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Nissan Unveils 88 Pound 400-HP Race Car Engine
cartechboy writes "Motorsports used to be about lots of horsepower, torque, and big engines. In recent years there's been a shift to downsizing engines, using less fuel, and even using alternative energy such as clean diesel and hybrid powertrains. Today Nissan unveiled a 400-horsepower 1.5-liter three-cylinder turbocharged engine that weighs only 88 pounds. This engine will be part of the advanced plug-in hybrid drivetrain that will power the ZEOD RC electrified race car that will run in the 2015 LMP1 class during the race season. Nissan says the driver of the ZEOD RC will be able to switch between electric power and gasoline power with the batteries being recharged via regenerative braking. Even more impressive, according to Nissan, for every hour the ZEOD RC races, the car will be able to run one lap of the Le Mans' 8.5-mile Circuit de la Sarthe on electric power alone. If true, that will make it the first race car in history to complete a lap during a formal race with absolutely zero emissions. If this all works, we could be witnessing the future of motorsports unfold before our eyes later this year when the ZEOD RC (video) makes its race debut at this year's Le Mans 24 Hours in June."
39.9kG
it should be g not G. G is the universal gravitational constant.
You read the headline, and it's posted by samzenpus, and you know it's bullshit.
Here is a case where "bullshit" is an understatement.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I want one of those, but throw away two of the wheels please :)
the horsepower per hour of engine life? That thing looks like it'll last 20 hours before it needs rebuilding.
Mostly random stuff.
If you're going to build a series hybrid, why bother with pistons and cranks? Just make the turbo bigger and you have... a gas turbine. Use it to drive a big alternator and viola! The turbine can run at constant speed and be optimised for that one speed - the rest of the drive train is purely electrical. Someone should at least test the concept.
ISO pleassssse
88 pounds = 39.9161286 kilograms
Yeah... except... over the last few decades, technology advances like this at the cutting edge of racing technology have translated within a few years to increased fuel efficiency and so on in production cars.
Vehicle technology gets driven forward by the people who sink lots of money into vanity projects like this. We all end up benefiting from it.
There are already full size electric motorcycles for sale if you can live with the range restrictions. The Empulse has a transmission. The Mission RS is direct drive.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
The engine the guy in the picture is holding has no turbocharger on it.
It's not going to produce 400hp without it. The other pictures have one.
It raises the question, "Why not an even 40kg?!"
What, just WHAT, are these people playing at?!
Where - exactly - is that last '0.0838714' kgs going to or for?!
I think it's the Illuminati taking their enrergy tax thereby increasing their profits. And let's not talk about hoe the Catholic Church is using this money - at the behest of the Illuminati, fo rthe control of the developing World and eventually, the Western World - again!
*I go tthis crazy one line box where the type is in bright red to edit this in. What's the deal Slashdot?! Are YOU part of this Illuminati consortium?!
What sort of car racing is this for? Is there a motor race for hybrids?
Since the battery was charged by burning gasoline in the engine, how does that make it "absolutely zero emissions"?
The rubber that comes off a tyre in one lap at speed should also qualify as pollution.
I thought when it came to trucks it was engine capacity, not actual power delivery.
I hope these low/no emission races grow to rival formula 1 and and nascar. They are a great way to boost innovation and also encourage people to adopt the tech.
Wouldn't the most efficient setup be like the volt, where all of your traction is coming from the electric motors and the gas engine just runs at a constant rate at peak efficiency doing nothing but generating electricity? You can add gearing to maximize efficiency and acceleration, as long as you don't mind replacing the gearbox after each race...
You attach a compressor to the exhaust pipe on a normal car. The exhaust is compressed and stored in a tank. The tank can hold the exhaust from one lap of a race. During a lap, no emissions are released. Would you have a "first race car in history to complete a lap during a formal race with absolutely zero emissions". No. You wouldn't. Whoever is claiming "zero emissions" is a fool. Altering the time or location when emissions are released does not make something zero emissions. How much nasty bunker oil was used to ship all the parts around the globe to make the damn thing? How many children in China will get cancer because they live next to the mine that produced all the rare earths that went into the magnets and electronics?
Minimizing pollution is a noble goal. Making blatantly false and misleading statements to support your world view, biases or support your agenda is wrong on many levels.
Take the average 1400cc 4cylinder motorcycle engine, remove ALL of the transmission and cut that part of the cases off... BAM super light 400hp engine, once you add a turbo. People have been getting that much out of busas and zx14s for ages and they aren't all that unreliable. Also... ask the team if they would drop the entire hybrid system if they could do so without having to add the weight lost back and I bet they would. This is not the future of racing, its more like forcing it into racing.
Find one unused and strap it to a go kart or mini bike, mmmmooooooooooommmmmmmmaaaaaaaaaa
Ferrari claims that their 1.6 liter, V6 2014 F1 engine produces 600-650 HP with another 160 HP from the Energy Recovery System. Each driver gets just five engines for the 19 race season.
http://formula1.ferrari.com/ne...
Technology marches on.
Nissan Unveils 88 Pound 400-HP Race Car Engine
How about battery weight that drives this semi electric beast?
I thought when it came to trucks it was engine capacity, not actual power delivery.
Actually the OP's premise is wrong. Trucks are about torque and the capacity to pull a heavy load, i.e trucks are about bigger balls and not a bigger cock.
I love alternative, cleaner energy sources, but lets be real. The emission was probably performed somewhere else, except if they can guaranty that the energy conversion and delivery process produced absolutely zero pollution
So could we scale that down and get a 10kg 100 kW engine that could be used as a range extender for an EV?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Maybe I'm kinda dumb, but since no one is touting how the hybrid tech provides any competitive advantage to Nissan's racer, I'm skeptical. Maybe it helps them skip a pit stop, but since none of the links mentions anything along those lines, I'm guessing not.
I'm not saying Nissan shouldn't do this, with the Leaf they're heavily invested in EVs and this is great PR, but let's not pretend that in two years EVs will be dominating the racing world.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Motorsports used to be about... big engines
As long ago as the 70's, we were able to get as much as 1,000hp per liter of engine displacement through the use of pure toluene and five or more atmospheres of boost (Can Am); squeezung ungodly amounts of horsepower from small engines isn't anything new.
2014 model year and forward this "may" be true, but for at least the last 20 years it has been about adding more ponies not economy. The zero to sixty times have been shrinking but fuel economy has been stagnant, if not even retarding a bit.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
and this is still too fucking small. I used to drive a truck with 1500hp under the hood and changed the oil ever 30k miles (normal was 15k, we were on extended change intervals). Aveaged 120k miles per year in that truck, some of the teams managed 180k miles a year with engines lasting 1M+ before major rebuilds. Course, if you got in my way, I'd simply run your little 4 wheel pickup over and keep going (Mack/Peterbuilt/Kenworth/Western Star/Freightliner) and 80,000 pounds.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Did you mean 500 hp of power or 1500 lbs-ft of torque? Because there's no on-highway truck that comes with a 1500 hp engine. Large construction vehicles and locomotives have 1500 hp, but not 80,000 GVWR trucks.
dom
Man, one of these in one of those little Smart cars.
...tires would be a bit of an issue.
So in other words, these fine folks are providing the means for us to choose between the huge cock provided by massive chest-thumping horsepower, OR the huge cock provided by smug save-the-planet fuel efficiency! Bully, old chaps!
See title.
I think people just like saying regenerative braking.
"that will make it the first race car in history to complete a lap during a formal race with absolutely zero emissions"...
How exactly are the batteries charged? For that matter, what about the manufacturing and disposal of the batteries? Electric car != zero emissions. Regenerative braking is good. Reducing engine size by going hybrid sounds good too. But let's get real about emissions. Electric transportation only shifts the emissions to another location.
But typical size and weight of cars have been increasing - along with the typical use of AC and other power-robbing technologies. So while we might (just might) have lost on fuel economy, we're having larger, heavier and more comfortable cars (not to mention safer and usually more reliable)
If you want 1 million kilometers (or miles) reliability out of a 500+ horse power engine, you really can't go low displacement. Also, huge torque at low rpm means fewer gears needed (even so, at full load a semi can change 10+ gears to 40 mph / 60km/h).
So, trucks use diesel engines (typically higher torque at low rpm), optimized for reliability (and get higher torque from higher displacement).
...they say "zero emissions" and yet fail to include all of the emissions necessary to create the chemicals for the batteries and the batteries themselves...
For American cars perhaps, I'm not an expert, but Japanese and European cars have become a lot more efficient over the last couple of decades and some of that is due to technology that started off in competitive racing. For example the VW Passat has a version of KERS which was developed for F1. Honda has a hybrid performance Civic model. Tyres have been improved a great deal too thanks to new materials and construction methods developed for racing.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
First race car to do a lap with zero emissions?
Depending on what you call a "race car" (is it a car in a race?) then Nissan well over 100 years too late, according to Wired.com.
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2014/01/porsche-first-car-electric
"...And you could say Porsche’s motorsports roots started with the P1, as the car managed to finish a 40-km EV race in 1899..."
Hmm, maybe that wasn't a lap, but a road course from A to B?
I wonder how hard it would be to drop one of these in an Elio? That would be an interesting combo.
One of the greatest innovations in consumer vehicles made by American manufacturers has been to refrigerate the glove compartment.
"If true, that will make it the first race car in history to complete a lap during a formal race with absolutely zero emissions."
I guess these green folks think electrons just fall out of the freakin sky....
Given how turbo bikes have been tried and mostly abandoned, I can't see how this would be interesting. Perhaps a quicker suicide bike, but boost makes bikes handle poorly.
Learn to love Alaska
It's shocking at how little useful or relevant information is provided! What is the base compression ratio? What is the boosted compression? How idiotic are journalists now that they don't even know what questions to ask or what parameters of performance or design matter?!
In Europe they have a grip of 1.whatever liter turbo cars that are fun to drive and get great MPG. In the USA you would be run over by someone driving an SUV and talking on the cellphone while turning around to yell at their children and be very killed. In the USA we get bigger engines with lower RPMs producing more torque and lower horsepower with lower top speeds for our low-speed roads. In Europe they get smaller engines with higher RPMs producing less torque and more horsepower with... yada yada.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
HAve you seen it? It's a stunningly beautiful engine, a real piece of work. And to get 400 horsepower out of that is mind boggling..
It doesn't matter if only one of these engines produces too little output for your purposes, because if you're using a series electric powertrain, you can gang them. It's impractical and expensive to put multiple internal combustion engines into a car, it's only been done a handful of times for amusement purposes, or on very very large equipment where it's the only way to get the job done.
Imagine having four electric motors instead of a pair of differentials, and four engine-generator pairs. The generator engines could automatically start and stop as needed and spread out their runtime hours, with all engines running only during peak output. If one engine of four fails, you still get to proceed at 75% output. The gearbox is eliminated entirely (which is highly practical when your speeds max out at trucking speeds) and a whole class of problem is gone for good.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Diesel engines are typically more efficient.
That's why trains use them to spin their generators.
If you want many millions of kilometres reliability out of a 3000 horse power engine with huge torque at 0 rpm, you really need electric.
The problem comes with the clutch. You could use a fluid coupling, but that adds weight and power loss.
Petrol engines have a wider power band, which means you need fewer gears. Add a turbo on and the power band gets even wider, although shifted up a bit too.
The higher the power band starts, the larger the speed difference the clutch needs to manage.