EV progress starting to really take off -- environmental discussion

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Subject: EV progress starting to really take off

Author:
billvon

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Date Posted: 08:25:35 11/13/07 Tue

For the past 20 years I've been watching what's going on with electric vehicles, because I always thought they were the ultimate answer to our transportation-energy problems. For a long time, there was just very little progress. No shortage of ideas; I remember a 1975 Popular Mechanics that had a hybrid vehicle. A turbine genset from an airplane charged a battery bank and the batteries ran an electric motor. But nothing panned out.

In 1992 I worked on a Ford project called the "VCC110" that later became the Impact. This time there was a lot more progress, but again nothing panned out. (For several reasons; they did a documentary on what happened.)

Nowadays we're reaching a sort of critical mass. The Prius has put partially electric vehicles in many people's hands, and we have groups dedicated to converting them into pluggable HEV's. A123 (and others) have started to produce extremely usable batteries as real batteries, not laboratory curiosities. They are in such demand that people are buying DeWalt drill batteries, taking them apart, keeping the cells and tossing eveything else. Car companies are realizing that they can either get into EV's/hybrids or go the way of Edsel.

A similar event is happening in the small-EV market, specifically ebikes and NEV's (neighborhood EV's.) NEV's are small vehicles limited to 25 or 30mph intended for town usage, but at least two companies I know of are selling NEV's that require only a simple mod to be able to do 50-60mph. There are obviously licensing issues with these.

Ebikes are changing even faster. The advent of the A123 cells and newer li-polymer batteries are giving people ranges of 60 miles or more. The first ebikes used frame-mounted motors, but nowadays hub motors are taking over, making them much easier to install. Power levels have climbed steadily, and today there are hub motors that will operate happily at 5kW. I know one guy who put together a two-wheel-drive bike that should hit 10kW output (about 14 hp) and should easily do 60mph. It's a bit easier to do this 'under the radar' since electric bikes are completely unregulated as long as they can be limited to 20mph and 1000 watts - and several people sell controllers that can limit ebikes to those speeds. (Disable-able, of course.) The people working on them have gradually changed from hobbyists who want a way to toodle around town to speed freaks who want to go really, really fast for significant distances. (For the ultimate in _that_ there is now an A123-based motorcycle that's hitting 168mph/7.8 seconds in the 1/4 mile.)

Going to be an interesting few years.

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Replies:

Subject	Author	Date
Re: EV progress starting to really take off	L.	18:46:57 11/16/07 Fri