Hacking late at night is something on the liking of engineers – you know, those guys who instinctively headed straight to the wall socket when they did their first steps. So were some engineers in Barcelona, Spain, who hacked a Nissan Leaf and made it go for 150 miles on a charge.
At the Nissan Technical Center, they worked for about six months during their free time. And they even made it compete with other eco-friendly cars in a contest called the ECOseries, where everything is about efficiency and fuel/energy economy.
The Spanish engineers doubled on the 24kWh Leaf battery, thus giving it the range envied by all the Leaf owners around the world.
The team won their first efficiency race. Senior engineer Dario Fernandez said that “We all have a real passion for what we do and being able to work on prototype projects gives us the creative freedom to be as innovative and forward-thinking as we possibly can.”
Increasing a gas engine’s power is something easily doable these days, and has been for as long as I can remember. However, working with electricity is farily easy and as more and more technicians (formerly called “mechanics”) learn how to handle electric car parts and learn how they work, cars like the Leaf or the Tesla range may get modded even more often.
I feel it’s the time for geeks hackers (aka “engineers”) to prevail in this realm. It time for those with a crush on physics or electronics or those with a passion for applied software to win races. It’s their future. Hacking high-power electronics late at night is not for the faint of heart.
