A battery powered car that doesn't suck

[Darkwolf]

http://www.teslamotors.com/
Now if they could only make it cheap to buy.

[WVRampage]

thats not to bad.

[Birddog]

A little wraith in that thing....

[dustbuster]

I've been waiting for someone to come out with a high performance electric car... all that efficiency and torque being used like it should. As much as I like buring gas, I think this is soooo much better.

[Una]

Toss a small 3cylinder diesel generator in there somewhere and you'll be rockin.. ;) Is that thing all wheel drive? Seems like that'd be the way to go with an all-electric car.. Wouldn't it be sweet to have a Hybrid TD? Swap out our rear end with a Ford 9" and a bigass electric motor.. Little extra push to help with traction off the line.. ;>

[Tony Hanna]

An electric car with some thought given to range and performance.
Sounds like things are moving in the right direction.:thumb:
Now if somebody would just come up with a standardized battery, and nationwide support so that you could (for a small fee) pull into a service station anywhere in the country and swap your dead battery for a fresh one, then I bet they'd really take off. Right now they're pretty well limited to around town unless you can plan a route that allows you to stop and plug in for a few hours every 250 miles.:(

[SpoolinGLH]

An electric car with some thought given to range and performance.
Sounds like things are moving in the right direction.:thumb:
Now if somebody would just come up with a standardized battery, and nationwide support so that you could (for a small fee) pull into a service station anywhere in the country and swap your dead battery for a fresh one, then I bet they'd really take off. Right now they're pretty well limited to around town unless you can plan a route that allows you to stop and plug in for a few hours every 250 miles.:(



It says it has a mobile charging unit for when not in town.

[GLHS069]

LOOKS A LOT MORE LIKE A LOTUS ELISE THAN THE WRAITH (S4S)




A little wraith in that thing....

[Darkwolf]

LOOKS A LOT MORE LIKE A LOTUS ELISE THAN THE WRAITH (S4S)

Pretty sure they are Lotus Elises just with some tweaks.

[Darkapollo]

Mine is on order... I cant wait to drive it... (i wish)

[Tony Hanna]

It says it has a mobile charging unit for when not in town.

Right, but did you look at the charge time? Even if you could find places that would let you plug in along your route, it would take several hours to charge. I think they said about 5 hours for the home charger, so you can plan on being stopped for 5+ hours every 250 miles. So, 5 hours of charge time for every 3 1/2 hours of drive time figuring a 70 mph average speed.
Don't get me wrong, I think it would be a great little car for the daily stuff, but just not practical on long trips. If electric cars are ever going to take off in any markek besides toys for rich people, then there's going to have to be a standardized battery and a nationwide support system for battery swaps.
The only way around that I can see would be a massive leap in battery technology that would allow for either a much greater range, or much quicker chargeing.

[Darkapollo]

I wonder why they dont use some sort of inductive pick up to give a further range. Sure the regenerative breaking helps, but say you are going on a 300mile trip, most of it is highway and sustained highspeed (65-75mph). As the front wheels turn (this is a RWD car.) they turn what would ammount to be altinators to charge the batterys, or run the motor at a sustained speed from the inductive pickup. I know it would not provide 100% efficency but Im willing to bet it would help. Similar to how our cars run mostly on the alt after the inital start up. It is basicly FREE energy, the crankshaft is turning anyway, so the magnets in the alt. are turning with it producing (or exciting the electons) electricity to flow through the copper winding, producing electricity.

If anyone has ever built or played with the hand crank inductive circut and the 100w bulb you will understand this theory. It does not take many RPMs to have the bulb at full brightness, maybe 100 or so rpm to get ~100w from a mag/coil the size of an apple. Im sure there must be some way to make power FROM the forward motion in the car WITH OUT using a friction drive generator like what is used in the regenerative breaking (also aids in slowing the car)

[Tony Hanna]

I wonder why they dont use some sort of inductive pick up to give a further range. Sure the regenerative breaking helps, but say you are going on a 300mile trip, most of it is highway and sustained highspeed (65-75mph). As the front wheels turn (this is a RWD car.) they turn what would ammount to be altinators to charge the batterys, or run the motor at a sustained speed from the inductive pickup. I know it would not provide 100% efficency but Im willing to bet it would help. Similar to how our cars run mostly on the alt after the inital start up. It is basicly FREE energy, the crankshaft is turning anyway, so the magnets in the alt. are turning with it producing (or exciting the electons) electricity to flow through the copper winding, producing electricity.

The only problem with that is the drag on the wheels from generating electricity would rob more power than it could make. At the theoretical best, you'd generate exactly as much as you lost (100% efficiency), but nothing is 100% efficient, so you'd actually be losing more than you made. Remember, when you use one kind of energy to create another (in this case creating electricity from kenetic energy), the best that is even theoretically possible is an even exchange and that's allowing 100% efficiency.
I got this explained to me in-depth after wondering aloud why you couldn't use an electric motor to drive a generator and then use the electricity from the generator to drive the motor (perpetual motion).

[Darkapollo]

with that then YES friction would come into play. But with an inductive style pickup there is no or nearly no friction.
you already have your rotating mass, the front tire, add something like a starter ring gear to the break rotor, to that gear an altinator.

OR have magnets set along the outter edge of the break rotor and build a coil into the break caliper so that everytime the magnet passes through the caliper it would excite the electrons in the coil and produce electricity.

[Tony Hanna]

with that then YES friction would come into play. But with an inductive style pickup there is no or nearly no friction.
you already have your rotating mass, the front tire, add something like a starter ring gear to the break rotor, to that gear an altinator.

OR have magnets set along the outter edge of the break rotor and build a coil into the break caliper so that everytime the magnet passes through the caliper it would excite the electrons in the coil and produce electricity.

Right, your second example would limit friction to parts that are already there anyway, but friction wasn't my point. My point was that the magnetic field itself is going to create drag that's proportional to the ammount of electricity you're trying to generate. Ever notice how a large electrical load on your alternator will cause your engine to idle down some? It's the same deal.
I goes back to the law of conservation of matter and energy which states that neither matter or energy can be created or destroyed, it can only change form. With that in mind you're still back to an even exchange at best.
Even a perfect system isn't going to create more than it uses. I wish I could explain it better, but I just barely understand the concepts myself.

[Darkapollo]

I understand 100% what you are saying, dont get me wrong.

Im just saying that they can use that type of device to increase range and/or decrease recharge time while the car is running. Not to totally run the car off of the system and shut down the battery power.

[Tony Hanna]

I understand 100% what you are saying, dont get me wrong.

Im just saying that they can use that type of device to increase range and/or decrease recharge time while the car is running. Not to totally run the car off of the system and shut down the battery power.

If you could reach 100% efficiency, a a regenerative system like that at best would do... nothing. What I'm trying to say is that the regenerative system is only going to generate enough electricity to offset the extra electricity that the main motor has to use because the regenerative system is there. That's at best. Real world, the regenerative system wouldn't be 100% efficient so instead of breaking even, it would actually rob more power than it made.
The only time I could see it being an advantage would be coasting down a long hill you could use it to charge while the drag held your speed. In this case gravity would be providing the power. That would be basically the same as the regenerative braking, but just not all-out.

[dustbuster]

Regenerative braking would be nearly 100% effecient, if it wasn't for friction losses, from the road, wind, wheel bearings, etc.

You could put some skinny high pressure tires with tiny lightweight wheels on it, improve aerodynamics... but then you're back to an ugly, slow electric car that nobody wants to drive.

Covering the entire top surface of the car with solar panels might give it an extra 10 miles and aid in charging, of course that would be even more expensive, and look weird.

What should happen (maybe Cali already does something like this, I dunno) is that the electric vehicles should have the right of way through all traffic, have their own commuter lanes to moderate speed/effeciency while cutting back on stopping and going, which wastes power and battery charge. Then people will buy them because they'll be able to get to work quicker, until everyone has them, then traffic is back to normal.

[Tony Hanna]

I still think the best setup would be a nationwide network of charging stations and some kind of standerdized self-contained battery module that's designed for quick removal and installation. That way when the battery gets low, you can pull into a service station anywhere, exchange your old battery for a fresh one, and be on your way. Idealy the battery and equipment necessary to swap it (I'm assuming the battery is pretty heavy) would be designed so that the whole operation would take about as long as filling up a gas tank. Once a system like that is in place, the limitations associated with owning an EV are eliminated.

[dustbuster]

^^that's exactly what we need to do, but we need something so people will want to kick the oil habit ... apparantly $3/gal gasoline isn't enough.

[Tony Hanna]

Yeah, I think the only thing that's going to make a system like that happen is if the oil dries up completely, or the government regulates gasoline powered vehicles out of existance. Hopefully before that happens, somebody will stumble onto a cheap clean renewable fuel that would work in a normal gas engine with a minor refit.