Improving Lithium batteries by 10x · 11/16/11

Extreme Tech has an interesting article about research done at Northwestern University using Graphene to improve upon Lithium batteries.

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Links for 10/ 4/11

Electric plane wins $1.35 million – powered by 450 pounds of lithium-polymer batteries the plane easily flew the 200 mile course at 100mph. According to the video the power pack is capable of around 300 miles on a “charge”. Pre-order customers got a sneak preview of the new Tesla Model S over the weekend. Launch date is on schedule for mid-2012. Speaking of Tesla, Toyota has announced an Electric RAV 4 powered by a Tesla battery pack. Mitsubishi is coming out with their electric car, the ‘i’ in California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii in November and nationwide by the end of 2012. Looks somewhat like a cross between Honda Fit and a Think Smart car.

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Tesla S Alpha · 03/21/11

GigaOm has a short photo feature on Tesla’s newest electric car, Inside Tesla’s Model S Alpha Workshop. The next Tesla model shoots to have as much as 300 mile of range.

Let’s take a quick look at what’s inside the new model, along with what’s NOT included.

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EV iPhone Apps · 03/ 8/11

I was curious the other day, wondering what was available in the world of EV related apps for your iPhone, iPod, and iPad. Any design tools? Remote EV monitors or the like? Sadly, no. But let’s take a quick visit to the app store to find out what is available these days.

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Links for 02/ 3/11

Good article over at Engadget Suck, squeeze, bang, bust: the death of internal combustion Speaking of moving to electric, the folks at Zipcar announced that they’re now offering plug-in hybrid vehicles in some cities. Check them out on Facebook Out of Hungary, the M55 Hybrid-bike Over in Ireland, Evan has started the blog: All Electric Vehicles

LED Bargraph battery monitor part 2 · 10/ 9/08

OK. So You’d like to build a set of those neat little bargraph battery monitors.

Here’s how it’s done ………

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Links for 08/26/08

Bob Hurst is back in the news with his electric Citroen. We’ve featured Bob’s EV before, here and here. Speaking of folks we know, Lee Hart is featured in this article, Engineer Designs Electric Car Kit. Unfortunately the article (like many news sites) doesn’t link to any of Lee’s work. I sniffed around and found their Sunrise project page. Be sure to check out the EV Kit page, interesting stuff. Shai Agassi is really pushing to put electric cars on the road. Steve thinks that he killed the electric car. A funny and nostalgic clip from the 70’s featuring Jack Nicholson getting rid of gas and replacing it with tanks of hydrogen gas. Wonder what he’s driving these days? Yet another prototype electric car, this time from Nissan. Finally we’ll close out with this thread over at Slashdot on how some Americans (ahem!) are refusing to wait for EVs from the car companies. As usual the comments are full of insight and idiocy, but there are a few good links to follow.

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Links for 07/27/08

Is this BMW’s future Electric Car?. Dunno, but watching the news these days it seems like pretty much everyone has an EV on the drawing board. One of the options when making a battery box is to use a thick plastic “board” and weld it into a box (I can’t remember the material’s name). To do this you’ll need a plastic welder. I ran across some plastic welding videos recently along with a wikipedia article on it. Here’s the videos: one, two, three, and more. Speaking of youtube, here’s a vid of an EV Mini QED with PML Wheel Motors. Most of the wheel motors I’ve seen have been for electric bikes. Less than 30% of the energy in gasoline actually gets put into use and over the years folks have looked into converting some of the waste heat into electricity. Here’s a new try from Ohio State.

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