Wheels Up EV Design

[SgtRock]

Greetings EEVBees:

--EV1 creator announces a "Wheel Motor" based EV. Finally an approach to EV, which has a chance of succeeding, and is more than just a gutted regular old car with a heart transplant, made to soak up government subsidies. See below link.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2013/04/17/father-of-ev1-says-electric-car-breakthrough-is-close/?partner=yahootix

"Wish in on hand and whiz in the other, and see which one fills up first."
Gator Dundee 1948 -

Best Regards
Clear Ether

[Rufus]

Greetings EEVBees:

--EV1 creator announces a "Wheel Motor" based EV. Finally an approach to EV, which has a chance of succeeding, and is more than just a gutted regular old car with a heart transplant, made to soak up government subsidies. See below link.

Sounds like bollocks to me. The problem with EVs is battery not motor. Putting all the weight of the motor and controls in the wheel is dumb but I suppose on shit low performance EVs you don't worry so much about keeping the tyres in contact with the road. The wheel is the worst place on a car when it comes to exposure to the elements and vibration also.

[SgtRock]

Dear Rufus:

--You said the problem is not the motor it is the battery. Well, duh, the article says nothing about the problem being the motor, some of the concerns are weight, efficiency, regenerative braking, and drive by wire Your point about exposure to moistue and dirt is a good one. The point about vibration, I am not so sure about, we shall see. Please see below links to a Wiki article about Wheel Hub motors, which addresses the often mentioned problem of "Unsprung Weight", which, if the Cast Iron Brake Assemblies are eliminated is a wash. Also please see the next link for an article from the Green Auto Blog about how those bollocks loving morons at Car and Driver have named Protean's In-Wheel Motors one of the 10 Most Promising Technologies for 2013. Interesting side note; Bombardier in order to reduce the Unsprung Weight on its All Terrain Vehicles has moved the brakes inboard where they clamp down on the drive shafts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_hub_motor
http://green.autoblog.com/2012/12/09/proteans-in-wheel-motors-named-car-and-drivers-most-promising/

--As much as I like this engineering approach to the EV, I still do not want the tax payers to fund it. Let it sink or swim on its own. My intuition is telling me that the EV solution may just be something other than a conventional buzz box with an electric power plant, and if the In-Wheel motor succeeds that could be a posibility. Future vehicles might not need such a prounounced snout, and the batteries could go where the driveshaft and transmission used to go, allowing the designers to start with a clean drawing board. vBut indeed, I have been wrong before.

"Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets."
Henry Ford 1863 - 1947

Best Regards
Clear Ether

[lemmegraphdat]

I guess if you can score some taxpayer money to get a paycheck then good for you. But that's all this is. Sick to death of the lame electric car fantasy.

[Harvs]

As much as I like this engineering approach to the EV, I still do not want the tax payers to fund it

And here in lies the problem with most of the "green" energy schemes (be it electric cars, home PV etc.)  As governments artificially control the market through subsidies and rebates etc, when they're a bit short on cash they pull them out and the whole industry built up around a service collapses (every "green" scheme our current government has been involved in has gone this way.)  So what good does that do anyone?

Nope I agree, let the market drive where it goes.  BUT, in doing so remove all support for other forms as well.  See how expensive oil becomes if western countries stop toying in the middle east.  Maybe then EVs will have a chance and the world will probably be a better place for it.

[lemmegraphdat]

Government subsidies is not why carbon works and solar does not.

[MacAttak]

Government subsidies sure as heck aren't making it better though.

O&G does not need government help to stay alive. But government interferes because low gas prices make for happy voters. Too bad they don't understand (or don't want to believe) that they are paying extra anyways because those subsidies ultimately get passed down as taxes or cuts to other programs.

The O&G lobby is a well-oiled machine.

[lemmegraphdat]

Do they actually get subsidies or is it just tax breaks on certain activities? Exploration for one.

[Harvs]

Well here's an interesting comparison.

I haven't looked at cars, because quite frankly being a cage driver doesn't interest me in the least.

However, back to the ideal world where we all ride motorcycles to and from work.

I currently ride a couple of fairly common modern motorcycles, they range from 4.5-6L/100kms.  (Yeah I know your honda jazz can do as well or better than that.)  My daily round trip is ~100kms.

The ZERO-S electric bike that I imagine you can currently by in the states (not yet available in Oz  ) would use roughly 6.6kWh to do that according to their spec.  Even on peak power prices here in WA that works out to just over $1.50 a round trip.  On my current bikes, with 98 octane unleaded (which the bikes are spec'ed as minimum), it's almost $9 a day at the moment.

With the price of the ZERO-S at the same as a typical 600cc jap bike in Oz, if they were to set up a dealership in Oz I'd be trading in one of my current bikes tomorrow.  I'd save about $1800pa in fuel alone taking into account the price of peak power.  It could be slightly more if I payed to get off-peak power metering for charging over-night.  But yeah, at the moment there's no dealerships on this side of the country, and there's no way I'm getting a vehicle without any form of local supplier for parts and service.

[justanothercanuck]

As soon as I read "father of the EV-1", I stopped reading.  The EV-1 wasn't really all that special.  It was a Saturn SL1 with a modified trunk area for aerodynamics, and a new interior.  Ovshinsky did more work developing the battery (which GM didn't wind up using until the second generation due to stupidity) than GM did creating the rest of the car.   

[RJSC]

In Hub motors are only good for low performance vehicles: the stator is isolated on the center of the hub and has no cooling surfaces.
You could run liquid on a hollow stator, but it would give more problems than benefit (reliability at the moving joints for turning).

Here in Portugal there are already more EV motorcycles than cars and the hub motor ones are limited to 6 kW for the said reasons.
The high power ones have an inrunner type of motor mounted on the frame to be able to extracted the head generated trough aluminium fins just like your regular AC induction motor, or have liquid cooling.