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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.
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.
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.
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