Kiwi creates trash-talkin' EV

Ian Wright’s engineering talents have carried him from the family sheep farm near Dargaville, New Zealand to the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, where his innovative contributions at Tesla unsettled the traditional thinking of the automotive industry and no one — including him — has relaxed since.

Innovator, inventor, disruptor – he’s all of these but the classic cars parked on the clean carpet in the office tell you more about the man himself.  He’s quietly spoken with a recognisable ANZAC accent and his passions for sports cars and tinkering run deep.

On the carpet sits a vintage Mini powered by a Honda Integra VTEC engine. Next to it is a Citroen 2CV on a Chevy 4WD pick-up chassis with a small-block V8. You soon get the message. He’s a blatant rev-head with a serious twist.

There’s also a Lotus Europa surrounded by a puzzle of parts, but he admits to favouring the Caterham 7. It looks basically standard but with 165kW and weighing 500kg it's definitely not.

“Handling is great; you can drive it sideways and it won’t bite,” he said.

Wright also views the business world from an oblique angle. He’s passionate about driving and high-performance cars so the jump from Tesla to 30,000kg garbage trucks takes some explaining.

Ian founded Wrightspeed in 2005 after backing out of Tesla, as he describes it, in 2004 after being one of its founders, which he plays down in a been-there-done-that sort of way.

“Tesla has succeeded beyond anyone’s dreams,” he admits, knowing too that 'Tesla founder' are two very powerful words on his CV. Doors open for Wrightspeed because of the Tesla connection.

No, he doesn’t drive a Tesla; he commutes in a 2008 Volkswagen Touareg V10 diesel, but he believes and is proving at Wrightspeed that electric vehicles have a definite role and offer several advantages over traditional petrol and diesel powertrains.

Wright points out that the same pure-electric approach that has worked so well at Tesla isn’t practical or possible with large trucks. He reasons that the combination of an engine and batteries – range-extender EV technology – was better suited for heavy trucks and explains why.

“Cars don’t burn enough fuel. So what does burn a lot of fuel? Trucks burn a lot of fuel. Short-haul trucks burn a lot of fuel and heavy garbage trucks that stop-and-go frequently burn incredible amounts of fuel.”

Wright had a target market for Wrightspeed but he still faced the challenge of developing the technology to make it work.

Hybrid is a loose description of Wrightspeed’s technology. As you’d expect there is an engine that drives a generator that charges the lithium-ion battery packs. What’s unique to Wrightspeed is its engine of choice. What it isn’t is possibly more important that what it is.

It isn’t heavy; it isn’t complex; it isn’t conventional. Wrightspeed unique EV-hybrid technology is defined by an axial flow turbine engine that is light, compact, fuel-efficient, clean and extremely quiet.

The Wrightspeed turbine engine is about as fat as a football and about as long as your arm. Ian claims his engineers have greatly improved fuel efficiency plus, and this is very important for a garbage truck at 4:00am, the small turbine produces only about 60dB at 10 metres.

“We can’t do anything about the noise from the smashing bottles,” he jokes. But obviously an electric garbage truck is very quiet, as much as 2.5 times more fuel efficient and will pay back the initial conversion cost of a couple of hundred thousand dollars in about three to four years. Fuel saving alone can total as much as $US35,00 per year per truck.

The exhaust gas the turbine engine pushes out the pipe is so clean that the engine passes all emission standards without a post-combustion catalyst or chemical treatment and can be tuned to burn a variety of fuels: diesel, petrol, compressed natural gas, liquid petroleum gas.

The turbine engine fires up only when the lithium-ion batteries need recharging, which is about every 50km. The compact turbine engine spins at a maximum 100,000rpm but is comfortable at a steady 80,000rpm.

Garbage trucks aren’t sexy but tapping into the potential of a $US2 billion market is the United States alone does cast a rosy aroma over the rubbish.

“We could do 35,000kg trucks but the sweet spot for us is the 30,000kg garbage truck with two drive axles and one steer axle,” he says. “These are trucks owned by companies like Waste Management which has 18,000 of them.”

Somewhere between 110,000 and 140,000 of these short-haul trucks hit the road every day in the US. Asked about targets, he doesn’t hold back: “This technology and this powertrain will completely displace the conventional diesel powertrain in this application in five years.”

“In a very real sense Wrightspeed competes with Cummins and Allison because we’re a powertrain supplier. We make a complete powertrain and sell it as a complete kit,” he explains.

Wrightspeed holds a trail of patents as its engineers invent the support technology including power control systems and software, the electric motors and gearbox design in addition to the multiple battery packs and compact turbine engine.

Wrightspeed refers to the turbine and generator as the Fulcrum Range Extender, and in a typical conversion, the range-extender sits in place of the diesel engine while three battery packs displace the bulky transmission between the frame rails.

The long propeller shaft and differential are tossed. The standard axles and housing stay as are the standard brakes and suspension pick-up points. This makes the powertrain conversion very straightforward and easy for Wrightspeed to bolt a pair of electric motors and a pair of gearboxes into the original differential housing.

This is where the powertrain system gets more interesting. Each drive wheel is driven independently by a 250hp (186kW) electric motor linked to a four-speed gearbox and controlled independently by the power control system which Wrightspeed also developed and owns the intellectual property for.

Each electric motor delivers more than 17,500Nm to each drive wheel, and the control system senses wheel speed and wheel slip and modulates power almost instantly and independently to each motor.

During regenerative braking, Wright points out that these 30-tonne garbage trucks do 1000 stops a day in 200km of driving, “We are very aggressive in our regenerative braking setting and will pull as much as 0.3g in deceleration.”

Whereas one of these garbage trucks would chew up its brakes in three months; with aggressive regenerative braking, the brakes aren’t used as nearly as much, “so regenerative braking is a real positive".

“And that’s one of the reasons we run such a very high power motor inverter and battery system, so we can put 745kW at the wheels in regen braking.”

He continues: “The amount of power that gets dumped into the brakes is a big number. If I can save all the brake maintenance and push the fuel from 36L/100km to 90L/100km, it is huge.”

The right pedal controls acceleration and regenerative braking. Acceleration is very linear, very responsive, very quick and very quiet. The slight pneumatic ‘click’ of the transmission gear change is all that’s heard other than wind noise.

Let the right pedal rise off the floor and the regenerative braking system awakens. Lift off more and the truck decelerates more. It is very direct but lacks the feel of hydraulic brakes. Lift off quickly and the regenerative brakes throw you uncomfortably hard against the three-point seatbelt.

“You do get used to it.” Ian adds commentary to the driving experience. “There’s no creep or roll when stopped and it won’t roll backward on a hill.” The original friction brakes are still there and operate as they always have should you need to foot the left pedal and pull up harder than the regenerative braking system.

In 2014, Wrightspeed began supplying FedEx with powertrains, and in 2015 the company received a $US6 million grant from the California Energy Commission, which will fund a dramatic increase in powertrain production.

In the short-term, Wrightspeed will relocate about 65km from its present 930 square-metre R&D facility with a staff of 25 into a renovated 10,200sq-m production facility on an abandoned US Navy base, and has plans to hire more than 250 employees.

Wrightspeed’s ideas for a supercar
Zero to 100km/h in less than three seconds is bloody quick and also the new benchmark for high-performance cars. Tesla’s Model S P90D in Ludicrous Mode drops sub-threes with high-fibre regularity, and CEO Tesla Motors Elon Musk is talking bad-arse things about his next-generation Roadster due in 2019.

Rumours claim that supercar constructor Hennessey is braining out ideas for an electric supercar. An EV’s power delivery offers incredible supercar potential.

Wright’s not worried about the competition for a sports car he’s already driving in his head. “The shoe that hasn’t dropped yet is in the very high performance road car application of this stuff,” he says confidently. That stuff he’s talking about is the same EV technology making garbage trucks quicker and more efficient.

“Go to all-wheel drive and go to one motor [186kW] per wheel because you suddenly have this fantastic control bandwidth with this fantastic control authority. When I really think about that I can do some very interesting things with vehicle dynamics.”

Although kiloWatt output doesn’t translate perfectly, the idea of approximately 700kW at the wheels with very direct and linear throttle response and braking response typical of an EV is mind blowing.

“In the 0-160km/h range, today quite easily you can build the car where you can slip all four wheels in either direction any time you want. So you can get extremely good braking performance. So driving one of those would be a whole different thing,” he said, having already played with an early prototype.

Wrightspeed has the necessary motors, lithium-ion batteries and mechanical bits on the shelf. The power control system needed to precisely allocate power to each motor/wheel individually and control dynamics to deliver supercar performance is a done deal.

“Once people really get into this, once the penny drops, you’re going to see some very interesting cars with one motor per wheel with a lot of torque and extremely good control,” he predicts.

When will we see something like this from Wrightspeed? “Not this year,” he states. “Maybe next year. We have the technology to do it now, and we have the prototype mule in mind.”

That mule may be an Ariel Atom that has already been electrified by Wright. A 700kW-plus, AWD Atom with lightning-quick reactions, anyone?