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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."
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.
I agree - that's why I said throughout that my estimate was conservative. Assuming constant acceleration gives the slowest possible 0-60, hence the max time from these figures is 3.25 seconds.
Interestingly if you look through the pictures in TFA you see that the speed has just about topped out at the 1/8 mile mark. If you run the numbers there, you get an acceleration around the 10.5 m/s^2 mark, which indeed gives about 2.5s for the 0-60 time.
And yes, clearly the car is not designed with cornering in mind.
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?"