Eleni Himaras

reporter@ltview.com

While car manufacturers around the world have been investing more in hybrid technology, they’ve been shying away from completely electric cars as the problem of constantly charging the massive batteries looms.
Local inventor Joel Goodwin believes he’s found the solution: easily swappable battery packs.
“Right now it, it’s the chicken or egg dilemma. Do you make the cars and hope the packs will be made or make the packs and hope the cars will be made?” Goodwin said.
He chose the first option and has built an 8-inch thick rectangular battery. He is working on making the already-designed swapping machine a reality.
The catalyst for him was watching gas prices spike after Hurricane Katrina and the realization that oil is a finite resource.
“I’ve had cars as my hobby all my life… this is like the ultimate car project for me,” he said.
While he knows the technology of a purely electric car won’t take off in the next one to two years, he believes it is inevitable. Goodwin said the inevitability of running out of oil and the ever-climbing gas prices will start leading people in this direction.
“Electric engines require virtually no maintenance,” he said. “The motor is rated for 100,000 hours of use. If you drove that car at 50 miles per hour, that’s 5 million miles. At 15,000 miles a year for 40 years, you’d only drive 2 million miles in a lifetime.”
Since there are no belts, moving parts or need for oil changes, the only thing that will wear out on an electric car, Goodwin said, is the tires. Depending upon battery usage and the type of battery in the pack, it can last anywhere from 300 cycles up to possibly 2,000 with a well-cared for lithium ion battery.
While the hybrid market is growing, Chevrolet will put out the first plug-in hybrid next year. Hybrids, while functioning off combined amounts of electricity and gas, still use gas as their only fuel source – just less of it. The Chevy Volt will be able to run for 40 miles off of a re-chargeable battery pack, but will also take gas for longer drives.
But the gas components still mean costly maintainence.
Japan’s Project Better Place recently unveiled an electric car battery swapping station that would cost $500,000. Goodwin’s model would cost about $20,000. While this is a high start up cost, the low maintenance cost and long life span makes this investment feasible for consumers, Goodwin says. But the early and most likely application of the technology will be for fleets of cars owned by businesses.
Also, while Project Better Place is looking to corner the market, Goodwin is advocating an open standard in design.
“I don’t want to be rich, I just want to live comfortably,” he said.
He’s put patent applications in on his battery case and swapping machine, but is happy to share the specs of his design with any other company.
In order to make the design even less maintenance-intensive, he has put all of the complicated mechanisms on the battery itself.
“I’ve put all the complex stuff on the battery pack and all the simple stuff on the car,” he said, so that if something goes wrong, a driver could just get a new pack and go.
He believes the ideal place to test the feasibility of the design is through a company or organization with a fleet of cars such as a local electric, delivery or taxi cab company.
“Most taxi cabs need an oil change and maintenance every 10 days,” he said.
Another school of thought in electric cars is finding ways to charge the batteries more quickly, but this, Goodwin says, will only cause those cars to drain nearly 50 times the energy they would with the slow charge.
Attempting to stay as local as possible with the design and development, he’s contracted Skotz Inc. to do the steel work.
“I like innovative ideas,” said owner Skot Ingram, who’s had the business on RM 2222 for more than 40 years. “That’s how, to me, forward things happen in this world. When you get away from the government-funded things and into private enterprise.”
He believes that Goodwin’s openness to new ideas, perseverance and timing will make this a successful venture.
“He’s going to make this first one work and hopefully he will get the right kind of company or city to try this out,” Ingram said. “It will take the right kind of politics to get someone who sees the potential to say, ‘let’s try this on a half-dozen cars.’”
Goodwin has admitted that he is far better at being an inventor than a businessman and is always looking for those better at the latter to help him make his idea work.