Students Design High Performance Battery Car
19 Sep 2007
Students at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, have designed a performance electric car that is powered by the same kind of battery used in a cellphone.
The UltraCommuter electric car runs on one of three 150kg lithium battery packs, capable of taking the car up to 200km.
Speeds of between 120km/h and 170km/m can be reached.
It took the Waikato Engineering students two years to design and build and they plan to race the prototype in the 3000km Darwin to Adelaide World Solar Challenge, in the non-fuel powered class in October.
Recharging each pack costs less than $5 of electricity, so the six-day journey is estimated to cost a grand total of $83.
Compare that to the same journey in a Holden VE Commodore, which would cost about $530 of gas (assuming 10.9 litres of petrol are used per 100km).
After the race the car, which has cost about $500,000 to develop, will be made road legal and used as a research tool for investigating the introduction of battery electric cars to New Zealand.
Waikato University mechanical engineer Mike Duke said taking the car to market would take at least 18 months and cost a minimum of $10 million in investment for the production of between 100 and 2000 electric cars a year.
But Dr Duke believes gas stations will become a thing of the past, replaced by "battery exchange stations" as electric vehicles begin their slow, but inevitable, takeover of traditional petrol powered motorcars.
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