MIT Electric Vehicle Team Blog: Mt. Washington!

EVT took a trip to Mt Washington this past weekend!

We attended the Mt Washington Alternative Energy Summit with the Porsche, the eBike and jamcycle! We got to meet lots of different people and also interact with some awesome vehicles people brought over to the summit!

J-rod and Lauren pushing the car up the ramp! SO STRONG!

Fuel stop in New Hampshire (our u-Haul had an "amazing" gas mileage of 11 MPG)

We made it!

The summit was a two day event for us, we drove over on Saturday and set up a booth with all our vehicles and a poster to showcase EVT.

john smiling

rango talking about electrons

We had lots of interest in the stuff we brought! We also got to see some AMAZING stuff other people brought over! My favorite being Howie's Stanley Steamer circa. 1900.

STEAM CAR!!!!! (howie is in the blue)

Howie gave us an awesome tour of the insides of the car itself! My favorite part of the car was the open differential with the (lubricated) band brake on the rear axle.

i don't think this would pass Charles' 2.00gokart inspection

So apparently I was so excited about this car that with my excitement I convinced Howie to give me a test ride of the vehicle! (i think i might have been the only one apart from Howie and his wife to ride the car that day)

wooohooo!

I also had the joy to try out Adam's lipo motorycle! I had heard so much about it but I hadn't seen it or had the chance to ride it yet. Riding the li-po bike was a GLORIOUS experience! Very different from riding a heavy gas motorycle. Adam's throttle responds so smoothly and the bike is so light that is feels like driving a toy (a 90 Horsepower toy).

Another cool EV we got to see was Rob Woroby's "mountain board". Rob founded Black Sparrow Industries they make an awesome crossover between a mountain board and a BMX bike. The steering is done via a linkage that responds to you leaning. The resistance/damping of the leaning mechanisms can be varied by the user.

Black Sparrow ! (photo courtesy of Charles Guan)

There was a bunch of Teslas and other electric vehicles around. Ted Dillard (the organizer) had his two electric motorcycles in the event as well.

A big part of the event was to get your vehicle to try and reach the top of Mt Washington. On Sunday morning, we got ready and attempted the hill climb with the Porsche.

john driving!

We were pretty cautious during the ascent. We knew the Porsche motor had some heating problems from before so we stopped every two miles to check the temperature of the motor.

Rango using the IR thermometer to check motor temp.

this is us halfway up the mountain!

yay! we made it!

Lots of fun! the way down was also cool! We used regenerative braking most of the way down and we were regening about 12kW on average! We used 30% of the battery energy going up hill and regenerated about 15% on the way down! So cool! Facts like this is tell me that in 100 years people are going to making fun of current state of the art mechanical brakes where we "waste" power.

The event was awesome! We had lots of fun and learned a lot about really cool projects going on in the realm of EVs! Here are some other shots from that weekend!