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Green GT's All-Electric Supercar Unveiled
Mike writes "Swiss auto company Green GT recently released the first details on a svelte all-electric supercar that is being heralded as the most powerful electric race car ever built. Designed with the 2011 Le Mans race in mind, the Twenty-4 will boast a sleek carbon fiber chassis and twin 100-kw electric motors totaling 400 hp — enough to push the vehicle from 0-60 mph in 4 seconds flat, and to a top speed of 171 mph. GreenGT's head engineer Christophe Schwartz has stated that 'The GreenGT Twenty-4 design study could become our 2011 Le Mans Prototype electric racer, or it could even become an electric road-going supercar. There is a possibility to do both!'"
It's been a while since I watched that race, but from memory I think Le Mans pit stops aren't the 4-second in-n-out with four fresh tyres and a full tank that you get in Formula 1. They last a bit longer than that.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Side note: 0-60 mph in 4 seconds flat. Ummm ... doesn't the Tesla Roadster do it in sub 4 and its a consumer vehicle ... just a thought
Yes, and the Wrightspeed X1, based on the Ariel Atom, does it in just over 3 sec.
Then again, straight acceleration isn't the most important thing in an endurance race. Audi has been cleaning up the big endurance races of late with their diesel engine, not by being the fastest, but by good team strategy and needing fewer pitstops for fillups.
Not a typewriter
Which none of those scoops would do.....
So again I ask....?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
What would you call "an industrial scale"? I've been reading over market research on electric vehicle forecasts for a business, and they're all over the board. However, it's safe to say that almost everyone is calling for them to be in at least "sizable" numbers by 2015. The most extreme forecast I've come across is Wintergreen's, which is, if I recall the numbers correctly, 32.7 million shipped by 2015. I find that number a bit hard to believe, but on the other hand, when there's perhaps three dozen marques planning to build them in 5 to 6 figure quantities per year within the next few years, some of the lower-end figures are equally hard to believe as well. I tend to favor an 8 million shipped by 2015 scenario.
Still a fairly small percentage of global sales, but a relevant number.
Give a boy a gun and you arm him for a day. Teach him how to make a gun, and the whole metaphor breaks down.
Well, currently there's a lot of stigma about 100% electrical cars. Many people (potential customers) believe that completely electric vehicles must necessarily have at least one of the following weaknesses due to limitations with electric engines in cars:
A.) Too slow
B.) Incapable of driving very far
C.) Requiring too much time to refuel
D.) Too fragile
I would think that making one that can compete well at the 24 hours of Le Mans would go a long way toward changing those perceptions.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
If the car stores enough energy to run at full power - 200 kilowatts for one hour, that's a lot of energy you need to transfer in a short time. To transfer everything in a 1 sec charge = 720 Megawatts. 10 seconds charge = 72MW. 100 seconds charge = 7.2MW.
Even if you halve the power to 100kW (say the car only goes 50% power on average), those are quite big numbers. Who wants to be sitting in the car while 36MW flows into it?
The transfer is unlikely to be 100% efficient so there will be waste heat generated. 1MW of waste heat is no funny.
If you're going to use supercapacitors or batteries or fuel cells, you'd be charging/filling them outside the car, and then plugging them into the car and hoping they don't blow up in the process (it's still easier to make safer than pumping megawatts of electricity into the car).
WTF are you on about?
Well, not against gas-powered cars, but in an all-electric race, perhaps... (if anything gets electric cars kick-started in the public consciousness, it'd be an all-electric indy or something)