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:Where's the energy saving?

[Peyna]

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

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.