highway where there is very little braking so very little spinning of the alternator, which means you are using up all the battery power without recharging.

this is obviously a major flaw in my design and of course is no where near perpetual motion. so step one is to put a regenerative braking system in the car. step two is to find supplemental systems to supply more power to the batteries. ideally, you want to do this without without a negative effect on the electric motor. meaning, a way to recharge the batteries that doesn't require energy from the momentum of the car or what have you. an example, it has been proposed that you could attach the alternator to a fan blade and as the car is driving forward, the blade would spin the alternator and charge the battery. the only downside is that with the friction of the air, it will require energy to spin the blade which basically means the fan blade will make the car less aerodynamic and in turn will make the motor work harder to keep the car moving. i might be possible to add a gearing system to the fan so that on initial start up, there will be no positive production from the fan, but as the fan spins and moves up through the gears, it takes less and less energy to spin the blade, which means more energy being added to the batteries. this system would only be engaged while on long stretches of highway. if you were to use it in the city with the constant starting and stopping, the fan blade would never make it through the gears to a gear that makes it easy to spin, and you would just use as much energy as is being produced.

so what we have now is an electric car with regenerative braking to charge in the city and a geared fan system to recharge on long highway runs. with these two systems, you could probably produce a system that would greatly extend the range of an electric car to a point where it could make long trips like gas or hybrid cars can. but there are other ways to get electricity to the batteries that actually require no extra force from the electric motor and doesn't even require the car to be moving or on. if you just said solar, then you are correct. now if you've researched solar at all, you know that solar powered cars are fairly slow and lack in power. solar, though completely independent of friction and momentum and such, is mostly a low voltage type of power source. the amount of solar panels it would take to power an entire car or charge batteries at the rate an electric car would use it, would be more than you could possibly put onto the surface of a car and at that point, the weight of the solar panels would make the car use more energy to move forward. but, if you placed of the high efficiency solar panels on the roof (similar to the ones the new Yaris uses to power the A/C systems) you could use it as a trickle charger for the batteries. what this means is that while the car is moving, city or highway, it will always have two systems charging the batteries. but it also means that when the car is completely stopped and the first two systems are inoperable, the solar system is still charging. stop lights, traffic jams, stopping to get gas to grab a bite to eat. at all times the solar system is charging the car. that will not only extend the time between a full charging further, but it will also decrease the amount of time an actual plug in charge would take to charge (assuming the car is exposed to sun of course)(this is where the true solar nerd installs windows in their garage roofs to allow the sun to shine even when parked in the garage.)

all of these things would make the electric car usable like a real car. depending on the efficiency of the motor and batteries and all of the components of the car, it would be possible to create an electric car that could make a cross country trip on a single charge.