The Flux Capacitor Becomes World's Fastest Street-Legal Electric Car (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Ars Technica: Jonny Smith now has the world's fastest street-legal electric car, called the Flux Capacitor. Previously, the Flux Capacitor was only Europe's fastest street-legal electric vehicle, with a less than 11 second, 1/4-mile time under it's belt. Now it can run the quarter-mile in 9.87 seconds, thanks to the extra 44 cells added to the existing 144-cell Hyperdrive Innovation lithium-ion battery pack. That has boosted the car from 370v to 400v and the range from about 30 miles (48km) to about 50 miles (80km). "The combination of big voltage, amps, and phenomenal grip gave us early ten-second quarter miles, and when we braved the RPM limit of the motors, we managed a nine [second run]," Smith told Ars Technica. "Despite all of this power and speed, the little Enfield still felt smooth, stable, and happy, which is unbelievable given that it was designed to do 40 miles an hour."
you have unlimited driving speed on non private roads only in outer space, international waters, antarctica and germany.
Uh... so how fast does it go? Y'know, in normal numbers?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Jonny Smith now has the world's fastest street-legal electric car, called the Flux Capacitor.
Ok what is its top speed? 0-60 time? G-force in a turn? Can it even turn?
Now it can run the quarter-mile in 9.87 seconds
The only piece of speed data provided. For reference the Tesla P90D can do a quarter mile in 10.9 seconds. (And it can go around a corner too) So basically they've built a purpose built dragster and not a real car. It's not hard to build a dragster that can outrun a Bugatti Veyron in a quarter mile but I wouldn't call one faster than a Veyron until it beat it around a track with corners.
boosted the car from 370v to 400v and the range from about 30 miles (48km) to about 50 miles (80km).
Wow, a whole 50 miles. That's... damn near useless.
.. with some strengthening bars up front, because 1970s cars weren't exactly known for their crash resistance and limited run small manufacturer cars barely had any especially if they were licensed as quadricycles, not cars.
Okay, so if my maths and guesses are right...
400V/188 cells = 2.12766 V / cell
* 188 cells * 3C = 1200 A discharge
1200A*400V = 480000W =
It ought to be 88 jiga (not giga) watts. What happened to the remaining 86.xx jiga watts?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
With a 50 mile range this would suit Meatloaf
There's nothin' wrong with goin' nowhere baby
But we should be goin' nowhere fast
It's so much better goin' nowhere fast
You're looking at this the wrong way.
It says "Jonny Smith now has the world's fastest street-legal electric car". How exactly am I to take that statement as anything other than an unsupported claim to have the fastest street legal electric car?
It's a fun project taking an electric car made in 1973 and updating it with today's batteries etc.
Which is all fine but then don't claim that it is the fastest street legal electric car unless they are prepared to back that up or qualify the conditions under which it is true. I don't give a crap if it is a just for laughs project or not.
It's a hobbyist car, not something put together by a car manufacturer. There's only 1. The guy built it for himself, so he can be the judge about if 50 miles is "useless".
I'm well aware of what it is. It's also objectively true that a "street legal" stripped down dragster that can only drive 50 miles isn't good for a hell of a lot besides runs at the drag strip. I'm sure he gets plenty of kicks from it and that's great. But dragsters aren't "the fastest" street legal cars. They are just the fastest accelerating cars on flat ground with no turns. No need to make exaggerated claims about its performance.
It sounds like you feel unhappy about his fun little project, but I imagine he enjoyed building and testing the car immensely.
Not unhappy at all. The project is cool as shit. But they don't need to make puffed up claims about it for that to remain true.
I would hope one of the requirements to be a "street-legal" car is that it can turn, at the very least...
I'm sure it can turn but very doubtful it can turn very well. Clearly it is built with straight line performance in mind if it is doing sub 10 second quarter mile runs.
So we can conservatively conclude this vehicle does 0-60 in under 3.25 seconds.
If it can do a quarter mile in 9.8 seconds it's almost certainly faster than 3.25s 0-60. Wind resistance isn't linear. A Tesla P90D gets to 60mph in 2.8 seconds and it is a full second slower in the quarter mile than this thing with better aerodynamics. Just guessing but I'd estimate this car is probably somewhere close to 2.5 seconds (maybe less) 0-60 to make a sub 10 second run in the quarter possible. Can't tell from the pictures but it looks pretty stripped down so I imagine it is very light and has very large sticky tires. I'd expect it to absolutely fly off the line.
it has NO wing mirrors
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Still, amazing that little soap box had the suspension and the chassis to take 600 HP.
I'd be fairly sure that it has a huge amount of reinforcement underneath if not a full space frame. You are quite correct that it wasn't designed to handle that much power straight from the factory.
I couldn't find anything in that article, but I'm guessing for the sake of weight and simplicity, it does not have a regenerative braking system.
The end of the run might be as exciting as the start.
How fast is that in libraries of Congress? And I mean the Swiss one.
As far as do it yourself electric dragster type vehicles that have been called "street legal" there are motorcycles that can do the 1/4 mile in the 6 second range. Really you can make any impractical vehicle "street legal" at least in the US as the requirements are fairly minimal. Also a fast 1/4 mile time dosent mean it really is the fastest on the streets or even is a good single measure of a performance vehicle.
They took a real 1970s electric vehicle, replaced the major parts that make it go with modern equipment, and took it to a dragstrip.
Which is called a dragster. Pretty much no car that can do a sub-10 second quarter mile is good for much else besides fast runs down a drag strip or laps around a racetrack. Not what I would call a real car in the sense that you'd drive it around the city streets routinely. Still cool but call it what it is.
It's the electric equivalent of hot rods, muscle cars, tuners, or whatever generation you choose souping up a vehicle beyond what it could do from the factory.
This isn't souping up the car. This is a wholesale rebuild where the only thing left is the outer shell. That's not tuning, that's something quite different. Anyway you seem to have missed the point. Clearly it is fast in a straight line. Cool project too. But "world's fastest street-legal electric car"? Going to have to back that claim up with some actual evidence.
Why is 50 mile range useless? Lots of us commute 50 miles.
And plenty of us routinely drive farther than that on a given day. Particularly when we do anything besides commuting which describes anyone with a life outside of work. Got kids? You'll be driving more than 50 miles routinely here in the USofA. My daily commute is 45 miles round trip for example so any detours or if the weather was particularly cold one day and I'd be stranded somewhere. There is a reason why you won't find a gas powered car with a range under 200 miles sold today. Useless might be too strong a word but it's not far off the mark.
How many times can this Fool's errand run the 1/4 mile flat out?
That depends on how much a person needs to drive doesn't it? Lots of people in urban settings might only drive 10 or 20 miles in a day and it would suit them fine for a vehicle which only does 50 miles
You're making the classic mistake of only considering averages. Most people drive less than 50 miles in a normal day. But virtually all of them drive farther than 50 miles on a substantial number of days. The range of a car needs to cover something like 2-3 standard deviations of the daily average at minimum to be a sane choice even if they never take long trips which describes very few people I know. My daily commute is about 45 miles round trip but I drive over 100 miles at least 5-10 days a month. It's not the averages that are the problem, it's the variation.
Urban dwellers who want a car for short commutes, one that avoids the costs and whatever congestion charges, road taxes or other fees that another vehicle might attract.
Another myth. Urban dwellers have access to taxis, uber, public transit, etc. A car is only useful to them if they live some substantial distance outside the urban center and have no alternative means to commute which means they are suburban, not urban dwellers. While you can find some small number of people who could use a vehicle with such absurdly short range, that would be the very definition of niche.
So Tesla doesn't count?
http://gas2.org/2014/10/09/tes...
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
Is there something wrong with the Earth's gravitational pull or something?
It's about time.
... under ***its*** belt.
Fail performance. EV's are quite promising but the current state is infancy and, well, it blows. Badly. My Suzuki TL1000s is two decades old and is able to do 2.9 in a quarter mile; since 1997, lol. It's fair to say motocycles have always enjoyed much higher performance levels than cars and perhaps cars may never overcome the gap. This is due to society's penchant for the all-safe vehicles accompanied by torrents of frivolous lawsuits which the motorcycle industry has not yet been burdened with and hopefully will never suffer.
They're looking at the wrong stats. Nobody cares if an EV is fast on the accelerator. They care about how far they'll get before they have to recharge. It does fuck all of any good for an EV to only last 50 miles. That's worthless in a "street-legal" vehicle. If it can't drive for at least 300 miles on a single charge then it's not worth it. Having to charge it at the end of the day every day is quickly going to out-pollute and out-cost gasoline.
..."its" without an apostrophe.
As someone who is a bit of a car enthusiast (always join the forums or car clubs for whatever vehicle I own, etc.) -- the fastest quarter mile results I ever see posted for vehicles taken to the drag strip is 9.x seconds. In most cases, you have people modding various sports or sporty cars to get down into the 12-13 second quarter mile range from wherever they start out at from the factory. Anyone running 11 seconds or under is considered "up there" in performance/speed.
So I'm starting to wonder .... is there pretty much a "hard limit" on how fast a quarter mile you can turn out based on the limitations of physics (tires can only provide so much grip, etc.)? Can you say at some point, "By getting my car to run a 9 second quarter mile, I've optimized it as much as is physically possible for a vehicle that's moving with rolling wheels on the ground?"
Oh I see...it isn't useful for YOU...so that makes it useless.
It is useless to the vast majority of the car buying public. A car with a range of 50 miles that takes hours to recharge is useful to a vanishingly small percentage of the people who buy car. Such a vehicle is either a toy or a second car option for people with more money than sense.
Wow, self centered much?
Really? Going to go straight to the ad-hominem attacks? Classy. If something I've said is factually or logically incorrect, by all means correct me. No need to be a jerk while doing it either. Show me how more than a handful of people would find an electric car with a 50 mile range to be good value for money.
Imagine how fast you can get groceries in this thing! It's going to make needing a Bugatti Veyron a thing of the past!
I'm waiting for their next model, the "Mr. Fusion".
Table-ized A.I.
Umm try sub 4 seconds 300 + mph? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
love is just extroverted narcissism
So I'm starting to wonder .... is there pretty much a "hard limit" on how fast a quarter mile you can turn out based on the limitations of physics (tires can only provide so much grip, etc.)? Can you say at some point, "By getting my car to run a 9 second quarter mile, I've optimized it as much as is physically possible for a vehicle that's moving with rolling wheels on the ground?"
The fastest street-legal dragster so far has run a 6.05. But there's probably still room for improvement...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There are such things as jet cars than don't depend on wheel grip. You can reach 5 seconds with just one engine. Now if you don't care about dying, you can strap an SRB to your back and go even faster. And if you really, really don't care, you can use explosives in place of rocket fuel.
As someone who is a bit of a car enthusiast (always join the forums or car clubs for whatever vehicle I own, etc.) -- the fastest quarter mile results I ever see posted for vehicles taken to the drag strip is 9.x seconds. In most cases, you have people modding various sports or sporty cars to get down into the 12-13 second quarter mile range from wherever they start out at from the factory. Anyone running 11 seconds or under is considered "up there" in performance/speed.
So I'm starting to wonder .... is there pretty much a "hard limit" on how fast a quarter mile you can turn out based on the limitations of physics (tires can only provide so much grip, etc.)? Can you say at some point, "By getting my car to run a 9 second quarter mile, I've optimized it as much as is physically possible for a vehicle that's moving with rolling wheels on the ground?"
Top Fuel dragsters do the quarter mile in 4.x seconds.
http://www.draglist.com/draglist/category.php?VIEW=Extended&CATEGORY%5B%5D=TOPFUEL&x=dragsters&SORTBY=ET%2CYEAR%2CMPH+DESC
The fastest quarter mile ever (according to a Google search) was 3.22 seconds, but that was a rocket car. It had wheels rolling on the ground, but didn't drive them to accelerate.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Well, there's a hydrogen peroxide rocket car that did the 1/4 in 3.58 seconds ("Vanishing Point" funny car, 1984).
Aside from the rocket engine the tires et al were kind of conventional.
I think you're going to have to be more specific in the future about what record is being discussed over 1/4 mile: internal combustion vs electric; torque vs thrust (rocket); street legal vs purpose-built; I'm sure there will be others.
This one has been doing the 1/4 mile in 9.89 @ 141mph for a while... 0.02 seconds isn't much of a gain. Besides, the '68 fastback is way cooler. :)
http://www.zombie222.com/zombie-specs.html
With a name like "Flux Capacitor", the car should have been one of those newly-manufactured electric DeLoreans.
Zombie 222
http://www.zombie222.com/zombie-specs.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAwIsKC7ROQ
0-60mph 1.79s
1/4: 9.89s @ 177.8mph
Top speed somewhere just north of 200mph
Yes, but that is a nitromethane burning monstrosity, tuned up to the point to where the where its engine is virtually at the point of being a highly engineered bomb...
it has about as much in common with a street vehicle as a cessna 172 has with an F16
Thats an avaerge of about 91 mph for 50 miles per charge. Just under 33 minutes to a flat battery!