Less Is More

The race is on to extract more result from minimum energy being spent. Here’s how automobiles attack the problem of efficiency.

- Shashank Singh

WASTE IS ALL AROUND YOU IN automobiles. The sound you hear from the exhaust, the heat you feel on your legs as you ride are both examples of energy that was stored in the fuel in your tank which is escaping as waste rather than powering your vehicle. For the past two editions of Simple Tech, we have been discussing how Energy Recovery Systems (ERS) recover energy that would otherwise be wasted, attacking energy normally lost as heat for example. In each case, the more waste energy we harness, the more energy efficient we become. And that’s the keyword for us today. In this article as well as for the automotive industry in general. Remember that this is about energy efficiency which is a larger goal than fuel efficiency.

Waste is targetted in daily life as well. You boss would like you to work faster and use less resources to accomplish that task. Efficiency is measured as a ratio between input and output, for our purpose, we’ll discuss it as a percentage rather than range from zero to one as the mathematicians like to do. If you reduce wastage completely you get 100 per cent efficient, that’s the magic number. Unfortunately, like all magic, it’s a nearly impossible goal, but we can get pretty close.