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More on the Tango Electric Car
jj00 writes "Here is an interesting story about a father-son built car in Spokane, Washington. What is most surprising is its top speed (130 MPH) and its weight (about the same as a Camry), and it runs on batteries!"
your question:
...how long do the batteries last?
from the article:
About 80 miles per charge.
I like this car. If the first prototype didn't cost 80 grand I'd be jumping on it.
Safety? It has jet-pilot seat belts and a racing-regulation roll cage; it weighs more than 3,000 pounds, about the same as a Toyota Camry, including 1,100 pounds of Yellow Top batteries under the floorboards as ballast, so it's not tippy on turns.
I don't know man, this 3,000 pound car weighs more than my Mazda Protege (approx. 2.6k pounds)
Top speed is 130 mph, not 160 mph.
RTFA some more.
U.S. Patent No. 6,328,121 (Ultra-Narrow Automobile Stabilized with Ballast)... Safety? It has jet-pilot seat belts and a racing-regulation roll cage; it weighs more than 3,000 pounds, about the same as a Toyota Camry, including 1,100 pounds of Yellow Top batteries under the floorboards as ballast, so it's not tippy on turns.
And moderators, RTFA before you mode up dumbass posts like the parent.
Check out their website at http://www.commutercars.com . Under the gallery section, they've got a video of it in action. Pretty neat-o.
So why does it need to go from 0-60 in four seconds and top out at 130? (and is anyone else wondering what the real numbers would be if someone took that thing out to a drag strip and timed it?)
From the article: By winter they had a drivable car, and by fall, they were racing it on autocross tracks
Seems like theres a good chance that these are fairly accurate numbers.
"A narrow car could or even travel between lanes, like a motorcycle." could it? sure. could it legally? uhh
A car could do it just as legal as a motorcycle can. It's fully legal to share lanes with any other vehicle(at least in California).
However, weaving in and out of lanes is not legal, technically motrocycles have to "pick a lane" though that usually doesn't happen...
Take Care
A1miras
At the moment, however, U.S. Patent No. 6,328,121 (Ultra-Narrow Automobile Stabilized with Ballast) is causing a jam in front of Spokane's Northtown Mall. Traffic stops, drivers gawk.
Holy fuck, they got a patent for a car that's narrow! It's like a regular car, but narrow. Wow that's so fucking novel!
Oh but it's got a low center of gravity too?! No one ever would have thought of that...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The reason the Smart has such disappointing sales is mainly due to the price. For the same price as a two-seater 600 cc engine (even though you can buy them turbocharged) you could buy yourself a 4-seater with a 1200cc engine.
What this translates into is a car which you would only buy as a second or third car and isn't really all that practical. It will still get stuck in traffic jams and a lot of cities in Europe have ALL parking bays painted out on the road anyway, including the parallel parking bays, making the main reason to buy it void.
The only major problem I see with that choice is all that lead floating around. But the production of the fancy battery types is not exactly environmentally friendly anyway. Well ok, the other problem is the 80 mile range. That works out to a 10 minute stop every hour to hour-and-a-half or so, if stations are placed optimally. Such frequent breaks could easily help traffic safety.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
From the article William Garrison, UC Berkeley professor emeritus and co-author of "Tomorrow's Transportation." "People want variety . . . They don't want people telling them what to do. We wealthy people with bleeding hearts say we need mass transit for the poor. The hell with that. The poor need money. If they had money, they wouldn't take transit."
I'm sorry Mr Garrison, but people do want variety. I'm all for effective electric cars, but we should allow our already working mass transit systems be developed to be equally or more convenient to use at the same time. In paris, you don't need a train time table: the trains are always two minutes apart. In Australia, tramstops have little touchscreen kiosks which allow you to plan your route, buy a ticket and even optimise your time.
I want my big SUV to go out bushbashing and hauling lumber in a trailer, I want to be able to rent/buy a small electric two seater so that don't get quashed in a road accident that would have killed a motorcyclist when I go shopping on my own and I want to be able to buy a ticket to a train that runs on time so I can read manuals or highlight meeting minutes or just plain sleep on my way to my tech job in the city where parking is a pain in the ass anyway.
And if you look at the videos, you can see that it's *very* stable.
The motor that's in it is a small fraction of the cost.
They've had it at Woodburn, Oregon's annual EV drag races in earlier prototypes. Come to this year's (August 31) and if you're lucky, maybe they'll bring one this year.
Come to the OEVA EV Awareness Day tomorrow (today? July 26) and if you're real lucky, maybe they'll have one here then too (they did last year).
The Toyota Camry with a standard transmission weighs 2,600. With an auto it's 100lbs more, but still not the 3k the article claims. ...Posted with a Sanyo 6400, yo.
From the manufacturer website:
For that average commute of 20 miles and up to 24 miles per charge, the total cost per mile of the Tango is approximately 30% lower than that of a Honda Insight. This includes battery replacement, maintenance, and the cost of electricity at $.05 per kWh (as in the Northwest). The Honda Insight has an EPA rating of 56 mpg city and 57 highway.
Link To Reference Here
Cost per Mile (ICE vs Tango)
You'll get maximum mileage from your batteries if you only drive the car 20-24 miles per charge; the chart indicates you'd get ~80,000 miles from the batteries. If you max out and drive 80 miles per charge (the maximum range), you'd cut that total down to ~16,000 miles.
At that point, the car really loses it cost effectiveness, as each battery pack costs $2,500. Driving it 80 miles per charge would probably make it as expensive to drive as the Hummer H2. Still, can you imagine what an improvement in battery technology could do for a car like this? It would push the TCO (total cost of ownership) of the car way down............
Electricity is not free; electrical energy generation and storage are horribly inefficient
Bullshit. A large power plant is very efficient -- much more so than a gasoline engine (which has 20-30% efficiency). Storage is slightly less efficient, but still approaches 80-90% efficiency with the right charging methods.
lead-acid batteries are friendly neither to your pocket book nor to your planet.
Virtually all lead-acid batteries are recycled. You can recover pretty much 100% of the lead from one and use it in new batteries. In comparison, most NiCd and NiMH batteries are just thrown in the trash (even though that's illegal), and can't be recycled as efficiently.
That said, I do acknowledge that the creators' original intent was to use fuel cells which may prove to be a superior energy delivery system.
Fuel cells have been in the "almost there" state for the past 40 years. It doesn't look like there was much progress since.
1. "...zooms from zero to 60 in four seconds" nuf sed.
2. " Working from a photo-shopped picture of a 1998 Mercedes A-Class hatchback..." and Mercedes seem to be doing ok with that style given how many I've seen around.
3. "... causing a jam in front of Spokane's Northtown Mall. Traffic stops, drivers gawk." nef sed.
4. "...leaving a puff of rubber smoke and conventional Corvettes and Porsches in the dust.". Sounds like most sets of traffic lights will do that part!
5. "... Three hours to completely recharge in a dryer socket" - in other words, at your home, your mate's, at work if they provide covered parking and a convenient socket or extension cable and technically any other location where they have a bloody main socket!
Did you actually bother to read the article before posting!?
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
SEALED, VIBRATION RESISTANT, AND LEAK PROOF, EVEN WHEN BROKEN
In an OPTIMA battery, the lead plates and separator are wound and tightly compressed into a cell tube so they can't move, shed, or break, even in severe shock and vibration applications. In independent SAE tests, the OPTIMA kept working after being subjected to vibrations up to 5G for 12 hours. As in all AGM TECHNOLOGY BATTERIES, there is no "free acid" that can leak out or spill and the OPTIMA can be operated effectively in any position -- even upside down -- without any risk of leaking and because it is sealed, no corrosion can form on the posts, connectors, or cables.
At DC Battery, we have been shown tests in which the a bullet is fired into an Optima leaving a huge hole in the center. Even with the battery's interior exposed, there was no leakage and when placed into a vehicle, it performed perfectly.
Hardly "completely disappointing sales".
They're all over the place in London, Paris, Madrid, Milan.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
All you're doing really is relocating the pollution elsewhere or changing the form of the pollution.
True, but in the end it works out more efficient: because a large power plant is designed solely to produce power, it is much more efficient and cleaner at doing it than a small combustion engine is, even taking power transport into consideration.
We don't all have diesel generators in our back sheds to power our homes, because it is cheaper and cleaner to have a high-effeciency power plant supplying millions of homes.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Both the Tango's website and their battery suppliers (Ovonics) offer info on this. If you use them to 80% depth of discharge (DoD) they'll last 450 cycles. If you use them to 20% DoD, 4000 cycles.
BTW, 20% DoD is 20 miles, precisely the average round-trip commute in the US (U of T survey).
According to Tango's creators, 20% DoD leads to a per-mile cost that is around HALF that of the Honda Insight. (Assumes 5 cents per kWH, WA prices. At 15 cents/kWH CA prices, the cost-per-mile equals the Insight.) Ok, that may prove optimistic IRL, but given the dimensions, it has a decent chance of coming true.
Then you are just comparing crumple zones. We all know that having crumple zones is a good thing... That has been proven for years. They expand the moment of impact, which lowers force exerted upon passengers at a linear rate.
What you should do is collide two moving vehicles of different weight. If you collide two 3k lb cars together at 50 mph, the energy from the collision will cancel and both drivers will come to a dead stop. If, on the other hand, you collide a 10k lb vehicle and a 1k lb vehicle, the 1k lb vehicle will have the lower of the two energies. Without pulling out my old physics textbook, that means that after the collision, the driver of the 10k car will still be going about 45 mph in the original direction of travel, but the driver of the 1k car will be traveling 45 mph in the opposite direction, for a velocity change of 95 MPH during the moment of impact. 5 MPH vs 95 MPH... Who is going to survive this crash?
Don't be so fast to shout bullshit.
-Chris
P.S. The passengers of the car don't feel the force of the kinetic energy of the opposing car during a crash, they feel the force of the kinetic energy the car they are in exerts upon them in response to the force of the second car. The mass of the car you are in is very important to the overall equation.
The ______ Agenda
I worked out in a previous comment that, despite the inefficiency of coal power, you will still at least break even: 40% efficiency at the plant, 90% converting to battery charge, and 85% efficient running the motor works out to just over 30% net efficiency, while most ICE's are at most 26% efficient.
:(
The cost of solar and wind power systems is continuing to decrease; I've been researching installing a solar system at my house for 2.4 Kw. After rebates, it's only $4000. To be eligible for tying into the grid, it will as you said require a true sine wave inverter, and a 2.5 Kw version goes for around $2200 (A same-power modified sine wave goes for half that). And most solar systems come with a bank of batteries to provide power through night/clouds, and it would charge a car without hesitation (Although to save a little from inverter losses, you might want to set up a dedicated 12VDC circuit).
However, the proles are indeed stupid, ignorant sheep