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230mph Electric Car
An anonymous reader writes "It ain't cheap, but Hiroshi Shimizu has finally shown off his latest electric car 'Eliica'. It accelerates faster than a Porsche 911 Turbo, and will cruise for 200 miles on a one hour charge. Stories at drive.com.au, and an image video and tech video. Interestingly, Shimizu believes that the Japanese motor industry is deliberately ignoring his invention and instead focusing on complex hybrids, as a simple electric engine dramatically lowers the cost of manufacturing, and will lead to a flood of cheap, mass produced cars from Chinese factories." A UK auto site has a story as well, including a test drive.
I think that it should be noted that electric motors always accelerate faster than their combustion counterparts. That is because their torque begins at it's highest during the beginning of the acceleration cycle, not the end like a combustion.
The "tech video" isn't worth much IMHO (unless you understand Japanese), but the image video was kinda amusing in that it had data shown on the screen, but the Japanese style of commercials is definitely different than I'm used to and was entertaining in a different type of way.
One more interesting thing not mentioned above is that it has 8 wheels.
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Although it may goto 200 mph on a one hour charge, The only downsides, apart from the tiny cockpit, are that it takes 10 hours to recharge, and a production version would cost £170,000.
The slashdot post was a bit misleading I think, still pretty cool though.
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It looks like all the wheels have their own separate motors (And as an aside, it looks like they're all direct-drive too, so we're probably looking at DC Brushless Motors). My guess is that they have 8 wheels because they need the outputs of all 8 motors to get the car to perform the way they wanted to.
Maybe the motors weren't available in more powerful configurations, it's somehow infeasible to get higher output motors.
It's somewhat misleading to compare these to your car, because your car carries around a lot of extra weight for safety. The article doesn't say how much this weighs, but it wouldn't surprise me if the range were reduced by half by the time they made the thing safe enough to drive on a US road.
I'm sure I'll hear the usual arguments about how it wouldn't need all that if it didn't have to worry about splatting into a three ton SUV, but drivers (even electric car drivers) screw up and plow into things like trees. Cars have lots of extra metal to save passengers when that happens, and that metal is heavy. It's less heavy in a cleverly-designed Japanese car with crumple zones, as opposed to an American-built behemoth that depends on sheer mass to solve the problem, but it adds to the weight of every production car.
I'm not entirely certain what this car has that's new that allows it to be faster, and I hope whatever it is will scale to build a real car. Electric cars have a lot of potential to supplant gas and help break the dependence on Middle Eastern oil. But the figures can easily mislead you into believing that's closer than it is.
essentially have perfectly flat torque over their entire RPM range. They can keep spinning and making torque at really, really high RPMs so they dont need to be geared down as road speed increases.
ICE (internal combustion engines) really only produce torque in a VERY narrow range of revolutions, and are limited to a fairly low maximum rev count by mechanical issues..
an electric motor, comparatively, will spin as fast as you want it to, and make the same torque at any rpm (within reason)
as someone else pointed out, electric cars always out-accelerate ICE cars in these "electric sports car" tests for two reasons
1) instantaneous peak torque, held all the way up to V_max
2) car is a prototype with no basis in reality for production use.
The average ICE car engine is only usable from 1000 to 6000 rpm. Diesel truck engines are more like 500 to 2200 rpm. The enormous diesel ship engine everyone was sending the link to a few months back runs at _90_ rpm.
It is not uncommon for an electric motor to spin at 20,000 or more rpm. The only practical displacement motors going this fast are the Formula 1 3L V10s, which spin up to 19k rpm but need to be rebuilt after 1 weekend.
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There is no transmission because the motors are all direct drive - ie, they're attached directly to each of the 8 wheels. They are probably using DC Brushless Motor which requires an external motor controller, but does allow you to electronically control both the speed and torque (by changing the spacing between rotor and stator)
With electric motors, you get high torque at low speeds and you don't need to keep the engine/motor running at the ideal rpm. So you don't really need to worry about transmission since all it would do is basically introduce mechanical losses into the system.
That was the idea behind it, you had a basic monthly "membership" and then you paid for each "refill" a small amount.
That idea actually is old, it was initially proposed back in Germany in the late 80s, the idea being used for Busses who would "drag" the battery on a cart behind them.
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Don't forget TZero.
In fact, the wheel themeselves are the motors. Each wheel is a 100-hp motor; the axle is the stator, and the rim is the rotor. They put 8 of them to have a 800-hp car; it could probably be easy to build a 4-wheeler with "only" 400 hp.
Not only that, but if a friend or family member crashes your car, I believe that both your insurance rates and their insurance rates go up. Cool, eh?
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Not faster than a 911 Turbo. As a long-time Porsche fan, I feel the need to set the record straight. . .
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Unfortunately, the difficulties are much greater than that. Li-ion batteries are incredibly heavy, and therefore difficult to transport in a car. The vast majority of the electricity expended is wasted in just carrying the extra weight of the batteries.
In this case, they probably achieved the 200 mile range by using 10 times the normal number of batteries. But the car probably weighs 10 tons. I bet that's why it's huge, and has eight wheels (including four in the front).
Just recharging that many Li-ion batteries would probably take more electricity than a city block uses in a month. To say nothing of the 180,000 gbp price tag, or the replacement costs (every 3-4 years!) for the batteries, or upgrading all the streets in the U.S. to handle the weight. Also, even if you only drive a short distance, you are still expending all the electricity of carrying batteries that are sufficient for a greater range.
The idea of using batteries to power cars was totally mistaken from the outset, and has been completely discredited by now. Batteries simply don't have the energy density required. They can't be used to power cars until there's a revolutionary advancement in battery technology, but none has been forthcoming after more than a century of research.
Of course, we should all be suspicious of those pepole who say: "I have a revolutionary idea that will transform the automobile industry -- but General Motors is trying to suppress me!!" Venture capital would chase you to the ends of the earth, if you had a real revolutionary idea. The difficulty is: some people overrate the importance of their ideas, and attribute their failure to a conspiracy to ignore them.
Cars nowadays last for quite a long time. People aren't waiting for them to wear out before buying new ones, they do so for fashion reasons for the most part. This seems pretty baseless to me.
No, it's not about the batteries. You need a road that charges your car, so you only use batteries when you're off that special road.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
you obviously have no idea how battery charging works. It isnt linear. It tapers off when you get neat the capcity of the battery. I have no idea what these particular batteries do, but Im sure if you got 2000 miles to a charge it would have stated it somewhere as that is MUCH bigger news than 200 MPH.
That's why you want to use a RUF. It only needs a small set of batteries, because the guideway powers the car on trips longer than ten miles.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Actually, Ni-Cad/NiMh batteries can be charged on a basic charger 500-1000 times before the capacity drops to half (end of usefull life) and over 2000 times on an IC- controled charger.
Li-ions can only take around 300 charges before they drop to half of their original capacity.
All batteries gradually lose capacity as they reach the end of their useful lives in a continuous manner.
Vanadium Redox batteries solve a lot of these problems. You can fill them with charged solution in the same way you fill up a tank of gasoline.
These are already in industrial use. They are discussed here
These meters would actually measure the voltage and amperage drained from batteries while they are in use. This aspect of the tech is very straightforward and we've known how to do it for over a century.
The laptop meters you're thinking guestimate a percentage of charge left. The meters we're thinking of are more like the ones on the side of your house. They don't care what you are using in the house or what condition the generating station is in. They simply measure the amount of energy that has passed through them.
Maybe they are both right. Perhaps a 1 hour charge gets you a 200 mile range and 10 hours fully charges the battery.
Actually, according the to the UK article, the car weighs 2,400kg, or 2.6455 tons. Also, the car has eight 100bhp in-wheel motors, so I am guessing that the eight wheels are there to provide the extra horsepower needed to have this thing go 0-60 in about 4 seconds.
Vast amounts of stored potential + insulation + trickle heating?
I mean, for crissake here, you've got 100kwh minimum here, running off half a kilowatt for heating the batteries to slightly above freezing is not an especially huge draw, assuming you're not going to leave it for over 200 hours... in -40 below... which would freeze gas in a normal car, btw.
This has to do with the actual value, not the intrinsic value, and this value is in its recognizability as currency. The point beyond which a dollar bill is unusable as currency is the point at which it is no longer recognizable.
If you bleached all the color out of a dollar bill, for example, you'd have a hard time convincing people it was a dollar bill. There would be a similar problem if you cut it up into tiny pieces, or if you scribbled until you couldn't see ol' George's face, or any other green part of the dollar.
The system works well enough that you are capable of making this mistake; very few, if any, unrecognizable dollar bills are in circulation.
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Someone else mentioned battery exchange. I don't know if I was the source for that, but I described it some time ago as part of the necessary infrastructure for electric taxis. In that case, the battery ownership can be "globalized" to the cab companies, but I think it would be harder to do for privately owned cars.
Also, the troublesome side effect of battery exchange would be like having different size gas tanks depending on the condition of your current battery. I don't think this approach would be very practical for long distance travel, though it would be fine for commuters and cabs. It depends on your personal confidence level, but in my case, if my daily travel was less than about 2/3 of the normal charge state, I'd feel secure enough. If I was able to charge it up while I was at work or parked elsewhere, that would of course improve the effective range without battery swapping. You'd notice your battery deteriorating over time, but it would be a gradual thing, not like a sudden shock when you exchanged a factory fresh battery for an almost unchargeable one.
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Students at Ohio State have designed, built and run a car called the Buckeye Bullet that topped out at 321 mph. It holds the world land speed record for electric cars, and was tested at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. It obviously isn't in the running to challenge hybrids or gas powered cars, but is quite an accomplishment. Go Bucks!
A bill does not have an "actual" value at all. Although I am not a historian, my understanding is thus:
Currency began life as a precious metal whose weight and value was standardised by the state. (e.g. gold floren) The value was in the precious metal contained in the coin, thus it had an actual value.
When banks came along, they had to now deal with larger amounts of money that made it impractical to carry around that much. Banks would issue checks/bills that gauranteed the holder to a certain arbitrary amount. Previously a letter of guarantee would have been used by nobles/wealthy people etc, but now it was standardised by a money lending institution.
Later the government decided to introduce a bill, which was given a standardised value. Unlike the coin, the component parts of a bill are worthless. At one time the federal reserve had enourmous amounts of gold to back the bills being issued, so in effect by exchanging bills, you were exchanging shares in government gold.
Paper money is an official document that the government guarantees to the holder is worth the amount written on the front. The amount is fixed because, like any other legal document, once "signed" (signiture is printed of course), you cannot alter the document without having it re-signed by the federal reserve bank. (altering a bill would be illegal of cause!)
So a bleached bill would have no value because the conditions of the document are no longer legible, not because the bill had any real value. If you were able to have copies like normal contracts, there would be no problem redeeming its worth.
Of course the confound is that every country has a special set of rules to do with money and it becomes a special case. (e.g. rules about how damaged/what kind of damage a bill can have before it is void/worth half as much etc) But that is the general idea as far as I understand it.
Hyper Car is reasonable and driveable, and does well to beat .
the fuel efficiency requirements to make it viable
Chk it out:
http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid386.php
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Tucker was unable to win against the big three auto makers, nor was Delorean.
Riiiight, I suppose the fact that they were doing illegal activities, making insane promises, and making stupid decisions had nothing to do with their failure. Both Tucker and Delorean made some supremely moronic decisions that doomed their respective companies from the beginning.