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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."
I don't see a single stat there that 'outperforms' a 1994 Honda Civic - in fact it falls short on every aspect. Don't get me wrong, those specs would make the car great on paper, and I am totally behind electric powered cars, I just hate it when headlines lie.
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
Will they have the same problems as the Ipods? Exploding?
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
How much will it cost?
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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?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
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.
Gentoo Sucks
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.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
(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?
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...
Putting the "anal" back into "analyst"...
Each team member works almost 100 hours per week without pay? Suddenly my work schedule doesn't seem so bad. I'm guessing that most of them are taking a full load of classes as well. This sort of dedication must be the reason MIT has such a good reputation.
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
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
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.
A capacitor that big is not very different from a bomb. Every home should have one.
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.
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...
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#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
The problem isn't as insurmountable as you'd think....
I recently had the privilege of visiting JET (the world's biggest experimental fusion reactor), and that thing sucks **HUGE** amounts of power. When you get there, you can see the massive high-tension power lines leading into the place.
Because the required power draw is so insane, they have two huge flywheel batteries which they charge gradually, and they discharge the flywheels as needed. Still, the place is located near a power station, and they're not allowed to draw power during peak periods.
Maybe all they'd need to do in your local gas station (besides getting a huge power supply), is replace the underground tanks with flywheel storage systems. Trickle charge the flywheels continually thoughout the day to even out the load on the power grid.
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.
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.
Gentoo Sucks
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!
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.
Ok, one thing that always bothers me about these electric cars is the seeming ignorance surrounding the simple notion of how to provide climate comfort within the cabin. How far will the electric car go in the winter time in Minnesota with the now electric heater running...or the air conditioner during the hot summer? Are these calculations taken into account when providing "MPG" ratings? Heat is somewhat trivial for internal combustion engines but obviously not for electric...