The reason electric cars are so very expensive is not about economy of scale, or ‘newness’ to market, rather the battery required to do everything a gas car can do is up to 50% the cost of the finished vehicle. This fact has led to the paradox that the electric car market leaders have had to focus their products for the rich, providing a more economical and environmentally benign form of personal transportation to only a very thin sliver of the population. Of course it would be smarter to provide electric cars to a much wider market at a lower price-point in order to really affect change in CO2 emissions and to wean countries off of fossil fuels.

Sadly the very technology of chemically stored energy (that’s what a battery is regardless of metals used: lithium, nickel, lead) seems to be ill-fitted to transportation. Batteries are slow to charge and discharge, the chemicals they are made of breakdown over time because of the very heat they produce during use, and they are heavy. Increasing the amount of energy batteries can hold is the focus of huge research and lots of money, breakthroughs have been made but at the expense of an increased cost battery, relying on more and more exotic materials.

Electric transportation is smart. Electric motors are very efficient, they can reverse polarity easily for harnessing energy by regenerative breaking and they are silent with essentially no maintenance. The problem, it would seem, is in the energy density of the batteries.

But maybe things are not what they seem.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute have come up with a unique solution for addressing the problem with battery energy density; stop trying to replace what a petroleum car can do with what an electric car is good for. The ChargeCar project starts from the premise that what people want is a vehicle that does everything they need it to do, nothing more nothing less.

ChargeCar has pulled together so many different ideas it is difficult to do them credit with a summary, therefore I recommend watching this presentation in its entirety, but it is an hour long so if you just want the jist keep on reading.

First, you need to realize what you use your car for.

	Electric standard CarnegieMellonU @ Youtube City over Highway

This is not as simple as it sounds. The problem is that with a petrol car you usually only think in terms of km/liter (m/g), and that is why all new cars at the dealership have two numbers posted on the window, one for highway estimates and the other for city driving. With a petrol car the highway is always more efficient then the city because a gas engine (over time) has ‘evolved’ into a machine tuned for higher speeds.

But as the machine is an intricate assembly of mechanical parts, its configuration cannot change so as to also be as efficient in the lower speed range of start and stop city driving. Basically the efficiency ‘at speed’ has hobbled the engine for the commute to work through city streets.

The electric car shows the opposite tendencies. Start and stops are easy with an instant torque electric motor and regenerative breaking, so-much-so that compared to a gas car electric cars easily realize 30-50% efficiency gains in city.

Highway driving will disproportionally affect an electric car, however, as high speeds require more energy to overcome air resistance, depleting the battery faster, with fewer opportunities to regenerate energy by breaking. For this reason ChargeCar recommends that the electric car is the perfect commute vehicle and should be treated as such.

Second, you need to realize how much you use your car.

ChargeCar has thought up a very smart way to do this; personalized commute data. This data is not just the distance travelled and how much was on highway vs. city; the data must also include elevation change to really get a sense of savings regenerative charging can offer. Collecting this data is done by GPS, either a hand held model such as the Garmin 60CSX or even available as the MotionX iphone app. This data is then uploaded to the ChargeCar website, so that profiles of actual user’s needs can be categorized.

The reason that ‘types’ of commutes are being collated is that the first wave of production will be designed to appeal to the greatest number of commuters based on their drive profiles.

Just what is ChargeCar producing?

ChargeCar wants to analyze as much commute data as possible to find trends in ‘type’ of driving people are actually doing everyday to get to work. The expectation is that people will fall into groups which can be cost optimized for producing electric power systems for retrofit to existing cars. The systems will be a unique combination of existing battery and supercapacitor technology along with a type of ‘smart meter’ which constantly measures and adjusts the supercapacitor and battery to balance load. The end result is a single smart system for retrofit into existing cars which optimizes the performance and lifespan of batteries.

	ChargeCar CarnegieMellonU @ Youtube A look at the system

Illah Nourbakhsh, associate professor of robotics and head of the ChargeCar project says:

"Most electric cars today are being designed with top-down engineering to match the performance of gas-powered cars. Our goal is to revolutionize urban commuting by taking a different approach -- by first analyzing the needs, conditions and habits of the daily commutes of actual people and then using this 'commute ecology' to develop electric vehicles suited to each unique commute. Many people have talked about using supercapacitors as buffers on a battery, but we also will use artificial intelligence to manage how power is discharged and stored. Based on a driver's route and habits, the smart power management system will decide whether to draw power for the electric motors from the batteries or the supercapacitor and decide where to store electricity produced by the regenerative braking system as the car slows down or goes down a hill."

The computer which makes this system smart is a vital piece of the puzzle and in keeping with the bottom-up, crowd-sourced nature of the ChargeCar research, a competition to develop algorithms tailored to different commute profiles has just been launched.

The goal of ChargeCar is to find the sweet spot of electric motoring by balancing the benefits and deficiencies which currently affect electric car transportation. It is also pretty apparent to me that this is a university based research project and as such the focus is different than what would be attempted by a business. Not only is this bottom-up, crowd sourced project dependant on public input, but ChargeCar is also looking to provide increased employment of laborers by focusing on retrofits. Businesses based in every petrol car service station could mushroom up across the world employing tens of thousands in the electric vehicle retrofit market.

	The electric commute Paul Stevenson @ flickr Visualized

The cost is still a big question market until many more thousands submit their GPS data (up to 4000 now) for analysis, but estimates are in the range of 5500 Euro (8000 USD) for a complete system and retrofit. Considering that the Nissan Leaf is planed to cost 20000 Euro (30000 USD), I think ChargeCar will be a welcome entry to the market for the masses.

Via: Inhabitat.com
Additional reporting: Sciencedaily.com