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A team of students from Eindhoven are working on the project InMotion. The objective is to make charging as fast and convenient as refueling, and the technology will be used during the 2023 edition of the famous 24 hours of Le Mans race which takes place in Atlantic France.
The story of the project InMotion started back in 2009, when three students from Hogeschool Utrecht developed Ignition, the first Bio-ethanol race car in the Netherlands. The project was then taken over at the Eindhoven University of Technology by one of the founders, Albert Maas, alongside 9 other students.
Their dream was “to create the most innovative racing car in the world”, but they realised an intermediate step was required. They started by building Fusion, a fully electric formula car unveiled to the public in October 2015 and improved over the following years.
In 2018, the third phase of the project was launched: Vision, their vision on how a future electric endurance car should look like. Their newest race car, the Revolution (in which they built their “Electric Refueling” technology), was revealed a few weeks ago, on the 5th of August.
Charging an electric racing car in a few minutes
“Fast charging is too slow”, according to the Dutch student team. With the project InMotion, they are now capable of fully charging a race car in 12 minutes and are working on reducing this time even further with the objective of reducing it to 7.5 minutes later this year.
“This poses two main challenges”, explains Camiel Cartign, Technical Manager. “On one hand, we need to push a lot of power into the vehicle in a short amount of time: this causes a heat stress on the battery pack which requires cooling technology. The other challenge is actually supplying the electricity we need.” The project is therefore sponsored and supported by Omexom, a subsidiary of the French group Vinci Energies which specialises in power grids.
To demonstrate the potential of electric refueling, the InMotion team is preparing the Revolution in order to run the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2023. An ideal showcase for sustainable transport technology.
