TriTrack dual mode electric car is a total electric solution to traffic congestion and energy waste to not only end our nation’s dependence on importing oil but also to end the nightmare of congestion that degrades our quality of life. The TriTrack patents describe a system of guideways built quickly across a city that would more than double the traffic throughput of the current infrastructure. In addition to building more capacity the second patent provides a car that drives on these guideways that significantly reduces the energy to move people. It is so reduced that it is “solar ready” meaning that the entire city transportation system can be powered by the impinging sunlight in the shadow of the guideways. This dual mode car drives like a normal car on the street but then drops its battery pack and goes up onto a guideway. The first 1500 feet of guideway is a linear motor that gets the car up to speed and up to 17 feet elevation where the cars go very fast to the other end of a mechanical beam. This beam has no electrical conductors as inside the car a high tech battery pack keeps the smaller motor powered till the end of that particular guideway section and the last 1500 feet of guideway extracts the power boost on the front end recovering unprecedented percentage of regenerative braking energy. As the car nears the ground after slowing from the high speed it rendezvous with another fully charged battery mule that contains its street battery pack and rear drive motor for street use. Once merged with the mule at 40 mph the car again drives on the street to make its next turn. While the car is on top of the mule the energy is quickly pushed up to the interior battery pack so that when the car again goes up on the guideway it is ready to run another few minutes on that charge. This gives the electric car an infinite range by logistically solving battery range limitations of the past. In addition to greater control of the trajectory and the added safety of being up out of harms way for cross traffic the guideway provides a much smoother luxurious ride and the patented features of the guideway dynamics provide a flat trajectory of the car even though the guideway beam is dynamic. The guideway is built using an automated process so that the 14.5-inch on a side triangular beam can be built for about $150,000 per mile. The car is built using aircraft composites and is molded in just a few major parts reducing the cost of the cars to around $10,000 at the consumer level. In addition to these drastic cost savings over highways and new car sticker shock, the energy cost to drive this car with its .07 coefficient of aerodynamic drag (wheels retracted) or .14 (wheels extended) results in a cost per passenger mile of 5 cents at high speed. This is a significant savings over a gasoline or diesel powered car and the pollution emitted from the solar version is zero. Because the car body is so efficient cutting through the air you get high speed and very low energy usage, which allows it to be powered by the area under the guideway. The most obvious choice for solar powered car is to put the panel on the roof. Unfortunately the car needs a lot more power than can be supplied by that small of an area but in the guideway situation the cars follow at 137 feet and the shadow of the car is 7 feet wide which is more than enough panel area per car to power them at the high speed. As concentrated gallium arsenide panels proliferate we don’t even need that much area and the 7-foot width can get smaller and still power the transportation system of a full city. The cars will be owned in all versions as today where some will purchase the car, some will rent from a rental agency, some will lease and some will call a taxi service or bus authority to pick them up depending on circumstances. The TriTrack allows for all versions of payment arrangements. Because these cars are lower cost than liquid fueled versions the normally accepted premise that energy efficiency will come at additional cost is now not true. It will cost less to own and less to operate by a large margin. More importantly for quality of life the time saved on the daily commute is the more valuable savings as it will give each commuter stuck in traffic more useful time in their day. Not reading a newspaper on a bus or train but rather home ready to interact with the kids. The safety aspect of elevated guideways is significant and is the most important but in introducing a new paradigm in transportation it takes a few moments to grasp how fundamentally different the fatality rate will be. We all have been touched with traffic related losses and the TriTrack will save the lives of thousands of people because it is fundamentally safer. There are thousands of intersection interactions that it avoids and it dares to test driver skill searching for drunk or impaired drivers. The combination of ejecting slow reacting drivers and less interactions at-grade the car will be safer.
In addition to the low Cd, the frontal area of the TriTrack reduces energy wasted beating the air as cars go by. The patented circular cross section of this guideway car will help the nation and the world as we proceed into the future. Because this is a technology answer, sharing it with the world brings even greater gain because if we can relive the economic and political pressure on a dwindling resource like sweet crude oil then the world will be able to breath easier. The air pollution associated with this low energy vehicle body and rolling chassis on the guideway will give us healthy air again.
