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UK Students Build Electric Car With 248-Mile Range
da_how writes "A group of students and graduates at Imperial College London have built an electric car with a massive range — 248+ miles on a charge at 'reasonable' highway speeds (60 mph). They did this by filling the car to the absolute max with as many lithium iron phosphate batteries as possible — 56 kWh — and designing a very efficient direct drive powertrain, about 90% batteries-to-wheels at highway speeds. The choice of vehicle is an interesting one: it's a converted Radical SR8 — a track racing car with a speed record on the Nurburgring. Not an obvious contender for an endurance vehicle (no windscreen either!) — but then they claim it's lightweight to start with, being constructed of steel space frame and glass fiber. Also, Radical is based in the UK and provided some help and sponsorship. The students plan to drive their 'SRZero' 15,000 miles down the Pan American Highway, beginning July 8 in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and ending up in Tierra Del Fuego three month later. That's about 60 charges."
It's positively electrifying!
Come on, that's puntastic!
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They made a monster battery to get a large mile range. That to me doesn't seem very functional since its still using the same tech, just a bigger fuel supply.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
....when me and some friends would get into our old beaten-up Radical SR8, pack some lithium-ion batteries and do the great American Road Trip in 248 mile bursts.
I just gave you some of the future right there.
One thing glaringly missing from the article is the cost of the battery pack. On the open market right now, 56kWh of LiFePO4 cells runs a bit over US$120,000.
15,000 miles down the Pan American Highway
They should do a little more research, as I wish them luck getting across the Darien Gap. There IS no highway from Panama to Colombia - they'll have to take the ferry like everyone else.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
With electric cars taking over , I thik we are heading for greener tomorrow. http://itdiscover.com/
The Tesla Roadster has a 245 mile range. And basic stuff like bumpers.
The student car looks like it has about a 3 inch ground clearance. If that. That's not going to get very far on anything less than a perfect road. And they want to drive it down from Prudhoe Bay? Right.
down the Pan American Highway, beginning July 8 in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and ending up in Tierra Del Fuego three month later. That's about 60 charges
Heh.....it's also not connected completely (need to take a ferry for part of it), and it is dangerous. For example, on the stretch between Guatemala and El Salvador, you will frequently find highway robbers. And of course, like any highway, there are traffic jams. So....that 60 charges is going to grow. If it can find a place to charge....some of those countries have 110 volt outlets.
But whatever, don't let all this discourage them. I'd love to read their trip report.
Qxe4
And the Tesla Roadster shows that decent performance can be attained. 150 miles and you've a couple of hours between recharges anyway. The problem is recharge times. Deal with that and electric cars are viable.
Thundersky has a pretty horrible reputation in the EV crowd- google "thundersky problems", and read all the sad stories for a few hours.
Please help metamoderate.
The original figure is 400 km. There's one significant digit in it. "250 mi" will do fine and save energy too! Don't you know that every digit except 0 has "on" bits and "on" bits require more electricity than "off" bits?
I don't see all the hype about electric vehicles. While I agree we need to move from our dependence on fossil fuels, electric vehicles simply move the pollution from the highway back to the power plant. All that energy has to come from somewhere...
It could be that the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
no, recharge times are not really a issue. but you have to realize that you use a electric car differently then a gas powered one.
you charge it at home at night, and its full in the morning, every morning. most people could do a week on a single nights charge.
that one time a year(if that) where you have to go further then the cars range you can always borrow or rent a gas powered car (or even take the train or something)
the one thing holding electric back is purchases price. the lithium batteries are expensive (all the rest is cheaper)
UK Students Build Electric Car With 248-Mile Range
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Submission: UK students build electric car with 264 mile range by da_how (1822480)
264 going once, going twice? Do we have 270???
I guess it doesn't matter, because I bet those girls that would date these students if only they had a car live just one mile further away...
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Exactly right, batteries are too expensive and you charge everywhere. My money is not on lithium tech. It is on NiCad, NiMH, lead acid and most importantly nickel-iron batteries. Fast charging is bad because it means expensive and brittle batteries as well as extreme loads on the power grid. Think about 1000 kW charging. It just does not work. Meanwhile, we have the solution to range anxiety: a biodiesel generator.
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I don't mean to troll, and I'm sure it was a fun and great learning experience for the students. In this regard, it is a big success and kudos for the team. But as far as the technology goes, I'm not very impressed. I mean, they took at very light vehicle, filled it up with standard batteries, and made it go. There is no true innovation here, just putting pieces together. And we should not blame them for this. The breakthrough we are all waiting for is in the batteries. Until this happens, all articles about electric vehicles will be along the same lines
As for their plan trip, I hope they have a good maintenance team driving next to them. The Panamerican road is by no means a proving ground or race track. In some parts its asphalt is quite damaged. I'm not saying that it can't be driven, but they are not very suitable for such a tuned vehicle with low clearance.
I wish them best of luck!
I'm still holding out hope for hydrogen fuel cells. They're clean, they're as green as your chosen electricity supply, and you can fill up your tank just as quickly as you can with petrol.
Still a long way from production line ready (not least the pesky problem of making hydrogen in large quantities at a decent price), but that's the future tech I'd be betting on.
I doesn't sound like they have ever driven the Alaska Highway.
Muddy sections, Gravel sections, Frost Heaves, Mosquitos, Moose.
A Radical SR8, electric or not is going to have a rough time.
I look forward to hearing about the effort
that one time a year(if that) where you have to go further then the cars range you can always borrow or rent a gas powered car (or even take the train or something)
You're assuming that everyone drives the way they do in the US, little short runs to work or the shops. In the UK (and particularly in rural areas), we use our cars a lot more, and tend to take far longer trips. It's not uncommon for me to drive a couple of hundred miles and then come back, within a couple of hours. I can do that on rather less than a full tank of petrol, and if I need to refill it takes a couple of minutes. With a range of 248 miles I'd barely make it to the next big town and back.
With
NiMH batteries
Place for 4 occupants & a trunk for luggage
Crash tested
in 1996...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solectria_Sunrise
Deleted
One thing that stands out to me is that the rear spoiler and front splitter would make for a lot of aero drag, especially where the rest of the car is rather likely to be quite aerodynamically slippery looking at it's shape. They've also tackled rolling resistance and drive-train efficiency so any gains in aerodynamics would greatly extend range. At 60mph it's the greatest force acting on this car, and with their steps towards efficiency it is even greater. If they would just ditch the big spoiler and the front splitter, they'll watch their range shoot up. 0.50 to 0.30 cd might account for 40% improvement in a vehicle where rolling resistance has been already addresed.
Don't get me wrong what these guys are doing is great, but ~270 miles range is not terribly impressive considering that's what a stock Tesla has achieved.
Ditching the wing and splitter could have yielded them 20-40% improved range at open road speed, at the small expense of the race car look. It would take a few minutes with a spanner to remove, and to put back on for parking up for a photo shoot with the local press. I hope this is what they do. Some further work with some duct tape or some more ambitious aero mods with some coroplast http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthread.php/aerocivic-how-drop-your-cd-0-31-0-a-290.html ecomodder* style and they could have squeezed out more efficiency. The very best road vehicles approach 0.15 Cd, this would have given them a shot at 500 miles range. Lower the speed a little and they may have gone 600mi / 1000km.
I can't find Radcial SR8's aero stats anywhere but I know such track day specials have a fair bit of down force by design, so a drag coefficient above 0.50 is not uncommon. This is largely the result of the wings, air damn, and underbody design. High down force set up might be over 0.70 or more. To compare, a SUV is about 0.40, a good sedan 0.32, and a Toyota Prius 0.27, Aptera is about 0.17 these vehicles are not even designed not to generate lift let alone downforce.
* Yes I do lurk there.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
sorry, but are they stupid?
everyone knows, that at highway speeds all that counts is aerodynamics. if you are driving constantly at 60 mph, it doesn't matter if your car weights ton, or ton and half. all that counts is aerodynamics.
so I would say that if they had used for example mercedes E class (car with best aerodynamic coefficient) they could do few hundreds km more...
ohm ohm ohm ohm.
Sorry
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
that one time a year(if that) where you have to go further then the cars range you can always borrow or rent a gas powered car
buy one of those little cargo racks that stick on the back of SUVs etc that fit a 1 1/4 inch hitch and are just about the size of a modest gas generator, like one foot by two feet... Most people use them to strap down a beer cooler, or maybe to strap down gas and propane tanks. I'd strap down a small gas (or propane) generator.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
You had to go 250 miles from your home to get a date? Man, I knew geeks were hard up but that is extreme.
Or were you finished before the battery could recharge in 30 minutes and she lived 125 miles away? Try working on your staying power, maybe then you could find a girl in the same country/state.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This seems to be the equivalent of bragging about getting increased range in a normal car because you put another fuel tank instead of having a trunk and removed everything else that makes a modern car modern. Like important safety equipment, or air conditioning. I don't get it. Tesla has already done what these guys are trying to do ten times over without sacrificing all of that. And good luck getting through the southern Mexican parts of the highway in that thing. You'll need it.
no, recharge times are not really a issue. but you have to realize that you use a electric car differently then a gas powered one. you charge it at home at night, and its full in the morning, every morning. most people could do a week on a single nights charge.
that one time a year(if that) where you have to go further then the cars range you can always borrow or rent a gas powered car (or even take the train or something)
the one thing holding electric back is purchases price. the lithium batteries are expensive (all the rest is cheaper)
If this car were to be bought by someone like me, I regularly have to travel more than 248 mile range it has. From my home, the places I regularly travel to are 228 miles RT, 316 miles RT, 340 miles RT, 424 miles RT, and occasionally one trip that is 842 miles RT. This is also the distances between my home and these cities. It doesn't include driving around while there. All the trips, with the exception of the last one, are usually day trips. I visit these places about 15 times a year, so pretty much any electric car will not work for my purposes.
There are no trains or buses here. I am also not going to borrow or rent a car for such purposes either. It's just not practical for me. I realize that I am not most people, but there is a large majority of the population for which an electric car would not be practical even if it were affordable.
I'm glad you are not impressed, as this car works less well than your homebrew electric car, but it's impressive enough.
FTA, the engineering was getting a 90% efficiency on the power transfer from battery to wheel on the highway. That it gets almost the range of a commercial effort with cash...
For sure this is not a great leap forward for science or for mankind. It's just a Big Fucking Adventure along the lines of Peking to Paris in 1907 or the round the world race the following year. You do it for the bravado. Period.
Pity we can't just say here are some crazy kids who want to travel the length of a continent in a cobbled up electric car. Instead we have to pretend there's a science and/or engineering feat involved. Sigh.
Couple of lessons they should have learned from racers of a 100+ years ago: 1) get a wind shield and a convertible top. 2) roads will be bad and break your car. 3) fuel will be unavailable at times.
Driving down through Canada, there are *many* places where it is more than 250km between ANY buildings on the road. There are no gas stations, no stores, no houses or homes, no people, nada, nothing.
Where do they plan to charge up?
That's nothing. I heard about some UK students who built an electric car that could go 400 kM! It has a 2.6 L engine. I haven't found the weight in stone yet.
60MPH is not reasonable for I-294 and Chicago area toll roads. Needs to be about 70 for that.
Bollocks. Average distance per trip 2 miles in the UK. As far as "drive further" that's bollocks too. How far doe people drive in the UK? 700 miles and you've gone from one end of the country to the other.
hot swappable hydrogen cells are the answer. The funniest thing is seeing these people expecting a passenger to wait hours for a refill.
Clearly there needs to be recyclable hydrogen battery cells that are simply swapped over the counter of a gas station, like selling a box of cereals in the gas station.
i.e. In the same way as a truck comes around every now and then with a new crate of stock, there would be a crate of hydrogen back up cells purchased according to whatever demand there is at that petrol station, and these cells are not that big AFAIK. There would be some kind of local (preferably renewable energy powered) hydrogen generator - generators which extract hydrogen from rain, the ocean etc. And the great thing is the bi-product of a hydrogen powered car is...water! The whole thing from powering the hydrogen generator, which bi-product is oxygen!! to powering the car has a cycle that pumps in hydrogen and water oxygen, and water. It will all be down to how efficient they can make them - something that uses up a proportionately small amount of hydrogen.
Measuring a car's perfs by having it race the 20 km or so of the Nurburgring's Nordschleiffe is to me what differentiate a real sport car from a "ricer". We're not talking about silly 0-60 drag race or any of other "straight line" non-sense.
So using the chassis from the Radical is great... Now of course that's not practical at all and if I had to choose a car performing well on the Nordschleiffe I'd pick something else than the Radical: the latest Corvette ZR1 (best bang for the bucks, incredible: eating alive most supercars on the Nurburgring's Nordschleiffe for a fraction of the price), a Porsche 911 GT2 RS, a Porsche Carrera GT. Something like that. Sure, they're expensive, they perform a bit less well than the Radical and they're just two-seaters (technically the 911 GT2 RS has a bit more room ;) but they are actually daily drivers (as shocking as it may seem). My daily driver? An old 911 Carrera... (yup, I love both american and german cars as long as they can perform well on the Nurburgring).
I'm wetting my pants for EVs to become usable daily and *also* look gorgeous. Hard not to fall in love with Porsche's 918 prototype (an hybrid) or with the Tesla. One day I'll upgrade my good old 911 for an electric sport car :) Please, bring us the future mad scientist!
Every single time I see one of these "revolutionary" new "cars", they ALL have the exact same characteristics that look like they were designed by Douglas Adams.
1. Made from some ultra-light material that has NO crash protection value whatsoever.
2. NO inside space, whatsoever.
3. NO practical applications, whatsoever.
Lemme tell you what I want to see in an electric car?
1. Must be able to carry 3 screaming kids.
2. Must be able to carry said screaming kids with 1 weeks worth of groceries in the back, 500 pounds of beach toys, or 500 pounds of ski gear.
3. Must be able to SAFELY carry 1 & 2 while traveling along the Long Island Distressway on a Friday afternooon in August, and a Sunday afternoon on the Throggs Neck Bridge in February.
4. Must be able to make it from Manhattan to either Hunter Mountain or Cooper's Beach while meeting criteria 1,2 and 3.
If you can make an electric car that can do THAT, you'll be the wealthiest person on the face of the planet.
[End Of Line]
And probably 500 rounds of ammo when they cross into Mexico...
I'm not. Hydrogen is a poor electrochemical reagent, and has extremely low energy density leading to massive storage problems (best way to store hydrogen is gasoline). A far, far better idea is that of the aluminium economy. Al-air fuel cells are 100 times cheaper than hydrogen cells, and just as efficient. Aluminium smelting just as efficient as water electrolysis while being performed on a large scale. So with no tech development, Al > H2.
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Did everyone here miss the part about them being students? The possibility that just maybe designing, building, and road testing an electric car just MIGHT be relevant to the studies of an engineering student? It sure won't look bad on their CV when the time comes to get a job.
I see nothing terribly noteworthy or newsworthy about this. They take a non-street-legal chassis, bolt an electric motor to it, and stuff the rest of the thing with batteries and call it an electric car. Seriously, not trolling here, but it sounds more like a science-fair project to me, not anything so much as a technology demonstration or proof-of-concept.
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I've posted many times about this. The issue is always the battery and nothing else. I bet if I could get a van and fill it up with batteries and a good powerplant, I could go 400+ miles on charge, but the reality is, it's a useless auto.
To sum up the attitude of the above post: Landing on the moon? I don't care, call me back when British Airways runs three flights a day.
Add a joke logout link or whatever it is these days and fill in a different topic each time and you've go the above post and many many others from the same poster.
Back to the post - is it also useless if it doesn't come in blue, red or pink?
It's an undergraduate project that has become impressive enough to get in the news FFS so mindless ranting about air conditioning is pointless.
This project is important because with so much FUD being put around by the big auto makers about how difficult electric cars are to make and how much R&D they need to do to get them working properly, at the end of the day you can just bung a whole heap of batteries into an existing car and it'll run.
If ten students can do it to a super-car and get a decent result, it shouldn't be that difficult for the big guys to do it OR for the garage in your town to do it either. ...and maybe people will start to question why electric cars they can actually buy and drive are always 3-6 years away.
They aren't even going to make it to Fairbanks without having to have the thing flatbedded. They are starting their trip with 400 miles of rough gravel road. In a track car. http://www.flickr.com/photos/smailtronic/1430466628/ 400 miles of that. In a track car.
You're assuming that everyone drives the way they do in the US, little short runs to work or the shops. In the UK (and particularly in rural areas), we use our cars a lot more, and tend to take far longer trips.
I've lived in the UK, and I have to disagree - my friends in Edinburgh can't understand why I'd drive down to London, rather than take a train or fly. People in the US tend, in my experience, to do a lot more long distances in cars. Once I looked at the numbers - the US has almost twice the cars per capita as the UK, and each of them is driven 50% more per year than in the UK. Ask someone in the UK how far someplace is, and you'll get an answer in miles. In the US, like as not, you'll get an answer in hours, even here on the relatively crowded East coast. New York - 4 hours. Boston - 8 hours. Orlando - 15 hours. And around here, a "little short run to work" averages 45min each way.
At least until you see a production model. Not to mention this VW is even smaller than the EV of this article with a freaking one cylinder engine. The production model is going to be twice that size, so you can safely bet it's not going to get 238 mpg, and it's a hybrid gas/electric to boot!
It's a two seat, four wheel motorcycle with a cover. One seat in front and one in back. Still an interesting vehicle
I suspect your comment is a joke, since pretty much everything you say is the opposite of reality. Or else you've never been to the US, where they drive 200m between car parks of shops because no one built a pavement. But anyway...
With a range of 248 miles I'd barely make it to the next big town and back.
Where do you live in the UK where the "next town" is 124 miles away?
The "most remote" place in England (Kielder) is 40 miles from a city (Carlisle).
In Scotland (mainland) you could get perhaps 70 miles from the nearest town.
The Isle of Skye, for a substantial part of the year. I'm not talking about a small village with a Co-op and a newsagent, I mean somewhere with a decent builder's merchant and motor factor, not to mention clothes shops that sell something other than jeans, Barbour jackets and overalls.
The Isle of Skye
It's misleading to suggest that's normal for the UK.
It's normal for the entire top half of the UK.
Scotland has 9% of the UK's population. Many live in Glasgow or Edinburgh -- 56% of people live in one of these towns or cities (I can't find a proper figure for urbanisation).
Living in a remote area of Scotland isn't normal for the UK; electric cars not being immediately suitable for those areas isn't going to have much effect on how many are sold in the UK.