Motorola’s 1990s Corvette EV Project
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
With a huge number of issues: you can't fast-charge NiMh batteries, and the self-discharge rate is horrendous.
Then there is the question of the control circuitry. The first truly reliable high-voltage IGBTs started appearing only in mid 90-s. Before that, you in practice had been limited to synchronous permanent-magnet DC motors.
So I think that EVs really started happening almost immediately after all the enabling technology got there in the early 2000-s. The first Tesla Roadster was released in 2008, so perhaps you could have shaved 3-4 years from that, but not much more.
The biggest issue with NiMH was that it was heavily encumbered by patents owned by Ovonics / Cobasys, who were acquired by Texaco and then Chevron...who did everything they could to prohibit the battery tech from getting into electric vehicles, with (among other things) Texaco/Chevron having universal right to "veto" any proposed sale/use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_au...
Even the best NiMh batteries were inferior to the worst LiIon batteries from the early 2000-s.
RAV4 EV was pretty much the best example of what is possible with NiMh, and it was pretty weak: 70hp motor, top speed of 80mph, range of 90 miles.
If it wasn't for companies like BYD, Tesla, etc, pushing EVs forward, I think we'd still be stuck with compliance cars.
NiMH wasn't great though. I think the best was the NiMH EV1 at 142 miles of range.
They took their knowledge from the kindle batteries and put it into a car.
P.S. Tesla has always used off the shelf vendor batteries. Panasonic has their separate section within the Tesla factories where they are mass producing regular looking batteries that are then assembled in series.
I just don't see it. The first LiIon EVs had very little technology that was not off-the shelf. Roadster was quite literally a bunch of laptop batteries bolted onto a car frame. It's not that hard to make an expensive EV.
https://www.drive.com.au/news/toyota-tesla-model-y-work-of-a...
Most auto production is optimized for ICEs. Even 20+ years ago, Toyota's engineers knew there was plenty to do in the EV space.
https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28...
The problem was/is that optimizing EVs will undercut ICE sales, so Toyota just ignored what their engineers said for decades to maintain the status quo and, like most legacy auto manufacturers, fell behind newcomers in the EV space.
The EV1 probably cost like $150,000+ in 2023 dollars just to build, so they've made lots of progress, but electric vehicles don't beat comparable conventional vehicles across the board, they have better performance and lower operating costs, and that's most of it.
Except on a couple accounts - Memory and Lifetime.
NiMH batteries have almost as bad as a memory effect as NiCD, and have a low lifetime cycle count compared to lead acid. I dont think you could put NiMH batteries in a production car, at any point, without designing the battery pack to be cheaply and easily replaced. NiMH batteries are far more of a consumable than even Lithium batteries are. There are also real limits on how much current an NiMH battery can deliver in a given period of time.
NiCD batteries because of the memory effect an inability to deal well with high current applications, made them unsuitable for a mass market electric car.
Top of the line NiMh chemistries had lifetime cycle count better than many Li-Ion batteries, like 10% degradation after 2000 cycles. They also don't have the memory effect, but can exhibit a somewhat similar but fully reversible effect.
Really, the energy density was the main killer.
But like, most of the issues I had with NiMH was because the devices that had the batteries in them had no charge controllers, so all the effects I spoke about were true for those - NiMH with a battery controller, and without might as well be completely different beasts.
RAV4 EVs have gotten 150k miles out of their original battery pack.
Control circuitry without IGBTs kinda sucks. You're stuck with switched serial/parallel circuits, like on locomotives or trams. Regenerative braking would be possible, but very limited because you can't control current/voltage well enough not to mess up the battery.
None of this presents an insurmountable barrier, but it definitely limits the design space.
I don't know when SWDC motors were invented but I would have assumed it was long before the 90's.
Before IGBTs, the main way you controlled a powerful DC motor was by having multiple windings that can be connected in parallel or series configurations, modulating the resulting current. This type of control goes way back to 19-th century, it was used on the first trams.
Series-wound DC motors don't have permanent magnets at all -- rather, they have two sets of windings (connected in series) that push against each other, so there would be no concerns about rare earths.
I don't know what a "synchronous" DC motor is, unless you meant to say "synchronous AC and permanent magnet DC."
But the lower energy to weight ratio would be a showstopper for a car, yeah.
Allows for fast and efficient switching of high current circuits and are thus used (from my understanding) to modulate the power that goes to the motor.
How would you run R&D and new business in a large company?
Facebook has spent $10 billion on Metaberse. I think running an internal accelerator, just like Y-Combinator, with internal startups (with their own budget, own teams etc, just like any startup) would have a bigger chance at getting a good result than what they did.
Having a big brand on a new 'startup' makes a lot of expectations and meeting those expectations reduces the flexibility of being a startup. There needs to be three clear paths for these things: shut it down, subsume it into the brand, spin it off as independent. But only one of those has clear value for the parent.
Too little and it ends up being a skunkworks that has fun, produces curious things, and never makes money.
Simulating real market dynamics is pretty difficult.
I feel like some big acquisitions fail this way.
I'd contest this (quite popular narrative): Xerox developed the Star as an highly integrated product and introduced it in 1981, 2 years before the Lisa and 3 years before the Mac. It may have been too early, though, as this was before capable microprocessors and the hardware was somewhat limited. Development started in 1977, which was about as early as PARC-based software became sufficiently optimized to make this a viable option, and the first D-processors, Dorado (rejected for its complexity and price point), became ready for evaluation. Arguably, it would have been hard to release a thoroughly engineered system like the Star significantly sooner. (There were also other GUI-driven spin-offs, outside Xerox, like PERQ, which also failed to make the proverbial dent in the universe.)
Even if Motorola had invested vast sums into development, I'm not sure it would have prevented the company from being broken up as it was in the 2000's.
Because only now, 30 years on from that time are electric cars coming into their own - and they're not really mass market yet - mostly still for now anyhow, just a thing for people of means. I think that'll change, but we are not there yet.
I often wonder, will self-driving cars face a similar fate? Will we have a self-driving winter where legislation/popular opinion/economics causes the current crop of startups to fall under, only for others to succeed in 10-20 years' time?