The electric dream machine

1/5
10 April 2012

When Alex Schey told his professors at Imperial College London he was forgoing his masters to build the world's sexiest and most efficient

Not only was it preposterous that an engineering undergraduate could build such a vehicle, but it was the end of 2008, the economy was crashing, and funding would be out of the question.

"They said I was a naïve dreamer," recalls Alex, 23. "Instead of embracing my idea of designing an electric car that would radically alter the public's negative perception of these vehicles, they tried to stop the project. I was told that I was a mediocre engineer incapable of organising myself out of a paper bag, let alone of raising £500,000 and breaking new scientific ground."

But this week, having achieved the dream, his creation, the SRZero, goes on display at the Science Museum as part of an exhibition in the Antenna Gallery featuring new scientific breakthroughs. Alex will be there to take questions.

There is quite a tale behind the car's existence. First, Alex inspired 35 corporate sponsors to back him, then he put together a 10-strong group of Imperial College students, all aged under 25, who called themselves the Racing Green Endurance team. For the next nine months, working 16 hours a day late into the night in a rented garage in Ladbroke Grove, the team built the world's longest-range all-electric supercar, overcoming huge technological challenges along the way.

Last July, after months of testing, they flew the two-seater SRZero to Alaska and set off on an extraordinary journey of more than 16,000 miles down the Pan-American Highway, five of them sharing the driving.

Their 140-day expedition, from the edge of the Arctic Circle in Alaska to Ushuaia on the southern tip of Argentina, was the subject of an eight-part BBC World News documentary. It took them through 14 countries and across enormously challenging terrain: over the snow-covered peaks of the Andes through tropical rainforests and across Chile's hyper-arid Atacama Desert.

They were fêted by British ambassadors, interviewed by TV stations and made front-page news on hundreds of local newspapers along the way. "For many countries, it was the first electric vehicle they'd ever seen and so there was tremendous interest," says Alex.

"At traffic lights, drivers would pull up alongside us and say, 'C'mon, rev that engine, let's hear what you've got'. We'd say, 'You won't hear a thing because it's all-electric'. Then we'd speed off silently - the car does 0-100kph (0-62mph) in seven seconds - you should have seen their faces! They just could not believe the car was powered by electricity.

"Most people think of electric cars as silly and feeble - the G-Wiz can't go above 50mph and has a range of just 48 miles - but our car has a top speed of 160 kilometres per hour (99.4mph) and can drive up to 500km (310 miles) on a single charge of just £5 of electricity, making it the longest-range electric car in the world. A normal car would have racked up a £3,000 petrol bill, but our running costs amounted to £350 of electricity." Alex, of west London, says he inherited his spirit of adventure from his late father Eric, a businessman and accomplished light aircraft pilot who died three years ago at the age of 48 in a paragliding accident in the Alps.

"My dad was always going off on adventures and I grew up learning that taking risks is part of what life is about. As a teenager, I'd turned our garage into a secret laboratory in which I would capture hydrogen on an electrode and explode it.
When my dad found out I was creating bottles of exploding hydrogen, instead of telling me off he got even more into it than me!"

Alex first got the idea of building an electric car after he and his classmates constructed a hydrogen-electric hybrid go-kart and an electric motorbike for their coursework. In January 2009, armed with a few sketches, he approached Radical Sports Cars, one of the leading makers of petrol-powered track cars for amateur racers.

"Basically, I was asking them to give me a £120,000 track car for free and to help us redesign the chassis so that instead of a fuel-combustion engine it could hold a 550kg lithium iron phosphate battery pack that would power the car by electricity.

"Here I was, this raw 21-year-old, they must have thought I was off my head, but I did enough to convince them I was serious - 10 days later they decided to go for it and we had lift-off."
The first leg through snow-covered Alaska and North America went smoothly, but in Guatemala, where the Pan-American Highway disintegrates into potholed gravel tracks, they hit 10 days of the wettest weather in 10 years, threatening the entire enterprise.

"The car has an open top and the rain was coming down in horizontal sheets which not only meant zero visibility, but if water had got into the battery connection, we would have been electrocuted and instantly killed. We decided to carry on in the hope that we'd done our homework and that the carefully sealed battery would stay dry, and thankfully, it did."

Driving the SRZero was "exhilarating", says Alex, "but you had to be on your wits - you're just eight centimetres off the road and trucks don't see you. We had police escorts in Central America and we'd do presentations at schools, to inspire youngsters to become engineers. The car was also displayed at the Science Museum in Panama.
"At the finish on November 16, we drove into Ushuaia to a crowd and champagne. It was just pure elation."

Since returning to the UK, Alex and his team have decided to form their own consultancy. "We're interested in developing our technology further to make electric vehicles affordable and attractive to the mass market. We believe their time will come."

Alex's Imperial College critics have been generous in their praise. The Rector, Sir Keith O'Nions, held a reception marking the "momentous achievement". Says Alex: "To do something this big, so young, will be a hard act to follow."

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