Tag Archives: electric car

BYD Auto

BYD’s Electric Car Technology

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BYD Auto, offspring of Chinese cell phone lithium-ion battery giant, will soon be releasing two electric car drivetrains.  One will be the fully electric F3e technology, which will allow for a top speed of over 150km/h, a 13.5s 0-100 km/h acceleration, 300km / per charge range, and and a battery life-cycle of about 600,000km. This stems from their superior Fe battery technology. The Fe-battery has such innovative advantages as low cost, zero pollution, zero noise and recyclable. It can deliver voltage twice as high as a standard Ni-MH battery, while costing less than comparable batteries.
Fe Battery

BYD is also making a huge investment into range extended vehicles, notably the BYD DM (Dual Mode).  The BYD site seems to try to distinguish this as something more than an electric vehicle with a gasoline range extender, but they are not very clear. This is how BYD describes their technology:

As early as in 2003, BYD started DM electric vehicles project, on which currently 500 auto engineers are working. DM stands for Dual Mode and BYD DM (Dual Mode) electric vehicle combines a solely electric vehicle system and a hybrid power system. The DM hybrid system is an advanced technology which integrates two hybrid powers to control electricity generator and electric motor, thus not only massively reducing fuel consumption and emission but also enhancing the power and operation performance. In addition, it enables dual energy supplies via both recharging and refueling, which makes up the dual mode hybrid system in the real sense. If we call an electric driven system “EV” and the hybrid electric system “HEV”, then BYD DM should be named “EV + HEV”. This system is bound to replace the traditional electric-gasoline hybrid system, becoming the most popular and advanced new energy hybrid system in the world.

F6DM

Source: BYD Auto

Tesla Motors

Tesla wants some of that money too.

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With loans to the Big 3 all but signed for, Tesla Motors feels they deserve a piece of the government handout pie. Tesla’s Vice President of Business Development, Diarmuid O’Connell, blogged about how it was a bad idea for the Big Three to get money that had been set aside in the December 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA), specifically Section 136. Section 136 set up the Advanced Technology Vehicles Loan Program (ATVMLP), and Tesla opposed taking money that was supposed to make cars cleaner and instead use it to just keep the Big Three operating.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk told the Detroit Free Press that if the electric car maker doesn’t get a $350 million loan from the government, then the Model S will be delayed and San Jose plant won’t open. Musk said that with $350 million, Tesla could sell 20,000 electric sedans a year by 2011. “We can’t move forward with that without a major amount of capital,” said Musk. “If we don’t get any government funding, then what we need to do is we need to wait until the capital markets recover, which could be a year or two years from now.”

I sure hope the government does the right thing by helping a company with a proven track record of providing energy efficient vehicles. Sadly, the way things are moving right now, this will probably not happen soon enough.

Sources: Detroit Free Press, Autobloggreen

ZENN

Founder of ZENN Motor Company Takes Questions

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You’ve heard of Fisker, Tesla, Chevy Volt, and Better Place, but ZENN Motor Company is the quiet upstart lurking in the shadows that may have the Excalibur that propels electric vehicles into the mainstream.  ZENN’s secret weapon goes by the name of EEstor, a company that has developed a type of capacitor for electricity storage called the ‘Electrical Energy Storage Unit’ (EESU). According to its patent application, these units will use high-purity barium titanate coated with aluminum oxide and glass to achieve a level of capacitance claimed to be much higher than what is currently available in the market. The claimed energy density of the prototype is 1 MJ/kg; existing commercial supercapacitors typically have an energy density around 0.02 MJ/kg, while lithium ion batteries are around 0.54–0.72 MJ/kg.1

ZENN has exclusive rights to EEstor technology for four-wheeled, light vehicles. In April 2008 ZENN Motor Company announced that a future highway speed electric vehicle using EEStor’s capacitors will achieve 80 mph (130 km/h) speeds, 250 mile (400 km) range and charge in 5 minutes (not from standard plug). ZENN is hoping these models will be ready by Fall of 2009 with a price range of $25,000-$30,000. This vehicle will be called the cityZENN.

With that said, there has been a lot of excitement surrounding EEstor, but very little information on its progress. So when Ian Clifford, founder of ZENN, took questions from concerned stockholders to casual electric car aficionados, he did his best to calm some jitters while not revealing too much. Supposedly, he has a non-disclosure agreement with EEStor so he cannot state whether or not he has actually seen and held their wonderful technology.

Highlights include Ian stating that they are still confident the EESU powered cityZENN will be lauched in late 2009, ZENN Motors will retrofit fleets of commercial vehicles with the ZENNergy drivetrain, and somebody asked about using EEstor technology in green sailboats.

Aptera

Final touches being put on the Aptera

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Aptera

First of all, the electric Aptera Typ-1 will now be known as the Aptera-2e.  I would prefer Aptera Raptor or something cool, but that’s just me.  I can never remember cars with a bunch of numbers and slashes in their names.  Here is the company’s reasoning behind this attempt at simplification:

The challenge is that, with the name Aptera Typ-1, we have two names vying for attention: ‘Aptera’ and ‘Typ-1.’ With that in mind, we have decided to simplify the name and call the vehicle the Aptera-2e, where the 2 designates the number of passengers and the e denotes the electric powertrain.  Our sentiment is that with this convention, the vehicle name will rarely be spoken apart from the brand.

Secondly, the car will now have traditional rear view mirrors and a single fin mounted camera on the roof for optimal visibility and user friendliness.  Tom Reichenbach, chief engineer of Aptera, explains:

By moving to a single camera and screen – in conjunction with more traditional side-view mirrors – drivers are now placed in the safest, most practical and familiar setup.  We worked hard to make these changes without compromising our core mission of minimizing drag.  Through our comprehensive aerodynamic studies we’ve been able to design mirrors that slip right through the air.  And because the body-mounted cameras created air pockets that disrupted airflow over the vehicle, the change to the overall drag has been minimal.

Source: Aptera

Tesla Roadster

Tesla’s Refrigerator Sized Cooling Problem

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Electric cars require cooling systems. Not nearly to the extent that a combustion engine vehicle does, but lithium ion batteries get hot. Put your laptop on your lap for an hour and you might start cooking your own thighs. So you can imagine, thousands of lithium ion batteries will require a significant amount of cooling. There are 6,831 lithium-ion batteries in the Tesla Roadster, each about a third bigger than a typical AA battery. They’re linked together in a unique package that incorporates liquid cooling, safety fuses, and sensors that prevent the cells from experiencing what battery engineers like to call “thermal events.” The batteries feed 410 volts to the Roadster’s air-cooled AC induction motor. Here is the AC cooling system, for the cabin and battery pack:

Telsa Roadster AC Cooling System

Martin Eberhard, former CEO of Tesla Motors, is making the claim that the current cooling pump is working overtime, a lot of overtime. In, fact Eberhard stated that the pump for his Tesla Roadster seemed to be on all of the time, which is completely unnecessary after the car has been parked for an hour or so. Now the ESS cooling system is crucial to the life of the battery, but this is ridiculous. So, Martin Eberhard, being the electrical engineer that he is, installed one of those electric meters you see on the sides of houses ahead of his car’s charging station. Then he charged the car up fully, unplugged it for four days, then measured how much power it took to recharge the battery after the car sat, fully charged and cool, for four days. Doing some math, he found the car consumed 1,278 kWh per year, from just sitting there. That is enough to power two big refrigerators. Not only is this significant on your electrical bill, but this drastically reduces the lifespan of the pump.  Eberhard explains in his blog post:

The second question is the life expectancy of the pump. I expect that Tesla used an automotive-grade pump from a good supplier. I am also sure that no other car leaves a pump running 24/7. Consider a typical car designed to run for 200,000 miles at an average speed of 30 mph. Such a car is designed to run for 200,000 / 30 = 6,666 hours. Let’s say the designers want some room for error, and design the water pump for that car to operate for 10,000 hours without failure. 10,000 hours life expectancy would be a good-quality automotive pump.

Now, let’s run that same pump 24/7 instead of the couple of hours per day it would run in our typical car. Running 24/7, that pump will pass 10,000 hours in only 13 months. That’s all – end of life. Just to make it through Tesla’s 3-year warranty, that pump would need to last 26,280 hours without failure. To last just 5 years, the pump would need to run 43,800 hours. Hopefully, Tesla installed a pump rated for at least 50,000 hours of operation without failure, implying an MTBF of at least 70,000 hours, assuming an exponential failure distribution. Does any automotive parts manufacturer even make such a pump?

Tesla also told Eberhard that the new Drivetrain 1.5, that they guarantee to retrofit all the purchased Tesla Roadsters with, will not make any changes to the pump. However, in a recent article from TIME, Elon Musk responded to Eberhard’s cooling pump complaints and also shed some light on the nature of their tumultuous business relationship:

Eberhard, the ousted cofounder, says Musk interfered with the design of the roadster, demanding changes that were costly and led to delays. These included installing electronic door latches, building a lightweight carbon-fiber body and lowering the doorsill by two inches. “It cost us $1.5 million to lower that doorsill,” Eberhard says. “We would have been better off to have a simpler car shipping a year earlier.” Musk says his design changes were not the cause of delays. Eberhard says that despite Tesla’s green-tech credentials, the roadster has a coolant pump that operates even when the car is parked, wasting as much electricity as two refrigerators. Musk says that will be fixed next month. Eberhard also gripes that Musk controls the board of directors, whose members include his brother Kimbal Musk. “I’m very unhappy about what’s happened to my company” under Elon, says Eberhard, who still owns about 3 percent of Tesla. “I think he’s a terrible CEO.” Elon Musk responds that “Martin is the worst individual I’ve ever had the displeasure of working with.” –TIME, An Electric Car Loses Its Juice

While Eberhard does have a legitimate complaint, keep in mind he probably takes some pleasure in publicly criticizing Elon Musk’s Roadster. But in the end, both sides just want to see the Roadster improved, and hopefully the issue can be fixed fairly easily and cheaply.