Slashdot Mirror
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.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
There's more in the world than just the US... think the superhighways in Germany or Italy for instance.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Maybe it was Total Recall, not sure.
Who mediates your information?
- Current capacity, Voltage: 88 Ah, 3.75V
- Amount of energy/Voltage: 55 kWh / 315 V
- Batteries weight 600 kg
Aha! So now I know what the mobile phone manufacturers use as the reference when announcing the battery lifetime of these cool new 3G phones :)
Speed limit where I live is 70.
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."
Parallel parking that thing is gonna be a bitch. :)
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
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.
Yes! Put him in his place! :p
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
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.
1. How can 75PS make a car drive 311 km/h? (Specially with a weight of roundabout 3 tons)
2. How far will the car go when driving max speed of 311 km/h? (Does this mean driving 20 Minutes, and then the batteries are empty?)
Running Performance 14.5 sec. (0-400m)
A quarter mile in only 14.5 seconds? Or am I reading that wrong?
Max Speed 311.67 km/h
Top speed, 193 MPH
Gross weight 2980 kg
Gross weight, 6,569 pounds!!!!! WHAT! That's 3 tons!
There's gas powered cars that weigh 1/4th that, have 15 second quarter miles (400km), and a top speed of 150 MPH (241 km/h). Is this some kind of cruel joke? Can't they put that engine and battery into a smaller frame and get an electric car good enough to compete in an actual race? That thing looks like a long minivan... If there was a cheaper version, with a MUCH better shape, I'm sure alot of people would buy it.
How far will it go on $15 and 2 minutes per week of refueling labor?
...that's a really fast electric *RV*. Not an electric car. THIS is a really fast electric *CAR*:
o me .htm
http://www.acpropulsion.com/tzero_pages/tzero_h
-----------------------
To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.
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"
The mother of the Pontiac Aztek has been found! The dad is the new Cadillac.
It's cool that they put everything (motor / reduction / brakes) in the wheel, but i fail to see the point of it... to be honest:
the reason you buy high quality name brand wheels is because (beside the "looks cool" and "got $$ buring holes everywhere") it gives a lower up-sprung weight. which means that the car does much better in the ride quality, easier to tune the shocks / suspensions, etc. by the way, different brake rotors would allow the same thing -- but people usually go for bigger rotors for the stopping power, and try to make sure the wheel themselves are as light as possible.
this is kinda important when you want your car to be performance oriented, as these guys are certainly trying to demonstrate -- but this combination of technology will ultimately yield a car that "can go 180mph but the ride really suck", or "if you want reasonable ride quality, then our entire million(s) dollar technology won't work"... self-defeating by my standards, anyway. =)
gotta say, though... damn... 600kg of batteries; that's over 1300 lb. some small cars (say, lotus elise) weight about that much...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Speed never killed anyone. It's how they decided to stop that caused the problem. <rimshot /> But seriously, most "speed-related deaths" statistics you'll find are artificially inflated. The way the statistics are counted is that if anybody involved was speeding (ie, going at least 1 mph over the limit), then it's categorized as speed-related. That's ignoring any of the true factors, like being alcohol-related, or caused by that little brat in the backseat that wouldn't sit down, or the driver was just an idiot (reading the morning paper while driving counts as idiocy).
Maybe you should look to see who I was responding too before you accuse me of being americocentric. Browsing at +1 makes you look like a fool.
Aerodynamical? That must be an industry term.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Yeah, but you ever notice how drunk drivers never seem to hurt themselves or any of the other drunks out on the roads at 2 AM when the bars close, but only sober drivers? I think everyone should be driving drunk and we'd see a large decrease in the number of auto deaths.
I keep looking at the photographs and can't shake the feeling that what we are really seeing is the class project for realistic computer graphics. The car is just too glossy and perfect looking, even inside.
Maybe I'm just getting paranoid, because of this Beetle
They've tempted you with a non-Internal combustion vehicle. Now that you're interested and go "Oh yes, I finally can just plug into my house and Pay the electric company for my power and not the gas station".. Then they unveil it. OH MY GOD THAT THING IS UGLY... and they tell us thats the only way you'll ever have a fast electric car.. a big heavy ugly ass machine. Thus the sabotage of zero-emission vehicles is complete. On a side note.. if we all just plug our cars into our house to charge it... electric companies then will have to produce more electricity.. then burning more of what ever fuel they use. Thus creating more polution.. or possibly some other environmental effect or danger even if your electric company doesn't produce from fossil fuels right..?
Who makes you Sig?
First of all, this is obviously a concept car. If you read the article and take a look at their homepage the idea comes forward.
As someone else allready stated, the weight is huge and 8 wheels is strange for a passenger car. However, on their homepage it is made clear that they created a standard chassis on which a bus, truck or passenger car can be build. Further more, it's interesting to see their concept as it shows that perhaps the future of automotive transportation lies in a totally different concept than currently used.
You can compare it to toyota's electric car or the lotus elise but those cars are made with todays concept of building cars. The engine built in the wheel is a refreshing thought as it surely leaves alot of room for a developer to design the card without compromising for motor compartments etc.
Off course it does raise questions like what would be the price of a new wheel and such but somehow i don't think the audience for this type of car will be impressed by it's maintenance costs.
Besides that, i think it's a refreshing design. But that's pure personal prefference.
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
number of batteries this car needs are enormous. Sure, you can put it in an elise (probably not, but just work with me) but you'll have enough charge to get up to 30mph before it dies.
:-)
Maybe I'm missing something here, but there is an Electric Lotus Elise. It has quite reasonable acceleration performance (but is speed limited to 150kph/90mph I think). There's some details here but a lot more links are listed on google.
I'd be tempted but I've already got a Lotus.
Simon
but last time I checked, 600 kg = 272 lbs. ;-) (1kg ~ 2.2lbs)
Errrr....When exactly did you check? Was it before you had any morning coffee.
I think you hit the divide and not the multiply key on your calculator
It's true that the EV's that are offered to us by most car makers seem to be designed to make us not want to buy them. They probably don't want us to buy them because they make a lot of profits from the much more complex mechanical systems and many car makers have quite a bit of money invested in the oil market. It's as simple as that. It's against their interest to make good EV's. Hybrid and fuel-cell vehicles and threatening enough to them but at least you still have to deal with complex systems and buy fuel.. things that aren't factors with EV's.
However I've seen some really nice homemade and conversion cars. My favorite are classic and muscle cars that have been rebuilt and converted to electric. I've seen some of those that can do 90mph with a range of about 200 miles per charge and the ability to be recharged in 15-30 minutes. An even better trick I've seen is rack mounted batteries. Pop the hood and a special arm (manual usually but could be robotic) is used to remove the spent pack and a new pack is inserted while the spent pack goes to be charged. It's refueling in the style of portable kerosene tanks or like renting a tape from Blockbuster except with batteries.
For refueling stations electric should be a major boon. Charge a membership fee for the right to exchange battery packs and set up solar/wind to recharge spent packs and you have little ongoing costs.. it's all upfront costs which shouldn't be anymore than starting a gas station. Also as fuel doesn't need to be hauled in to the station you can put the stations in remote locations and make them fully self-service.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Even the worst electric plants are more effecient than the ebst internal combustion engines at producing and transporting the resulting energy. Even counting the loss of transferring the energy into batteries.. hauling the batteries around in the car.. converting the electricity into making the car go.. the electric is still more effecient. The main downside of electrics however is that it's harder to store at the same space efficency... meaning that batteries need to be a lot bigger that a tank of gas to get the same range. Batteries are getting better but they still can't squeeze as much into the same space. They can also be slow to charge unless you have the money to spend on a fast charger and batteries able to stand being charged that fast. However common EV's can more than provide enough range for the average person to drive to work.. go to lunch.. go back to work.. make a few stops on the way home.. and get home. The cost of fuel is typically way cheaper than gasoline even if you just plug into an outlet in your home and of course you have the option of using solar and wind to recharge your vehicle which of couse costs you nothing other than the upfront cost of installing your system. Insurance is usually cheaper for EV's also as they are usually very safe to drive as they have no parts that can explode and the batteries absorb impact during a crash.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Yeah damn it, this it the twenty-first century now! It's been the twenty-first century for *three years*!. Where's my flying car, you swinish motor manufacturers?
Meanwhile, the direct injection electronically controlled turbo diesel just goes on getting more and more efficient, and cleaner. And smaller. And lighter. And more reliable.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
I'm surprised that no-one has pointed out that one of these motors, kicking out around 75hp, would power a small family car just fine. Using only one motor and a transaxle would probably let you fill the existing engine compartment and fuel tank areas with NiMH batteries, giving a Ford Fiesta/Escort sized car (small/mid family car) with reasonable around-town performance. You could also stick the 75hp motor and batteries in a Nissan Micra-sized car, for a small car that goes like hell... The standard, non-cat, carbie Micras have about 55-60hp, and the new shape ones are all about 50-55hp. 75hp and *no* noxious emissions would be pretty damn useful in something that weighs 550kg wet.
It looks almost like it was designed as a lemosine or something, for carting around rich environmentalist actors :)
That this can go 190 miles an hour isn't really that impressive, especialy given that it probably has motors on all 8(?!) of it's wheels.
There are actualy a lot of niche electric cars for sale that will go pretty fast. Perhaps slashdot could look them up and do a comprehensive story.
Oh wait, that would require real work, nevermind...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
Deleted
I mean, it's a 400kW vehicle. Why electric? 400kW is 400kW whether it's petrol or batteries. You still have to generate and store the energy so you're still throwing similar amounts of C02 into the atmosphere when you use it.
So, at 400kW, I don't see the point of the thing. BioDiesel or methanol fuel cell based, I could see the point of.
Deleted
On level ground, about the same speed... Unless the passengers stick their heads out of the windows. It will take longer to reach top speed, though. Tyre friction will increase due to the extra weight, unless you pump some more air in, but you don't want a blowout at 180mph! Having said that, this thing has 8 wheels so you might be OK...
but carry 8 passengers as well?
Just the thing to get the rugrats to soccer practice.
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).
In my mind the practicality of these vehicles, independent of cost, revolves around the range versus recharge cycle. If it takes more than a few minutes to do a recharge, and the range is less than a thousand miles, then they're just not good enough for a general-purpose vehicle.
This is why hybrids are interesting ... recharge
cycle is a tank fill.
What I'm waiting for is someone to look at making a hybrid where the engine is always on, always producing power, but the generator is producing a bit more power than the thing normally will need and charging a capacitor stack rather than batteries. That gives you acceleration (for awhile) but is much lighter and cheaper than batteries and since the engine is operating efficiently all the time, and requires quite a bit less power than if it were producing motive power directly (eg a few hundred cc ought to do a pretty good job) it should still be more efficient.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
Oh yeah. Let's just stomp that sumbich flat.
Pretty cool ride but I don't see the use unless they can start making CHEAP EFFICIENT solar systems. Of course, I should probably just ask Santa for a pony because I am more likely to get that down my chimney that effective solar power with oil and coal so CLEAN.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Torque 465.05 nm / 343.0 ft lbs @ combined rpm
heh... that's more torque than most truck engines, actually =).
i guess this really confirms the rumor that the electric motor on the prius is so powerful (torque-wise) that they had to tone it down a bit to get reasonable (as in, slow-ish 8-10s) acceleration times (and reasonable fuel economy -- after all it's supposed to be a gas-sipping car). and remember, that torque is available at any rpm.
I would not be surprised that an eletric-motor assisted car would do better than a straight int.comb. engine car (if you can save the weight on the batteries, say, use ultra-caps or something)... This is true *especially* in acceleration, which in any race that involves actually turning, would be one of the, if not the most important stat (while braking into a turn, your engine is still redlined and charging up the capacitors for that speedy exit)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I think the Air car has a better chance of working, not only due to cost, but the licensing model as well. They will grow through selling the factories, not the cars. Check the website to see how many licenses have been sold.
None in North america, 40 in China alone. http://www.theaircar.com
"Three words, Sully - Eight Wheel Drive!"
OK - I get superb cornering in my front wheel drive, four wheels on the ground Neon. So does the Skip Barber racing school. 8?
Why 8? You have to be adding all the inefficiencies of all the wheels when you add wheels. Granted some of us can't live without a dualie or full-time all-wheel drive, but we're also willing to live with the slight inefficiency.
Maybe it's still more efficient than an 8-wheel or maybe a 4-wheel IC engine and traditional transmission and transfer cases, but it can't be more efficient than a 4-wheel electric with a motor on two wheels, and I can't imagine steering all those wheels is a trivial problem for engineering the steering.
(Footnote - go read up on the transfer of Paul MacCready's electric car to GM ("We can't put a motor on each wheel. What if one fails? The thing'll do donuts!" Never mind that many IC motor mount failures will collapse the nearby wheel assembly to the same effect...)
Geez - the guys at Pep Boys battery & tire dept. will drool and throw a rod when they see this thing limping in once a year...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
BTW, I'm not so sure they are statistically independent. I think you could make a case for synchronized swerving.
The politicians don't/can't/won't understand the stats.
The result is that we now have thousands of Gatsos all over the place to stop *speeding* because the politicians think speed related accidents are actually *speeding* related accidents. The problem is that it turns out that while speed is a significant contributer to accidents and deaths, *speeding* isn't.
Deleted
Both are or can be made in a renewable fashion.
There's no net pollution. CO2 produced by burning the fuel is taken up by the plants producing the oil or the mechanism creating the methanol.
Deleted
and yet you missed "mechanical transmittion"? :)
Intelligent Life on Earth
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
I'm I the only one who thought that on first seeing the car.
Might as well throw in a link to their homepage as well.
Yep. Killing one site at a time just isn't enough for old Slashdot now, is it?
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
American politicians?
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Why not?
Perhaps you are confusing top speed with acceleration?
Nah, this is a preview of James Bond's next ride...
American politicians?
Definitely not; this vehicle isn't a huge gas-guzzling SUV, and doesn't show support for the oil lobby or the American auto lobby.
If people were going too fast for conditions, that it's speed related?
You could mark it as an ID-10-T error as well, I suppose, but that approach makes sense. Excessive speed in the wrong situation greatly increases the probability of an acident leading to fatalities.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
While I was going to make some insightful comments about continual growth of electric cars lately, this 'product' is just plain laughable.
[...]
And seriously, whats with the 8 wheel design?
That was my first thought too, but on closer inspection, this looks less like a car and more like a small bus with a nicer-than-usual interior. Under that category (luxury chartered bus), it could easily work.
I like the name...there's just something about "Kaz" that rings a bell. Now, if it could only rip rocks...
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
Yes, the car can do 180mph but can the webserver handle 180hpm (hits per minute)?
[alk]
I think the teardrop-shaped car you recall seeing was designed by Buckminster Fuller, who called it the Dymaxion car.
Actually, the interesting point of their design is that with four wheels per side, one of two tires could blow out and the car would still have two wheels left to keep control, after which I'd assume one would stop.
Hm. Pneumatic tires are passe anyway. Solid tires exist, but are not widely sold, if at all.
...they overclocked it!
You know what this means, right? Every couple of years, the cars can go twice as fast. Imagine how much the internal storage will grow!
Damn digital's cool.
I've heard that there is a growing trend in Japan to make cars more homey and luxurious, like little living rooms, as mentioned here and here for example. Partly because they spend so much time in their cars due to heavy traffic. The pictures and diagrams really brought this home. Check out the size of that mother, and look at the flat-floor diagram, with the wide seat sideways and the others arranged around it. I could easily imagine adding a coffee table and a lamp.
I doubt the motors are more than 20% of the entire vehicle weight. Modern rare-earth electric motors are fairly light and efficient for their output power.
Older EV designs did generally use a single motor, but with current motor technology using a motor in each wheel is supposed to save weight and be more efficent than a single big motor.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
http://homepower.com
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I read an article on all-wheel steering about 20 years ago. It talked about experimental vehicles which switched steering algorithms depending on what speed you were travelling. At low speeds steering changed the orientation of the front and rear wheels in opposite directions. At highway speeds all the wheels changed direction at once. That could take some getting used to.
you yanks
:-)
Watch the insults. I am a canuck
A new spin off of the NHRA, NEDRA is the National Electric Drag Racing Association.
Nothing like an electric motorcycle hitting 152 mph in 9.4 seconds on the quarter mile.
Also amusing to see an old Mazda RX7 nearly stand pure vertical on its rear bumper on launch. They added wheelie bars to the car the next year.
Or perhaps you'd rather drive a nice 100 mile range electric sports car that can beat a Corvette off the line.
Electric vehicles are advancing rather impressively on the small scale with little or no R&D funding. Which makes the total lack of interest displayed by the major auto manufacturers all the more disheartening.
Once more unto the breach dear friends...