It is a means of transportation that requires no fuel, oil or periodic maintenance. It is a zero emissions vehicle.
That is the proposal made by Mauricio Aramburo Londoño, Manuela Calle Escobar and Juan Carlos Hernandez Perez from Product Design Engineering and Santiago Perez Cardona from Mechanical Engineering, both undergraduate programs at Universidad EAFIT. They all came together in 2012 to carry out a project on sustainable mobility.
The winning vehicles of the Tenth Capital Semilla Contest sponsored by Medellin Mayor's Office in 2013 focus on three users: people moving in the city using fossil fuel cars or public transport; cargo transportation companies; and companies with fleet vehicles.
The electric vehicles work with batteries that can be recharged overnight to give power to these automobiles for around 40 kilometers. The recharging time ranges between one to five hours depending on the type of charger and the type of batteries being used.
It costs 300 pesos a day to run this distance since this is the equivalent to the price of the energy used to recharge the batteries daily.
However, being cost-effective is not the only benefit offered by this project. Less pollution is generated when fuel is replaced with power in a green automobile whose compact design makes it more space-saving to improve mobility.
"The life-time of the vehicle is based on the duration of its battery, which lasts about six years that when depleted may be replaced with a fresh one that will allow the vehicle to run for hundreds of kilometers," as explained by Santiago Perez.
The average cost of the car depends on its design and ranges between $4,000,000 and 6,000,000 pesos. Today, there are 20 test vehicles being manufactured that will be placed on the market by this group of young entrepreneurs.
Innovation from the classrooms
The project of the four engineers, members of the Design Engineering Research Group (GRID in Spanish), was developed in EAFIT shops. It became a business development strategy thanks to its recognition with the Capital Semilla award.
The proposal was regarded as innovative because of the land suitability of these vehicles to Medellin's topography, since many of the imported cars do not work well on steep roads, mountain roads and city roads in the region.
Thanks to the significance and usefulness of the project, as well as to the ability of its members to explain the idea, these young engineers won 15,000,000 pesos, which were invested in raw materials.
As stated by Ricardo Mejia Gutierrez, professor at the Department of Product Design Engineering who supported them in the process: "the whole platform to start generating new ideas with market potential has been implemented academically and research-wise."
Journalists’
Contact information
Marcela Olarte Melguizo
Journalist Information and Press Area
Telephone: 574 2619500 Ext. 9931 Mobile: 3113547204
Email:
molartem@eafit.edu.co