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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.
Shimizu believes that the Japanese motor industry is deliberately ignoring his invention and instead focusing on complex hybrids
Of course they are. Electric cars may be more efficient and cheaper to build, but you have to plug them in and wait. That's not acceptable, if only once every year when your friend/family member needs a ride.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
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 UK auto link in the submission text says recharge time is 10 hours not the 1 hour quoted above. So whos right?
USA may have to invade to stop this.
... 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...
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.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
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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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.
- 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.
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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