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Electric Car Goes 375 Miles On One 6-Minute Charge
thecarchik writes with this quote from AllCarsElectric:
"We all know that battery packs are the weakest link in electric vehicles. Not only are they heavy and expensive, but they take a long time to recharge and on average can only provide around 100 miles per charge. A German-based company has changed all that with a new vehicle capable of driving up to 375 miles at moderate highway speeds. ... It doesn't end there. The company responsible for the battery pack, DBM Energy, claims a battery pack efficiency of 97 percent and a recharge time of around 6 minutes when charged from a direct current source. Unlike the small Daihatsu which was heavily modified by a team in Japan earlier this year that achieved a massive 623 miles on a charge at around 27 mph, the Audi A2 modified by DBM Energy was able to achieve its 375 miles range at an average speed of 55 mph."
How many charge-discharge cycles will this battery last, and how expensive is it?
Is it really that hard for tech reporters to slip in enough meaningful numbers to give us a full picture of what they are supposedly reporting about? Sure it might only take 6 minutes, but what kind of power was it drawing during those 6 minutes? Will the average house have a connection large enough to actually charge it that fast? Will it be practical to build "gas" stations that can charge several cars like this in a reasonable amount of time?
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
slight? that is more than range than my Mazda 3 gets out of a tank. So figure the energy density of around 10 US gallons of gasoline....
That is a lot of energy to put into a battery in a very short amount of time.
I want a lot more info.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The science may be there but something tells me that other interests will prevent this from going anywhere.
The science probably isn't there, so the Great Petroleum Conspiracy can probably sleep well tonight. What they're describing doesn't violate any laws of physics per se, but the amount of power transferred in the time they're claiming is highly suspicious. The waste heat alone would be enormous unless their secret is room-temperature superconductors, in which case the electric car market is small potatoes, and someone is going to get a Nobel for this.
I'm not going to call bullshit on this story, but I will note that the article makes extraordinary claims without providing the requisite extraordinary evidence. At this point, it's just another startup making unsubstantiated claims. I hope it's true, but I am definitely not holding my breath.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
What does the charging station use? Is it ultracapacitors?
Also, last time I checked both Germany, Japan and pretty much the rest of the planet used the metric system, so:
Oh, come on, now you're being unfair. It's not the rest of the planet, Liberia and Myanmar are also yet to adopt the metric system. Sheesh.
No, the engineering is what they are doing now with their prototype. The fact that a tangible prototype exists suggests that the brunt of the core engineering has already been completed, barring any rework on the design that might be required for mass-manufacture.
What is required now, is getting a greenlight from investors, regulators, and safety orgs.
Like most things, the actual design and core science happens much faster than the beaurocracy can actually handle. That is where most projects end up dieing on the vine-- the beaurocratic side, not the engineering side.
It's a lithium-polymer battery dubbed "Hummingbird", and it's already in-use in warehouse forklifts. There's more info at dbm-energy.com and lekker-mobil.com (both in German). Still pretty light on details though.
I'd post the link to the FAQ directly, but Slashdot still won't let me paste the URL (yep, Chrome user), and it's way too long to type by hand.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
No, because you normally don't pit-stop at home for 6 minutes at a time. At home you would charge it at night, likely from a 220v source like your dryer and stove use. What the fast charge is for is to also enable the car to make long trips by having special chargers at gas stations.
Solar photovoltaic and fuel cells generate direct current. Usually they go through an inverter, that loses 10-25% of the energy (as heat, and burns out the part for replacement about every 5 years). A battery like this would mean keeping that energy without losing it. Leaving a battery charging at home while driving the car around, then swapping it into the car when the car returns home - or reverse the positions for batteries charging at work or at whatever daytime destination. That battery can also power household devices, like the many devices that really consume DC, which waste power running from wall current into rectifiers.
This kind of device could improve not only transit energy, but also residential (and commercial sites that reverse the locations).
--
make install -not war
Fall 2011 for around 27,000$ after tax break. Or so says Mitsubishi.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Translated from this page: http://adacemobility.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/das-wunder-von-berlin/#more-744
"Technical Data Audi A2 DBM *
* Subject
Empty weight (including driver) 1260 kg
Perm. Total weight 1600 kg
Battery lithium-iron-polymer (260 Ah/380 V) cell voltage of 3.8 volts
Battery weight about 300 kg
Charging time about 4 hours due to mains phase current in the household (380)
battery requires 6 minutes (future solution)
Life time 2500 charge cycles (without loss of capacity)
= Service life target: 500,000 km
Top speed 160 km / h
5-speed sequential gearbox (race gear: shifting without the clutch)
E-motor 300 Nm torque"
So, the 6 minute charge is future/theoretical limits of the battery. The actual time is 4 hours; which is still very impressive.
Sincerely, Neil
Currently hooked on AMP
The planet doesn't give a damn. It's us who are fucked.
Not for quick charging. You MUST have the electrical equivalent to a gasoline storage tank in order to supply it quickly enough. A big bank of batteries/capacitors.
Yes, you will likely be able to plug in at the local shopping mall and grocery store, maybe even plug into the parking meter! But for a road trip, you use up your 'tank' and want to fill it up quickly. The grid can not support that now or likely ever. Thus, the need for the 'gas station' with the 6-min charge capability (at a drastically increased cost of electricity over a home fillup to pay for the infrastructure.)
The core engineering require to build a proof-of-concept prototype is a small fraction of the engineering work necessary to put it into readily-available, commercial products.
According to this German article and another German article. The engine uses between 8-15 kWh in normal use.
The trip was 605 kM (377+ miles) at 130 kM/h (81 MPH) or 90kM/h (56 MPH). The 130 in one article seems wrong, and a commenter posted a correction. So, likely it was 90 kM/h.
At the end of the trip the battery pack still had a 18% charge, but the inventors say the range is 600 kM (
So charging to 97% in six minutes required a 79% charge or 90kWh or about 0.9 MW in 6 minutes.
You could drive it for more than 375 miles on a single charge, depending on how deeply you want to drain the battery. Still, who wants to drive more than 7 hours a day. Now if you had just three available stations. you'd be able to drive then entire North-South distance of the US (in 29 hours - I've done it in 21). With seven stations, you'd be able to drive across the US (in 56 hrs ). 377 miles on a "tank" is fairly standard. that's about the range in my cars. There are certainly better ranged cars. The one thing the article breezes over, is that over 55 MPH, you'd likely see polynomially decreasing range.
Note that there are no USA companies, or technologies mentioned anywhere.
Look no further than the first 75% of the comments on this article. It's not just our technological edge, it's the incredibly skeptical attitude to EVs (and pretty much everything else on the alternative energy front) that you see. Nothing but naysayers as far as the eye can see.
Instead of picking apart every solution because it isn't perfect (which apparently is the prevailing US thinking), the Germans know that even if you come up with a 10% solution, you only need to come up with 10 of them.
What we've lost is our ability to look at anything in the long-term. Short-term thinking is what is holding the US back...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
So... 30kW at 60MPH is the claim.
The second generation Honda Insight has a drag coefficient of 0.25, a frontal area of approximately 26 square feet, a curb weight of up to 2,730 pounds.
From those specs: Power to maintain 60MPH is 13.9 HP - 10kW.
Your math is off by a factor of at least 3 right out of the gate.
=Smidge=