projectevie
Jon Azrielant
Jeff Bladt
Matt Vance
andreafjeldFiled under: EVs of the World | Tags: EV charging station, Gallic discontent, Marcel Duchamp, Paris, Paul Simon, vehicule electrique
Walking the streets of Paris – doing the “trottoir,” as they say – one is liable to see many a thing: lots of high heels, regurgitating sewers, poor imitations of Paul Simon as backpacker, incontestably waifish old women, silhouettes of urine-soaked cement, enough second-hand smoke to turn an infant French, enough strewn cigarette butts to keep Marcel Duchamp happy an eternity, expressions of “more stylish than thou,” expressions of vain Gallic discontent, xenophobic airs, French (and not English) bulldogs… the list goes on.
Imagine my surprise, nay delight, then, when whilst taking a walk one morning, I look down, and instead of finding dog poo smeared across my new shoes, I see this:
Is it... EV?
Wait a second… doesn’t that look like?… Could it be?… But it can’t… but maybe it is?…
I peer upwards…
EVs ONLY: GAS CARS KEEP OUT!
There was no doubt about it. It was a plug-in electric vehicle charging station! My first, real-life, personal encounter with one. My day is made…
My first EV charging station
So it turns out that since 2007 there’s been over 90 of these stations installed all around Paris.
All dotted around
Most of them can handle a couple cars and a few ‘two wheelers’ (mopeds or motorbikes), but about half can handle trucks too. Drivers simply pull into the designated parking spaces, get out, plug in, swipe their card, and voilà, can go off and do their chores while their vehicle recharges.
Anyone that owns a plug-in hybrid or electric vehicle can get a charging card, and the best thing about it is that both charging and parking are free. Well, at least for a certain amount of time. In high-congestion areas, cardholders get to park and charge at these stations for up to 2 hours, while in more residential streets, they can park and charge for 24 consecutive hours.
Not a bad deal. Anyone who’s been to Paris knows there’s not many spots to park your car, and get buzzed, without having to pay a single centime.
Filed under: EV news
So, after another exciting day of events at Climate Week, I decided to unwind a bit and watch the Colbert Report on hulu. Lo and behold, I was pleasantly surprised to see one of my personal heroes, Shai Agassi (CEO of Better Place) being interviewed! What was most surprising is the finesse with which Agassi managed to promote EVs without once taking Colbert’s bait to veer off topic. What a wonderful voice for the EV movement. Wow.
(see the interview on hulu’s website here).
Filed under: EV news | Tags: Electric Cars, EV, Ferrari 360 Modina, Porsche Carrera GT, torque, RPMS, Tesla Roadster
And see the Past get smoked:
The remarkable acceleration you just witnessed is due to electric vehicles’ ability to deliver much greater torque, and over a wider RPM range, than gasoline-powered vehicles.
Torque is the turning force that makes cars accelerate. The higher the torque, the more powerful the force that turns the wheels, and the quicker the wheels can get going and push the weight of the car.
Internal combustion engines are limited in this respect in that they need to ‘rev’ at a certain rate before reaching their peak torque, and even then their peak torque can only be maintained within a limited RPM (speed) range. EVs, on the other hand, have a much higher torque, are capable of instantly delivering maximum torque, and can sustain maximum torque in a much broader range of RPMs.
The graph below illustrates this difference in torque by comparing the torque of a 4-cylinder high performance gasoline engine to that of a Tesla Roadster:
Why EVs smoke gas-powered cars at the starting line
Filed under: Charging Stations, EV news | Tags: EV, Solar, charging station, Lex Heslin, Beautiful Earth Group, UN, United Nations, Climate Week
So, I was looking through the events for Climate Week and I saw that Beautiful Earth was giving a private tour of their soon-to-be-released Solar-Powered Electric Vehicle Charging Station for the UN top brass and no press. I thought to myself, well, these guys will never let me in, but why not give it a shot, right? Turns out Beautiful Earth CEO Lex Heslin thought our mission at EVIE was pretty similar to his own and he (ever so generously) extended an invitation to Project EVIE to attend!
I promised Lex that I wouldn’t release any design details or post any photos before the public press release next month. Biting my tongue and trying ever so hard to hold back, let me say that from what I saw it looks like Beautiful Earth can really change the world with this thing. Lex’s charging station can be built for next to nothing out of supplies that are readily available around the world– most importantly, in the developing world. For an astoundingly minimal investment, solar charging stations like the one Beautiful Earth built in Brooklyn can be built anywhere (think the side of a road through the Gobi Desert) and will continue to charge several cars a day with no maintenance costs for a decade.
Anyway, I’ve probably already said too much, but definitely keep an eye out for these guys down the road!
P.S.: Did I mention they let me play with the first Mini-e ever produced? SOOO cool!
Filed under: EV news, Grassroots EV | Tags: Shai Agassi, Better Place, battery-swap, range anxiety
What’s that old adage? If you want something done, do it yourself? Well, that’s precisely Shai Agassi’s attitude when it comes to switching the world over to electric vehicles. Shai has figured out that the world can’t afford to wait around for technology to make that change for us. We’ve got to make that change for ourselves, and make it now.
The two main obstacles facing EVs right now are 1) Range anxiety caused by the current limitations in battery technology, and 2) Their expense, primarily due to the high cost of these batteries. Now, while other people are prepared to sit around, twiddling their thumbs, waiting for a mythical day when technology will swoop down from the sky and save us all, Shai has decided to confront these problems now, using the greatest technology available to man – his brain and his capacity to think.
After all, who knows when battery technology will improve? If human progress continues, it surely will, but when? Will it be before oil has run out? Will it be before there’s no more Arctic? Before the seas have risen and there’s no more New Orleans, San Francisco, and New York? Before North Dakota is a desert? Or before the air is too polluted for babies to breath? We can’t afford to take this gamble. Yes, technology is a wonderful thing and has revolutionized the way we live today, but it has always been most effective when combined with our own initiative and ideas. Technology, like all science, needs human direction – it’s not a problem solver in itself. Putting blind faith in technological salvation can lead us down a dangerous road – just think of the Terminator scenario, or Hal from Space Odyssey: 2001.
Now, as said above, there are two major problems facing EVs today 1) Range anxiety, and 2) Cost. But beneath both these problems lies one common cause: batteries – their power limitations, and their expense. And so to solve this problem, Shai has come up with a plan to isolate the batteries, from the car. This plan is called BetterPlace. The BetterPlace plan has two key components: 1) That the owner of an EV does not own the battery pack itself, and 2) In addition to recharging an EV by plugging it into a socket, drivers can have their depleted batteries swapped for a fully charged one.
How does this system solve the battery problem? By having an EV driver own only the car and not the battery pack itself, BP’s plan cutes the price of an EV to one competitive with that of a gasoline car, and that’s not even taking into account the tax breaks many countries propose to give to zero-emissions vehicles. And by setting up battery-swap stations, drivers don’t have to worry about where to next plug in their car, or about waiting around hours for their battery to recharge – they’ll know exactly where they can swap for a new battery, and that in a matter of minutes they can be on the road again.
But who owns the battery then? And how to do these battery-swap stations work? Well, BetterPlace will own all the batteries. And they’ll charge consumers on how many miles they drive. Under current conditions, BP will charge drivers 8 cents/mile (~$1.50/gallon), yet as volume increases, this price is expected to fall (unlike oil’s price, which from here on out can only feasibly increase and increase). As for the batter-swap stations, they’ll look a lot like car-washes: you’ll drive your car up onto a ramp, turn it off, a machine will then take over, and in two minutes you pop out the other side will a fresh battery. These stations are expected to cost ~$500,000 – about half the price of setting up a gasoline station. And the plan is to install these stations in a net of strategic points so that in any, say 75 mile radius (avg. EV range is 125 miles), a driver can get to one. Where’s all this electricity coming from though, you might ask yourself. Well, the biggest kicker to all this, is that BP has pledged that all the electricity it will funnel to customers, down the very last electron, will come from a renewable energy source.
This, in a nutshell, is Shai’s solution to the battery problem. But, on a larger scale, it’s an ingenious solution to a chunk of the environmental, economic, and energy problems the facing the world today. Israel, Denmark, Australia, Japan, Hawaii, and San Francisco have all signed up with Shai to BetterPlace’erize themselves. Let’s hope more follow suit, before it’s too late.
If you didn’t read or catch all that above, please watch this video of Shai explaining the BetterPlace platform at a TED conference last February. This guy can really speak his mind. Get inspired!
Filed under: History of the Electric Car | Tags: California, electric starter, hand crank, history of electric car, Prius, Switzerland, Thomas Edison
Think of the electric car as a purely modern invention? That the Prius, the 90′s, Hollywood, celebrity drivers, and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) was the start of it all? Think again. EV’s go back as far the 19th century. (Though you’ll be easily forgiven for thinking otherwise – admittedly, anything in, from, or associated with the 90′s and California seems to have this kind of ahistorical effect on people).
Yep, the invention of the first electric vehicle is credited to as far back as the 1830′s. Advancements in battery technology in the 1860′s and then 1880′s led to several European countries electrifying their railway systems, installing electric tramways, and supporting the use of electric cars. As a matter of fact, in what seems today like an extremely prescient move, Switzerland, that most ruthlessly wise of all countries (except perhaps for Israel), decided to electrify their entire rail network in order to reduce their dependence on foreign energy!
By the 1890′s, electric fever had reached the United States. Several EVs were on show at the famous Chicago Worlds Fair of 1893, and in 1897 the first fleet of electric taxis hit the streets in New York City. By 1900, over a quarter of the 4,192 cars produced in the US were electrically powered. And meanwhile, our national wizard-laureate, Thomas Alva Edison, was beginning his decade long research into battery technology.
Thomas Edision and the electric car.
In the early 1900′s, EVs continued to gain popularity in the States, even as their circulation in Europe began to taper. Sales peaked in 1912, a year when there were a total of 33,842 electric cars registered in the US (for comparison, in 2007 there were 55,730). That meant that in 1912 38% of all automobiles in America ran on electricity, compared with 22% on gasoline, and 40% on steam.
Several factors contributed to the EV’s success in the States. There was none of the deafening, bone-shuddering vibration there was in gas-powered cars, and they didn’t require any gear changes, which was a constant source of disquietude for any owner of a Model T or the like. Perhaps the most major advantage EVs held over gasoline cars though, was that you didn’t need to start it up manually with a hand crank. But it’s also in the hand crank, sadly, that the EV met its premature demise.
You see, getting your car going back then with a hand crank could be an extremely difficult, and dangerous endeavor. Not only was it physically demanding, but there was the risk that the moment you started the engine, the hand crank would begin spinning round with the crankshaft at an extremely fast and powerful pace, potentially hitting the cranker. Broken thumbs and wrists were common, yet much worse and more ghastly could also occur.
So, obviously enough, this was a major downside for gas-powered cars. Folks weren’t too keen on receiving the third-world punishment for stealing for simply trying to start their cars. This major selling point for the EV though, disappeared in 1912 when the electric starter was invented, allowing gas-powered cars to start at the turn of a key.
This simple invention, the electric starter, turned the tide against the electric car, and soon enough, gas-powered cars, now with their ease of ignition, and superior range, became the consumer choice. And there you have it, how ironic it is that the electric car was killed in the States by the electric starter!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Brookings Institute, Google.org, RechargeIT.org
So, I was looking over the Brookings Institute Google RechargeIT Conference last year and I found this really cute video they were playing at the conference… Yet one more reason to go electric!
