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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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Maybe it was Total Recall, not sure.
Who mediates your information?
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.
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.
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
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To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.
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).
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
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
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.
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.
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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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.
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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).
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
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
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.