Other testing is focusing on reducing noise, vibration, and harshness to ensure a quiet cabin. The company is on target to deliver 250 miles of driving range from an 80-kWh battery pack. He said the design maintains the ability to service the battery and ensure safety.Īs the company approaches its second anniversary, it’s putting more Beta prototypes into road testing. Anything that we can do to maintain that range while minimizing additional layers of components is a direct benefit to the customer. Customers are concerned about usable energy, which translates to range. I call this problem the ‘box in a box in a box problem.’ You put the battery cell in a module, and you put the module in a pack, and you put the pack in the vehicle.Įvery one of these steps adds mass and cost while taking away energy density. Weicker talked about what led Canoo to drop a traditional battery enclosure. After Canoo’s first vehicle, which looks like a lounge on wheels, the company is likely to introduce vehicles purpose-built for ride-sharing and deliveries.
#Occupant packaging in car body design full
The packaging of the powertrain can be low and minimal, thereby allowing a full reconsideration of the cabin. With this statement, he’s expressing a central tenant of EV design, but that has not yet been fully explored. Weicker said, “ It’s nice to be working on an EV that looks like an EV.”
But the platform is the size of a Toyota Prius. When I sat inside the Canoo, its cabin felt like a modern take on a spacious, old-school surfer van. You can be creative about ultra-safe crashworthiness while providing a spacious interior on a small footprint. When you combine these design innovations with the first steering system that operates entirely by wire – zero mechanical linkages – it creates an unprecedented degree of flexibility for cabin design. “And it saves weight and money.”Īlso, he said Canoo is the first EV to use a transverse leaf-spring suspension – thereby eliminating that shock towers that typically intrude into the cabin and compromise interior packaging. This allows us to provide a higher level of functional integration,” he said. “The battery is packaged directly inside the skateboard. Weicker explained that Canoo’s skateboard design, which will be used on multiple vehicle platforms, does not have a separate battery enclosure. When you remove those constraints, you can either fit into what people are used to – or you can explore what could be done differently in the future. The internal combustion engine imposed a lot of constraints on the design of the vehicle. This gives him the experience to re-think assumptions:
He previously had top battery-engineering roles at Faraday Future and Coda. We spoke with Canoo’s powertrain chief, who told us that the Canoo doesn’t use a battery enclosure.Ĭo-founder Phil Weicker is Canoo’s head of powertrain and electronics. If an EV doesn’t need a conventional engine and transmission, then why does every electric car on the market pretty much look like a gas-powered vehicle? That’s the question being asked by Canoo, the EV company actively re-thinking vehicle design for a new age of shared and connected mobility.
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