News in from Otmar – the high-powered motor-controller maker has found new manufacturing feet for his famed Zilla controller. Double the top current-handling of my Curtis, the Zilla fills a much-needed hole in the EV market in the high-performance end. With water cooling built into some models, these things when fitted into a sports EV will give the Tesla a run for its money.
From the DIY Electric Car forum last month…
The Zilla will return later this year.
My production crew has been busy finishing up the last orders that I accepted in September. Meanwhile my engineer Arthur and I are finishing the design changes needed for effective higher volume production. The automated test equipment that Arthur built will support volume production and has already increased the quality of Zillas going out the door. The improved Hairball code I’ve been working on ran today for the first time in my 914 and promises to increase reliability as well as make diagnostics easier.
I am in talks with a very qualified licensee, and although we have not signed any formal agreements yet, we seem to be finding common purpose and I expect things to be well established soon.
I apologize for the delay. My less than ideal health and my possibly unreasonable requirement for quality has not been conducive to moving faster on this path, but it is encouraging to see the transition coming to fruition.
The waiting list on our website continues to grow and I hope the new manufacturer will be contacting those of you on it soon.
Thank you all for your patience, – Otmar, http://www.cafeelectric.com/, The Zilla factory.
More threads here:
- http://www.diyelectriccar.com/forums/showthread.php/zilla-coming-backi-31922.html
- http://www.evdl.org/archive/index.html#nabble-td23634546
and on Better Place too…
Real Value Resides with the Developers
With Otmar’s ill-health amongst other issues, many of us will keep our fingers crossed for a happy outcome. He has worked hard for a quality product. The alternatives are to design our own speed controller, which I’ve been fiddling with but time, money, my lack of good business skills (because I’m more of a geek), equipment costs and my own dubious-health etc., etc., have all been a stopper as the car has cost me a fair bit now.
I’m a dreamer but I didn’t have the right connections; never really had a family to help me – disjointed and self-serving as they are. Had my VC ‘buddy’ come through with some funding like he said he would instead of blowing it on a technological cul de sac with someone else, then things may have been different. He’s not a happy-chappy right now but I do hope things improve for him. Similar bad carrot things have happened to some developer friends and frankly, for their innovation’s worth they don’t deserve to be pushed around by suits. Agh! Agassi! I mean, Agamemnon!! Ah well, it’s not what you know, and in my case ‘who you know’ didn’t help either. Either way, fun must be had, and making changes, even on the cheap, can be fun and in a way more challenging.
As an alternative to the Zilla, I was looking into Logisystems or Synkro as a stop-gap upgrade to the Curtis. Poor Logisystems has had some negative feedback but I am sure it’s just the usual production spec-upping teething problems. Their website is still ‘under construction’ (http://www.logisystemscontrollers.com/) but keep an eye out. I don’t know much about the Synkro. It doesn’t use water cooling but a special fan-force push-pull air-intake method, so I’m told which is a neater solution provided thermal efficiency is up there with the coolant methods.
More details here…
http://www.evcomponents.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=SYNKRO&Show=TechSpecs
More Shai of a Better Place
Speaking of Agassi, for battery-heads, check out the recent news on Shai Agassi’s battery swap-over infrastructure…
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_12359765?nclick_check=1
Someone hinted he may use Thunderskys after all – that’ll be interesting (hah-hah, note earlier posts where they tried to suss our business), but more likely cobalts of some description to be in line with MiEV, etc., is expected. Speaking of which, check out the latest MiEV news, http://www.autobloggreen.com/2009/06/04/mitsubishi-launches-production-of-the-imiev/
Swap-over is a nice idea to get around the slow charging, but if drivers ignore ‘low fuel’ warnings and repeatedly flatten their packs well below the breakdown threshold, Better Place could be up for a lot of disintegrated batteries and angry customers with their recent swap-over pack, stuck on the New Jersey Turnpike. Personally, I’d rather have control over my battery pack, nurture it and make it last. Incentives should be available for those who prefer to slow home-charge instead.
Anyway, Better Place (ahem, should we call them ‘BP’?) will no doubt instil the usual BMS warning systems in their charging stations to flesh out the dud batteries – of course wastage is still an issue; they may for all we know discard a dodgy module consisting of, say 10 x 3.2v cells that really only have one or two dodgy batteries inside. Ah, but of course they’re going to have a fool-proof quality control/battery rejuvenation/recycling plant set up too (?). Amazing.
As far as charging is concerned, I’m much in favor of inductive charging where nothing is removed from the car and an induction loop enabling fast charging for the newer batteries now emerging on the horizon, such as the STAIR (see previous post). It avoids over-complicated battery rack/swap-over engineering and compliancy, forcing standardisation on partner car-makers (that in itself could take time for agreement), premature technology redundancy etc., etc.
With so many new battery technologies coming out in the next few years, I’m wondering if the whole BP charging station set-up would turn into something akin to a giant white lead acid elephant. Of course, charging/swap-over stations – the right kind of stations – are great for the many who don’t have garages in which to park ‘n’ charge. I’m all for kicking the oil companies up their collective asses, but it’s important not to hurt the foot that kicks; the steel-cap kind of technology proposed must have longevity, flexibility, be financially efficient and have the agreement and demand of the people.
More on the Agassi aspirations here…
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/energy-smart/the-reality-of-electric-dreams-20090409-a28c.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2
It’s nice to have friends in high-places, so long as they stay high 
July 7th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
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June 5th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Hello Carmel,
I am interested in the other end of the scale to the Zilla – the “minimal” metro commuter EV, for example using a 200A/100V controller. The neat thing about such a controller is low cost (maybe $100 in parts). Driving our EV makes me realise the small amount of power we actually need (as opposed to what we might want), for example I only actually use 5kW @ 60 km/hr, and 15-20kW to accelerate with normal ICE traffic. I know this makes me different amongst the EV community as most people are keen on high power, or at least power up in the maximum kW range of typical ICE cars.
I would like to work on an open source design (CAD files, circuit and PCB files) – my motivation is to lower the cost of EVs. There are a few simple PWM controller designs out there, the toughest bit for me is the mechanical side, as I understand most of the electronic bits OK.
Maybe a project for later this year.
Cheers,
David