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Electric Car Bests Ferrari F550 In 0-60mph
Mind Mage writes: "It finally seems that electric cars are becoming worthy of consideration for performance automotive enthusiasts. Here's a link to an L.A. Times article describing AC Propulsion's new electric 'sports car.' The T-zero does 0-60 in 4.1 seconds and pulls .88G on skid pad tests. The manufacturer's web side has some Quick Time movies of the T-zero drag racing a Porsche 911-4, a Corvette, and the F550. I wonder how many 1/8 mile drag runs the T-zero can sustain before having to recharge the battery?" Electric car racing isn't new, but seems to be making faster strides than ye olde (and formidable) internal combustion engine.
NO.NO.NO.
You misunderstand. I don't want to REPLACE my engine. I want an ADDITIONAL 30hp.
I'm suggesting a motor that straps onto the driveshaft to assist the dinosaur burner. That way you jump from 170 to 200 for a somewhat average vehicle. No, it's not an incredible jump. But it would save a lot of that energy used to stop a vehicle into energy used to accelerate it. The main benefit is fuel economy, with some secondary performance enhancements to boot.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
NO.NO.NO.
You misunderstand. I don't want to REPLACE my engine. I want an ADDITIONAL 30hp.
I'm suggesting a motor that straps onto the driveshaft to assist the dinosaur burner. That way you jump from 170 to 200 for a somewhat average vehicle. No, it's not an incredible jump. But it would save a lot of that energy used to stop a vehicle into energy used to accelerate it. The main benefit is fuel economy, with some secondary performance enhancements to boot.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I stand corrected.
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Most of the people I see on the freeway commuting to work are also driving solo. Do you usually take your SO to work? As a motorcyclist for 25 years, I don't see this as less safe. On the plus side, the material is remarkably similar to helmets, so it functions as a full body helmet. On the downside, it can't handle as well as my motorcycle; but is much more visible. Price is modestly above that of a full dress motorcycle these days. "...few places for a few hours" any place with 110v sockets, which is just about everywhere in this country.
if i remember, standard sealed lead-acids are 98% recyclable.
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
Alpina B10 Bi-Turbo (modified BMW E34 5 series)
http://www.bmwm5.com
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Some circles like willfully ignorant circles. There are many reasons this is not true, most of them reducible to the phrase "economy of scale."
I'm not an expert in this field
Clearly.
For some reason, though, the major car companies are only pursuing electrics.
Not true. I happen to know firsthand of a GM effort to make fuel cells economically feasible by and storage of hydrogen safe and non-explosive.
Not that pursuing electric technologies is incompatible, either. The company in the above arrticle is selling the regenerative drivetrain technology. When you say "hydrogen powered," you probably mean fuel cell, which generates electricity. You then need an electric motor to send power to the wheels. If you had one of these drivetrains in it, you would get an electric drivetrain and regenerative braking in one.
Did you know that for every electric car Honda sells, they lose around $3,000? That's because it has 2 engines, one gas and one electric. Neato, eh?
Uh... Like I said, hydrogen fuel cell cars have two engines too.
Bingo Foo
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taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
I don't think $24k is reasonable for any car. Pay $1000 for a junker and run it into the ground.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Sheldon seems to be just another well meaning yet deluded fool in thinking that 'out-of-sight, out-of-mind' will suffice to allow Canadian citizens all manner of 'guilt free driving'.
too bad really, because the sooner we start taking this situation seriously, the sooner we can start solving the problems.
::I will not moderate my opinions for your stinking karma
Always keep in mind that you have to transport that energy from the generating station to the end user. The inefficiency in transmitting electricity long distances is truly staggering. This is especially true for older remote hydro-electric stations (dams), where over 95% of the energy is lost in transit. Meaning that 95% of the energy goes to heating 100s of miles of hydro cables and towers.
This all goes to say that you must generate many times more energy if it's generated 200 miles away than you would if it's generated 3 feet from the drive wheels.
Too bad nuclear scares the crap out of everybody, more reactors like the CANDU would make for way less polution. Want to get irradiated? Stand next to a coal plant and bask in the Carbon-14.
Read the article yourself. Read the website too.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Don't get too excited. All an electric car does is moves the power generation from the inside of your car to a powerplant outside your city, which probably produces more pollution by burning coal. Better car performance is cool, but this doesn't have any environmental benefits.
/., ten posers have to remind us that 'it doesn't have any environmental benefits.' Well, if the the damn NC Department of Education would adopt electric buses, I wouldn't have to choke every morning when the school bus comes to pick up my neighbor's child (anyone else here notice how buses are the dirtiest, nastiest vehicles on the roads next to logging trucks?). For me, that would be an 'environmental benefit.' Maybe we could have just the one stand of trees around the power plant in a city killed by noxious fumes instead of all of them.
Oh, shut the FUCK UP. Every time an electric car article comes up on
And how about noise, jackass. Every electric I've ever heard ran at a quiet hum, compared to the rattle put out by the average unmaintained fossil fuel spewing junk heap that most people drive around in.
And what about future possibilities? The future promise cheaper, more efficient PV cells that could be integrated into an electric car so that there will be an advantage to letting my PV covered vehicle sit in that hot parking lot all day. I may only get half a charge before quitting time, but it would be a free fill-up. How would a convential vehicle take advantage of all that 0-emissions sunlight?
So take your tired arguments and go find someone who hasn't heard it. Maybe they'll listen to you.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Recharge time is a killer. Want to drive cross country? That will take you a month. Drive 300 miles, plug in and wait overnight, repeat. Gasoline still has the advantage that you can refuel in minutes and be on your way.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
That's true - think about it: It's much better to have all of the pollution in LA, where it won't hurt anything, rather than having it bother the entire central region of the country (actually, the Rockies help out a lot with that - no, not the baseball team...).
I almost did a spit take when I actually SAW the car. You wonder why there isn't a buzz about it? Who's going to get excited about driving something that looks like a shopping cart?
Later,
ErikZ
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
I'd settle for a retro-fit electric motor that fit around my drive-shaft.
Maybe you should look here:
http://www.goodvibes.com/
;-)
The biggest problems come from the smaller (relatively) oil companies that do the actual exploration/drilling/etc. They are not large enough to be diversified, and they must keep the "oil dependency" in order to survive. Ask George W. about it.
I'm not a fan of large corporations, but the big guys are well aware of the limited supply, and are putting a lot of money into other systems/fuels. They win either way, and so they're relatively neutral in the fight. We need to watch out for the 2nd tier corporations and their buddies. They're less well known, and consequently are able to avoid public scrutiny, while they pay off politicians and buy barrelfulls of lobbyists.
A witty saying is worth nothing - Voltaire
My bad. Conversion power error when going from English to Metric units.
10k = 6m
1000k = 600m
That still fits Ron's def of reasonable, at least.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Yeah, until another dam is required, at which point another river is blocked and several more square miles of land are put underwater, etc
Hydro is nice and it doesn't pollute, but it has its drawbacks, make no mistake. Also, individual cars can still be more or less efficient in their use and storage of electricity (but wouldn't be as bad as gas)
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Vidi, Vici, Veni
I know it's not the purist's car, being a hybrid and all, but on the other hand, an Electric car's fuel is either smelly coal or dirty plutonium/uranium, for the most part.
Acceleration: Dunno, but it's probably reasonable ^^
Top speed: It'll do at least freeway speeds!
Good looking: Yes! It looks like a streamlined old school Honda Civic!
Reasonable range: Yes! 10.6 gallons, 60mpg == 600 m, ~100,000km range!)
Recharge time: Braking regenerative charging, as well as fuel assisted...
Reasonable price tag: Yes! $24k
Your 'only' tradeoff is that there is a gas tank, and that you get the 'burden' of having to visit the pump every 100,000km...
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
I can't think of any dams that have been built in BC in the last 20 years. I could be wrong I just don't kow any off the top of my head.
Hpwever I know of a couple that are currently or planning to install and upgrade their power generators to more efficiently produce power with existing resources.
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What will impress the layman is when you figure out a way to make the electric car appeal to babes. When women of loose morals and ample busts are turned on by the electric car, then Joe Sixpack will drool over it.
My Valkyrie Interstate runs plenty fast, is as comfortable as the livingroom couch, and will run for hundreds of thousands of miles without an engine rebuild.
Bring it on, Hayabusa Boy.
Air bag sensors are commodity items by now. Why couldn't a system be created to release the pressure quickly in a controlled manner in the event of an impact? Something along the lines of "In the case of sudden impact/sudden pressure drop blow the explosive bolts holding the top lid of the tank off, venting the contents straight up". This way the contents of the tank wouldn't be vented sideways into the occupants. :).... I guess you'd have to design it so the lids don't go flying off, but open on a very sturdy hinge.
(Watch out for lids punching holes in freeway overpases though
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Uh, your analogy has no bearing on cars whatsoever. A layman cannot drive a model airplane that accelerates faster than an F550. Nor would he want to I'm sure. Whenever you say "electric car" to the layman, they say "slow, ugly, tiny" because all incarnations of such cars had those exact characteristics. One problem has been nailed down(not that it wasn't possible before, it just wasn't a priority). Now it's possible for car enthusiasts to start gossiping and drooling over electric which is a first step: it gets publicity and attention.
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"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
This news is wonderful, however the oil companies will not like it one bit. You bet that Shell, BP, Texaco, Mobil and so on are all lobbying for various taxes to be imposed even as we speak, and considering all sorts of strategies to undermine the Electric car as a serious proposition.
You couldn't be more right. I heard that back when L.A. was just a town, the city board recognized that it would be a megatropolis in the future, and were deciding what to invest in: public transit systems (trams, trains, etc) or building lots of highways. There were oil tycoons on the board and other executive positions, so you can guess which one we got.
Now, we have 2 hour waits to drive 20 miles on the 405, and air quality went to shit (although it has improved dramatically of late, and we are now cleaner than a lot of other big cities.)
It's a damn shame that in this country, decisions are made base on lobbyers (sp?) and not based on whats right.
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python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Actually that's not true -- some if not all of these companies are starting to move in the direction of alternative energy sources already. Recent BP ads refer to the company not as "British Petroleum", but as "Beyond Petroleum", the implication being that the writing is on the wall, oil supplies are being exhausted, and they're preparing for a day when their major product will be Something Else. This is a Good Thing.
As noted repeatedly in this thread, by myself & others, this is a red herring. Pollution is displaced, yes, but it is displaced to a place where it is far easier to manage. There are a host of reasons why it's better to draw power from a centralized plant rather than millions of dirty little engines, and the sooner we can get to such a point, the better.
Maybe, I'm not sure. This is just speculation on my part, but my instinct is that the environment can probably as a rule better withstand a low level shock everywhere than an intense shock at certain localized points.
That is, if the level of say CO2 goes up everywhere by some small amount, say half a percent, then the global plant population can probably absorb that without too much trouble. On the other hand, if all of that is dumped into a 50% increase in, say, New Jersey, with basically no increase anywhere else, then I suspect New Jersey is basically screwed. (Anyone that has driven down the NJ Turnpike near Newark can verify this has already happened... :). If that point of acute damage to one place is then followed by a low level increase as in scenario one, the damaged area probably won't be able to handle the load as it would have otherwise.
But like I say, this is all speculation on my part, and I welcome sources that can back up or refute the hypothesis.
In any event, I don't think that would be a very big problem if electric cars were to catch on. The pollution is getting centralized, but probably not to the point that it would cause that much of a shock, especially considering previous points about power plant scrubbers and what have you. Given the choice between 150 million nasty gasoline cars and the same number of electic ones complemented with a few thousand power plants, I'd eagerly take the latter.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Electric cars are more energy efficient than gas ones. So even if the power plants that supply the electricity to charge the cars was just as inefficient than current gas powered cars, the net effect is still lower polution levels. But that doesnt even take into account the fact that larger power generators are much more efficient. I heard a statistic somewhere taht the real emmisions of an electric car are around 30% of a gas one.
got drum'n'bass?
http://mp3.com/vitriolix
The car itself weighs 2400lbs ... which while light, isn't a mind bogglingly low weight. The Honda S2000 weighs 2600lbs for example.
Having an engine that can't be shifted isn't exactly what I'd call an advantage, unless you think that your car would work better in 4th gear all the time.
The reason it IS so fast is the powerband of the electric motor. Unlike petrol based engines that have a nice rounded powerband, electric motors reach their peak torque quickly. Not only that, but they hold that torque across the powerband. The other reason is that the drivetrain is more efficient than what'd you find on a typical petrol powered car.
Compared to an equal sized car with similar "paper" numbers, this car IS amazingly fast. The closest thing you can probably come to it on paper is the S2000, which makes 200hp and only weighs 200lbs more. It reaches 60 nearly 2 seconds faster.
The fact that the car can only be driven 100 miles at 60mph is rather prominately stated on their website. It's not like they try and hide that fact from you.
Range: No EV is going to deliver great range. They don't need to either, because you can't recharge them in a reasonable amount of time (5 minutes). What does this mean? No cross country trips. So you're "stuck" driving it around town. How many people in this country actually drive more than 100 miles in a day, around town. You'll find that people who do WON'T be driving this car (real-estate agents, for example). As a person who drives a LOT every day, a 100 mile range isn't unreasonable.
People also need to stop thinking about electric cars compared to normal gas cars. Just because you can go 2 weeks without stopping by a gas station doesn't mean you need an EV to do the same.
0.88g on the skidpad is also rather respectable. It isn't very good compared to the F550, but it's right there with most other cars in the "sport" class.
The reason why this car is a big deal is that it helps eliminate the stereotype that electric cars are slugs. If you want an EV that can give a Diablo a run for it's money you can have one.
I can't think of any reason why the air compressor couldn't be running as I drive, perhaps using a generator running on the circular motion of something in the vehicle (what vehicle doesn't have circular motion of some kind?). Even if it reduced the "charge" capacity by 10% to give back 50%, isn't that okay? Superchargers have been drawing 5hp to produce 70 more for decades, and it's proven to be a good tradeoff.
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Slashdot: News For Zealots. Stuff That's Hypocritical.
Gimme Doc Brown's De Lorean and Mr. Fusion!
Live the Dream-- Drive Stainless!
"You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas"
Sen. Davy Crocket to US Congress, Nov. 1, 1835
Having worked for an independent oil and gas exploration and production company, I think I can comment on this. As it stands right now, new oil exploration and production and the US is an expensive pain. The current money is in natural gas. Improved 3-D seismic surveys and analysis have made it possible to find very productive pockets of gas. And since gas fired power plants are going up all over, the energy companies still get their money.
Now, whether the power generating capacity would be able to keep up if we added a bunch of electric cars into the mix is another issue...
A remote controlled car costing less than $200 with an eight volt battery will smoke your ugly Hayabusa in a 40 yd. race. That's because it only weighs 3 pounds.
So how many times has your dealer replaced your cam chain tensioner? Have you ever put soft bags on with an aftermarket exhaust, or are you afraid your sub-frame will collapse onto the rear wheel?
If you were anywhere near as cool as you thought you were, you'd be riding a CBR1100XX. Not as fast, but not nearly as ugly, either, and the maintenance schedule is a dream compared to your "Eye-Abuser."
Flame me if you must, but deep down you know you want a Blackbird.
As fast as it may accelerate, it still has a big problem. It's probably as ugly as the Pontiac Aztec, and gets blown around on the highway by Ford Expeditions. I'd be willing to be that just the exhaust from my '68 GTO would make this thing fall apart. Call me nuts, but there's nothing quite as satisfying as changing my oil, replacing spark plugs, etc. It'll be a sad day when gas-powered cars are no more. Very sad.
Yeah, nice thought.
Is it really true, or just an urban legend, that it's those $1k junkers commiting the top 70% of the pollution right now?
On the other hand, I guess it's your 'right' to say that the pollution of a $1k junker is worth $23k in value, since that's what you're going to 'buy' with the money you save on the junker...
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
If you think about it if they could compete with a gas car, the price of gas will lower thus causing the first gas/electric war in the history of the planet, this would help out especialy in places like California and other areas where there is power deregulation. Hmmm, yes if that ever works out the people who started power deregulation will become heros instead of fools.
It's funny how that works out don't you think ?
http://logd.programgeeks.net/referral.php?r=lordv
Yes, companies rate their engines based upon the engine's output, but when the horsepower of a car is given, it's in BHP, which includes the tranny and diff in the numbers.
So you'll buy one car for commuting and another car for everything else (e.g. big trips to the supermarket, driving to the airport with your luggage, taking your kids and their friends to a soccer game, etc)?
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And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
my goddamned chrysler K-car does .88 on the skidpad.
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Vaginux.
:::
Vaginux.
"eat me".
Apart from the greater efficiencies of power stations and the possibility of completely clean electricity generation, electric (also hybrid) cars don't waste fuel idling, and they often don't waste energy braking either, thanks to regenerative braking.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Sidenote: Diesel engines are actually more efficient than gasoline engines.
How exactly did this troll get marked "Insightful"?
Gas-electric hybrid cars surpassed pure IC cars for mpg efficiency about ten years ago. At this point, the ratio is probably around 5:1 in favor of g/e hybrids, even in the overweight commerical vehicles (the best are home built).
Head on over to Unique Mobility and look at the 4-wheel drive gas-electric Humvee they built for the military (not the consumer model, look at the pricy custom military job - tres cool!). You'll need a pdf reader.
It took 25 seconds to find these links:
Alternative Energy Engineering
Electro Automotive
Energy Conversion Devices, Inc.
Home Power Magazine
innEVations
Jerry Halstead's Car
Low Rolling Resistance Tires
Phoenix EAA
Unique Mobility
Wilde EVolutions catalog
Look no further than the April 2001 issue of Discover magazine. SUVs are not only much less safe than regular passenger cars in single-vehicle accidents, their design also promotes bad driving habits (driving too fast, turning too sharply) which can lead to increased risk of accidents occuring in the first place. Additionally, SUVs are certainly not safer for the people who are outside of them.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mind you, this is on dirt which is not where a snowmobile is supposed to be driven. Imagine that thing on snow?!
Offtopic, yes, but it would probably be slower in snow. I'd imagine that you would get better traction on dirt (esp. with a studded track, which I'm sure it had) and no more drag from the skis since they would still be a foot off the ground well past 60mph.
don't flame me, I know I'm an idiot
you have got to be kidding.
:)
:)
driveline losses for 2wd systems are typically 10-20%, most people just say 15%. if you dont beleive, me, go have your car dyno'd.
furthermore, the transmission/clutch assembly is not where all the losses occur, putting 30hp at the front of the driveshaft would still subject you to the losses of the driveshaft, coupllings, and more importantly the differential. Why do you think performance vehicles have temperature senders for differential fluids ? Because they turn some of your hard earned power into heat (and tiny metal filings
even in a perfect system, 30hp to the tires themselves would be a useless vehicle. even motorcycles deliver more power to the road.
this car is interesting because they're actually getting respectable performance out of it. im examining this site to see where they're "cheating". if they could make a 3500 pound electric vehicle that ran under 8 seconds for 0-60, seated 4, and had a 100mile range, then that'd be something. that'd be your average lame sedan. afaik, No one has made that car yet. once you start going to electrics, you need small, light, cheap, flimsy vehicles.
I'll never drive anything that looks/handles/performs like a geo metro just because it runs on batteries. They can't even make laptops run a long time on batteries
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
That would work, if you never wanted to get at the batteries after installing the interior. :)
The body on the car isn't there just to make it look like a car; it's covering the batteries too. They made a mention on their site about how that it isn't a pain to replace any of the batteries should it ever be required.
You can't hide all 1200lbs of that right at the wheels though, even if you tried. For what it's worth they distributed the batteries to produce something like a 45/55 weight ratio, if I recall correctly.
My current car pulls 0.87g's on the skidpad. It is definately enough force to throw you around the car through a turn.
I live in Uruguay, and about ten years ago some guy had a car that could do short ranges around 20-30 kilometers. All I can remember is that the principle that it used was fairly simple, but the guy didnt get any funding to develop the idea.
But even with that aside, electric cars themselves create quite a lot of polution. Electric cars are filled with batteries which contain highly toxic and dangerous pollutants (heavy metals). These batteries have to be replaced every 2-3 years, and are also prone to leak (significant even for small leaks). My understanding is that the single battery in current cars causes significant pollution already.
I would be very interested to see an impartial and complete rundown of the environmental impact of electric vs. gasoline cars. (Combined with stats on buses, trains, hybrids, bicycles, and other transportations would be even more interesting) Mostly I've just seen highly partial statistics, and statistics in regards to pollution seem particularly easily manipulated. Very possibly electric cars could be the most environmentally safe, but I'm not convinced of that yet.
Wow. Maybe the quad espresso was a bad idea before posting. Do you have an argument here, or are you just screaming?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
No, they're extras are not free - you just don't notice their impact. Who would notice even 10% worse gas milage? When the gets empty, we fill it up.
Very likely they wouldn't be noticed on an electric, as long as it has a decent range. When the cells run try, we'll charge 'em up and not think that we went 10 kms less between charges.
Don't get too excited. All an electric car does is moves the power generation from the inside of your car to a powerplant outside your city, which probably produces more pollution by burning coal. Better car performance is cool, but this doesn't have any environmental benefits.
Please don't spread completely incorrect assumptions like this around here. You're wrong. Let's say you have a 100MW coal-fired generating station. The average output of a good-sized car engine is about 200kW or so (that might be a little bit on the high side). If you think that 500 large car engines running flat out are a better bet than a properly running plant with a turbine, I have a bridge to sell you. Not only from an emissions standpoint - but there's lubricants, replacement parts, lifetimes - that plant is probably good for 50 years - how many 1950's engines you going to run flat out for 50 years? This translates into bigtime savings in emissions and environmental pollution elsewhere. And that's coal - some of the messiest. There's lots of surplus hydro power in Canada - but you gotta get it from us Canucks. Keep suckin back the juice so my taxes will go down! :)
ELECTRIC CARS HAVE LOTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS. The problem is getting a battery technology that lasts long enough to be cost effective, or getting fuel cells to have the outputs required to make them cost effective. A properly designed electric motor will run as long as it's OWNER if it's kept within it's temperature specs - and you can overclock motors, too :) - compare that with your average ICE GM product.
I suppose you drive a SUV and think it's safer, too. (Sorry, couldn't resist. That was uncalled for :).
..don't panic
I hope not either, because you're not entirely correct. Moving to electric vehicles does have the problem of simply displacing the pollution to a centralized point, but generally that plant is going to be cleaner than personal vehicles could ever be. Even if it is a coal plant, there will be scrubbers that do a better job of cleaning up the by-products than can generally be done on cars.
When moving to electric vehicles & centralized power production, economies of scale are on your side. The dirtiest engines today are, perhaps surprisingly, the smallest ones out there: lawnmowers. People don't tend to think about how much air pollution the Lawn Boy makes, but they're really nasty. For a lot of reasons, larger engines tend to be more fuel efficient, cleaner burning, and more economical overall. We stand a lot to gain by moving as far in that direction as possible.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Another reason why the enthusiast might shy away from electric cars: "trick-out" ability. One of the biggest trends in the auto industry right now is the "Sport Compact" market. Young buyers who want a fire-breathing, ass-hauling machine, but do not have a lot of cash to spend are turning to automobiles such as the Honda Civic or the VW Golf. They have singly handedly created a huge market of aftermarket parts for small, light, inexpensive cars such as these. I could conceivibly go out and buy a VW Golf with a 1.8 Turbo in it, spend about six grand on parts (chip, coilover suspension, anti-roll bars, intake and exhaust), and keep up with if not beat cars that cost twice as much as the finished price. Yes, with a electric or hybird car it is just as easy to modify the suspension, and possibly brakes, and maybe a few other things, but the engine is the problem. You can't just slap a intake and exhaust system on and magically have 15 more horses under the hood. The gasoline engine is remarkably simple to modify, even with all the new fangled electronic control systems. Enthusiasts (such as myself) will pop the hood on a electric or hybrid electric and say to his/herself "What the hell do I do with this?" So what if this thing can beat a 550 or a 911 Carrera-4 (911 Turbo is where it's at, anyway), what is the use if you can't get your hands dirty.
.88 on the skid pad really aint THAT great. If you look at the specs on the 550 and the 911, they are pulling mid to high .9s.
Also, just as a side note,
Anyway, how about that new WRX? SWEET!
Eric
Make it idiot-proof and someone will build a better idiot.
However, electric transmission and storage is still grossly inefficient. Unless your electric power comes from nuclear or hydroelectric, it is probably dirtier for the environment to power cars electrically than with gasoline. There is another choice, however, alcohol burns cleaner, is a renewable energy source, and it's production takes carbon out of the atmosphere unlike burning fossil fuels. It is relatively easy to retrofit gasoline powered cars to run on either ethanol or methanol.
Electric cars also require large amounts of batteries, which are made of toxic materials. Manufacture of electric cars is probably a net negative for the environment as long as we don't have a clean battery technology.
As for converting electric production to sustainable alternatives, the tree-huggers need to rethink their positions on nuclear power.
Electric cars are held back by a few huge factors. Environmentally, they require batteries and huge amounts of energy to recharge them. They are not capable of long distances, and recharge times are long.
h tml.
If I had to bet on a new "green" car, it would be the e.Volution. Sorry name, but a great product. Take known principles of internal combustion engines and use compressed air to cause expansion rather than explosive fuel. Plus, it's not vaporware, and the people pushing the car are *against* having distribution channels and whatnot. Check out their website at http://www.zeropollution.com/zeropollution/index.
The real problem is how many miles you can go on your battery. 120 - 130 (Which seems to be about average currently) miles isn't enough for many commuters.
As for the issue of moving the pollution elsewhere, if you'd freaking let them build a nuclear reactor in your back yard it wouldn't be a problem, would it? All that ecowhining and they still won't allow the most pollution free plants in their areas. The breeder plants don't even generate much nuclear waste.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
A skidpad test isn't a measure of how quickly it breaks -- they will provide a braking distance from 60-0 (or 70-0) if they want to demonstrate that. The skidpad is a measure of how hard the car can throw you against the door in a turn.
For example, the car grips the road enough to produce pull 0.88g's in a turn.
It's very VERY rare to that number at/above 1g.
You forgot to mention that the filters at power plants can be larger and more complicated.
That isn't street legal, pal. Sorry to burst your bubble. It's also not really a civic, as all the things that made it a practical, usable, economy car were discarded in the name of being "fast" -- and it will still get toasted by a big-block V8 with a turbocharger strapped to it.
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I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
it merely moves the pollution elsewhere, in this case to power stations and the venting that takes place there
A common argument. But what you fail to realize is that power stations are very energy efficient when compared to cars. Just in terms of the added efficiency benefits, it's worth it. That's not even taking into account all the time, energy and money drilling for oil, refining it, transporting to every station in the world, pumping it, and on and on.
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"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
There's always the theory that lots of small polluters are better/worse than a singe massive pollutor. Six of one, half a dozen of another.
But that's not the issue. The issue is that the automobile manufactures advertise fuel efficency as often as the number of sterio speakers. They will say X miles/gallon only if it happens to be good. A power company is different. They sell massive amounts of power while promoting efficency to reduce costs.
In another words, it's in the best interests for the power companies to be efficient, but not the auto manufacturers who don't buy your fuel.
Second, there is mention in the above web page about the idea of recharging during off-peak times and selling stored energy back to the power-grid during peak times. This means that this car could reduce the brownouts instead of making it worse.
I think that is very exciting.
Ozwald
and when you're an atheist, these things matter
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Vidi, Vici, Veni
Now, range is important in a gasoline powered car. Why? Because it's the only thing on the market right now. (Hybrids are fancy gas cars, IMO, and GM doesn't even lease EV1s any more.) If I need to drive 300-500 Km I will do it in a gas car. For me this is quite often actually as I have a friend that I like to visit on weekends that lives 300 Km away.
My daily driving habits are different, though. I rarely, if ever, drive more than 70 Km (43 miles) in a single day on a workday. Average is more like 35 Km. For this, an electric car with lead-acid or better batteries is more than sufficient. As long as it can recharge overnight that's all I need. Pull the car into the garage when I get home from work, plug in the charger, unplug it before I leave in the morning, no big deal. Easier than having to watch a gas gauge and having to decide if I'm low enough on gas to justify time spent filling up and coordinating the gauge reading with my distance from the cheapest gas station.
I think with the present technology the optimum combination is a gas car for long trips and an electric car for commuting. Unfortunately the car co's marketing depts think consumers are too stupid to see things this way. Maybe they are. *sigh*.
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http://www.e.volution.co.za/
And even these are more efficient that current combustion engines. Why? Becuase they can be run at their spec performance, full throttle. And then turned off when they aren't in use.
An engine is least efficient at idle and part throttle, so if you eliminate those modes you get a much more efficient engine. You also get a more efficient engine by running it at 'spec'. Spec is the rpm where everything in the car is running at its most efficient level.
This same technique helped a rather ordinary Chevy Metro get over 115mph.
This is also why power plants are less poluting than automobiles, and I won't even get into scrubbers and other polution reducing systems that just aren't feasable on cars but very feasable on huge power plants.
And transporting electricity isn't as inefficient as you many would lead you to believe. It is very inefficient to power the trucks carrying gasoline, and store it in cities where land prices are very expensive anyway. As it turns out (funny enough) even in the So Cal gas crunch, cents per mile is 3/4 for a electric car for a simularly weighted gasoline car.
That's not to say that hydroelectric power doesnt have its own problems. As a resident of Vermont, most of my power comes from Quebec Hydro. The problem is, that dammed up water creates a buildup of mercury into the ground and water supplies, which is poisonous.
Paizurishitetai desu ka?
Actually i think the main problem is that the oil companies really don't like alternate fuels. They seem to buy up most of the research into that field, which could explain why its going so slow.
The reason most companies are persuing electrics right now is that fuel cells are still WAAY to expensive to mass produce. There have been some sinificant advances in fuel cell technology over the last decade, bringing the price down from millions per unit to maybe a quarter million dollars. However, I don't see Ford selling many cars at $250k a pop. The price has to get down to $50k before you can even think about making cars based off of it; the only reason you can get away with that price in the mass market is if the car will last 10 years and cost you pennies to maintain.
Insight: 2 engines. Duh. That's why it's called a hybrid. It's actually quite a good idea, and I personally think it'll be the next "wave" of vehicles we'll see on our roads. It has none of the problems associated with a fully electric vehicle, but is 2x more efficient than anything else out there.
Honda is losing money on those cars because the batteries are EXPENSIVE, and they wanted to sell the car at a price people would actually buy it at. For them, it's a technology demonstration...a proof of concept -- a "we were the first, all your base are belong to us" type move.
If money is no concern, this is possible. Solar cells are expensive and inefficient, so it would take quite a lot to make a difference. Having a solar/wind charging system at home, keeping a set of storage batteries fully charged, would be nice. You could plug in and dump a bunch of volts into your car in a short time. You could easily go many miles, just not many miles from home. Don't get the wrong idea! I believe electric cars are great for local commuting. If you want to go farther than 100 miles from home, use a gas car. Most folks would only use the gas car a couple of times per months.
Ever heard of a thing called "rotational inertia?" You see, the spinning wheels are what keeps the bike upright. The faster they spin, the more they want to stay upright. That's why two wheeled vehicles fall over when they stop. The whole "pebble at a hundred miles an hour" thing is the product of non-analytical thinking.
This company could amke the best car in the world, but I'm willing to bet that if it IS that good, and it IS that revolutionary, the big automakers will squash it. Remember the Tucker...?
I agree it would be interesting to see a total over-all environmental impact comparison.
The polution from the batteries depends largely on what type they are. Lithium Ion are quite nasty, NiCad a little less and NiMH less still. The good thing is that batteries can be recycled - gas can't.
Batteries have come a long, long way in the last while. Capacities increase while weight and size decrease. It's especially obvious with electric remote control aircraft where they're put through some tough use. High current 2400MaH NiCads that weight 2oz in a sub-C package are common, as are 3000MaH NiMH cells.
"overtake petrol based cars in terms of miles/gallon " ... using the PEF (petroleum equivalency factor) adopted by the US federal government in june 2000, my corbin sparrow gets over 500mpg (160watts/mile plugged into their formula). The "lameless filter" barfed on the details. See http://www.ott.doe.gov/legislation.shtml#rules
Before I found that site, I'd worked out the following from various web sources:1 US gal of gas (unclear octane rating) 125,000 BTU;`1 kWh 3,413 BTU Thus yielding 36.64 kWh/gal.
Which allowing some generous rounding up to 200watts per mile, yielded a somewhat more conservative 180mpg.
Using today's electric rates and gas prices, it's more like 100mpg if we use a $ for $ comparison.
How much better does it have to be?
The same person who's got enough money to have a porche for every day of the week. Let's face it, a car like this isn't meant to be something you drive around town day in and day out.
Bikes can be fast. Bikes are usually a lot cheaper than cars. Hell, if you get something like a Ninja you can roast most anything on the road. But you have to like bikes. And you have to be willing to tolerate the extra hazard of driving one -- the extra hazard being severe injury/death in a highway accident. You also have to be willing to tolerate the loss of creature comforts a car provides.
For example, us drivers in hydroelectric rich British Columbia (Motto: Keeping California's Lights Burning) would be able to enjoy guilt-free driving right now.
I'm proponent of alternative engergy sources, and high performance automobiles.
Efficiency is certainly an issue, but electric cars do just move polution from the roadways to the power plants.
In the example you provided--hydroelectic power plant--is definatley a low polution power plant. However, it is not without serious consequences.
If you don't beleive me, try to go salmon fishing on the Columbia River. Sockeye salmon have been on the endangered species list for almost 10 years. Steelhead for the past few. Why would, over the course of only 50 years or so, the Columbia river go from being one of the biggest sources of Salmon to having hardly any? You're so-called guilt free hydro-electic dams.
The only low-impact electric power plants are Wind and Solar, to varring degrees. Niether of which are providing the amount of power that hydroelectrical plants are. So if you are advocating electric cars, you're advocating coal plants, killing salmon and nuclear plants. Suddently doesn't sound like a great idea anymore.
well...duh! What'd you expect from slashdot?
Blar.
Does that concept even apply here though? What are you saying -- the amount of lead acid burned for every certain number of miles? God I hope that's a small number -- way smaller than gasoline consumption, 1000x times better even.
It's a problem of comparing the proverbial apples & oranges. What's needed are metrics that are more generally applicable. Perhaps a measure of energy units (joules?) consumed per unit distance, with maybe a local & global factorization that accounts for how much the vehicle itself consumes (the gas tank, the battery, etc) and how much went into supplying the vehicle (the oil refinery, the power plant, transportation costs, etc). Only then can reasonable comparisons be made.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Having an engine that can't be shifted isn't exactly what I'd call an advantage, unless you think that your car would work better in 4th gear all the time.
... which while light, isn't a mind bogglingly low weight. The Honda S2000 weighs 2600lbs for example
No, but on a 0-60 test, not having to shift saves noticeable amounts of time.
The car itself weighs 2400lbs
You're right, it's not. My bad. I couldn't find a weight on the car listed anywhere.
0.88g on the skidpad is also rather respectable. It isn't very good compared to the F550, but it's right there with most other cars in the "sport" class.
I still say it sucks. They are charging more than a Porsche for a kit car. Looking at my most recent R&T other cars in its class:
Acura NSX 0.92g
BMW M3 0.91g
BMW Z8 0.92g
Corvette Z06 1.0g
Corvette C05 Convertible 0.92g
Dodge Viper 0.98g
Ferrari F355 Spider 0.93g
Ford SVT Mustang Cobra R 0.99g
Honda S2000 0.90g
Lamborghini Diablo 6.0 0.99g
Lotus Esprit V8 0.90g
Mazda Miata 0.92g
Panoz Esperante 0.92g
Porsche 911 Turbo 0.96g
Toyota MR2 Spider 0.91
Granted, skid pad ratings are hard to compare...but it still isn't anywhere close to other cars in its price class. It isn't even close to cars that are in one-quarter its price class (Toyota MR2 and Mazda Miata).
Please tell me this is a joke.
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
If the car can do 0-60 in 4.1 seconds, that's enough power. I think it would be really cool to be able to do that quietly without using gas. Just make the car look cool and there'd be no image problem as far as I'm concerned.
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Vidi, Vici, Veni
Car engines are typically 30-35% efficient (which is why they need radiators and an exhaust subsystem). It's not hard for a large steam turbine to beat that, even if you lose 20% in the grid and another 20% of the remaining power in your car batteries.
It's very easy to make electric motors that are >90% efficient.
I'd settle for a retro-fit electric motor that fit around my drive-shaft. Control from the brake could provide regenerative braking, and return extra excelleration at startup. The electric motor could run till the cells are nearly depleted, and leave the rest to the old dinosour burner. Solar cells could provide additional energy, though charge times would require all day to get an apprecialbe amount of energy. This would give a large portion of the benefits of EV, at a fraction of the cost.
How feasible would it be to add a 30HP electric motor to the driveshaft (basically, convert the drive shaft into a rotor), and throw in a few batteries to capture braking energy? Rotational speed of the driveshaft is a factor, I know, but I believe that can be compensated for.
Note: 30HP on the driveshaft would equal much more than 30HP as advertised by most car companies. Companies generally rate their engines at the engines output, and not the transmissions. Putting 30HP directly into the driveshaft avoids losses through the transmission.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Where do you think hydrogen comes from? Ok, it comes from water, but it takes power to extract it, a little more than you are going to get back when you use the hydrogen in a fuel cell, or a LOT more than you'll get back if you fuel an engine with hydrogen. Hydrogen cars would put the same load on the power plants as electric cars do. Plus which the idea of some dolt hotdogging down the freeway with half his SUV occupied by a tank of highly compressed hydrogen bothers me for some reason...
For fixed installations (power plants, heating, etc.), hydrogen does have some theoretical advantages. You could generate it from solar energy in Arizona and pipe it to places where there isn't enough sunshine to make solar worthwhile. That's assuming that someday we'll be able to make solar panels that are (1) cost effective, and (2) don't create more pollution in their manufacture and recycling than a well-filtered coal-fire power plant would. But hydrogen in mobile applications is nuts.
Somebody hurry up and invent Mr Fusion!
You're using her as bait, Master!
Range - I drive ~55 miles to work; i drive ~25 miles to see my girlfriend; i drive ~35 miles to see family members.
Recharge time - If i go to one of the above mentioned places, i may not want to spend the night (excluding my gfs, that is). I also doubt my employer would want me sucking all that electricity down that he's paying for so i can go home. Also, as of right now, no gas stations are setup for this. In order for this to be widespread, it has to be available at any gas station. But to be available at any gas station, this needs to be widespread. so without some kind of legislation to force gas companies to sell both (and gee, i think they might fight that), i don't see how its going to happen.
Here's the thing, though: an electric car could have fantastic skid pad numbers, as you can put all the drivetrain weight right at the wheels, as low as you want, plus you can mount the batteries right on the floorboard. The net effect is that you can put the center of gravity, and hence the instant roll-center of the suspension incredibly low, without getting the "jacking" that you get with internal combustion engines' higher positioning.
Nonperiodic Central Trajectory
> In the example you provided--hydroelectic power
> plant--is definatley a low polution power
> plant. However, it is not without serious
> consequences.
Absolutely.
> So if you are advocating electric cars,
> you're advocating coal plants, killing salmon
> and nuclear plants. Suddently doesn't
> sound like a great idea anymore.
No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying electric cars are better than the alternatives, especially when combined with less damaging forms of power generation.
Oil spills kill those same salmon, even those that receive less memorable attention then the Exxon Valdeez.
Those same salmon are also extremely sensitive to fluctuations in temperature when young, and guess what the greenhouse gases causing by internal combustion engines are doing? Yup, almost litterally cooking them in their own streams.
Nobody should be using coal any more, for anything. The effects are just too damaging. Heck, those things give off more ambient radiation than a true nuclear plant (Carbon-14).
Sorry,
But many of your points (but not all) are flawed.
My BSME Thesis project was a city transit bus fuel economy study, so I think I know what I'm talking about. Big diesel engines are the most fuel efficient engines on the road (best power to fuel consumption ratio). Yes, of course big engines spew more pollution than small ones, but what you're not taking into account is the pollution per person. There's a reason why 40 people can fit on a bus.
To make your comparison fair, compare the pollution created by a single bus with 30-40 average commuter vehicles.
All powertrains are a comprimise. In the USA, our EPA doesn't like the particulate matter pollution created by Diesel engines, while in Europe, Governments don't mind a little particulate matter because they feel that NOx and HCs are bigger problems.
The idea that electric vehicles can be bigger polluters is no hoax. If coal is burned to power the generators that charge car batteries, you can be sure that it would be a problem in countries that don't have stringent air quality standards. In Europe, the situation is much more complicated, because you could be pulling power off of the grid from any country at a given time. Maybe your electric car is being powered by Windmills in Holland, Nuclear Power Plants in France, or Coal burning plants in Italy.
The bottom line is ALL powertrains are polluters if you count the pollution created during the manufacturing process, disposal, or daily operation.
The selection of a powertrain is a complicated comprimise between performance, drivability, noise/NVH (you had a valid point), complexity, various pollutions, profit, logistics, and sale price. Fuel Cells, Flywheels, ultra capacitors, and batteries could prove to be the next big-big thing, but unfortunately each needs to improve it's performance/cost ratio.
Your rant shows you care, but unfortunately the world isn't that simple.
I think nuclear is the way to go. We already have 1000's of safe disposal units that can handle highly radioactive waste -- rusting coldwar ICBM's.
The difference in being cleaner is that thousands of electric cars have their energy produced at one giant electric company whose generator can be made as efficient as possible using the $ from these thousands of cars. Compare this to each person having their own generator, which they have to carry around, and are not able to be as efficient due to space, weight, and monetary constraints. That is the difference.
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I would think the only comparison that mattered would be the owner's cost per mile. That would vary depending on the cost of gasoline and electricity in the area under consideration. I guess the cost of the vehicle should be considered in the equation, as well as annual maintenance.
Actually, hydroelectric dams produce lots of pollution, in the form of methane (a greenhouse gas) produced when vegetation washed into the stagnant dam water rots. See a blurb about this here. The report was produced by the World Comission on Dams, and I think this graphic does an admirable job of illustrating some of the pluses and minuses of hydroelectric energy. It's not perfectly clean, although it certainly has advantages.
1. Yes, it does. So does building cities, roads, factories for computers, laying cable for networks to read Slashdot, etc.
The benefit of hydroelectric power is that the damage is localized so at least the ecology can try to adapt around it. Polution from power plants like gas and coal are everywhere and it's systemic, there's no escaping it.
2. I believe The Three Gorges dam will cause the earth to wobble a bit differently, it's just that big. But tell me how the shifting of the techtonic plates, ocean tides and artic ice flows aren't already causing a wobble.
The less impact we have the better. Unfortunately, most of the populus of the world doesn't seem to care at the moment.
In the end, it looks like electromagnetism has the ability to produce more instantaneous force than ye olde combustion engine.
Well DUH... Have you fallen off the stupid bus or were you just trying to troll?
The AC induction motor has an extraordinarly steep (almost vertical) speed-torque curve when it's near full speed. Now take into account that variable frequency drives (VFDs) keep the Volts/Hertz ratio in check at all times and you find that the AC induction motor, when being driven by a VFD, is "always" at full speed and is therefore always capable of delivering rated torque. An internal combustion engine can't even come close to this kind of performance.
The speed/torque curve of most internal combustion engines looks like an upside-down 'u' -- i.e. your maximum torque is somewhere in the middle of its speed range. You need gearing to keep the engine in this maximum torque range or you're just wasting fuel and heating things up. They are also mechanically complex and require more maintenance compared to an AC induction motor. Internal combustion engines burn gasoline which has one of the highest energy densities of any available consumer fuel around which is why they're everywhere.
Inverters (variable frequency drives) are solid-state, capable of regenerating the energy from the motor slowing down to brake and are relatively efficient so long as you don't mind a bit of a whine from the IGBTs or FETs switching. An AC induction motor is extraordinarily efficient (the shitty little 3HP one (which could probably fling my little Jeep around at a good clip) sitting beside me here is 87% efficient. What's the most efficient readily-available internal combustion engine? 50%? 60%?
The AC induction motor is simply amazing from almost every perspective. No brushes, almost zero maintenance (greasing only really), great efficiency and decent size/power ratios. Electromagnetism has always been way more capable than the internal combustion engine when it comes to producing instantaneous force. It's only recently that battery and hybrid technology has been developed to take advantage of them in automotive use.
Or perhaps the frequency of refueling, and the cost to do so. Perhaps 'average cost/month to refuel' would be a good measure (assuming of course, the same distances).
This is especially true for older remote hydro-electric stations (dams), where over 95% of the energy is lost in transit. Meaning that 95% of the energy goes to heating 100s of miles of hydro cables and towers.
Transmission line losses are NOT 95%. What are you smoking? The figures I've heard bantered about are more like 5-10%. You are incorrect, and I don't want to see this modded up.
Not to commit the same crime, my Standard Handbook for Electrical Engineers (13th edition) quotes the figure at about 8% of the total output of a large power system. (18-107). PLEASE think before you post such a completely ignorant figure in the future, and I really hope the moderators don't mod that up, because it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Centralized power distribution is the most efficient way to generate power. Period. Yes, it makes a mess in the location you do it in (coal, dam, whatever). Welcome to the price of a modern society.
..don't panic
Ouch. First of all, if Norway and Canada are going to suffer the effects of increased pollution cross-border, not only 'obscure' plants and animals will be affected. The 'lives of millions' will also be worsened by respiratory problems, a damaged environment (ever seen an acid lake?) and many other toxins.
I'm assuming that you spent your childhood in the city or the suburbs, never got or took the chance to go out and be in the real outdoors. Many who grew up with different philosophies disagree with yours, and have many valid points. There's no fundamental reason that both people and nature can't coexist except perhaps for laziness and fear of change.
Wah!
More importantly, the the power is produced in centralized locations. This means if the power plants become 5% more efficient all of the EXISTING vehicles create less polution. Not to mention that as more power plants shift away from nasty sources of energy like coal, every electric cars on the road will become truely polution-free almost overnight.
It seems that everything is going client-server these days, eh?
Bad geek joke, I know. But this really is the power of an architecture manifesting in another area. Put too much into the client (the car), and it's harder to undo later.
For OO geeks, that means that there is now an abstraction layer between the car and the...ah, never mind... =)
Now, I know the original poster meant hybrid cars and even then, we should compare the usage in power consumption, since you can convert the power usage of a fuel car into kWh. (1 kW = 0.75533 HP if I recall well)
A lesser known point is that electric cars do use fuel for the heating system. Why? Because the strain of the heating would drain the batteries in no time. The Peugeot 106 Electrique does at least, tough it is not mentioned in the datasheet (I tried to link it directly, but it didn't work). I don't know for sure for other electric cars.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Old wives tale.
Remember the LA Subway? I remember a good piece on why it was doomed to fail but I can't find it. If you look it up you will find a chart of population density where public transportation becomes feasable.
Basicaly becuase public transportation is slowed down by the amount of stops it makes, it isn't feasable until there is a certain population density. That is why mass transit in Tokyo, Chicago and Tokyo is successful and why the LA subway will never be built.
In the mean time there is a trend toward "Smart Development" in So. Cal. It is essentialy a more urban development, forcing development to be more dense. It relieves pressure on freeways, land development, etc... You need the right infrastructure to make mass transit work, not the other way around.
Meanwhile people still see government as a self serving titan, rather than a screaming playground where someone forgot to bring the ball.
Another reason, which I'll mention here even though it's already been mentioned several times on this topic, is that this kind of car really doesn't offer any environmental benefit. Sure, the car spits out air instead of exhaust, but you need a generator to power the air compressor that refills it, so where does that electricity come from?
The only "alternative" fuel powered cars that produce zero total emissions are solar powered cars, which are pretty useless in most parts of the world, and even then are very weather dependant. Batteries, compressed air, fuel cells, all of these solutions produce secondary emissions, and so can't really be considered environmentally friendly.
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www.scorbett.ca
Also don't forget that it only has one gear ratio, the ferrari probably has 6 to choose from. The ferrari realy, has an advantage in that area, even if it does have to shit.
If you wanted to make things fair, I guess you could dump some lead in the ferrari, and start it in 3rd.
Still, I guess that dosn't change the fact that it can only get 100 miles (which is that bad really) per charge.
> Geothermal, like wind power is limited in power Tell that to Iceland, where every house is heated by geothermal power.
Where did you get the $80k figure for the car?
Recycle?! Bah, just ship the nuclear waste up to the moon and store it there. Sheesh. All you'd need is some kind of base up there to monitor all the nuclear waste. Heck you could use the base for research too. That'd be cool too. Our first moonbase. We could call it Alpha, for first, huh?
Alan!!
I can see the bumper sticker now:
Save the baby salmon, don't drive electric cars in BC!
Forgive me then, my standard reference texts and EE degree are worthless and I obviously bow down to the l33t knowledge of the "Natual Library" books. How stupid am I to go to my reference shelf!
You're being incredibly dense and ignorant. Power losses have been low ever since people figured out Ohm's law and that heating is a function of current, and that's why transmission lines run at 100's of kilovolts at low amperages - so you don't heat the lines up an lose power through thermal inefficiency. I have no idea about the turbine losses, but I can look those up, too. The actual transmission line losses factor in about 8%, which is more than acceptable, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation - electricity would cost too much.
100's of miles isn't actually that much loss, please read some basic physics and electric theory and you can figure out why.
..don't panic
Well, using their figure of 1 hour at 240VAC@100A, which is 24 kwh, and my local (British Columbia) electricity cost of $0.06/kwh, that comes to $1.44 per 100 miles.
With gas prices at $0.80 a LITRE here (roughly 4L to the gallon), and a super-efficient 56mpg car, that translates to close to $6.40 per 100 miles.
Assuming you commute to work and put roughly 10,000 miles a year on your car, that works out to about $500 per year.
Assuming a lifetime of about 200,000 miles for either type of car, you save: $10,000 over the life of the car in my region in fuel costs alone. (Maintainance costs are a whole other argument. I think fewer parts and less drivetrain complexity equates to cheaper maintainance, but the batteries could offset that, so I'll call it a wash for this exercise.)
Yes, the inaccuracy of the variables I chose are probably pretty high, but at least this gives you SOME idea of when an EV becomes economically attractive.
How does it compare to the hacked Powerwheels?
/. story about the magnetically propelled projectiles. In the end, it looks like electromagnetism has the ability to produce more instantaneous force than ye olde combustion engine.
Seriously, though... This is quite like the
Dancin Santa
I guess this means that when I pull up to the line I can't use the engine noise as an indicator of whether or not I want to race, eh?
terradot, growing awareness
Kind of like from server to desktops and back to servers. Coal generators on rails to cars and back to generators.
User #47 claims "similar to having longer chiminies -- merely moves the pollution elsewhere". This is neither supported by logic nor measurements. As for the former, fixed plants can easily have much better pollution controls and more efficient burning, use of engine waste heat, etc. (and a large fraction of fixed plants use cleaner fuel). Mobile generators use gas or diesel, don't have the space or weight budget for extensive emission controls, nor do they have any practical use for most of the waste heat. Depending on the power sources being compared, EV's are measured to produce 97% or less of the pollution of conventional engines. If you are making comparisons, you might want to make consistent ones. Gas doesn't spring up fully refined in your pump, it has to be refined (which takes a considerable amount of energy and produces considerable pollution) and then shipped (more pollution, more energy) and finally pumped. See http://www.ott.doe.gov/legislation.shtml#rules for the fed/DOE comparison on pure efficiency grounds. Bottom line: wellhead to pump .83 total vs. .924 for electric transmission in the US and .328 for electric generation aggregate (which is biased towards older plants, because there are so many more older ones). State of the art plants are, I'm told, pushing 40%. According to a different fed site, http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/atv.shtml a conventional combustion engine is about 13% efficient in moving a car down the road (it details where the losses are).
For a more complete, albeit more opinionated analysis, http://www.evadc.org/papers.html
...I would just want: Reasonable acceleration/top speed. A good looking (if small) car. Reasonable range (say 300-500 Km on a single charge) Reasonable re-charge time from a normal home circuit (over night perhaps). A reasonable price tag. I don't think I can get all of that just yet.
BlackNova Traders
I'm in no way arguing that electric cars with current battery technology make any sense whatsoever - you're right, you probably could make a good case for them being net polluters, not the other way around. If you look at electric motors alone, which near 90% efficient, and in most cases, don't HAVE a transmission to cause losses. The problem is the energy storage, and the solution to that is a fuel cell - which we can't produce cost-effectively, yet.
I can dig some numbers out from my machines reference on high-output electric motors themselves, but they're extremely effificent. The losses are in the energy storage mechanism.
..don't panic
car == dick
It's cool that an electric car is faster than a Ferrari. Now the manufacturers need to find some way to make it noisier, and they'll sell like crazy.
Hydroelectric, wind, solar, geothermal
Let's see... Hydroelectric power floods huge areas of land and also creates mercury pollution (don't remember by which bio-chemical process)
Wind power is limited (You can't generate power for a whole country) and cause pollution by noise.
Solar power, although it looks "clean" also creates a lot of pollution because the solar cells are made of toxic chemicals.
Geothermal, like wind power is limited in power.
So far, there's no magical energy source. It would be nice to have a clean mass-to-energy converter (E=mc^2), but right now, there are lots of technical problems (like finding a source of anti-matter!) so it's not going to happen in a near future.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
It had always been my understanding that electric cars often needed overnight to recharge. With high-efficiancy solar panels and other small, cumulative energy conservation and creation techniques, I could see the range on this thing going well beyond 500 miles. Any thoughts?
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
What's more of a joke is their pricing plan:
>>>
The tzero is being readied for production, and is expected to begin deliveries in 2002. The exact timing is not yet determined. It will be priced between Porsche and Ferrari.
*cough* excuse me?
"between Porsche and Ferrari" is going to mean 70,000ukp (at least). Now who in their right minds is going to spend 70k on something that, frankly, looks like a dodgy home-made kitcar and has a 100 mile range on "careful" use?
Any of the current crop of UK bike-engined sportscars will beat the tzero in a straight line and would lap several seconds quicker around a track. And they cost a fraction of what the tzero will.
Kudos to them for making an electric car with a bit of pace, but it's not much good if you can't even get to the track on one charge.. if they actually think they can sell any at those prices, they won't be in business long.
If you can afford an $80000 car (approx) then 3 grand for a battery is chump change
Umm...i on is more efficient than gas->cumbustion->piston->motion?
Can you please explain to me how you figure coal->fire->steam->turbine->electricity->EMF->mot
I understand the scale...one engine more efficient than many...but you lose that b/c you are going to many electric motors. Cumbustion engines are far more efficient than using energy that could create cumbustion (or steam), converting it to electricity, pumping that electricity down a line, and then to something that has to create motion again.
Or catalyzed from hydrocarbon fuels, which is how they want to make it for cars. Then you wouldn't need to electrolyze water for hydrogen, and you wouldn't have to store hydrogen in large quantities. A cat-cracker/fuel cell combo is potentially much more efficient than an internal combustion engine. Plus it can run on chemically simpler fuels -- gasoline for internal combustion engines has lots of additives and compromises so that it burns properly.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
What nobody else has mentioned yet, though, is the greater ability to control pollution of power plants compared to cars. Power plants nowdays install scrubbers and all sorts of apparatuses to reduce or remove many of the major pollutants, to a degree that cannot be practically implemented in cars, both because these devices are not economically feasible on that scale, and because it would be virtually impossible to implement. Imagine that tomorrow a scientist develops a new device to decrease the pollutants from exhaust by 95%, that is practical to produce both for power plants and cars. The U.S. Government would likely require all power plants to be retrofitted with it within ~3 years. The average age of cars being driven today exceeds that, and there would be no feasible way to retrofit all those cars. That is, of course if the device can be operate efficiently on the scale of a car, which remains highly unlikely.
Additionally, electric cars are typically designed such that standard braking recharges the battery, whereas in conventional cars, energy is not recovered in braking. Similarly, many electric and hybrid cars spend a negligible amount of energy when sitting idle at a stop light, whereas conventional cars must remaining running at a significant fraction of standard power output.
Either electric or hybrid cars are where the future is.
.. isn't a turbine powered by gas/liquid flow through it? A pump that is similar in setup to a turbine would actually be a compressor..
--
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
Power drain problems; you can limit the "engine's" drain, but you STILL pay for it in range, and a lot more than you would in a gas-burner, especially when you're talking about heat. Heat in a gas-burner is essentially free, you can run your heater all day long without any hit on your range.
Fuel cells; Burn either methanol, or hydrogen. Methanol still releases CO2, and potentially other hazardous stuff (An ideal consumption of hydrocarbon like methanol, or methane, or octane for that matter, yeilds CO2 and H2O, ideally, but differing mixtures, temperatures yeilds Nitrogen Oxides, and Carbon Monoxide, and sulfur content in todays crappy gasoline mixtures yeilds Sulfur Oxides, so, any burning of fossil fuels, whether it's Methanol in a fuel cell, or gasoline in an internal combustion engine, is going to yeild results that are environmentally undesirable. True, fuel cells have a better potential to control things like sulfur content and inclusion of nitrogen oxides, but they can't eliminate them, and currently, fuel cells are even less efficient.
Hydrogen is never going to be a staple fuel for powering cars. For one, you have the same problems as you would with raw electricity. Hydrogen has to be generated from water, probably seawater, and that generally requires energy input. Electricity. Hydrogen is very difficult to transport, and very unsafe, and even store- hydrogen molecules are so small that it actually leeches through the metal walls of compressed gas cylinders over time. Hydrogen is one of the most explosive substances there is. Even burning hydrogen can yeild some nasty noxious substances. Under ideal circumstances, you get water as a product, but you'll also end up with carbon and nitrogen compounds of hydrogen as well. Cyanide, Ammonia, things like that. Small amounts to be sure, but multiply that by hundreds of millions of cars, and you have another unsavory environmental dilemma.
Ideally, all the problems with hydrogen can be worked out:
generation: genetically engineer a plant that collects sunlight, and splits seawater, collect and refine the minerals for industry, package the pure oxygen and hydrogen in some inert manner, store them together in the fuel cell (eliminating atmospheric contaminants in the burn so you dont end up with Cyanide and Ammonia) -
Now, figure out what happens to our climate with all of that steam our cities are suddenly releasing into the atmosphere, and maybe THEN we'll have a solution.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
While I'm the first to agree this is cool, and shows off the strides that have been made in electric car systems, it's hardly more than a showcase for top systems rather than the real systems that are required for everyday use, which are still somewhat lacking when it comes to things like efficiency.
What we really need is for electric cars to overtake petrol based cars in terms of miles/gallon - without this there is absolutely no chance of them ever taking off as anything other than a curiosity for people with money and an environmental conscience. And given that the giant fuel companies are hardly likely to welcome such developments, it may take significant benefits to allow people to make the change.
Still, it's good to see that the state of the art is progressing so quickly - these developments will eventually filter down to affordable systems and bring electric cars onto the streets for normal people sooner.
The real Paul Vallee is slashdot userid 2192, and, what do you mean it's not cool to point out your low userid?
nor do they have any practical use for most of the waste heat.
Well, here in upstate NY, you can believe me we put most of that waste heat to good use.
The manufacturer's web side...
Is this what you call it when you're mooned by Spider Man?
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
The ultimate dream car:o tos.html
p ecs.htm
http://www.geocities.com/MotorCity/Garage/8837/ph
And the specs to go along with it:
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/7389/s
finally, someone who agrees with my thoughts on nuclear power...
Nuclear power is cleaner than almost any othe source of power, except hydro and wind, which aren't very efficient, and hydro fucks up local ecosystems too much to be used very often...
Shit adds up at the bottom...
The dragracer is an important ideographic image in American culture. He is defined by his sleek car and fast speeds, but he is also defined by the clouds of smoke that trail behind him as he burns rubber. Will a "clean" electric car cast the same fiery clouds of masculine brimstone in his wake? Will manufacturers be able to overcome the perceived impotence of electric vehicles?
Well, the "burning" of tires comes from the friction between the tires and ground. But more important is the sound of gas vs. electric cars. I consider myself a bit of an enthusiast, and the sound of a car's exhaust can make or break a driving experience. Car manufacturers put considerable import on the exhaust sound. Ferrari certainly doesn't hide this fact; there was an article in C&D a year or two ago about it. I'd be more than willing to bet that manufacturers are willing to sacrifice a few horsepower to get the sound of their exhaust just right.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
As to electric cars being cleaner than ptrol powered cars, I do not think they are especially. This is similar to having longer chiminies - it merely moves the pollution elsewhere, in this case to power stations and the venting that takes place there.
This means that countries such as Norway and Canada, which have to suffer the pollution produced in Britain and America respectively, will suffer even more from its dead effects. Electric cars mean that Londoners and Manhattanites will live in cleaner environments while the true countryside suffers a little more.
However, my attitude to this is 'So What?' The lives of millions and their living conditions is a lot more important than the continued existance of some obscure far away plant or animal. I only wish the statist environmentalists could see that.
--
[jwb ~] echo nuclear | wc 1 1 8
What they don't mention is that the car can only run for 4.1 seconds before dying...
Pax Digitalia
That may be true for batteries that require to be charged, but the future of batteries is fuel cells that generate electricity directly from alchohol, which is a pretty clean source. Cars in Brazil run on a gas/alchohol mix, with the alchohol coming from fermenting maize (corn). Fuel cells also promise power densities many times that of rechargable battery technologies.
Hope I didn't shatter anyone's illusions :)
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
While this is great that a *rev head* might now want to look at electric cars, and that electric cars will start even more to move into the mainstream we must remember the premise and real drive for electric cars - polution control. The air quality will improve with these things, but electricity has to be generated somehow, and we need to have cleaner production of power overall, hydro/wind/solar still doesnt cut it.
Does it go on forever?
is that there is not enough electricity around to power even a fraction of the cars in this country, even assuming that all the electricity from the power plants in U.S. will go exclusively to fuel these cars.
And since there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of people who like living next door to a nuclear reactor (one of the cheapest and most efficient sources of power we can build with current technology - not to mention safest, despite Chernobyl and Three Mile island), there isn't much chance of electric cars taking off in the near future.
That's all great in theory. Here are the problems:
1) There are a lot of people that live in apartments or townhomes, with no garage and lack of easy access to power. Recharging is a pain and you'd really only want to do it about as often as you fill up a tank (once a week).
2) A lot of people probably commute more that 43 miles a day, my commute is about twice that. Again, I really only want to fill up my "tank" once a week.
3) Insurance/Repair. Two cars sounds like a great idea until you try to insure and repair them both. Very few people outside of families really want the hassle of two cars.
For me, range is the biggest issue. I have a townhome and wouldn't mind rigging up something once a week (at least until I got sued by someone tripping over the power cord across the sidewalk). I need to be able to drive a few hundred miles at a time, especially for road trips but also for commuting.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
1) is absolutely true.
2) is utter bullshit, unless you can cite some really convincing evidence. The mass of the Earth's mantle (which is liquid and moves around a LOT) absolutely dwarfs the mass of the water we've been moving around on the surface. If we drained the Pacific Ocean and moved the water to, say, Portugal, maybe.
The other thing to keep in mind is the terrible efficiency of the power distribution network. I believe (I can't cite this) that the power net wastes close to 40% of the power generated, just getting it to where it's needed. That, coupled with the fact that the vast majority of electrical power in the world comes from fossil fuels, makes a big problem for the pollution savings for widespread electrical vehicles.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I wonder why there's not more buzz about it
The primary concern of using hyrdogen to power cars is the pressure that it needs to be stored at (NOT, as many people believe, that the gas itself is flamable). So this car has the dangerous high pressure tanks, without the huge amount of energy (equaling driving range) in the form of hydrogen. Sounds like a winner to me!
Actually, the hydrogen was not the cause of the Hindenberg disaster. The dirigible had 7.2 million cubic feet of hydrogen (displacing 236 tons of air) . What caught on fire was the surface varnish, laden with powdered aluminum. The paint formula was similar to a solid rocket booster. When the Hindendberg burned, 7.2 million cubic feet of hydrogen burned in about 30 seconds, the 120 foot drop killed some, followed by a massive fire on the ground -- hydrogen is about 15 times lighter than air, and it rose quickly away from the wreckage, causing virtually no harm. The diesel fuel and rocket-fuel-painted cloth exterior fell to the ground and burned for about 10 hours.
Compressed hydrogen fuel tanks have advanced greatly and are very safe. Modern tanks can withstand dynamite blasts, small artillery fire, crash tests, drops from extreme height, etc, without rupturing or exploding.
basically it's an air compressed car that goes at about 60mph top speed that can go for about 120 miles between charges. To charge it you basically plug it in an electrical outlet, and the compressor compresses the air to fill the tank.
No air conditioning, no heater!?!?? I'll give you a hint as to why it doesn't sell more: it gets hot down here in Texas, and it gets cold up there in Michigan. Any questions?
What's your damage, Heather?
Nice, but how about a small 500 watt sound system to go with you nice new car?
I suppose you drive a SUV and think it's safer, too. (Sorry, couldn't resist. That was uncalled for :).
As long as your chastising people for not referencing any proof -- why not provide some proof that SUV's are not safer?
"And like that
Out of curiosity, what are the clearner alternatives to gasoline?
Hydrogen Fuel Cells are vaporware.
Natural Gas cumbersome and inefficent.
Alcohol based fuels eat engines.
Electric inefficient, heavy and expensive.
What are you talking about?
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
The comparison to a Ferrari is particularly ironic, imho. The Ferrari, as a massively expensive sports car, is not just a high-performance vehicle. It's also a status symbol. An expensive entrenched status symbol.
It won't be enough for electric cars to perform better than internal-combustion cars. We've had cleaner alternatives to gasoline for years now, and most have flopped. Part of that has to do with the economics of scale and the relative abundance of petroleum on our planet (more available and cheaper than milk), but part of that also has to do with image.
The dragracer is an important ideographic image in American culture. He is defined by his sleek car and fast speeds, but he is also defined by the clouds of smoke that trail behind him as he burns rubber. Will a "clean" electric car cast the same fiery clouds of masculine brimstone in his wake? Will manufacturers be able to overcome the perceived impotence of electric vehicles?
The trend has sadly been away from fuel efficiency. SUVs and diesel trucks hog the roads. Unless electric cars are fundamentally cheaper or better performance-wise, they will flop for sure. And it'll be years before the prices come down out of the stratosphere.
Actually, I'd rather have the Honda RC-51 for its outstanding performance, fun level, and looks.
GAH! of all the short sighted environmentalist wankery, I swear! If you check out their web page, you'll see that they blithely boast of how efficient and 'green' their vehicle is. But if you stop and think this stuff through for a moment... Where does the electricity come from? it comes from oil and gas burning power stations. The handful of such power stations in California put out nearly 4 times the amount of pollutants than all of the cars and trucks and trains combined, and that's every day. Couple this with the 70% transmition loss (which is radiated away as heat on the lines, btw), and we are talking something on the order of 100's of times less efficient than my Honda Civic.
I shouldn't even have to mention the horrifying production process of these batteries, or the contamination we'll see after accidents, either on the road or in some redneck's front yard! You thought dumping motor oil was bad? holy goddam hell!
::I will not moderate my opinions for your stinking karma
At an estimated base price of $80k for a no-name brand (none of the prestige, for instance, of owning a Porsche) and a skimpy range of only 100 miles at 60 MPH (not 100 MPH!), this car's only benefit over GM's EV1 or the like is the acceleration numbers. But who cares? Any car that gets a range of only 50100 miles is appealing to virtually no one.
Oh, and don't forget replacing the battery pack every 15-20k at $3k a pop. No A/C either.
Nope, sorry, not there yet. Check back in in another 10-15 years... Hybrids are the way to go for now.
Will people want to steal it? That's a measure of true value of course.
No wait, True Value is a hardware store.
Damn! Real hardware can be found at Tom's or Anand's.
I wonder if Tom and Anand date?
But a date is a fruit! I wonder if they bake cakes together, even if they don't date.
Will people steal the cake if they bake it? Probably not. They'd rather steal Sue's Chocolate Wafer Roll .
WebWord.com -- Industrial Strength Usability
How to Download YouTube Videos
Electric motors have far more torque than internal combustion engines, but can they compete in miles per "tank" ? Ie, time between "refueling"? They may not make it very far in stock car racing =P
Shifting doesn't take much time at all. In a drag from 0-60 you'll have to shift once (most manufacturers gear their cars to top out at 60mph in 2nd for a reason ;)). I would give you an extra 0.1 seconds for the difference, at best. I say 0.1 seconds, because that appears to be the difference that I've seen between manual transmissions and CVT's in the 0-60.
;) I would argue that they probably made a sacrafice between raw handling and ride quality.
... I'm sure it would compare to the amount spent on batteries for solar powered racers).
I don't know where you got some of your skidpad ratings from, but some of them look somewhat "off". For example, Edmunds lists an '00 Miata at 0.89g.
Most of those cars you listed don't have skidpads that are spectacular compared to the Tzero. Notable exceptions include the Dialbo, Cobra, Viper, Porche, and the Z06. IMO, anything in the neighborhood of 0.90 is doing pretty good.
And you're right -- it is hard to compare skidpad ratings. Different tires can make a dramatic difference, for instance. Lowered suspention, different shocks/springs, too make a diff. But I'm sure you'd argue that for $70k that you shouldn't need to do any of that.
Yeah, it's an expensive car. I'll never own one. I'll never buy a porche either. Hell, I can't figure out why people spend 50k on an SUV that they use to drive back and forth to work.
But seriously, you don't spend that kind of money on any car for "practicality", value, or performance in it's class -- Ferrari would be out of business if that were true; most of their cars can be outperformed/matched by less expensive vehicles. You do it to stroke your ego.
The other thing that doesn't seem to be taken into account is how much more expensive it is to make an EV compared to a similarly spec'd gas powered auto. You think NiMH batteries are expensive at $20 for 4? Try buying 1200lbs of 'em (I'll admit that I can't tell how much the batteries alone would cost, but they're not cheap
BZT! Wrong answer. It's the opposite.
Humans ought to die away. The sooner the better.
______________
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OTTERS RULE.
The main batteries in the Honda Insight (in the back of the car) are NiMH cells @ 140volts. There is a Lead-Acid battery under the hood for the 12volt system. Honda says around 8 year life span for the NiMH cells. I should know, I own one. :)
According to your specs page you posted it was 0-60 in 3.4 seconds, which is impressive, but it's not the only car on earth in that speed range.
And just what happens to the carbon in the hydrocarbon? A cracker, fuel cell, & electric motor combination might be cleaner than a modern IC engine, but it's also heavier, larger, and much more expensive. If you are going to spend extra money on the drivetrain, get a hybrid-electric (small IC engine with electric drive and batteries or flywheel good for a few minutes at full power).
Theres plenty of proof that some SUVS are much less safe than other types of cars. There are also many reasons for this. SUVS are much more likely to flip in accidents, and are much more likely to be overloaded. Most people don't realize that 5 men can put a Ford explorer over its weight limit, increasing the risk of flips even more. Some SUVs are safer, like jeep wranglers and some of the range rovers... but to assume that a bigger car is safer is fallacious at best...
Shit adds up at the bottom...
I don't understand why range and recharge time are really that important. Surely, when electric car use becomes widespread, you'll be able to pull into a gas station, whip the flat batteries out and stick a freshly charged set in in 2 minutes. I know you can't do this at the moment, but see no reason why it shouldn't be possible. After all, the same system worked with horses and inns in the old days.
I guess it may require some redesign of the cars, but surely it's not that impractical.
Yes, but what I really care about (which landed me in a 911) is being able to pull onto highway 101 in the bay area without getting creamed by some idiot in an SUV wearing sunglasses and talking on his cellphone while changing CDs with his other hand. Changing lanes while going from 50-80 is the key here. I did manage to find info in their PDF brochure that top speed in the T-zero is 90mph (governor limited), and it mentions it does 35-50 in 1.4 seconds (not bad at all), but no mention of non-straightline acceleration or acceleration at freeway speeds.
One thing I remember hearing about electric power cars is that, yeah you're taking a huge notch out of air pollution from burning gasoline, but now you have a whole bunch of batteries with nasty chemicals which have to be discarded eventually. Is this really an improvement to the environment? What about all of the air pollution that is used to create the electricity to charge the cars in the first place?
Can anyone offer any insight?
Tyler
Happy people make bad consumers.
Well I guess they did not get it, we *need* electrical cars with large autonomy.
90 mph max. Fun, but not nearly enough for a sports car. 90 miles on one charge. Cute. And releasing the accelerator automatically brakes? This has neat innovations (as said, it was built to showcase the drive train) but overall, would you really want this car? I certainly wouldn't. One last comment about "a private ferrari owner": These tests appear to be totally uncontrolled, and if his clutch was burning out by the fourth or fifth drag, then maybe he didn't know what he was doing. Still a neat car, but I think the results are overhyped. -CD
I know its not street legal...and not really a civic...the point is you take anything to the extreem and it can be fast...taken to the extreem...just like this electric car is taken to the extreem and makes a ferrarri look practicle.
Although the accelaration on this beauty is very impressive, I can't find any information on top-speed. The electro powered vehicles/hybrid cars I have seen in recent years, have done nearly ok in acceleration, are very economical, but the top-speed is always what seems to limit these kinds of cars. I wouldn't be too surprised if the tZero has a slight disadvantage here over other sportscars. Hope not.
-Kraft
----------------------------
-Kraft
Live and let live
Electric motors have amazing torque at low revs so acceleration tests like these are a dream for electric cars. In addition, gears aren't really needed as compared to gas powered engines so you save all the time required to change gear. The only odd thing about pure electric cars is that when you are stationary there isn't the rumble of an engine. As you're sitting at the stop light and a potential racing mate draws along side you sit there silently - no threatening revs. But when the light goes green - eeeeeeeeeeeeeeekkkkkkk! Eat my dust! Cliff
Like most companies who make electric cars, AC Propulsion fails to mention that they future may not be in electric cars.
It is widely circulated in some circles that electric plants emit more pollution generating the electricity required to drive an electric car, than a gas-powered car would emit, given similar circumstances.
I'm not an expert in this field, but have friends in the industry, not working on electric motors, but Hydrogen cars. I am told that the only things they emit is water. For some reason, though, the major car companies are only pursuing electrics... Did you know that for every electric car Honda sells, they lose around $3,000? That's because it has 2 engines, one gas and one electric. Neato, eh?
5% improvement, if I rember my thermo correctly, steam powerplants, i.e. most run at damn near carnot [sp?] effiecency already. That means that for stuff like coal, oil, and natural gas you aren't gonna get any more energy outa the plant for what you put into it, unless you make some fundamental changes, like using something other than steam to convert thermal energy into kinetic energy.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I read that if the waste is reprocesses, we would have enough uranium to last a thousand years.
Numbers 31:17,18 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man,but save for yourselves every virg
Nuclear baby! I was always against it untill I learned how the system worked in chemistry class. I had to hit myself over the head. What was I thinking.
It's been a while so I'm not brushed up my isotopes. But are there not various recycleable isotopes (plutionium. etc) that could be refined from the waste and used again? If my memory serves correct. European countries recycle the waste, but the US does not. Would this not help quite a bit in the waste department?
Anyways, I would honestly not mind having a nuclear reactor in 'my backyard.'
This is an interesting claim that I've never heard before. Can you provide a source please?
tetrad
That Energizer rabbit just won't quit! ;>
Don't forget this line... "The drivetrain is the innovation," Cocconi said. "We just built the car to show it off."
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Gas powered engines have only one source of energy available....gas!
You can make electricity with oil, nuclear power, solar, wind, and of course water.
Now you are going to tell us that all these cars will provided with electricity ONLY generated by burning oil? I don't think so.
At least with electric cars we have the option to use oil as a power source.
I guess that the only thing that is suprising is that batteries are getting efficient enough (in terms of weight and size) to store enough energy to make the efficiencies of electric motors shine.
Actually, electronic fuel injection was more of an 80's buzzword just to get buyers into the showroom, thinking that the TBI "plastic carburetor" was going to turn their 2.0L 4-banger into a hot-rod.
To keep it on topic... is anyone else as unimpressed as I am that this car is a hybrid? Once I see a pure electric car outperform even a worn-out 1988 Mustang GT, then I'll be interested.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Check out The Ultimate Poseur's Sport Utility Page. It's got a good page on the SUV safety myths, plus links to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
The latter site's page "Passenger Vehicles Fatality Facts Tables" tells the story well. The figures show that in a multiple vehicle crash, you're best bets are large (but not very large) cars and utility vehicles. However, in single-vehicle accidents, pickup trucks and utility vehicles are more likely to roll over and kill you than any size car.
The table "DEATHS PER MILLION REGISTERED PASSENGER VEHICLES 1-3 YEARS OLD" summarizes it nicely: All passenger vehicles, except pickup trucks, have basically the same death rate. Also, if you look at the table "DEATHS IN PASSENGER VEHICLES", the number of deaths has remained more or less constant since 1975, with the car fatality rate dropping, and pickup/utility vehicle rate rising, which reflects the growing popularity of those vehicles in recent years. If pickups/utility vehicles were safer, you should see the total death rate drop.
So, here's my inflammatory analysis: If people bought cars instead of SUVs, they'd not increase their risk, but would reduce the danger to others. And if everybody bought cars, the danger from monster SUVs would disappear and everybody'd be safer.
Other forms of batteries tend to be considerably more expensive, aren't they? I'm very reluctant to say that things should be more expensive because it's good for the environment -- when you take in the larger picture, it's often not true. If those batteries are quite expensive -- as all the better batteries seem to be -- it's very probably because there's a lot of resources going into their creation. A lot of water used, mining required, etc. None of those things are good for the environment.
I think the transportation problem really needs to be looked at as an infrastructure problem, not a car problem. The best solution will not only be good and environmentally sound, but cheap too. And I don't even think it needs to be high-tech.
Actually, there is a simple answer to the speed of recharging problem. Swappable battery modules.
Can't remember where I read it (probably Autoweek), but someone (perhaps Ovoid corp) is actually pushing this idea - you could do it at gas stations.
Click here for alternative fueled vehicle links
Oracle and unix guy.
I'd buy one if honda removed those friggin ugly wheel covers. Some trunk space would be nice too. (damn near all batteries rear of the driver)
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
You should build some power plants using this prinicple and make a fortune on free energy!
This thing is smaller and lighter than the F355 (or whatever they used, I forget). It doesn't have to lug around the weight of that huge 12-cylinder engine. The t-zero is an "engineer's car", as they say--every scrap of weight savings they could take, they did. Hell, it pretty much *is* a go-kart. I bet they saved on weight by severely limiting the size and number of batteries.
Call me when they get an electric car that can do this (or even close to it) with me at the wheel. I'm six-four, 375--a big fat bastard.
Any electric car that gets its power from a solar cell is a "solar-powered car," even if those solar cells are in a large array on top of a mountain hundreds of miles away.
The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion.
As far as I am concerned, the ultimate vehicle would be a Stirling-electric hybrid. A Stirling engine is capable of 50% thermal efficiency. As it is an external comustion engine, it can burn almost any fuel, solid, liquid, or gas. Unlike a fuel cell, there is no particular requirement for ultra-high purity in the fuel. Unlike a diesel or gasoline internal combustion engine, a Stirling engine works better in very cold weather. As a Stirling engine does not burn fuel under compression, it does not make NO2, and if the burner is adjusted correctly (could be automatic), does not make CO, either.
This is really the best of both worlds. The slow starting nature of a Stirling engine is no problem whatsoever in a vehicle that depends for acceleration on battery power, and the range limitations of batteries are addressed by constant re-charging by the Stirling engine (Which should have output needed to cruise at 55 with flat batteries, but no more) and by regenerative braking.
So, why haven't the Hybrid-EVs used a stirling engine yet?
Any ideas?
Dog is my co-pilot.
A fuel cell is a great solution, and the progress is going quickly. Of course, you still have to deal with carrying fuel, which either means storing hydrogen (another whole problem) or carrying a converter to strip hydrogen off of methanol/gasoline/whatever.
:). Hydrogen has miserable energy density per unit _volume_ compared to gasoline or methanol at practical storage densities, and is a bugger to work with (you need a containement vessel that can take hundreds of atmospheres, and hydrogen gas will do fun things like diffusing through the walls of your pipes and fuel cell if they're made of the wrong materials).
Actually, if I understand correctly, several varieties of fuel cell can reprocess simple hydrocarbons like methanol internally (just need the right catalytic electrode material and the right operating environment).
I'd also argue that even carrying a converter would be less hassle than trying to use hydrogen
Methanol is a well-behaved liquid (a bit corrosive over the long term, but less so than water).
If you want a purely-electric solution, keep your eye on ultracapacitors. They're still pretty expensive, but they're already starting to beat the energy density of batteries.
Unfortunately, this isn't saying much. The energy density of batteries is orders of magnitude lower than the energy density of most fuel-burning schemes.
We have tons of hydroelectric plants here in Nebrasksa.
shane
Nuclear. The world's cleanest power source, and the only one which can account for the whereabouts of 100% of its emissions.
It was one of those hardcover "LIFE Natural Library" books. Most were published from the 70s to the early 80s. They were specifically speaking of hydro electric power which is often located 100s of miles from it's primary point of usage (the largest metropolitan area). Perhaps technology has come a long way but there's still no way you can transmit power over any appreciable distance with only 5-10% loss.
The T0 is a hybrid gas/electric. It gets 60mpg and still out-accelerates the Ferrari.
It uses regenerative braking, its maximum range is 90 miles (yes, that would mean a 1.5 gallon tank), and it recharges in 1 hour with a high-current supply.
The other nice thing is the drivetrain; lightweight equates to more than great performance, it means better efficiency too. The T0 is just to show off the technology, which could be used in much more practical electric cars.
Still, it's less than 15 miles to where I work. With the T0, I could get there in, what, 5 minutes? Supposing I didn't get stuck at lights. Or by cops.
For geek dads: Contraction Timer
I'm not sure we're on the same page as to how fuel cells work. The ones I'm aware of existing presently run on hydrogen and oxygen.
Acceleration: Similar to a Civic (plain, not an SI) Top speed 115mpg (I've had mine to 105) Looks: I start more conversations getting out of this car. Range: 600 miles between tanks. So long that I forget which side the cap is on. Recharge: when I brake Price: ~20k. Insight #5129 check out insightcentral.net
fortune: You die cold and alone
So? What do you propose then? Conmuting and public transport also pollutes...
Shall we all go back to horses? Oh, no! They crap all the way around and they eat grass that has to be grown in areas which used to be forests.
Shall we all take a scooter/bike/skates and walk to work? Oh, no! A worker in the outskirts of the city will take between 1 to 5 hours in order to go to his/her job downtown just 15 miles away.
So, what to do, what to do? Maybe we all should leave large cities and live in small towns like our grand-grandfathers did. But then, what will happen with all the progress develeped in the last century? Forget TV, internet, refrigeration, warming, cooling and laundry machines?
I do NOT think so. We (humanity) have already altered our environment and our society, therefore, we should find a way to live in armony with our surroundings and maybe electric cars are a part of a solution. Not all the solution, just a part. Recycling, Reducing, Reusing, etc. also help, but it has to become a global effort.
It is really easy to bitch about damns/gas/coal/oil, when surfing on the net on a nice office with central cooling...
Imagine the past, remember the future - Carlos Fuentes
There are several ways to limit the output of harmful pollution in the atmosphere caused by fossil-fuel power plants.
The simplest one of these is to plant more vegetation and plants, which, as you know, generate oxygen. Fact is, the more trees and vegetation there is in any given area, the air surrounding that area will improve improve at a ratio directly proportional to the amount of trees versus people in the area.The second is one that's heavily overlooked - when you concentrate the source of the the pollution, like you have with fossil-fuel power plants, it makes it a lot easier and more feasible to introduce industrial strength filters...since the area is concentrated, the filters will be a lot more effective than trying to install filters on every single car that's omitting harmful pollutants. So the "longer chimney" theory is pretty much invalid considering those two factors.
So no - all in all, it will not "damage the surrounding real countryside(tm)".
"A few atoms won't even light a match" - Dr Jones, 1933
6000 hp! (yes, six thousand) I LOVE it!
"Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers
No transmission to grind, and no need to use brakes. Wooha!
Of course the real issue is power supply.
A battery can only hold 1% per weight of petrol.
So while trains don't have that problem. Cars do. I can't get to the site at the moment, but I suspect that eventhough they may bet petrol cars, the batteries probably don't last as long a tank of gas
But it is imporving, And one day, EV will be better performers than gas, there is only so much you can do with a gas engine. No matter how many new systems you can make, it dosn't change the fact that 80% of the energy is lost in heat and noise, and while that figue may decrese quite a bit. electric motors only waste about 20%, and thats probably improving aswell.
Fuels cells depending on what they are burning are not always environmentally friendly. Even burning hydrogen and producing water that might change condensation, humidity and other factors if used on a wide scale. Solar turns the surrounding area into desert which is fine if you stick it in a desert to begin with but still it takes up a lot of space to be usable. Nuclear produces waste that we can't even get rid of, burying it for later generations and hoping it doesn't leak and cause the local wildlife or whatever to mutate. And wind doesn't work to well once the jet stream (or if it's in another area, wind currents) change.
Check out AFS Trinity - a company working on high rpm flywheel battery systems. They are working towards a system where the flywheel itself will be able to absorb a vehicle's kinetic energy to slow it down. This in effect recharges your battery every time you brake.
They will probably start out with hybrid gas-electric vehicles, and eventually move to all electric. Very cool stuff.
1. Ruins? no. Changes drastically? yup.
Good or bad? Depends on your perspective.
In some cases it's great, it can provide more reliable water sources for irrigation both upstream and downstream, not to mention a resevoir for areas that can use it (not that many do, but it can) And some are screaming now that they are releasing greenhouse gases from rotting vegetation. Um, well, lets see, the oldest plants going into this are what, maybe 100 year old trees? which would have been removed prior anyway in most cases. So on average you probably have 2 year old plants. In their 2 year life span they gathered those gases efficiently from the atmosphere. Their biodegrading after death is innevitable. It would happen anyway. It's not bad. It's completely normal. Are you suggesting that plants shouldn't be allowed to die because it's a pollutant? That is absurd. This is not a valid argument. When you compare the life cycle in the natural generation of these gases to be gathered and contained, and our "forced" release of them (though it is inevitable anyway), I think you'll see a miniscule thing. Now consider oil. How many billions of years did it take to create it? How much destructive energy are we releasing quickly by using it? I think if we used a very very tiny amount of oil, it wouldn't be noticeable because the earth would compensate, but at the rate we use it? Heck no.
Now... we see the error of your ways.
2. Um. Please tell me you are kidding. Do you have the foggiest concept of the mass of the earth? a big storm in the Atlantic will move more water on it's way up the coast than the US will move into dams probably in it's existence. Yeah, this stuff slides back down. Well, we retain a portion comparable to what? an atom to NYC? if you put a drop of water on a basketball, you'd still be making a comparison so amazingly larger than what we do that it's ridiculous.
Next you'll be claiming that Scientology is a religion.
-- there is no point in pulling the pud... if you do it right.
Couldn't you divert some of that high pressure air into the cabin? After expansion, it should be quite cold. Not much help for the heating though... Maybe a kerosene heater ;)
This
At the risk of being flamed... isn't the case that a hydroelectric dam replaces a land ecology with an underwater ecology? Whether or not that is a good thing is debatable, but it certainly doesn't 'ruin ecologies' the way Chernobyl (or Los Angeles) did...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
However, that CO2 is largely tapped off and used for production of products such as soft drinks which would otherwise require CO2 produced from fossil fuels.
Also, the plants that are used for the fermentation remove large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere while they are growing, so alcohol production does not release large amounts of carbon that has been stored deep inside the earth like burning fossil fuels like coal to produce electricity does.
Interesting analogy... a biscuit to the first person who comes up with a viable 'peer-to-peer' transportation/energy-distribution system.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Let me inform you of something you might not have known. Just recently some people in washington state wanted to build a new powerplant up by the border. It was the cleanest power plant ever proposed (natural gas) in the state and, I believe, in the nation. Canada basicly complained until the program got cancelled.
why?
Because, canada makes millions on selling the US their extra power to the US. In this case there's a extremely dirty power plant just across the border that they don't want shut down.
So not all your power is as guilt free as you may have hoped.
xJoshx
Click here to read too much about my personal life
These batteries have to be replaced every 2-3 years, and are also prone to leak (significant even for small leaks
FWIW, I spoke with a Honda PR guy (yeah, I know), and he said the battery pack in the Insight is designed to last for the service life of the car (8-10 years).
They're sealed lead-acid batteries, so they don't leak unless (a) you fuck something up in the electrical connections, or (b) you crack one of the battery's housings. Even then, you only get sulphuric acid (H2SO4) leaking.
--
Every time the subject of electric vehicles comes up on /., someone always spouts off nonsense about how EVs are not as good for the environment as a modern gas car. So I'd better post this link and ask people to read it first. It's entitled "Debunking the Myth of EVs and Smokestacks" by Chip Gribben of Electric Vehicle Association of Greater Washington, D.C. To sum up a few points:
1) ICE cars use gasoline (duh) while EV's are fuel neutral. As long as it can be converted to electricity, the EV will run on it. This includes coal, oil, natural gas, solar, hydro, nuclear, etc.
2) Emissions controls on power plants are much more sophisticated than the automotive catalytic converter. Also, they are constantly monitored to make sure they are working properly. Not every place does emissions checks on cars and even then it's only once a year.
3) Power plants are much more efficient at using fuel than car engines. The theoretical maximum efficiency of a heat engine is 40%. It is much easier for a large stationary PP to get close to that number. An ICE car? Forget it. Not even close.
If you know about electric cars, then you know that with the constant torque and an opportunity to store and dump enormous amounts of power in a short amount of time, it's far easier to build a fast electric car than it is to build a fast gasoline car.
Since you can put a motor on each wheel too, you can have an AWD dragster without a big transmission weight penalty.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Never mind local hooligans and misdeed doers swinging by in the middle of the night and cutting the cable. [No charged car in the morning.] Or the neighbor who borrows your charge plug when you are not around, running up *your* bill.
Right now it is only really secure and practical in a private home with a private garage.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Several posts have mentioned that electric cars just move polution. They argue what used to be generated in cars will be created at power plants. This is true, but wrong.
The fact is, there will be LESS polution generated at the power plants. Besides being more efficient at converting fuels to power, not every power plant is poluting. For example, us drivers in hydroelectric rich British Columbia (Motto: Keeping California's Lights Burning) would be able to enjoy guilt-free driving right now.
The worst case is that some polution will still be generated at the plants, but at last there will be much less of it. More importantly, the the power is produced in centralized locations. This means if the power plants become 5% more efficient all of the EXISTING vehicles create less polution.
Not to mention that as more power plants shift away from nasty sources of energy like coal, every electric cars on the road will become truely polution-free almost overnight.
As if I care about the environment....
(actually I do, but I care about my pocket first)
I object to the insane level of tax that goes on our litre of petrol in the UK.
You can bet, though that the minute you see popular cars running off domestic mains power there will be some napster style lawsuits against the power companies by the petrol companies....
Either that or the UK govt will start taxing electricity at an insane amount.
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
One of the most interesting things about the stats given was the efficiency in miles/btu. It looks like this puppy probably beats you everyday car (and certainly your SUV) by a fair bit and as a result you do win, environmentally.
On the other hand it is virtually identical to a hybrid, efficiency-wise. So, with a 90 mile range, which one would I buy?
What they're really comparing is a super-lightweight car using a 200 horsepower engine that doesn't need to be shifed against an F550. And then we're supposed to be surprised by the results?
Anyone familiar with the Lotus Elise shouldn't be, since this sounds like pretty much the same idea with about 25% more power on tap minus the time lost due to shifting.
Frankly, I'd be surprised if it didn't go as fast as it does.
They don't really mention that you can only drive 100 miles ("with careful driving") and that running a quarter-mile uses up 20% of the battery. So if you want to get a few runs in at the track I guess you'll be towing your car there rather than driving it.
I'm also surprised at the rather weak skidpad rating of 0.88g. I wonder why that is.
How unenviously ironic your heading became. You cannot be troubled to get even the most basic facts straight, freely quote figures out of context, and accuse everyone of being an idiot to boot. Why not try to *think a little* before posting drivel like this the next time? One poster gave a very nice calculation showing that the vehicle gets somewhere around 200 "mpg". Not so shabby, I'd say. The real problem with electric vehicles at this point is practicality.
When my internal-combusion engine is not working quite right, it runs noisy or pings. A malfunctioning electro-pneumatic car would, what, fart?
I'm sorry. I refuse to drive a farting car. It's as simple as that.
I just found out how much the batteries cost -- it wasn't nearly as expensive as I thought. The whole set costs $3000. I was thinking it'd be along the lines of 10k.
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Check this out
h tml
;)
http://www.electrifyingtimes.com/guynegre.html
and
http://www.zeropollution.com/zeropollution/index.
basically it's an air compressed car that goes at about 60mph top speed that can go for about 120 miles between charges. To charge it you basically plug it in an electrical outlet, and the compressor compresses the air to fill the tank.
It's also interesting that, due to some carbon filters, the exhaust air is cleaner than the air that goes in
I wonder why there's not more buzz about it, it seems really cool for short range movements, I know if I had one I would surely use it for the work/home commute...
-- the cake is a lie
So it tops out at 90mph, does 100 miles then takes an hour to recharge? That's cute, but it's hardly an important or even a particularly impressive alternative to gasoline.
Here's a telling quote from the spec: recombinant lead Acid [...] production battery, and replacements are readily availble at reasonable cost.
Yes, replacements. When we're dribbling on about how clean and efficient electric cars are, how come we never consider the environmental cost of making then "recycling" (== dumping) all those lead acid cells? Or mention that the energy to power them mostly comes from horrendously inefficient coil, oil or gas plants? Bah. We need to stop mucking around with these overgrown R/C toys and throw some serious money at fuel cells or even good old alcohol burners.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Electric Motors are superior to piston engines -- weight, tourque curve, reliability...vastly superior.
Unfortunately, the energy density of batteries is only a fraction of the energy density of gasoline, drastically increasing the vehicles' weight (and thus lowering performance). Thus, after 60 mph or so the ferrari just takes off.
here's a link to more info. It's using Optima batteries...I hate to pee on the story but that "one hour" charge time requires a 240VAC@100A ac line...I don't think I'll be doing that at my house!!
Still, a little over three hours at something like 30 amps isn't too bad.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
$3,000 for replacement batteries every 15-20k miles isn't bad but HOW MUCH DOES THE DAMN THING COST! Would be nice if they actually had some FAQs in the FAQ. Another one would be - when is this thing purchaseable?
What the article doesn't say is the quarter time...probably b/c by then the electric has topped out and the Ferrari has passed it. What about the classic performace mesurement 0-100-0...well it can't even do that. Plus the car is not street legal, it hasn't been crash tested yet. If it will pass its crash tests and run a decent quarter mile...then I will be impressed!
According to my favorite bedtime story collection, The Pictorial History of Steam Power, a steam turbine can produce one hoursepower of work per hour on about a half kilo (1lb) of coal. So, what's the conversion to kilowatt hours from horespower hours? I fergit, somebody help me out here.
Anyhow, seeing as how there isn't really a shortage of coal at this rate, it seems infinitely sensible to just go ahead and use the coal and work on the emissions a little more creatively.
What really impresses me about the history of steam is that although a turbine can pull this incredible amount of work out of a minimally processed resource, turbines aren't really all that much more efficient than the gigantic triple expansion steam cylinder engines that they replaced.
Even without a turbine, you could have gotten by with a pound and a half of coal to produce your hour of horespower well before the turn of the century.
Centralized power generation with grid distribution is omnipresent for a reason, it is efficient and makes real live economic sense.
If these guys have a drivetrain that can really spin off lead batteries, they're onto something. Now let's see the price drop. That's the part they're gonna hate.
And of course, most people forget about the manufacturing and disposal/recycling pollution problems that batteries incur.
first off, ferraris, porches, and vettes are stunningly beautiful cars. this tzero looks like a plastic kid's toy. second, the tzero's cockpit looks like a go-cart. weigh it down with power-everything, a sound system, and leather bucket seats and see how well it does. third, tzero's .88g's really isn't all that impressive. the new vettes will beat it at half the price. and only 100 miles?
i'll be impressed when an electric car wins the 24 hours of daytona
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Yup, the #1 biggest reason for the increas of Smog in Toronto and surrounding area is the Tories' insistence on keeping the coal-fired electricity plants running full-on and not converting them to natural gas, a small investment that would pay off in spades with less pollution and more efficient generation.
But, nooooo, we're Tories, we don't know how to invest in the future...
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.