A Good Day in Richmond

A very good day for Edison2 at the State Capitol.

On Thursday February 10 Edison2 received a commendation from the Virginia General Assembly. House Joint Resolution 828 (HJ 828) detailed the achievements of Edison2, noting " the success of Edison2's Very Light Car in the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize is a reflection of the creativity, knowledge and dedication of Edison2's entire workforce"

As an additional honor, Edison2's Oliver Kuttner and Brad Jaeger represented the team in a "Center Aisle Presentation" on the floor of the House of Delegates, in which patrons of HJ 828 (Ward Armstrong, D-Danville, Scott Garrett, R-Lynchburg, David Toscano, D-Charlottesville and Rob Bell, R-Albemarle) explained the accomplishments of Edison2 to the their colleagues in the House, and passed around very light lugnuts as examples of our light-weight craftsmanship.

At the same time, in the other chamber HJ 828 co-patron Senator Ralph Smith (R-Botetourt County) introduced Edison2's David Brown and the accomplishments of Edison2 to his fellow senators.

Edison2's #97 car was showcased in Capitol Square for several hours, drawing interest from numerous Delegates and Senators, as well as lobbyists, schools groups and others visiting or working at the Capitol.

There were a lot of positives about this day. It was gratifying to be honored before the Virginia General Assembly – a bookend of sorts to the recognition from Governor McDonnell we received on September 16. It was pleasing to serve as a focus of bipartisanship in a time when that is too often lacking. It was satisfying to have our car described by legislators who have visited the shop and who clearly understand what we are doing and its significance. And it is just plain fun to show the Very Light Car to people, answer their questions, gauge their reactions and tell them about where Edison2 is headed.



What Have We Changed?

At the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Edison2 unveiled a model of our next generation Very Light Car. Here’s a picture. We’d like to take a minute to explain what’s different and where and how we’re moving forwards from our X Prize cars.

 

First, a little bit of history. Richard Petty was once asked when the first car race took place and he famously answered, “shortly after the second car was built”. The X Prize was not exactly a race but it was in the end a competition between cars and the teams who built them. Competitions need rules and over the years race rules have been tested by circumstances and have evolved to cover all that has been learned. Being a different kind of competition, the X Prize rules were written without the benefit of years of accumulated experience and this created a lot of problems as the difference between teams’ interpretations and officials’ intent emerged.

For the most part, the differences were resolved in a fair way by reasonable adults: teams had to do some rework and a few rules got re-written and in some cases softened. Sometimes the rules softening worked against us. For example, we initially faced a requirement for “safety glass” windows and, since time prevented us from designing the complex tooling required to make compound curved glass, we designed the VLC to have a flat wrap windscreen. By the time we learned the X Prize Foundation would accept “stuff you can see thorough that won’t shatter” for “safety glass”, meaning we could run a polycarbonate screen, it was too late to change and refine our body shape.

Now that we are no longer constrained by well-intentioned but sometimes counterproductive rules, we are making a number of design advances, such as:

• Moving to compound curvature windows and exterior body panels has enabled us to subtly but substantially reprofile the central fuselage for even more interior space. Our early cars could, and often did, carry 4 full sized adults and their gear. The next generation VLC can carry even more.
• The new, smoother lines promise even better wind cheating performance. With half the drag of a Prius, our early cars are the most aerodynamically efficient 4 seat cars yet built. We expect to exceed that with a better optimized shape.
• New, raised and reprofiled “wings” are designed to meet FMVSS bumper standards. Edison2 learned about crash-worthy design the hard way, through more than a century of combined professional auto racing experience. Now we have more design freedom, we’re applying that experience.
• Larger diameter tires permit more travel from our patent pending in-wheel suspension, giving a smoother ride and also reducing rolling resistance.
• A new rear window gives better rear vision than the camera it replaces, and the hatch it mounts to gives access to luggage space now available above our rear-mounted driveline.
• It takes a lot of work to get from proof of concept to production capable. The path involves redesigning almost every component and system of the Very Light Car. So under the skin are all the advances you can’t see.

Of course, some things stay the same. Not just Very Light Car Principles – light weight, low drag, breakthrough efficiency – but also the orderly, thorough way we do things. Not much happens by chance at Edison2, and that includes working towards what is really an all-new car.

Making Stuff

Lynchburg, Virginia, is a place where you can get stuff made. A rich history of manufacturing – shoes, and then textiles – left Lynchburg with a machine tool industry that managed to hang on, even after the textile plants closed. This legacy has been crucial to Lynchburg’s ability to attract businesses such as Babcock and Wilcox, Areva, and, yes, Edison2.

Which is why we were pleased to read the business feature in the NY Times GE Goes With What It Knows: Making Stuff. It is not just that GE wants to return to its research and production roots after an ill-advised foray into the financial world, but that it understands just how crucial it is that our country have a robust ability to create and manufacture. “Technology based manufacturing of all sorts has to be a central part of reinvigorating the economy” asserts CEO Jeffrey Immelt.

This is exactly the message Oliver gave in his X Prize acceptance speech and why Oliver and several others on the Edison2 team carpool an hour each day to Lynchburg. Lynchburg simply has manufacturing resources that some communities, like Charlottesville, never really had and that many other communities had but lost. The importance of these resources was underscored by Oliver’s passionate impromptu introduction to his acceptance, acclaimed as  “one of the most compelling summaries of what we need to do to restore the American dream”.

Innovation is crucial to our future as a nation and cannot be outsourced. GE’s Jeffrey Immelt knows this and so does Edison2’s Oliver Kuttner. And hopefully so do a lot of other people. Our future depends on it.



The Electric Bandwagon

Within the last few days the Chevy Volt has been named Motor Trend Car of the Year and the Nissan Leaf European Car of the Year. Clearly, the Volt and Leaf are leading the electric car bandwagon and we feel it’s time to share some thoughts.

Rating an electric car’s actual energy consumption can be a bit of a challenge. Even choosing the units is difficult: who can visualize watt hours per mile?  The X-Prize handled this question by expressing energy consumption in terms of what’s in a gallon of gasoline: they called this mpge or miles per gallon energy equivalent. The conversion factor between gasoline and electricity (1 gallon of gas = 33.8 kilowatt hours) is fixed and not in dispute. We’re pleased the EPA have also now chosen mpge as their electric energy consumption unit.

In stark contrast to published claims by Chevy of 230 mpge and Nissan of 367 mpge, the EPA has recently rated the Volt at 93 mpge (when running on its batteries) and the Leaf at 99 mpge. Once its range extending gas backup engine kicks in, the Volt’s energy mileage drops further still, to 37 mpge.

The EPA arrived at these numbers by measuring the consumption of electricity actually delivered to the vehicle, the “plug to wheels” standard. This is directly equivalent to counting the energy of the gasoline pumped into the tank, or “pump to wheels”.

Whether it’s fair or accurate to use plug to wheels as the standard is another question. A Forbes essay, for example, says the EPA’s numbers ignore the considerably less than perfect efficiency of the power stations that generate the electricity the Volt and Leaf use. Therefore, Forbes argues, the two cars’ real energy consumption is significantly higher than the EPA reports. But, in turn, Forbes (and other websites we’ve seen commenting on the same question) ignores the energy cost of extracting, refining and transporting to the gas station the gasoline burned in regular cars.

There’s some real sticker shock with both the Volt and Leaf’s electric range: 37 and 77 miles respectively. After that, the Volt’s gas engine has to kick on and the Leaf simply stops moving. Electric car range is a tricky thing, very dependent on weather and driving style. Wipers, heat, A/C and lights all draw their power solely from the battery and highway driving offers little opportunity for regenerative braking. But the plain fact is, neither car will go very far on its battery. So, for now at least, we think the Volt is the better idea because its gas backup engine can always get you home.

Of course, for the Leaf or Volt to have any electric range at all, owners must remember and find the time and place to recharge them.

We feel the EPA sticker glosses over the very serious issue of emissions. While Nissan may claim in ads the Leaf emits no pollution and the EPA’s sticker shows zero, the fine print in both says it all: they mean no “tailpipe” emissions. It’s certainly the case that generating the electricity on which electric cars run causes pollution.

The majority of the United States’ electricity is generated by burning coal and the majority of the remainder by burning natural gas. Although it varies by just exactly where you are in the nation, wind, solar, hydro and tidal electricity generation are small parts of the overall picture. Argonne National Labs’ GREET (Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions and Energy Use in Transportation) model – which was used by the X-Prize – takes into account the underlying emissions from electricity generation. On this basis, the Leaf’s 99 mpge means the power stations producing its electricity emit about 230 grams of CO₂ for each mile the car runs. This is about 2.8 times the amount measured by an EPA certified lab for the Very Light Car.

It’s worth pointing out that neither the Leaf nor the Volt meet the performance, efficiency and emissions requirements of the X Prize. In fact, they’re a long way short. Edison2’s Very Light Car won; the Leaf and Volt would have been eliminated.

Edison2 is an optimistic organization and looks to the positive. We are thrilled that Chevy and Nissan are working towards more efficient cars, demonstrated by the Volt and Leaf. Both are worthy efforts and we congratulate the engineers who worked on them. We were parked next to a Volt at the Virginia Governor’s Energy Conference in October and were impressed by what we saw. But at the end of the day, both the Leaf and Volt are 3500 lb cars with unexceptional aerodynamics and therefore, whatever drives them, their efficiency is limited.

Edison2 is energy source agnostic. We simply make a much more efficient car. Because of that, whether it runs on electricity or gas, the Very Light Car uses less of either to drive and causes less pollution.



Edison2 and the Media

In 2010 the media has been very good to Edison2.

The New York Times, NPR Morning Edition, Popular Mechanics, Slate, Jim Lehrer Newshour, GQ Germany, Car, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, Automobile, CNN – our press list goes on and on, and includes numerous blogs and a host of newspapers and TV affiliates.

Our favorites? Autoblog Green got the ball rolling at the Detroit Auto Show in January with Detroit 2010: Edison2's Very Light Car scoffs at Electric Avenue. Journalist Ronald Ahrens penned several flattering stories, calling the Very Light Car “stunning” in his X Prize Notebook, followed by stories in the Times and Automobile. Jason Fagone’s article in Slate had perhaps the best title - Can some out-of-work car-racing engineers save the planet?

More important to us than the quantity of stories has been their quality. Writers understand what is significant about what we are doing. “The winner of the Auto X Prize proves that the next generation of cars will look like nothing we’ve ever seen before” says Rolling Stone, and we agree: breakthrough efficiency cannot come from modifying an existing car.  Automobile quoted  Felice Bianchi Anderloni  – “Weight is the enemy, air resistance the obstacle – to illustrate our approach, while Car Magazine asks “Is weight, rather than power source, the real future of the automobile?”

Again, we agree. The future of the automobile is a car that simply take little energy to push, no matter the energy source. A car that is very light and extremely aerodynamic. A departure from the ordinary: the Very Light Car.