Electric Vehicles 101

Announcement from www.milesev.com:

We are down to our last remaining inventory of our New 2009 ZX40ST Truck Sale.

With the new year coming upon us we need to sell the last of our new 2009 Trucks. Our new price reduction should allow us to sell the remaining 2009 trucks before we bring in our new 2012 trucks.

All vehicles have the standard equipment listed in our specifications, plus:

1.       New batteries with 18 month prorated warranty

2.       Standard Warranty – 12 month Bumper to Bumper

3.       Spray on Bed Liner

4.       Spray on Undercoating

Price for our remaining new 2009 ZX40ST Trucks is $9,900.00 per truck plus $895 freight.

Price is good for P/O’s received  by January 15^th 2012.

Miles Electric Vehicles  LLC
Dan Christy
C – 916-796-3901

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Swiss win round-the-world electric race

A Swiss team riding a futuristic two-seater electric motorbike has won an epic 80-day round-the-world solar race that ended in Geneva on Thursday.

The Zero Race, organised by Swiss teacher Louis Palmer who in 2008 circumnavigated the globe in a solar taxi, was intended to raise awareness about climate change, mobility and renewable energy.
“We made it,” shouted Swiss globetrotter, Tobias Wuelser, team leader of the victorious Zerotracer bike punching the air while riding up the “Aisle of Flags” at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva.

“The vehicle runs; it was really amazing we didn’t have a single breakdown, there is electricity everywhere. It was a great adventure,” his teammate Frank Loaker told swissinfo.ch.

…

The race involved 80 days on the road, each day covering 500km, and two months on the high seas, as the vehicles were shipped between continents.

Palmer is already planning his next electric race: a two-week event across Europe in September 2011 with around 20 participants.

Read more: http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/news_digest/Swiss_win_round-the-world_electric_race.html?cid=29577916

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“Still, it could make its mark: if BYD clears the regulatory hurdles, its F3DM plug-in hybrid would be a frontrunner in the race to become the first production car in American showrooms from a Chinese automaker — arriving as soon as next spring, the company says.”

…

“Think of the F3DM as a Chevrolet Volt with a Wal-Mart price tag, a car with a large-capacity battery — that delivered 31 miles of uninterrupted pure-electric driving for me — as well as a gasoline engine that gives it the ability to go an additional 300 miles.

“General Motors, however, loaded up the Volt with a powerful electric motor, an iPod-like console and a luxury feel that help to justify a $41,000 price tag (before state and federal tax incentives). The F3DM — which does have an auxiliary audio input jack and a parking sensor — is expected to sell for less than $29,000. Incentives could drop the price closer to $20,000.

“My drive of the F3DM started with the 16-kilowatt-hour battery charged to 95 percent of its usable capacity. Instead of babying it to see how close I could get to the 60 miles of E.V. range BYD claims, I punished the F3DM with a succession of pedal-to-the-floor freeway merges and herky-jerky speeding and slowing, all with the air-conditioning going full tilt.

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To: future-fuels-and-vehicles
Sent: Tue, Jan 18, 2011 10:14 pm
Subject: [future-fuels-and-vehicles] Wikipedia Purging EV Articles

Hello All,

One of Wikipedia’s greatest strengths is its open format. Anyone can edit. Unfortunately, this strength can become a weakness in the hands of unscrupulous editors. I remember that my ex-wife, a publicist, used to try to “pitch” her clients on Wikipedia by posting praise of these clients in there own Wikipedia articles and in other articles as well. Of course, she was well paid for her efforts by her clients.

I don’t know if the anti-EV forces on Wikipedia are being paid, or if they are just people who don’t like electric cars. Whatever their motivations might be, a small but determined group of Wikipedia editors is trying to eliminate nearly all articles on electric vehicles in Wikipedia. There most frequent tactic in doing this is to take an article on an EV and merge it with another article. Once merged, they dismantle the section on the EV, saying that it makes the other article too long or that the subject matter is unimportant.

This tactic recently reached its most absurd point when editors suggested that the article on the BYD 56DM EV be merged with an article on the BYD 56 gas vehicle, EVEN THOUGH NO ARTICLE ON THE GAS VEHICLE EXISTS AS OF THIS POINT!

We need to fight back to make sure EVs are represented in Wikipedia. If you’ve never edited Wikipedia, here is your chance to start. There are a number of discussions underway in which the editors mentioned above are trying to eliminate EV articles. We need to get as many people as we possibly can to contribute to these discussions to make sure EV articles are not “Blacklisted” on the world’s most frequently visited encyclopedia.

Here are links to some of the discussions currently underway:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Automobiles#Mitsubishi_i-MiEV

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Test your electric car knowledge by taking this fun electric car quiz:

http://planetgreen.discovery.com/games-quizzes/electric-car-quiz/know-your-electric-car-trivia.html

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Utilities thrilled and worried about electric cars
Published: Sunday, 21 Nov 2010 on CNBC.com

NEW YORK – The first mass-market electric cars go on sale next month, and the nation’s electric utilities couldn’t be more thrilled — or worried.

Plugged into a socket, an electric car can draw as much power as a small house. The surge in demand could knock out power to a home, or even a neighborhood. That has utilities in parts of California, Texas and North Carolina scrambling to upgrade transformers and other equipment in neighborhoods where the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt are expected to be in high demand.

Not since air conditioning spread across the country in the 1950s and 1960s has the power industry faced such a growth opportunity. Last year, Americans spent $325 billion on gasoline, and utilities would love even a small piece of that market.

The main obstacles to wide-scale use of electric cars are high cost and limited range, at least until a network of charging stations is built. But utility executives fret that difficulties keeping the lights on for the first crop of buyers_and their neighbors_could slow the growth of this new niche.

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” says Mike Rowand, who is in charge of electric vehicle planning at Duke Energy.

Auto executives say it’s inevitable that utilities will experience some difficulties early on. “We are all going to be a lot smarter two years from now,” says Mark Perry, director of product planning for Nissan North America.

Electric cars run on big batteries that are charged by plugging into a standard wall socket or a more powerful charging station. A combined 30,000 Nissan Leafs and Chevrolet Volts are expected to be sold over the next year. Over the next two years, Ford, Toyota and every other major automaker also plan to offer electric cars.

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EPA: Nissan Leaf Is Tops in Fuel Efficiency, Gets 99 MPG Equivalent

Nissan’s Leaf–the first mainstream, affordable all-electric car–just got the thumbs-up from the Environmental Protection Agency. Not only is it best in the midsize vehicle class for fuel efficiency, but the EPA gave the Leaf a whopping 106 miles per gallon for city driving and 92 mpg on the highway, for a combined rating of 99 mpg equivalent.

How does the EPA calculate the miles per gallon of a vehicle that doesn’t contain any fuel? Green Car Reports explains that the energy content of 1 gallon of gasoline is 33.7 kilowatt-hours, and the Leaf uses approximately 80% of its 24-kWh battery pack. The EPA put the Leaf through five-cycle tests using a number of different driving conditions and climate controls.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1704873/epa-nissan-leaf-is-tops-in-fuel-efficiency-gets-99-mpg-equivalent

The real world figures are not 100 miles/charge as I thought I read, but 73. That would be using 80% of a full battery charge. Looks like it’s close to 1 mile per 1% of full charge.

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Chris Paine the director of Who Killed The Electric Car will be at University of Minnesota, Duluth on Nov 29th and 30th.

Winter 2010 Sustainability Fair at UMD
Sustainability: The New Business As Usual

Featuring Chris Paine, Director of WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? and the
upcoming REVENGE OF THE ELECTRIC CAR
Monday & Tuesday, November 29 & 30 at UMD

Join UMD students, faculty, staff and community members as we explore the topic of sustainability in business during our Winter Sustainability Fair on Monday & Tuesday, November 29 & 30, 2010.

Chris Paine, director of WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? will present a lively presentation titled How many lightbulbs does it take to plug in an electric car? at Weber Music Hall on Mon. Nov. 29 at 7 pm, free and open to the public. He will then kick-off the Fair at 11:00 a.m. in

Kirby Ballroom on Tuesday, November 30 with a talk titled “”Science, change and the art of storytelling”, that will venture through the business, environmental, and societal impacts of electric cars.  Chris’ talks glide through the politics, personalities, and cold hard cash reasons for return of the electric car.  He shares his role as the filmmaker who caught GM and others destroying thousands of this “disruptive technology” in 2003.  Seven years later, he’s documenting the incredible return of electric cars for his 2011 doc “Revenge of the Electric Car”.   Chris will also include a preview of the upcoming documentary release REVENGE OF THE ELECTRIC CAR.

The Sustainability Fair continues into the afternoon, and UMD Kirby Lounge will be filled with engaging panels, presentations, and tables in the UMD Kirby Lounge.  Learn which Duluth area businesses are working on sustainability- including a panel discussion at 1:00 p.m. in KirbyLounge. At 2:00 pm, Mindy Granley, UMD Campus Sustainability Coordinator, will discuss what sustainability means to UMD’s bottom line.  Stay for an encore showing of WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? at 3pm.  In addition, local businesses will be tabling all afternoon throughout the Kirby concourse.

Chris Paine Background
Chris Paine is the writer/director of Who Killed the Electric Car?. The
film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006 before its release
by Sony Pictures to become one of the most successful documentaries of
the last ten years. His next documentary is Revenge of the Electric Car
due in 2011.

Previously, Chris executive produced the motorcycle racing film Faster
with Ewan McGregor and No Maps For These Territories about cyberpunk
author William Gibson.    On the entrepreneurial front, Chris co-founded
Internet Outfitters, an early player on the web and Mondo-tronics a
materials provider for the Mars Pathfinder mission.

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From an email I received from the Rocky Mountain Institute :

Some cities in America have prepared for plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) for years, but the PEV transition will soon affect much of the U.S. With the first wave of vehicles shortly upon us, initial PEV fleets will hit specific areas where, for a number of reasons, readiness and appetite is highest.

The path of the subsequent nationwide rollout of PEVs will be driven by a “chicken-and-egg” dilemma of city readiness and charging infrastructure.

Luckily, pioneering cities are helping make the roadmap to PEV readiness much clearer and shorter for those who are less prepared. It is not too late for newcomers to the game to join the next wave of PEVs by learning from the leaders how to more rapidly “get ready.”

In the report, “Electric Vehicles in America,” Roland Berger Strategy Consultants and Rocky Mountain Institute’s Project Get Ready identify which of America’s 50 largest metro areas are currently most prepared for PEVs.

Report findings were shared last week by RMI’s Matt Mattila at The Business of Plugging In conference in Detroit.

Learn how your city measures up.

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Swiss solar plane flying high in crucial test

GENEVA – An experimental solar-powered plane took off from western Switzerland on Wednesday for a 24-hour test flight — a key step in a historic effort to one day circle the globe using only energy collected from the sun.

The plane with its 207-foot (63-meter) wingspan left Payerne airfield shortly before 7 a.m. after overcoming an equipment problem that delayed a previous attempt, the Solar Impulse team said.

Clear blue skies on Wednesday allowed the prototype aircraft to soak up plenty of solar energy as it flew over the Jura mountains west of the Swiss Alps. The big question, however, was whether the plane’s 12,000 solar cells could fill up its batteries with enough energy so the plane could fly through the night.

The flight is going “extremely well,” said team co-founder Bertrand Piccard, a record-breaking balloonist whose father and grandfather also accomplished pioneering airborne and submarine feats.

“The goal of the project is to have a solar-powered plane flying day and night without fuel,” Piccard said. “This flight is crucial for the credibility of the project.”

By late afternoon, pilot Andre Borschberg had his oxygen mask on and was cruising at almost 29,500 feet (9,000 meters), having earlier dodged low-level turbulence and thermal winds that are frequent in the mountains.

Read the full story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100707/ap_on_hi_te/eu_switzerland_solar_adventure

Find the Solar Impulse official site here

Commentary:

This is not the first nor the last electric airplane. NASA had similar planes, and you can find consumer planes here that are electric: http://www.electraflyer.com/

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A month ago the Karma by Fisker was in Minnesota, here some shots

A well-built vehicle

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Racing Green Endurance is a project of Imperial College students who intend to build an electric super car with a record breaking range of up to 500km. To proof the endurance of their high-tech wonder they want to drive the 26’000km long Pan-American Highway from Argentina to Alaska. The start of the expedition is scheduled for May 2010.

Claudio von Planta, the director / cameraman of Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s motorbike TV series ‘Long Way Round’ and ‘Long Way Down’ will use the Racing Green Endurance event as an opportunity to film a ‘green’ version of the ‘Long Way Up’

The World’s Longest Road: The Pan-American Highway

Our project aim is to turn around the public perception of electric vehicles as slow, unattractive and of limited range. So, is there a more perfect challenge than tackling the longest road on the planet in our electric supercar?

From Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, to the world’s southernmost city, Ushuaia, we will become the first electric car to travel the full 26,000km of the Pan American Highway!

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PRESS RELEASE

EVO Electric Technology Powers New Electric Supercar

EVO Electric, a leader in the design, development, production, and sales/licensing of electric drive solutions for the automotive sector, announced today that its advanced Axial Flux motor technology was selected to power the Radical SRZero, an electric supercar unveiled today at Autosport International 2010 in Birmingham, England.

The SRZero is powered by two EVO AFM motors, which offer unparalled perfor¬mance in terms of power, torque, weight, size, efficiency, reliability and durability. Radical Sportscars, the Peterborough-based sportscar manufacturer, worked with Imperial College London’s Racing Green Endurance team to develop this all-electric supercar, and the results are stunning. The Radical SRZero has a top speed of 190 km/h with capability to accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3.5 seconds. The supercar will be demonstrated in a number of events, culminating with a 26,000km (16,000 mile) endurance trip from Argentina to Alaska later this year. The Radical SRZero aims to be the world’s most focused, fun-to-drive electric vehicle.

EVO technology is also featured at the International Boat Show in London (8-17 of January). EVO was selected to supply motors for the “Fast Electric”, an all-electric boat designed by Patterson Boatworks, a specialist builder of luxury and racing boats. The boat is available for purchase from Patterson and Bates Wharf Marine Sales Ltd.

“Motorsports and luxury boating are a great way of demonstrating the capabilities of EVO technology”, commented David Latimer, CEO of EVO Electric. “Many technologies are first implemented in motorsports and other niches before migrating to the larger but more cost-sensitive mainstream vehicle market segments. We believe the same will happen with hybrid and electric vehicle technologies including EVO’s advanced electric motors and generators, which are also being implemented in other near-term applications such as commercial and military vehicles.”

For more information on Radical Sportscars: www.radicalsportscars.com

For more information on Patterson Boatworks: www.pattersonboatworks.co.uk

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China To Subsidize Electric & Hybrid Car Purchases.
Summary:

• Pilot subsidy program to run in five cities
• Electric car buyers to save 60,000 yuan ($8,800) each
• Buyers of plug-in hybrids to save 50,000 yuan each
• Government to invest in electric car infrastructure
• Also offers 3,000-yuan subsidy for fuel-efficient cars

China to subsidize electric, hybrid car purchases in five cities

English.news.cn   2010-06-01

BEIJING, June 1 (Xinhua) — China Tuesday released details of its green-car subsidy program designed to boost the nation’s auto industry and cut vehicle emissions.

Through the program, subsidies of up to 60,000 yuan (8,784 U.S. dollars) will be given to buyers of pure electric vehicles in the five cities chosen for the pilot program, the Ministry of Finance said in a statement on its website.

Buyers of plug-in hybrid cars will receive up to 50,000 yuan in subsidies.

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More electric vehicle charging stations projected.

.

A total of 4.7 million electric vehicle charging stations will be installed worldwide over the next five years to support the transition to plug-in vehicles, says Pike’s “Electric Vehicle Charging Equipment” report. The United States alone is likely to be home to almost 1 million charging points by 2015.

Pike Research forecasts that annual revenue from EV charging equipment will reach $1.8 billion (US) in 2015.

That need will be fueled by the more than 3.1 million electric vehicles (EVs), including both hybrids and all-electric cars, expected to be sold worldwide during the next five years,

Read the full article here

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A recent news article on www.marketwatch.com titled “Nissan Charges Up for Leaf Electric Car” showed a clip of Nissan’s CEO Carlos Ghosn stating to Neal Boudette of the Wall Street Journal that demand for the company’s soon-to-be-released electric car, the Leaf, is outpacing production.

Quotes from Carlos Ghosn:

the demand is here because we have a lot of people showing interest

we had one hundred and thirty thousand hand raiser already in the united stats and these are .. individuals, .. not talking about companies or a fleet

we have a lot or pre-orders being taken

Other items mentioned:

• Nissan is working on a large ramp up in production
• Nissan is planning on producing a family of Nissan electric cars:
  • The leaf will be a small 4-door sedan with a 100 mile range.
  • Other vehicles will include a small delivery van, a luxury car under the infinity brand and a family vehicle.
• Carlos Ghosn also said that cities have to put up charging spots, public garages, at supermarkets etc..

With an attitude, the reporter here, Simon (last name??), pontificated the following opinions: Read more…

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I was very excited when I read a news article on March, 12 2009 about a new battery technology developed at MIT.  Basically, these new battery cells can charge up very very quickly.

This technology enhances Lithium Ion energy storage and speeds up charging to just a few seconds. The news was released in a letter written by Byoungwoo Kang and Gerbrand Ceder of MIT. The letter described their work on enhancing lithium iron phosphate electrodes. The letter was published in Nature.

With li-ion batteries it normally takes hours to fully charge. This new technology means that EVs (Electric Vehicles) that take all night to fully charge can now fully charge in only one hour. Further, cell phones could be charged in a few minutes.

Apparently charging this fast requires high levels of power that could require wiring changes at homes.

I was thinking  WOOHA!  Now we will finally have Electric Vehicles, they can no longer claim that battery technology is not good enough for 100% Electric Vehicles. But, it seems I might be wrong.

Later on, I found that batteries that can fully charge in a few minutes are not really news, they’ve been around for a while and have been used in EVs that are allegedly nearing commercial usage. Read more…

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