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Peugeot EX1 Sets Electric Car Lap Record At Nuerburgring
liqs8143 writes "Peugeot EX1, the all-electric concept car, now holds the electric car lap record at Germany's Nürburgring circuit. The car was unveiled at the 2010 Paris Motor Show, and has already broken half a dozen speed records up till now. Despite wet weather, the EX1 broke the existing record with a time of 9 minutes, 1.338 seconds, beating the previous record set by a modified MINI E electric car by almost 50 seconds. The 340 horsepower EX1 averaged an impressive 85.9 miles per hour during the lap."
Oh I don't know, but it's hardly a negative - how many laps can a petrol engined vehicle that does 10 mpg before you have to refill it?
At full tilt, a Merc SLR can drain its tank in about 20 minutes, as shown by Top Gear during one of their challenges, and funnily enough they then *didn't* show the production team pushing it towards a garage by hand with a "oh dear, just look what happened" voice over, unlike their "unbiased" footage of them pushing the Tesla Roadster back into the garage by hand after testing it on the track, even though the computer logs in the car showed that it never went below 10-15% charge and would have been able to easily drive under its own power back to a charge point.
Sure, it will still take longer to recharge an electric vehicle right now compared to refilling a tank of combustible hydrocarbons, but a high-capacity power feed and improving charge systems will narrow that down all the time.
You've never heard of the Nürburgring, have you?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nürburgring
"...is widely considered the toughest, most dangerous, and most demanding purpose-built racing circuit in the world."
The lap time should have given it away - 9 minutes!
The nurburgring remains as an example of the old school racing circuits from the previous century - long and dangerous.
They've built a more modern circuit around the pits, but the old long configuration (nordschliefe) is still used for endurance events with various vehicles (GT cars, motorcycles etc)
Have a look at the track map here
They stopped running F1 there due to safety concerns (no run-off and thin track).
On topic of this EV, I have to say it's closer to a motorcycle than a car...
He's American. They like driving around in ovals.
Good turning on a car? What's that? Just put a big engine in it.
Better Place says they've had their battery swap system do changes in under 40 seconds. The video on their site shows it happening in just over 1 minute. Not bad for the first gen (wow, that robot moves slow), but they're stuck in that place where they have the idea, and have invested in the technology, but need to get all the players on board or they'll get nowhere. Unless car manufacturers get on board, it won't matter how many swap stations they build. Unless they have swap stations, no car manufacturers want to join. Right now, they've opened one in Israel, but only some demo vehicles can use it so far, since the Renault Fluence Z.E that is supposed to be the flagship battery swap electric vehicle isn't on sale yet (or wasn't in March when that was written). It will be interesting to see what happens. I like the idea of charging my car's battery at home most of the time, but having the option to swap it at a road-side station if I want to go on a long trip. We're a lot of infrastructure away from that day, though.