Detox the Fleet by billferree

the proposal is good,

This proposal is excellent. It has the potential to become a real time solution. How about adding "Idling time for deliveries " to the list.

Bill,

This is a fantastic idea.  Some of the older vehicles we drive daily would be an excellent choice to try this on.  The stop and go type of driving we do would be perfect for an electric vehicle that would basically shut down while not moving.  Our current vehicles now just keep on burning fuel and is a good reason why we average 4-6 MPG.  We have to break our complete dependence on fossil fuels.

Gordon

Ron Stevens. Thanks for the comment. You raise several issues that are key to whether or how significantly the elimination of CO2 emitting vehicle drive trains can be accelerated. Agreed, a local shop that has done just one or two conversions will face skepticism about reliability and about the potential payoff in cash savings. There may be a threshold that must be crossed in terms of vehicles completed, before the perceived "engineering risk" is overcome by operational cost savings. That threshold may be twenty conversions or one hundred. Doubtful it would have to be as large as the UPS fleet.

Part of the project, as proposed, is to discover what vehicle would be a good demonstration platform. It might be the UPS delivery van, or it might be the small Ford Transit Connect utility truck. Both of these have relatively short range requirements, and there are many thousands of them on the road.

Regarding warranty and support, creating a company from scratch to do conversions would require funding for a significant warranty reserve. A more promising approach might be expansion into this business by an existing auto service business, for example, an auto parts chain or a muffler shop chain. Both of those will suffer declines in their traditional businesses as EVs gradually become a larger part of the total highway fleet. 

Definitely a good idea, well thought out and comprehensive.  To begin by retro-fitting one type of vehicle, trolley or delivery van, and to convert a fleet of them will be a sizeable contribution  to cutting CO2 emissions in cities.   As an academic project or a business venture, it has great promise toward eventually converting  all older vehicles on the road. 

I suspect that the CoLab entry vehicle conversion will wind up being too expensive because of inadequate battery space in the layout of a gas powered vehicle, but it's worth researching.  Vans are likely to have the most space available.

I have been driving a Nissan LEAF for three years now and love it. The silence, the lack of emissions, and the cost savings are all huge benefits and much enjoyed (also, the car has great low-end torque which makes it a pleasure to drive in stop and go traffic). The driver has to use more care around cyclists who won't always hear the vehicle approaching but they do appreciate the lack of hot, toxic exhaust in their lungs. Tourist buses idle, producing huge emissions, and that problem is fixed by EVs.

Note that if the trial will be done in a place with a winter climate, you should expect half the efficiency from the batteries during the cold months. Not only does the battery pack seem to take longer to charge in the cold, it also takes a great deal of energy to run either the defrosting for the windshield and/or the cabin heat. The LEAF reduces this load in several ways, using a heat pump instead of "toaster" style electric heat strips for cabin heating, and also by including in-seat heat (lovely)! My point here is that your 40 miles out of a 60 kW/h pack will barely be doable in the winter. Maybe the mileage driven by a tourist vehicle in the winter will be less so it won't matter.

Also, for every uphill that "costs" 1.5 kW/h, you can expect the downhill regen to give you 1 kW/h. It is not a 1:1 comparison but no gas car I've ever driven has gotten gas back in the tank as you go downhill :-) and also, the wear on the physical brakes is reduced 75-90% which is also very good for the environment!

I wish you the best and think this is a great proposal.

It seems like a well-written and logical proposal.  While I'm not a mechanical or electrical engineer, but the following issues come to mind:

There should be a big market for retrofitting combustion-engine vehicles, especially as those are replaced in commercial fleets by driverless vehicles (say in about 16 years).  Many taxi drivers-owners, truck driver-owners, postal delivery drivers and package delivery drivers  are likely to be laid off once driverless cars are phased in, and they may well be interested in the conversions to reduce the ownership cost and allow them to continue working as freelance drivers.  

I would also suggest that you study some of the alternative types of batteries such as flow batteries.  The goal would to find a battery solution that 1) is less likely to catch fire or explode than a lithium-ion battery; 2) is less expensive than the equivalent lithium-ion battery; 3) is incapable of releasing all of its stored electricity at once, as most commercial vehicle batteries can do (given a conductor and a return circuit); and 4) doesn't require a caustic or toxic liquid to work.  From what I've heard, flow batteries such as those being studied at MIT showed be seriously considered.  Since vehicles get into road crashes all the time, the goal would to be to reduce the chances for fire, explosion, toxic chemical exposure or electrocution of anyone coming into contact with the damaged power system.

Finally, at least for commercial vans and tractor trailers, the exterior surface could be covered with some form of photovoltaic materials, to provide a trickle-charge to the battery system when the vehicle is in.  While many people scoff at the capacity and efficiency of such materials, they are getting better all the time.  It might help to extend the range of a vehicle if it was taking advantage of solar loading whenever possible.  In this regard, I hope you will consider tractor-trailer rigs, since this would be another large market that might benefit from a conversion kit option (and someone else may already be working on it).  The trailer bodies would also present large surface areas, at least on the roof, to collect solar power when conditions are good.

Thanks for your contribution to the conversation, Noel. Here are my thoughts on the issues you raise.

• Integration of battery electric drive with autonomous vehicles is an exciting field of development right now. The autonomous part of it seems to be coming sooner than I expected. Apparently, it is economically viable, and I suspect proponents will soon have data to back up claims that it is safer.

  I have seen no claims for significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions with driverless vehicles, however. Also, I haven't seen signs of interest on the part of manufacturers in building combustion-engine powered autonomous vehicles. It suggests the future is autonomous and battery electric drive.

• You raise the issue of job loss with autonomous vehicles. It's an issue to watch, but maybe one not as impactful as some other innovations over the past few decades. Consider what the UPS driver actually does. Controlling the vehicle as it navigates along its fifty-mile delivery route is only part of the driver's work day. I would venture driving is something less than a fourth of the work contributed. If 25 mph is the average speed, it's two hours of driving during an eight hour shift.

  The target here is not the cost of ownership directly, but rather the cost of operation. In the case of the freelance driver, they likely have a vehicle already. That is a sunk cost. There will be additional, the cost of the conversion. I think it's quite feasible that for some applications, the owner could recoup that investment in two years, from operating cost savings. Also very feasible is usable life for another five years beyond the payback period. In other words, another five years of cash flow after the investment has already paid for itself.

• Regarding battery alternatives, lithium-ion is good off-the-shelf, available technology. What we have today is better than what was available ten years ago, and if Elon Musk's claims for Gigafactory produced batteries is anywhere close to accurate, today's cost per unit of energy stored has fallen to about a tenth of what it was ten years ago. They work, and in terms of safety and environmental impact of the complete energy cycle, a whole lot safer and less polluting than fossil fuels.

  That's not to say there won't be a better technology ten years from now. I don't know much about flow batteries, other than the fact that some people with good science and technology credentials see them as promising, especially for larger scale stationary energy storage. I suspect development of flow batteries for a mobile device like a car or truck is farther in the future.

• The idea of photovoltaic materials on the vehicle is appealing but may not produce the highest return on investment compared to mounting the material on some other available surface and then transferring the electricity generated through a charging cord. The problem is, the amount of surface area available on the vehicle is insufficient compared to the amount needed. A 53-foot trailer, typical in the US has roof area of about 42 sq meters. Sunlight strikes the earth at approximately 1000 watts per square meter at the latitudes where people live and can be collected for about 5 hours a day. Theoretically, you could capture 5000 watt-hours (5 kWh) of energy for each square meter if the collector is aimed directly at the sun, i.e. tracking, for the whole time period. 42 square meters, 210 kWh per day. All well and good until you account for clouds. Take the theoretical amount available down by half, 105 kWh/day. Then reduce for the efficiency of PV panels. The best photovoltaic panels readily available convert about 22% of the energy that hits them to electricity, if they're clean. Realistically 20%. You're now down to something like 20 kWh/day if you could always stay aimed at the sun. That's not possible. Better cut the number in half again. Count on maybe 10 kWh per day. A big truck running ten hours at highway speed could require perhaps 300 kWh of energy or maybe double that. Of course, 10 is better than nothing, and panel efficiency continues to improve, but I think for now, at least, PV on the vehicle is a hard sell.    

Thanks for the comment Gary. I know you have considerable experience in this space and no doubt have a better appreciation for the nuts and bolts of conversions.

That said, I'm not proposing one-offs as the target market. Those were the electric conversions of twenty years ago. Then it was lead-acid batteries, heavy DC motors, probably, and whatever other hardware needed that you could buy at Radio Shack and Home Depot, plus a lot of head scratching and skinned knuckles. 

Ten years ago you could buy and drop a 4 kWh lithium ion battery pack into the spare tire well of your Prius and then be able to drive maybe ten miles on battery only. The project wasn't that complicated. Ron Stevens, (see one of the comments above) and I did it in my 2004 Prius. Pretty cool, but there were shortcomings.   

Today, entry level for EVs is 100 miles plus range, and the price is reasonable. The point is, a lot has changed over the last two decades, including what is available off-the-shelf in terms of engineering that's integrated into motors, batteries, software and other balance of system components.

The proposal suggests identifying one particular vehicle that has good alignment of mission and the capabilities of existing technology, i.e. battery cost and capacity. Then do a batch conversion so that those additional design costs you refer to are distributed. The trolley example might be ten vehicles for a total cost of $400,000, half of which is balance of system. Balance of system would include engineering and fabrication of components like wiring harnesses and mounting racks.

A logical follow-on would be to select additional vehicles and do batch conversions. Each batch should produce best practice knowledge that drives down the cost of the engineering and design part of the whole package for future batches.One of the beauties of the BEV concept is that the drive hardware can be modular. If 107 hp (original Nissan Leaf) isn't adequate, bolt on a second motor, or a third, just like Tesla. For batteries the same is true.

The trolley sketch example shows, pretty much to scale, 60 kWh of capacity. That should serve the mission well, but there is ample physical space for attachment of more battery modules should longer range be required. Customizing the basic design to make it match the vehicle's mission should require minimal additional engineering design. 

I totally agree with your recommendation to capture the wisdom of experienced builders.