Electric power

In Germany, the new experimental car, "Schluckspecht," broke previous world records earlier this month when it traveled 1,631.5 kilometers (994 miles) on a single battery charge.

Developed by researchers at the Offenburg University of Applied Sciences, the drive took just more than 36 hours, with four drivers taking shifts and traveling at about 45 kph.

Schluckspecht is a slang word meaning "guzzler," or "heavy drinker" in German.

"The first car we built was really a heavy drinker, we ran out of fuel before the finish line," Ulrich Hochberg, one of the project's leaders, told Deutsche Welle.

Shattering distance records

The team had considered changing the name – but after setting several world records, including by traveling 626.6 km on public roads in South Africa last year, "it's really become now a brand name," Hochberg chuckled.

The Offenburg team has been working on the "guzzler" since 1998.

The previous record for electric car travel on a single charge, on a circuit track, was 1,003 kilometers, set by the Japan Electric Vehicle Club in May last year.

The Schluckspecht record was made at the German industrial company Bosch's circuit track in Boxberg, southwestern Germany.

In October 2010, a German team drove an Audi A2 from Munich to Berlin on a single charge, setting a new long-distance record on actual roads.

Promoting electrical cars

The new electrical vehicle distance record comes at a time when the German government is pouring billions of euros into research and considering tax breaks for electrical car owners.

In May 2011, at a summit hosted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Berlin announced that it was aiming for one million electric vehicles on German roads by 2020, and would be doubling government spending on electric vehicle research to a total of 2 billion euros ($2.87 billion) by 2013.

With this new distance record, it seems possible that overcoming one of the major hurdles to widespread adoption of electric cars – their small range of 200-300 kilometers – may now attract Germans who are used to driving great distances on the autobahn at high speed before filling up again.

Earlier this year, both BMW and Volkswagen announced that they intend to sell their first electric cars in 2013. Meanwhile, eight regions around Germany are working on building 2,500 charging stations to support the 2,800 test vehicles.

Mass production

Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, an automobile economist at the University of Duisburg-Essen, told Deutsche Welle that he doesn't see the new world record as a great breakthrough.

"These are individual items, prototypes," he said of such research projects. "What we need is mass production, economies of scale," Dudenhöffer said, adding that big steps have been made in this regard, including by companies such as Nissan and Mitsubishi.

However, despite what he sees as the limited usefulness of such research projects, he thinks they could act as a stimulus.

Environmentalists criticize electric cars as still requiring a charge from energy sources that may involve the burning of fossil fuels.

Liquid fuel will always give a longer ride than a battery-powered car, Hochberg explains, since it takes oxygen from the air for combustion, returning it to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

To him, "the only sense is to use energy from renewable fuel sources" if Germany wants to fulfil its goal of putting one million electric cars on the road by 2020.

"This is a political figure, used to promote investment," he added.

Super light and aerodynamic

The Schluckspecht's success largely lies in its ultralight chassis, which replaces a base plate with a frame based on the bowstring concept, developed with the Fraunhofer Institute in Freiburg.

The vehicle, with a regular car seat for one driver, has motors integrated into the wheels. Without the need for an engine or transmission, the researchers were able to develop a particularly slim and aerodynamic shape.

There's even a little extra room for equipment, or as Hochberg put it: "You can put a case of beer into it."

Author: Sonya Angelica Diehn
Editor: Cyrus Farivar