#1 in our new series: "CO2...This is important."

Welcome to the first in a series about the EPA's new CO2 regulations. Our first entry is a compelling overview and expose of powerful new regulations the media is not covering. In the coming months we'll explore why these regulations matter. And we'll reveal, innovation by innovation, why Edison2's game-changing solutions are the best fit for this regulatory vision of an efficient, planet-friendly transportation future. Please join the conversation and enjoy our new series!

CO2...This is important.

#1. Overview

Many are not aware of this, but the United States had two Super Bowls in February 2012: The first, Giants vs. Patriots, lasted three hours. The Giants prevailed. The second, 100 industry giants and fifteen states vs. the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), lasted two days. This epic showdown combined twenty-six appeals from a deep bench of lawyers over ten pages long. [1]

The giants did not prevail. In June 2012, the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from mobile sources – the cars we drive – was upheld by the DC Court of Appeals. On October 15, the EPA and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued their joint final rule. [2] In short, mobile source CO2 regulation, AKA The Tailpipe Rule, is here to stay.   

Starting in 2017, if automakers fail to meet EPA limits for CO2 emissions four years in a row, the EPA now has the power to make it illegal for manufacturers to sell their vehicles with the highest CO2 tailpipe emissions. [3] [4] In other words, the heaviest, sportiest, most luxurious vehicles – iconic brands like Mercedes 500, Camaro SS and Range Rover – could be banned from entering commerce in the United States. [5] 

In 2009, a presidential memorandum directed the EPA to coordinate with NHTSA on CO2 and MPG requirements. This convergence of regulation was created to help the United States address oil consumption and climate change. [6]

What this means is automakers are now in a regulatory vice that closes more each year; CO2 limits get lower and MPG requirements get higher, and the rate of change is increasing. MPG requirements that went up 9.5 MPG in 31 years [7] will now shoot up twice that amount in less than half the time. [8] This is the 2025, 54.5 MPG requirement the media is covering.    

What isn’t being covered are the new CO2 limits and EPA’s power to remove cars from commerce. Automakers taking this threat seriously are scrambling for solutions in technologies they or their partners own. The EPA combined these technologies into 47,000 unique packages and ran analysis to determine which were most effective at reducing vehicle CO2 emissions. [9]

There are two problems with this approach: physics and cost. The decades-old chassis and suspension design (architecture) in our modern cars is inefficient and heavy. As efficiency requirements go up, physics makes it increasingly difficult to meet those requirements with incremental solutions, and automakers end up throwing significant capital at inefficient architecture. Stacking incremental technologies like advanced downsized turbo diesel and gasoline engines, gasoline direct-injection and start-stop, and eventually more effective but pricy Plug-in and electric drivetrains and batteries, exotic materials and more onto legacy architecture...it starts to resemble lipstick on a pig - expensive lipstick.

If automakers succeed in complying without addressing inefficient architecture, the lipstick-on-a-pig approach could make cars bought by average consumers expensive enough to create real problems. [10] Affordable cars could shrink to unsafe sizes; consumers could shun compliance cars in favor of cheaper gasoline-only cars or pre-regulation cars; CO2 compliance would fail as a result; and the EPA would ban well-known vehicles. Some of this near-future exists today in the low sales of high-tech compliant cars and the new automakers who are either struggling or extinct. 

The silver lining to this is scattered throughout the EPA/NHTSA final rule, studies that show Edison2's credo of lower mass and lower aerodynamic drag is effective, and affordable. [11] [12] [13]

Together, Edison2's patented in-wheel suspension and new chassis design offer a true leap in automotive efficiency and a viable solution to the regulatory vice. Our vehicle is compliant beyond 2025 regulations today, and is designed from the ground up to be economically feasible for automakers and consumers. This is because our platform innovations enable expensive drivetrains, batteries, components, total vehicle parts and material input to be downsized to cost-efficient levels. We accomplish this without costly, exotic materials, and without sacrificing the performance, ride, safety and handling that consumers are accustomed to. Efficient architecture makes all the difference.

Rapidly implementing solutions like Edison2's is critical if automakers hope to create affordable, desirable passenger vehicles that keep pace with increasingly stringent CO2 and MPG requirements.

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Reference help: The links beside EPA/NHTSA require copy/pasting the link into a new window and take up to 10 seconds to load the page and cue to the correct paragraph. Clicking or right-clicking opens the page, but it can cue to the wrong paragraph. 

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[1] USCA Case #09-1322 http://bit.ly/TZNo6T

[2] EPA Regulations and Standards: Light Duty http://1.usa.gov/RrJlha

[3] EPA/NHTSA final rule http://1.usa.gov/TSrXb7

[4] EPA/NHTSA final rule http://1.usa.gov/W3sGVI

[5] EPA/NHTSA final rule http://1.usa.gov/STz3LT and http://1.usa.gov/S5PINZ

[6] Whitehouse press release http://1.usa.gov/n69isg

[7] NHTSA “Summary of Fuel Economy Performance” (PDF download, pg 3) http://1.usa.gov/qcdF35

[8] Center for Climate and Energy Solutions http://bit.ly/R64pPI

[9] EPA/NHTSA Final Rule http://1.usa.gov/Yndcjq

[10] NADA study, pg 5, paragraph 2 http://bit.ly/HxHQtF

[11] EPA/NHTSA Final Rule, phase 2 Toyota Venza mass reduction study http://1.usa.gov/11vpYh0

[12] EPA/NHTSA Final Rule, conclusions of current mass reduction studies http://1.usa.gov/13w8Bvh

[13] EPA/NHTSA Final Rule, see bottom of CO2 reducing technologies chart http://1.usa.gov/WjvbmM WR20% = 20% weight reduction, Aero2 = aerodynamic treatments

Pieces Off the Machine

One of the fun bits of engineering is when parts you’ve designed change from existing only in your mind and on the CAD screen into real, tangible pieces. Recently the first of our new front suspension links arrived in Edison2’s engineering office.

These links are part of our patented in-wheel suspension and they control and constrain the movement of the wheels as they go up and down over the bumps in the road. They’ve been very thoroughly considered and analyzed and they incorporate everything we learned with our early cars.

If you know machine shop methods, you’ll see straight away these parts are milled from aluminium plate. That’s not economically viable for a production car but – and this is the significant thing - they have been designed to resemble forgings. Forging is absolutely a volume production method and so these new parts represent a step along the road towards being able to buy a Very Light Car.

Edison2, Local Motors & Siemens: The VLC Design Challenge

Since introducing the electric Very Light Car almost a year ago, Edison2 has been quietly busy designing a dramatic new version of the Very Light Car, although work on the next generation VLC actually started before the ink was dry on our $5 million X Prize check. The updated Very Light Car is much more than just a pre-production version of the X Prize prototype.  It is a completely new vehicle, using the same underlying architecture and with the same virtues of efficiency that won us the X Prize.

Now we are collaborating with open source community Local Motors and Siemens PLM on an exciting design competition. Anyone can join the Local Motors community to create an aerodynamic new door handle for the Next Generation VLC, using Siemens Solid Edge Design1, part of the software suite used at Edison2. The competition begins August 1, and the submission deadline is August 12. As with their other design challenges, Local Motors provides a downloadable “ignition kit”, to give entrants the tools and assets needed to work on designs.

Our work on the Next Generation VLC actually started before the ink was dry on our $5 million X Prize check. The X Prize VLC was purpose-built to demonstrate the importance of platform efficiency ... and to win the competition.  

Designed to meet the letter of the rules, it is an uncompromising vision of light, aerodynamic efficiency. We knew that as we moved toward a production model we would make improvements.

The sleek new shape of the Next Generation VLC is an aerodynamic improvement over the angular X Prize design, helping to offset requirements such as bumpers and mirrors, while also improving driver visibility. Larger wheels allow more in-wheel suspension travel, improving ride quality. The interior will have simple but sophisticated fit-and-finish. With an eye towards eventual mass production, the chassis is now aluminum sheet metal instead of tubular steel.

Finally, getting into the VLC will be easy. The car will have a lower door sill, an improved door swing mechanism and, with the help of the Local Motors community and Siemens Solid Edge, an aerodynamic and effective door handle. 

A Look Back at 2011

2011 was a very good year for Edison2.

Ron Mathis lectured on the Very Light Car at NASA Langley and the NASA Goddard Space Center.  Brad delivered the keynote address at the worldwide launch of Siemens Solid Edge ST4. Oliver was as panelist in the Jefferson Innovation Summit, and spoke to the Society of Allied Weight Engineers and at the Automotive Weight Reduction Conference. The VLC visited the Detroit Auto Show, the DC Auto Show, the Louisville Auto Show and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, and was accepted into the permanent collection of the Henry Ford Museum. Edison2 was written about in the New York Times and featured on CNN International.

But it was in the shop, on the track and in the test lab that the Very Light Car really shone in 2011.

Edison2 won the XPrize through extreme platform efficiency and in 2011 we demonstrated how important a light-weight, low aerodynamic drag car can be. We fitted a Smart Car driveline into a VLC, and the 41 mpg (EPA highway) Smart engine tested at 89 mpg as a VLC. It is a fast, fun, very efficient machine. Ron Cerven, who led Li-ion to an X Prize Alternative class victory with an electric 2-seater, joined Edison2 in 2011, and helped create an electric Very Light Car. As expected, an eVLC combines acceptable range (114 miles), short recharge time (<7 hours) and outstanding efficiency (350 MPGe) with a small battery pack (10.5 kWh).

We also began safety testing of the Very Light Car. We ran numerous crash simulations using industry-standard software, and in November conducted our first actual crash test. These all confirm what we know from racing, where it is not uncommon for drivers to walk away from very high-speed crashes: that with the right architecture a very light car can be a safe car.

And we made a lot of progress in 2011 on the design of the next version Very Light Car. This prototype will be a car with bumpers, mirrors, production fit and finish, and more interior space. Wind-tunnel tests at Virginia Tech showed that the next-version shape is even more slippery than the X Prize car, so bumpers etc can be added without sacrificing efficiency.

2011 was a very good year… but 2012 promises to be even better. Stay tuned.

Squiggly Lines, Dots and the Art of Data Analysis

One of the cool things we get with official EPA test results for our electric car is instantaneous voltage and current draw readings. Since the eVLC runs on DC electricity, it’s simple to calculate power: it’s voltage multiplied by current.

Suppose at some point on the test the car draws 53 Amps at 107 Volts, the power is 53 x 107 = 5671 Watts or 5.671 kW. There’s a direct conversion from this to horsepower: 1 hp = 0.746 kW so in our example we’re using 5.671/0.746 = 7.6 horsepower.

The voltage and current readings taken by the lab allow us to plot the power consumption in different ways and study and learn from the results. Consider the graph below which plots power against speed for the FTP75 EPA City test

Speed in miles per hour is on the X-axis and Power in Watts is on the Y-axis. Inspection tells us lots of things. For example, the maximum speed of the test is about 56 mph, second, the maximum power required is just over 15 kW (about 20 horsepower), the majority of the test is run below 40 mph and, because the power is sometimes negative, we are using regenerative braking (regen).

On closer inspection it gets more interesting. The City cycle involves 23 stops and starts and each launch is reflected by its own loop in the power/speed trace. There is only one excursion above about 36 mph and the power required to accelerate the car is much greater than that required to maintain it in the cruise portion at about 50 to 55 mph.

Where it gets really interesting for an engineer is the convergence to a sloping line beneath zero power, meaning it’s to do with our regenerative braking. That this is a straight line indicates there is a torque limit to our regen: our relatively simple controller has a limit on how much it can cull from the motor and put back in the battery while the car is slowing.

Could we improve the regen and thereby make our numbers even better? That’s where the art comes in. Consider the graph below which is of exactly the same data as the first chart but with the measurements presented as points rather than a line.

Inspection shows us something interesting that’s not obvious in the smoothed line format – there are many more data points above zero power than below. Since the data points are taken at even time intervals, it becomes clear that even on the City cycle where you’re stopping and starting all the time, it’s how much energy you spend that dominates, not how much you recover through regenerative braking.

This has a number of profound implications for the design of the car, which have been a theme through everything Edison2 does - and you’ll see this if you read back through the various papers we’ve presented on this blog.

First, let’s consider whether we could do better if we had a better motor/regen controller, one that allowed us to recover the energy that might be available below and to the left of the present torque limit. The answer is, we could, but at what price? Right now we’re using inexpensive, off-the-shelf components and we’ve put up the best official EPA test numbers ever, by far. One of the core points we make at Edison2 is that we have superb performance with here-and-now technology. If we had a gold-plated, mil-spec controller we could do a bit better still but you’d have to be rich to afford it.

Second, the relative lack of points below zero power indicate that you can’t make great numbers, even with best in the world regen, if you’re spending energy like crazy to move a heavy square box along the road. The secret is to not spend it in the first place and that’s what the Very Light Car is all about

Third, regen has consequences. Most electric cars are front wheel drive because, since that’s where the weight goes when the car brakes, that’s where you can recover the most power. Front wheel drive has the disadvantage that the driving wheels must also steer so you have to move the power through articulating couplings in the driveshafts. This causes mechanical drag and it puts extra parts in the airflow, causing aerodynamic drag. At Edsion2 we realized the car spends much more time being driven than slowing so we deliberately chose rear wheel drive because we could package everything better for aerodynamics and it’s mechanically more efficient.

So, once again, testing by an impartial lab to a recognized standard has produced results that demonstrate the fundamental correctness of our methods and approach. We know we are on the right path and the results confirm it.