Design your electric car

Inhabitat

Design your Own Electric Vehicle With the Trexa EV Platform!

by Mike Chino, 01/19/10

What if designing your own electric vehicle was as simple as picking out the parts and plugging them together? Trexa is aiming to make that dream a reality as they unveil the world’s first fully-electric vehicle development platform. This svelte all-wheel drive platform includes everything you need to make a vehicle go – a battery, driveline, and power electronics. The design of everything else is up to you, and its modular nature means that it can be tailored to virtually any application – from futuristic connected tram systems for commercial fleets, to high-performance hot rods, to neighborhood-friendly EV’s perfect for a jaunt around town.

The Trexa platform offers an unprecedented level of versatility because it contains an entire vehicle’s drivetrain within one low-profile enclosed structure. The platform is highly scalable, so features such as range, suspension, torque, acceleration, and top speed can all be tailored to suit the vehicle’s intended purpose. For starters, the standard platform has an acceleration of 0-60mph in 8 sec, a top speed of 100mph, a 105 mile range, and a charge time of 4 hours (based upon an efficiency of 200Wh per mile — comparable to a Prius in electric mode).

Working with this simple streamlined platform, designers can build virtually any vehicle they can dream up. Trexa is also offering a vehicle developer’s kit complete with a docking system, steering wheel/pedalbox, and CAD models for designing on the platform, which makes this system as plug-and-play as vehicle design gets. You can keep up to date on all the latest developments from the Trexa team by following them on Twitter and Facebook.

It’s thrilling to see this level of customization finally available to aspiring vehicle designers in an approachable package, and we can’t wait to see the innovative applications that they come up with. What would you design with a Trexa platform? Sound off in the comments!

+ Trexa