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."
Offload the capacitor? (Score:2, Interesting)
Meh... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Offload the capacitor? (Score:3, Interesting)
On one hand, I'm rooting them to fail because I think that no electric car can both save us from running out of gas *AND* solve all of the other problems inherent to the automobile that are also near the bursting point (like wasting tons of money to make four-lane highways filled with cars carrying only one person).
But, on the other hand, I'm looking forward to disassembling the "fast charging" system you propose to build railguns with the big capacitors.
Electricity (Score:2, Interesting)
A lot of articles recently about electric autos. Not a lot of (no) discussion about the electrical generation and delivery infrastructure.
(paragraph)I do not know about Europe, Asia, Africa or South America; but North America doesn't have the electrical generating capacity, nor the 440V lines into the home, necessary to support lighting your room and running your PC, much less any to spare for transportation. Don't believe me? In 1969 the standard delivery into a home was 250V/125V. Today it is 215V/108V. See the difference?
(paragraph)Just another Pig in a Poke people. Move along nothing to see here. (aside) Why does LF/CR not work?
Re:but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Add in the "10 minute recharge" and you get 356/6 KWh = 59.3KWh
Recharge in 10 minutes? (Score:3, Interesting)
In order to rapidly recharge those batteries, they'll need 350 kilowatts. "That's enough power to blow the fuses on 20 residential homes at once ... so we'll be hooking up directly to MIT's power plant to get that kind of power," Gogoana said.
The primary reasons they can get it recharged quickly is using a new battery material (lithium iron-phosphate) and access to MIT's power plant. I know nothing about current grid limits, but I'd imagine we would need infrastructure changes just for a recharging station that supports 10+ vehicles every few miles. Otherwise this is your typical charge overnight on a 220V outlet electric car.
Re:Dedication (Score:3, Interesting)
That's more or less typical for a research assistant in some PhD programs. Grad students are worked to the bone. The upshot for these students, at least, is they'll be able to write their own ticket once they get out of school.
Re:Physics? (Score:3, Interesting)
The batteries can take that kind of current, it is just that it wrecks there long-term life span. Simply put, you can charge a battery almost as fast as you can discharge it. 3000 Amps at 96 V may sound like a lot to your average residential home owner, but in the scheme of things, it isn't that much power. It is only 300 kW of power. Most factories have multi-megawatt substations. With 200 A, 240 V residential services (heating usage), it is only about 6 residential homes. The total transformer capacity of a 3 transformer hydro-poll array is probably about 300 kW.
The bigger problem is that you get really fast charge/discharge rates by sizing the charger/motor/battery combination for peak power transfer. This means your efficiency goes through the floor, you abuse the battery, thermal losses increase dramatically, etc. Some schemes define optimal power transfer as the point at which losses equal energy stored. If you implemented this logic, you have created a 300 kW space heater inside your battery, and that can't be good.
Ironically still useless. (Score:2, Interesting)
It's ironic, but my brother, who doesn't have a license, brought up an excellent point about cars: If you're anywhere a car with a 320km/day range would be useful, you probably don't need a car.
If you live in a larger city, mass transit, taxi service, and walking can help you to get pretty much anywhere you want to be, and for a lot less than the tens of thousands of dollars these crippled vehicles cost. It's not until you leave the cities and need to travel for a number of hours that a cars utility becomes inescapably more convenient, and at that point electric vehicles aren't practical.
Unfortunately, it's not likely we'll see charging stations, because they're not economical to run. Gasoline is something companies can charge for from the ground up and make a fortune. By contrast, people won't allow themselves to pay very much for electrical service.
That's ignoring too that a reasonably fuel-efficient vehicle travelling the speed limit on the highway can travel about 700km on a tank of gas, so you'd have to stop twice as often as well as spending 8-12 hours at each stop.
Re:Outperform? (Score:3, Interesting)
No not really. A 5-seat Lupo 3L gets 88mpg on the highway. The new VW 2-seater arriving after Christmas gets 250mpg on the highway.
Show me an electric car that can exceed that? It doesn't exist. In fact the best EV ever made (GM EV1) is no better than a Prius (~50mpg) according to greenercars.org and falls short of an Insight (66mpg).
You must be from Europe. Here across the pond, we get excited about 32 mpg. Silly, isn't it.
Re:Outperform? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hard to say what similar performance capability would be. I mean, they could compare it to my '70 Impala with 460 ci engine; 9 MPG, top speed past 140 MPH, and has trunk big enough for 14 full size suit cases or a dead horse (MotorTrend review quote). Or are they comparing it to my 2002 Chevy Tracker; 29 MPG, top speed 100 MPH and an carry 5 suitcases?
Re:Outperform? (Score:2, Interesting)
>How about you ride your bike to an electric light rail station?
Yeah, I'd love that. Too bad the light rail serves neither the residential nor the industrial parts of town.
Why not capacitors? (Score:3, Interesting)
Are they inventing new technology GM & Tesla don't have or are they using a capacitor instead of a battery? If the latter, why aren't GM & Tesla doing that?
Re:Outperform? (Score:2, Interesting)
See, but you aren't seeing it as a system.
If you elect me Wirehead, dictator of America, I could have my jack booted thugs march into every suitable factory of the land and produce an awesome inter/intracity rail system in short order so good that nobody would ever need a car again. Same way we produced Liberty Ships in WWII. And then my jack booted thugs would destroy every single car.
But, until people start signing my petition and stop calling the police and telling them that they had a meeting with Napoleon, different measures are required.
It is only when you stack the capabilities of several car-alternatives that you reach a tower of possibilities to match the car.
But... ehrm... rail's awfully nice. :)
Re:Outperform? (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless the electricity is coming from wind or solar power (or nuclear if you forget about waste storage), in which case the EV1 is far superior as far as "MPG" goes.
New technology (Score:3, Interesting)
The summary indicated it could rival what other manufacturers are doing in the field, not rival a combustion vehicle. Poor wording in the summary perhaps but it appears to me they were referring to what other auto makers were doing with electric cars with the end goal to produce something with 'similar performance capabilities' of a combustion variant. The summary is accurate as far as that goes.
The Model-T Ford got about 200 mile range from a tank of gas [barefootsworld.net] and about 20-25 mpg @ 35 miles per hour. It appears the majority of the refinement on combustion engines has been in power, and speed where an electric automobile has to do the opposite and concentrate more on range.
Re:Outperform? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's mainly why I traded it for an MX5. ;) I get 35+ with that, but it can still top 100mph easily, so the argument still stands.
I did love that rotary even though the MPG sucked.
Re:I didn't graduate from MIT; however (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, the article said they retrofitted a 2010 mercury milan hybrid...which has gone through crash tests, has airbags, etc. Which article did you read?