Electric vehicle design from University of Waterloo's Alternative Fuels Team

FleetCarma is very happy to be working in collaboration with a group of graduate and undergraduate students from the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University as they design and build a prototype vehicle in partnership with General Motors.

These students are participating in a three-year collegiate competition called EcoCAR2, which challenges them to re-engineer a donated 2013 Chevrolet Malibu into a plug-in electric vehicle that reduces energy consumption and emissions while maintaining its performance, safety and consumer acceptability.

In addition to General Motors, other large organizations are sponsors of the program including the U.S. Department of Energy and Natural Resources Canada.

FleetCarma was asked by these university students to help them gather drive cycle data from a large group of consumer vehicles.  The students used these data to inform their vehicle design choices and strategies.  In the end, the team of students was able to gather 171,000 kilometres of data – which they translated as the equivalent of driving from the West Coast to the East Coast of North America 28 times.  These data empowered the students to design their prototype GM vehicle to meet the driving requirements of a broad set of drivers which they were targeting as the ideal consumers.

The team has put together a video highlighting the project — which we are happy to share here. Enjoy!

The following editorial by Ted Kristsonis at MediaPlanet, featured an interview with Matthew Stevens, CEO and Co-founder of FleetCarma’s parent company CrossChasm Technologies, and appeared in the Engineering & Infrastructure Special Report in the National Post on March 2^nd, 2012.

Integrating EVs into the smart grid of the future

Electric vehicles are hailed as a game changer for transportation and the environment. However, utilizing the car of the future with today’s infrastructure presents significant challenges.

How we made it

The promise of electric cars is that they could make a lasting impact on the environment, but once they reach critical mass, there remains uncertainty over how millions of electric cars could affect the power grid in the future.

Electric and hybrid vehicles are still in an early adopter phase, and their merits in reducing greenhouse gases have been widely reported. Matthew Stevens, principal at CrossChasm Technologies, a Waterloo, ON-based firm that works with the automakers and fleet operators, suggests that the biggest impact could be on the grid.

“What’s interesting about electric vehicles is that they are both an incredible opportunity for the grid and an incredible risk,” says Stevens. “Electric vehicles, by and large, are charged at night, and they won’t need the entire time they’re plugged in to draw power. The risk is in trying to charge them quickly. A Quick Charge, which is a 50-kilowatt load for 20 minutes, is equivalent to a small subdivision’s consumption.”

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Some months you renovate the kitchen.  Other months you install new curtains.  This month we grabbed our IKEA cards and got us some new curtains, a bunch of them.  No massive overhauls, but a lot of requested touches that we think you’ll like:

Maintenant en français

Français.  This one’s big. The entire backend is now available in French. Big thanks to Simon for all his work on the translation and Josh for making it happen.  So should this blog update be available in French too?

Replacement Cycle.  FleetCarma was the Henry Ford of replacement cycles – You could use any replacement cycle you wanted, as long as it was 7 years.  Not anymore.  FleetCarma now lets you pick your replacement cycle.

Upstream Emissions.  Because of the debates on the correct upstream emissions factors I have been battling against adding this.  But Eric has beaten me into submission.  The default is zero, but if you’d like to add upstream emissions factor for gasoline and/or electricity, play away.  US electricity mix = 670 gGHG/kWh, Canadian mix = 200 gGHG/kWh, Quebec mix = 2 (yes, 2) gGHG/kWh, Wyoming mix =  980 gGHG/kWh… What to use for upstream gasoline emissions …see what you’ve started Eric.

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