By Carrie Cox
The electric vehicle revolution and the possibilities of an autonomously driven future continue to power this pioneering UWA project
Fifteen years ago, Professor Thomas Bräunl and a group of UWA engineering students took on the task of converting a newly purchased Hyundai Getz into a fully electric vehicle. The project, as EV hobbyists were also discovering at the time, was surprisingly simple. “We were done within a few months,” Professor Bräunl recalls. “I remember thinking, ‘This is super-easy. All cars will be electric within two years!’”
It wasn’t just the ease of production that was clear; it was the by-now pressing need to move the transport sector away from fossil fuel dependence. Professor Bräunl couldn’t have imagined that 15 years down the track, not only was the take-up of EVs still a slow- moving beast in Australia but also that his little undertaking — the Renewable Energy Vehicle (REV) project — would have grown into a juggernaut: a wellspring of EV industry firsts, a source of advice to government and a transformative educational experience for hundreds of students.
Since REV began at UWA, projects have included the EV conversion of a Hyundai Getz, a Lotus Elise, two Formula-SAE race cars, 11 Ford Focus conversions as part of the WA Electric Vehicle Trial, establishing WA’s first EV charging network including Australia’s first CCS-type fast charging station, and building some of the world’s earliest electric watercraft.
The UWA-designed electric jet ski, launched in 2015, was only the second of its kind in the world.
“We did some of Australia’s first road-legal electric vehicle conversions based on lithium batteries back in 2008 and we were surprised how long it took the industry to adapt to this new technology,” says Professor Bräunl. “Fast-forward to 2023 and we are finally at the beginning of an EV boom that should lead to a fully electric vehicle fleet here towards the end of the 2030s.”
In countries such as Norway, which has been actively making it attractive to purchase electric vehicles since the 1990s, more than 80 per cent of the car market is already powered by batteries. While high demand for charging stations still presents some issues there, the nation’s electricity grid has not collapsed and greenhouse emissions have dropped by a third.
In Australia, Professor Bräunl says the only factors now stalling take-up are purchase price and the availability of charging stations. “The cars are still too expensive here as we haven’t been on the front foot with incentives and subsidies like other countries have,” he says. (Earlier this year, WA announced a Zero Emission Vehicle Rebate Scheme that will provide $3500 to eligible EV purchasers.) “And we’re only now rolling out the implementation of the WA charging grid.”
Associate Professor Doina Olaru, Head of the Department of Management and Organisations, UWA Business School.
While WA’s size and geography stymie the task of providing EV charging continuity, Professor Bräunl insists “it’s not impossible”. Indeed, in 2018 he and his team drafted the charging grid plan that is now being implemented around the State.
“But that’s just the first step of what needs to be a much bigger project,” he explains, “which is essentially greening the whole grid. More renewable energy sources will have to be added to the grid and large-scale storage facilities will have to be built. We have so much coastline here and so much wind and yet large-scale wind turbines are still a rarity in Australia.
Even without or before any wholesale shift to green energy, electric vehicle technology makes sense, Professor Bräunl argues. “Even if EVs were powered by fossil fuels, that’s better than having petrol cars,” he says. “Studies show more people die from vehicle emissions than from road accidents — it’s crazy not to do anything about that. Government subsidies for EVs would easily be offset by the savings in health costs.”
As the commercial vehicle market has finally started to catch up to EV pioneers like REV, Professor Bräunl’s team has expanded its focus to the next and much bigger challenge: autonomous driving. The team’s first project saw the autonomous conversions of a BMW X5 and of a Formula-SAE race car — the first in Australia and one of the first in the world — that was able to complete a fully driverless loop around a race track.
“While electric vehicle technology is simple, autonomous driving is in fact rocket science,” Professor Braunl explains. “It requires building a robot in the shape of a car with high-performance onboard computer systems and sensors — all very complex and expensive.”
“More renewable energy sources will have to be added to the grid and large-scale storage facilities will have to be built.”
Professor Thomas Bräunl
Complicating matters in a country like Australia are the bureaucratic speedbumps on the road to testing. “In Germany, car manufacturers can simply trial autonomous vehicles on the road at any time,” Professor Bräunl says, “while in the United States, there are just a couple of pages of paperwork to fill out. Here in Australia it took us three years and some $60,000 paid by sponsors for a full traffic analysis and management plan just to drive on a single suburban road.”
Barriers notwithstanding, Professor Bräunl appreciates the public’s broader safety concerns about driverless vehicles but insists that safety is in fact one of the most significant advantages of autonomous driving technology. “Over 90 per cent of vehicle accidents are due to driver error,” he says, “and while autonomous driving will not bring the road toll down to zero — there will still be a low number of accidents due to system failures — it will significantly reduce fatalities. Of course, closing up that last 0.01 per cent window of risk must be the goal.”
The other big advantage of autonomous driving technology is accessibility. “When it’s fully mainstream, and I think we’ll see that within the next five to 10 years, it will be of great benefit to so many people. It will mean cheaper, accessible individual transport for everybody — the elderly, the sick, basically anyone who can’t drive.”
One of REV’s most exciting recent projects was the engineering of a fully autonomous EV shuttle bus, dubbed ‘nUWAy’, purchased as a shell from Singapore. The bus is equipped with eight Lidar sensors to guide navigation and prevent collisions, two cameras, a GPS and an inertial measurement system. An independent hardware system monitors the vehicle’s movements and automatically stops or deviates the bus if anything comes too close.
While nUWAy-1 continues to transport students on campus, an identical second shuttle bus nUWAy-2 is currently being used for a three-year public road trial at Eglington in Perth’s north, taking passengers to and from Amberton Beach. It is the first autonomous vehicle road trial in WA using locally developed technology and delivers invaluable real-world experience for UWA students.
The REV team highlighting their work on the autonomous shuttle bus.
UWA’s Business School is also involved in the trial, investigating enablers and barriers for autonomous vehicle uptake. Associate Professor Doina Olaru, Head of Management and Organisations at the UWA Business School, says: “Student experience will increase through the participation in a unique work- integrated-learning experience where students from around campus will ‘operate’ the bus, as well as collect data on perceptions and attitudes as part of the research team.”
REV is also now working with the Queensland University of Technology, University of Sydney and other partners on a project to test and deploy automated vehicles in rural, regional and remote areas where more than 80 per cent of the nation’s public roads are located.
Indeed, while the past 15 years have literally sped by for Professor Bräunl’s team and the more than 300 students who have taken part in its many projects, the next 15 may hold the most exciting challenges of all, as Australia moves toward full EV conversion and autonomous driving applications across many industries.
Read the full issue of the Summer 2023 edition of Uniview [Accessible PDF 15Mb].