All charged up
A team of MIT students has been working on testing a rapid-recharging system that could help to change public perceptions about electric vehicles and their practicality. They have already done extensive testing of the system with an individual battery cell and with a motorcycle they converted to all-electric operation, and in coming months they hope to be able to demonstrate the system on a full-sized sedan they converted.The goal is to demonstrate that recharging can be accomplished routinely in under 30 minutes without severely reducing the operating lifetime of the batteries or causing other problems. In the year since the MIT Electric Vehicle Team started working on the project, new and established companies have begun to offer commercial rapid-recharging systems, and Japan has officially adopted a new standard for the connectors for such systems and has begun installing the systems in more than 100 locations. The Nissan Leaf, a pure...