Tonight the student team InMotion unveiled their plans for the coming years. The students of the TU/e and Fontys Hogescholen are building a new version of their electric race car. The ambition is to drastically reduce the charging time of the car.
Sure, they know what driving fast means. With their race car Fusion, the successor of Ignition, the students broke electric lap records at the circuit of Zandvoort, the circuit of Zolder and the TT-circuit Assen. Now they are building car number three, the Vision. A car that not only drives fast, but also charges fast.
‘We want charging an electric car to be like refueling a traditional car’, explains Gijs Herings of the student team. Now it easily takes half an hour to charge your electric vehicle, while a traditional car is ready within a few minutes. In the Innovation Powerhouse at Strijp-T, the student team presented a roadmap for the coming years this evening. The ambition for 2020 is to be able to fully charge the car within 7.5 minutes. In 2022, this should be reduced to only two minutes. Ambitious but possible, according to the students. There is still a world to gain in improving the cooling of the batteries, a factor that determines how much energy you generate.
The Vision that was shown tonight was a prototype. The real version will be developed in the coming years. The students are aiming to particpate in the 24 hours of Le Mans, in the Garage 56 class reserved for innovative vehicles, in 2023.
InMotion consists of about fifty students and former team members from the TU/e and Fontys Hogescholen. Twelve students are participating on a full-time basis this year. The team is located at the Automotive Campus in Helmond and works in close cooperation with companies from the region and abroad. VDL is helping the students with the batteries, Heliox with the charger and Kumho with the tyres.
Photo credits: Johan van Uden
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