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Electric Car Capable of 180mph
niclas_b writes "This electric car is pretty cool. It's not cheap and maybe not very practical. But very cool nevertheless." Might as well throw in a link to their homepage as well.
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While I was going to make some insightful comments about continual growth of electric cars lately, this 'product' is just plain laughable.
In my opinion, something that is more important to the future of electric cars (and a testament to their potential) is the Toyota Prius Rally Car. It recently just finished a 5,000 mile 3 week rally. Didn't finish first, but finished (which, as any rally fan will tell you is a challenge in-and-of itself). At least Toyota's accomplishments are tangible.
And seriously, whats with the 8 wheel design?
"However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation."
Because it's not in the KAZ article itself, pictures of the car are available here:
http://web.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~hiros/kaz/pict.html
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
The Spirit of Oklahoma electric car can go over 200mph. Granted, it's a formula race car built for speed and definitely can't carry 8 passengers, but it is faster...
Here are it's specs.
check out the 3rd or 4th picture on this page. add a TV, ps2, and a mini-fridge and it's a quick, comfy miami to seattle trip :-)
It doesn't suprise me that an electric car can hit high speeds, or have very short acceleration times. Electric motors have very good low speed torque. Basically they translate about 90% of the energy you dump into them to kinetic energy (try getting that out of a mechanical transmittion), so acceleration is pretty much dependant on what you can draw from the power source. Also, top speed is very dependant on areodynamics. I remember a vehicle from the 1930's in the Deutches (spelling) Museum in Munich that could do 70 miles an hour on a very low power engine (I seem to remeber about 50 hoursepower). It acompished this by having a very low drag coefficient (it was tear-drop shapped, and supposedly has the lowest drag coefficient of any car ever made). The electric vehicle in question here looks like it is pretty areodynamical, so I don't doubt the top speed claim. You should also take note that the high speed and acceleration probably have a very dramatic effect on the range (since drawing high current causes the battery to dump more of its energy into heat). For the same reason stop and go traffic probably kills the range since lots of current will be drawn starting and stopping the vehicle.
For use in the states I'ld be concerned that the time to charge wasn't listed, making it impractical for long distance travel (or stop and go traffic). Let's see some fuel cell cars that can be re-filled instead of re-charged (like a internal combustion car).
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
Electric drag racers are meant to run in the 1/4 mile and don't concern themselves with how fast they eventually can get. For all we know, this could take 1 to 100 km to reach it's top speed of 180 km/hr. But with 440kw (over 1000 hp) it won't take 100 km.
And for the parent thread... 180 mph isn't that high. My 7 year old car does 146 mph and only 146 mph because it has an electronic governer prohibiting it from going any faster. Look at most (if not all) of the AMG Mercedes Benz, they are all with a top speed of around 180. Porsches have been doing it for generations. Most low end cars can make it to at least 120 mph. for something with 440kw of power, 180 mph shouldn't be too hard.
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
Actually, that is not a lot of battery weight. In fact, it's rather puzzling. Gross weight of the car is 6570 lbs and battery weight is 1323 lbs. That's a 5247 pound car, which is a hellacious amount of weight to lug around for an EV. That vehicle, WITHOUT BATTERIES, weighs more than my wife's Mercedes 450SEL and weighs more than her Toyota Landcruiser with a Chev 350 conversion. Even without batteries, it weighs a half a ton more than my 1965 GMC pickup truck.
I'd like to know how much of the 5247 lbs is in the motors. Traditionally, EVs use one motor. The implication in the KAZ pages is that they used 8, which would help explain the extremely high "dry" vehicle weight.
Speaking of performance electrics, don't forget NEDRA. Their current champion, "Current Eliminator IV", uses Dragster - 336V of batteries and did a standing quarter-mile in 8.801 seconds. I wonder what it sounded like - a two-tonne bumble-bee on crack..?
I second the previous comments about the need to keep wheel mass low - low sprung weight is a definite goal of performance cars. It's hard to call this thing a car, it's more like a bus, since it seats 8 and weighs 3 tonnes...
(this is not a
Example. If the limit is 40mph, it's pissing with rain, fog, ice and someone crashes while doing 25mph where the conditions would realistically determine 10mph or 15mph, it is still marked as a speed related incident, despite the fact that the limit for the stretch of road is 40mph.
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That's range. 300 Km when running at a constant 100 Km/h speed. I wonder how much range it has under normal conditions (going 100-120 in the highway, 0-60 in the city). 150-200 Km perhaps? That's not good enough :-(
My dad's Passat 1.9TDI does 1000 Km under normal conditions, with just 55 litres of diesel. I know. I've measured it.
I've read a few IEEE articles on EVs in the past, and range seems to be their major problem right now. Also, Lithium batteries tend to die every couple of years and need to be replaced (too expensive).
Electric motors have very good low speed torque.
Depends on the motor design, really. I'm assuming that a proper vector drive is spinning the shaft here -- a typical NEMA design A or B motor can pull about 12x nominal torque in this situation. The Marathon Blue and Black Max motors are significantly higher, having very (very!) peaky breakdown torque curves -- 25x nominal torque IIRC. Of course you're drawing significant current to get to these torque levels, as you stated.
I thought that most EV designs regenerated when braking / going downhill to try and conserve some energy. It's not a perfect conversion but at least you're not just wasting it.
I wonder if the air tank explodes when damaged?
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
Every engineer I've talked to about it has sounded worried about the 300 bar pressure that the tanks are stored under. That's a lot of pressure -- more than scuba gear tanks, which even the people who do scuba try to avoid keeping in their cars whenever possible, because the explosion hazard if one does go up is just horrible.
I really like the idea, but I'm not sure it's overly safe. Also, the cars on the site are optimized for in town driving -- according to their charts, you get less than 1/2 the range when driving at fast highway speeds (say, 100km/hr).
A fuel-efficient car can drive for 600km or so without refueling -- the air cars get at most 300km, and gasoline fueling stations are far more common than "quick charge" stations, so in practice, you probably shouldn't venture more than 150 km from your home (where you can set up a slow charge), a friend's home (who'll let you borrow electricty for a slow charge), or a city with a high-speed charge station. And since that's the range at 50km/hr, it will take you 3hrs to limp back if you're down to half-way and 150 km out.
In short, I don't think the tech is there yet. I just drove back with my friends from Edmonton, Alberta to Kitchener, Ontario -- it was a bit more than two days of non-stop driving, pausing only to refuel, and change drivers so the previous driver could sleep. There's no way I could have made that trip in an air car -- it simply doesn't have the range to make it across some of the more desolate sections of the praries, even assuming charge stations in every major town along the way.
In short, it's a nice idea, but the pressure is dangerous, and the range is still too limited.
It's also much better suited to densely populated areas (like, say, China),than sparsely populated areas with people living clustered together in big cities (like, say, Canada or the US).
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AC