Audi's "Electric Life" project is part research and part promotion for the A3 e-tron, their compact car with a purely electric motor. Ten "e-pilots" were selected from within the company to receive an e-tron and live with it for a few months, providing video coverage along the way.
Yesterday they released the third episode, and we were excited to see they'd chosen an industrial designer as one of the pilots. And while we expected L.A.-based Jae Min, a 16-year auto design vet and Art Center professor, to spend most of the clip rabidly flogging the car, instead he shares calm insights on the vehicle as well as a bit of design philosophy. We're also treated to a peek at what he does at Art Center:
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I understand the economics of needing to sell the current technology to consumers to continue developing electric vehicles, but I feel the current electric car platform is flawed.
As it stands the battery units have a limited life span (significantly less than the engineering on the rest of the vehicle) and yet manufacturers are worried about standardising the charging plug rather than the battery pack/volume for ease of replacement!
The current sequence of use that consumers have with petrol powered vehicles is the only level inconvenience that will be truly accepted by mass market. I.e. 300miles range is added in under 5 minutes at the pump. This means that a 12 hour charge for a shorter range is, at best, a difficult sell to existing car users with pre-learned behaviour. The current platform has limited redundancy in the system, the penalty for not having enough 'juice' to complete your journey is too great (also consider moving a flat electric car with 1 tonnes of battery on-board should you not make it to a charging point, your not going to push that very far)
If the battery pack was standardised across manufacturers (voltages, power, capacity etc) and was swappable at a 'charging station' for a full one in 5 minutes the system could work from a consumer perspective. The argument against is that companies would have to invest in stocking large numbers of battery packs and the additional drain on power grids, the difference in performance between vehicle types..... and on and on... you could debate hundreds of ways of running the system. The bottom line in my opinion is this...
Environmentally, economically, practically; an electric vehicle that costs $40,000, has a range of 200 - 300 miles (in optimum conditions) takes 12 hours to re-charge (at limited locations) and will require a new battery pack within the decade at a cost of perhaps $10,000 (not a bad estimate given the rising price of rare earth minerals needed to make the batteries in the first place) seems like a terrible idea, and negates the point of its existence in the first place... unless its real reason is to make lots of nice publicity videos and money, but now I really am being cynical.
I don't think much has changed in three years.