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MIT Electric Car May Outperform Rival Gas Models
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."
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Its one thing to build a prototype. Its a much bigger challange to produce it. And its a much much bigger challange to produce it while conforming to a myriad of safety regulations (6 airbags, pedestrian safe, etc) get people to buy it without lawyers taking what little profit may be left when it breaks. But yeah, kudos if they get the fast recharge working. Selling out to carmakers would be a better plan than "rivaling" them.
TFA says it is a 356 volt system that charges at 1000 amps.
a 500mcm aluminum conductor should move 1000A just fine.
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).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The batteries in your cell phone and Blackberry are lithium polymer, based on lithium cobalt chemistry. These have the highest energy density of common commercially available batteries, but their safe charging rate is limited to somewhere around 1C -- that is, 1 amp per amp-hour of capacity.
The MIT batteries are lithium iron phosphate. These unfortunately have much lower energy density than lithium cobalt polymer cells (not in the least because there's no polymer version available; the cell are in a metal casing). But they have a high power density and they can take charge rates around 4-5C (for the regular cells; they don't have the specs on the automotive cells on their website). That translates to much shorter charge times.
Watch the video. He explains that they are hooked up straight to the MIT power plant, and are thus able to dump huge amounts of power ("20 homes" worth) into the thing. They're pushing the envelope on the rapid recharge stuff.
I'm no expert on these things, but as I understand it the process of power generation in a power plant is fundamentally more efficient than that undertaken in a car. An internal combustion engine is basically inefficient, as it starts and stops combustion thousands of times a second. Also, it's possible to scrub and sequester the output of stationary power plants, but not of a car. So, while running an electric car off non-renewable energy is not exactly ideal, it's better than nothing.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Dear Anonymous coward #1 and #2:
It's not a division by zero error, because electric cars are not perpetual motion machines. When the EPA or similar organizations compare EVs to regular cars, the electricity used by the car during the efficiency test is converted to the equivalent gallons of gasoline burned, and the EV is given an "MPG" rating. Therefore no #DIV0 error.
Bottom Line: ACEEE.org found the GM EV1 is no better than a ~50mpg Prius or Civic.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
It's not a mispronunciation. The "jiga-" pronunciation was the one formally promoted in the US from the late 50s to the 80s. It is still, in fact, a correct but unusual pronunciation in English.
It comes from the Greek "gigas" (not bothering with unicode here), and if you've ever heard a gamma spoken in native Greek, both "jiga" and "giga" are off, but "jiga-" is a little closer. Think of ordering a gyro.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
What's preposterous about 288KVA of load in a commercial/industrial setting like the equivalent of an electric gas station?
(and yes I do work for an electric utility in their Distribution Engineering Dept.). We have MUCH larger individual customer loads than that (in the tens of Megawatts). This is not unusual.
I have seen this straw man thrown out again and again, that existing infrastructure can't possibly support the widespread use of electric cars, but you never hear that from anyone in the electrical utility industry. Any reliable system in this country is designed to handle the maximum anticipated peak load that customers require on the worst day (think maximum AC load on the hottest day, maximum heating load on the coldest day) on top of the normal industrial load. Even this peak only occurs for a few hours, a few days of the year, and normal electrical load rises to a peak during business hours and falls off sharply after that. The rest of the time the capacity if the system is grossly underutilized.
The average person using an electric car will drive during the day and slow charge it at night (at home, because this will be cheaper than a commercial charging station. The extra household load is minimal, even if everyone on the block does this. If you wanted to go the extra mile you could use a timer to delay the start of charging until Off-Peak hours ar add a small device that allows the Utility to turn on the charger during off-peak times in exchange for a lower electric rate ( this isn't new many industrial/agricultural customers have been doing this for years).
Trust me, the power company would love to even out the day/night load swing and get more return on their underutilized investment.
So go ahead and gripe about the capability of the cars, but don't say the grid can't handle it.
Not much, only about 7%.