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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.
All kidding aside, I'm not trying to troll, and I know that there's probably some merit to his claims. But for the love of god, why do all these new efficient cars have to be so damned ugly? The prius is hideous, so is the echo, and now this?
I know some people will disagree, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but come on...
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American hated the concept of Electric Motors in cars for one simple fact. Speed. They like to go fast and with the ones introduced to us, they did not. They were slower, hybrid animals that may have accelerated faster, but were not up to par by American standards. At least in a few years this car proposed will develop into something more hormone ravaged teens will dream and adult driving enthusiasts will utilize. Only now, to develop a ample charging device...
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One of my favorite jokes: "There are liars, there are damn liars, and then there are battery chemists."
Electric cars don't become economical until batteries do. Don't hold your breath either. People have been working on this for a long time and there doesn't seem to be a breakthrough in the offing.
... that wouldn't be an issue with a replacable cell station.
Consider the gas station. We pull in, refuel and leave. How could the gas station business model work with an electric car? Simple. No one wants to wait for a battery to charge. But what if there was a cell-swap activity involved rather than a recharge? Perhaps in the future we'll be pulling into a station and they swap out our battery cells instead of adding more fuel? They make a profit by offering bad cell insurance or whatever and they get to own the cells... I dunno... I haven't really thought it through to the detail but on the outside it seems like a good way to continue our general business model and to continue to provide convenience to the end user. And most assuredly, the daily work-commuter would plug his machine in to charge each night.
But as for the idea that current auto makers intentionally suppressing electric cars? I'll go in on that since there is still too much money at stake for the old ways and the pressure would come from too many sources to determine any particular "bad guys." We just have to wait for the fossil fuels to run out before we can really expect electric cars to really take off...and then we can expect the current oligopoly to find a way to lock up the electric car and fuel systems in some other way... somehow they'll make a privately owned windmill to charge your car illegal...
Problem here is that batteries rely on chemical reactions and they become less and less efficient as you use it. It's more noticeable in certain chemicals (ie, Ni-Cad) than others (Li-Ion).
So, unless the charge station periodically takes out the old batteries and replaces them with brand new ones (which will cost a bundle of money, something they'll have to somehow pass on) people will start to see less and less mileage out from their "newly" replaced batteries. Would you be willing to trade in your brand new set of batteries and possibly get something that's close to dying?
If you watched or know the story of Tucker you'd see that you cannot challenge a market with powerful players without being squashed. Theres only one way around this and that is to go overseas and establish the technology in another country under the protective wing of the government and then introduce it as an import everywhere around the globe.
Tucker was unable to win against the big three auto makers, nor was Delorean.
Mark my words, the only way we will ever see a flying car or radically advanced automobiles or cheap diamonds is if another government does it first.
If you dont want the powerful companies that control the US to stifle what you're doing take your innovation overseas and develop it there. That is the only way you can become a real player.
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- Charging. You need to let these cars sit for a period of time between use to let the batteries top up. Without that, it's just a very expensive paperweight (and not a very good one at that.)
- Battery life. A typical Li-ion battery will lose twenty percent of its capacity every year, from the day that they are manufactured. With a pure electric vehicle, that means a 20% drop in range. Would you buy a car that ranges up to 200 km the first year; 160 km the second; 128 km the third; and 102 km the fourth? (ie: a 50% drop in range every three and a bit years.) Would you buy a new set of batteries (see next point) every three years, or even more often?
- Cost. How much will those Li-ion batteries cost? (Hint: they're not cheap. My PowerBook needs a battery that costs $US130. And that's just a tiny fraction of what a car engine would need...)
- Charge cycles. The more you use a Li-ion battery, the faster it degrades. (The above 20% is regardless of usage, btw -- so even if the car sits in the garage...)
Those are just off the top of my head. There's probably plenty more. Car manufacturers know damn well that with disadvantages like the above, consumers won't buy. That's why they're not interested. There's no conspiracy here, folks. Move along.Generally competition helps the costumers, yet here it is, damaging a very good car
More correctly, here it is purportedly damaging a very good car.
The reality is that these things are seldom as straightforward as they seem, and whenever someone claims that the industry is in some giant collusion to keep an innovation down (rather that the more credible scenario that they are mercilessly looking for an opportunity to devastate their competitors and capture the market) you really need to look for the tinfoil helmets, and look deeper than the surface.
In this case very little is said, at least in the non-slashdotted article, about things like range, yet that has traditionally been the killer of electric cars. The motors and other basic element of designs are very well understood (putting many motors on a car is hardly innovative), but without sufficient power reserves it simply won't sell -- the whole reason why hybrids exist is that they allow them to leverage the tremendous power reserves of gas because batteries on their own are insufficient. Hence why the industry has been vigorously exploring fuel cells and electricity storage systems, but the technology isn't there yet. The car part of the equation isn't the problem.
Hmm...I wouldn't buy a cell phone that took 10 hours to recharge, the downtime would be too hurtful to its overall usefulness. Why on earth would anyone use a car that was out of commision for 10 hours, when one could go refill their hybrid in less than 5 minutes?
Drive to work, drive home, and charge. Exactly what people did with older mobile phones. One could argue that something that "fills" overnight when you are sleeping saves you 5min at the pumps once a week.
I'm not going to say that this is better than a gas powered car. The range of a gas powered car is limited only by tank size, and the availability of fuel pumps along your path of travel. But for a daily driver this would be more than acceptable, esp. among those two car households.
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If people are accustomed to paying for gasoline, would it be out of the question for them to pay a fee when they get a fresh battery? That fee could obviously cover the costs of battery replacements as needed.
I think it's little too much to ask the government to do something like that efficiently... :)
Politics aside, it's not fair to compare batteries to bills. Bills are basically the same, but batteries are not. Each car would have differing requirements in terms of pack voltage, peak current output, and total capacity. We can make the packs into smaller standardized cells (again, someone needs to standardize it which will be major pain) but then you may have cell and current inbalance problems which can be deadly in such a high capacity battery pack.
Yeah but power produced at a power plant (as long as it is not coal) is much usually less polluting per unit of energy than the one produced at your engine. Power plants can use industrial strngth technology to remove pollutants from their exhaust. Also they can afford complex large reactors that capture more energy than car engines.
That does not work for coal powerplants as burning coal is just inherently dirty (and one could say poisonous). This is especially true for Bush's "grandfathered" coal plants which can avoid pollution standards because they are really old (try to figure out the logic behind that reasoning).
So the first thing we should do for the quality of our air is get rid of coal plants. Even if we replace them with nukes, it would be an improvement.
But after coal plants are done away with one can be reasonably sure that the plants will produce less pollution than cars' engines.
I own a 1990 Honda Accord. I don't know what pieces of shit you are buying, but my nearly 15 year old car has had absolutely no major problems and I take no special car of it. Hell, I don't even know how to change my own oil.
Cars are not computers. When people buy a new car every 3 years, it is because they want to. If they are buying a new car every 3 years, it is because it is breaking down, then they are a god damn idiot because they keep buying crap.
There is no 3vil corporate consipracy to force people to keep getting new cars. Car companies get all of their parts from suppliers. The only thing a car company does is put the stuff together. If a supplier sells a car company bad parts that break down, then they lose their contract. If I buy a car and it turns out to be crap, I just don't buy from that same company again. Take off the tin foil hat. Car companies want to sell cars. If electric cars could be made cheaply and even come close to having the same characteristics as a combustion car in all areas, car companies would be killing each other to sell the most.
This is very similar to Chep pallets. You (as a company who ships stuff) simply reports who you shipped pallets to, and in the end, Chep has a good idea of what everyone has (also noting what breaks). In the end, you get a higher quality pallet than a standard wood one. Similarly, you 'subscribe' to the service, they always know which battery you have and what the life is on it (X charges), and you pay for each 'fill up'. At the end of the month, you get a bill for the number of swaps you made. Include some fancy monitoring gadgets on the top that measure their effeciency of their last few runs and you can easily see what you should expect out of this run (and even calibrate a fuel guage acurately). Think about it :)
What we really need is better battery cell technology that doesn't have these issues.
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The same problem applies to money: dollar bills become less and less usable as time wears one - becoming frayed, ripped, and generally uglier.
Uh, no they don't. Unlike batteries, a dollar bill has no intrinsic value, it is only an abstraction of value backed by the US government.
My raggedy dollar bill with a pair of horns and a mustache scribbled on ol' George's face will buy exactly the same amount of goods as a brand new, crisp and tidy, bill will.
On the other hand, a dead battery ain't going to produce any more juice even if George Bush and Alan Greenspan personally praise it on the floor during a joint session of congress.
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I work in the field of electric storage, including batteries, and there is absolutely no reason they cannot come out with a vehicle that can't use batteries that can be rapid-charged, nor set up the charger to do them. (Granted, you would still be looking at a charge time of roughly an half-hour to an hour, little longer than it takes to get gas.) The standard deep-cycle batteries used for applications like RV's and boats cannot be charged like this, but those like the Optima and Odyssey do have this capability.
This begs the question, then, why is there not a workable electric car out there? 200 miles is plenty for the average person's daily driving, and it would be a simple matter to charge the vehicle every night. (In fact, this is better for the health of deep cycle batteries than full discharge.)
Further, a half hour recharge would only be a slight inconvenience on cross-country trips, especially since recharging stations could be set up right along the interstate, or set up in rest stops, not requiring the underground tanks and the like that a gas station does. Generally, after driving 200 miles, I for one am ready to get out of the car for a little while anyway.
The biggest downside that I see is that the cost of replacing the batteries (especially premium batteries like the Odyssey or Optima) would be considerable, given that these cars would have to use banks of 10-15 batteries, at a current cost of about $160 per battery. Of course, the massive boost to production of these would probably create competition and an economy of scale, driving the price down, as more and more migrated to electric cars. The savings on gas (which will only get more expensive) would also be considerable, although a high volume of these cars would create additional demand on the electrical grid.
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All these so called problems are not really big problems if a city really wanted to do the switch, so to speak.
The only thing that is required is that it is done on a large scale and it would almost certainly require (local) government involvement.
Having to stop to recharge would not be a problem if all parking lots where required to have electric outlets. Very few people need to drive their cars non-stop.
Making a practical system for battery swapping is also just a matter of money and will.
The show-stopper is that such a large scale deployment of infrastructure to support electric cars is costly, at least in a short perspective. I'm guessing no city will do this until there is a large recognition of a financial model that takes environmental factors into account.
You could have an awesome electric car for sale now, and nobody will buy it, for fear of being stranded.
I always knew that we've got "combustion lock-in" which always seemed a bit irrational to me. I guess I didn't think it might be because of a conspiracy to shut out emerging auto competition. But is that a crazy explanation? Not really.
But... here's a way China could really kick our ass if they wanted to: They set up the infrastructure in their own country to run electric cars, get good at making them, and laugh at us while we're sending billions per week to the Middle East. It's not like the Chinese market is small, and I bet they could export the tech to India, Thailand, etc. That's enough to get this caught on. China is beginning to realize that they have the luxury of giving the world the finger. They can make their own DVD format, their own fancy cell phones, etc., and just aim those things at the domestic market... and they do fine! It might not be easy for them to break through with auto manufacturing, but I expect them to try (I don't know, have they already? I know they had some Porsche engineers meeting with the government asking them to propose a Wagen for the Chinese Volk....) The Chinese government might still have enough power to "give incentives" to large numbers of people to buy domestic cars once they're made. Of course, they could do that more effectively still if they start taxing gas at $10/gallon and using the proceeds to subsidize electric cars. It's in their interest anyway; they don't have a lot of domestic oil either.
Another mistaken assumption is that batteries themselves are "pollution free". Just because it doesnt let out gaseous emissions from an exhaust doesnt necessarily mean it wont damage the environment. I'm sure even the first gasoline powered engine designers never thought the pollution caused by they're creations would be enough to impact global climate. But when you multiply these cars (and hence they're batteries) by a few million times you will eventually lead up to a pollution problem of some kind or the other. Hell even unused plastic computer cases these days are a pollution hazard, let alone millions of unused car batteries with all sorts of lethal pollutants in them leaking out into the environment.