MIT Electric Car May Outperform Rival Gas Models 457
alphadogg writes "Inside a plain-looking garage on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's campus, undergraduate Radu Gogoana and his team of fellow students are working on a project that could rival what major automobile manufacturers are doing. The team's goal is to build an all-electric car with similar performance capabilities of gasoline-only counterparts, which includes a top speed of about 161 kph, a family sedan capacity, a range of about 320 kilometers and the ability to recharge in about 10 minutes. They hope to complete the project, which they chronicle on their blog, by the third quarter of 2010. Each member of MIT's Electric Vehicle Team works almost 100 hours a week on the project they call elEVen. 'Right now the thing that differentiates us is that we're exploring rapid recharge,' Gogoana said during an interview. He said that many of today's electric vehicles take between two to 12 hours to recharge and he doesn't know of any commercially available, rapidly recharging vehicles."
Outperform? (Score:5, Insightful)
Battery Issues (Score:3, Insightful)
Will they have the same problems as the Ipods? Exploding?
but... (Score:4, Insightful)
How much will it cost?
Physics? (Score:4, Insightful)
This doesn't sound feasible. Back of the envelope:
Lets say 20hp average power required.
That's 15kilowatts.
At 100kph (62mph), 3.2 hours for 320kilometers.
48 kilowatt hours.
Lets say it's a 96 volts dc system. That's 500 amp/hours.
500 amp/hours charged in 10 minutes is 3000 amps, assuming 100% efficiency.
And these are the conservative numbers!
Even if all the other tech were there, how are they going to move 3000 amps into a car?
It's impossible. (Score:2, Insightful)
all-electric car with similar performance capabilities of gasoline-only counterparts
Look, it's just not possible. The energy density for batteries is simply so far away from what you get with an internal combustion engine, that it's not funny.
Look, I'm not saying that electric cars aren't useful, more efficient, more enviro-friendly, whatever.
But you aren't going to get performance similar to a gas vehicle until there are revolutionary breakthroughs in battery technology.
Outperform? (Score:3, Insightful)
To me, outperform means that it will need to:
1) Hit fewer pedestrians and cyclists
2) Be drivable while drunk
3) Not result in massive traffic jams
4) Not require huge ugly parking lots and parking garages.
5) Be cheap enough so that normal people, instead of rich douchebags, can afford it
6) Require fewer tax subsidies.
7) Allow the user to get some exercise instead of getting progressively fatter.
320 *km*?! (Score:5, Insightful)
To be superior to a gasoline car, it should have more than half the range of a gasoline powered car, I should think. Most gasoline cars are sized to have about 400 miles range, which works out nicely given our average highway speed of 60--70 mph and our typical need to eat interval of five or six hours, with a 12% reserve for miscalculations.
Competitive, huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, this is all cool stuff. One day relatively soon, I bet these things will be the norm.
But we need to stop with the hyperbolic comparisons to current cars. Apples and oranges. Any comparisons should be made to other types of experimental work along these lines.
Re:Good bridge solution (Score:1, Insightful)
(3) Combine/Use (1) and (2) A home power storage device that draws power 24/7 til full and then delivers that power to the car in a spatter of minutes?
Re:Physics? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Metric units? (Score:2, Insightful)
You do if you want to do science, or be part of the global economy, or just not be an ignorant american.
While using metric units may make it a bit easier to communicate with the non-USA parts of the world, not using them certainly doesn't stop anyone from doing science (lots of science was done prior to the invention of the metric system), or from being part of the global economy (I think the USA is a pretty big player), or from learning...
Re:Outperform? (Score:2, Insightful)
Indeed. I'm getting really tired of reading about prototypes with amazing mileage that:
1. Will never pass a crash test.
2. Don't have seat belts / airbags
3. Have no radio, AC, or other features.
4. Can't hold more than one or two people.
I've owned these amazing machines for years. They're called motorcycles.
Dedication (Score:4, Insightful)
MIT car FAILS to outperform... (Score:5, Insightful)
Primarily on the fact that while a 1994 Honda Civic exists, the MIT Electric car that the page describes doesn't even exist yet. Not even in the "We're heading to the track to start testing" phase. Hell, not even to the "Lets turn the key and make sure the lights work" phase.
They just finished tearing apart the donor car a week ago. So far all they have is an over weight drive train, a single power cell package prototype, and a whole lot of pipe dreams.
This story is something that belongs in The Onion...
"Local Farm Boy Dreams Up Revolutionary New Automobile"
While no details on how he is going to overcome any of the significant obstacles in his way, we are excited that he has in fact been dreaming and has some ideas. Local organizations have donated some amount of parts for him to start working with, and his father has loaned him a welder.
That's about what we have here.
-Rick
Re:Good bridge solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you ever swapped a propane tank at a gas station? The replacement tank is usually dirty, beat up, and not actually filled to capacity. I gave up doing that a long time ago and just pay a little extra to take my tank in to be refilled. I would never consider just swapping out something as expensive as the batteries in an electric car at a gas station.
Re:Offload the capacitor? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I didn't graduate from MIT; however (Score:4, Insightful)
That's exactly right. All too often people tout a new electric vehicle and then compare to existing vehicles. The problem is, all too often its an apples and oranges comparison. All too often people are actually comparing a go-cart, having no safety features with a real car.
Re:Physics? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Offload the capacitor? (Score:3, Insightful)
A capacitor that large would have a number of problems:
* It would be, monumentally, more expensive than the, already expensive, battery pack in the car.
* Since capacitors don't have, even close, to the same power density as a battery, it would take up a massive amount of space.e
* It would discharge way too fast for even the most advanced battery to handle (giving you the exact opposite problem as what you started with).
* The ultra-fast discharge would vaporize even the largest normal connector you could use, requiring obscenely expensive industrial connectors designed for long distance power transmission.
Those are just the problems I can think of off the top of my head...
Re:Outperform? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Outperform? (Score:2, Insightful)
If you think the new VW 2-seater has an efficient combustion engine... man, wait till you see what a great conversion rate modern power stations get!
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Outperform? (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>About the two-seater: Some of us want the ability to carry more than two (or three in extreme circumstances) people
That's fine. Keep your current SUV or whatever for those 1% of trips that need that capacity, and use the 250mpg two-seater during your daily trips.
Alternatively you could take two separate cars. In those few rare times (virtually never) I don't have enough room in my two-seater Insight, we just take two cars. The overall MPG average in that case is still 35mpg... still better than ualing around an SUV everywhere.
Re:Outperform? (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, my shelter-from-bad-weather while biking is under a pound in weight and fits nicely in my bike bag. It's the latest in space age technology. It's called a waterproof jacket, a pair of waterproof pants, a pair of clear sunglasses, and a fender for the front tire. And a hood-like thing called a Balaclava.
Actually, I wish I'd realized how not-hard it all is at an earlier age. I stopped biking when I was in college when it was raining or snowing and there was no reason why I should have.
Going long distances is another matter... but it is a lot easier carrying a bike in a rail car, bus, aircraft, or other such form of transportation than it is to fit a car in the same sort of vehicle.
Insisting that one form of transportation must necessarily do all things that you can presently do with a car is poor reasoning.
Re:Offload the capacitor? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's one of the stupidest bloody things I have ever heard. A train is a way safer place to be than a car. Hell, they're not even in the same league!
The reason it takes you more time to get somewhere by train than by car on a (I'm assuming) congested highway isn't because transit sucks, but because transit in your area sucks. I'm guessing the main reason for that is the kind of money wasted on making four-lane highways and not train tracks.
Re:Outperform? (Score:1, Insightful)
I realize that the article and the press release claim that the vehicle can be recharged in 10 minutes.
I say that is complete and utter bullshit. What are they doing, connecting the vehicle to a nuclear power plant with 4-inch thick cables?
Seriously, anybody who suggest that you can power an all-electric vehicle in less than a couple of hours is smoking some really good weed or is not knowledgeable about how much energy that a motor vehicle actually consumes. Oh, if you are only going to travel a dozen miles or so I suppose you can recharge quickly, but we are talking the raw transfer of energy, and a simple 110 volt standard plug just won't do. Even a 220 volt electric clothes dryer plug or even the fancy adaptor that Tesla Motors uses to recharge their vehicles still takes on the order of hours to recharge a high-performance electric vehicle. Again, this is due to simply transferring the raw power.
Also, most ordinary homes are rated with between 40 to 100 amps of service. @220 volts, this translates from 8 kilowatts to 20 kilowatts. Yes, that is significant, but I do presume that most people also would like to operate a home theater, air conditioner, stove, and other appliances simultaneously while their car is recharging, even with slightly beefed up service. Remember, 1 kilowatt-hour is 1 kilowatt of power drawn for a whole hour. 1 gallon of gasoline is the rough equivalent of 35 kilowatt-hours @ 100% conversion of energy to raw electricity. You do the math from here, as a vehicle taking 8-12 hours to recharge may actually be quite efficient from an energy perspective. Extracting 350 kilowatt-hours of electricity in 10 minutes (the energy equivalent of 10 gallons of gasoline) would require a 2.1 megawatt circuit. That is some power station at your home, or even your friendly "fuel station" where technicians trained on how to attach megawatt power cables to a vehicle (certainly not minimum wage jobs if I ever heard of it) are available. And who is going to invest the money to build these monster recharging stations?
Back to the point, I'll believe it when I see it, but a 10 minute electric vehicle recharge (assuming electric batteries as the energy storage medium) is never going to happen, unless you change the basic laws of physics in this universe. Electrical energy at these densities necessary to pull this off are dangerous and not part of the current industrial infrastructure anywhere in the world at the moment.... for a good reason.
Re:Outperform? (Score:2, Insightful)
How much are the transfer losses (as in fuel burned per fuel transported) for gasoline?
Re:Offload the capacitor? (Score:5, Insightful)
See, this is what fascinates me the most. Even among people who claim to be atheist, cars are a religious thing, afforded faith beyond logic or rational thought that even mystical things are denied.
So, tell me, how was my wife supposed to avoid the driver who was on their cellphone who ran into my car from behind, totaling it? Your argument that you haven't had an accident in 20 years because you are driving carefully has about as much reality as the person who lived to 100 while smoking a pack a day saying that they smoked carefully. It's irrational and a perfect example of how your religious fervor for the Car as your Savior.
Nor was I telling you to get rid of your car. There is not a magical anti-car field preventing you from driving to a train station. Or riding a bike, where you can travel at least four times faster without breaking a sweat.
Mostly, after examining transportation statistics and applying them to my personal habits, I realized that if you avoid driving a car unless forced, you can burn the same amount of gasoline than a hybrid driver. Except that I come out ahead fiscally and actually discovered that I've got more time than before.
Nor do you understand that rail is a more efficient use of space. Four lanes in each direction with the accompanying noise and pollution as compared to a pair of rail lines that can be buried or surrounded by trees or otherwise gotten out of the way.
Nor do you realize that there is not a magical anti-train field preventing them from building a closer rail line. See, the same network effects that make the Internet work better when more people are on it also apply to the trains.
The problem is that there are a lot of people in America who refuse to consider that there might be a more efficient way to run things. Because you may not whisper incantations to it every morning or spend a good hour attending to it every Sunday, but you worship your car with the fervor of the most annoying televangelist.
Re:Outperform? (Score:4, Insightful)
BTW, your a jerk.
Re:Outperform? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, who would build recharge stations that are expensive and potentially dangerous. It isn't like people have made a fortune from storing volatile fuel in giant tanks where any person with a pulse can dispense it.
Re:10 min charge is BS? [RTFA] (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, it's a party trick, but it's a demonstration of the sort of thing that might be possible if you decided to invest in serious charging station infrastructure. (Such a charging station would need major energy storage of some kind, just like your neighborhood gas station has big underground gasoline storage tanks.)
From an engineering economy POV, it's almost certainly better to swap batteries at a battery-swap station than it is to build infrastructure to support 10-minute charge times. But the latter is a lot more fun to play with.
Ridiculous recharging specs! (Score:3, Insightful)
Ridiculous recharging specs!
365 volts at 1000 amps is about ten times the available power at the average house. In order to carry this off you'd need a major upgrade of the wires going to each house, plus some interlocks so only 10% of the houses can be charging at any time.
The charging rate of 365 kilowatts, assuming a battery of 90% charging efficiency, means the battery needs 36.5 kilowatts of cooling while charging. That's one HUGE fan, or a complex liquid cooling loop.
We don't know the temperature coefficient of the cells they are considering. If their temperature coefficient goes the wrong way, you can't charge the cells in their series configuration. Just one weak cell in a string and it would tend to run away thermally and wreck at least its string, or worse.
It's sad to see students at a major university being so clueless about basic energy equations.
Re:Outperform? (Score:5, Insightful)
How far in the winter... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Outperform? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Outperform? (Score:4, Insightful)
But with EVs there's still the benefits of:
* Quiet Cars
* Less pollution localized around vehicles (i.e. less of that highway diesel marinade)
* Lower maintenance cars - rotate the tires & change the wiper fluid
* Less points of failure compared to a combustion engine
* Lighter Weight = Less Impact/Damage on roads