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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.
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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
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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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.
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".
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 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.
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'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.
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?
Here's a video of it in action.
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
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.