Eco Factor: Zero-emission car designed to run on lithium-ion batteries.
First-year students at the University of Sydney have spent the last five months designing and building an all-electric vehicle dubbed ManGo. The hand-built car is designed to be lightweight and features a four-wheel drive with a motor in each wheel, eliminating the need for mechanical brakes.
Eco Factor: Concept car runs on a zero emission 1000 cc electric engine.
Nature is the best thing to derive inspiration from and varieties of creations that can be found in it are incomparable. Taking advantage of this very aspect of nature, designer Mohd Azam Abd Halim has conceived a marvelous concept for Malaysian roads. Much better, the concept is inspired by nature for the sake of nature. It’s a public transportation concept, named “MCET” (Malaysian city eco-transit) that gives looks similar to the woodpecker found in Malaysia.
Eco Factor: Low-emission concept car runs on a diesel/electric hybrid engine.
Volkswagen has announced that the company will unveil the updated version of its 1-liter concept at the Frankfurt Motor Show. The lightweight car is supposed to drive 170 miles on a gallon of fuel. Powered by a diesel/electric hybrid engine the car could make it to the streets by 2013.
Filed under: EV/Plug-in, Solar, Volkswagen, Frankfurt Motor Show
Volkswagen promises to release the “Beetle of the 21st Century” by 2013. Those are some of the biggest shoes in the history of the automobile to fill, and VW plans to do just that with a new car based on the New Small Family architecture that was introduced on the original Up! concept that’s been floating around for the last few years.
Naturally, like any future-spec concept that’s looking to alter the vehicular landscape, the E-Up! will be powered by electrons. The car is small – under 10.5 feet (3.19 meters) in length – and will seat four occupants in a 3+1 arrangement. Top speed is listed at just under 85 miles per hour (135 km/h) and the run to 60 mph will take about 11 seconds while the city-centric zero to 30 mph is dispatched in just 3.5 seconds.
That performance is surely buoyed by the E-Up!’s low weight of about 2,400 pounds (1,085 kilometers) – 530 pounds of which is accounted for by the 18 kWh lithium ion battery pack. That’s enough juice to provide a range of about 80 miles (130 kilometers), which VW believes is sufficient for urban use. Depending on the outlet used to charge the EV, a battery pack replenished to 80% takes as little as an hour.
VW is quick to point out that its E-Up! is not a retro design like its own New Beetle. Instead, the car used Volkswagen’s latest design languages and draws inspiration from current models like the Polo and Golf. Details like diamond-cut head lamps and C-shaped fog lights join the solar roof that provides a working ventilation system without draining the battery to add to the car’s futuristic feel. Click on past the break for the complete press release and check out our gallery of images below.
Continue reading Frankfurt 2009: Volkswagen calls E-Up! Concept “Beetle of the 21st Century”
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Lithium-ion battery technology hit a major milestone this year when hybrid leader Toyota announced plans to test it in road trials of 500 plug-in hybrids — marking the first time this type of battery would be used for propulsion in a Toyota vehicle. While the automaker is going ahead with that plan for plug-ins, Toyota said today that after three years of testing, it’s decided lithium-ion battery technology still isn’t ready for prime time in the regular hybrid (without a plug) Prius.
Compared with nickel-metal hydride batteries, used roughly in 2 million Toyota hybrids sold since 1997, Kazuo Tojima, senior staff engineer for batteries at the company, told Bloomberg that the benefits of lithium-ion batteries — higher efficiency and less weight — just don’t outweigh the relatively high cost.
Toyota’s verdict on hybrid battery tech highlights two key points: the growing demand for lower-cost lithium-ion batteries (which many startups are targeting), as well as the need and opportunity for other battery technologies, which startups like PowerGenix are hoping to offer in coming years.
Hybrid vehicles are somewhat of an interim solution, with much of the auto industry, and the policies that influence it, moving toward plug-in hybrids and all-electric vehicles. According to Global Insight, hybrids are on track to snag some 5-11 percent of the U.S. market by 2015, up from 2.2 percent in just two years ago. So while lithium-ion is increasingly the tech of choice for upcoming electric vehicles, it’s hardly the only game in town.
New advances in lithium-ion batteries are making energy storage more effcient, less expensive, and more ready for a deep plunge into the mass market. With application far beyond electric cars – think cell phones, laptops, grid storage, power tools, and even lawn mowers – it is only a matter of time before the world is awash in billions of used lithium-ion batteries.
The emerging lithium-ion battery recycling industry has a lot of catching up to do, but at least two companies are rising to meet the challenge of making the technology more sustainable, Toxco Inc in the U.S. and Nippon Mining & Metals Co Ltd in Japan, both of which are developing new recycling processes.
In April 2009, Daimler first made a small and mostly unheralded announcement that they would start production of a fuel cell car in the middle of 2009 that would start rolling out in limited production in 2010. Little was made of this at the time.
Now, Daimler has announced that 200 Mercedes F-Cell B-Class hydrogen fuel cell vehicles will start production in the 3rd quarter 2009 and rollout in early 2010. The Mercedes FCV will have 134 hp, a range of 250 miles and an MPG equivalent of 86.6 city and highway miles combined.
The Mercedes F-Cell B-Class will also be equipped with a 35 kw lithium ion battery pack, regenerative braking and can start in temperatures as cold as minus 25 degrees C. The Mercedes F-Cell B-Class will boast 10,000 psi hydrogen tanks that can be refueled in as little as three minutes.
Daimler had already put 60 F-Cell A-Class test vehicles on the road and the Mercedes F-Cell B-Class was introduced in 2005 also as a test vehicle. The 200 F-Cell B-Class vehicles will be delivered to customers both in the U. S. and Europe in 2010, but whether this is a buy or lease deal has not been released yet.
As the critics continue to pan hydrogen cars as impractical the major automakers such as GM, Honda and Daimler continue to rollout a couple hundred production vehicles apiece with plans to scale up production over the next 3 to 5 years.
Battery startup Farasis Energy is betting that a combo of low manufacturing costs in China and advanced tech expertise in the U.S. will lead to lithium-ion cells that can compete on a global mass market. CEO Yu Wang said in an interview today at IBM’s Almaden Institute in San Jose, Calif., that the six-year-old, Hayward, Calif.-based startup is close to having a factory ready in China for pilot-scale production of its lithium-ion cells.
The strategy is similar to the bet that electric car startup Coda Automotive is making and A123Systems also said it would base much of its manufacturing in China if it didn’t get funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. In addition to the cost-cutting benefits of keeping production in China, the strategy puts these companies at the forefront of what’s shaping up to be a powerhouse EV market. China has growing demand for autos in general, but also new government support for electric vehicles and charging infrastructure, as well as its own auto and battery makers eager to beat out Europe, Japan and the U.S. on plug-in vehicle technology.
Founded in 2003 by Wang and Keith Kepler, President and CTO (both directed research at now-defunct battery maker Polystor), Farasis Energy got its start before the field of lithium-ion battery startups really became crowded, or acquired the hype observed last month by venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. Wang said he’s banking on that head start and his team’s industrial experience, in addition to the technology itself and low costs, to give Farasis a competitive edge.
So far the company has raised a first round of venture capital from Chinese investors as well as at least 0,000 under the DOE’s small business innovation research program. But unlike Coda, A123Systems, and more than a hundred other battery and vehicle developers, Farasis has opted out of requesting stimulus funds. For its second round of financing, sometime in the next two years, Wang tells us that Farasis may be courting investors stateside.
Governments and many companies in the U.S. and Europe all but forgot about battery innovation over the last 10-15 years, according to Joerg Huslage, the group leader for electrochemistry at Volkswagen. But with a growing number of automakers now jumping headlong into plug-in vehicle development, and already approaching the limits of lithium-ion (the battery technology of choice for the upcoming generation of electric cars) researchers are now in a high-stakes race to produce the next generation of plug-in vehicle energy storage technology that will have higher energy density, cost less, and last longer than today’s batteries.
Demand for energy storage technology that will replace lithium ion is “tremendous,” Huslage said this morning at IBM’s Almaden Institute — an event that focused on the topic of going beyond lithium-ion batteries. Investors have certainly been concentrating on what will come next, and Vinod Khosla recently went so far as to call lithium-ion a tech that has been “overhyped,” and will “possibly be replaced.”
Now that leaves a lot of questions about where the innovation will come from, who will be developing the breakthroughs and what type of technology will emerge. Will it come out of China, Japan or the underdogs in this race: Europe and the U.S.? Volkswagen, for one, has taken steps to utilize battery tech out of Asia. The German automaker has a partnership with Sanyo Electric to develop batteries for plug-in vehicles, another arrangement with Toshiba for an upcoming electric concept, and in May, announced a deal with China-based BYD Auto to test the Warren Buffett-backed company’s lithium-ion battery technology for upcoming VW cars.
As for who will produce key innovations, Huslage says his money’s on PhD students. That presents somewhat of a handicap for the U.S., he said, noting the declining interest from foreign students in doing graduate and post-graduate work here. As BusinessWeek reported last week, international admissions to U.S. grad schools fell sharply this year — the first decline since 2004, largely because of “the deteriorating job market and problems with visas and financing.”
Startups on the other hand, he said, are swimming upstream — more so in the battery sector than in most others. “It’s easier to build a car” than a battery with 10 times the energy density of today’s devices. As a rule, Huslage said, “Small startups cannot do this.”
One area of battery development that could offer better fodder for entrepreneurs, however, is new materials, said Huslage. And he expects at least some startups, spun out of university labs, to come up with “small solutions” (a groundbreaking electrolyte, for example) that end up making a big difference in battery capacity and performance.
What types of energy storage will emerge after lihtium-ion? Butron Richter, Nobel laureate and director emeritus of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, said yesterday, “Some of the experts here say lithium air is the best possible battery,” referring to the battery technology that the summit’s host, IBM plans to develop over the next five years. But “there’s a lot of the periodic table that’s unexplored.”
