USM and UNITEN triumph in Perodua Eco-Challenge 2010

Back in February, Perodua donated one unit of the Viva plus RM10,000 seed money to each of the engineering departments of the participating institutions, which included Politeknik Sultan Azlan Shah (PSAS), Universiti Kuala Lumpur-Malaysia France Institute (UniKL-MFI), Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM), Universiti Tenaga Nasional (UNITEN), Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) and Politeknik Ungku Omar (PUO). The other institutions are Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (Unimas), Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Universiti Teknologi Petronas (UTP), Universiti Malaysia Pahang, Universiti Industri Selangor (Unisel) and Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia.


source : Paultan.org

Public Charging Stations: Necessity or Luxury?

What comes first the car or the public infrastructure? A 21st century version of the old chicken and egg conundrum.

I have read a lot of articles that have basically taken the stand that electric cars need a complex network of public charging stations, like gas stations before people will buy them because they will be afraid they will be left stranded by the roadside without any place to charge.

Honestly I don't know if these worries are genuine or just scare tactics by groups that do not want to see electric cars become the method of choice for our transportation. I suppose it is a combination of that and legitimate concern by people that have not had the opportunity to live with an electric car like those of us in the MINI-E program have.

Public charge points will definitely help the long term success of EV's, but to claim that they need to be in place before the public will buy EV's is just not true. The majority of EV charging will take place at the owners home, probably as much as 80%. The second most common charge point would be at the owners place of work. I believe many companies will agree to install chargers on their property if they have employees that will use them. It won't cost much to install them, there's even a government program now to offer free chargers to about 5,000 locations (I've already applied for my restaurants parking lot). Then there will be private enterprises like McDonalds, Walmart, Home Depot, etc that will take it upon themselves to install them in their parking lots. This makes all the sense in the world because not only can they charge a small fee to park and charge there, but then they have a captured customer while their car is charging. Every time one of my fellow MINI-E drivers stopped by Nauna's to use my charger they sat in the dining room and bought a meal. It's a win-win situation in every way.

What also needs to be noted is that although the cars take a few hours to charge, when someone uses a public charging station, they are more likely going to only need a quick charge to finish their travels and get home. The won't need to completely charge the car so they won't be waiting 3 or 4 hours in most circumstances. I can speak with authority on this topic unlike most journalists and "automotive experts" because I have lived with an electric car for 13 months now and have developed a network of friends that are also driving one and we frequently share stories and talk about the benefits and challenges we live with by driving an EV. Most everyone agrees that after their home charger, having a charge point at their place of work like I have would be the first place they would like to have one installed. Many say they don't even need a charger at work but would use it if it were available and even more say they would have rarely ever use a public charging station if they were available.

Personally I think that private enterprise will provide for most of the public charge points needed to begin to transition from gasoline powered cars to electrics. If municipalities added one or two in each public parking lot that would even be better, but this thought that we need to install them everywhere like gas stations is just not reality, and is only causing people that aren't sure if an EV would work for them to worry about it. I wish the auto manufacturers and the government would listen more to people that have actual experience with EV's. If they did they might realize that they could do more with less.

Tiramisu of The Day : 2011 Sonata & 2011 Tucson

BMW 0 Series, is that you?

If BMW intends to go downmarket any further, which seems likely considering that the automaker has already confirmed it will offer a front-wheel drive model under its own badge, there's only one model designation available: 0 Series. And by all accounts, it's on the way soon.

Intriguingly, BMW may be offering a few hints as to what we should expect from the new entry-level model. In a new video released for its Innovation Days in Asia, the automaker prominently displays a series of still images that may very well be early sketches of the upcoming 0 Series.

Assuming for a moment that we are indeed witnessing the new Zilch, we like what we see. Deeply sculpted sides, a nicely sloping rear hatch and large, vertically oriented kidney grilles indicate a design language that's suitably differentiated from current rear-wheel-drive BMWs. And it looks pretty dang good !


Source: Autoblog.nl

Hot in the city tonight

I have often written here and on other blogs that the biggest flaw of the MINI-E isn't the lack of a back seat as others complain about, it's the lack of a thermal management system to keep the batteries at optimal operating temperature.

The cold weather seems to have a worse short term effect than hot temperatures do, since the range is dramatically reduced when temperatures drop below 30 degrees. However, I think the long term effects of overheating the batteries would be a concern if I actually owned the car and planned to keep it for 10 years of so. Supposedly, the life of these lithium ion batteries will be shortened if they were exposed to high temperatures (over 100 degrees) frequently.

Yesterday it was about 95 degrees outside with high humidity. I had a 50 mile drive that was mostly  at highway speeds. I had the A/C on and wasn't paying much attention to the temperature gauge until I got the warning icon that has a cog with a temperature symbol in the middle(see above). I think it showed 112 degrees at the time. When this icon comes on it means that the battery temperature is getting too high and the car in going to reduce the amount of regenerative braking that the car uses. I saw this icon last summer a few times and noticed the regen was less aggressive. As the temperature continued to climb the regen was less and less apparent until the temperature climbed up to 116 degrees and then the regenerative braking completely disengaged. It was the first time that has ever happened to me and it was really strange driving the car without regenerative braking at all. Having the car coast like a regular car does when you lift off the accelerator was strange after driving it for almost 13 months now with the aggressive regen that the car usually has. The reason the regen lessens and then completely disengages when the battery temperature get too hot is because charging the batteries causes them to get even hotter. This is good in the winter when I'm trying to keep the batteries as warm as possible, but when they are overheating like they were yesterday you don't want to do anything to make them even hotter.

The good news is that BMW realizes that the thermal manage system is necessary and the ActiveE and the Megacity EV's that they are making will both have sophisticated thermal management systems like Tesla has to keep the batteries within a certain range of temperatures (something like 80 to 95 degrees). This will help keep the car's performance nearly the same in the cold as they are in the hot weather, while also prolonging the life span of the batteries.

Lada Samara Diva transformed into life-size robot

If comically obscene and offensive ghettofied twin robots aren't your thing – and we certainly hope they are not – allow us to introduce you to a transforming automobile that is in much better taste. Designer Nikola Nikolov took his first car, a Lada Samara Diva, cut it apart and welded it all back together to form the finished product you see here.

The artist describes his created as standing "in a position of ready surprise. He is in the moment between knowing what he was and knowing what he has become." No, we're not quite sure what that means either. Regardless, we think this 6.5-foot-tall, 200-pound robot statue is pretty darn awesome.


source : autoblog.com

Sound Off

I was going to do a post about the recent push to enact a law that will require all electric cars to get this: Install a device to make a noise all the time the car is driven under a certain speed! The thought is that electric cars are so quiet that they are going to be virtual killing machines, running over cyclists, the blind, poor little children, the family dog and anything foolish enough to come close to the streets once electric cars hit the showrooms.

Then, today I read an article on this subject at AutoBlogGreen by Chelsea Sexton, a long time EV advocate that has been on the front lines of the electric car movement(if you want to call it that) since she worked for GM and was involved in the EV-1 program. Anyone that has seen Who Killed The Electric Car should remember her as she was a prominent figure in the movie. Anyone that hasn't seen it needs to, as soon as possible! She managed to put everything I was thinking, and then some into words, so instead of me going on about why I think this is such a bad idea, follow the link above and read what Chelsea has to say about this, I really think she is spot on.

I have traded some messages with her in the past on this subject and one of the things she believes is that the auto manufacturers should be getting more involved in this instead of just sitting by the side and waiting to see what is legislated and she is right about that. Perhaps they don't want to look insensitive to the requests of the National Federation of the Blind? Perhaps they are luke-warm about EV's anyway so they really don't care if this hurts them. I'm not even sold that the NFB even really started this. I think there was another player(hello big oil) that brought this whole issue up. Where's the data that shows this is necessary? There have been electric cars on the roads for a while now, although not is great numbers, are they running people down? I drove my MINI-E 34,000 miles so far and managed not to kill anyone. How about the other 600 MINI-E's driving this past year, did ANYONE hit a pedestrian? I haven't heard of any incident like that. How about the GM EV-1's that were on the roads for a few years or the Toyota RAV-4's that have been out there for almost a decade, can we pull some data first before jumping the gun? Can we know what we are dealing with here before we enact laws? Also, the new cars today are so quiet you can hardly hear them unless they are under acceleration. The industry has spent tens of millions of dollars trying to make their cars as quiet as possible. Now the government wants them to add noise to them. We should be striving to reduce noise pollution, not increase it. We should be striving to make the roads as quiet and peaceful as possible so we would hear the sound of tires rolling on the pavement as an EV approaches.

I'll be contacting the executives that head up the newly formed electric car division of BMW. As one of the more active MINI-E drivers I have had the pleasure of getting to know many of the top people in the program, I even had four pages dedicated to yours truly in BMW's 2009 annual report(pages 192 to 195). I know many of the BMW executives (US & Germany) read this blog so they will probably know ahead of time that my emails will be coming. I would like to see them to take a stand on this and urge the politicians to look at the facts before rushing into legislation that may in fact prove unnecessary. If the 2013 BMW Megacity has to beep or brup or whine like the cars on the Jetsons cartoon all the time that they drive under 30mph you might as well pack it in and start the new "hydrogen car division" and keep us waiting another 20 years or so to get off oil. People are not going to want to buy an electric car, even BMW electric car if it sounds like a toy and these artificial noises do just that.

The Future of Green Architecture: A Floating Museum

Physalia is a vessel, 100% self sufficient in energy, whose bionic structure is inspired from the pneumatophorous called also “Physalia physalis”, from Greek physalis that means “water bubble”! As this aquatic pneumatophorous, the project is relevant by its perfect symmetry, its oblong shape and its translucent aspect. It is a sum-up of the nature and the biotechnologies dedicated to navigate on the main extra-European rivers between Danube and Volga, between Rhine and Guadalquivir, or also between Euphrate and Tiger. It is a poetic invitation to travel, a sensory experience for the transdisciplinary research, geopolitical debates, popular pedagogy and therefore for the emergence of an ecologic avant-garde on the water theme. It is a charismatic place, an abstraction of landscape opened on the world and mixing the European cultures through an innovative special assembling. It is a ecosystem reacting to its environment, a fragment of living earth, inviting the fauna and the flora of the fluvial biodiversity to come and make its nest in the city!


source: Vincent Callebaut Architecture

Why Walk Though a Museum, When You Can Drive?

Not just any car museum. A drive-through car museum. The proposed building, by Francesco Gatti of Rome and Shanghai, looks exactly as it should -- like a glorified parking garage. Visitors cruise up a ramp that encircles the exhibition space (see above) until they reach a top-floor lot. From there, they descend by foot into the core of the museum. With glass every which way, everyone and everything is self-consciously on display: the motorists, the pedestrians, and, oh yeah, the cars. It's like a Saturday night on Sunset Boulevard.

source : fastcompany.com

Tiramisu of The Day : Bugatti-16C-Galibier Rendering

Jason Castriota - Chief designer of Saab !

Saab Automobile announced the appointment of Jason Castriota as its new Design Director, reporting directly to Saab Automobile CEO Jan Åke Jonsson. He and his design team will be responsible for exterior and interior design and will lead the design activities at Saab as the brand renews and broadens its product range. “I’m greatly looking forward to joining such an iconic brand,” said Castriota who once worked in the Italian design studio, as Bertone and Pininfarina. “Saab has a very strong and distinctive heritage which gives it great potential to develop. This is an exciting opportunity for me to help shape its future products.