3DExperience Platform Enables Innovation & e-Bee EV
1/25/2013
The e-Bee electric vehicle is designed to be customizable for each user. Profiles are stored locally, and changes are accessible in the vehicles many touchscreens. (Source: Visteon)
interesting that they chose to model climate control. EVs sometimes have a problem with this because heaters and air conditioners tend to cut into the power budget.
I suppose that is what fills of the driver profile, climate control settings. I suppose EVs are not a practical in extreme hot/cold weather. In other words, I don't think they would be energy efficient in Chicago, where temps are all over the place. This is something to consider, as I toy with the idea of buying an EV.
You're right about extreme temperatures, Cabe. When the Wall Street Journal tested the Leaf a ouple years ago, the range numbers dropped sharply during a Detroit cold snap.
Cabe, I think the trick is to "pre-warm" or "pre-cool" your EV. In other words, warm it up while it's plugged in, so that you don't have to blast the defroster (or the AC) when you're off the cord.
Thanks for this Cabe. I had the pleasure of consulting for Visteon back in the late 1990s on some very innovative engineering projects -- I'm delighted to hear they are still exploring. The 3DExperience platform's ability to receive "feedback from customers, partners, and suppliers in seconds, not weeks" is most definitely one of the magic ingredients. In undergraduate education as much as I dread grading homework and papers, rapid feedback is among the key items that make an educational course successful. Getting grades back weeks later or (gasp) not knowing how you are doing in the course until your grades arrive after the final exam is a whole bushel of lost opportunities for learning. Just imagine having a 24-hour delay buffer on your own biological senses... It would make survival, let alone evolution, nearly impossible.
Cooling and heating go way beyond just tending to cut into the range of an EV. The power needed for warm weather air cooling may exceed the power to drive down the road in many cases. Making the matter worse, some EVs in the past have not had openable windows. For heating, using the waste heat from the drive motor and electronics could be handy, but I am not aware of thet heat ever being used. Possibly some other means of heating will need to be created, perhaps modeled after the heaters used in the older Corvair vehicles. Probably current technology could do that job better, though.
So it is a real consideration as to how these vehicles would work out in areas subject to other than very moderate temperatures. Of course, consider thet until the 1960's, most vehicles did not even have air conditioning availablke as an option. So just because it is now difficult to purchase a passenger vehicle without A/C, perhaps a reversal of the trand could be started.
As for preheating or pre-cooling a vehicle while it is still plugged in, that is an expensive luxury option indeed, at least at all of those "credit card enabled" charging outlets, which are the only kind that I have seen in the Greater Detroit area. Not to mention how ticked off some of us might feel if the charging outlets were being hogged by those wanting to pre-cool their vehicles just prior to their eventual departure.
You should write about some of your experiences with Visteon and submit it to Design News. I am sure people would love to read about some of your design experiences.
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