The 2012 summer Olympics are over but electric car marathons are beginning to heat up. Israel’s Better Place smashed the 24 hour distance record of 994.14 miles set last month by Renault’s Zoe. The new record was set with a Hoden Commodore. This is an Australian made electric car modified to use Better Place’s innovative quick battery change system to get a fresh battery during every 75.8 mile lap.
Ordinary electric vehicles can take hours to charge making it difficult for them to come near Better Place’s 24 hour distance record. Even the CHAdeMO rapid charger at Masdar city takes about 30 minutes to reach 80 percent of a batteries capacity. But Better Place’s battery subscription model and quick change refueling stations can have you back on the road in one minute and 13 seconds, not quite as fast as a Formula 1 race crew can change a tire, but quite a bit faster than you’ll ever refuel that old-fashioned gasoline powered car.
Here is a video demonstrating how their battery replacement system works:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHHvjsFm_88&feature=player_detailpage[/youtube]
The Better Place team noticed that the depleted batteries still had about 20% charge after each 75.8 mile lap, meaning it might not be long before they to break their own record.
Race car photo from Shutterstock.com
Author: Brian Nitz
Brian remembers when a single tear dredged up a nation's guilt. The tear belonged to an Italian-American actor known as Iron-Eyes Cody, the guilt was displaced from centuries of Native American mistreatment and redirected into a new environmental awareness. A 10-year-old Brian wondered, 'What are they... No, what are we doing to this country?' From a family of engineers, farmers and tinkerers Brian's father was a physics teacher. He remembers the day his father drove up to watch a coal power plant's new scrubbers turn smoke from dirty grey-back to steamy white. Surely technology would solve every problem. But then he noticed that breathing was difficult when the wind blew a certain way. While sailing, he often saw a yellow-brown line on the horizon. The stars were beginning to disappear. Gas mileage peaked when Reagan was still president. Solar panels installed in the 1970s were torn from roofs as they were no longer cost-effective to maintain. Racism, public policy and low oil prices transformed suburban life and cities began to sprawl out and absorb farmland. Brian only began to understand the root causes of "doughnut cities" when he moved to Ireland in 2001 and watched history repeat itself. Brian doesn't...
