Electric Mini: 0-60 in 4 Seconds: It Has Motors In Its Wheels
by Justin Thomas, Virginia on 08.30.06
A British engineering firm has put together a high-performance hybrid version of BMW's Mini Cooper. The PML Mini QED has a top speed of 150 mph, a 0-60 mph time of 4.5 seconds. The car uses a small gasoline engine with four 160 horsepower electric motors — one on each wheel. The car has been designed to run for four hours of combined urban/extra urban driving, powered only by a battery and bank of ultra capacitors. The QED supports an all-electric range of 200-250 miles and has a total range of about 932 miles (1,500 km). For longer journeys at higher speeds, a small conventional internal combustion engine (ICE) is used to re-charge the battery. In this hybrid mode, fuel economies of up to 80mpg can be achieved.
Explains Martin Boughtwood, PML’s MD: “Until now, most electric vehicles have been little more than souped-up milk floats, limited by range and speed, with compromised performance. For those with a green conscience who also value an enhanced motoring experience, there is still something missing.
“Working in partnership with our customer, Synergy Innovations, we set out to demonstrate what our electric wheel technology is capable of. We simply took a standard BMW Mini One, discarded the engine, the disc brakes, the wheels, and the gearbox. These components were replaced by four of our electric wheels, a lithium polymer battery, a large ultra capacitor, a very small ICE with generator (so small it almost fits alongside the spare wheel), an energy management system and a sexy in-car display module.”
The benefits of PML in-wheel drive technology are;
* It is adaptable to other vehicle chassis
* It eliminates the need for gearing and mechanical drive train
* It allows more space inside the car
The vehicle has three driver-selectable modes of operation:
* Eco mode for town/city frequent start-stop driving;
* Normal mode for daily commuting and ICE- equivalent operation, and
* Sport mode for super car performance.
Other notable features include:
* No (mechanical) brakes means returned energy!
All braking is performed by the wheel motors acting as very efficient electrical generators which return almost all of the energy back to the battery system. The beauty of this dual-circuit, ultra safe system is that your green conscience can be quite content even when accelerating hard, since you are assured of collecting most of the expended energy when it is time to slow down rapidly.
ABS as standard – even when accelerating
Because the wheels are high performance motors, ABS comes as a standard function built into each wheel’s software. Now anti-skid can also be applied to acceleration since the motor can smoothly control torque delivery to/from the road in both cases. Flooring the brake or accelerator hard merely results in controlled maximum torque, giving the shortest possible stopping or acceleration time.
Clever wheels
The technology eliminates the need for crude differential gears to share power between left and right sides. The wheels are in constant communication with each other deciding 1000 times each second how much torque share is optimum for the current driving conditions. Should one wheel detect a slippery surface and take appropriate anti-skid actions, the other wheels are aware of this instantly and adopt an appropriate compensating strategy to keep the vehicle as stable as possible.
640 brake horsepower – for life!
Each wheel develops 160bhp - 640bhp in total. The original Mini One develops less than 100bhp with an engine that weighs nearly double the weight of the four electric wheels! Apart from wheel bearings there are no wearing parts in the electric wheels; this means the horsepower stays for the life of the vehicle - and beyond.
As the battery level reduces, the rear mounted ICE/generator starts to automatically top up the battery. So when you arrive at your destination you can simply park the vehicle knowing that when you return the battery will be replenished. Alternatively you can take advantage of lower cost mains electricity and plug in to recharge. So you never need to worry about battery capacity or how to recharge. During operation, as the battery level falls the generator cuts in, enabling an average speed of 60 – 70mph to be sustained with no further battery depletion.
See more information at World Car Fans
Update: BMW to Make Electric Mini. Only in California. Only 500 of Them.
Home page for the car: PML Mini QED
Interested in electric cars? Check out: 17 Electric Cars You Must Know About
So let me make sure. This is not a production vehicle?
Finally, someone (although not a major auto manufacturer) makes a real hybrid!
I've read that Mitsubishi was working on this same type of set up, but of course it was in "development". Unfortunatley with large auto manufacturers, things like this always seem to be in "development" with the consumer never seeing anything actually put into production!
When can I get one!!!
Now we're talkin'. A EV/hybrid with high performance and the cool looks of the MINI!
I would hope that they will add a parking/emergency brake to it. Note the wheel chocks in the picture of the prototype.
Oh, hey everyone look, candy! You want the candy dont you; you need the candy? Come get the candy, yeah...
Oh I just remembered. We're not going to make the candy so get lost.
Damn and how much would that cost? Motors in the tires are the way to go. What if they replaced the ICE and put more batterys and capacitors there, what would be the range then?
Cool.
But 'up to 80 mpg'? In a small car?
Is that it? There are cars on sale in Europe which currently do around 70 mpg.
It must be the, to quote TH above, 'four 160 horsepower electric motors on each wheel'. Maybe one per wheel would do.
"with four 160 horsepower electric motors on each wheel."
are there really 4 motors on each wheel or one motor on each wheel for a total of 4?
Motors in tires certainly have many benefits, but the downside is that they are a lot more exposed to shocks. I wonder if that's a big problem or if it's possible to make motors that are resistant enough for all but the most extreme off-road conditions.
Beautifull!!!
To lower cost, you only need 40miles of all-electric range.
It should be posible but what about the salt used on winter roads, I didn't think of that before.
Would it be posible to have 2 motors each driving a pair of wheels through 1/2 shafts like FWD and AWD vehicles use. The packaging should work ok as the front motor would still be much smaller than the ICE drivetrain and the rear motor would be an underfloor unit where a rear diff would fit in a AWD vehicle.
How much does this cost? $250,000?
To quote PML's website:
"Motors
4 x 750Nm 1800rpm high efficiency Brushless permanent magnet sine wave Hi-Pa drive™ 24 phase water-cooled"
i.e. One motor per wheel.
This is AWESOME. The most amazing part about this whole thing is that it was built with entirely production parts.
This means you can build your own tesla roadster tomorrow, if you had the money and the drive.
This is a HUGE leap forward for electric vehicles.
They've also done it RIGHT. My problem with most electric vehicles today is that they still follow the standard ICE design:
Stick a big ole powerplant in the vehicle, and use lots of gearing, driveshafts, diff's, etc to reduce the power to the wheels through distribution.
They did it the way electrical vehicles should be done, and stick the motor at each wheel. The only thing you need to worry about distributing is the electrons, a much less lossy proposition than distributing torque.
This is *THE* perfect southern california car. Clean, long range, and more importantly FUN.
For my daily commute the ICE wouldn't even bother turning on, and I would plug it in when I get home. But for those weekend, long drives, I still get a huge range *AND* I'm being green and clean. Here's a hybrid that finally makes sense.
Eventually, in vehicles like these you will be able to replace the ICE with a more clean way to generate the electricity like fuel cells, or cleaner ICE's like ethanol engines, CNG, or biodiesel.
The point of a prototype is to demonstrate technology and operating feasibility, not to control cost. If all the non-traditional components are "off the shelf", bulk purchases would immediately lower cost of goods. The heart will be the custom computerized controllers. Probably took thousands of coder hours to make them work and thousands more remain to tweak to perfection. That's where the patents will lie as well.
Prototypes like this often never make it to market because the projected profit margins and gross profits are below corporate expectations. However, with inefficient vehicle sales plummeting, perhaps the inventors will be lucky enough to find a niche in a major maker.
ARRRG!!! First Mitsubishi now these guys are using my idea for the hybrid propulsion system used in my thesis car design years ago. It was designed as a performance electric car with intelligent in-wheel motors that eliminated the need for a complicated and heavy transmission and standard car layout. It also used a small ICE to recharge the battery while parked or running and it didn't directly drive the wheels. I never had the $ to build it, but I guess I should feel validated that my ideas were sound...
Catablade hybrid sports car:
http://www.phrancis.com/thesis/CataHome.html
CG video commercial:
http://www.phrancis.com/CataVidPlayer.html
This mini cooper has the one thing that the tesla roadster is missing. A small ICE with generator for extended driving.
as a MINI Cooper S owner, I have a few Q's:
1. Which edition of the new MINI is this? there was a special edition released recently which is more aerodynamic,, and has carbon fiber body. The 2007 edition is over 2 inches longer.
2. Do we still need heavy energy hungry emmissions controls?
3. An important handling quality of the usual MINI is that the heavy engine block is just behind the front wheel base. Did the center of mass change noticeably?
4. How about a thin-film colar roof to help charge the batteries?
5. What can we the consumer expect to really see from either PML or MINI?
-sam
It's a technology demo for the motors and controllers -- not a production vehicle. To answer Tim's question, there's a cable-linked band break in both real wheel motors. The chocks are probably just for safety.
there is such a clammor, i cannot believe these companies are not coming up with the goods...
i think F,GM need to fall by the wayside like the slow dumb dinosaurs they are and let some new blood get into the new game that has developed. i hope this little company cleans their clocks.
Put HOnda and Toyota in that bag as well.
I have always *hated* the mini, personally... however a mini like THIS one... even I would buy. Very nice indeed.
That is a current model MINI body (the 07 doesn't lift the headlights with the bonnet).
I have an 03 MINI Cooper S and this sounds EXTREMELY interesting. I like the Tesla concept, but living in Las Vegas makes the 250 mile range useless for anything other than in town driving. This gives a usable range for distance driving, what looks like better acceleration than my current MCS and monster MPG numbers.
Where do I sign up? How much extra does it cost over the standard MINI?
Wow. Want want shiny car. Of course I want it in a car that's not a "premium compact" or whatever they call the MiniBeemer.
My concern with this sort of vehicle is heating/defogging in winter. I live in Ottawa, ON, in Canada, where winter temperatures stay below freezing for months at a time. Most vehicles produce enough waste heat from ICE to warm the occupants, but getting heat from batteries is *expensive*.
Don't do that... We will loose the need to go to war with the middle east to get more oil...
No seriously, hydro Quebec in Canada did this in 1995. http://tinyurl.com/h8q9f
Do you have the feeling that somehow the industry does not want to get there... Loose money and control...
Sorry, but they are lying on their specs. They claim four 160 HP electric motors. Each horsepower equals 746 watts. They are claiming 4 x 160 x 746 = 477,440 watts of power. Gee that is half a megawatt, which would melt a wire thinner than your wrist. The real power is considerably less, and they should stop misleading people with bogus "peak" power claims which can't possibly ever be achieved.
Correction, what you ment to say was 1 HP = 746 Watts
Formula is still correct.
4 x 160 x 746 = 477,440 watts of power
Thats enough power to light up a small town
"BMW (UK) Ltd has requested that we mention they have no involvement with this project and that such conversions invalidate warranty!"
Isn't that typical ?
"My concern with this sort of vehicle is heating/defogging in winter. I live in Ottawa, ON, in Canada, where winter temperatures stay below freezing for months at a time. Most vehicles produce enough waste heat from ICE to warm the occupants, but getting heat from batteries is *expensive*."
That's a good point. Less energy wasted equals less waste heat, in this case.
The battery pack should produce some heat that can be diverted and supplements by electrical heat during operation in the winter, but from a cold start, it could be problematic. Maybe if such electrical vehicles become popular enough, there will be many electrical outlets near parking spots. Or maybe a small ICE (running on biodiesel, ideallly) could be used to generate the electricity to warm the car and then shut down.
Either way, it would still be much more efficient than what we're doing now.
Another cool mod:
Motorcycle Engine in smart Car.
Unsprung weight is bad.
personally, i'm not all that concerned about how much wattage it generates. i agree that it's silly to exaggerate the numbers to such an extent, but they mean nothing to me. what i'm more concerned about are the performance specs.
how reliable are the assertions that it will do 0-60 in 4.5 seconds? or that it has a top speed of 150 mph with a range of 932 miles and 80 mpg on ICE?
Regarding the comment about "160hp" beeing unreasonable. "hp" units are likely used for car-geek audience not accustomed to the only proper way to describe electric motor power: torque. One of the previous posters gave the most important number, each of 4 motors has 750Nm torque.
On another issue: this is not really a hybrid. This is electric powered car with small gasoline electric generator to recharge the electric system. This engine never powers the car through shafts or such...
I hope they make production model (even much less power will do).
Or you could use TEC's or small butane heaters.
Lil' Hugger,
The reason that hybrids usually use the direct drive from the piston engine (at least in part) is because you loose energy (make heat) when you convert from one form to another.
Example with 90% efficiency:
Engine -> 90% generator -> 75% of that actually stored in the battery -> 90% of what's left over to the electric motor.
yields: 0.90^3 * 0.75 = 0.54 = 54% => 46% loss in the drivetrain. My numbers are back-of-the-napkin, so let's say my accumulated fudge-factors and other innacuracies may add up to about 20%
Not trivial. I don't have any efficiency statistics for a transmission, but it seems like a well designed gearbox has a good change of not-destroying 26% (giving the benefit of the doubt to the numbers i made up above) of the energy that goes through it. Sure a CVT is an odd piece of hardware, but, given the way that they're used, they must be better than eating up more than a quarter of the energy provided by the engine. After all, a series-hybrid appears to be easier to build -- much easier to build than a transmission that my father (who spent his youth hotroding cars) thought was impossible (and I though was impractical, due to materials).
Note that these numbers are /after/ the efficiency of the engine, which theoretically could turn 60% of the heat generated into spinning (though it's probably quite a bit lower than that.
I'll let real engineers fill in the numbers and correct anything that I have omitted -- but my argument is right out of the first chapter of a thermodynamics textbook -- which is pretty solid stuff (more solid than my supposition about belt/chain materials for the CVT).
Finally good hybrids are getting developed but by the time they get released and then I can actually afford to own one is way too far away. This looks really cool but I can't imagine what the price tag will be. If it wasn't hybrid and wasn't from BMW, say maybe a ford or chevy I bet this would cost maybe $12,000 standard.
If you make the ICE "Flex Fuel" capable (running on one or more of the following: Biodiesel, Methanol, Ethanol, CNG), you've got the OPEC problem pretty much licked.
I believe congratulations are in order for companies like PML and Telsa Motors.
How much? I'll take it!
Awesomeness. Now put one of these into the chassis of a classic Mini and I'm completely sold.
Even better, make a biodiesel edition for ultra greeness and long lasting power.
Although this is a great idea, and I applaud the concept, I can't help but think this design would utterly ruin the handling characteristics of the MINI. For small cars like the MINI, unsprung weight is the enemy. You want your tire/wheel combo to weigh as little as possible. I suspect these motors weigh at least 20 pounds each, if not more. Granted, the thing is fast in a straight line, but I bet it would be a pig in the twisties.
"Unsprung weight is bad."
Yup that's why in my second post I wondered why not have a front and rear or just a front motor using 1/2 shafts like FWD vehicles use. You could retain the disk brakes just have it so that they don't engage unless the person gets heavy into the pedal so regen works first.
I lived in Ottawa, ON for 6 years and O'Bunny has a very good point. Ottawa has long cold winters and I wonder about the range of an EV and how much you would lose to heating. I read last week that the cold weather range of the GM EV with the cold sapping the batteries and running the heater/defroster could be as low as 12 miles. That's why they only leased them in warm weather states.
For heating if you had a small ICE for battery recharge you could use a heater that burns a small amount of the fuel and engine waste heat. If you could plug it in an electric heater would bring things up to temp.
I like the concept of having the small ICE for battery recharge. I live in Chicagoland and have had winter storm commutes that have lasted over 3 hours. Having a 50 mile round trip commute is bad enough and would love to have an EV but it needs enough range or a backup generator to make sure the batteries don't leave me stranded. I love the cars specs above, decent power, AWD and more than enough electric range that normally the ICE wouldn't need to run but as long as you have fuel your not limited by battery range alone.
Some of you "it's just a demo, it'll never happen" types need to remember that without a plausible demo you'd never get a production model. Cars aren't iPods -- the parts are huge, they require tight controls and thus they're expensive unless they are mass produced. There just aren't factories making batteries big enough, or cheap enough, to make this type of car.
Yet. Showing tech demos will encourage automakers to try their own tech demos. This will create demand for factories that make electric parts. It may even encourage certain entrepeneurs to strike out on their own. AC Propulsion's tzero inspired the soon-to-be-production Tesla roadster. If this inspires BMW -- or more likely, Toyota -- to make a small hybrid with braking motors, it's a very good thing.
Oh, and the cool thing about charging a car with a gas generator? When gas gets too expensive, you can replace the generator with something better...say, more batteries or fuel cells? Couple of squirrels on treadmills, or gas-generating bacteria on a pile of biomass for you vegan types?