While testing on Nürburgring Nordschleife in September Metropolia Electric RaceAbout has made a new road legal electric vehicle lap record. German race driver Ralf Kelleners needed only 8 minutes and 42,72 seconds on Electric RaceAbout (E-RA) to complete a full lap of 20,832 km (12.944 mi). This world famous, curvy and hilly track with long fast sections is also known as “Grüne Hölle” - Green Hell - and widely used to benchmark the automotive top performance.

The average speed for the lap was 142 km/h (88 mph) and the top speed at Döttinger Höhe 238 km/h (148 mph). Later on during testing Kelleners reached even more impressive 244 km/h (152 mph). For the complete record lap E-RA consumed 25,6 kWh, measured as energy taken from grid to recharge the battery. This results to energy consumption of 1230 Wh/km or 123 kWh/100km for the lap.

Even if E-RA powertrain produced approximately 300 kW peak and 160 kW average power throughout the lap, there was no sign of overheating problems in motors or batteries typical to electric vehicles in such a heavy use. The weather was close to perfect with dry and sunny but still not too warm conditions at around 15 degrees C ambient temperature. E-RA was equipped with Nokian Z G2  high performance road tyres  - 225/40 ZR 18 in front and 245/40 ZR 18 in rear.

Electric RaceAbout is built by Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. Approximately 25 engineering students and 2 faculty members have designed and buit the vehicle starting from a clean desk. Exterior and interior styling was created by students from Institute of Design at Lahti University of Applied Sciences.

E-RA has four motors – one per each wheel – designed jointly with Lappeenranta University of Technology and produced by AXCO Motors. The motor controllers come from Vacon a leading Finnish electric drive manufacturer. E-RA has full carbon fibre composite body to save weight for the powerful and efficient 33kWh lithium-titanate battery pack.

On Nordschleife and in various events like Michelin Challenge Bibendum, Automotive X-Prize and e-miglia, Metropolia team has demonstrated with the road legal and registered prototype vehicle E-RA, that using electric powertrain it is possible to construct both efficient and high performance car which can also be used in regular traffic. On normal roads the average energy consumption for E-RA is only 145 Wh/km and on racetrack it can achieve 244 km top speed still with modest consumption and minimal losses.

Electric RaceAbout team wants to thank all the supporters who have made our work possible.

Additional information:

Racelogic VBOX data file on the lap (use Save Link As command to store the file locally)

Racelogic Circuit Tools visualisation on the lap

Video highlight on the lap

Photos: E-RA on Nordschleife

General presentation on Electric RaceAbout

List of Nürburgring Nordschleife Lap Times

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BMW, Peugeot and Toyota Motorsport have set recently fast electric vehicle lap times on Nordschleife and raised public interest in the performance the electric vehicles can deliver today. In the past Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences has demonstrated successfully electric vehicle efficiency with the Electric RaceAbout (E-RA) prototype.

Now the E-RA team wants to demonstrate with the very same vehicle - that using battery electric powertrain, the high efficiency and high performance can meet in one single driving machine, which is also suitable for everyday use on public roads. Team plans to set a new EV lap record on the famous Nordschleife with the road-legal Electric RaceAbout registered in Finland under plates ERA-10 and using Nokian Z G2 regular production tyres from Nokian Tyres in Finland. E-RA will be driven by Ralf Kelleners (D) and the team aims for under 9 minute time.

E-RA has four motors – one per each wheel – designed jointly with Lappeenranta University of Technology and produced by AXCO Motors. The motor controllers come from Vacon a leading Finnish electric drive manufacturer. E-RA has full carbon fibre composite body to save weight for the powerful and efficient lithium-titanate battery pack.

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Metropolia University of Applied Sciences participated in e-miglia 2011 rally with Electric RaceAbout sportscar on August 2-52011. The car worked very well and finished easily all the stages of the competition. The powertrain, battery and chassis of this unique vehicle demonstrated again that electric vehicles are not only efficient but can also be powerful and fast at the same time.

In this competition the Metropolia RaceAbout team achieved 9th place in a group of 31 vehicles starting the rally. This was clearly below expectations and was mainly caused by traffic jam in a German village of Schliersee during the first day of the competition. Due to this “stau” the team arrived to time control 4 minutes late and received a penalty of 40 minutes. This sizeable 40 minutes penalty was so much that there was no possibility to compensate for it during the last 3 competition days. The Traffic jam could have been avoided by better knowledge of the local traffic conditions, more skilled team or alternatively using information from outside the race vehicle, but without these assets available RaceAbout team decided to follow the road book.

This far Electric RaceAbout has mainly been participating in efficiency focused events like Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize in 2010 and Michelin Challenge Bibendum 2011, where it has demonstrated overall efficiency of 145 Wh/km and 132 Wh/km respectively.

In e-miglia 2011 the energy consumption was also part of the competition results. The rules for the event state:

 “Electric power consumption: the overall electric power consumption will be

evaluated as a separate assessment criteria..

a) the electric power consumption in kWh will be converted 1:1 into seconds

and will be incorporated into the overall standings.”

However we found out during the third competition day (when the Teslas with big batteries didn’t plug in for charging anymore) that the “overall energy consumption” for the organizer did not mean charging up the batteries in the competition end in St Moritz back to the same state of charge as we started with in Munich few days earlier. This was extremely frustrating finding as we think the “overall energy consumption” in the rules should count for all the energy consumed for the route. Now suddenly it included all the energy you used for the route minus one full battery charge. This of course gives the cars like Tesla with 56 kWh battery an important advantage over vehicles like ours with 33 kWh battery or city cars with 25 kWh battery.

We think that our car has at least the same performance in this kind of competition as Tesla roadster and maybe even better efficiency. But even with the same energy consumption and assuming the same performance in the timed events for the rally (valid assumption as now we were 2.2 seconds behind the winner) a Tesla would have beaten us with more than seconds due to the bigger battery capacity! What a frustrating moment in the middle of the competition to find out that we had even not a theoretical chance to win even if our car did fulfill the 200 km range requirement set for the rally.

This interpretation of the rules is also counterintuitive and different to the other competitions we have participated where the energy storage is always refilled after competition to the same level as it was in the start. After some lengthy discussions the organizer said there was no problem with the rules or interpretation and nothing to change. We don’t know how did some participants know about this interpretation and the others not.

From the competition results we can see that the time difference between the winning Tesla and the Jetcar on 2nd place is 20.2 seconds. It can also be seen that the Jetcar with a smaller battery has charged 18.2 kWh more which equals 18.2 seconds in total time, which explains 95% of the difference in the final results between these vehicles! We think that if the total energy consumption had been measured we would likely have celebrated Jetcar as a winner of the e-miglia 2011 as it most likely is more efficient than a Tesla roadster. Indeed in the final results the main difference comes from the not accurately measured energy consumption for the top 3 cars.

There was also a charging problem for about one third of the vehicles after the Day 1 and therefore the Day 2 results were neglected and uncontrolled or unmeasured charging was allowed. Due to this one cannot make any conclusions on the energy consumption of the different vehicles from the results by the competition organizer. The results can be found here: http://www.e-miglia.com/ergebnisse/e-miglia-2011/

Electric RaceAbout is capable of measuring it’s energy consumption within few percent accuracy and also estimating the energy required from mains to charge up the battery. We logged these values throughout the race and they would be of interest to someone. A summary of the results can be found below. The recorded distances come from in car GPS and agree with the competition roadbook with about 1% difference. Day 2 distance for RaceAbout is not the full distance (267km) for that day. We decided to stop after 234 km as we met a serious thunder storm with loads of water on the street and as the day was not counted it made sense to play safe and not to soak the vehicle.

190 Wh/km overall efficiency is very good given the facts that the speeds were fairly high for the roads used and the amount of climb along the route. Many of the uphill sections were set as special stages with considerably higher average speeds as visible in this table. This together means quite a bit higher load and losses for the powertrain which are not compensated fully in the downhill sections. It would be nice to be able to compare these figures with other vehicles.

e-miglia 2011 route selection was well done and the roadbook accurate enough. The landscape was very beautiful and the views magnificent. All the people we met in the competition were very friendly and nice to compete with. We just cannot help us thinking of not returning unless the playground is set more evenly. This event is a real good one to promote electromobility, but unfortunately gives a distorted picture of the performance of the participating vehicles.

Metropolia Electric RaceAbout team wants to thank for the sponsors Nokian Tyres and Technology Industries of Finland Centennial Foundation. Again we have proven together that electric vehicles are becoming a real alternative for today’s individual mobility needs.

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We just added new pictures taken this summer at:

Le Mans

Nürburgring

e-miglia 2011

To our flikr photoalbum

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On the way to the E-Miglia Rally we had a change to stop by in Nürburg, Germany.

Of course we had to take a lap with E-RA in the world famous Nordschleife -circuit.

Check out the video!

Now we are heading to Munich and the E-Miglia Rally starts tomorrow, on Monday 1th of August.

At the award ceremony of the Michelin Challenge Bibendum, Team RaceAbout with the car E-RA was announced the be the winner of the Battery Electric Rally. E-RA collected also awards from Fuel efficency, Local pollution and well-to-wheel CO2 emissions.

It´s obvious that this event couldn´t gone better.

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Second day of Michelin Challenge Bibendum included the battery electric rally. The results of the rally are not yet available , but the car and team showed great performance.

At the design contest award ceremony E-RA won the trophy for best design and vehicle concept in category for protypes from non-manufacturers.

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First day started at the Tempelhof airport with the technical inspection and the design contest evaluation.

After passing the inspection, E-RA was transported to the ADAC Test Track at Linthe. In the test track E-RA accomplished the
manouever test and was charged full for tomorrows 125km Battery Electric Rally.

The car is now handling a lot better than last summer in PIAXP, thanks to the new suspension set up and wheel alignments.
 
Tomorrows Battery Electric Rally will be driven around the public streets of Berlin, Germany.

More information:

www.challengebibendum.com
 

Finally, May 11th. E-RA got official licence plates. Registration process required a variety of measurements and whole process was long and difficult!

Succesfull registration confirmed that E-RA will take a part in Michelin Challenge Bidendum event in Berlin! For further information about Michelin Challenge Bidendum, please visit: http://www.michelinchallengebibendum.com/en

See you in Berlin next week and don't forget to follow our website!

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Today E-RA went through techical inspection for registration. Everything went well and now we just wait for licence plates.