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Electric Car Faster Than A Ferrari or Porsche
jumpeel writes "CNN's Business 2.0 has photos and video of a Silicon Valley-made electric car with a 0-60 acceleration rate that's faster than a Ferrari Spider and a Porsche Carrera. From the article: 'In fact, it's second only to the French-made Bugatti Veyron, a 1,000-horsepower, 16-cylinder beast that hits 60 mph half a second faster and goes for $1.25 million.' The X1 is built by Ian Wright whose valley startup WrightSpeed intends to make a 'a small-production roadster that car fanatics and weekend warriors will happily take home for about $100,000 --a quarter ton of batteries included. The X1 crushed the Ferrari in an eighth-mile sprint and then in the quarter-mile, winning by two car lengths.'"
The problem with electric cars was never performance, it's range. And this car doesn't solve that problem, although the range isn't that bad either (100 miles). Being an open car, it's not exactly a daily driver though.
Also, if you look at the pictures this is actually just an electric Ariel Atom, which is also faster than a 360 Spider or Carrera GT.
Don't get me wrong -- this is cool. It's just not nearly as revolutionary as the article writer thinks it is, and it certainly won't "save the planet--fast!"
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Maybe I'm just crazy... but I'm sick and tired of hearing about new and grand vehicles that could potentially reduce our dependency on foreign oil, or make the environment clean or run a bajillion miles to the gallon... I don't really care about the theoretical, research side or first builds that cost more than a single family house... I'd like to be able to find such a vehicle reasonably priced at my local car lot in sufficient shapes and sizes that I drive off with one without feeling crammed into a matchbox and as if I just shelled out far more than I could afford.
Wake me when they are affordable and widely available will you?
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
It's not really fair to compare a formula 1 design electric vehicle to a 'standard' ferrari car. The way I read the summary, I imagined something more of a 'every day driving' car..what are you supposed to do when it rains?
It may be speedy, but is this car going to be of any practical use, or is it simply going to be a novelty item, used for racing or showing off your newest toy to the other bajillionaires?
Also, as an obligatory point... Where are they getting the electicity to run this thing? Most of the US still get's it's power from Gas run power plants. It's good to see improvement in the tech though, so when we do have other methods of power generation we'll be ablt to take full advantage of them.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
Most people can't afford a $40,000 car, let alone something that's 2.5x as much. Plus, people feel that their car is less powerful if it's completely silent. Just look back to electic motorcycles, they had to add artificial noise-makers so people would accept them.
I think you're being a bit unrealistic here. What you describe is the typical characteristics of a gas powered vehicle. However, how many people need to drive for 6 hours and then refuel in 5 minutes (so they can drive another 6 hours)?
Most people drive less than 100 miles a day commuting and have all night to recharge. This car meets these specs just fine.
If you're driving cross country, rent a gas car.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
And they'll shit a brick when 30 nights of pulling volts in a row lands them a $500 electric bill. Way to save all that gas money.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
Problem with the solar panel idea is getting 4.5 hours of sunshine _after_ work.
However, this may be feasible by using a spare battery charging during the day and swapping (in smaller-than-500lbs increments).
Gasoline engines are restricted by the tolerances of their mechanical parts
Well, so's an electric drivetrain. The big difference is the torque curve. An internal combustion engine at 0 rpm stalls out, providing absolutely 0 torque, so you need some way to couple non-rotating parts (red light!) to an engine that has to idle at some minimum rpms. And then the engine delivers more torque as you spin it up.
Electric motors deliver their maximum torque at 0 rpm, and then it drops off as mechanical friction starts acting as a parasite. And since you don't need to worry about mating non-rotating to rotating parts, your drivetrain can be more efficient overall, since you can get out some of the lossy linkages.
You're right. This is nothing new. I saw a video online of an all-electric car beating a Ferrari off the line years and years ago (And not just beating, dominating). But at the end of the quarter-mile it needed a recharge. There are a lot more obstacles to electric cars replacing IC cars than just performance.
I think you've been drinking too much of Matt Savinar's kook-aid. The man is a huckster, the product he's selling is The End Of The World, and he'll apply whatever spin is necessary to make the sale.
Today's battery technology is the main obstacle to electric cars. There's no question that batteries will improve, the only questions are how much and how soon? And there are alternative technologies. . . Supercapacitors look promising. The newest ones, in the lab, are achieving energy density similar to batteries -- but they recharge much faster, never wear out, and don't contain a witches brew of chemicals. Another potential is flywheel energy storage. Flywheels aren't there yet, but they are gradually being improved.
I do think that biodiesel is most promising in the long run, especially if it can be produced from algae. Savinar is quick to dismiss that idea with a haughty laugh and a wave of his hand, because it "has yet to produce a single drop of commercially available fuel". Well of course not, when oil is still cheap and plentiful. There's no incentive. But the research has been done, and on paper it looks like this should work. When the real crunch hits, someone will surely give it a try.
So many car companies are intent on making plug-in-abble cars, but if electric cars become the new thing, we'll have to stop fuding hydrogen engines and dump all of our money into a thousand new nuclear power plants or fusion research.
Computers that use more than 25W should also pay extra for electricity. You should pay a 30% surcharge on electricity for entertainment, or incandescent bulbs. Overclocked, noisy, water-cooled gaming machines should be banned. Those people should pay more and the rest of us that are responsible people that give a damn should not have to subsidize their selfishness. People shouldn't be allowed to run home machines 24h per day. There is no reason to be buying Alienware PCs other than to look retarted.
Congratulations on your new car purchase. Has it occured to you that you could've saved the environment even MORE by buying a used corolla? or by making sure your current vehicle is up to spec?
Probably this doesn't apply to you, but people who buy a new car every year have no right to criticize people who buy an SUV every ten, no matter how miserly the new car is with gas.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Why in the world would Matsushita Electric sell their patent to Exxon-Mobile? That doesn't make any sense.
I read the internet for the articles.
"Exxon-Mobil holds the patents to the nickel-metal hydride battery"
I don't think this is the case.
I would love to see a credible link to prove me wrong though.
No matter where you go, there you are.
When a hybrid is traveling on a highway for an extended period, 100% of it's power is coming from the engine. To push a modest car (honda accord) down the road a 55MPH requires about a 30-40 HP engine. You probably want a larger one so it does not wimp out if you want to go faster for an extended period.
The batteries in hybrid cars are only used for acceleration in city driving and short periods of excess speed on highways. They are NOT used for anything else because ultimately 100% of the average power comes from the gasoline.
Thus the sole benefit of hybrids is that it turns city driving inefficiency (stop and accelerate) into the equivalent of highway driving since the engine can run at a constant, efficeint, tuned point almost continuously. For people who actually stop and leave the engine running for long periods, the hybrid can save a few sips by shutting down the engine. Also the hybrid can make use of engine type not associated with sexy car performance, like diesel.
But anyhow it cant avoid getting 100% of the energy from the gas.
What about charging the batteries off the grid? That will not work if everyone tries to do it.
If you wanted to be able to pull your car into gas station and gas it up in under 10 minutes to a range of 300 miles like you can with gasoline then the gas station would have to deliver power to your car at a rate of a megawatts. Besides the absurdity of delivering that over the powerlines, any practical battery would explode when charged that fast.
Okey you say, well what about trickle charging it overnight or while you are parked for a long time at work. Well that would work, for you. But if everyone else in your neighborhood did it, then we are back to delivering many megawatts to every neighbor hood. that simply is impossible until we have underground superconduction transmission lines in every city in america.
Thus electric cars re nice show pieces but cannot replace gasoline on a large scale at this time.
Thus the only way to charge an electric car is to have distributed power production or distributed chemical fuel delivery.
So this can mean: 1) hydrids that burn fuel like now. 2) hydrids that burn hydrogen like fuel cells (make the hydrogen at nuclear plants and ship it as chemical energy not over wires)
or charge batteries at nuclear plants and ship them in trucks to refueling stations where you swap batteries.
Thus you can only transport the power needed for typical driving as chemical energy.
30 HP = 22,371 watts
300 miles @ 55 Miles/hour = 19,636 seconds
30hp for 19636= 43,9285,090 joules
delivering 24 mega joules in one minute requires
7,321,418 watts from "pump" at gas station to recharge one car.
If a gas station was a busy one and was processing one car per minute all day long then it would have continous feed of 7 megawatts.
The total capacity of the US for power production is 300 terrawatt hours. so that would mean that if we doubled the entire electrical capacity of the US we could build less than 10,000 gas stations, ignoring all the transmission problems.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The real cost is the batteries, the electronics, and the car itself.
...but now it starts falling down.
OK so far...
Exxon-Mobil holds the patents to the nickel-metal hydride battery, so there's why the price for NMH for cars is so damned high.
You want to know why pure-electric cars are incredibly unlikely to become popular? Answer: it's not possible to get a full battery charge in 2 minutes. When you run out of gas, you can fill up again in 2 minutes. Travelling cross-country, it simply is *not* acceptable to have to sit around for 3 hours at the gas station waiting for your car to get enough juice to continue. Nor is it likely to be possible to improve on this, until someone invents some radically new battery technology - no existing battery technology will allow charging at this kind of speed without the batteries exploding.
So we need a new battery technology which will, at which point Exxon-Mobil and their battery won't matter a damn. The world and their brother is working on that, bcos everyone knows that whoever gets better tech is going to be in the money big-time. Trouble is that nothing's coming along - the best bet so far is fuel cells, and we're back to fossil fuels again (or hydrogen, which will be produced and distributed by the same folks anyway).
Grab.
They leave out the fact that with that 100k$ price tag of the X1, you don't get a roof, or last I checked a street legal car. You don't get a stereo, or nice leather seats. You really don't get anything... you get a motorcycle with 4 wheels more or less. The other cars it's "competing" against are real cars, not glorified crotch rockets. Let's try apples to apples my good man.
The X1 is good as a track car and that's about it. That's definitely not the market bugatti is aiming for.
We don't need a new battery technology. Just build batteries so that they are standardized in some form of rack or enclosure that can be swapped out. You pull into the "gas" station an automated device pulls the battery rack out of your car, gives you credit for any remaining charge, loads in a new rack of already charged batteries, and charges you for the difference in energy between the two packs. If properly designed, the enitire transaction could happen much faster than filling a 24, or even 10, gallon gas tank.
The issues come in where someone figures out a scam of pulling in with "bad" battery packs from the junkyard, and pulling out with brand new, fully charged packs.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
Why not a hybrid where the engine is not connected to the tranmission?
The present generation of hybrids suffer the problems of both gas and electric vehicles. Gasolene engines can be very efficient if run at a single load and speed, so you build a car in which that is all the engine does: recharge the batteries while running at its most efficient load/speed combo.
Maybe there is some good reason why this does not work, but it would seem to have a bunch of advantages, including elimination of the transmission, more efficency, etc..
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
If Exxon-Mobile controls the patent, they can stop people (at least for a little while) from making cars that just might run on something other than gasoline. Long story short: People keep paying ridiculously high prices at the pump, and Exxon CEO's can continue lining their pockets with gold.
Christmas is the opposite of theft. See?
Don't forget about regenerative braking. That is a major reason why stop-n-go driving is more efficient in a hybrid.
I race bikes (Novice in WERA). I saw that same footage as well. I would stomp that or any other car outside of CHAMP or F1 on my Yamaha R1 (2002 1000cc, and not the fastest thing out there either).
The rider they had either sucked, or was taking it easy b/c he was on a stock 600RR (Decent kit, but not the best 600 to test with either).
The Atom is a race car with blinkers. I can put blinkers back onto my race bike if you'd like, and still suck the paint off that Atom as I blew by it on a race course.
Don't get me wrong, the Ariel Atom is the best excuse to drive a car that I've seen in a loooong time, but with a decent rider and a somewhat prepped race bike, it would lose. Maybe not by a huge margin, but it would lose.
Thus the sole benefit of hybrids is that it turns city driving inefficiency (stop and accelerate) into the equivalent of highway driving since the engine can run at a constant, efficeint, tuned point almost continuously.
None of the currently available hybrids use a setup where the gas engine can run at constant RPM.
The benefits of the current drivetrain designs are as follows:
1. Your engine is the same total power, but now has two pieces. You can turn half of it off when both are not needed, such as when cruising.
2. In stop-and-go traffic, regenerative braking turns your kinetic energy back into stored power you can use to accelerate.
3. The large electric motor acts as an "instant starter" making it easy to shut down at stoplights and start up again seamlessly.
4. The high-torque electric motor lets the gas motor be run on the more efficient but less torquey atkinson cycle.
With 10000 such stations you could charge 14,4 million cars a day (24 hours). With 300 miles/refill the average american fills up, what, once a week? Thats 100,8 million cars that would be supported by just doubling the capacity.
Why not?
In the US.
14 Million new cars are sold annually.
455 Million galons of oil are used daily.(for transportaion purposes)
If the demand is there, somebody, somewhere will find a way to fill the production needs. We did for oil and we can do the same for other commodities.
As for disposal, the batteries could be striped for heavy metals and recycled. Fluids or pastes within the batteries can be purified and reconstituted. Yes we will still be dumping tons of unsalvagable material into the ground but currently we are doing the same with the air. The key difference being that these materials are only being used to store energy, not create it.
You could make a battery from tin, copper and lemon juice if you so choose. The ability to choose what materials to use allows us to search for options that are effective to use while at the same time having relatively benign effects on the environment. You cannot make gasoline out of anything other than oil. Granted you can use vegetable oil but producing that consumes more input energy than it releases as output energy, even moreso if you consider the required sunlight.
Energy production can come from solar, wind, hydroelectric or tidal sources. Hell find a river you don't like very much and put a dam in it. While that reservoir is filling, put a dam below it. Repeat as necessary or until you run out of room.
The point isn't so much that oil is dirty, it's that oil is finite whereas sunlight, the rotation of the moon and the spin of the earth are, for our purposes, not.
My God! It's full of eval()'s.
Why do I have the feeling that car companies will standardize a mechanical interface for batteries some time after laptop manufacturers do?