Slashdot Mirror
Sahimo Hydrogen Vehicle Gets Over 1,300 mpg
Mike writes "Students from Turkey's Sakarya University have unveiled a remarkable attempt at creating Europe's most fuel-efficient vehicle. Dubbed the Sahimo, their pint-sized hydrogen car is cable of eking out an incredible 568 km on 1 liter of fuel (about 1,336 miles per gallon). An aerodynamic carbon-fiber construction keeps the vehicle's weight down to less than 110 kg (243 lbs), and the designers hope to push the Sahimo's performance even further to a full 1,000 km per 1 liter of fuel before participating in the Global Green Challenge in October."
1,336 MPG
Still 1 short from being leet!
At 110 kilograms, how far will it fly when it gets T-boned by a Hummer?
Considering that high-school students in the U.S. have built viable vehicles that get over 1,000 miles per gallon of gasoline. They should be able to do better with hydrogen.
but I'd rather see a competition that takes regular cars and modifies them to get the most gas mileage. The problem with these uber gas-mileage vehicles is that they're street legal, have no safety equipment, and don't go very fast.
...if it had smooth disc wheel covers and an attempt at wheel skirts.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Billy, we hardly knew ya
Le français vous intéresse?
In my opinion cars driven by electric motors are where we should be placing our bets.
Electric motors can go very quickly (at least the speed limit), have great acceleration, don't require a grid of hydrogen fuel stations to be built, don't require the massive amounts of energy used for electrolysis (the process of making useable hydrogen), have 0 risk of exploding (although admittedly hydrogen vehicles are pretty safe, but its more of a mental thing), and are ridiculously efficient. You know that about 3% of the energy used in internal combustion engines actually ends up moving the driver? With an electric motor, it is more like 50-80%, depending on the type of vehicle.
You could argue that we're just shifting the dependance (and the green house gases) to power plants- but this would open a door to a 100% maintainable system, it just requires an eventual (much more eventual than current state) shift over to clean power for plants. Our existing grid could easily handle 20 million plugin cars.
The only thing we're waiting on is efficient battery technology for the range of the things.
Um, you're gonna be f**ked if you get rear-ended by a semi no matter *what* you're driving. Avoiding being crushed by much larger entities is one of the keys to staying alive, y'know?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Billy Mays is going to bed. He crawls under the covers and says a little prayer...
"Lord, this week you saw fit to take Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson..."
and the Lord interrupts, "BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!!"
Car would probably roll in either case. Carbon fiber is actually stronger than steel.
I'm sure you can find some nice radioactive thermal generators that have under a liter of fuel in them. That will get you a hundred thousand miles per liter easily.
Electric motors [snip] have 0 risk of exploding
Yeah because lithium-ion batteries are perfectly safe!
A lot safer than compressed hydrogen canisters- especially considering that the batteries in electric cars are separated to prevent any sort of massive failure. Worst case scenario one out of 6,300 cells pops, and you have to open it up and replace it.
1,336 MPG? Is that city or highway?
Seriously though... What is the practical fuel economy of this vehicle under normal driving conditions? With a strong tail wind and solid tires, everything I own is 'capable' of 100MPG. In practice, 40 MPG is about what I expect.
That's the general problem when you concentrate a lot of energy in little space. There are practical differences between fossil fuel, hydrogen, urane and batteries, but the concept of accidentally releasing (converting to pressure/temperature) much of this energy is pretty much the same.
This stuff doesn't work.
Why ahsn't this gone to mass production?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I'm surprised. Why does this 3rd place winner get this attention? If the numbers are anything to impress with, take a closer look at the winner, the Norwegian contribution, clocking in at 1246 km per 1 liter of fuel equivalents. Official Results: http://www.shell.com/home/content/eco-marathon-en/europe/2009/results/app_results_2009.html
Not necessarily. A friend of a friend (I met him, heard the stories and saw the pictures) got t-boned by a dump truck loaded with gravel which happened to run a red light at over 50 mph. He just remembers trying to hold on to the steering wheel as it pulled away from him. Luckily, the guy was seriously into racing. His car was outfitted with a steel roll cage, carbon fiber racing seats and a five point harness... he walked away with literally no bruises. The car, however, was completely destroyed (as in no easily identifiable parts left outside of the roll cage, just debris littered over the street.) He won't drive anything without race-spec safety anymore, but the truck driver isn't even allowed to operate a Tonka anymore.
Miles per gallon, or kilometers per liter, is only a useful measurement when we're comparing vehicles with the same fuel. Getting a 25% increase in miles per gallon of gasoline would be great. But is 568 kilometers on a liter of Hydrogen even GOOD? How expensive is that hydrogen? (How many kilos of coal were burned to generate the energy to generate the hydrogen?) How dangerous is a fast-moving vehicle with a liter of hydrogen?
This may be great, but the statistic is pretty meaningless. They could get a lot BETTER miles per gallon out of a gallon of plutonium, I'd wager, if we're making those sorts of comparisons. Don't even get me started on antimatter.
"Our existing grid could easily handle 20 million plugin cars"
I'm not sure it could. Take for example the 10 minute fill up of this car http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/advanced-cars/electriccar-maker-touts-10minute-fillup
"To charge a 35-kWh battery in 10 minutes requires 250 kilowatts of powerâ"five times as much as the average office building consumes at its peak. That rules out rapid charging at home. Even rapid-charge âfilling stationsâ stretch the imagination, as youâ(TM)d need a megawatt power feedâ"generally available only at electrical substationsâ"to simultaneously operate four power pumps. "
i wish i could stop
In my opinion cars driven by electric motors are where we should be placing our bets.
Electric motors can go very quickly (at least the speed limit), have great acceleration, don't require a grid of hydrogen fuel stations to be built, don't require the massive amounts of energy used for electrolysis (the process of making useable hydrogen), have 0 risk of exploding (although admittedly hydrogen vehicles are pretty safe, but its more of a mental thing), and are ridiculously efficient. You know that about 3% of the energy used in internal combustion engines actually ends up moving the driver?
I think you mean 30%, if you are referring to petrol (gas in USA) and 45+% for diesel.
Incidentally, on UK roads, although an accident may be more survivable in an SUV, you are more likely to have an accident involving a collision with an oncoming vehicle, owing to our narrow roads and many obstructions. Also, journey times in SUVs are longer because you are likely to be held up so much more often. The recession and the oil price spike has brought a sudden halt to the SUV-ification of the UK, and most new cars are either company cars or small ones. The result is that driving on my mixed urban/rural commute is getting noticeably easier. This trend may accelerate.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
...which, of course, will always work just fine. Everyone knows that safety systems are all infallible, and all work exactly as intended.
Oh. And nothing ever catches fire.
Kid-proof tablet..
A driver of one of these would have significantly more safety on a motorcycle.
That thing, if t-boned by a motorcycle, would likely result in the driver dying. This thing has a curb weight of 243lb, which is 100lb less than a small non-highway motorcycle. Consider, also, that it's (likely steel- or aluminum- mesh substructure) carbon fiber: it's significantly less resistant to fracture than any metal (except maybe over-hardened iron).
Additionally, the driver's vantage point is low. Very low. Again, if hit by a motorcycle, the driver's head would be right at the bike's center of gravity. This is right at the "bumper" level of other 4-wheeled vehicles. The driver would be fucked.
Finally, this thing is unlikely to produce the noise that a motorcycle does (which adds to others' awareness of the biker), lacks the agility of a 2-wheel vehicle, and decreases the driver's visibility over what is available on a bike (due to the 'cockpit' as well as the low perspective). Driver competence aside, a motorcycle is safer.
Finally, there are a lot more drivers per capita in the US than in Europe. This might have something to do with the death rate (as well as the endemic nature of car ownership here). The bar is significantly lower for ownership, combined with the fact that the roads are likely much more full of cars as a result (and that people drive more often/regularly here) may lead to this statistical difference. If someone has a daily commute of 30+ miles each day - with tens of thousands of other people doing the same thing, rain or shine - the likelihood of an accident goes up.
As a parable, someone who gets certified to sky-dive and does it a handful of times isn't as likely to have a problem as someone who does it with regularity (say, someone in Airborne) due to the sheer number of times it's performed. Shit happens, and is more likely to happen with increased exposure.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Now that I've started commuting, it's time to replace my old Chevy Van with a more efficient car. The Smart car looks pretty attractive at first (it's actually possible to park one in San Francisco, unlike the van :-), but the big drawback with it or the other small lightweight cars on the market is safety. Admittedly I've only had a collision every few decades, but the van's never been the smaller vehicle, while the small cars are smaller than most other things on the road, plus they're short enough that you don't have as much visibility.
On the other hand, a friend of mine totalled her Miata once and walked away with only some airbag burns - a truck ahead of her on the freeway lost a ladder, and there was no time to dodge it. She spun around a couple of times and banged into the median barriers.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you're an average American, your car probably outweighs you by a factor of 10-20 (unlike this lightweight vehicle, which you might outweigh :-). So no more than 5-10% of the energy is moving you as opposed to the vehicle, and *then* you can go multiply by 30-45% depending on fuel, etc.
Also, one of the most common methods of producing hydrogen today isn't electolyzing water, it's cracking methane or other hydrocarbons.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This is how I'd start to approach making a modern street car more fuel efficient:
* start with a small sedan (Ford Focus, Honda Accord, etc.)
* rip out anything unnecessary from the inside. This includes all the comfort electronics. Weight requires more energy, so remove as much as possible.
* remove all unnecessary subsystems that leech from the alternator: air conditioning, power steering, ABS, etc.
* remove the "emission control" measures, which seem to invariably sap a good 25%+ fuel efficiency.
* add an HHO system and run the engine rich, either tricking the sensors or modifying the computer to ignore the high readings
* if you plan on heavy city driving, add in the break energy collector and a fuel cell of some sort.
Bet you could get close to 100MPG if you did something like this. Too bad performance and fuel efficiency seems to drop off quickly if you go below a 4 cyl engine.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
ICE are actually about 30-40% energy efficient in terms of the energy utilized to move the vehicle. I assume that was what you were referring to, unless you're under the presumption that a vehicle with an electric motor can weigh about 1.5x what the driver does.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
From the article: "The SAHMO is truly a lightweight carbon fiber vehicle, weighting less than 110 kilograms."
The entire car weighs less than an overweight American.
OK, if your car is built to race spec then yeah, you'll have a much better chance. There was an F1 driver a few years back who hit a concrete barrier head-on at around 200mph and he escaped with (iirc) broken legs and a lot of bruising. They quoted his actual deceleration distance as being something like 65cm. If you're willing to spend the money, you can make cars very safe indeed - it's just that no private driver is willing to spend that much.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
568 km/l to mpg
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It takes more energy to make hydrogen than what you get back out of it. You can't make this at home. But you can make electric power at home, for free.
Hydrogen fuel necessitates a distribution network exactly the same as for petrol. This is why the oil crazies in the Bush regime pumped money into hydrogen and nothing into electric, even as electric cars worked and people loved them to death.
Plus, it's unbelievably explosive - in concentrations between 2% to 98% it's explosive. So you either must have none or very close to 100% hydrogen for it not to explode. Now, when gasoline turns into a vapour and creeps along the ground then explode if lit you can get a 30 foot or more radius is vapour with corresponding explosion as the vapour ignites. And gasoline is a fairly heavy dense molecule compared to hydrogen which is the lightest molecule known, and since it's really a gas, unlike gasoline which will sit there as a liquid for days, hydrogen turns from a liquid to a gas in much less than one second.
If you have a tank with 5 gallons of hydrogen and the tank is ruptured - and eventually this absolutely is going to happen one day - then the resultant break and explosion would very much on the order of what is definitely not conducive to human life. That is, you'll be ok unless that tank goes, then you're pretty much a goner, much more so than with gasoline.
Between the fact you have to buy it from the oil barons and can never make it your self for free and is the most explosive substance known, yeah, hydrogen is great. Not.
I think if we knew what we were doing we'd immediately stop anything to do with hydrogen cars and stick to electric. Keep in mind before the oil companies paid the car companies to stop making electrics, there were more electric cars than gas powered cars on the road in the early 1900s.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Oi! I resent the blanket generalization. I'm pretty sure I _could_ fit about half an ass cheek in that thing.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
At over 1300 mpg, there's really no need for a dense grid of Hydrogen stations to begin with, as you'll rarely need to fill up and having to drive out to a station wont take that much out of the vehicle's range with a filled tank.
Heck, maybe it will be possible to simply order Hydrogen in small quantities and have it delivered to the consumer to fill their tank.
You didn't say how fast the Hummer was going, or if it was an H1, H2, or H3 (or how overweight the guy driving it is for that matter).
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You know your efficiency figures are wrong and meaningless, right?
Where the hell did you get that 3% figure??? Last time I checked, it was more about 40% for combustion engines.
Plus, you'll have to multiply your 50-80% by the efficiency of a power plant, between 30 and 60%.
What about the problem where in HHO takes more energy to create than it expunges? It's pretty simple physics. The electrolysis process to generate HHO requires something like ~280 Joules per mole and HHO only produces something like ~240 joules per mole. It's been a while, but when you also factor in friction in the cylinder, inefficiencies in heat, etc, it gets worse.
Have these problems been solved?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
You'll be saying wow every time you use this Car! It's like a corvette! It's like a Prius! It's like a sponge for liquid hydrogen! A regular car doesn't work wet - this makes water all the time. This is for the executive, the environmentalist, the pitchman, the john with a bitten tongue fleeing a crazy hooker! This car burns twenty times less hydrogen than gasoline. Look at this! It just extracts all the work that was put into the hydrogen before! Why do you want fossils and dinosaurs to work so hard to push you to work and back? It drips, but it doesn't make a mess. You cruise the highways, fill it at the hydrogen filling station. It is made in Europe, you know the Americans never make good green stuff. Olympic divers, they pick up chicks in these. We're gonna do this in real time! Look at this! Put in a gallon of hydrogen, turn the ignition! [gets in the car] You follow me, camera guy? Look at this[cut] and we're 1300 miles away! [camera pans around] See what I'm telling ya? You'll be saying wow every time!
Please give us a car analogy...oh, wait.
But how much of that energy is used to move the driver, as opposed to hauling the vehicle itself around?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The only reason to compare fuel volume is one of convenience. How far can I travel in a vehicle that devotes a given amount of space for its fuel storage. However, we don't compare electric vehicles based on how much space their batteries take up to travel a given distance. Comparing gallons of hydrogen with gallons of gasoline and making it look like a fuel economy comparison is totally misleading.
Me? I think I'd rather explode in a quick hydrogen blast then burn to death in a gasoline fire.
No sig today...
Using volume to compare hydrogen to gasoline (or diesel) is silly.
With a "gallon" of reactor fuel, a usable street vehicle could travel tens of thousands of miles.
I wonder how many of Toyota's patents they have violated?
The cost of development for the SAHÄMO wasnâ(TM)t cheap â" amounting to $170,000.
Who the hell thinks that $170,000 to develop a prototype vehicle is expensive? That sounds incredibly cheap, to me.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Yeah, so true! Because lithium-ion is the only battery that exists. Oh, wait, it's not.. Check out LiFEPo4, A123 makes them, there was a video when they drilled straight through and no kabom, just some smoke if i remember.
They need to change the rules on these efficiency challenges. This vehicle and this vehicle are completely impractical.
The rules need to be:
1)Must carry more than one occupant in a seated position.
2)Must maintain an average speed of at least 30 mph.
Sure, but to paraphrase one of the other posts: "What'll happen when it gets run over by a Hummer?"
The one of those things are built, they're pure death traps in traffic! Just imagine waiting for traffic to clear the intersection and a Hummer runs the red light, running over your pathetic Formula 1 car and the Hummer's wheels just happen to go into the driver's compartment? /End sarcasm
Here's what I'd like to know - what happens when a Hummer (or the like) gets t-boned by another Hummer? Or 18-wheeler? Anyone got any videos of that?
GM will be releasing this thing in 2011 as the new flagship luxury car...
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
It does not have to be perfectly safe.
It just has to be safer or as safe.
Well, LiIon, not so much, but LiPo are quite safe unless you actually SET one on fire or rupture the casing. Then again, that's also somewhat likely in a car accident, so instead we'd use LiTit batteryies, or better yet the up and coming LiSu. They don;t explode, don't burn, and can charge to 80% in under 10 minutes...
Of course, they're a ways off from enough mass production to actually support us all having cars with them, and we're 30-50 years from having enough electric power, and a completely rebuilt smartgrid that could actually handle the loads, so we need an interum solution:
Here it is: wwew.dotyenergy.com. If you have questions about their RFTS process, I'll be happy to enlighten you.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
I always hear this but decided steel was better after watching so many robot battles on TV. The carbon fiber bots always lose.. they look like shreded wheat.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Am I the only one that got a good laugh out of the sponsorship logos on that thing?
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
I would love to see more of these technologies coming out in the consumer sector, where it can be used right now instead of 20 years from now....really!
http://www-static.shell.com/static/usa/downloads/responsible_energy/ecomarathon/SEMA_2009_Final-Results.pdf
All they did was add a body kit to a Smart Car
Loading...
Blasphemy. Shamwow was Vince the hooker-puncher.
You've obviously never cracked a piece of CF before.
A vehicle such as this would be a great addition to any manned venture to another planet or even the moon. I think you all can work out the details of why... eh, this is /. I'll spell it out in a traditional format:
1) Build a light weight, fuel efficient vehicle powered by the most abundant resource in the universe
2) Launch it into space
3) ???
4) Profit!!!
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Wow that car is light... I'm 20 lbs shy of weighing the same as it....
shift over to clean power for plants
What? I always thoughts plants used the cleanest power available... lied to again, when will the deception end... first Santa Claus... now this...
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
It gets 26,208,000RPH (that's 655,200 furlongs per hogshead).
In any case, that's OVER 9000!!!!
http://weblogic.noroot.org/2006/02/24/rods-to-the-hogshead/
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If we are achieving over 1,000 MPG for cars without air conditioning, and ~15-60 MPG for cars with air conditioning, it seems to me that we need a "green air conditioning" competition. Rolling down the windows wouldn't count for the contest of course (and besides, that would drastically alter the drag coefficient).
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
They built one of those small kid versions of real cars that runs on hydrogen! Much better than those battery operated SUVs.
Unfortunately, they didn't have any pictures of the actual car. Maybe I didn't go far enough into the article....
To be honest the amount of money they spent on developing and building this thing they could at least make it a bit more practical with a possibility of actual released to the public. Iâ(TM)m all for going green and getting away from fossil fuel but these competitions and the cars that people have developed for them are so impractical itâ(TM)s not even funny. Who the hell would want a car that could not carry anything or could barely carry a single person and move slower than a person on a bicycle.
Oh, and you are almost right - you've gotten one step closer to the right answer than the grandparent post, who totally neglected to convert the liters to gallons, but yet you've somehow managed to still get a wrong answer. I think maybe you divided when you should have multiplied. (That is, since the original ratio assumes 1 liter, and we want a ratio that assumes 1 gallon, you have to multiply your answer by the 4.54609 liters per gallon, but to get 77 you must have divided by that amount, which is wrong). Also, you are apparently using a non-US Gallon (UK gallon)? I guess that's ok, but it's probably good to make that explicit, but by using a UK gallon, you get an *even larger* answer: 1604.49172 mpg.
X * (km/L) = X * ((.621371192 miles/km) / (0.264172052 gallons_US/L)) = X * 2.35214584 miles/gallon
So 568 km/L = (568 * 2.35214584) mpg = 1336.01884 mpg, which is the answer given in the article.
So wait. It gets 568 km to the liter. What does a liter mean? Are they using gaseous H2? Liquid H2? Solid-adsorbed H2? Is it a liter at STP? Is it a liter at 100 atm? At 2 K?
The article doesn't answer these questions. To say "a liter of hydrogen" is not meaningful in the same way as saying "a liter of gasoline." There could be a _huge_ amount of fuel in a liter of hydrogen, or virtually none, depending on pressure and temperature.
The ideal gas law is not hard. People are supposed to learn it in high school. Is there a reason journalists can't pick up on these things?
That's a very interesting link (although, it would have been nice if you'd made it clickable). I've been wondering for awhile if anyone had ever developed any techniques to synthesize gasoline using input energy, water, and CO2 from the air. The only things I'd been able to find for 'synthesize fuel' were processes that turned coal into liquid gasoline. I'm gonna seriously look into this dotyenergy company, when I get a chance.
If it's not snake oil, that might be a brilliant idea. I mean, we could have 'carbon-neutral' fuel, without changing our cars at all (I mean, increased fuel efficiency isn't bad, but it would be good to be able to still use gasoline, if possible).
Yes, but you are not completing the conversion. You converted km to miles, but not liters to gallons. So, you are correct that it would be 300ish miles per 1 liter, but NOT 300ish miles per US gallon (there is also a UK gallon, which is different, so be wary when converting to know which you are converting to). Once you figure in the fuel conversion, you get the answer of 1336 mpg. There is another thread I posted the formula in to show how the conversion is done, if you care to look for it.
There is also another really important bit about car safety; if it absorbs more energy on impact, your chances of survival / reduction of injury goes way up. I think many people that buy huge trucks that feel "solid" don't quite understand that the car being crushed is what saves the pulpy bits inside.
-- Humans, because the hardware IS the software.
The EU as whole also tends to have much harsher penalties for speeding than America, leading to people actually obeying them. If you're doing the speed limit in the US you better be in the right lane or you'll end up with a BMW up your exhaust pipe. I've had cars pass me while I was doing 105.
Just sayin'.
"I defy the second law of thermodynamics."
"The hell you do. Get back in the box."
It's not snake oil, I promise. They've been working on this 20 years, and it's already a technology used in WWII to make deisel fuels.
All their ideas focus on improved heat exchangers, a new electrolysis chamber, making parts of the process symbiotic, new catylist systems, systems for flow and containment of the process; it's very much logistical systems improvements, with a few pretty impressive new invetions thrown in (actually their heat exchanger design has a lot more applications than this), and all materialized into a single system.
It can all be done today, using seperate systems for each phase in the fuel making process, but at about $1500 a barrel if you wanted to do it on your own, not $80 as they predict.
Their initial investment will make a facility about 2-3 times the size of a typical mall store, and a few stories high. They'll be able to tweak and prove out the larger scale process using that "lab scale" facility. They'll make only a few gallons a day at that scale, and use a couple of MW doing it. Phase 3 is a 75MW facility that will make hundreds of gallons a day (size sclaes very well up to a point for this process). The real things are 250MW, completely modular, and premanufatured for efficiency. We'll need a few thousand of them in the USA to replace 100% of our fuel use. They'll cost somewhere north of about 100M each to build. The cost is a fraction of what it would take to deploy an H2 infrastructure. They'll be profitable at about 2X what oil-based gasoline is.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
I think you should clarify your post a bit. I didn't see this race but if they hit head on at 200mph, they sure as hell didn't do it perpendicular to the wall. They had to do it at a very acute angle to the wall. Even then, I still doubt the veracity of that statement. Lets look at the numbers. I'll give you 1 meter as the deceleration distance.
so velocity: 200mph == 89.408m/s.
time to decelerate: 1m/89.408m/s = 0.0111846815s
(de)acceleration: (89.408m/s - 0)/0.0111846815s = 7993.79044 m/s^2 (~815g's)
lets assume the person is an about average weight at 70kg.
force: 70kg * 7993.79044 m/s^2 = 559565.331 newtons
now the car can be made out of some super alloy that is indestructible and survive fine or have some amazing crumple zone. but i don't care what kind of person you are, no one's organs can sustain hitting their ribcage with that much force and live.
its been a few years since i did physics though so my math might be flawed.
And oddly enough, we perceive a problem in the small car, not the large one.
Hmm, that doesn't seem right. Stopping from v = 200 mph = 89.4 m/s over a distance of x = 0.65 m would require a constant deceleration of a = -v^2/(2 x) = -6150 m/s^2 = -630 g, 630 times the force of gravity. The highest g-force test I'm aware of was 46 g and that caused permanent injury.
"An aerodynamic carbon-fiber construction keeps the vehicle's weight down to less than 110 kg"
I find this endlessly satisfying. There were a BUNCH of people on slashdot when I mentioned taking wind turbines, and moving from aluminum construction to carbon fiber for lighter weight, and everyone told me "CARBON FIBER IS HEAVIER"
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Miles Per Gallon is useful if you need to know how far you can get with the fuel that you have. While that's important, I think the real reason we're interested in this car is because of the fuel efficiency, which is conveyed much better if it's put in Gallons Per Mile. Knowing how much fuel you use per mile is what we're really interested in anyway, and MPG is misleading when representing that.
Carbon fiber is actually stronger than steel.
A buddy of mine got cracked fork on his high-end bicycle the other day while riding on a paved bike path. No buddies of mine have ever gotten a cracked fork in their steel frame bicycles. I know, anecdotal evidence and all.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I was replying to a couple of absolute statements:
It seems plain, to me at least, that the "worst case" might very well involve a "massive failure" which cannot be "prevented" by putting the cells in their own little compartments.
Just because it's safe enough (and I think modern lithium battery tech probably is), doesn't mean that it's absolutely safe against catastrophic failure.
I don't believe I'm being overly pedantic by calling bluff on these statements, however sarcastic my reply might've been.
Kid-proof tablet..
i.e. not downwind
How many joules of energy are used to break the water bonds?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
since obviously that means the sober people are responsible for 51% or of the fatal accidents
Mod parent up.
Hummers and massive SUVs are the problem, not small cars. I remember seeing something on TV a while ago about how the larger SUVs aren't safer for those inside in an accident. They do make it provably less safe for the occupants of the other vehicle involved in the crash. This applies to family sedans as much as concept cars like in TFA.
Recently a car crashed into a meridian near where I used to go to school.
A hero rushed in and pulled the driver from the car. About 20-30 seconds later, it exploded in a giant fireball, similar to those explosions you see in the movies.
I don't care if electric is perfectly safe... nothing is.
Yeah, I probably should have done more research. :P I'm not 100% sure but I think this may be the crash I was remembering.
For starters, the 200mph was the track speed at that point, so while the driver would have been moving that fast when he lost control, he almost certainly wasn't by the time he hit the barrier. Secondly, it was at quite a glancing angle, as you inferred. Still, it was a pretty solid hit that would have absolutely destroyed a passenger car. From the video I'd estimate he was doing ~150mph, with impact at 45 degrees (although it could be more glancing, hard to tell with the narrow FoV zoom camera).
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
One "conspiracy theory", if you want to put it that way, was that the Bush administration pushed Hydrogen as an alternative fuel, because they knew we were a decade or two away from practical applications, and in the meantime we would still be dependent on good old petroleum, owned by all his friends.
What DUMBass would mark this as flamebait. Why the fuck can't humourless wretches just keep to their own, instead of pissing on someone's chance to make others laugh. Just because it isn't marked funny doesn't mean someone out their didn't wryly enjoy it. You bastard. Keep away! Go watch a comedy, or smoke a blunt or whack off instead of undercutting the little off-beat humor this site manages to get.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
...again, that doesn't answer my question. At all.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
If you've patented the method, then your invention is covered under patent laws. Copyright has nothing to do with it.
Further more, if it's patented, then it's already available to the public through the USPTO. Given how many of these things that simply do not work, and rely on breaking the laws of physics, that are out there, searching through the USPTO's records is probably worse than searching for a needle in a haystack.
If you have an infinitely efficient machine then you're going to break the laws of physics. Have you even built one of these and have one in use?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.