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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!'"
What interests me is how they'll power the car in a 24-hour race. There don't seem to be details on that.
According to their site, there's a large solar-powered charging station (100 square meters of photovoltaic surface) which can be used to charge the car between races, but unless they're seriously loading the thing with batteries, they're either going to need long pit stops for charging or the ability to swap out battery packs as fast as other cars can pit for fuel.
On the other hand, with their target date two years out and the rapidly evolving electric car scene, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some hot new prototype hitting the car show circuit around then that blew their doors off.
Start a happiness pandemic
This has been done among Universities for several years. If I remember Ohio State and Oklahoma won a lot of the races with these cars.
http://evri.ou.edu/lightning/specs.php
The races were short, it could only run for 8-10 minutes depending on the load without changing battery packs. A quick release mechanism was designed where all 32 batteries could be changed in 10-13 seconds.
Why the big air scoops on this car? Do they have a heat problem? They almost look like they are placed for tire cooling more than anything else.
You would think that they would try to make this the sleekest wind-cheatingest car they could instead of grabbing huge chunks of air.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Why not develop a car normal people will actually buy and use? This is interesting but I don't think we have the luxury of trickle-down innovation at this point
I disagree. We don't have the luxury of dumping millions of ill-thought out poorly designed cars on the market without adequate testing to ensure they won't all be clogging out junk yards with huge disposal problems of toxic battery components due to premature failure.
We do NOT have an electrical grid that can support all the new electric cars you would love to see. Sorry, its just not there, and not likely to be there for several decades.
We must go slowly on grid-charged cars until we can double our electrical generation capacity, and beef up the distribrution system.
Race technology has always lead the way in the automotive industry. How else can you get worst case scenario testing in the real world.
We DO NOT have to rush into deployment of half baked technology on a mass scale. We DO have the time to do this right. The end of the earth is NOT upon us.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I can apply hundreds or thousands of foot pounds of torque by standing on a long lever. However, I cannot produce more than about .09 horsepower for any length of time. Uniform torque through the power band is important for good acceleration unless you have a continuously variable transmission, but other than that the maximum power and efficiency is what matters (and motors are far better at providing constant torque than internal combustion engines). 0-60 in 4s is rather slow for a supercar, but if it can maintain a higher efficiency by regenerative braking it may have a chance. Electric motors can usually handle 150-200% of their rated power for short bursts, like accelerating out of a turn using the energy regenerated from breaking coming into it.
I couldn't agree more. The push for green car technology will only serve to hasten the demise of the U.S. auto industry, while doing little eliminate toxic waste. Ignore those who claim to be able to predict the future. Last time I checked, no one had a crystal ball.
I don't mean to nitpick, but it's possible for a human to produce a *lot* more than 0.09hp for quite a while. In the 1989 Tour de France final time trial Greg LeMond produced roughly 2/3 horsepower continuously for just under an hour. I'm not of that caliber but I can crank out just under a third of a horsepower for over two hours if I'm feeling really motivated, according to an on-bike dynamometer.
While I'm on the subject, humans have pretty good torque characteristics, similar in shape to a steam engine's: flat up to about 90-120 rpm (depending on training) and then dropping off towards zero fairly quickly.
Some electric motors have their max torque at 0 rpm, dropping linearly to zero torque at their max rpm, but others have sigmoidal or other odd torque/rpm curves; compound-wound and series-wound motors diverge (in opposite directions) from standard dc motors (if I remember correctly.)
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.