The World's Fastest Electric Car

Roland Piquepaille writes "In this review, Forbes.com looks at the fastest electric vehicle in the world, the tzero roadster built by AC Propulsion Inc. 'The tzero does 0 to 60 mph in 3.6 seconds, according to the company, and it does it on only 200 horsepower.' The company says it starts faster than a Ferrari F355. It also has a limited range of 280 to 300 miles at 60 mph on a single charge. The company expects a price somewhere between a Porsche and a Ferrari, but Forbes says it carries a $220,000 sticker price. This overview contains more details and links. It also includes a rendering of the Tzero. Please note that the Forbes article has a very different focus from the one mentioned in a previous Slashdot reference."

Comments

Re:What about the Tengo?

[dreamchaser]

It also only has an 80 mile range...

Re:Where's the energy saving?

[Peyna]

Power plants are incredibly more efficient at producing electricity than your car engine.

Re:Battery life!

[Peyna]

Rather than being 'design to fail' after the warranty expires; it is more likely that they are designed for their own purposes. Then rigorous testing will show the average time that the item will fail, and the warranty date is set to a time after that point at which they can still afford to have a warranty and not be losing money.

The phrase "Designed to fail after the warranty expires" is misleading. The warranty date is set after the product is designed, built, and tested.

Re:hmm.

[icejai]

If you read the article you would know that the range of 100 miles was the range of the vehicle with some older battery. With a 'new li-ion' one, the range was increased to 280 to 300 miles.

It's in a bunch of places

[Spamalamadingdong]

How are electrical cars more energy efficent than gas powered ones?

Among other things, electric cars don't sit in traffic with their engines idling but doing no work. They also have no throttling losses from operating at part load.

We get the majority of our electricity from burning fossil fuels.

If you have e.g. a Ford Ranger which uses 300 watt-hours/mile at the wheels while getting 25 miles per gallon at cruise, it is operating at about 21% efficiency. A typical old-technology coal-fired steam turbine gets 30-35% efficiency, a gas-fired combined-cycle turbine plant can beat 50% handily, and other technologies can probably hit 60% or more. If these are used along with co-generation to supply heat for other uses, total utilization of the fuel can probably exceed 80%. That's four times what the truck can get on its own.

If we all convert over to electrical cars, will be not just burning more oil and coal in our power plants?

But given the higher efficiency, we'll be burning less overall. We'll also have the option of supplying cars from nuclear, wind, hydropower or solar; anything that makes electricity is the same as far as the car is concerned.

The substantial storage capacity of electric car battery packs would also give benefits for the electrical grid (which should be high on our list of priorities after 8/14/2003). See the papers at acpropulsion.com about vehicle-to-grid ancillary services.

And no, I have no relationship with these guys, I just think they're clever and have a damned good idea.

Re:It's in a bunch of places

[jimsum]

The Ford Ranger is actually less efficient since you didn't account for the energy costs of producing the gas. Producing gasoline from crude oil is about 88% efficient.

Re:Where's the energy saving?

[Cecil]

The most important fact here is that most powerplants are not emitting their pollution directly onto crowded downtown streets.

Whether they emit more pollution en masse than vehicles do is irrelevant, as those are not normalized statistics. Electricity is used for just about everything these days, but combustion engines are used for transportation and very little else. Is it really any wonder that power plants generate more pollution? They're providing much more power overall, even despite transmission line losses (which are quite low, compared to the inefficiency of a typical gasoline combustion engine).

If you could take away 33% of the CO2 emissions (vehicles) and add back maybe 10% of that by adding new power plants, does that sound like a good deal to you? They're more efficient, it really is that simple.

Re:You forgot transmission losses for electricity

[Marc2k]

"Put 100 megawatts of power into a transmission grid and I doubt much more than 50 or 60 megawatts come out the other end."

False. Modern transmission systems can achieve under 2% loss in large-scale power transmission. And that's talking about a scale of Terawatts Hours, not Megawatts (keeping in mind that as the amount of energy lost in transmission is proportional to the amount of energy transmitted). Granted the site is for the UK power grid, but it shows you that any modern transmission system is ridiculously unlikely to be operating at 50% loss on a megawatt scale, even when dealing with distribution levels (transmission refers generally to connected substations, etc. on the power grid, distribution refers to how it gets to your house from there).