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.

Comments

It should be noted

[Dozix007]

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.

Re:It should be noted

[theLOUDroom]

I think that it should be noted that electric motors always accelerate faster than their combustion counterparts.

This isn't true.
They only accelerate fast IF YOU'RE STARING THE ENGINE AT ZERO RPM. Most of the time you gas-powered car doesn't sit there at ZERO RPM. It might be fair to say that an electric motor will always accelerate faster from ZERO RPM, but that sounds a lot less impressive (and with good reason)

Anyone who knows even a little about drag racing knows that you can get all the torque your tires can handle and then some while starting from a dead stop. This is because a gas-powered car has a clutch and transmission.

Re:It should be noted

[ForestGrump]

5252 is right.
Torque is instantenous force. Torque is what makes you accelerate.
Horsepower is a measurement of how much work an engine can do at a particular RPM.

When looking at car brochures/magazines, the hp/torque numbers quoted are maximum.

Ok, so lets put torque and HP into perspective and what each means to you, the driver.

Put these two cars side by side.
2003 Volkswagen Jetta with a 1.9 liter turbocharged diesel makes about 100 hp@ 5000 rpm, but 150 ftlb of torque at 1500 rpm.
2003 Mazda 6 with a 2.3 liter naturally aspirated gas engine makes about 160 hp@ 6000 rpm and 150 ftlb of troque at 3800 rpm.

Both cars weigh about 3000 pounds, give or take a few hundred. They both make make about the same amout of torque but the mazda makes 60 more hp than the VW.

Because the VW has the torque at 1500 rpm, its going to leave the mazda at the stoplight. However, once the mazda gets rolling, it is going to reach 60 mph faster than the VW would. Why? Because the mazda has more HP.

Note: numbers are approximate, i'm recaling from memory.

So what should you buy? Depends what you like. A diesel engine gives wonderful torque on the "low end" and thus gives alot of city drivablity and allows you to go up hills in a higher gear (for lazy manual tranny drivers who don't want to shift). Gas engines however are designed to produce torque in the midband and horsepower on the high end. If you like tearing up hills or want fast 0-60 times, go for gas.

In summary. Torque gives you acceleration, horsepower determines your 0-60 time.

Note: This is a very general explaination. As the previous poster mentioned gearing. Gearing is a way to multiply engine output to allow for maximum driveablity and mileage.

I RTFA and...

[ThomasFlip]

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.

Re:Ugly?

[miratrix]

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.

Don't forget safety

[jfengel]

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.

electric motors

[bmajik]

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.

Re:No conspiracy here.

[Russ Nelson]

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

Already Solved - Vanadium Redox

[StCredZero]

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