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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?
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Not quite, but the did make the mistake of using some cheap aftermarket Firestone tires.
TFA says it is a 356 volt system that charges at 1000 amps.
a 500mcm aluminum conductor should move 1000A just fine.
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?!
That will be especially useful when the car travels back to the 1950's.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
No, no, no, no, no. This sucker's electrical. But I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity I need.
- Dr. Emmett Brown
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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...