Why I still work for biscuits
We are the first generation to experience the effect of Global Warming, and the last generation to do something about it.
With this powerful statement, Hieke, partnership manager of student race team InMotion, opens the video below.
In 2012, I met a group of students who had the wild plan to build a racing car and compete in the 24 Hours of LeMans with it. Last Thursday, they presented a unique battery that is the world’s first to cool at cell level, allowing them to charge the battery in 3.56 minutes.
Let that sink in… 3 minutes and 56 seconds to fully charge a battery. That’s about the time it normally takes you to fill up with petrol. That’s why they don’t call it #FastCharging, but #ElectricRefueling.
The charging time of an electric car is still the main barrier, next to price, for many consumers not to switch to electric driving.
But there is more important news. When testing battery charging under the toughest simulations, 24 hours of consecutive charging and discharging on race simulation, it showed virtually no battery degradation. Fast charging, conventionally, is disastrous for the battery and shortens its life exponentially. But no more with the new battery; the implications are incalculable! Even beyond the automotive industry.
In 2018, after achieving the electric lap record at Zandvoort circuit, I wrote an article here titled: Why I sometimes work for biscuits. The bottom line was that working with and for a student racing team brings me so much more than money ever could.
I still fully support that!
The team consists of students who put their studies on hold, or off, for a year to dedicate themselves fully to the InMotion project and thus indirectly to a better world for future generations. That they do so by working on an electric LMP3 racing car in a semi-professional garage including office areas on the automotive campus in Helmond, of course helps 😉!
For students doing this in their own ‘work’, think electric and mechanical engineering, you can still easily explain it by pointing to work experience alone. But that is not the only and sometimes not even the most important reason.
But for team members dealing with policy, management, partner relations, finance, etc, etc, experience in their own work field may not be so obvious.
They too experience working for and with InMotion as an enrichment of their lives where they benefit far more than just the experience they bring to their future field of work.
It is therefore not surprising that many former team members continue to feel actively involved with the team in board positions, or just the weekly Wednesday evenings where the team is always present and former team leader drop in to discuss the progress of the project and provide guidance if needed.
Indeed, the very first idea was still a combustion engine that had to be more fuel efficient than a Volkswagen Polo, where the air leaving the engine had to be cleaner the air entering the engine and they also wanted to enable autonomous driving.
Over the years, the focus shifted, with great success to first electric racing and then charging, but not the end goal LeMans.
And still once every fortnight I go for coffee with chocolate chip cookies from Lidl to discuss with my marketing contact what we have done in the past weeks (evaluate) and look ahead to see what we can and should do.
Year on year, the team becomes more professional, key partners come along and also experience how ‘satisfying’ it is to work not for money for once, but for future generations.
So here’s the call! If you are or know a company that can contribute to InMotion’s mission, just donate as well, please show them the video. And even if you are just enthusiastic, please share the video and the message, because as the saying goes: you don’t know how a cow catches a hare.
With my current workplace MindYourPass, we might start helping them make their cybersecurity secure, who knows what you or your network can contribute. Because as team leader Julia defiantly says to the industry at the end of the video: We’re #ChargingAhead of the automotive industry as students, they only have to follow!
