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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."
The difference between a traditional electric car and one of those new-fangled hybrid cars is the power source only. What is really amazing about this car is that a 110lb electric engine produces 200 hp and that easly makes the transtion between electic, hybrid, and hydrogen cars. I am still scatching my head about diesel engines being included.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
The World's Fastest Electric Car - don't let the price shock you.
What about the world's fastest SOLAR-electric car?
The Nuna II, just won the World Solar Challenge, travelling 3000 kilometers in just 31 hours, averaging around 97 km/h.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
World's fastest stopper. 60 to 0 in 0 seconds flat.
Anyone who golfs knows what kind of punch an electric golf cart has from a stand still shouldn't be surprised by this. Nothing beats waiting for your playing partner to get one foot in the cart and then flooring it. He gets bended backwards over the seat like a pretzel. Pisses at your and struggling with a sore back, he shanks it the rest of the round. Fun with inertia!
if it's like a laptop, you will have to change de battery after 1-2 years!! and how costly is a car battery??
What about the Tengo?
It gets 0-60 in about 4 seconds, and a top speed of 130MPH. That is certainly better than 3.6 and 60.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
Not trolling... I just honestly don't know.
How are electrical cars more energy efficent than gas powered ones? We get the majority of our electricity from burning fossil fuels.
If we all convert over to electrical cars, will be not just burning more oil and coal in our power plants?
Where the energy-saving step that I am missing?
Davak
Whose average commute is longer than 100 miles?
:P
And when you are sitting in traffic, do you need to go 0-60 in 4.1 seconds?
Why can cars with a relatively low range not be used for commuting to and from work?
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
Also, is the electric car most efficient (in terms of miles per.. um, Watt I guess) at 60 mph? Or was that speed chosen because it's what gas-powered cars use?
Inquiring minds want to know!
[ReidNews]
I have a problem getting into a car that is so likely to become airborne that the manufactuer put in an altimeter.
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.
..the only reason that 200hp can push the car to 60 in ~4 seconds is because the thing is the size of a matchbox (look at the Gallery pics, the car is about as big as a gas pump :D). I suffered with an MR2 MkII for a couple of years, this thing looks 2/3 the size...good thing it only has an hour range, my legs couldn't take much more.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
How much coal, oil, gas is required on a large scale to make all of that extra electricity that would be required? Seems to be close to a zero sum proposition.
With every country but the USA moving to minimum renewable energy targets, it's an increasingly attractive proposition. Plus you can generate your own electricity if you wish, using renewable sources. I won't rehash all the benefits of centralising the cleaning of fumes in a power station as opposed to millions of portable generators, as already discussed dozens of times on Slashdot, so even in todays infrastructure it still makes sense (especially countries like France where over 80% of energy is nuclear).
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Electric motors, unlike internal combustion engines, can generate maximum torque at zero RPM. This translates directly into excellent off-line acceleration, impressive 0-60 times, and all-round high performance. Around-town driving in an electric car should give the impression that there's a much bigger engine due to our preconceptions based on internal combusion (thus, the comment "only 200 hp"). Top speed, however, will seem stunted in comparison to that available from an internal combustion engine because they generally produce increasing torque with increasing RPM (especially below 2000 RPM).
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
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.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
It effectively makes the car a hybrid.
4.1 sec is bloody fast actually and in fact you have to be quite skilled to get a figure like that from a car driving yourself (I'm now talking about a manual-gearbox, fuel car), it's not just putting your foot down, you do that and then too suddenly you need to take care of many many things at the same time (changing gears, compensating steering).
By the way, and this applies to fuel, electric whatever car: You don't need to spend big money (Ferrari, Porsche as mentioned by these guys) to get ridiculous performance. I'm the proud owner of a "Locost" kit car which does 0-60 in 3.8 secs and paid about $7500 (5000 actually) for it on the road. Description of these here.
Cheers,
Alex
then when do we see hybrids that have REAL efficiency?
30-50 MPG is a waste of time. the VW TDI deisel get's 55MPG and is NOT HYBRID.
Hybrids should be at 60-80MPG now and +100Mpg by the end of this decade.
until then I'll stick with a VW TDI and the ability to get it serviced almost anywhere unlike a hybrid car.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's a start, isn't it? Do you think when the first computers were being knocked together out of valves and punched-card readers, and filling up a room, their creators shouldn't have bothered because they were so expensive that the masses couldn't afford them? Or are you glad that they did, and that continuous innovation's put ever more powerful tools in the hands of an ever increasing proportion of the world's population?
"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).
--- What
Learn about torque. Electric motors generate tons of it at any speed. Gas engines don't. Most people havent a clue what horsepower actually is. these days its a well abused marketing term. Sort of like claiming mhz in a computer processor defines how fast it computes.
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"plus most driving in the city is sitting at a standstill so the vehicle uses almost ZERO power while sitting."
do buy in to that. In the real world, its going to need a radio, and some enviromental controls.
Not that this isn't interesting, but they really need a test that involves what most consumer would want.
Clearly, buy purchasing this car, the consumer feels they don't need what a gas engine brings them, but how many people will sit inside a car with no AC when its 100 degree outside? or a heater when its 32F/0C outside?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
IMO, I think this vehicle is overpriced. Most electric motors will out-accelerate equivalent gas-powered ones. Here are some links to other fun electric vehicles that the common man can actually afford:
An electric crotch-rocket style motorcycle for $6800 at Electric Motorsport
An electric dirt-bike for $4699 at Electric moto
Considering that hybrids have to carry around 2 engines, a fuel tank and batteries, probably not for a long time.
Smart sell 100s of thousands in Europe, but haven't even bothered bringing their amazing 2-seaters to the States, where the bigger, heavier and unaerodynamic a vehicle is the more successful it seems to be.
Smart used to just make the sub-sub-mini coupe, (which I'll admit is a bit odd even though I drive one) but now there is the sporty roadster, a very pretty car indeed which gets better economy than the Prius from it's turbocharged Mercedes engine, and costs less than a mid-range Ford. Pop over to www.smart.com and see what you are missing.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
My buddy turned on his Honda hybrid for me yesterday and it said he had been getting 65 mpg. That was in LA traffic.
Life in Orange County
The Toyota Prius is NOT designed to get the maximum efficiency. It's designed to get TDI-like efficiency with "all the trimmings" -- it's a quiet, moderately zippy family car with a lot of goodies that would have been factory options a decade ago. The Toyota engineers chose not to go for maximum efficiency (like the Honda Insight), but rather for the efficiency of a jellybean car (like the Geo Metro) in a quiet, comfortable, safe four-door.
" If OPEC decides it wants to raise the price of oil again, we can just make more nuclear power plants"
No - the current political regime does not see things this way.
OPEC does not raise the price of oil. OPEC cuts supply. This has the effect of raising the price of oil. Which is enormously profitable for domestic oil producers. Who donate huge sums of money to politicians to ensure that this continues to happen.
So you see, there's NO incentive for domestic energy companies to abandon the profitable oil business and compete with other energy sources like nuclear, solar, wind, or faeries, and it doesn't have anything to do with whether a given technology is green or not. Has everything to do with how profitable it is to keep the market dependent on the artificially scarce resource.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Regenerative braking doesn't recover all the energy. I apologise for not making that more obvious. The wastage due to friction {an absolute, not a percentage} is directly proportional to mass -- so heavier vehicles are less efficient.
I think you are also being quite pessimistic about the efficiency of internal combustion engines. With proper engine management and continuously-variable transmission systems, engines are much more efficient today than they used to be. An ordinary car has only five gear ratios, so the engine speed has to vary greatly to cover a range of road speeds. An engine driving the wheels through a CVT keeps constant revs except during acceleration. As long as you press hard on the gas pedal, the engine speeds up; when you relax your foot, the engine starts slowing down and the transmission adjusts to make up the road speed. When you press the brake, the transmission adjusts to match the road speed to the still-slowing-down engine, so it will be ready to drive again when required. When maintaining any constant speed, the engine maintains the same constant revs. The transmission ratio is adjusted so gradually that a clutch is only needed when the vehicle is coming to rest. Modern electromagnetic clutches are better than centrifugal clutches, because they disengage more positively.
Better-refined fuels - which would almost certainly become the norm anyway with the adoption of biomass-derived replacements for petroleum - and leaner fuel-air ratios would eliminate the need for catalytic converters {themselves a bodge, sacrificing fuel efficiency for slightly cleaner emissions} as the products would consist of just carbon dioxide and water vapour, and no unburned fuel. The exhaust products would still carry away kinetic energy, but some of this could be recovered with a turbocharger. With the engine doing near-constant revs, the turbo could be active almost full time - achieving an efficiency close to the theoretical maximum.
I've no problem with the idea of electric vehicles per se {and modern electronic control systems have the same benefits as CVT}; I just don't think lugging a heavy battery around is the best way to do it. But for public transport systems powered by means of overhead wires, electricity certainly has advantages.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!