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Appeal For Commuter GPS Logs To Aid Electric Cars
holy_calamity writes "A team at Carnegie Mellon University has begun a project seeking to design a kit to cheaply convert secondhand cars into cheap, electric ones suitable for commuting, if little else. They hope to rely heavily on smart management software to extract as much efficiency as possible from regenerative braking, and knowledge of terrain from GPS tracking. But they are hampered by a lack of public data on how commuters actually drive. Their solution is to appeal to GPS users to upload .gpx log files of their commute to the team's site. The data is plugged into a simulator that reveals how much cheaper an electric car could do your journey, and an anonymized public dataset will be created. A programming contest will award a production electric car to the coder who designs the best management algorithm using it."
Is that where they break, and then fix themselves?
I am Car of Borg. You will be assimilated.
TomTom has been collecting this data for years for their IQ Routes:
http://www.tomtom.com/page/iq-routes
Did CMU ask them ?
From what I see here in rush hour, you only need boolean control: Full throttle or hard braking. When I coast towards a red light, there'll always be someone next to me who steps on it and cuts in front of me.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
It's "braking," people. Braking. Though in the case of electric cars, that usually means decelerating/regenerating. The friction brakes on my Tesla still squeak after 12,000 miles of driving.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
Ok, so maybe someone can help me out here, but how exactly do you anonymize travel data?
I mean sure, psuedo anonymized could be fairly easily done, just take the raw data, match with topographical data, and output the combined result devoid of geographic representations.
But even that wouldn't be anonymized to anyone who's looking for info on a specific area, since the data would all be similar and it wouldn't be hard to detect a route that goes through a given set of terrain, especially if the start or stop points (someone's house/parking garage) is known.
So someone who's more in-the-know with anonymizing data sets of this or similar nature able to shed some light on this?
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
In theory, this is a good idea, but I do not think it will work that way. I have yet to see a specialized, 35+ mph, 10+ year lifespan (important for resale value) car that will cost under $10K. A basic, 30+ mpg car can be had under $12K. A basic plug in hybrid (Prius?) will likely go under $25K (without extra batteries), and get pretty good mileage as is.
I expect in the near future, there will be plug in hybrids with a variable amount of batteries. People will go to a car dealer and buy (or rent) the plug in hybrid without range extending batteries. They will drive around and see how many kwh they use up. Based on that, the buyer will buy the amount of kwh in batteries they feel they need. If they drive long distances, the buyer may skip the the plug in hybrid altogether and buy a diesel instead.
I think the average public's intelligence is being underestimated when it comes for the potential to save money.
"It seems that 99.9% of drivers drive the speed limit, and engine-break to lights."
Do they really expect anyone who isn't already driving a hybrid or electric and/or driving super-energy conscious will be interested in helping a project like this and send in Data? How people really commute: They drive 10-20 miles over the speed limit on highways, and 5-15 miles over the speed limit on city streets. They speed up to get in front of a slower (but still over the speed limit) car, just in time to brake hard for the stoplight. The data they collect will say regenerative braking is pointless, but the common-knowledge data will say that regenerative braking is the bee's knees.
and the whole electric drive-train, is going to be cheaper than paying for gas?
I'm having a hard time believing that, but I suppose it depends how much you drive.
Hell, wouldn't it be cheaper to buy a new electric than to retrofit it?
Sent from my PDP-11
If I'm not mistaken, CMU has a small endowment for a University of its size and stature (Just over $1 Billion), you'll find it trailing many universities . That said, I believe CMU does receive more than its share of grant, research funds and donations (Tepper, Gates, etc...) for buildings, etc...
Ah, truth, justice and the american way. How refreshing.
I've been following the progress of a Finnish electric car project:
Quote:
"we are offering the open source blueprints of the electric conversion kits globally and leave the manufacturing of the kits to the markets"
http://www.sahkoautot.fi/eng
http://ecars-now.wikidot.com/
Ah, truth, justice and the american way. How refreshing
Damn straight. If you are so hot to trot for people to work for free, then you should work for free for me.
This is my sig.
According to http://www.sahkoautot.fi/eng:faq#toc3, lithium batteries will last for about 125,000 miles. What nobody wants to talk about is the price of replacing them. They just want to talk about how "cheap" it is to charge them. Articles just assume that by the time you need to replace them, surely cheaper and better batteries will be available. I've heard estimates of about $10,000 for replacing the batteries in an electric vehicle. So that's 8 cents per mile times 30 miles per gallon that conventional engines get for the same size vehicle which is $2.40. So pretty much zero savings.
My Versa gets around 36mpg which bumps the cost per gallon of the electric up to $2.88 which is about 30 cents more than fuel in my area. And that doesn't include the cost of electricity needed to charge the batteries.
Electric cars simply cannot beat the economics of a small commuter car. Until they get the price and performance of rechargeable batteries well below the cost of regular gas there's no financial incentive to buy an electric car. They need to do far better than 8 cents per mile for electric. I'm not going to spend $20,000+ on a car just to have electric when I'm saving no money per mile and could have spent $10,000 less on standard car AND saved money on getting where I want to go.
Work Safe Porn
Well, once would have to wonder if CMU produces any IP as a result of this free data, would they release all copyrights and patents for free?
Or is that different?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
If you've got a halfway modern Garmin GPS, you have already been collecting the very data that this project is working for. What? Your GPS is logging you without permission? Yes. (Garmin probably got some legalese somewhere to cover their tracks.)
The Garmin GPS has a facility to show/hide your 'trail' (which is based on a time/location log of your travel). I believe it also has an option to reset that log. (Or, at the very least, you could USB mount its storage device and clean out the log file.) But even if you erase the log file, it will automatically repopulate your travel log, with or without your permission. There is no built-in option to prevent this behavior.
In short, a Garmin GPS *is* a GPS tracking device that your willingly put inside of your own vehicle, and is ready to report your travel history at any time.
I have personally verified this information with Garmin's technical support. You cannot disable GPS logging. Could be a plus for this project, though.
Those have demonstrated much more energy recovery from regen braking.
Liberty.
So if enough people upload a commute including hard braking, hard acceration, high-G turns, and sections well over 100mph, will that cause them to design an electric car with some serious power?
I have two conflicting feelings about electrical conversions.
First, I have an aging Dodge Caravan that I use to commute 22 miles every day. I'd love to remove the engine and drop in an electrification kit of components. But it is still one guy in one oversize car. And the whole stupidity of driving 22 miles to do the modest job that I do? This society needs it's employment location matrix annealed.
Second, a little birdie in the back of my head says no, the future needs autonomous vehicles, aggressive ride sharing, collision avoidance radar, vehicle scheduling to eliminate stops, and ride systems based on cell phones talking to passing vehicles.
Plus, the society needs it's matrix of jobs and worker-locations annealed so that everybody gets a chance to work close to home.
The underlying vehicles can be a mechanical zoo. But I can see a 50% reduction in commuter CO2 emitting miles simply by raising the load factor in commuter vehicles from ~1 rider per car to ~2.5 riders per car.
The result is that to get acceptable power and life from a lead acid power pack, the weight becomes such as to be potentially dangerous in a car chassis not designed from scratch to take it. Cars are engineering structures designed to take just so much load in just such places. Sticking a load of heavy lead acid batteries in a car chassis risks catastrophic failure under the wrong conditions - and re-engineering the chassis to fit this would not be cheap to say the least. You would do better to put the batteries in the bed of a pickup, provided you designed a suitable carrier that could resist the side forces and contain the acid in a spill - but then your vehicle will still be a less environmentally friendly commuter than a modern small car, and most of the carrying capacity is now battery
Has it occurred to people like these carnegie-Mellon guys that there are people out there who have dedicated their careers to electric vehicles, that many of them are brilliant engineers, and that if they think the future is lithium - to the extent that Mitsubishi and Nissan are building battery factories - perhaps they know more about it than someone who thinks he can build a racing milk float cheap using a bit of regenerative braking?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Wheel motors though could lead to a lot easier conversion project. Trade offs.
As spoken by someone who has no idea what they're talking about. Like the GP said, wheel motors lead to shitty handling. That's why they're used only in special-purpose vehicles going very slow. Having one motor per wheel is a good idea, having one motor in every wheel is a crap one. Speaking as someone who reads the specifications for tires for his sports cars (one at a time, thanks) you're full of shit. Going from stock 21 lb wheels on my 240SX to 9lb wheels resulted in a bent wheel (I couldn't afford forged) but also resulted in dramatically better traction on rough roads. I bought my tires based on weight too, and got 1cm less tread width than I had planned to save 4 pounds (21 or 25 pounds per tire.) Now you want to stick motors in there? Massive fail.
Even if the electric was only used for the start and stop cycle of the commute, to regain some energy from regen braking, then quickly expend it, just to get going from stops, etc,
That would still be a large weight that it was stupid to add to the wheel. The right place to put a disc motor on a wheel is attached to the transaxle, in between it and the output shaft. This is a nice place to put your friction brake too, but Americans can't make a CV that will hold up to that kind of abuse. Subaru is putting one between the engine and the transmission to replace the torque converter on an automatic, but that still has transmission loss.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The most fuel-efficient method of cresting a hill is to be going slowest at the top, fastest at the bottom. Real world data will reveal that most people are going fastest at the top, slowest at the bottom.
This is what makes regenerative braking work out for most people. However, I used to regularly commute 46 miles touching my brakes only once: when parking in the lot at my destination. How much would regenerative braking have helped me?
Regenerative braking only works when you drive like an ass. And yes, I understand that having other cars on the road (unlike my old commute) forces you to drive like an ass.