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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.
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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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?
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
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.
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
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.