Student-Built Electric Car Charges In 10 Minutes
MIT students are developing an electric car that could easily compete with petro-based vehicles.
Using a 2010 Mercury Milan hybrid and 7,905 lithium iron-phosphate batteries, the car fully charges in about 10 minutes. Whereas most EVs require overnight charging to reach full capacity, this is clearly a game changer.
Radu Gogoana, an undergraduate on the Electric Vehicle Team, says “Right now the thing that differentiates us [from car manufacturers] is that we’re exploring rapid recharge.”
The motor is an oil-cooled, three-phase 187 kW induction motor originally designed for electric buses. Installed in the Milan, the car will go from 0 to 60 in just 9 seconds and has a top speed of 100 mph at 12,000 RPMs. And each “ten minute” charge will get you about 200 miles before you’ll need another.
The vehicle needs 350 kW of power to obtain that ten minute charge time. But the car can also use a standard outlet which would require an overnight charge.
“That’s enough power [350 kW ] to blow the fuses on 20 residential homes at once,” Gogoana said.
Ideally, charging stations that delivers 356 V and 1000 A would be widely available.
Some companies are working on building charging stations nationwide. There are currently 40 ChargePoint stations across the U.S. The CT1000 ChargePoint can output 1.4 kilowatts, or 120 volts at 12 amps, which isn’t enough to rapidly recharge MIT’s car.
Another hitch is the cost of the battery array. It runs about $80,000. The team hopes that can be scaled by mass production. Um, me too.
The team’s press kit added that, “electrochemistry [of the batteries] is less volatile than that of other types of lithium-ion cells, which makes these batteries desirable in applications where crash safety is a high priority.”
Each member currently spends about 100 hours a week working on the project called the elEVen. The car is expected to be finished around the third quarter of 2010.
More on Student-built Electric Cars:
- Students Build Hydrogen Vehicle That Gets 1,336 MPG
- Texas Teen Builds His Own Electric Car on $10,000 Budget
- 2008 Eco-Marathon Car Gets 7,148 MPG
- Don’t forget to visit The Great Electric Car Race. Or, want your own electric car?
Source: DVICE
How much does the car weigh?
It’s clear that we have the ability to develop renewable and clean energy technology. What we lack, as a society, is the will.
SECOND!
Beats the heck out of hydrogen powered cars, which strike me as a fundamentally questionable proposition. Go MIT!
renewable? it all depends on how recyclable are the batteries, and at the cost of $80K only super rich could buy one. everyone says the technologies are there… I agree, technologies are there to build prototypes.
US went to the moon 40 years ago, then why we all can’t go there even if the technologies exist? it will take 10/15 years to really have pollution free car, but first we need to find a way to generate a lot of electricity to recharge batteries, because it does not make sense having electric cars that recharged by energy created using coal
A game changer? Really? With an $80,000 battery pack and needing 350-kilowatts to ‘fast-charge’, you think this is a game changer? Gee … maybe with mass production, they can cut the cost down to a meager $40,000 … pocket change!
Give us a break. There are teams of researchers all around the world building completely impractical power trains that will never see the light of day. This is just another teaching tool for the students. The real ‘game-changing’ work is being done in the R&D labs of the auto manufacturers and their suppliers. That’s where the engineers are working on designs that will work in the real world. Eventually combining both the affordability and reliability necessary for mass production. Only then will you see the game start to change.
A lot of great work is being done in the colleges and universities, but sensationalizing every press release as ‘revolutionary’ gets a bit stale after a while.
The will and 80 grand for the battery pack.
Um, $80k? Really? The main goal of their project shouldn’t have been “how quick” they could charge the car, but how cost effective it could be built and a method of charging the car without always having to be plugged in. (i.e. Solar hood and roof. Alternator being spun by one of the forward wheels when moving providing a charge at all times.)
I keep reading about how all these asshats keep running out and spending $100k on building an electric car. (Tesla, Chevy, etc..) None of them think past how fast it can go, how far, and what it will look like. An electric car that takes 380kw to charge isn’t using a renewable energy source. We’re talking about trading oil and gas for more dams, more brown outs on our aging power grids, more pollution from coal fired power plants, and nuclear waste from power plants to power cars whose battery technology is sub standard.
These cars need to be engineered in a way that they are able to charge themselves somewhat and they need to use LESS energy to move.
Nice project, if there are only going to be a few of these on the road. There is no way that the fast charge they are talking about will be feasible with the current electrical grid. Some quick figures indicate that a typical 1 Gigawatt power plant would only support fast charge for less than 3000 cars, that is at peak output and no other load. That power plant could power approximately 1 million homes at 1kw each. I suspect the number of homes actually powered would be more like 100000 plus industry and businesses. So you can see many many more power plants would have to be built for everyone to transition to fast charge electric. Sure it only takes 10 minutes to charge but most people are going to plug it in when they get home or before they go to work so the 8-5 crowd make the rules. Either that or you plug it in and some kind of scheduling device picks a time so you might as well slow charge.
The idea is cool and all just not doable on any kind of scale that would make a difference. If you have any doubt at all, call your local electric company for a quote on that kind of power service. Think 800 amps at 440 volts.
10 minute recharge? Where, at the local power plant…? Dream on.