Top Gear did a great show with the Tesla a few years back. They raved about it, but also acknowledged its shortcomings.
Tesla is now suing the BBC about those negative comments and Top Gear's response can be seen here.
Posted on 09/30/2011 9:03:59 AM PDT by Red Badger
A group of gear heads from Croatia has produced a car designed to show that “electric vehicle” doesn’t have to mean “something my granola-eating neighbor drives.”
Rimac Automobil, named for its founder, Mate Rimac, unveiled the Concept_One at the International Auto Show in Frankfurt. Designed as a sleek sports car it is powered entirely by batteries, and can, the company says, hit 62 miles per hour in 2.8 seconds, and reach a limit of 190 mph. The batteries carry 92 kilowatt-hours, or enough to power an average American home for three days -- or drive the car 372 miles, enough to get from New York to Pittsburgh. (The Tesla Roadster, also a very impressive electric hotrod, hits 60 mph in 3.7 seconds, has a top speed of 125 mph and has a battery range of 245 miles.)
The engines put out the equivalent of 1,088 horsepower, enough to beat some internal combustion models. The motive force to the wheels is divided among four engines that can each be controlled independently. That allows the torque to each wheel to be adjusted as necessary. A computer subsystem controls each pair of wheels and, according to Rimac, can make adjustments thousands of times each second.
The body is light, made of carbon fiber, and the battery is placed near the center of the car for better weight distribution.
This isn’t the only electric supercar out there: there’s the Tesla Roadster, which boasts a similar 0 to 60 acceleration and Audi rolled out a high-performance electric concept car, the e-tron, in 2009. But if nothing else it shows once again that newer body designs and advances in control technologies can build an electric car that is both powerful and environmentally friendly.
Don’t want electric sports cars.
I want a car that I take kids to school in, commute in, pick up groceries in and take a road trip to the Keys down A1A in.
If they want to make money and prove the electric car concept, they need to build the “Mom ‘n Pop mobile” not sports cars.
I didn't say anything about a cross-country road trip. I have no idea if it is viable or not. I suspect not.
Not necessarily coal-powered. While massive solar energy plants are nowhere near being competitive with coal-generated electricity, solar panels for on-site use (i.e., recharging your car at home, cooling your home, selling surplus production back to the electrical company) are going to be competitive soon. Not a solution for powering our industry, but they certainly are feasible for powering up cars overnight.
(”Overnight?” you ask. of course, I’m not talking about generating solar power at night; I’m talking about exchanging night-time-produced coal power for daytime-produced solar power, or storing solar-produced power until night.)
But will they be competitive without subsidies and with a reasonable pay back time? Last I looked, there was about a 20+ year pay back.
Don’t forget that a gasoline engine is terribly inefficient. Combustion produces heat, not motion. You have to convert that heat into motion, which is not very favorable.
” Let’s see the range on a typical winter day with the heater running and hot summer day with the air conditioner blasting especially if the car is left outside overnight. What rare earth metals are used in the battery? Who supplies these minerals besides the Chinese? What are the environmental impacts of mining these rare earths? What is the replacement cost of the batteries? “
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!
These are exactly the common-sense questions that have to be kept in the forefront of this topic. Solve these problems, and you’ve got something. Ignore them, and you fail miserably.
Lets say it's lithium ion. 720kJ/kg (lead acid is only 100kJ/kg)
Gas as you say is 3400kJ/l, 4700kJ/kg.
100 years of development in battery technology, and the smart guys who picked gasoline a century ago still have the most advance electric technology beat by a factor of 6.
Indeed, that's impressive! =-)
>> OTOH, lets examine “1,088HP”....enough to beat “some internal combustion models...” LOL. “some” Seeing as the Corvette 6.2l monster is rated at 430HP, yeah, 1,088HP would be just about beat “some” engines out there. This is the kind of “tell” in an article that shows the writer has no clue what numbers they’re throwing around. <<
I’d like to see a Corvette go 0 to 60 in about 2.8 seconds. There’s a reason the author calls the Roadster and this car “supercars.”
What is “magical” is the efficiency at converting electricity to power (and torque). The problem has long been the effective transport of that electricity, since you can’t exactly drag an extension cord all the way to work.
What about putting a small turbocharged “green” biodiesel using
engine in that thing? Then hybridize the car and use
the small diesel to charge the batteries. No worry about recharge time.
Great mileage, carbon neutral(just so Al G. doesn’t call me). Easy
accessibility to fuel.
OTOH, if they can get batteries to be smaller, hold larger
amounts of energy, and can be recharged quickly this could
be a great idea.
How about a universal battery pack, which can be removed from
your car, and replaced with a fully charged pack? This could
be done at an electric station. Could take less time than
a fill up with gas.
The body is built of carbon fiber.
They did not mention cost or if it will pass federal safety standards.
If it can do that for $130k or less then it can talk of blowing the doors of Tesla.
If it cost over $150k and can’t pass federal safety standards then it just a mildly interesting concept.
The Volt uses a gasoline fueled internal combustine engine after the first 25-50 miles of pure electric drive.
>> Lets say it’s lithium ion. 720kJ/kg (lead acid is only 100kJ/kg). Gas as you say is 3400kJ/l, 4700kJ/kg. 100 years of development in battery technology, and the smart guys who picked gasoline a century ago still have the most advance electric technology beat by a factor of 6. <<
Ridiculous comparison. You don’t consume ANY Lithium* in a Lithium battery.
(*Well, eventually the battery loses its rechargability, which is one of the cautionary issues about electrical cars and their amazingly expensive batteries. But this is at an infinitessimal consumption rate, if you can even call it consumption.)
Just think if it had been a new kind of watch made in Croatia! Instead of a Swatch it’d be a Cratch!
Croatians are not known for innovative thinking.
That’s 92 kwh “in the batteries”. When you take into account the energy transmission and conversion losses: chemical(coal) to heat(boiler) to mechanical (turbine) to electrical (generator) then transmit to chemical (car battery) you will find an energy efficiency worse then a similiar sized gasoline auto. In other words, I would like to see the electric vehicle owner’s eyes when he gets his first electric bill. Another way to look at it is to compare gas clothes dryers vs electric clothes dryers: A gas dryer will cost you about half, per month, when compared to an electric dryer. By the way, 92 kwh in California will cost about $.30/kwh not $.05/kwh as advertised in their ads. Also, I do not believe the 4 mi/kwh claim (380 mi for 92 kwh). It should be like 1 mi/kwh.
Of course you don't. Performance and range are defined by energy density. That's the comparison.
How much weight do you have to carry around to provide the "92kWH."
In fact, batteries are worse than combustible fuels because the "lithium" is not consumed.
But you bring up another good point against batteries...!
As you burn gasoline, the weight of the car goes down, allowing effective increases in effective mileage. As you discharge a battery, battery still weighs the same. Effective energy density of a battery goes toward zero as it runs down, whereas energy density of gasoline or diesel remains constant.
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