7 3/8 x 9 1/4 T echnical / Build Your Own Electric Vehicle / Leitman / 373-2 / Chapter 3
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Build Your Own Elec tric Vehicle Much of the enthusiasm on the part of automakers for electric vehicles during this period can be traced to government support. The U.S. Advanced Battery Consortium (whose principals are General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, with Department of Energy participation), the CALSTART consortium (involving utilities and large and small aerospace/high-tech companies including Hughes, then a subsidiary of General Motors), and research institutions driven by the Los Angeles Clean Air Initiative provided support for research and development of advanced batteries and other electric vehicle technologies. As we head back into another era of plug-in vehicles, these and other collaborative efforts have experienced a resurgence after several years of seeming to be relatively dormant.
The Need for Events
Some people are thinkers, others are doers, some just like to tinker around—and EVs provide a fertile field for all three types. • Thinkers can attend symposia; the largest and most well-known is the Electric Vehicle Symposium (EVS), which has been held in cities such as Paris; Washington, DC; Toronto; Hong Kong; Milan; and Anaheim. • Doers can go to races and road rallies; what started out as the simple MIT versus Cal Tech Great Electric Vehicle Race of 1968 evolved to the huge crowds and multiple classes of the Phoenix 500 race by the 1990s. The Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) had the Tour De Sol event, which allows kids in high school and college to race prototype electric vehicles and also has events at each leg of the race to promote electric cars and electric drive. • In recent years, the National Electric Drag Racing Association has gained prominence, as have races such as the “Power of DC” in Washington, DC, and the “Battery Beach Burnout” in Southern Florida. Chapters of the Electric Auto Association have been holding road rallies since 1968. Some regard the greatest of all challenges (and the greatest of all publicity stunts) to be the World Solar Challenge: a 1,900-mile race across the Australian outback using a motor the size of a coffee can powered only by sunlight.
The 1990s–2000s Environmental and conservation concerns put real teeth back into EV efforts, and even General Motors got the message. Indeed, GM did a complete about-face and led the parade to electric vehicles. Resumption of interest in EVs during this wave was led by unprecedented legislative, cooperative, and technological developments. Electric vehicles of the 1990s also benefited from improvements in electronics technology, because the 1980s mileage and emission requirements increasingly forced automotive manufacturers to seek solutions via electronics. Although EV interest was in a lull during the 1980s, that same decade saw a hundredfold improvement in the capabilities of solid-state electronics devices. Tiny integrated circuits replaced a computer that took up a whole room with a computer on your desktop at the beginning of the 1980s, and by one that could be held in the palm of your hand by the beginning of the 1990s. Development at the other end of the spectrum—high-power devices— was just as dramatic. Anything mechanical that could be replaced by electronics was, in order to save weight and power (energy). Solid-state devices grew ever more
