Electric Vehicle Plug Standard Coming In July?

SAE J1772 is supposedly going to ballot for this month for final approval. This would be a good move toward standardization of infrastructure and hardware. The SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) process typically takes a few years for completion
of a standard or recommended practice so the outcome is generally well vetted by the industry.

Source: AutoBlogGreen

2009 Washington Auto Show

Two nights ago I attended the SAE Government/Industry reception and Washington DC car show. Here are some notes:

Briefly chatted with Henrik Fisker about racing. He was open to the possibility of racing his cars if a team with sponsorship came to him and wanted to develop a range extended vehicle for racing, particularly the American Le Mans Series. If a company were to do that, imagine how much faster it would drive the development of these types of range extended vehicles. Racing would quickly identify new problems and the solutions needed to overcome them.

The Tesla display had a nice rolling chassis and powertrain on display. The transmission is made by BorgWarner. I only brought my camera phone so the pics aren't great but...

Ford will release a Focus-sized electric sedan in 2011 in conjunction with Magna. It's going to be powered by lithium-ion batteries, an AC motor, a single ratio gearbox, and the batteries will be in the trunk and under the rear seat. The batteries will be air cooled by fans that suck air from the cabin over the batteries and then out the body vents.

The range-extended ENVI (I think that's how they feel about others right about now) Chrysler minivan on display had a neat powerplant - appears to only have two cylinders. It's a great example of downsizing engines for serial-hybrid applications if it works.

This EV pick up with in wheel motors is a monster. I don't buy the whole "no compromises" hype but it is a neat vehicle. A quick peek underneath reveals that there is a solid beam axle with wheel motors on the ends - kind of like a self-propelled barbell, and more ground clearance than if it had a driveshaft. Each motor weighs sixty-six pounds which is quite heavy unsprung mass, but it might ride well nonetheless.

Also, the hydraulic hybrid SUV is here. The powertrain was orginally developed for parcel delivery vans but is now being scaled down for slightly smaller applications. We probably won't see these on small cars until the storage tanks can withstand much higher pressures, but it is an interesting mechanical series-hybrid application. There are no driveshafts and the wheels are driven by hydraulic pumps.

More info at EPA: http://www.epa.gov/oms/technology/

SAE Government/Industry Meeting Notes

SAE Government/Industry Meeting Notes

John German from Honda made some excellent points during his presentation in a session about fuel economy, CO2, and CAFE. Since 1987 advances have been used to improve attributes other than fuel economy (http://www.epa.gov/oms/fetrends.htm). If the benefits had been directed entirely toward fuel economy we would be averaging 38 mpg today.

The reason it hasn't been so is because the market wants other benefits more than pure fuel economy (according to their surveys fuel econ has been low on the list of top considerations by consumers). And when/if the price of fuel stops rising a lot of current behavior changes. People will revert to the way they behaved before.

There are currently far too many technical options, requiring manufacturers to hedge their bets. What's needed is a clear path, not technology du jour. This is because there's a limited number of engineers. If there are multiple standards, their efforts would be diluted and thus progress would be slowed in order to comply with the differing standards.

The Internal combustion engine (ICE) continues to be the benchmark by which alternative technologies are compared. However, it is a moving target as it too continues to improve.

Later in that same session, Keith Cole from GM made an informative presentation with regard to three things. One is the so-called 3 legged stool for reducing greenhouse gases which consists of improving vehicle efficiency, reducing the carbon content of fuel, and reducing vehicle miles traveled/reducing congestion/improving infrastructure.

The second item consists of next generation ethanol, and why GM invested in Coskata and Mascoma (sounds like a disease). According to him, Coskata's feedstocks for ethanol can come from multiple non-food sources, and resulted in an 84% reduction in greenhouse gases (GHG) compared with regular gasoline on a well-to-wheel basis. He further claimed that the energy produced is 7.7 times as much as the energy it takes to make it, and that it costs producers less than $1 per gallon to make it (didn't specify if that was with or without the tax credit).

Finally, he made an excellent point that CARB's proposal to regulate CO2 of vehicles sold in California would not be effective for national fuel economy. This is because increasing the average fuel economy of vehicles in that state would enable a manufacturer to have a lower average elsewhere in the nation if the CAFE (Federal) standard was lower than the California standard. In the end, the national average would still be dictated by the national standard.