What’s so stressful about Pikes
Peak is the power - all that energy coming
out of the battery pack, going through
the electronics, getting delivered to the
road through the motors, keeping
everything cool. It's just really
stressful. We think that that test
represents really the most that any of
our customers would ever do with their
car in the real world, and it's a great
development environment for our
engineers. “What things can
you do to make sure that we can get to
the top?” “Can we even do this?”
We’re putting out more average power I'm
sure than any of these purpose-built
racecars, because of the mass of the car.
Now we got a lot of really clever and
great IP [issued patent] and the battery pack,
specifically the coolant loop. We tweaked
all the models in the simulator to be
representative of our car. We ran that
through our really detailed powertrain
simulation, and so that gave us like a very
detailed map of what all the components
would be doing throughout the whole race.
Compared to the simulator we were very,
very close. We were within a matter of seconds.
We felt we’d be running against right
up to the thermal limits, but as it turns
out we've got a little bit of margin. And
so we feel pretty good about that.
Everybody involved in the project is
working directly on all the production
equipment. We ran production-intent
powertrain, production-intent software up
the hill. And so everything we developed
for the tests and validation goes
straight into the production program. When we
first started this project, we were
thinking of a lot of different ways of
modifying the systems so it’d perform
properly on different sections of the
course, depending on my driving style, and
also the amount of elevation gain and
things like that. Where it's in fact all
we've done is executed the stock system
to the best of our abilities. The big
turning point in there is developing the
improvements that we had planned for the
gamma phase of development. We were able to
accelerate that and use it as a testbed
for a lot of those ideas. Three corners
from the end of the race Robin had to
come to a stop and cycle power on the
car to reset it. What happened was a
software issue, and calibration that
was too conservative for the accelerator
pedal sensors - meant to detect an
accelerator pedal that was stuck. It's in the
culture of our company that our
engineers know: it's okay to fail, but
fail forward. Learn something from it.
Now that we have the data from the
car we can make changes to the calibration
and the feature itself to be more robust.
I think the most important thing we have
done with this project is open up the
battery limits. Working still in a
smaller start-up environment, everybody is
engaged and involved in doing the best
they can to help the car achieve that
next milestone. We've learned a lot. We
expect to learn more before we
ultimately deliver a better production
car to the customers. Definitely we can
take the momentum from this and apply it
to whatever the next big challenge is for
this car.
