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Electric Cars as Fast as Ferraris
Ubergrunt writes "A Welsh engineering company has made a motor to be used on electric cars that will make them as fast as a Ferrari. "The motor is revolutionary in that it contains no bulky permanent magnets. Instead it relies on transmitting electric pulses across up to seven rotors, arranged in different phases. These are "fired up" in turn, much like the pistons of an internal combustion engine. There are no gears - the motor provides enough torque at one revolution per minute to put a vehicle into motion - and it spins at up to 2,500rpm.
"Size for size, we can provide 400% more torque than any type of motor currently available," says managing director John Bryant."
Insightful? WTF? I think we need a "-1, tinfoil hat club" modifer. Either this is an idiotic comment, or it's an attempt to be funny that kind of fell flat.
WHY would the car industry want to shut this down? EVERY SINGLE MAJOR CAR MAKER IS BUILDING ELECTRICS as we speak, and most have something on the market at the moment. So far, hybrids that are only somewhat more fuel-efficient than pure gas engines have been a necessary concession, mostly because of performance, range, and infrastructure (fueling) issues.
If this technology gets off the drawing board and actually works, the car makers will shit themselves to get their hands on licenses because this seems to solve the performance issues, hands down. They'll still have to cope with range and fueling problems, but those have their own solutions coming, sometime.
And what, exactly, do you expect the oil industry to do to "close this down"? Where on earth would they get the power to do something like that, in a country like the UK?
Look, oil producers realize that hyper-aggravated prices don't help them, in the long run. That's why OPEC is struggling right now to increase the world supply by upping production, with mixed results. Big Oil wants a stable price, and not too high, either, because it makes the market nervous and causes people to buy less oil in the long run! (It's more complicated than that, but basically that's the story with any commodity.)
But their inability to increase the supply to meet the higher demand, thereby lowering the price of oil, shows that they CAN'T increase supplies much more. They would probably breathe a sigh of relief if production could go up (which it probably never will), so the only credible scenario to decreasing prices is to decrease demand.
Big Oil would benefit, in the long run, from a demand for oil that slacks off a bit and then stabilizes (below its current level) for the future. They know this, and aren't going to stand in the way of anything that keeps it from happening.
Sure, a higher power/weight electric engine capable of operation over a wide spectre of speeds is useful. It is not, however, the thing an electric car needs the most to be competitive.
It's *already* the case that an electric motor is equally strong, or stronger, than a equally heavy internal combustion engine.
The problem for electric motors is *energy*storage*, typically batteries. With todays tech 400kgs of batteries can store *maybe* a tenth of the energy in a tank of petrol weighing a tent of that, meaning it's 100 times less effective for storing energy.
To add insult to injusry the 40kg petrol-tank can trivially be refilled in a minute or two, while the battery-pack weighing ten times as much and storing a tenth of the energy, needs hours at best to approach full.
Nice try. Am I right in assuming that you've never worked on a car engine? Hint: They don't have any internal gearing at all. That's what the transmission is for. The article is clearly discussing a direct drive setup with enough torque to drive the wheels without any sort of transimssion.