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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
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
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
The performance isn't quite as good, but Tesla Motors was already taking orders last year.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
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."
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
The only catch is that it is very expensive.
Price, not strength, is the reason you won't be seeing a carbon fiber sedan.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
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.
That depends on how your power is generated. In Manitoba, we're mostly hydro electric, so the only bi-product is flooding behind the damn. If your in places that use coal, oil, gas, or any other carbon fuel to generate electricity then you will have this issue. But using renewable energy such as hydro electric, geothermal, nuclear, only product heat.
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.
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.
Actually, it's only 0.88g. Which is still a LOT for acceleration in a car, but nothing like the 6-10g that people can handle momentarily before they start to black out.
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
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.
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.
First, because a lot of people also want to drive their cars on the tracks.
Second, people who want a stable, safe, efficient vehecle doesn't mean they'll also want it to be slow.
Lastly, just because you don't want to do a 3.5 second 0-60 to reach 175, doesn't mean that "noone" wants to. Open you eyes.
there's no reason light cars can't be safe - people regularly walk away from 150mph crashes in F1 cars.
We can't even get people to wear seat belts and observe traffic laws - what are the odds we can get them to spend years developing high speed driving skills, to wear nomex garmets, full-face helmets, neck braces, undergarmet cooling systems, four point harnesses - and not have head-on collisions - and be willing to spend the several hundred thousand dollars for the carbon fiber bodies that F1 cars are using?
You know, putting the wheels side by side just might revolutionize transportation.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
No, really!
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!
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.
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
Here's a video of it in action.
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
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/
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.
You have heard wrong. Your typical gasoline engine is about 20% efficient at turning chemical energy into motion. Your electric motor is around 90% efficient. That means, if you work through all the maths from start to finish, that the electric car always produces less pollution per mile driven as compared with the gasoline car.
If all your electrical power comes from coal-fired plants, that's the dirtiest source of electricity we have, and the electric car still comes out slightly ahead on pollution. When you bring in other sources of any energy -- any other sources -- the numbers get better. You can burn natural gas, or run nuclear plants, you can do wind, solar, geothermal, hydro power, and your cars don't have to change.
And here's another fun fact. . . Many electrical power plants in the USA produce excess energy at night, when demand is low. It's not practical to shut the plants down and "cold start" them again the next morning, so they sit idling and producing power that is wasted. If we charged electric cars at night during that time, we could power tens of millions of them without having to build a single new generating plant.
Why not convert our cars into gigantic slot cars while we're on the Interstate? Our electricity use would be metered and read off when we take the exit using the same technology used in wireless toll passes.
Actually, I'd go farther and have autopilot too, so the cars can draft on each other safely. But then you have to convince people that an automatic system that occasionally fails and kills people is better than a manual system where you're only as safe as the worst driver on the road and which routinely kills people.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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.
I remember reading in an automotive magazine recently about a British company modifying a Mini (the current design) to be powered by four powerful electric motors. The result was actually FASTER than the standard Mini, which shows that once we lick the battery storage problem electric cars won't be slow, that's to be sure. And since the electric motor is very compatible with computer controls it could mean built-in traction control and antilock braking all by controlling how each motor works.