Go electric EU - Blog!

Woah! This would be the (almost) perfect car for me. It’s a electric battery powered mini-sized car that has a top speed of 135km/h (wich is higher than the speed-limit for our highways), a range of 130km and it’s good looking.

E-Up! Concept car, front.

It has some of the characteristics of the ultimate daily driver in my opinion.

1. It’s electric thus having low running costs and low environmental impact.

2. It’s small and should therefore be easy to drive, park and use in cities.

3. The interior can be used in many ways with it’s folding seats. This make it a three (I think it’s only one seat in the back) person car or a two person car with a good loading space or a one person car with a huge loading space (up to two meters is huge in a car thats just over three meters).

4. It has 1,4 square meters of solar panels on the roof. Described to run the air conditioning when parked in sunlight but I hope a combination of improved solar panel technology and VW engineering will make some addition in driving range…

E-Up interior with folded seats

Please VW. Read this:

1. Make it simple. We want a small, simple, cheap car for our daily trips. We don’t need 4-5 touchscreens with super-everything-control and variable-anything-settings.

2. Please don’t make it rust away! Where I live all cars tend to rust until they fall apart, at least the ones that isn’t owned by car enthusiasts. Build this car in aluminum, plastic and other modern materials and make rust a 20th century problem.

3. Optimize it! Build it with flat belly pans and run the car in a wind tunnel! Lower weight and drag increases range and top speed.

And I have the usual concerns regarding these concept EV’s.

1. The’re concepts, and if they make it to production that’s still about 5-10 years away.

2. The’re often very high tech, making them expensive.

3. People want to buy a cheap car, with a low price tag even if a more expensive alternative will have lower owning costs and a lower total life cycle cost.

Futher reading and images available at Volkswagen, Engadget and Autoblog.

/F

New miniserver incoming

This isn’t really EV stuff but it’s a bit ECO-friendly. I’m building a mini server for some home use, based on the INTEL D945GSEJT AtomN270 mini-ITX motherboard which has a estimated power consumption as low as 20W with a ordinary hard drive. I’m going for a completely silent system with no moving parts, therefor the harddrive is switched out for a 16Gb CF card. More when the motherboard arrives!

Ps. a 60W power supply and the CF-to-SATA-adapter is on it’s way from china…

Homemade Electric Bike

A friend of mine told me he has something to show me, and later arrived on his…

Homemade electric bike! A really impressive build with it’s 1000W (yes three zeros) motor and regenerative braking. Currently powered with lead acid batteries but LiPO might be on the way in!

Check out his blog here and the bike here.

/Fredrik

Renault Clio Electrique (not the one in ad)

This is a really nice, mint condition, all electric, factory made car. If I only had 11,000 USD to spend on a daily driver I’ve would hade bought it right away but my economy isn’t that great.

Facts (generally):

Top speed 90-100 km/h (55-60 mph)
Range 65-100 km (40-60 miles)
Fully charged in 1-1½ hour
114v Ni-Cd Batteries

Facts (this one):
PakTrakr
Newly measured batteries
Mint condition

Link: Renault Clio Electrique

Since I started looking at ways to add range to electric cars by optimizing air flow, weight and drivetrain, the main idea has been to keep it simple, small and light. Then it struck me, a motorcycle would be perfect for this! And since it’s smaller the cost is lower to!

But someone has always been there before and in this case it’s Eva Håkansson. She’s currently involved in building the worlds fastest motorcycle and she has built an EV motorcycle with her father. This EVMC goes about 80 km (50 miles) at 70 km/h (44 mph) per charge.

Check it out here! Eva Håkanssons blog & gallery.