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World's First 1 Megawatt All-Electric Race Car
New submitter MotoJ writes: A Latvian company has announced plans to race a one megawatt all-electric race car. It has a 50 kWh lithium-ion battery pack and is propelled by six YASA-400 electric motors. It provides 1020 kW (1368 hp) and a top speed of 260 km/h. It has a real chance to become the first overall winner of the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb competition with an electric vehicle. That's something to look forward to and curious who will pilot this machine. The race is on June 28, 2015.
The same company has an equally interesting all-electric off-road racer.
For three minutes.
There have been plenty of 1MW electric cars built prior to this one. There is a company named Evnetics that makes a controller called the Shiva, it's capable of 1.2MW continuously, and there have been numerous drag cars built with it capable of exceeding the 1MW level in bursts. I've also run across EVs using multiple Zilla 2ks which have an output exceeding 1,000KW.
This may be the first AC motored car to exceed 1MW though.
with 1MW power, the 50KWh battery would be dead in 3 minutes at full throttle.. jeez.
Roughly equivalent to a gasoline car with a 2-gallon tank... lol. (1 gal=33KWh)
260 kph in real units is only 160 miles per hour making it one of the slowest race cars on the planet. Wake me up when electric vehicles aren't complete piece of crap (Which will be never). Until then I will stick with the much superior in every way internal combustion engine cars.
Battery is dead...
... Its that pesky issue of energy storage!
Traditional ICE systems have it easy with the absolutely mind-boggling amount of energy that can be found in an ordinary tank of fuel. Who cares if you waste 80-90% of your energy heating the atmosphere when gas is a few bucks a gallon?
It's not as bad as you imply, and newer engine designs are pushing the efficiency further as well. This doesn't mean that a reciprocating piston engine is incredibly efficient, but there's no sense in fabricating numbers to support a point either.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
We were hiking in the Latvian Mountains
Our Sherpa dropped our corkscrew down a crevasse
Had to live on nothing but food and water for three days
--had the man shot
Firesign Theater
After the Sierra Club litigated to get the entire course paved, it's no longer the last holdout of Group B racing, and especially an electric misses the point of dealing with the altitude changes. An overall lap record at Nürburgring would be more impressive.
It would be more fitting to do a hard rest of all records from 2011 onward, as the elements that made it truly unique are about gone, and now it is just another technical road course instead of a nightmare of changes packed into 13 miles.
Any subsequent victory is just less impressive.
Was i the only one reading this as:
A Latverian company has announced plans to race a one megawatt all-electric race car. ?
Now i'm sad that we will not see the glory that is DOOM.... ; _ ;
1020 kW, that's almost 1 MiW!
It's a custom-built open-cab one-seat hill-climb racer that only needs a range of twenty kilometers, and it still weighs as much as a first-generation Prius?
With no need for combustion engine or radiator, and a carbon-fiber body on a custom frame, I'd expect it to be hundreds of kg lighter.
Each Yasa-400 is only 24kg, so that's not it... maybe it's the batteries? 50kWh => nearly ten times the battery capacity of the Prius, whose battery weights 80 kg. So yeah, nearly 800kg right there, and that's 2/3 of the car's total weight!
curious who will pilot this machine?
How about if Google Car's auto driver races the electric car up Pikes Peak?
Call me when someone makes a 1.21 Gigawatt electric race car.
In the land of the blind, the one eyed man still has no depth perception.
No doubt, we will see a Tesla Dual on the track. That is night and day above the one that set the 12 minute EV production run. I would not be surprised to see this monster and a Model S owning the top 2 records.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Just because I don't reply to every idea does NOT make that idea acceptable and therefore implementable. That's a problem with you. You are too numerous, that being a reason why you are all murderers and are therefore being culled. Maybe you can make the job easier.
Is KW your personal notation for kWh ?
How are they going to pull this off with only 50KWh battery? The altitude difference between the finish and the start is 1509m and the potential energy increase of 1200Kg (car) + 60Kg (driver) from start to finish is almost 52KWh. All this without calculating any energy losses.
At least one aspect of an electric car is affected, cooling. As altitude increases, the efficiency of heat-sinks decreases. I hope they added some over-sized cooling fans, Apple didn't.
Doesn't say if they'll have a motor sound or it'll just be like a fast golf cart. Would be really humorous if it had engine noise.
25%-30% efficiency in the engine isn't great, and that doesn't include the inefficiency of the fuel production/transportation.
Dave420 where's the engine you made? It isn't. You're no expert.