Dodge Circuit EV test drive gets chronicled on video
By Donald Melanson 
posted May 11th 2009 2:24PM
posted May 11th 2009 2:24PM
We've already gotten a good look at the Dodge Circuit EV courtesy of the good folks at AutoblogGreen, but they've now come through yet again with a video that shows the Tesla competitor in action (or moving, at least). While it's expectedly still very much in prototype form, our fearless test driver nonetheless seems to have been fairly impressed by the car, with it delivering some speedy acceleration and an apparently generally pleasing ride. As noted earlier, however, the car is a tad cramped, and the real visibility leaves quite a bit to be desired, although Chrysler says that should be remedied somewhat by some smaller batteries in the eventual production version. Head on past the break for the video.
GM should had release this car years ago.
I think you're confusing GM with Chrysler
they didn't have the technology or the steady hands to pull off a procedure like that...
And you should had pay attention in grammar school.
Dodge is a Chrysler Brand and they had much of the technology 10 years ago. I remember reading about a 275HP Dodge Intrepid with 2*100hp electric motors +75hp diesel, that also did regenerative breaking. The problem with the US Auto mfr is that they couldn't and still cant produce vehicles that are price competitive. It used to be that they had features not available from the cheaper competition like full-size trucks or better reliability but that isn't rue any more.
http://www.allpar.com/model/intrepid-esx3.html
And lets not forget, until the 4-5$ gallon of gas came into play, American's were still buying trucks and SUVs.
This particular car is a cool technology showcase, and should help bring the cost down eventually -- but I'm far more interested in a Caravan/T&C application. Not that any of us WANT minivan's, but lets face it -- thats where the bread'n butter is for this company, and for a family, its still one of the best type of vehicles you can buy.
wow...this car is actually a sexy beast. yeah yeah yeah, it sa lotus. but i never thought i'd see the day that a dodge would come w/ an alpine head unit, yeah yeah, its basically a concept, but just the fact they stuck that in there is sweet.
GM was waaay ahead of Chrysler and released the EV-1 back in the late 1990's at a time when most people (except myself and a few others) though electric cars were for Golf.
time for RECESSSION ANTIDOTE!!!
That's just ridiculous.
Sweet car. I'm assuming $ is out of my range, though.
That front end reminds me of a GT 3000.
it should remind u of a lotus lol...
Whats the point of these releases anyway? The technology is available now, so why release photos of something that's 2 years out (and really shouldn't be). And also, the production model will in no way look that nice or sleek, so why bother making me lust over something i'll never get my hands on anyway. The Volt concept was totally lust-worthy and the final design is nice but "meh".
Indeed. I was going to buy a Volt, then they showed the actual body and I rolled my eyes. The whole concept car procedure is just a complete waste of money...no wonder these guys are dying.
The Volt was redesigned because the original concept car was terribly inefficient:
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2007/11/14/lutz-chevy-volt-aero-might-have-been-better-if-we-put-it-in-the/
It seems to me that GM considers the hybrid technology to be a marketing gimmick. Otherwise why design and show off a prototype without giving any thought to efficiency?
They didn't expect the concept to be that popular, and weren't serious about making it in the beginning. But now they know so the Converj concept has the aerodynamics to work as a production vehicle...
http://www.hybridcars.com/vehicle/cadillac-converj.html
Unfortunately it will be too expensive to matter. I wonder if I can get a discount seeing how I already paid to keep this company going.
isn't this thing just an Elise chassis with different body panels and an electric drivetrain...
alot like the exclusive telsa roadster..
hmm.. why?
we all know electric isn't the future, it just doesn't fit our lifestyle.
till we can get reliable batteries that give us 300miles in driving range with a 2-5min charge time for a full charge.
ev cars aren't going to sell to the masses.
oh and ev cars need to hold at least 5 people...so far the road going ones only hold 2.
---
Chrysler should be spending more money on bringing the 200C concept into production.
Improving quality over all of their products
and making sure that they can quickly turn around from bankruptcy
The future of cars is fossil fuel/electric hybrids and an intermediate step between hydrogen.
ev just doesn't fit our lifestyle.
This car is a waste of money by the marketing department.
*correction
The future of cars is fossil fuel/electric hybrids, an intermediate step between hydrogen.
No. Even worse. This is just a Lotus Europa with a different front-end. Anyone who commends Dodge for the styling of this must be having a laugh since it's just a Lotus with a few different internals. Pretty embarrassing when a massive car company like Dodge has to use the designs of a small British manufacturer.
@Nathan
Not really, some of the most popular and certainly my favorite US vehicles had Euro body styling with a Detroit 3 drive train. The 427 Shelby Cobra being a good example.
These dumbasses who designed these things have no clue. Lets design an EV. It needs two doors seating for two and a price tag affordable to the elite and the upper upper middle class. Rather than an affordable car seating for 4-5 passengers with a sub $30,000 price tag. Pure EV will never be a success at this current technology level. Like they said hybrids are the only feasible measure as a stop gap before Hydrogen cars becomes widely available.
What does EV save us anyhow? Instead of burning gasoline we will burn more coal at the power plant. These companies are morons we aren't saving the environment with EVs. How toxic would those lithium batteries be to the environment if not disposed of properly.
I assume they are going to offer lifetime warranties on these as the average mechanic won't be able to touch the power train with a wrench.
How about the next time the Prez. wants to promote green technology he not fly out there in Airforce One. I drive a gas guzzling pickup and I am more environmentally safe than all of these green promoting politicians.
@B
Until someone can affordably mass produces those research-stage next-gen batteries that can recharge in ~2 or 3 minutes, I think the best solution is the range-extended EV model where you have a completely electric drive-train coupled with a small gasoline/diesel engine that is used solely as an electric generator that recharges the batteries.
I think this would be a great transition platform for the next 20+ years as the world looks to new technology and new sources of energy. The majority of commuters would not even need to use fuel for their daily driving, instead having their vehicles recharged over the grid at night which actually could be a good thing (with proper management of course) in that it will balance the peak/off-peak electricity demand. For longer trips, a small, highly efficient generator would keep the batteries charged during driving. The generator could run on any number of current or future fuels including gasoline, diesel, bio-diesel, ethanol, methanol, hydrogen, etc. This could be a very important issue since we are likely to see the development and testing of dozens of different types of biofuel over the next 20 years as governments around the world experiment with different solutions to the energy crisis.
@Tarnation
http://my.epri.com/portal/server.pt?open=512&objID=243&PageID=223132&cached=true&mode=2
@b
Not this again. First of all stop thinking of an EV like a gas car. An EV will be plugged anywhere there's a plug, it's doesn't have to follow the model of fueling a car once a week at a station. Most of the companies developing them are cooperating with businesses and workplaces to install plugs to charge EVs. Eventually there'll even be street chargers. Remember a typical car is probably parked 90% of the time. Why not use that time to charge?
For the times with longer trips, just use a genset trailer or like loosely_coupled says use or rent a REEV.
And another thing is it is possible to build a battery pack that can go 300 miles already, the Model S will feature them as an option (I've done the calculations and they can make a 300+mile pack if they use cutting edge high capacity 3000+mah 18650 cells instead of the 2400mah cells they are using in the Roadster).
There are existing rapid chargers which can charge roughly 100 miles every 15 minutes (the fastest one can charge 150 miles in 10 minutes but it's not very practical since it uses a lot more power). The ones being used widely today are for forklifts & baggage carriers. And if Project Better Place succeeds they might be able to build a battery swapping network.
@Tarnation
They are doing that now because it's expensive to build these cars and if they want to make some good profit they will have to build a sports car. Even so, Ford is looking to release a affordable Focus EV soon, Nissan is also looking to release an affordable EV (sub $33k supposedly) soon, BMW is planning a 2012 release of their affordable EV, so it's not like they aren't aiming down market.
On the coal thing, an EV is still cleaner running on coal than a gas car because of the efficiencies in the drivetrain. And the US is 50% not 100% coal on average, some areas like California have very little coal and running an RAV4-EV there is like running a 90mpg RAV4. And the grid is guaranteed to become cleaner anyways as time goes on as the whole world is moving to reduce pollution. The li-ion battery disposal is a scare tactic. We have been regularly recycling (90%) the much more toxic lead acid batteries people use in their cars. A bigger li-ion pack won't easily be lost and even when not suitable for use in a car it's suitable for use in powerplants, so the probability it'll just be dumped somewhere is extremely low.
And li-poly packs are nontoxic. Even normal li-ions are relatively low in toxicity (the packaging usually has the toxic elements).
The problem with hydrogen cars is they aren't coming anytime soon. Every estimate I have seen pegs the cars at the order of millions in cost (they do a good job of hiding the cost though so it's still a guess). And what makes you think they are greener than EVs. The handful of hydrogen stations today either use natural gas (about even in energy usage compared to an EV running on a typical natural gas plant) or they use electrolysis, which wastes more energy than an EV directly using the electricity (uses roughly 2x the energy per mile). The backers of the technology (many of them the oil companies, like Shell) are reluctant to build any significant infrastructure themselves. They expect us to give them billions of taxpayer dollars to build infrastructure for cars that currently cost in the millions. Right now only a few Hollywood celebrities are driving around in (leased not even sold) hydrogen cars serviced by a handful of heavily subsidized (half of the cost by the California state government) hydrogen stations in the LA. I personally will not support them until they demonstrate their cars can cost on the order of $10k and not millions and that their infrastructure is sustainable once built (or build it with their own money). EVs have already demonstrated that, even with their limitations; hydrogen hasn't.
@jake
Not every family can afford more than one car. Try to remember who is buying these cars.
Lower income families struggle to afford one family car that can suit all their needs.
ie. EV doesn't fit their life.
and like you said, rapid charging requires too much power, so its not reasonable atm.
also:
150miles in 10mins is 15 miles of range per min
300miles in 5min is 60 miles of range per min
thats a big difference... people don't like waiting, we like things to be as quick as possible...
so pure ev doesn't work for our lifestyle...
i'm not fully bashing EV cars, its just that the technology now doesn't fit the our lifestyle.
===
hyrdogen, i think, is newer than ev, and yes the biggest problem with it is infrastructure.
but hydrogen has one advantage over ev, the current technology fits our lifestyle.
people hate charging things, they are always complaining why can't their cell phones last longer, or their laptops last longer... and also hate dragging around a charger, or even looking for an outlet...
ie people are lazy =D
so we like this once a week fill up our car lifestyle, not plug in every day...
cause everyone has forgotten to charge their cellphone now and then.... but its rare for a person to forget to fill up their car...
back to hydrogen... there was a post on engadget about an efficient system hydrogen extracting system a few months back... something about using solar panels to help extract the hydrogen during the day and storing the hydrogen to power the house and everything else at night... then again that system requires more efficient solar panels.. but i forget the exact article...
to me, we are closer to developing a more efficient way to extract hydrogen than developing safe reliable rapid-charging batteries.
also, when you talk about near future technologies, cost is sort-of irrelevant...
this is due to economies of scale, but we all know how that works.
this is why i never brought up cost. in my arguments =D
*Not every family can afford more than one car. Try to remember who is buying these cars.*
-Actually tons of people are looking into buying these cars. The ones who can afford it first will buy it first. Economies of scale kick in, the cars get more affordable. Then used ones will appear on the market after a while. Still, pure EV's are not for everyone. For those people, ER-EV's are a boon. You can charge at home AND the gas pump.
*Lower income families struggle to afford one family car that can suit all their needs.
ie. EV doesn't fit their life.*
-If lower income families struggle to afford one family car, they probably shouldn't be in the market for a car to begin with, let alone the EV/hybrid market.
*and like you said, rapid charging requires too much power, so its not reasonable atm.*
-If you require rapid charging to make long hauls less time consuming at the plug, maybe you should stick to ER-EV. For most, solar cells on a rooftop feeding the grid (or even just powering your own house) during the day offsets for charging EV at night on the grid.
*also:
150miles in 10mins is 15 miles of range per min
300miles in 5min is 60 miles of range per min
thats a big difference... people don't like waiting, we like things to be as quick as possible...
so pure ev doesn't work for our lifestyle...*
-If you are looking to do some traveling, consider a train or bus and let someone else drive for you. Else, get an ER-EV or rent a ICE'd car. But still remember when you are inside your house, your car is charging so that you don't have to wait at a 'station' unless you plan a trip over 50 or 60mi. I can't remember the last time I had to drive that far and not have access to some sort of plug anyways. But I realize it's different for everyone. Some people live 40mi from a grocery store. But then they'd probably have some real-estate available for solar cells....
*i'm not fully bashing EV cars, its just that the technology now doesn't fit the our lifestyle.*
-Thats a good point, to which I counter-point... perceived lifestyle does not match actual lifestyle. We've been living outside our means for decades now. It's time to get real.
===
*hyrdogen, i think, is newer than ev, and yes the biggest problem with it is infrastructure.
but hydrogen has one advantage over ev, the current technology fits our lifestyle.
people hate charging things, they are always complaining why can't their cell phones last longer, or their laptops last longer... and also hate dragging around a charger, or even looking for an outlet...*
-Hydrogen is newer afaik. I'm one of those people complaining about battery life, honestly. And consider that we also hate driving around looking for fuel stations, and an EV's 'fuel station' is your house (or your office, or train station parking garage) Also, not every place you go has the ability to fuel your car up. As just one example, a parking garage has electric lights in them already, and can be easily fitted with charging posts. There are infinitely more places already available with electricity than anything else. If you have enough solar cells of your own, you could use electrolysis to generate hydrogen, but then why not just charge an EV battery directly with that energy?
*ie people are lazy =D*
-Time to step it up =)
*so we like this once a week fill up our car lifestyle, not plug in every day...
cause everyone has forgotten to charge their cellphone now and then.... but its rare for a person to forget to fill up their car...*
-If you can equate battery charge level to 'gas' level, I don't think you will forget to charge. The dashboards on these things will be prominently displaying the battery charge level as a 'fuel' gauge anyhow.
*back to hydrogen... there was a post on engadget [cut for length] but i forget the exact article...*
-Link or it didn't happen. But yes, advancements happen every day!
*to me, we are closer to developing a more efficient way to extract hydrogen than developing safe reliable rapid-charging batteries.*
-That's an opinion you're entitled to. I think that more focus is being made on battery technology these days, but who knows? Maybe a hydrogen breakthrough will see us driving 7-series and FCX Clarity's everywhere.
*also, when you talk about near future technologies, cost is sort-of irrelevant...
this is due to economies of scale, but we all know how that works.*
-Yep. Everything is cost-driven. Economies of scale, trickle-down economics. Unfortunately /everything/ is in trickle mode right now. =(
.
*this is why i never brought up cost. in my arguments =D*
-Cost is relevant, but also relative in this case.
It's been nice chatting in response to you
@b
"can it be automated.. sure.. tho the robotic equipment then requires maintenance, and new programming for every swappable car out there... we don't even have robots that complicated in our homes, yet alone gas stations... "
Project Better Place is already building these, which you say is impossible. Here's a video of such a battery exchange robot in action, right here on this site:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/13/video-better-places-automated-electric-vehicle-battery-switch/#continued
i think chrysler has put this car on hold.
It's not only similar to the Elise, it's identical to the Europa which Lotus only sell in Europe.
I think it's interesting that they're still designing all-electric cars as if they were ICE-powered vehicles, right down to the big grills on the front. It'll take a while before we see a full transformation of auto engineers' thinking from the old days to the new, which is why, if there continues to be an auto bailout, that new alt-energy startups (e.g., Aptera, Tesla, etc.) should get at least a penny for every dollar the big-3 get. After all, I'd bet that those small guys look a lot more like the future of the American car industry than GM and Chrysler do.
those huge rims look heavy...
I think you'll find the electron-volt is eV not EV as per the car.
and we cant buy this because ? -- i want one !! but i want a challenger also
What's the point of Chrysler for this video, they are going to bankrupt anyway. Is this where our 27 billion dollar tax spent for one piece of junk. Why this video came out since they're going out of business anyway. Are they hoping to rip other than the government to buy there failing company. Can we just focus ourselves to Tesla I think they make more sense to me.
@b
A battery that can drive a car 300 mi and recharge in 2-5min is a pipe dream. Forgoing any difficulty in creating a battery that can recharge that quickly, you have to realize the amount of power required to accomplish this.
For instance, to move a 1000 kg car (read: light) with a good drag coefficient and high efficiency tires at 70mph on a level road requires ~31.5 kW. to travel at this speed for t = 300 mi/70mph = 4.29 hr = ~15429 s => requires 31.5kW*15429 = 486 GJ. Now, suppose you wanted to transfer all this energy to a battery (if you could find one that could store this energy) in (lets stay conservative) 5min=300s, you'd need to supply 1.62 MW of power during that time. Envision a "gas station" where numerous people could recharge their EVs...lets say it allows for 10 cars at a time: you'd need 16.2 MW of power!
Now, barring any problems with providing that type of instantaneous power, how do you propose that amount of current be transferred to the battery? Suppose the car is connected to the recharge station via a 440 V connection and the power factor is 1, 3681.8 A would be traveling through the wire. Note that 3/0 gauge wire is rated at 195 A max current and you have quite the design challenge.
According to your argument, EVs will never be sold to the masses as the problem you propose is simply too complex to address, at least with current technology. Did you ever consider a battery exchange program? Or as discussed below, a slower charge handled overnight? EVs being an intermediate between current cars and hydrogen...lets not even get started on the physics behind that...
"ev just doesnt fit our lifestyle" perhaps you should insert "current" between our and lifestyle. Its obvious that with a shift to only EVs would certainly require that we think outside of our current methodologies.
@Tarnation sure you'll be burning more coal at a power plant but did you consider that it's possible to generate energy using other fuels? Not to mention, a centralized pollution source can be more easily contained and pollution control can be concentrated on a few, large and centralized sources rather than the millions of small sources distributed about the world. I'm not going to argue the disposal of the batteries however if everyone used Li-ions, a method for collection and disposal could be created.
@tb6387
okay, our "current" lifestyle... but you think people will change their lifestyles? in the near future??
as for battery exchange programs...
unless we have a set standard that will work between ALL MAKES and MFGS
and an easy systematic way to move things that weigh over 200lbs... its questionable.
cars come in all different shapes and sizes, making a singular modular system wouldn't be the easiest thing to do.
if a battery exchange program was made, cause it does make logical sense... i think there maybe too many steps involved.
with today's cars, the easiest is to have it removable from the bottom.
so to swap the batteries you have to put the car on a lift, drop the battery, move the battery, put the fresh one under, the lower the car, and make sure everything is attached securely...
this would probably be a 2-4 person job... yeah.. right.. 2-4 ppl to refill my car.. lol
can it be automated.. sure.. tho the robotic equipment then requires maintenance, and new programming for every swappable car out there... we don't even have robots that complicated in our homes, yet alone gas stations...
might as well put a hydrogen extractor in every gas station, which is more feasible...
I don't know why people are so attached to the idea of a gas-station. As if it's some god given right, or as if, it's actually convinient in some AMERICAN way...
I would MUCH RATHER have my car charge overnight in my garage, and be topped off every morning, and not ever have to stop at a gas-station.
I believe that body is someone else's entirely (Lotus body), so, sadly, Chrysler might not be building one that looks THAT GOOD.
I however would like them to go pull the origonal Neon body and revamp that a little bit.
That one set some trends for what we see today in compact cars, it would be nice if they pulled that one up and started over. I could really go for a 4dr+hatch electric Neon.
See, 'Electric Neon', it's natural.
Wasn't this car cancelled a week ago?
Sorry Chrysler too little too late..... How big is the market for 2 seat roadsters ? not big enough to save your company ...
@b
Just so you don't miss this, I'm posting it again:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/13/video-better-places-automated-electric-vehicle-battery-switch/#continued