| Backbone TV |
NEW Geoweb video
|
|
|
| An electric car for the masses |
May 5, 2008 |
 The Chevy Volt concept is perhaps the best bet yet for a successful electric car
By Laurance Yap
A car is a car, right? Sure, today’s vehicles are sleeker than their hundred-year-old predecessors, they may have more stuff on the inside to play with, they go faster and are more comfortable, but they still have four wheels and are powered by engines that drive gearboxes that turn axles and differentials to put power to the ground. Cars are mechanical, tangible; pieces move and mesh with each other.
But there has been a quiet revolution going on under the hood. It started about 10 years ago with the introduction of drive-by-wire throttle control, where the motions of your foot on the gas pedal are transmitted to the engine not by a mechanical link but by a computer. Giving it more gas no longer literally meant more gas; more gas meant you wanted to go faster and the engine computer figured out whether to achieve that goal with more fuel or by altering valve timing, fuel mixture and other variables. The result was cars that ran smoother and more efficiently while offering the same or better performance.
Since then, the influence of technology has spread. Mercedes-Benz was the first to introduce electronic braking in 2003, and several car companies now offer suspensions monitored and adjusted by computer. Drive a Ferrari 599GTB or a Corvette with Magnetic Ride Control and you get a suspension that reads the road surface hundreds of times a second and makes constant adjustments.
General Motors has been more aggressive in integrating electronics than any other car manufacturer, largely because it sees the electrification of the automobile as its long-term goal. It has several reasons for doing so. For one, electrically powered cars have the potential to answer environmental questions facing the car industry. Second, they offer excellent acceleration in real-world situations, as electric motors generate full torque from a dead stop. Finally, the cost of running electric cars, particularly those that stay in the city, is significantly less than their gas-powered predecessors.
Green architecture
Which leads to the Chevrolet Volt concept car. About the size of a Chevy Cobalt compact car, it’s got a mainstream shape with a long hood, short rear deck and sporty stance, with room for four adults and their luggage. Designed and packaged for the masses, Volt is intended to sell by the hundreds of thousands if people can be convinced to make the leap to electric, and if GM can deliver on its promise of bringing electric drive to market by 2010.
Volt isn’t a pie-in-the-sky exercise like some other concept cars. GM product development chief Bob Lutz envisioned a lot more than a concept car, said Tony Posawatz, the engineer in charge of its overall architecture. “What we were building was an architecture that would underpin several products for many years to come.” As such, Volt is a lot more finished—a lot more engineered, you could say—than most concepts, whose fiberglass bodies are hand-formed and which have chassis that amount to a couple of metal girders supporting rudimentary running gear.
Indeed, the story here isn’t so much about Volt the car, as it is about what’s underneath: an architecture called E-Flex that will support the development of dozens of electric cars over the next several years.
What Posawatz recognized with E-Flex is that, despite recent advances, we’re still years away from fully electric cars that you can plug in at night and then drive all day on a single charge. GM—with a track record that stretches back to the slow short-range EV1 that was the subject of the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?—this time sees a period of at least 10 years before battery technology reaches a level in cost and weight where it’s practical to drive on electricity alone.
E-Flex 1.0
And that’s where E-Flex plays. Think of it as an operating system for an electric car whose ultimate goal is putting power to the ground. And think of its small gasoline engine, which doesn’t drive the car itself, as simply an application program that allows it to generate power. Like the operating system and apps on your PC, E-Flex can be upgraded as technology improves, allowing GM to build better, more powerful electric cars when better gadgetry becomes available.
E-Flex 1.0, as in the Volt, is a major step in electrification beyond the hybrid cars that are becoming increasingly common on our roads. The Toyota Prius, poster child for the hybrid movement and the world’s most popular two-mode car, drives on a combination of gasoline and electric power which, at its most efficient, consumes about five litres per 100km driven. It is, despite the ability to drive on electricity alone at low speeds, primarily a gasoline-powered car, with electricity providing assistance under acceleration. Volt, on the other hand, is a purely electric car: the wheels are only ever turned by the electric motor with a tiny gasoline engine there solely to top up the battery when its overnight charge is depleted on long trips.
Stick to a routine of primarily urban motoring—on pure electric, the range is about 64km on a charge—and Volt’s gasoline engine never engages; longer trips tap the gas engine for generating duties but even that only results in consumption of 1.2 litres per 100km. You could go weeks, even months, before filling the tank. Get home at night, plug Volt in and it takes seven hours to achieve a full charge; GM is also working on a 220-volt charger that does the job in half the time.
Like any good software company, GM is working hard on Volt’s user interface as well as its underlying engineering. “We want a user-friendly power plug with the ability to communicate,” Posawatz said. “Since a car like Volt will be a customer’s first introduction to the electric experience, it’ll be important that they understand exactly what’s going on.”
And that’s just version 1.0. GM has already been working on evolutions of the E-Flex platform.
There’s E-Flex 1.1, in the form of the GM-owned Saturn (née Opel) Flextreme, which generates electricity with a small diesel engine rather than a gasoline one; it’s perfect for European countries where diesel is more common and often has tax advantages. The Cadillac Provoq, shown at this year’s Detroit auto show, could be called version 1.2; it substitutes a fuel cell that runs on hydrogen, making for a completely zero-emissions car. Provoq is also all-wheel-drive: unlike conventional cars, which would require the addition of many large, heavy mechanical components, E-Flex simply adds a couple of extra electric motors and a little bit of wiring.
Future iterations
This is not the first time GM has been down the road of developing an electric vehicle architecture. When it was first launched in 2002, the company’s Autonomy concept was touted as the fuel cell-powered future. Featuring a self-contained “skateboard” chassis containing the batteries, drive motors and fuel cells, Autonomy would have underpinned several interchangeable body styles: if a pickup was required instead of a regular sedan, the pickup style could be swapped in temporarily. GM even showed a couple of Autonomy versions. The glass-fronted Hy-Wire was a five-door crossover while the GMC Sequel featured a taller SUV-ish body.
Autonomy was sufficiently developed that the Hy-Wire was actually drivable, but it lacked flexibility. The skateboard platform came in one size and there wasn’t enough room in it—physically or philosophically—for different electricity-generating options. Posawatz describes Autonomy as a “pure, almost artistic interpretation” of what an electric-car platform could be. “E-Flex isn’t as clear and as pure, but it’s more practical and allows us more flexibility in developing our infrastructure of suppliers.”
E-Flex is also scalable in a way Autonomy wasn’t. Rather than having a fixed physical form, the propulsion system, the underlying software, is the platform. The initial design could be sold in a variety of markets in different body styles: a hatchback, perhaps, or a tall wagon. Posawatz said: “the components can go up and down in size. We could build a larger SUV or even reduce the size of the components to create a two-seat sports car.”
There are still many challenges ahead for E-Flex, both on the traditional mechanical front and on the software side. Posawatz has a team of more than 100 engineers and programmers working flat-out to meet its 2010 deadline. Taking proper care of the battery, for instance, remains an issue: it’s big (located in the Volt’s central tunnel) and heavy (the first Volt will weigh several hundred more kilos than a Cobalt). Like a laptop battery, it also needs conditioning: when plugged in, some of the energy is used to condition the battery, but what happens if you leave a Volt unplugged for a few days, particularly in a cold climate? “Driving away using the on-board engine may be the only alternative,” Posawatz said.
“Developing and marketing any new technology is going to be expensive,” said Dr. Peter Frise, scientific director and CEO of the Auto21 Canadian Network Centre of Excellence. “For a real market introduction (as opposed to a technology demonstration), the sales volume would need to be at least in the tens of thousands of vehicles or unit costs would be astronomical.”
Even getting a basic version of E-Flex to market will involve many important challenges. “The product must be supported in the marketplace with service expertise and parts infrastructure at the dealership level. The negative publicity of having a brand-new flagship vehicle disabled somewhere due to a lack of parts and service support is real. Bringing a whole new generation of vehicles to the market is a much bigger challenge than consumers might realize—and certainly much more complicated than merely having a lab model driving around on a test track.”
Work, challenges ahead
Posawatz is already thinking of the next generation, using lightweight materials for the vehicle platform, higher-performance electric motors for more responsiveness and even eliminating the fuel-powered generator. “In certain markets,” he said, “with a better electricity infrastructure, we might be able to lose the generator set altogether and build a pure electric car.”
The company still has a long slog ahead of it; answers aren’t simple or certain due to the vagaries of the car market. GM’s go-to-market plan will likely have many facets: to sell the product at a high enough price to actually pay for the R&D costs; take a hit financially in the early stages (difficult because profit margins are already slim); partner with other OEMs to share costs and risks (such as GM has already done with BMW, Mercedes and Chrysler on a two-mode hybrid system), and rely on public-sector incentives to buy down the costs and encourage consumers to adopt a new technology.
Where E-Flex has something of an advantage over other systems is in its diversity and adaptability. “It’s flexible enough,” Posawatz said, “so that we can use it in different markets, which often have different market conditions, different driver preferences and different infrastructures. It lets us satisfy a lot of demands. In 2006, when we first launched the project, we had advocates at GM of many different technologies: fuel cells, gasoline engines, diesel, E85. E-Flex gives us the breadth of choice to use all of these fuels, and allows us to tap into the breadth and expertise of our engineers.”
Showcasing green
This year’s auto shows have seen many environmental initiatives.
Ethanol. Seeking, perhaps, to cover all of the environmental bases, General Motors announced a deal at the 2008 Detroit show with energy startup Coskata. Over the next few years, the companies will collaborate on a new process to make ethanol that’s far cheaper and less energy-intensive than anything being done today. The team’s proprietary process produces ethanol out of any renewable source—including garbage, old tires and plant waste— for less than $1 a gallon, about half of today’s gasoline production cost.
Plug-in hybrids. After years of trying to convince the car-buying masses that one advantage of hybrid cars is they don’t have to be plugged in, a number of manufacturers seem to have given up. On the show floor were plug-in hybrids from Toyota (testing a plug-in system in the Prius), Saturn (which will offer a plug-in Vue in 2010) and even high-end sports-car maker Fisker.
Clean diesel. For years, Europeans had access to amazing diesel-powered cars that produced enormous power and torque while sipping fuel and spewing low levels of CO2 emissions. Now, thanks to the widespread availability of ultra-low-sulphur diesel in North America, we’re starting to get access to these cars. Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen are already delivering powerful, clean next-generation diesels, but the floodgates will really open in 2009 when manufacturers like Audi, Honda and others will introduce diesels into mainstream large-volume models.
Turbocharging is back. Originally used primarily as a tool to boost performance, turbocharging is also turning out to be quite handy at delivering cleaner, more fuel-efficient vehicles. At the Detroit show, Ford announced its new EcoBoost initiative, which will see the introduction of smaller-displacement turbocharged engines across its model lineup, replacing fuel-sucking larger-displacement naturally aspirated engines. You’ll be able to buy an Explorer powered by, for instance, a direct-injection turbocharged four-cylinder instead of a V6, and an F150 pickup with a turbo V6 instead of a V8.
autoForward Archive
|
|
|
| Green Innovation |
|
|
| Top 300 Issue |
 
|
| Gadget of the Week (Canadian) |
|
Pick the best 3G for you
RIM Blackberry Bold
Choosing the right smartphone is an important decision, and here’s the good news: while both the new iPhone and the Bold are excellent, the feel is entirely different, making it easy to choose.
more>>
|
| Gadget of the Week (Japanese) |
Sounds of Japan
Why record just the visual when you can capture the sounds as well.
more>> |
| Backblog RSS feed |
Click to subscribe  |
|
sponsored by 
