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Colleges Drive Research on Electric Cars
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Written by Mark M. Holt   
Tuesday, 14 July 2009
As the General Motors Corporation shuts assembly plants and veers toward bankruptcy, the lonely remnants of one of its top technological achievements the first modern mass produced electric car lie scattered across a few dozen American college campuses.

GM produced and leased to customers more than 1,000 "EV1" automobiles beginning in 1996. In an act still decried by environmentalists, the company took them off the road in 2003 and crushed them into scrap metal. Only about 40 were spared and given to universities and museums.

Looking at an EV1 collecting dust in the corner of a Howard University campus garage in Washington, Jason C. Ganley, an assistant professor of chemical engineering, says that "if General Motors would have continued this kind of work on their own, they would have made a lot of the progress that they're trying to make now, a long time ago."

Students and professors are now experimenting with these and other vehicles. Electric cars, which run on less polluting and even nonpolluting sources of energy, could be a huge part of the nation's energy puzzle.

Despite some common perceptions, the cars can be speedy performers, says Perry W. Carter, a professor of manufacturing engineering technology at Brigham Young University who advises the Electric Vehicle Racing Team there. Mr. Carter's students ran their modified EV1 a quarter mile in 14 seconds during a drag race, a world record for a modified version of a mass produced electric vehicle.

But there are battery problems. The EV1 initially used a standard lead acid battery. GM's second generation EV1 had a nickel metal hydride battery, the type now used in hybrid cars like Toyota's Prius. Newer cars powered solely by electricity, such as the Roadster sports car by Tesla Motors, use a stronger lithium-ion battery. The Roadster can race a quarter mile in better than 13 seconds, and its battery can last more than 200 miles on a charge.

That comes at a price, however. The Roadster runs about $100,000. The battery lasts about seven years, and it costs about $35,000 to replace. Also, some batteries using lithium run a risk of overheating and explosion.

Researchers, however, may have solutions. One promising avenue involves capacitors, standard devices in electrical circuitry that store energy. New technologies and materials are leading to "ultra capacitors" with expanded storage capacity. Such capacitors can be charged and recharged hundreds of thousands of times without failing. Batteries generally cannot. Experiments at the Argonne National Laboratory, managed by the University of Chicago, involve possible combinations of capacitors and batteries.

Argonne also organizes the EcoCAR challenge, a three years competition in which teams from 17 universities try to design a commercially viable car with minimum amounts of fuel consumption and emissions. The event's lead sponsors are the Energy Department and GM.

The exercise is familiar to Eric Cardwell, an examiner at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office who finished a master's degree in engineering at the University of Tennessee in 2006. As an undergraduate, Mr. Cardwell participated in the FutureTruck competition, also led by Argonne with sponsorship from the Energy Department, GM, and the Ford Motor Company, in an earlier search for a fuel efficient vehicle. The auto companies, he notes, kept ownership of technologies discovered in the competition, but with low gas prices low and tax rates, they continued to produce large gasoline powered vehicles.

"We were doing all of this 10 years ago at the university level," Mr. Cardwell said. "In classes, you're taught that it's completely viable at this stage, but nobody wants to do it."
Last Updated ( Tuesday, 14 July 2009 )