BMW's drive down electric avenue

BMW is investing a lot into developing its Megacity car, being produced under the auspices of a futuristic sounding Project i – but will the car it produces bear the BMW badge?

SOMETIMES being first isn’t being clever. It is a statement I put to Ulrich Kranz, who heads the almost Hollywood-movie-sounding Project i, BMW’s cross-departmental think-tank. It was created to redesign, rework and reboot the way we think about electric vehicles and perhaps urban transportation overall.

By the time 2013 rolls around, BMW, a brand that prides itself on innovation, might be just another brand, launching just another electric car, with Nissan’s much-hyped Leaf, Renault’s Fluence EV and Opel’s Ampera likely to be pretty common on our roads.

But does BMW know something the others don’t? You would have to wonder, with BMW beating the hydrogen technology drum for so long, whether perhaps all this huge investment, relatively late in the game in electric cars, is somewhat reactionary?

It could be seen as a risk to create a brand new car, with perhaps a new label, rather than spend time and money giving customers what they want, which is probably an electric Mini.

If brands such as Nissan and Renault can make their normal-looking family cars, such as Leaf and Fluence, work from a packaging and range point of view, why did BMW have to start from scratch to make their car a real prospect?

Kranz looks every inch the boffin – small, wise and professor-like. He smiles, slightly wistfully, at the suggestion that the early models might slip up because they are trying to make the electric car fit our concept of standard cars, rather than making the car fit the technology.

So what is Project i? “It is a think-tank – one that has to show clear results at the end of the day, so it is not just an exercise in philosophy. It is something that has to generate very concrete results,” says Tobias Hahn, spokesman for the project. “The project is completely independent of any of our existing brands and this think-tank works for the entire BMW Group and is not attached to any brand in particular.”

This project is setting out to tackle the issues of transport in busy urban areas, primarily very busy, heavily populated cities with more than three million people, or “mega cities”, and this has spurned the working title for what is likely to be the first fruit of Project i’s labours, the BMW Megacity.

We stare at a sketch of the car, nearly 15-feet high and emblazoned on a wall in the BMW museum. The car itself is three years away, according to the design team, and the design has yet to be fully approved by the board. The marketers say they don’t know what it is going to be called and aren’t even sure it will be a BMW. “The Megacity vehicle will be launched under a sub-brand of BMW, it could be badged as a BMW but will be related in the same way the M (Motorsport) badge is closely related to the brand. It won’t be an entirely different brand like Rolls-Royce or Mini,” says Hahn.

Megacity will be a rear-wheel drive, four-seat supermini with a carbon fibre reinforced plastic body cell, which will reduce the weight of the car and so offset the added weight of the multiple batteries. An aluminium chassis forms the foundation of the car and integrates the battery, drive system and structural and basic crash functions into a single construction.

The lightweight passenger cell is made from carbon-fibre-reinforced plastic, or CFRP for short. CFRP is 50 per cent lighter than steel yet just as strong and 30 per cent lighter than aluminium. It is also resistant to corrosion, acid and organic solvents.

In addition, CFRP remains stable under all climatic conditions, showing very little change in shape even when exposed to large temperature fluctuations.

This cell will be ultra strong to keep its occupants safe and the power will come from an electric drivetrain with just a single gear that will generate over 100kW of power (equivalent to around 134 bhp) and it will very quickly get up to its maximum speed of 150km/h.

The power will be instant and the differentials, slip control systems and gear assembly will ensure that every ounce of the motor’s torque is transferred to the road. Like the Mini E concept car, the accelerator will, at times, work like the brake. Lift your foot off the accelerator in the Mini E and the car quickly comes to a stop. This ability to brake using the accelerator pedal makes it what BMW is calling a “driving pedal”.

This deceleration force is harnessed for energy recuperation. When braking the electric motor becomes a generator, producing energy and charging the battery. In an electric vehicle the recuperated energy can be converted directly into propulsion. Using the energy recuperation function increases the range of the vehicle by as much as 20 per cent. The “driving pedal” also allows for relaxing driving, with less frequent footwork. BMW says that is also enables quick reactions and so is well suited to “going with the flow” in city traffic. Here, up to 75 per cent of deceleration manoeuvres can be done without using the brake pedal.

Range is a talking point with the EV and although the trials of Mini E showed that most users of the 600 or so models were happy with the average 160km range, BMW wants the Megacity to have more than this to satisfy most urban dwellers and haven’t ruled out using a small petrol engine as a range extenderas an interim solution until battery technology improves, like Opel’s Ampera model.

For now the trials continue: next up will be the BMW ActiveE, based on the 1 Series. The premium German brand is certainly being thorough about its research. We will have to wait until 2013 to see if it’s efforts bear fruit in the industry-wide race to an electric future.