Re:What they don't tell you is...
by
Illbay
·
· Score: 3, Funny
So if you don't run the car for at least the full 4 seconds every time, does it eventually only get up to about 30 mph because of that "battery memory" problem?
-- Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
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.
Re:good news for environment
by
earthforce_1
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Actually, the main reasons electric cars are not more popular are:
1) Lengthy refuelling time 2) Limited cruising range 3) Cost is not competitive - either the vehicle is prohibitively expensive (as in this case) or the batteries need to be replaced after a relatively small number of charge cycles, and the cost of electricity to charge the vehicle is not competitive with gasoline or diesel.
Solve all of these problems at the same time, and you will be wealthier than Billy G. (And less resented for your wealth) I won't hold my breath though, barring some revolution in battery technology, I put my best hopes for an alternative energy vehicle in fuel cells.
It has long been possible to get good acceleration out of an electric car, I remember a 1970's popular science article describing an electric vehicle with regular lead acid batteries that used an energy storage flywheel that recovered braking energy and fed it back into the transmission when you hit the accelerator for quick takeoffs. While you were idling at a stoplight, the battery would gradually be topping up the flywheel velocity, ready for a jackrabbit getaway on the green light.
-- My rights don't need management.
Re:good news for environment
by
afidel
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Or, just give people what they want but make it more friendly for the environment. For instance the Union of Concerned Scientists crafted the UCS Guardian which is a Ford Explorer made green. It gets up to 35mpg, is safer than normal SUV's, and the increased cost is minimal (about $2,300 more than the normal Explorer which will be made back two times over the life of the vehicle in gasoline savings).
-- There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Re:good news for environment
by
sunspot42
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
>1) Lengthy refuelling time
There's a fairly simple solution to that problem, and it's the same one we use for portable electronics - when the batteries are dead, swap them out for a new set. It would require standardized battery designs and altering the general layout of cars slightly. Essentially a hatch to the battery compartment would be placed somewhere on the car - probably at the rear of the trunk in most sedan-style vehicles - that would pop open to reveal several perhaps circular bays, each containing cylindrical battery (think giant AA battery). You'd slide in some kind of counterweighted gadget - like a giant socket wrench - twist it to unlock the battery from its bay and lock it into the changer, then pull it out and swap it for a fresh battery. The bigger the car, the more cells it would take. There might even be a couple different sizes of cells (but not too many). You wouldn't "own" the batteries, and they wouldn't be a permanent part of your car. The batteries would belong to whoever runs the service stations - you'd just be buying the energy, and perhaps paying a large deposit on the batteries which would be refunded (or transferred) when you swapped 'em for a new set.
Storage of all those batteries would take up a lot of space, but it could be placed beneath the "battery stations" in the same way gas tanks are placed beneath gas stations, with dumbwaiter-like devices used to ferry batteries back and forth. And the fixed stations could afford to employ far more efficient, faster, heavier (and hence more costly) chargers than you could ever shoehorn into a car.
Battery technology isn't there yet, but thanks to advances in the computer and portable electronics industries, it's not outrageous to imagine a time when batteries will become efficient enough to make such a system possible.
Another article...
by
DrEldarion
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Here's an article that you don't have to register to see.
Re:Another article...
by
DrEldarion
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
... but why can't they be fuel efficient, have good performance, be good on the environment, and NOT BE UGLY?
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Re:Another article...
by
rmohr02
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Why are electric cars always so damned ugly?
Well, if you're the type of person who has "6,800 lithium-ion laptop batteries lying around", you probably don't concern yourself with how your car looks.
100% of torque at 0 rpm.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Good engine good.
Here's another article with picture . very nice.
by
zymano
·
· Score: 5, Informative
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
Laptop batteries aren't that reliable....
by
puppetman
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
We have 12 laptops in the office, and in 3 years, all the batteries but one have died (they're Dells, and the Dell warranty doesn't cover the battery); and they aren't cheap to replace.
To replace all 6800 batteries every 2-4 years would be an expensive proposition (unless they can come up with a more reliable battery).
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.
So that gives you just over 300 miles a "tank" before you have to stop and recharge...which AFAIK takes significantly longer than pumping gas...unless you were able to do what the first post suggested and harness the power of lightning (or plutonium) to get your 1.21 gigawatts.
"So that gives you just over 300 miles a "tank" before you have to stop and recharge."
At 27 miles per gallon equivalent
We have petrol cars which are more efficient than this, but I don't believe that anything capable of accelerating that fast does 27mpg.
Re:Finally!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Sorry for the troll.
Yay, I love watching 500 laps of people driving in a circle. Woo-hoo. I prefer rallying. If NASCAR cars had passengers, it'd go like this:
"Left. Straight. Left. Straight. Right. NO NO, I WAS KIDDING!"
New Limited Edition Scotty Model
by
tds67
·
· Score: 5, Funny
However, with the single-gear Tzero's engine limited to just over 100 m.p.h. at 13,300 r.p.m.'s, it will never win an oval-track race against those supercars.
Unless of course you purchase the Scotty model, which comes with a guy in a red shirt (who surprisingly doesn't die) who rides shotgun, takes requests/orders from the driver to improve performance, whines about how the (di)lithium crystal batteries won't take the stress, then after a few tense seconds gets the car going 30 m.p.h. faster than it's rated to go.
Okay, so it can hang with Lambo's and Ferrari's. Can it handle something really quick? And before you nabobs twitter about safety, I notice that the Tzero doesn't meat crash specs either. And if you crash the bike, it won't leave you drenched in acid (yeah, yeah, Lithium Ion gel, whatever). Did I mention that you can buy about 20 of them for the price of the Tzero? The bike will also go 80 mph faster than the electric car. And you can fill it in less than 9 hours (3 at a 220 station:)
Nifty toy.
-- Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I've always found that line voltage works better
by
kfg
·
· Score: 4, Funny
That's outdated though - the NYT article has the laptop battery version, whereas your link has the older lead-acid version.
Someone has to do it...
by
ThisIsFred
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
...So I might as well bring up the negative points.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* A 100 mile cruising range is less than one half of the range of a typical passenger car with an ICE, and that's taking into account that the motors can be shut off some of the time. What is the actual cruise range on the hilly terrain in my part of the country? 50 miles?
* The vehicle shown has less interior room than the Corvette (arguably one of the most uncomfortable cars to ride in) and is miniscule. Put the Corvette's engine in that chassis, sans the batteries, and you'll probably get sub-3 second 0-60 time, if the wheels can get a decent grip.
* Totally electric cars are less efficient in the winter, when power is drawn for heating.
* 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.
* The battery system is totally impractical, and a chemical nightmare after a collision.
Can we move the focus off of electric vehicles, and concentrate on better power generation and storage technology?
-- Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted" -RMS
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.
Range more impressive
by
Teahouse
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The fact that they can get 300 miles out of a charge is more impressive than the fact that it accelerates like a ferrari. The real impressive new piece of tech on the car is their regenerative braking, which turns off to avoid skidding. This is a well thought out EV. My only wish is that they made one more in my price range.
-- "Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
Re:Here's another article with picture . very nice
by
GigsVT
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
emissions equal to zero
How much emission does manufacturing 6800 lithium-ion batteries produce?
-- I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Hybird trailer range extender
by
chhamilton
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Not only is the tZero a sporty little electric car with amazing acceleration, it can also achieve reasonable mileage and range using their hybrid range extended trailer. There are links in the AC Propulsion white papers section regarding the range extending trailer. Also, a link to a PDF
With this thing attached the car it gets a combined 40 MPG (highway driving at 100kph/60mph) and a range of around 380 miles. Not bad for a sports car. Another cool feature of the trailer is that it has a linked steering system; it's not a freewheeling trailer, rather the trailer wheels move with the car steering. This makes things like backing up (parallel parking and the like) much easier for those without experience towing a trailer.
If they could just give this car six times the range at one eleventh the cost... then it would be competive with my new Honda Civic Hybrid for commuting to work.
The car goes 300 miles on a charge. You have an 1,800 mile round-trip commute???
-- Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Despite the clear unfeasibility of this car in particular, I think it's good to see AC Propulsion making some waves and getting its name out. I was on my university's FutureTruck team (we called it the Hybrid Electric Vehicle team--the page is way out of date), and the team used an AC Propulsion motor the year before I was there (if I remember correctly...could be wrong here).
The FutureTruck competition is highly sponsored (read: "Ford"), and produces good research, but also good, experienced electrical and mechanical engineers (I'm neither, which lead to my quitting the team--oh well) who have faced the design challenges of a real vehicle. Anyway, we can sit here and pick apart why the Tzero isn't worthwhile, but the fact is that it's a concept car, pretty much, and it shows that it is possible to get great performance out of batteries.
--
This side up.
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.
Re:Here's another article with picture . very nice
by
Bagheera
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I notice the races were all 1/8 mile rather than the standard 1/4 mile we're used to in drag racing. Could that be because the electric motor's torque curve tapers off at higher speed/RPM where the high strung exotics shine?
Electric motors have max torque at 0 RPM, which is great for off the line acceleration. The Porsche is producing maximum grunt much higher in the rev range, which will show further down the track.
Off the line, it's no surprise the electric could win. I'd be much more interested in it's performance at higher speeds and how it handles under extremes of cornering. Little sports cars handle well because they don't weigh anything. Battery packs are still heavy if you want any usable range.
-- Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
Home to school to home was 400 miles (Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Terre Haute and back) while I was in college. Having a vehicle with a range of only 300 miles would have been sh*t for the parents who took me to school and back.
The only downside to electric cars of this sort is the charging time. But for long trips there's a simple way around that.
An automobile needs high horsepower for accelleration. But for cruise it requires very little. On the straight-and-level it depends mainly on air and rolling friction, and 18 horses might suffice for even a moderately large sedan, significantly less for a streamlined sports car.
The electric car described has stored battery power enough to both accellerate from stop repeatedly and climb mountains, and uses regenerative braking to salvage much of the gravitational potential and momentum when going downhill and stopping. So the problem for range extension is just to replace the average straight-and-level cruising losses.
Refueling mid-trip is out, due to charging time. But (if I recall the article correctly) the charging circuit is capable of charging the car at about twice the average consumption on a long trip.
So one solution for longer trips is obvious: A small trailer, about the size of a motorcycle sidecar, containing a gasoline generator and a fuel tank. The generator tops off the batteries while the batteries provide the accelleration and climbing power (so you don't hold up traffic in the mountains, as "eco-friendly" gasoline cars do).
The article talks of charging the car from an oven-style home outlet. Let's be pessimistic and say it's not a standard 30-amp oven but more like 50 amps (at 240 volts). That's 12 KW, about 16.09 HP (plus generator losses). So figure about a 20-25 horse engine (so 17 horses is near the peak of its efficiency curve and you can run it at that long-term), a bit less (since the efficiency of the SYSTEM might be better if you reduce the weight of the engine a bit and run it a tad fast), or even QUITE a bit less (since you don't have to charge at a rate that lets you run 70 MPH for 24/7, but can start out charged and finish up mostly drained).
It's not just a speculation: Follow some of the links you see when googling "tzero charging time" and you'll see such a trailer hanging behind another model of electric car.
If the car is set up for it you can reduce the weight of the trailer by leaving off the starting battery and starting the engine from the battery in the car. (Leave off the starter motor, too, using the generator as a motor for startup.) The car's computer can direct the trailer engine to only run when required, eliminating the idling losses and running it at the peak of its efficiency curve, and arranging proper warmup after start before putting load on the engine.
-- Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Slashdot Mirror
They could only measure 0-60 because at 4 seconds, the li-ion batteries are all dead.
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 --
Good engine good.
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
We have 12 laptops in the office, and in 3 years, all the batteries but one have died (they're Dells, and the Dell warranty doesn't cover the battery); and they aren't cheap to replace.
To replace all 6800 batteries every 2-4 years would be an expensive proposition (unless they can come up with a more reliable battery).
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.
Sorry for the troll.
Yay, I love watching 500 laps of people driving in a circle. Woo-hoo. I prefer rallying. If NASCAR cars had passengers, it'd go like this:
"Left. Straight. Left. Straight. Right. NO NO, I WAS KIDDING!"
Unless of course you purchase the Scotty model, which comes with a guy in a red shirt (who surprisingly doesn't die) who rides shotgun, takes requests/orders from the driver to improve performance, whines about how the (di)lithium crystal batteries won't take the stress, then after a few tense seconds gets the car going 30 m.p.h. faster than it's rated to go.
Okay, so it can hang with Lambo's and Ferrari's. Can it handle something really quick? And before you nabobs twitter about safety, I notice that the Tzero doesn't meat crash specs either. And if you crash the bike, it won't leave you drenched in acid (yeah, yeah, Lithium Ion gel, whatever). Did I mention that you can buy about 20 of them for the price of the Tzero? The bike will also go 80 mph faster than the electric car. And you can fill it in less than 9 hours (3 at a 220 station:)
Nifty toy.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
It's cheap, reliable, readily available, doesn't require batteries, thus saving money, weight and complexity.
.
I haven't been able to thoroughly test my prototype though. It keeps losing power suddenly every time I get 100 feet from my house.
If I can just work out that one little bug. .
KFG
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.
...So I might as well bring up the negative points.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* A 100 mile cruising range is less than one half of the range of a typical passenger car with an ICE, and that's taking into account that the motors can be shut off some of the time. What is the actual cruise range on the hilly terrain in my part of the country? 50 miles?
* The vehicle shown has less interior room than the Corvette (arguably one of the most uncomfortable cars to ride in) and is miniscule. Put the Corvette's engine in that chassis, sans the batteries, and you'll probably get sub-3 second 0-60 time, if the wheels can get a decent grip.
* Totally electric cars are less efficient in the winter, when power is drawn for heating.
* 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.
* The battery system is totally impractical, and a chemical nightmare after a collision.
Can we move the focus off of electric vehicles, and concentrate on better power generation and storage technology?
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
The fact that they can get 300 miles out of a charge is more impressive than the fact that it accelerates like a ferrari. The real impressive new piece of tech on the car is their regenerative braking, which turns off to avoid skidding. This is a well thought out EV. My only wish is that they made one more in my price range.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
emissions equal to zero
How much emission does manufacturing 6800 lithium-ion batteries produce?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Not only is the tZero a sporty little electric car with amazing acceleration, it can also achieve reasonable mileage and range using their hybrid range extended trailer. There are links in the AC Propulsion white papers section regarding the range extending trailer. Also, a link to a PDF
With this thing attached the car it gets a combined 40 MPG (highway driving at 100kph/60mph) and a range of around 380 miles. Not bad for a sports car. Another cool feature of the trailer is that it has a linked steering system; it's not a freewheeling trailer, rather the trailer wheels move with the car steering. This makes things like backing up (parallel parking and the like) much easier for those without experience towing a trailer.
Neat little car.
If they could just give this car six times the range at one eleventh the cost... then it would be competive with my new Honda Civic Hybrid for commuting to work.
The car goes 300 miles on a charge. You have an 1,800 mile round-trip commute???
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The FutureTruck competition is highly sponsored (read: "Ford"), and produces good research, but also good, experienced electrical and mechanical engineers (I'm neither, which lead to my quitting the team--oh well) who have faced the design challenges of a real vehicle. Anyway, we can sit here and pick apart why the Tzero isn't worthwhile, but the fact is that it's a concept car, pretty much, and it shows that it is possible to get great performance out of batteries.
This side up.
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.
I notice the races were all 1/8 mile rather than the standard 1/4 mile we're used to in drag racing. Could that be because the electric motor's torque curve tapers off at higher speed/RPM where the high strung exotics shine?
Electric motors have max torque at 0 RPM, which is great for off the line acceleration. The Porsche is producing maximum grunt much higher in the rev range, which will show further down the track.
Off the line, it's no surprise the electric could win. I'd be much more interested in it's performance at higher speeds and how it handles under extremes of cornering. Little sports cars handle well because they don't weigh anything. Battery packs are still heavy if you want any usable range.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
Home to school to home was 400 miles (Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Terre Haute and back) while I was in college. Having a vehicle with a range of only 300 miles would have been sh*t for the parents who took me to school and back.
The only downside to electric cars of this sort is the charging time. But for long trips there's a simple way around that.
An automobile needs high horsepower for accelleration. But for cruise it requires very little. On the straight-and-level it depends mainly on air and rolling friction, and 18 horses might suffice for even a moderately large sedan, significantly less for a streamlined sports car.
The electric car described has stored battery power enough to both accellerate from stop repeatedly and climb mountains, and uses regenerative braking to salvage much of the gravitational potential and momentum when going downhill and stopping. So the problem for range extension is just to replace the average straight-and-level cruising losses.
Refueling mid-trip is out, due to charging time. But (if I recall the article correctly) the charging circuit is capable of charging the car at about twice the average consumption on a long trip.
So one solution for longer trips is obvious: A small trailer, about the size of a motorcycle sidecar, containing a gasoline generator and a fuel tank. The generator tops off the batteries while the batteries provide the accelleration and climbing power (so you don't hold up traffic in the mountains, as "eco-friendly" gasoline cars do).
The article talks of charging the car from an oven-style home outlet. Let's be pessimistic and say it's not a standard 30-amp oven but more like 50 amps (at 240 volts). That's 12 KW, about 16.09 HP (plus generator losses). So figure about a 20-25 horse engine (so 17 horses is near the peak of its efficiency curve and you can run it at that long-term), a bit less (since the efficiency of the SYSTEM might be better if you reduce the weight of the engine a bit and run it a tad fast), or even QUITE a bit less (since you don't have to charge at a rate that lets you run 70 MPH for 24/7, but can start out charged and finish up mostly drained).
It's not just a speculation: Follow some of the links you see when googling "tzero charging time" and you'll see such a trailer hanging behind another model of electric car.
If the car is set up for it you can reduce the weight of the trailer by leaving off the starting battery and starting the engine from the battery in the car. (Leave off the starter motor, too, using the generator as a motor for startup.) The car's computer can direct the trailer engine to only run when required, eliminating the idling losses and running it at the peak of its efficiency curve, and arranging proper warmup after start before putting load on the engine.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way