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Zero-60 in 3.1 Seconds, Batteries Included
FloatsomNJetsom writes "Popular Mechanics has a very cool video and report about test-driving Hybrid Technologies' L1X-75, a battery powered, 600-hp, carbon-fiber roadster that pulls zero-60 in about 3.1 seconds, and tops out at 175 mph. Of course, there are few creature comforts inside, but that's mainly because the car's 200 mile range is meant for the track, not the road. Nonetheless, Popular Mechanics takes the car for a spin up 10th Avenue in NYC. Oh, and the car recharges via a 110 outlet. They also test-drove Ford's HySeries Edge, a hydrogen fuel-cell powered, plug-in series hybrid that, unlike the L1X-75, is unfortunately at least 10 years away from production and nearly 100 mph slower."
How would a bike version do? Existing litre bikes can manage around 2.5 seconds... Or is gravity the limiting factor here, I have hellish problems keeping my front wheel on the ground.
Deleted
We are talking about an electrical motor here. From the time that you push the pedal to the time that torque is applied should only be on the order of nanoseconds. If you want to decrease the 0-60 time you could make the electrical engine as large as you want and put tons of batteries in parallel so that a current surge doesn't kill cause the batteries' internal resistance to spike decreasing current (though at a certain point you will no longer have traction unless you increase the weight of the car--which will slow your acceleration time down).
It's useful to know when you'r racing away from a traffic light.
The Wrightspeed X1 goes from 0-60mph in 3.07 secs... Not much faster but certainly a cooler looking car. Not to mention that the X1 HAS turn signals..
More info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrightspeed_X1 and http://www.wrightspeed.com/x1.html
10+ years until production makes this a concept car, which is about as much as we can expect from American car manufacturers trying to make energy efficient vehicles.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
The Killacycle used to be powered by spiral-wound AGM cells, but the producer went out of business.
Since then, it was repowered with A123Systems' LiFePO4 cells. It now does 0-60 in 1.5 seconds and the quarter mile in 8.16.
Electrics need not be slow, and their range is growing by leaps and bounds. The ICE has received its terminal diagnosis; the future is electric.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Because of it's nature, this type of car would have to be made out of very lightweight materials, and even then, panels as thin as possible. Seeing that the majority of car sells are in the sedan/family models, it wouldn't be reasonable for auto manufacturers to market and produce a car like this - that won't be very safe and crash survivable - on a large scale.
cb_is_cool knows where his towel is.
The performance isn't quite as good, but Tesla Motors was already taking orders last year.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
It's pretty awesome, I'll grant you that, but it'll be expensive to gear up production on this thing (not to mention sell it - I couldn't see any speculation on price in TFA, but I imagine it won't be cheap). I don't see this being sold in any halfway-large volumes until at least after the other side of peak oil. Until then, it's a nice toy, but it doesn't make any econmic sense.
This seems like conspiracy theory at best.
Although I have no factual information to back this up, I would assume that auto manufacturer's stand to profit far more from developing low cost fuel efficient engines than by stifling innovation to benefit oil companies who kick money back to them.
When you consider that the main concern of many company fleet purchases is mpg and it's also on many consumer car checklists, I would imagine that the market interest created by a low cost fuel efficient vehicle would overcome any perceived loss of profit from deals with oil companies.
Yes, and in how many days to pass that much energy back into your car. Not exactly a candidate for a quick pit stop, unless they can swap the entire battery pack in 10 seconds.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
> Why do car manufacturers always quote 0-60 time when quarter mile is what everyone really cares about?
Because you can play games with gearing and traction to get a good 0-60 time. But 1/4 mile trap speed is hard to fake, and trap speed (even more than 1/4 mile E/T) correlates with how fast a car "feels" to drive in the real world or on a racetrack.
My car does about 11.7-8 @ 124 mph in the 1/4. I can pick up half a second of E/T just by going to sticky tires, but improving my trap speed is much harder. I've driven cars that are "as fast" as mine when you look at 0-60, but they don't feel anywhere near as fast in practice. Yeah, they'll keep up from 0-60 by dumping their clutch at high RPM. But coming out of a 40 mph turn on a track into a long 150 mph straight, I will totally obliterate them.
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Just dispense with the front wheel altogether and race a unicycle. All the weight over the wheel, and no way to lift it off.
Or put the wheels side-by-side Segway style.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
There's a reason the TGV is electric
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
So how come I can buy a Civic or a Yaris? Are they not fuel efficient? Is Toyata an American auto company now? They sell a damn lot of cars in the US.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Wired had an article a couple of years back about a guy that was making electric race cars. His whole philosophy was that to sell electric cars, you have to make them cool.
t ml
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.03/drag_pr.h
Wow,
I would agree with your assessment on a normal market playing field. Auto manufacturers are no longer auto manufacturers; they are owned, run, influenced by holding corporations or corporations that influenced by many areas. Look and see where GM made most of its money in past years; not in making cars, but in the fincancing of cars; theirs or others. You know, make money on the razor blades, not the razor.
Another I watch is G.E. - they make nothing, directly, anymore. Good or bad company? I'm not sure.
I also have no factual information to back this up, so maybe we need to verify this ourselves.
Ben from Popular Mechanics, before taking the test drive, says he's going to "hand the mic over and take this thing for a spin". The next shot is of him driving with the microphone. Hahahah Both key factors continuity and safety are thrown completely out the window so to speak.
There is no such thing as an "American" auto company anymore. There hasn't been for a long time. They are all internationally owned.
What?
Actually I'd rather know how it does 30-70 in gear, as that's the kind of acceleration I actually need - getting up to speed for joining a motorway. Blasting away from the lights is strictly for boy racers, and how fast my car does it is of no practical value to me.
I've heard that electricity generation produces more carbon pollution than combustion engine technology. So is this a productive application of technology?
The Tesla that appeared in the last IEEE spectrum issue is also a nice looking car with also good specs when compared to this one.
Some real specifications are here. It's not quite as fast as PM is claminig and it has only half the range.
No price mentioned other than "six figures".
It is caused by the water dropping down, releases ton of carbons. As for wind power, those blades are made of carbon and they just evaporate in the sun. Nasty stuff.
When will people finally get it into their head that the move to electric/hydrogen cars means that you break the direct link between your source of energy, and the energy to put in a moving vehicle?
A wind powered car would be inconvenient, by an electric car whose electricity comes from windpower isn't.
A country like greenland could use geothermal energy to create hydrogen and ship it to the rest of the world.
But yeah, some power plants currently use carbon based fuels, so electricity causes carbon pollution. We wouldn't want to confuse you.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Glad you passed through friend, but don't let the door hit you on the way out ...
I don't know, the big institutional holders of Ford are vaguely American:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=F
but they certainly aren't only American, if that's what it takes.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
With electric cars, the h.p. rating it typically limited to overheating the motor. As opposed to a motor with brushes, a brushless motor can take as many amp as you will as long as it does not overheat. That means a lot if you only want to accelerate for a few seconds. The same goes for the control electronics and batteries.
So while you may have 600hp to accelerate, you may only have 50hp of continuous power. This may be exactly what you want in a car, but the term may be somewhat meaningless.
Instead of a gas engines power/torque curve vs rpm, a power curve vs time would give us this information.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
When will we be allowed to build a sufficient number of nuclear reactors to power these vehicles? I enjoy the feel of my internal combustion engine, but for the efficiency of nuclear power for electricity, I'm ready to switch.
Free the atoms! Free the atoms!!
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is it that bad seein a hot chick again? if i see a hot chick walkin down the hall i dont say "repost"
When I can buy one of these for under $40K, call me. Until then, this is a neat idea which requires much more development before anyone will be interested.
I'm all for green power, green transport, et. al. But if it costs me more than my house, what's the point? Nobody will buy it because nobody can afford it, good intentions or not.
Now if all automakers would suddenly convert over to pure carbon-fiber bodies, CF production costs would (eventually) plummet to the point where it's the same cost (or cheaper) than steel. But that's not likely to happen anytime soon.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
When considering the full energy cycle of ICE cars vs EV's, EV's are more efficient by a fairly significant amount.
REFERENCE: http://www.evadc.org/pwrplnt.pdf
STFU about slashdot bias.
Ten years from production don't mean shit when your company is three years from oblivion.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
... so the batteries were accellerated to 60 mph *together* with the car?
Aha. I deduce that we are not dealing with trolley car in this particular case.
yes, we have no bananas
It's old news (Wow bet you are suprised! ;) ). It isn't the first, and any car that weighs in under 1200 kilos and has 600 HP damned well better pull that kind of time. The Electric Ariel Atom smokes this car. Of course the Ariel Atom pulls sub-3 second 0-60 times (2.8) with a mere 300HP motor. And yes again the key factor is weight: It weighs in at just under half the weight of this car - about 500 kilos. The electric one pulls 3 seconds in the 60 and weighs in at about 700 kilos. The fact that the two variants of the Atom are so close in performance is testament to the impact of the vehicle's weight on the performance of the vehicle more so than power source.
I don't car what your power source is. If you have a car priced at $125,000 with 600HP of power that weighs a mere 1200 kilos you better pull times like this. Otherwise go back to the drawing board. The Corvette Z06 weighs in at a hefty 3100 pounds, has 500 less HP and pulls 0-60 times of 3.2-3.8 with 3.5 being the official result.
Drag racing, especially 0-60 times, is all about power to weight. Source is irrelevant outside of that.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Cool, that's close to 2G acceleration.
18m/s^2
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For those of us who are not total gearheads, how is 3.1 seconds for 0 to 60 compared to internal combustion engines? Anyone have a chart of 0 to 60 times for Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche and various types of race cars?
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
yo !! this is really cool/.,,/ The elctric version will soon come for almost everything/,../,.the eco-freindly way/./.But what about the recharge?????? how much does it take to recharge that exotic car????? and how long does each full recharge remains in the car??? but anyways/,,./this is really cool,./,i can't wait to test drive one?>>?/,./,
This car seems a GT1 car.
I saw this on Discovery Channel years ago http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tYgqq3zvlQ
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I guess It won't be slow neither ... electric cars don't need to shift gears.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
The Veyron is the so-called "most expensive production car", so 3.1 seconds would be considered very good. All speed numbers from Wikipedia. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject -- so you know you are getting the best possible information.
Internal combustion charts Ferrari 575M Maranello (not fastest but don't have the booklet) - 4.0 Seconds Fastest Porsche : 911 Turbo (480hp /40torque) - 3.7 seconds on manual / 3.4 seconds on Tiptronic S.
Fastest BMW : M6 Coupe (500hp/383torque) - 4.5 Seconds
Fastest Lexus : GS450H (340hp/torquenotlisted) - 5.2 seconds
*All figures taken from respective manufacturer's product catalogs that were handed out at the Manhattan 2007 Car Show on April 6th.
0 - 60 in 3.1 seconds for an electric car is pretty damn impressive.
127.0.0.1
Two axes of stability is boring. .... adventurous.
One axis of stability is fun.
Zero is
You also have to accelerate the batteries as well as the rest of the vehicle, and of course the more batteries you have, the greater the mass to be accelerated. In fact, it doesn't take a genius to see that once you reach a certain size the weight of the driver is hardly a factor and any increase in power will scale precisely with increase in mass, and hence acceleration will rapidly asymptote to a nearly constant value.
The only way you can really improve this is to either produce batteries and control electronics which can produce more power for a given mass, or improve the efficiency of the drive chain significantly. Modern brushless motors and FET controllers are better than the old systems but there is not a lot more to gain. Battery technology - minimising internal resistance, developing polarisation free chemistry, finding completely reversible cycles that can handle high oxidation rates - is the key to producing high acceleration electrical vehicles.
Unfortunately, such are engineering tradeoffs that long life and high discharge rate rarely go together, and these experimental vehicles seem largely to be about either getting publicity or bragging rights. One thing is certain: factor in the battery manufacture and recycling costs, and they are no solution to global warming. I believe there is a claim that, when total life cost is taken into account, even some small SUVs are actually lower energy impact than a Toyota Prius.
Pining for the fjords
The entanglements are too much for me to handle. I'll have to accept your premise unless someone points out how much foreign investment there is in those institutions. Anyway I shouldn't really care where the car comes from. I just want a good one. On the subject of your original question, I thought that GM has a big chunk of Toyota, and they do have some factories in the US.
What?
Check out the videos on the White Zombie EV drag racer site.
STFU about slashdot bias.
I'm pretty sure that last time that SUVs are better than a Prius thing came up here, many people did a very good (and reasoned) job of smashing the claims to really little pieces.
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century,free flow of information is the only safeguard against...
I've seen this claim before. If this is "for certain", then I suppose it should be easy for you to produce some actual evidence to back it up. And please, don't bother linking to this discredited study.
STFU about slashdot bias.
He makes a clear point. Electric cars break the tie to any single fuel type. That means at any point the generation is cleaned up by adding renewables/nuclear even old electric on the road benefit.
You concentrate on the worse case scenario without even looking into it. You can look up carbon content per megajoule of energy today and do the comparison numbers.
You will still produce much less net emissions by using an electric car because of it's much higher efficiency.
Under no circumstance is an electric car producing more net emissions. This long tailpipe argument is an old unsupported red herring.
Based on this:
http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/ir/stock/outline.html
if GM owns any of Toyota, they own less than 60 million shares(which is ~1.6%), or do it very indirectly. I wasn't under the impression that the companies had any relationship at all. Err, that is, I was under the impression that they were separate(except maybe for some research programs or whatever, but their operations are separate).
My original reply was because somebody had modded up the post, so it seemed worth throwing in some dissent, but not worth going to extreme lengths to do it. I have to agree about the entanglements being a bit of a chore and barely worth looking into, and that it doesn't really matter where a car gets made(or really, who owns the factory).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
One thing thats been bothering me for a while, is every electric car or hybrid I've seen lacks solar panels. To me that makes perfect sense, quick charge battery's have a short life as well as being as it being difficult to find a charge point and cars like the above use standard connections but obviously the charge time is long enough to be annoying.2 &criteria=solar%20cells&doy=8m4 ass you place three of those on a spoiler thats a steady stream of 54watts to charge your motors and is effectivily 'free' energy, adding something like that as an optional extra and I'm sure it would pay for itself in added range/costs over the lifetime of the car.
I know solar cells have a dubious enviromental advantage but a small set on a spoiler or on the roof (silicon or the new type which is less efficent) would provide a constant small charge during the day, I know most car journeys seem to be work runs or school trips where the car spends a great deal of time inactive. I know that you can buy portable solar cells like the following http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=9690
I never understood why people watch the 0-60 timing and top speed of a car. On the road, what you need is a stable, safe, efficient vehicle.
Noone really want to go 0-60 in 3.5 seconds and reach 175mph, unless they're looking to die, and do it as fast as possible.
Apparently you watch them so well you don't bother to go to the "products" page on their website? For some examples, they make most of the world's jet engines, nearly all of North America's diesel-electric locomotives, and have a big chunk of steam turbine and wind turbine markets for power generation. Their primary work over the last decade or more has been increasing the efficiency of such systems, so I'd hazard to guess they are a good company now if you care about decreased emissions[1].
You really have to take a step back, and think about such conspiracy theories. If one company can go against the conspiracy and make more money, they'd do it. That's why secret conspiracies don't really work, and only public ones such as OPEC succeed. In OPEC, nations can face sanctions from the other members if they cheat on the oligopoly, but if it were secret you couldn't do that without making it clear something existed.
The only real "conspiracy" is very large companies not wanting to take risks in their research and development, and what you get is what seems like a lot of foot dragging. However it's primarily just inertia and highly risk averse primary investors. Would you bet your retirement fund on unproven investments? Probably not. So, you look to small companies for innovation, but the reality is that many small companies fail. That's just the nature of business -- nearly anyone can start a company, but only a few can grow large in a market with limits.
[1] Their environmental history sucks though, in particular with regard to dumping PCBs, but find me a large company that didn't abuse the environment when they could get away with it prior to the 1970s.
You know, putting the wheels side by side just might revolutionize transportation.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
No, really!
Please add regenerative braking to this car! Get some extra mileage!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
More like when you are racing to beat the timing on sequential sets of lights designed to slow you down.
Just remember though, that sets of lights you can get through at 40mph you can also get through at 160mph!
We all know that 0-60s and the like get the punters in, but the reality is that generally electric cars that focus on this are *atrocious* to drive.
These cars are far too heavy and handle like shit.
The Lotus/Tesla roadster goes some way to making a sensible car that handles well, but even still, its way worse than even a series 1 Lotus Elise.
So yeah, its interesting to see electric cars become cooler, and we should encourage that, but lets not let ourselves be fooled by press releases quoting 0-60s as a benchmark of a well performing motor vehicle.
The big three (I will talk primarily US) are tanking and fast precisely because they never got it on mileage and reliability until the japanese had a solid decade or more advances on them. And for the most part they still haven't caught up. They obviously threw away that market because they didn't give a crap, and are mostly retarded to boot.
I used to have a 74 dart, held six adults, roomy trunk, I tried it once it would actually do 110 mph with the six banger in it, and it got around 25 miles per gallon, with just a fraction of the plumbing and electrical nightmare modern engines are.
Now it is 2007, what do you see? See much diff with US cars other than they cost huge gobs more, about impossible for the average joe to work on them much, and get maybe just a smidgen better mileage, or in some cases worse or just static, no improvements? I'm just talking performance and mileage now, not radar gps equipped DVD playing sensurround airbags stuff, just from the transportation angle, which is primarily what cars are supposed to be anyway. It's like about zilch progress near as I can see.
Nope, the big three US car makers been stepping on their dicks for a LONG time now. On purpose or just top heavy retarded management, no idea (my guess is equal amounts of both, and yep, oil is a profitable commodity, you sell a lot more at 10-25 mpg than at 45-65 mpg), but the results are there to see.
I'll tell you another reason, the top engineers go into racing where it is fun, change can go fast and is driven by engineering, they get paid pretty darn good and are held in high esteem. They are *valued* folks. In the car industry, engineers are way down the list of "attaboys" and paycheck compared to the bloated marketing and managing side, and those folks get "driven" by the vultures who demand ever increasing profits but have mostly no clue about quality. A first year rookie car dealer salesman makes more than an engineer working for years. And I don't want to hear that it's all the unions fault either, they build what they are told to build, they have zero say in how things go in that direction.
I was in the UAW in the 60s,and you could clearly see this coming, at least I could. Of course back then it was the horsepower wars,that mostly blinded folks and oil by the barrel was very cheap as well, but anyone who stopped and extrapolated a few decades out could see gas would get dear eventually and that reliability long range would keep a car company running in the red. Detroit and most of their management and "analysts" missed both of those obvious calls. And they are so obvious, that yes, you might tend to think there was some action on the side to make it that way on purpose, lose some in one industry, gain a lot more in another.
Sort of like "new and improved" bloated operating systems sell new computers, even though the old ones aren't "broken" or "worn out". One hand washes the other with lotsa cash it appears.
Heh, a reverse from slashdot normal computer to car analogy!
electric cars don't need to shift gears.
Nor do internal combustion engine driven cars, with continuously variable transmission. Williams tested it in the early 90s - there's video of Coulthard accelerating from a standing start with the engine steady at peak revs the whole way, but it was banned by the FIA.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
yea umm you don't need much to make an electric car go. And you dont need gears and shafts and whatnot. A lot of the guys building electrics put 2 motors in direct drive on the rear wheels, they are pretty light (like 15 to 25 lbs each motor) and then its all hooked up to a mad speed controller. Unfortunately good battery technology is hard to come by for the average builder, which cuts the range at the moment to custom jobs but that will change. For an example there are electric drag cars that put over 2000 ft/lbs of torque to the ground. Also if you wanna overcome loss of traction on launch you don't have to increase weight (there is enuff weight from batteries anyway). You can increase wheel width or diameter or get some launching skills and control it off the line. Good drivers are there for a reason, otherwise you would just use an on off switch instead of a throttle.
Balderdash!
I'd guess, just offhand, PRETTY GODDAMN QUICK. As in, way way quicker than whatever you drive now, unless you're "joining the motorway" in a Ferrari Enzo.
Pfft.. my '92 Eclipse has NOS stickers, a CF spoiler, and a 6" tailpipe and it'll SMOKE that shit all day, any day.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
By your line of reasoning, Porsche, Ferrari and Lamborghini should have gone out of business decades ago, since "nobody" can afford those cars, and they clearly require "much more development before anyone will be interested".
Yet, somehow those companies manage to stay in business. I wonder how that is possible?
That's just too cool. Weird name though -- Embr[iy]o?
-- Alastair
Many of these are more-or-less performance oriented vehicles. . .
m l
Tesla Roadster: http://www.teslamotors.com/
Tango: http://www.commutercars.com/
UEV Spyder: http://www.universalelectricvehicle.com/spyder.ht
Wrightspeed X1: http://www.wrightspeed.com/x1.html
ZAP-X: http://www.zapworld.com/ZAPWorld.aspx?id=4560
Silence: http://www.silenceinc.ca/accueilEN.htm
VentureOne: http://www.venturevehicles.com/
Phoenix SUT & SUV: http://www.phoenixmotorcars.com/
Does it run linux?
It's shocking that a gasoline car advocate would add fuel to the fire by igniting an argument with electric car advocates. Maybe he doesn't have the capacity to understand the power of electric vehicles.
No, the whole idea is to have all the pollution happen elsewhere - like at the top of a very tall stack instead of at ground level in the centre of a city. It's the same with hybrids - they are the solution to a city traffic problem and have a different transmission system that has benefit.
As for the SUV thing - yes you can cherry pick stuff and say that a one litre Suzuki Seirra is still an SUV but it all comes down to big heavy vehicles requiring more energy to move about whether they have a tonne of batteries or are just big to look impressive. A minivan with the aerodynamic properties of a brick can carry more people for far less energy than what I would normally call an SUV.
The original AC cobras only ran 5s and mid 4s (0-60)depending on the small or large V8.
No one denies electric cars can be both quick and fast (top end), what we are lacking is a normal commuter car at around 10-15 grand, your very basic transportation model. A new model A or VW bug for the 21st century, the "people's electric". A hundred mile range is more than enough for the vast amount of commuter distances (average is 33 miles round trip in the US), which means you wouldn't need top of the line, 1,000 expensive laptop batteries to pull it off.
My best guess is the Chinese (maybe the Indians) will beat everyone for that market, and be inside that price range, while most of the other guys building electrics are building sportscars way out-side the pocketbooks for most people. Ya, some cool tech gets developed there, but we need the affordable electric,in the common styles, a sedan, a minivan/suv thing and a small pickup.
The point is that people's perceptions of electric vehicles is that they have to be glorified golf carts.
Now I happen to think there's room in the transportation world for glorified golf carts that are capable of typical commuting trips. But not everyone agrees with me.
So you have to educate people that the electric drive trains have a variety of possibilities.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Actually, if health care were taken off the table, then they'd be closer to having a level playing field with foreign competition. They'd still be bleeding from multiple bullet holes in their feet, but at least both feet would still be attached.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The website says 8-10 hours @ 220v (like your clothes drier uses).
This video says 45 hours @ 110v -- I suspect that it also uses a lower current so that special wiring isn't required.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
No, they're not the same polyester and carbon fibers that are in an inexpensive fishing rod.
F1 bodies are made out of prepreg, which use aerospace epoxy resins (which are nothing like polyester resins in terms of performance, cost, or availibility). Prepreg consists of various orientation and weaves of carbon fibers pre-impregnated with the above mentoned epoxies mixed under tight industrial process controls. Prepreg is then stored and shipped under refrigeration to the builders who have to use it before its shelf life expires.
Using prepreg is not the same as mixing up some Bondo brand polyester resin in a paper cup and slapping it onto some fibers with a disposable paint brush. It has to be oriented and draped into the mold by hand or by production robotics, then placed in a vacuum bag which in turn is placed in an autoclave. The part then is subjected to a very careful cure schedule consisting of high pressures and a series of specific temperatures for very specific periods of time. The cure schedule depends on the resin formulation and the desired properties of the finished part.
No part of this process is cheap. No part of it is similar to the process used in every-day consumer composite parts, except maybe for the fact that there's carbon fibers and some sort of resin involved. The carbon monocoque of an F1 car has far more in common with an F22 or JSF body than it does with a carbon/polyester fishing rod.
Why would you ever compare this to a production car?
It's a home-built prototype which meets no federal or state safety standards that is designed to accelerate quickly and has no top end (120ish MPH per the manufacturer). It's the same as the last 5 or 10 electric "sports cars" that have been publicized, then pretty much never heard from again, with the exception of the occasional "look at this, we still exist" PR releases.
If I built a light frame and stuffed any decent sporting motor in it, it would smoke this car. Comparing it to production exotic cars makes about as much sense as having a custom built supercomputer, then comparing the performance to one of Alienware's PC's. You'd be pissed if your supercomputer barely outran it. Especially if it only outran it in one test, and only if it's short enough. Against a production car it might win 0-60, and maybe 1/4 mile, but would get creamed in the half mile and beyond by all exotics, and many lower end sports cars.
The article is way off with both the top speed and range estimates, Hybrid Technologies own website list the top speed as "over 120MPH" not 175 MPH, and the range is listed as "over 100 miles" not 200. Do a few 0-60 runs, and that range probably shortens to 75 miles. Race it on a road course and it would probably drop to 20. Recharge time is listed as 8-10 hours on 220V, nothing is listed for 110V.
This sentence no verb.
What was Maddox's priceless comment to the Segway stability solution? "BAM...THIRD WHEEL..."
CVT's aren't so obscure. Everybody's doing them nowadays; off the top of my head I've seen them from Ford, Nissan, Audi, and Honda. The Audi A6 had a 5-speed auto, 6-speed manual, or CVT at one point (last I looked was at least a year or two ago) and the CVT gave the best 0-60 and gas mileage of the three. And without any shifting. No doubt, CVT is cool.
What I would really like to see is a diesel on a CVT. In a sports car. No, seriously...by modulating the transmission ratio rather than the throttle you'd have total access to that power and torque, which would be much higher pound-for-pound than a gas engine. Of course, it would be good to have diesel+cvt in normal passenger cars too (and hybrids...wtf? why aren't there diesel priuses!?) but I digress. Point is, diesel and CVT seem like a perfect match.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
I call your fake vehicle and raise you two real ones.
Because it's a bitch to meet US clean diesel low-sulfur standards while also cramming hybrid technology into the same chassis. I doubt the Prius would still get the SULEV (super ultra low emmision vehicle) rating with a diesel engine vs. a gas engine.
Well, then "everybody" has been doing CVT since the 1950s - my grandfather drove a DAF car with CVT in the Netherlands back then. Despite that, very few people other than car geeks have heard of CVT and CVT cars are a rarity on the road..
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Isn't this a little ridiculous? Considering the current problems with energy supplies (Global warming, Oil prices, Middle Eastern politics, Nuclear waste), shouldn't we be focused on trying to make the cars as efficient as possible?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the purpose of cars to get from one place to another?
Is all this extra power actually necessary, or is it just the modern equivalent of beating my chest?
Also, consider the fact that 99% of the cars made will not be driven on a track. They will be driven on public roads. Most non controlled access roadways top out at 55mph. (Yes, I know there are exceptions -- I can think of a few myself.) To me, I look at a 0-60 time as a measure of how easily the car will be able to pull into traffic. When your 0-Speed_Limit time is a scant few seconds, you won't need much of a gap to be able to make that right turn onto a busy city street.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
Actually its here now, but it will take that long to drive them to the dealerships.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
I agree. I was recently in the market for a new compact car. I am going to go with the Yaris. I checked out all the American cars. The real problem is that the American cars aren't. The Chevy Aveo is a Daewoo. When you get into it, it seems like everything you touch is going to break. The tranny feels like ass, and it has NO snap. The Yaris is in the same price range and just "feels" better.
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I think it is quite likely that carbon fiber could become an affordable building material. What we need is to create mass production techniques for the material. Currently, high end carbon fiber race cars are built by hand. I believe that there has already been progress on this front.
Boeing is building its new 787 out of carbon fiber, using a type of mass production technique. Also, I recently heard of a company named Fiberforge that seems to have the beginnings of viable mass production techniques. Their method is to first lay the fibers in the proper directions using something akin to ink-jet printing, and then apply the resins. Once they have made the sheet, they use heat and pressure to form the sheets into various shapes. I saw a sample object, with the shape of a hollow hemisphere. When you tapped on the hemisphere, it made a sound like a metal bell.
Carbon fiber cars have the potential to be far safer than steel cars. With the right engineering, we should be able to make cars that crumple in the optimal way during a crash. With the above production techniques, we should be able to modulate the thickness and strength over different areas of various car components to achieve a high level of occupant protection. It is simply a matter of good engineering.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
It used to be fun to see electric vehicles tangling successfully on the performance end of the spectrum.
Now, I think the golf cart myth is pretty well shattered and there's only so much market for toys.
So, how about a 4 seater that's priced reasonably (under 30K), can tangle on the freeway, and has enough range to not make you worry about having to fit in a recharge during a busy day of commuting, picking up kids, running errands, etc...
Whoever does this first makes billions. People are very practical and will favor electric cars when they work in their lifestyle simply due to the fact that they will feel newer longer, and cost so little to maintain.
What you're forgetting is one very very important thing: Headon collisions.
They very rarely happen in F1, but they happen a lot in real life.
2 cars hitting each other headon at 75mph each still gives you a 150mph impact.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
In general, all the technology for EVs is there except for the fuel cells or energy-dense batteries.
The other elephant in the room is cost. Car companies like GM, Ford, and DCX don't want to risk making EVs or hybrids available that are much above existing vehicle costs. Parts manufacturers can't or don't want to afford to sell them the specialized, low-volume, EV/hybrid-only parts at high-volume commodity prices.
Toyota bit the bullet and paid to commoditize their technology to some degree. They are very vertically integrated as owners of Denso, a huge and diverse car parts manufacturer.