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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."

2 of 457 comments (clear)

  1. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Informative

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  2. Re:Outperform? by commodore64_love · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
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