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Right On Time? Swatch Announces a Revolutionary Car Battery

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electric car

December 7th 2015 7:07

Swatch, the innovative Swiss company known mostly for its stylish watches, made an attempt to build an electric car way back in the 80’s. That effort was a dismal failure, mostly because the timing was all wrong. The only batteries available then were of the traditional lead acid variety. No one had even thought of using a lithium ion battery to power an electric car back then.

That program led to the smart car and a partnership with Mercedes. The collaboration turned sour, however, and Swatch was bought out by the German company. The smart car concept then went in an entirely different direction than the one Swatch had envisioned.

Over the past twenty years, Swatch engineers have been quietly working on improved battery technology. Now the company believes it has developed a new class of batteries that are superior to the lithium ion products that power virtually every plug-in or electric car today. Today, it makes over 800,000 of the new batteries a day for its watches and other small electronic products. 

The Truth is in the Solids

What makes its batteries better? They uses a solid material to separate the anode and the cathode instead of the liquid used in most batteries today. Swatch says its battery will be 30% lighter and charge twice as fast as conventional lithium ion batteries. Less weight means increased range, which is the Holy Grail for car makers today. Swatch says it will have a new factory completed to produce automotive batteries within 12 months. At that point, it will be ready to get back into the electric car game, almost 30 years after its first attempt.

In an odd twist, it took the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal to convince Swatch to renew its interest in making an electric car. Now that the world is rethinking its reliance on diesel engines, Swatch thinks the market will be more receptive to electric cars.

The Swatch technology sounds a lot like the solid state process that Bosch says it is working on. The main hurdle for Bosch is that its batteries have to be heated to 178 degrees F in order to work properly. It is unlikely that Swatch is facing the same temperature constraint with the batteries it makes for watches and small electronic devices.

The world is abuzz with news of battery innovations that are just over the horizon. Will the Swatch battery turn out to be just more vaporware? It’s too early to tell, but the company has been down this road before and has undoubtedly learned some hard lessons from its previous failures. They may have a better chance of success than some start-up that has never built an automobile before.

Using rapid prototyping, the Boeing Phantom Works engineers in Philadelphia designed and built a flying subscale model of the innovative Phantom Swift in less than 30 days to be part of Boeing's proposal for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) vertical takeoff and landing X-Plane competition.

Published on Apr 15, 2016

The Volocopter VC200 made aircraft history on March 30, 2016 as the first certified multicopter to fly with a person onboard. Designed by German company e-volo, this electric aircraft gives people a glimpse into a future where, one day, travel may exist above street traffic. “The Volocopter is super easy to fly, silent and built with electrical simplicity compared to helicopters, which are difficult to fly, loud and mechanically complex,” said Jan Stumpf, CEO of Ascending Technologies, an Intel company that has worked with e-volo since 2013.

Technology developed by Ascending Technologies enabled the flight controls, motor electronics and key elements that extend multi-rotor UAV technology to this new type of aircraft.

Special thank you to e-volo for sharing this video. Learn more about the company here: http://volocopter.com/

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Volocopter | Intel
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The multicopter transportation revolution is taking off!

Published on Feb 20, 2016

Passenger 'Drones' are now powerful enough to carry a person. Here's my list of top 5 drones that can carry a person (in no particular order) which are interesting, risky or just simply entertaining. We might one day see human carrying drones in the consumer market.

Credit:

World's first manned flight with an electric multicopter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L75ES...

Volocopter VC200 First Flight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNulE...

The Swarm Manned Aerial Vehicle Multirotor Super Drone Flying
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5Jgn...

Ehang 184 Human-carrying Drone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbeoT...

In May 2015, Montreal inventor Catalin Alexandru Duru broke the world record for the longest hoverboard flight.

Duru flew up to five metres above a lake for a distance of 275.9 metres aboard his homemade, propeller-powered hoverboard in a trip that lasted more than 1½ minutes.

Now, the 31-year-old Duru and his company, Omni Hoverboards, are working on a secret, next-generation version of the device.