Renault LEGO Gearbox
LEGO has many uses. It teaches children fine and gross motor coordination, as well as creating stuff in three dimensions. It also teaches parents of children who play with LEGO not to walk around barefoot at night. This is the story of an adult who used LEGO to solve a crucial puzzle blocking hybrid cars.
In the olden days, explorers used to mark the unexplored bits of their maps with “Here be Dragons”, either to explain why it was not explored or to keep others away until they could get to it. For amateur car designers, the dragons are in the vague rectangle marked “gearbox”.
This lack of detail is a testament to the complexity of a car’s transmission. Most of us can draw an adequate plan of a cylinder head or camshaft, but how many can do a gearbox? Oh, you can? Great, now draw one for a hybrid engine please . . .
A decade ago Renault realised that electric would play a major part in the cars of the future. At that stage pure EVs were not practical because batteries were expensive and heavy and not very powerful and, to put it mildly, they lacked range. Hybrid cars, on the other hand, could combine the clunky battery of the day with a smaller ICE engine to provide a green car that was less than the sum of its parts. The disappointing early hybrids were like the early Wright brothers planes: although they did not work very well, they did provide a glimpse of the future for those with vision.
The future of hybrids was to find a way to allow driving only on battery, only on ICE or give the battery oomph to the ICE when needed. That was the vision of the future, but how to unlock it quickly and without breaking the bank?
To unlock the potential of that future, Nicolas Fremau, the Gearbox Specialist at Renault bought boxes and boxes of LEGO and spent the entire Christmas of 2010 cutting, screwing and glueing LEGO together to try and see if his back-of-the-envelope scribblings will work and to see what else it could achieve.
After several weeks, Fremau had created a LEGO prototype transmission that paired the ICE engine with the electric motors through a clutchless gearbox – the latter courtesy of Renault’s Formula 1 experience. Fremau’s innovation with LEGO allowed him to tinker and perfect his design at minimal cost. But the result became the world-beater technology we call E-TECH.
E-TECH allows you around 80% of urban driving on pure electricity, with the petrol engine kicking in when you need more power or have to go on a longer trip.
So next time your child asks for LEGO, get it for him or her. You don’t know what may come of it. Just remember to wear shoes at night. We will have more tales about the talented Fremau in our blog in the near future.
