The annual IDTechEx conference on the Future of Electric Vehicles - land, water and air held in San Jose, California this week saw 200 attendees with 12 exhibitors including BMW MINI E, KillaCycle and Levant Power.
As a precursor to the main conference the attendees were given interactive masterclasses from experts in the field. Dr Peter Harrop talked about Electric Vehicle Needs, Markets and Solutions - land, sea & air with a contribution from Dr Harry Zervos in the morning session. The afternoon session gave an Introduction to Electric Vehicle Technologies from Dr Harrop with a contribution from a guest speaker, Amish Parashar - Vice President, ZuumCraft on Driving Innovation: From EV Prototype to Production.
The two sessions were complimented with a tour of one of the exhibitors facilities; KleenSpeed, who are a technology partner with NASA, located at the Ames Research Centre gave a tour of their laboratories and race tracks where attendees were shown KleenSpeed's WX10 racing car, winner of the Electric Vehicles lap record two years running. The WX10 was developed by Dante Zeviar, Chief Technology Officer and his team of advisors. Dante spoke about how KleenSpeed are pushing the boundaries of electric vehicle technology and developing new and innovative products for the industry; an example is their battery management system which monitors every cell's voltage, current and temperature remotely giving a huge amount of real-time data which can be analysed to improve the performance of the WX10 racing car.
A conversion of the popular Mazda Miata, demonstrated by KleenSpeed during the master class tour, showed how a conventional vehicle can be modified and rebuilt to operate as an electric vehicle. A Lite system was installed in the 1990 Miata which morphed into the Eiata. The Eiata is aerodynamic and weighs 2460 pounds and operates quietly, with no exhaust at 65 mph. Tim Collins regularly drives the Miata between San Francisco and NASA, an 80 mile round trip with no visits to the service stations or maintenance necessary. The less powerful and lighter Lite-Lite system used in Kleenspeed's E-Kart was also demonstrated by Tim during the tour.
Image: KleenSpeed
Other exhibitors at the future of Electric Vehicles were BMW who presented the MINI E, 100% electric, zero-emission that MINI is trailing with 600 vehicles around World to gauge perception and adoption before they roll out full production cars into the Electric Vehicles market.
Hawkes Ocean Technologies brought one of their deep flight manned underwater electric vehicle - Super Falcon for attendees to see. The fully electric vehicle submerges and flies as aircrafts do, only underwater. Hawkes Remotes illustrated several remotely operated unmanned vehicles in their range. Animatics EV demonstrated their complete suite of interoperable products that comprise a complete Electric Vehicle Powertrain.
Levant Power Corporation had a booth to illustrate their Energy Harvesting shock absorber primed to make a real impact in fuel savings on future vehicles. KillaCycle demonstrated the World's fastest e-bike, capable of doing 0-60 mph in less than 1 second.
For more attend: Future of Electric Vehicles Europe 2011
