good news for environment
by
civilengineer
·
· Score: 4, Informative
One of the main reasons electric car sales are not picking up is that they are percieved to be slow pickup vehicles. Looks like this wont be an issue any longer.
The car, priced at $220,000, is available only directly from AC Propulsion and has not yet met federal safety regulations.
and that's one more problem
--
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
Re:good news for environment
by
MourningStar
·
· Score: 5, Informative
You can also get the Tango from http://www.commutercars.com
It's only 80K and it runs off DC motors with a range of 100+ miles and 0-60 in under 4 seconds.
For those that don't have NYT, the home page for the Tzero is http://www.acpropulsion.com/tzero_pages/tzero_home.htm
Re:good news for environment
by
StewedSquirrel
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Hydrogen-based vehicles ARE electric vehicles.
The atomic bonds of H2 gas are just much more efficient at storing electricity than those weak ion based things we call "batteries".
The "Fuel Cell" is just an electric power source that is much more efficient output/weight.
Stewey
-- There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Another article...
by
DrEldarion
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Here's an article that you don't have to register to see.
January 29, 2000 -- AC Propulsion' s tzero out-accelerated a Ferrari F355, a new Corvette, and a Porsche Carrera 4 in a series of impromptu 1/8 mile drag races held last weekend at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California, and at Calstart' s northern facility at the former Alameda Naval Air Station. The tzero was driven to the Bay Area from southern California last week. That journey spanned more than the geographic distance between those two areas, it spanned two cultures as well. Hot rodding, coming from the garages of Los Angeles, and high tech, growing from a garage in Palo Alto, are combined in the tzero.
The tzero is a silicon hot rod. It starts with the hot rodder's holy grail, horsepower - 200 of them. But the tzero harnesses the power with 120 IGBTs, equal to 7200 square millimeters of silicon-based control. The result is acceleration to 60 mph in 4.1 seconds, efficiency equivalent to 70 mpg, and emissions equal to zero. The tzero is an electric car.
The trip to Silicon Valley was planned to demonstrate the tzero to entrepreneurs and investors interested in the concept of a high-performance, environmentally-sensible, silicon-intensive automobile. As word of the tzero visit spread, the planned demonstrations took on an edge when a Ferrari-owner challenged the tzero to a race.
The race became reality when both Moffett Field and Calstart made their facilities available for the politically correct contest of speed. Saturday, January 22 dawned bright and sunny and an eager group of exotic car owners, high-tech gurus, venture capital investors and electric car enthusiasts gathered along the 4000-foot north taxiway at Moffett Field. Cones were set to mark the start and finish lines, and the tzero, with AC Propulsion vice-president Alec Brooks at the wheel, pulled up to the start line and sat silently. The Ferrari made glorious sounds as Rick Schick, a race car driver assigned to drive the Ferrari for the event paced the high-strung Italian thoroughbred up and down the track, warming its complex internals with nervous blips of the throttle and heating the tires with sudden burnouts. Finally the race was on. Immediately the crowd saw what it had not expected to see. The tzero leapt ahead at the start. The Ferrari' s 32-valve, 4-cam V8 engine screamed its delicious song in vain effort against the mute power of the tzero' s 120-IGBT-fed 3-phase induction motor. The spectators gasped at the sight of the tzero driving away from the automotive icon from Modena. At the end it was tzero by eight car lengths.
A Corvette C5, the newest example of American V8 muscle from Chevrolet stepped up to defend the honor of combustion power. Considered opinion had the Corvette, with its large displacement, high torque V8, putting up a good fight in the short 1/8 mile sprint. But against the tzero, the result was the same, proving in equally convincing fashion that American brawn fares no better than European sophistication against the tzero' s combination of light weight, high-current lead-acid batteries, and electric propulsion.
More races were run.
Different drivers wheeled the tzero. The result stayed the same. A Miata driver, unfamiliar with high power levels, got into the tzero and immediately blew away the Ferrari. She wants a tzero now. The Ferrari owner took a turn and was astounded by the continuous surge of smooth power. A newspaper reporter who arrived in an Escort allowed himself to be talked into driving the tzero and he beat the Ferrari. An investor from Sweden, after one victorious run in the tzero decided make a second run when challenged by his friend and investing partner who was proudly driving a brand new Porsche Carrera Cabriolet. By now everyone was surprised when the tzero lagged behind. Was the tzero battery dead? Was it collusion between two friends? Neither actually. The tzero inadvertently ran the whole race with its hand brake on, and the Porsche won by seven car lengths.
Re:Grrrr
by
Strudelkugel
·
· Score: 5, Informative
-- Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
RTFA
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3, Informative
At the end of a hard drive, including five scorching zero-to-60 runs, the car had traveled 57 miles and used only 9,900 of the 50,000 watt-hours in its batteries, costing less than the price of two gallons of gasoline.
Re:What they don't tell you is...
by
WhiteBandit
·
· Score: 3, Informative
That's outdated though - the NYT article has the laptop battery version, whereas your link has the older lead-acid version.
Re:Someone has to do it...
by
evilviper
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Good luck getting a charge when you run out of juice in the middle of nowhere. At least the AAA can bring you a 5 gallon container of petrol with a conventional vehicle.
Terrible point... One of Electricity's advantages is how very flexible it is these days. If you thing you are going to run out of power, then you just need to bring along some sort of generator. A small gas-powered generator would do the job if you think gas is going to be available.
With cars that run on gasoline, you NEED to have a gas station nearby. With electric, you could just as well pull out a solar panel, and get a charge in the middle of nowhere.
Not to mention that you could just plug-in to any homes that might be around. There might not be a gas station for 200 miles, but just about anywhere you are, you can see power-lines along the roadside.
A 100 mile cruising range is less than one half of the range of a typical passenger car
Yes, 100 miles isn't as much as normal cars, but that's only important if you need it. Most people drive much less than 100 miles each day. The only thing higher capacity gets you, is the ability to get gas half as often.
The emissions aren't "near zero," it's just that the extra pollution would be emitted from power generation facilities.
But power generation can be near-zero pollution, just because much of it isn't, is not a reason to say that electric cars cause a lot of pollution. Even with the most ineffecient power generation, electric cars are far, far more effecient than gasoline-powered cars.
Can we move the focus off of electric vehicles, and concentrate on better power generation and storage technology?
Electric cars are the ideal vehicles, it's just that no car companies are spending much money on R&D. Technologies like flywheels promise to hold an incredible deal of electrical energy, while being very light, just as fuel-cells do. Electric cars really are the only logical next step, although more effeciency with gas-powered cars in a good step in the interim.
Re:Don't be silly
by
kcbrown
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It says it costs about $3000 to replace the batteries, and it should be done every 20,000 miles.
Of course, that $3000 buys 1500 gallons of gasoline at $2/gallon, and if you're averaging 20 mpg you can go 30,000 miles.
So the gas car still wins, and we haven't even factored in the cost of the electricity to recharge the Tzero.
The Tzero might do significantly better in Europe, but that depends a great deal on how much electricity costs there.
-- Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
You should have read more closely
by
Tau+Zero
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Unfortunately for your critique, it's addressed to the old version of the tzero (the one with lead-acid batteries, not lithium batteries). You made a number of other mis-statements which you could have corrected with a visit to the manufacturer's web site. (Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with AC Propulsion, and I think their vehicular product is a toy for people with too much money. If they can get some of that money, more power to them [150 kilowatts at a time].)
* It may do 0-60 in 4 seconds, but so can lots of vehicles if you do hairy modifications to the engine and drivetrain. The car is tiny and light, obviously, since it needs only 200 horsepower to produce those figures.
2450 pounds is not light in my book, though the lithium-ion version is reported to weigh a bit under 2000 pounds. The sparkling performance is due in no small part to maximum torque being available from zero speed, a characteristic of many types of electric motors.
* Note the careful wording: "...Efficiency *to* 70 mpg." That tells me they are taking an average and counting when the motors are off while cruising.
You count the time your engine isn't working on a downslope when calculating your gas mileage, and your car gets its best mileage when putting along on the cruise control too. Not that the tzero's motor shuts off; the tzero doesn't have gears or even a clutch, so the motor is spinning whenever the car is moving.
* Good luck getting a charge when you run out of juice in the middle of nowhere. At least the AAA can bring you a 5 gallon container of petrol with a conventional vehicle.
If these vehicles were common you'd have charging stations everywhere, and you could always accept a partial charge from another vehicle. You know, like siphoning gas only without the risk of fire? (AC Propulsion used to list this as one of the features of their technology, but they've either removed it from their web site or made it very hard to find. It is implicit in the ability to generate AC to back-feed the grid; see the link named "Vehicle-to-Grid Demonstration Project: Grid Regulation Ancillary Service with a Battery Electric Vehicle".)
* A 100 mile cruising range is less than one half of the range of a typical passenger car with an ICE
That's for lead-acid batteries. The lithium-ion version has a range of about 300 miles.
* Totally electric cars are less efficient in the winter, when power is drawn for heating.
That's what hybrids are for. If you are using the hybrid battery in "depletion mode", you just switch over to engine power after you use the battery's non-surge capacity. If you run short distances between charges, that might be never.
* The emissions aren't "near zero," it's just that the extra pollution would be emitted from power generation facilities. Those power generators may be more efficient, but an increase in output (to supply these vehicles) is going to introduce tons (literally) more pollutants into small areas of the planet.
Figures? The typical ICE vehicle runs around 20% efficiency or less on average. If the tzero is powered by combined-cycle powerplants burning natural gas at 50% efficiency and has 40% losses in transmission, batteries and conversion, that's still 30% net efficiency. Plus, the waste heat of the combined-cycle plant can be harnessed to do useful things; you can't do that with the heat coming out of the radiator, exhaust or brakes of the ICE car. And with electric cars and microturbines as co-generating heating plants, the net efficiency of the system can go over 80%.
You can also hook the tzero up to a wind plant or solar panels. 500 watts of solar panels would give you about 12 miles a day. The I
-- Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the main reasons electric car sales are not picking up is that they are percieved to be slow pickup vehicles. Looks like this wont be an issue any longer.
The car, priced at $220,000, is available only directly from AC Propulsion and has not yet met federal safety regulations.
and that's one more problem
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
Here's an article that you don't have to register to see.
e .html
http://www.evworld.com/archives/reports/tzero_rac
Why are electric cars always so damned ugly?
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Electric Tzero
January 29, 2000 -- AC Propulsion' s tzero out-accelerated a Ferrari F355, a new Corvette, and a Porsche Carrera 4 in a series of impromptu 1/8 mile drag races held last weekend at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California, and at Calstart' s northern facility at the former Alameda Naval Air Station. The tzero was driven to the Bay Area from southern California last week. That journey spanned more than the geographic distance between those two areas, it spanned two cultures as well. Hot rodding, coming from the garages of Los Angeles, and high tech, growing from a garage in Palo Alto, are combined in the tzero.
The tzero is a silicon hot rod. It starts with the hot rodder's holy grail, horsepower - 200 of them. But the tzero harnesses the power with 120 IGBTs, equal to 7200 square millimeters of silicon-based control. The result is acceleration to 60 mph in 4.1 seconds, efficiency equivalent to 70 mpg, and emissions equal to zero. The tzero is an electric car.
The trip to Silicon Valley was planned to demonstrate the tzero to entrepreneurs and investors interested in the concept of a high-performance, environmentally-sensible, silicon-intensive automobile. As word of the tzero visit spread, the planned demonstrations took on an edge when a Ferrari-owner challenged the tzero to a race.
The race became reality when both Moffett Field and Calstart made their facilities available for the politically correct contest of speed. Saturday, January 22 dawned bright and sunny and an eager group of exotic car owners, high-tech gurus, venture capital investors and electric car enthusiasts gathered along the 4000-foot north taxiway at Moffett Field. Cones were set to mark the start and finish lines, and the tzero, with AC Propulsion vice-president Alec Brooks at the wheel, pulled up to the start line and sat silently. The Ferrari made glorious sounds as Rick Schick, a race car driver assigned to drive the Ferrari for the event paced the high-strung Italian thoroughbred up and down the track, warming its complex internals with nervous blips of the throttle and heating the tires with sudden burnouts. Finally the race was on. Immediately the crowd saw what it had not expected to see. The tzero leapt ahead at the start. The Ferrari' s 32-valve, 4-cam V8 engine screamed its delicious song in vain effort against the mute power of the tzero' s 120-IGBT-fed 3-phase induction motor. The spectators gasped at the sight of the tzero driving away from the automotive icon from Modena. At the end it was tzero by eight car lengths.
A Corvette C5, the newest example of American V8 muscle from Chevrolet stepped up to defend the honor of combustion power. Considered opinion had the Corvette, with its large displacement, high torque V8, putting up a good fight in the short 1/8 mile sprint. But against the tzero, the result was the same, proving in equally convincing fashion that American brawn fares no better than European sophistication against the tzero' s combination of light weight, high-current lead-acid batteries, and electric propulsion.
More races were run.
Different drivers wheeled the tzero. The result stayed the same. A Miata driver, unfamiliar with high power levels, got into the tzero and immediately blew away the Ferrari. She wants a tzero now. The Ferrari owner took a turn and was astounded by the continuous surge of smooth power. A newspaper reporter who arrived in an Escort allowed himself to be talked into driving the tzero and he beat the Ferrari. An investor from Sweden, after one victorious run in the tzero decided make a second run when challenged by his friend and investing partner who was proudly driving a brand new Porsche Carrera Cabriolet. By now everyone was surprised when the tzero lagged behind. Was the tzero battery dead? Was it collusion between two friends? Neither actually. The tzero inadvertently ran the whole race with its hand brake on, and the Porsche won by seven car lengths.
Much better link, with more details and pictures.
Resistance to /. effect unknown.
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
At the end of a hard drive, including five scorching zero-to-60 runs, the car had traveled 57 miles and used only 9,900 of the 50,000 watt-hours in its batteries, costing less than the price of two gallons of gasoline.
Random NYTimes Registration Generator
the company's website
That's outdated though - the NYT article has the laptop battery version, whereas your link has the older lead-acid version.
Terrible point... One of Electricity's advantages is how very flexible it is these days. If you thing you are going to run out of power, then you just need to bring along some sort of generator. A small gas-powered generator would do the job if you think gas is going to be available.
With cars that run on gasoline, you NEED to have a gas station nearby. With electric, you could just as well pull out a solar panel, and get a charge in the middle of nowhere.
Not to mention that you could just plug-in to any homes that might be around. There might not be a gas station for 200 miles, but just about anywhere you are, you can see power-lines along the roadside.
Yes, 100 miles isn't as much as normal cars, but that's only important if you need it. Most people drive much less than 100 miles each day. The only thing higher capacity gets you, is the ability to get gas half as often.
But power generation can be near-zero pollution, just because much of it isn't, is not a reason to say that electric cars cause a lot of pollution. Even with the most ineffecient power generation, electric cars are far, far more effecient than gasoline-powered cars.
Electric cars are the ideal vehicles, it's just that no car companies are spending much money on R&D. Technologies like flywheels promise to hold an incredible deal of electrical energy, while being very light, just as fuel-cells do. Electric cars really are the only logical next step, although more effeciency with gas-powered cars in a good step in the interim.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Of course, that $3000 buys 1500 gallons of gasoline at $2/gallon, and if you're averaging 20 mpg you can go 30,000 miles.
So the gas car still wins, and we haven't even factored in the cost of the electricity to recharge the Tzero.
The Tzero might do significantly better in Europe, but that depends a great deal on how much electricity costs there.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
2450 pounds is not light in my book, though the lithium-ion version is reported to weigh a bit under 2000 pounds. The sparkling performance is due in no small part to maximum torque being available from zero speed, a characteristic of many types of electric motors.
You count the time your engine isn't working on a downslope when calculating your gas mileage, and your car gets its best mileage when putting along on the cruise control too. Not that the tzero's motor shuts off; the tzero doesn't have gears or even a clutch, so the motor is spinning whenever the car is moving.
If these vehicles were common you'd have charging stations everywhere, and you could always accept a partial charge from another vehicle. You know, like siphoning gas only without the risk of fire? (AC Propulsion used to list this as one of the features of their technology, but they've either removed it from their web site or made it very hard to find. It is implicit in the ability to generate AC to back-feed the grid; see the link named "Vehicle-to-Grid Demonstration Project: Grid Regulation Ancillary Service with a Battery Electric Vehicle".)
That's for lead-acid batteries. The lithium-ion version has a range of about 300 miles.
That's what hybrids are for. If you are using the hybrid battery in "depletion mode", you just switch over to engine power after you use the battery's non-surge capacity. If you run short distances between charges, that might be never.
Figures? The typical ICE vehicle runs around 20% efficiency or less on average. If the tzero is powered by combined-cycle powerplants burning natural gas at 50% efficiency and has 40% losses in transmission, batteries and conversion, that's still 30% net efficiency. Plus, the waste heat of the combined-cycle plant can be harnessed to do useful things; you can't do that with the heat coming out of the radiator, exhaust or brakes of the ICE car. And with electric cars and microturbines as co-generating heating plants, the net efficiency of the system can go over 80%.
You can also hook the tzero up to a wind plant or solar panels. 500 watts of solar panels would give you about 12 miles a day. The I
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.