The most bitchin' hybrid-electric car yet

[midnight armadillo]

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/08/the_hybrid_mini.php

This is a modified Mini. Each wheel gets a 160 hp motor inside the wheel hub (640 total!!). 0-60 in 4 sec. There are no brakes - the motors decelerate and recharge the batteries at the same time. An onboard gas engine is used only for battery charging, and could for example be run while you're out of the car.

Range: 930 miles, 80 mpg. No gearing or mechanical drivetrain. Prius, eat your frickin' heart out, you turtle-slow, poor-handling slug.

If they ever release this as an aftermarket system I think I will have to gut a late 80's Saab 900 hatchback and install it. Holy crap this is cool.

[GOPBasher]

1. Wow! 200-250 miles on all electric. Most people would hardly

ever use any gas that way. Nice! :thumbsup:

[Skink]

2. British Ingenuity.

[Straight Shooter]

3. That is totally fine.

I could handle having one of those :)

[OnionPatch]

38. Oh when, Oh when are

these types of vehicles going to be widely available and (most importantly) AFFORDABLE.

I would LOVE To have this car. I just have the sinking feeling that when it does become available here, it will be out of the price range of most of us. :(

But I can still hope and it's great to know they are making these types of cars.

(edited to add: Oops, I thought I was replying to the OP and not yours. Sorry.)

[Straight Shooter]

40. Amen.

You may have been replying to the OP, but that was my first thought ... I won't be able to afford it. Still, it's a step in the right direction. Maybe when I'm 90 it will be affordable. :D

[miketorse]

4. This is GREAT! n/t

[demnan]

5. Wow!

That's nice. Probably couldn't afford it, but way cool.

[AX10]

6. NICE!

:thumbsup:

[Pierre.Suave]

7. Very Cool

I like it, a lot.

[mike_c]

8. wow-- that looks very nice-- 640 bhp!

The stock mini is 100 bhp. I could drive this car 95 percent of the time or more without ever starting the gas engine!

[midnight armadillo]

9. It's more than that

It's unclear what method they used here, but electric motors are typically rated by their average power under load, and gas engines by peak power with no load (i.e. measured at the crankshaft on a test stand). So that 640 hp may be much more than in an apples-to-apples comparison with a gas engine. Also, electric motors have 100% of their torque from 0 RPM, not 1500-2000 RPM like a gas engine...

[don954]

24. yes.. one time i tried driving a 400hp electric race car

i just touched the peddle and i spun the tires. I had to feather touch it to get it moving first then do heavy acceleration, which felt like a rocket taking off... ;) IT was kinda surreal, no rawer of a engine, just the wine of the motor controller..

[phantom power]

10. Pimp my ride, with that, baby.

[gaspee]

11. Wow

I want one so bad. Cost?

I'mn driving a 8 year old 4 cylinder lickup truck. Not great on gas, but I can't afford a new car.

That car is too cool.

[phantom power]

12. Looks like they sell the components on their website.

[WolverineDG]

13. I want one!!!!

Ever since I saw "Who Killed the Electric Car" I've been looking for a good hybrid/electric.

dg

[TlalocW]

14. Wait... no brakes?

I don't understand. Yes, you decelerate, but how do you actually stop?

TlalocW

[skids]

15. Small burst of reverse current, likely + cogging torque.

For parking there is a conventional mechanical handbreak. I guess they must have done the math and figured out that any energy saved by having a mechanical drive-time holding brake was not worth it, statistically, with the cogging torque factored in for staying still when not on a hill.

I've been wondering when the first hub-motored passenger car would appear. This thing is pretty neat. PM motors to boot.

[w4rma]

17. electro-magnetic brakes. frictionless, I believe. (nt)

[w4rma]

16. That car kicks butt. (nt)

[tinrobot]

18. Put a plug on it and it'll be perfect.

A car that can get 200-250 miles on pure battery? That's screaming to be charged off the grid rather than through the motor. It would give you much huger energy savings as well.

[w4rma]

19. It's got that too. It's a hybrid with a plug in. (nt)

[tinrobot]

20. I just saw that on another article.

So this means the car is perfect.

I WANT ONE!

[Gregorian]

21. It's probably the only way to get people to become interested in electric.

For years I've been saying how exciting, in performance terms, electric cars can be. As someone mentioned above, electric motors have the peak of their torque curve at 0 rpm.

It's interesting to see permanent magnet motors. Some companies are using three phase. There's a lot of room for ingenuity here.

I think for now we almost need to forget about how the energy is generated, and just get people to stop drooling over supercharged v8 engines. Electric has been sitting ignored for way too long.



I saw an electric tractor yesterday. The solar cells are a canope that shields the operator from the sun. No gas, no oil, no maintenance. It always starts. No noise.

[IronLionZion]

22. Oh sweet, this is so awesome!

Finally, some enterprising entrepreneurs are investing in efficient performance. That's when this technology gets attention and investment. The high performance tech will trickly down much better than reagan/W tax cuts.

[StrictlyRockers]

23. When can I buy one? It might even get me off my bike for journeys over

(edit for spelling)


...fifty miles.

[midnight armadillo]

25. More details

Looking at their website, the company sells the EW 30/60 wheelmotor, which is rated at 14400 watts, presumably average power. If this is the one they use than the 640 hp figure would be peak power.

Now, this motor's maximum torque is 640 N-m, which is 472 lb-ft, for a total of 1888 lb-ft of torque. WOW.

Presuming, of course, that they used one of their stock wheels for this project. That motor is limited to 900 RPM, which with a 17" wheel is about 45 mph, so either they've got some internal gearing or they have a non-stock motor in use.

[skids]

28. They seem to do custom motors a lot.

Their site is riddled with verbiage about being able to customize solutions.

(They also market direct-drive PM gensets for VAWTs, which is a most challenging application in that you have to get very high response at low rpms along with very low cogging torque.)

http://www.pmlflightlink.com/news.html

[Gregorian]

34. The motor max rpm is 1800.

And 17 inch wheels is the nominal wheel size. Actual diameter is around 24 inches or so.

150mph is a bit over 13,000 feet per minute.

24 inch diameter is 6.3 ft. At 1800 rpm, that's 11,000 feet per minute. So it's close.



Motors
4 x 750Nm 1800rpm high efficiency Brushless permanent magnet sine wave Hi-Pa drive™ 24 phase water-cooled

[Javaman]

26. How much and when can I get one?? nt

[Kolesar]

27. I can still drive like a moron. Who says you can't have it all?

All braking is performed by the wheel motors acting as very efficient electrical generators which return almost all of the energy back to the battery system. The beauty of this dual-circuit, ultra safe system is that your green conscience can be quite content even when accelerating hard, since you are assured of collecting most of the expended energy when it is time to slow down rapidly.
ABS as standard – even when accelerating

And the car does the thinking for me!:

Because the wheels are high performance motors, ABS comes as a standard function built into each wheel’s software. Now anti-skid can also be applied to acceleration since the motor can smoothly control torque delivery to/from the road in both cases. Flooring the brake or accelerator hard merely results in controlled maximum torque, giving the shortest possible stopping or acceleration time.
Clever wheels

The technology eliminates the need for crude differential gears to share power between left and right sides. The wheels are in constant communication with each other deciding 1000 times each second how much torque share is optimum for the current driving conditions. Should one wheel detect a slippery surface and take appropriate anti-skid actions, the other wheels are aware of this instantly and adopt an appropriate compensating strategy to keep the vehicle as stable as possible. 640 brake horsepower – for life!

I thought we were trying to solve a resource-depletion & CO2 problem, not make a race car:

Each wheel develops 160bhp - 640bhp in total. The original Mini One develops less than 100bhp with an engine that weighs nearly double the weight of the four electric wheels! Apart from wheel bearings there are no wearing parts in the electric wheels; this means the horsepower stays for the life of the vehicle - and beyond.

They will never be able to productize that with a lithium-polymer battery due to the price

[dave123williams]

29. That's SLICK, slick!

My old man's arguments against green vehicles evaporate daily!

[progressoid]

30. Coolio!!

[abelenkpe]

31. Yeah nice, but

When is someone gonna make one of those that I can put two infants in car seats in the back? I want a hybrid so bad, but need something for my two little ones under two. I got them squeezed into a Jetta right now. I don't want a big car, just something reasonable. All family vehicles get shitty mileage. Ever notice that? Cool car though....

[skids]

32. E.g. the ford escape hybrid? n/t

[Gregorian]

33. A couple of other thoughts. (Water cooled motors! Wow.)

I don't know why I'm responding except I'm into this kind of thing. I remember my first electric car show around 1965.

I have a pretty high performance car. And in the forum, there are guys supercharging them with kits that forum members have fabricated. This is a Porsche 928 with a v8. I'm just reading one on the details of supercharging, right now. And it's pages and pages of complexities. Tiny obscure air bleeder valves and special intakes, and fuel regulation, and twin screw superchargers and on and on. It's absolutely a nightmare of complexity on a Rube Goldberg level. Yes, we get 600 horsepower. But an electric motor has one handful of moving parts. And it never goes bad, essentially.

This car is far from efficient. It's the energy conversion that is going on. In fact, it may very well be less efficient than a gas engine, just because instead of burning fuel in the car, they burn fuel to make the electricity, and then they have another conversion of using the electricity to power the motors.

But at this point in time, I think the concept of turning people's heads to a different kind of thinking is more important than efficiency.


Edit- OK, I'm not sure how they are getting the power steering pump to work. But there are details.

I'm already thinking about buying this stuff and making my own car with these components. YIKES, I thinki I've been bitten!!!!!!!!!!!!

[tinrobot]

36. 80 mpg isn't efficient?

The thing about hybrids is that the gas motor can be tuned for maximum efficiency. The electric motors provide all the torque for getting off the line, and then the gas motor takes over once the car is up to cruising speed. The gas motor also turns off when you're not using it, so you're not wasting gas while sitting in traffic.

Regenerative braking also saves tons of energy - instead of braking creating heat on the brake pads, the energy goes back in the batteries.

[Gregorian]

41. 80 mpg is only PART of the story. Not the whole story.

The 250cc engine (and this is just an educated guess) is only for topping off the batteries during use. That is, when one uses a huge burst of 500 horsepower, the engine comes on and over a long period of time (fifteen minutes?) replaces that loss of energy. The rest of the story is where the batteries get their charge. Ask where that comes from. It does not come from the auxilliary engine.

Here's the situation. You live three hours from San Francisco. You get there and the batteries are drained. That 250cc engine is not going to charge those batteries. If it does, you'll be there a long time. Days. The only way to get a recharge is to plug in to grid power. And that is either coal, or nuclear, or hydro, or a petroleum fired plant. Those ARE more efficient means of generating electricity, by virtue of the mass of the generating machinery. The more massive the machine, the more efficient (in a nutshell). And just the opposite for that 250cc engine. That thing is about as inefficient as they get.

The car is not the answer to our energy problem. Energy conversion is. How we generate the electricity is the problem. Essentially. Don't lose sight of that. If you do, it's no different than believing in Bush's tax cuts.


I'm seriously thinking of building one of these. I am in this kind of business. As a mechanical engineer with a machine shop, this is something I would rather enjoy doing.

[skids]

45. I could see potential...

...in a shop that does EV conversion for normal car chassis, if you could get the cost down to around what it costs to add PHEV to a normal hybrid ($10K to $15K) though that's only a SWAG as to what the price point would have to be for people to buy in. The cars would have to be old enough that customizing them would not disable any of their safety features -- i.e. because they don't have things like ABS.

For batteries you'd want to look at a123 systems or Valence Saphion -- those are what is going into the aftermarket PHEV kits.

Do note though that the car is more than just a good power train -- there's a lot of computer controlled engineering that went into this.

[Gregorian]

47. It's their preexisting controller that has me excited.

Realistic sales of these vehicles has to be on a mass basis. Anything I do is going to be custom.

But those custom Harley choppers that are being aired on the Discovery channel are $100k each! Those are a piece of cake compared to the retro that has to be done with a car like this.

The controller in the article here has ABS as well as wheel spin control during accelleration.

The cat is out of the bag. This is OLD technology. But it has been suppressed, and also held back by battery technology.


Let me just add something that might interest you. I know someone who was one of the venture capitalists for Apple when it started. He began work on an electric car. He's an electonics engineer from Stanford university. The story goes that when he had his prototype working, and approached companies for production, suddenly he got a visit from the FBI. And it went further. They snagged him in some pretty nasty way. However his dad just happened to be a retired general, and something like an ambassador to China. He managed to fight his way out of the bullshit they entangled him in. I mean it was ugly. And it scared him from persuing it any further.

[Dover]

35. Speaking of Saabs....

I also love the look of the Saabs. I'd love to buy a 9-3 hatchback but the mileage is not impressive. Have you seen anything to indicate that Saab is going to come out with either a hybrid, diesel or at least a more fuel efficient model?

http://www.parkers.co.uk/imagecache/file/590/archive/SAAB/9-3%20Hatchback%20(98-02)/00H3-15D.jpg

[midnight armadillo]

42. You've asked the right person

I am a bonafide Saab nut. Once my wife and I buy a house in '09 I will get my dream car, a 1991 Saab 900 SPG :)

GM has shown off a Saab 9-3 hybrid: http://saabnet.com/tsn/press/060330.html
GM's strategy appears geared towards E85 (which can be run in 'biopower' 9-5's in Europe, and on 9-5's here with an aftermarket upgrade, see www.genuinesaab.com) and hybrids, not diesels. The GM "dual mode" hybrid system will show up in various models in the near future, including Saabs. Diesels however, are not planned for passenger vehicles, probably since GM doesn't have any that satisfy the new EPA requirements. Another market they'll miss. Honda will be bringing a 50-state legal diesel to the US in '09, particularly for use in their larger cars like the Odyssey.

The 9-3 hatchbacks do ~22 mpg in the city, and ~32 mpg on the highway. That's not bad but not as good as a Civic. On the other hand, they are extremely safe, the safest car in their class, the hatchback is very useful, they're fun to drive, and have that Swedish je ne se quoi. They also depreciate quick so are an excellent used car bargain. Buying a used car is much more environmentally friendly than a new car since the energy cost of manufacturing is being amortized over a longer car lifetime. Saabs last a loong time too, I plan on keeping my '01 9-5 wagon til 300k miles. Go to www.saabnet.com for questions if you have any.

[Dover]

43. Wow....I really DID ask the right person! Thanks for the info and links.

My very first car was a '69 Saab that I bought used in the early seventies for $500.
I had it for ten years with very few repairs...none major. The engine was so simple I was able to even do some repairs myself.
And I've never bought a brand new vehicle off the lot. Always used, and only got a lemon once.
I really like saabs and volvos and hatchbacks in general, but have been really disappointed in their inability or unwillingness to introduce many of their better vehicles that are in Europe into the American market. Seems like all the inovation is happening in Europe. And then there is the issue of the new ownership. Seems like every company suffered from these mergers not to mention the lack of imagination/innovation of the leadership.
Once bought a used Mazda 626 Hatchback which was actually one of the best cars I've owned, and good mpg. But once again, under Ford's 1/3 ownership, they seem to be moving backwards and downwards.

And what's the deal with ethanol? I'm glad they are doing something, but why ethanol?
Whatever happened to "fuel cells by 2010"?

Hadn't realized the 9-3 got 32mpg highway. Twentytwo in the city stinks, though not as bad as SUVs.

[midnight armadillo]

49. response

And what's the deal with ethanol? I'm glad they are doing something, but why ethanol?
Whatever happened to "fuel cells by 2010"?

GM already has E85 capable cars, I think it's the cheapest route for them to appear green while they're flirting with bankruptcy. Fuel cells will probably never happen outside of niche applications.

Hadn't realized the 9-3 got 32mpg highway. Twentytwo in the city stinks, though not as bad as SUVs.

It's the turbocharger - when it's running higher boost pressures (like during acceleration in stop & go) it burns more fuel. It's the downside of getting 205 hp out of a 2 liter 4. Other cars with similar power get around the same mileage figure. The highway mileage is good since the turbo isn't boosting a lot (lower fuel consumption), but it's spinning nice and fast so throttle response is excellent. Saabs are terrific highway cars, I find my 90% highway commute is much more relaxing in my 9-5 compared with my old Subaru whose engine was out of power at highway speeds.

Anyway, my personal opinion is that it's fuel consumption that's the biggest concern. I do about 7k miles per year so mileage isn't a huge concern for me. My wife drives the '03 Odyssey (another used purchase ;)) only 5500 miles per year, so again getting 18 mpg city doesn't bother me too much. If I commuted 60 miles a day instead of 25 I'd be seriously thinking about a more efficient car, like a diesel VW Passat. With two kids, nearly 3 and 5 months, I need back seat room :)

[leveymg]

37. Self-delete

[Massacure]

39. Connecting the drive shaft to a generator rather than wheels is good.

That way you can run the engine at its most efficient sweet spot turning it only on and off based on how full the batteries are, rather than having to run it faster or slower based on your required speed.

[TheWraith]

44. Okay, cool, but the Tesla Roadster is better.

For one thing, the Tesla Roadster is completely electric--no fuel at all. Top speed is 130 miles per hour. Range of 250 miles on a charge. Fuel efficiency equivalent of 135 miles per gallon. Operating cost of $0.01 per mile. Battery lifetime of about 100,000 miles.

They've already sold out the first hundred, even though they're not going to be available commercially until next year. Price is expected to be around $80,000 at launch.

http://www.teslamotors.com/index.php?js_enabled=1

[Arctic W Fox]

46. Yeah, $80,000... that's nice.

I'll take two, please.

As soon as my 93 Duster lets go.

Can't these car companies sell these at a Democrat's price, not a fat-cat republican's price?

[midnight armadillo]

48. Tesla's plan

A year or two after the roadster goes on sale they will introduce a 4-door sedan costing abuot 1/2 that ($50k or so). The next car will be an affordable, higher volume compact. There is no mass market for electric cars so it makes sense to start with a low-volume, high margin product.

[TheWraith]

50. You think that Mini conversion is any cheaper?

Probably more expensive. 160 HP electric motors don't grow on trees, new ones cost thousands of dollars.

[Massacure]

51. Don't be silly, of course it uses fuel.

Coal.

[TheWraith]

52. Or hydro, or nuclear, or gas, or solar, or wind, or oil, or...

It's electric. Period. Where you get your electricity is beside the point. Would you prefer a car which burns fossil fuels at 10 or 20% of the efficiency?