MEET LUCA ROBO TAXIS EV UPTAKE
A student team from the Eindhoven University of Technology have developed a car made almost entirely out of waste . The result is a sportylooking electric car called Luca with a base of flax and recycled plastic , a large part of which was fished out of the ocean .
The body , finish , windows and interior are also made of recycled materials , including PET bottles , the hard-plastic ABS and household waste .
Luca is a compact car with two electric motors in the rear wheels . It can reach a top speed of 90 kilometres per hour and has a range of 220 kilometres . In addition to the efficient engines , this is due to the low weight : the car weighs only 360 kg without batteries – about half as light as comparable cars .
“ I ’ m so proud that we could make the chassis with ocean plastic – this is a really very difficult material to recycle , because there are so many different types of plastic in different conditions , be we still managed to implement it structurally ,” media representative of the project Matthijs Van Wijk said .
“ I don ’ t think this will necessarily become the norm , but I expect there to be more and more biodegradable and recycled materials especially for interiors in the future ,” Mr Van Wijk added .
The rise of self-driving taxis in China comes at a time when people are nervous about taking public transport due to COVID-19 . As such “ robotaxi ” providers are planning to ramp up the number of driverless cars they are putting on the roads to cater to the increased demand .
One of the leading players AutoX is rolling out 100 autonomous vehicles in Shanghai by June 2021 . The start-up is one of several Chinese companies quickly moving to offer self-driving taxi services to the public .
“ The pandemic has made our society realise that we need self-driving cars for situations like this ,” said a spokesman for AutoX .
“ RoboTaxi with its self-disinfecting capabilities and driverless logistics could save lots of lives .”
During the initial first phase the robotaxis will not be truly driverless as they need a human safety driver at the wheel .
“ The safety drivers will be phased outthat is absolutely the intention of this service ,” added the AutoX spokesman . “ Virus spread will be a concern for a long time , so this strongly motivates this type of automation .”
A new telematics plan has given the city of Madrid essential emissions information to support the uptake of electric vehicles .
The Spanish capital is the lead partner in a major four-year European green transport programme that comes called Civitas Eccentric that started in September 2016 .
As part of the project the Madrid city council decided to install a Geotab telematics system in 19 Renault Zoe cars operated by the city ’ s waste management service for site inspections . By tracking the vehicles between August 2019 and January 2020 , the fleet department was able to measure CO2 savings , reductions in NOx and particulate emissions , total energy consumption , kilometres driven , and calculate a total cost of ownership .
The results revealed that the energy consumption of the batteries has a close relationship with external temperatures , rising sharply between summer , when the average consumption was 13.06kWh per 100km , and winter when the figure rose to 20.34kWh per 100km due primarily to heating in the cars .
The telematics data also revealed that during the four-month trial the EV fleet saved 4.3 tonnes of CO2 emissions , a reduction of 61 % compared to running internal combustion engine versions of the same cars .
30 ISSUE 25 OCTOBER 2020 / WWW . AFMA . ORG . AU