From more than 300 nominees, the editors of MIT Technology Review have selected this year's group of young innovators—35 men and women under the age of 35 who have made some significant accomplishments in a wide range of fields from medicine to electronics to nanotechnology and more. These researchers, inventors, and entrepreneurs are involved in rather interesting and unique work such as sniffing out cancer, turning adult cells into stem cells, creating fuels and drugs from special microbes, making the electric grid smart, and building robotic flies to name a few.
One of the young innovators in the TR35 list that piqued my interest was JB Straubel who, at age 32, has developed an electric vehicle that sports a number of impressive specifications. Straubel is the chief technology officer of Tesla Motors, a company chartered to mass-produce high-performance electric vehicles. The 2008 Tesla Roadster now is in production and currently undergoing final safety and durability testing. However, you'll have to wait until late next year to buy yours.
When discussing electric vehicles, your thoughts probably turn to slow, small, short range, and staid, designed to move you primarily from Point A to Point B. Well, the Roadster is anything but. It accelerates from 0 to 60 mph in just under 4.0 seconds, has a top speed of 125 mph, can be driven about 220 miles on one charge, and sports a useful battery life of about 100,000 miles.
As noted in the MIT Technology Review TR35 article, apparently a lot of engineering time and resources went into the battery design. The battery pack is made up of a few thousand Li-ion batteries just like the kind found in your laptop computer. Actually, the number of cells is 6,831, and you might imagine the difficulty of assembling such a large number of cells into the final battery pack. What happens if one of the individual batteries catches fire? And will the rest of the batteries catch fire in a chain reaction?
The answer was the development of a liquid-cooling system with tubes snaking around the entire pack that can quickly extinguish a fire. The system is designed to remove heat from a single burning cell, ensuring that none of the other cells are affected.
Another unique feature of the car is the drivetrain which sports a single-speed transmission with an integral differential. There is no need to rapidly move the shifting lever from low to high when driving this car because there is only one gear. Punch the accelerator and you reach cruising speed without taking your hands off the steering wheel.
As for the car's motor, it's a 3-phase, 4-pole electric unit that generates 185-kW maximum power that translates into 248 hp. The motor is speced at 90% average efficiency and redlines at 13,000 rpm. As noted on the Tesla Motors website, it costs less than 2 cents per mile to drive.
Other than the base price of $109,000 for the car, it does have another small drawback. The two-seat roadster has only one cup holder so you'll have to share it with your passenger.
Paul Milo
Editorial Director
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