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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.
I'm sure the smart folks have already considered this option for "fast charging", but why not have a big capacitor that stays plugged into your wall at home and builds charge slowly, but when you connect it to your car, it can very rapidly transfer the charge to your own capacitor. You'd basically be off-loading the slow-charge step to a place that doesn't move around anyway.
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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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
According to the article, in order to charge the car in 10 minutes, you need 356 volts at 1000 amps. This gives a total energy of about 60kWh. Assuming 10 cents per kWh, the total refill would cost 6$. With a range of about 320 km, that would be about 53 km/$, or 33 miles per dollar.
According to this site, the Toyota Prius gets just 15 miles per dollar.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Considering the combustion engine is over 100 years old and highly refined by market demand over that time, it's not surprising. What is surprising is that they are making leaps like this with an electric car in what is arguably a technology that is still in it's infancy (not the electric motor itself, but rather the underlying technology for charging, and efficiency in a compact size).
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 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.
Sounds great OPECS and big oils very worst nightmare. No need to pay thousands of dollars for gas. But what I don't understand is that the average car weighs somewhere around 4,000 pounds. When the vehicles moving how come that energy cannot be used to generate the power to recharge the battery itself? Maybe the battery companies are funding MIT's project and need some way of generating some dinero of this thing? Somebody has to get some money somehow.
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.
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.
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...
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?
-knewter
Its one thing to build a prototype. Its a much bigger challange to produce it.
That's exactly right. All too often people tout a new electric vehicle and then compare to existing vehicles.
Where you then replied, "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?"
Which raises the question, what thread did you read because while topical to the article your completely tangent to this thread.