New Australia

Sustainable Transport

NewAustralia supports a big shift in funding from roads to various mass transport systems. We also support shifting car subsidies to building mass transport vehicles and systems.

See the Transport pages for more details.

Greener Cars

The Aptera. A plug in hybrid with a drag coefficient of 0.15 that can achieve 0.78 L/100 km. (Image: Aptera - converted to right-hand drive.)

Peak Oil and Climate Change present huge difficulties for the transport sector.

NewAustralia suggests the following measures:

• Expand public transport and rail freight. See Transport pages.
• Improve cycling and walking infrastructure. See Cycling and Walking page.
• Encouragement of clean diesel cars.
• Encouragement of both electric vehicles and electric vehicles with generators, e.g. 'plug in hybrids'. Support for the plans by Better Place for electric vehicle infrastructure and battery exchange (BEX) facilities. Standardisation of electric vehicle plugs and exchangeable batteries is essential!
• Encouraging telecommuting.
• Encouraging car pooling through the use of car-pool only (transit) lanes in the inner city including freeway/tollway on ramps.
• Limited use of bio-fuels derived from acceptable sources for essential services. Care must be taken to ensure that there is a net environmental benefit in using biofuel from the source chosen and that food crops are not being disadvantaged.
• Re-examination of Compressed Natural Gas as a transport fuel given Australia's huge reserves of CNG.
• Encouraging vehicle efficiency through vehicle stamp duty reforms that increase the cost of inefficient vehicles. Enhance mandatory energy efficiency standards for new vehicles using the best available technology as a benchmark.
• Abolishing fixed vehicle rego and licence fees with slightly higher fossil fuel taxes. This improves the price signal on fossil fuel usage without increasing overall tax.

Redirecting the Car Subsidies

NewAustralia recommends re-directing these subsidies to government or Australian owned factories ("Comeng II" ?) manufacturing:

• Electric cars with backup generators such as the Chevy Volt concept, or similar.
• Manufacture of public transport vehicles - trains, trams, buses and monorails.
• High efficiency diesel vehicles.

Sustainable Biofuels

A range of sustainable biofuel feedstock options are now emerging:

• Sewage: As is being pioneered by Aquaflow Bionomic. It has been claimed that 80% of New Zealand's diesel could be supplied from algae grown on sewage. more...
• Pongamia Pinnata: This legume is native to Australia and is now being invested in for areas such as Northern Australia by Pacific Renewable Energy.
• Other Algae: Algae could be grown in other places using water and land that are unsuitable for food production.

Biofuels would be unlikely to be able to supply all of current demand. However NewAustralia suggests biofuels could supply public transport, emergency service and military needs.

For more on Sustainable Biofuels see Wikipedia article.

Here and Now: The Clean Diesels

Many new diesel vehicles offer similar or better fuel efficiency than hybrids without the problem of having to replace the battery in ten years.

Examples are:

• Mini Cooper D: 3.25 litres/100km. Two doors.
• Golf 77TDI: 4.3 litres/100km. Four door hatch.
• Subaru Outback Diesel: 6.4 litres/100km (Combined). Large all wheel drive wagon.

(Combined City and Country efficiency data.)

Concepts: The Future is Coming

Nissan Leaf

The Nissan Leaf is a pure electric 5-passenger hatchback with a range of over 160km. (Image: Nissan.)

Chevrolet Volt

The Chevrolet Volt. All-electric range of 64km then 1.6 to 4.7 L/100 km using the 1.4-litre generator as required. (Image: Wikipedia...converted to right hand drive.)

Rinspeed iChange

The iChange. All-electric, 220kmh, 0-100 in 4.2 seconds, range 90km, 3 hour charge time. (Image: Rinspeed)

Aptera 2e

Another view of the Aptera. (Image: Aptera - converted to right-hand drive.).

Turbine/Electric Jaguar

3^th Oct 2010: New Jaguar electric car uses gas turbines as generators. "The miniature turbines are more efficient than petrol engines and can spin up to 80,000rpm and are relatively light (35kg each) and compact, as well as producing decent power for their size (75kW each)." more...

The UltraBattery

30^th Dec 2008: This combined lead-acid battery and ultracapacitor delivers low cost, long life, high performance power and provides a solution for future energy storage needs and would be ideal for plug-in hybrid vehicles. more...

Electric car network plan

23^th Oct 2008: Details of a plan to roll out a network of electric car charge points across Australia. more...

Better Place

The Better Place web site - more info on their plan to roll out electric vehicle infrastructure powered by green energy.