Electric Vehicles

A lot of focus is going into Hybrid and All Electric Cars. Tesla being the most well known example though there are many other successful players in this market. However the Electric Aircraft or Electric Plane or E-Plane is moving along a bit slower.

E-Planes

At its core, the E-Plane is a harder design challenge. You have to address a lot of different issues at once and many are in direct contradiction with each other. A short list of top competing requirements is:

• weight versus range versus battery size
• safety
• cost
• compliance and regulation

So lets look at some examples of how it is going.

Siemen’s EFusion.

EADS E-Fan

Randall Fishman’s Electric-Powered Ultralight

Elektra One – D-MELN

LH-10 Ellipse

Airbus E fan

EnerDel

Pioneer Commercial Electric Plane: Yuneec E-430

And the latest kid on the block, SunFlyer.

So this looks like it still has a fair was to go before large scale commercial adoption is possible. However we have definitely reached the point where short range and ultralight E-Planes are both technically and financially ready for market.

Successful Endeavours specialise in Electronics Design and Embedded Software Development, focusing on products that are intended to be Made In Australia. Ray Keefe has developed market leading electronics products in Australia for more than 30 years. This post is Copyright © 2017 Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.