The Flux Capacitor Becomes World's Fastest Street-Legal Electric Car (arstechnica.com) 183
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."
My brain hurts (Score:2)
Uh... so how fast does it go? Y'know, in normal numbers?
Re:My brain hurts (Score:4, Informative)
112 MPH when crossing the 1/4 mile mark.
The article has a photo of the summary sheet from the drag strip showing all the statistics.
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Re:My brain hurts (Score:5, Funny)
I live in Australia. Our drag strips are 1/4mile long. The entire industry this car was built for uses this as a common metric (pun intended).
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No, but I can tell you that it can do 0.402336km in under 987 deciseconds.
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True, electric motors lack torque at high revs, where "high revs" is in terms of what the motor can handle before it destroys itself. But they have massive, unyielding torque within a powerband similar to an ICE engine's *entire* rev range, you'd just need to run a gearbox to take advantage of that up to high speed (as Formula E cars do).
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Per the screenshot in the article, was actually 121.73 @ 1/4mi mark, 9.8697s
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However eye witnesses said it vanished briefly when hitting 88 m.p.h. then reappeared.
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These are normal numbers. Cars are built with a purpose. Acceleration and top speed are two completely different metrics which require different car designs. For a fantastic aerodynamic design you can achieve great top speeds without some of the acceleration that these cars typically exhibit.
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Indeed. It's like hearing nails on a chalkboard when I hear some motoring show talking about streamlining in a competition that's built around acceleration, or about reducing weight on a competition that's built around top speed. At least the latter is somewhat relevant, although relatively minor. Streamlining in a 0-100km/h sprint is almost meaningless.
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...More to the point, during acceleration, if anything, you want a high drag shape, with as much downforce as you can muster so you can get better grip with your tires.
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...More to the point, during acceleration, if anything, you want a high drag shape, with as much downforce as you can muster so you can get better grip with your tires.
That's meaningless at the low end for the same reason that streaminglining is meaningless at the low end; absent speed, you don't have any meaningful drag. Dragsters have aerodynamics to keep them on the ground at the high end.
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A F1 car, at the speed this one got up to on the quarter mile, will have over 1000kg of downforce at the end. Obviously the relevance of that for your acceleration depends on how much power you have vs. how much traction you have.
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You don't generate a lot of downforce at the lower speeds when you'd really need it for better traction. Downforce is necessary to keep your vehicle from becoming an airplane.
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As Enzo Ferrari said, "Aerodynamics are for people who can't build engines".
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Fastest or quickest. Big difference. A couple of years ago, Don Garlits in his electric dragster did a 7.26 seconds 184 mph quarter mile run. As of a couple of months ago, he has not broken the 200 mph barrier. Yet.
And then he had to have it towed off the track because it's not street legal...
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The idiot again.
To convert time and speed for 1/4 mile to time and speed for 100/m or in other words to figure how long it takes to have a speed of 100km/h conversion of units is not enough.
If it was that easy you had done it for us instead of posting another complete idiotic post.
I'm surprised that you sometimes write something that makes sense, though.
To convert from the 1/4 time and speed to metric units, we have to figure the acceleration, consider that it is constant, and construct the time for 1km or
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Who the f drag races cars and measures time in time to 1km or to 100km/h? No country I know of!
He might not be a country, but apparently angel o'sphere does!
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I need to agree, While Slashdot is a geeky site, and I am sure nearly all of us is able to do the Math to get the numbers. But still for a news summary the numbers do not help bring the point across. We see an article saying "Fastest Street Legal Electric Car" we want to know either Miles per Hour or Kilometers per Hour. As those are the standard unit for Land based human movement. As our walk rate is between 2-4 MPH, our Jog is 4-6, run 6-12 and sprint 12+. The neat thing about units is it allows us to
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"fastest" also includes acceleration. That's why they give it in a form that combines both speed and acceleration into one metric, not that it makes any sense to me either.
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For acceleration we normally use Meters/Second^2
or in car terms 0 to 60mhp in how many seconds.
So still this was lame use of representing the data.
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But the fact remains that it's still the only way to combine top speed and acceleration into one measurement that's in common use.
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I don't think you mean top speed (that's not measured on a 1/4 mile track), maybe speed at the end of the 1/4 or average speed (rarely shown)
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Uh... so how fast does it go? Y'know, in normal numbers?
The *real* question is "How FAR does it go on a charge?" Which is followed closely by a related question "How long does it take to recharge?"
Having high acceleration and top speed are nice, but if you only get 40 miles from a full charge which takes 4 hours to achieve, what's the point? It might be interesting for the race track, but as a practical means of transportation it's useless to 90% of us.
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Uh... so how fast does it go? Y'know, in normal numbers?
The *real* question is "How FAR does it go on a charge?" Which is followed closely by a related question "How long does it take to recharge?"
Having high acceleration and top speed are nice, but if you only get 40 miles from a full charge which takes 4 hours to achieve, what's the point? It might be interesting for the race track, but as a practical means of transportation it's useless to 90% of us.
I know this is slashdot and nobody reads the article, but seriously... read the article. It's in there.
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Improvements at the track have frequently made their way into improvements for the rest of us.
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/... [howstuffworks.com]
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60 what? In case you haven't noticed, UNITS is exactly the point of this subthread. Because my old Mazda Diesel could do 0-60km/h in 8 seconds. Easily.
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60 what? In case you haven't noticed, UNITS is exactly the point of this subthread. Because my old Mazda Diesel could do 0-60km/h in 8 seconds. Easily.
When someone says 0-60, they are talking about mph. When they say 0-62, they are telling you about a 0-100 kph time. If someone says 0-100, then you can ask if that's mph or kph.
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No, anything over 8 sec 0-60 is for your grandparents, and a hazard when trying to merge onto a freeway.
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It's pretty good in the Traffic Light GP. Often I get some twat in a BMW or Civic pull up, hoping to get ahead. They rarely do, because especially off the mark the Leaf is very quick. In fact it holds back below about 15 MPH, only using 70% of the available power no matter how hard to press the accelerator, and even then it's very easy to spin the wheels.
The 0-60 time doesn't really do it justice. Sure, eventually other cars will catch up and overtake, but it's still hilarious when you hear their engines ro
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I get about 70 miles real range in the winter with rain. That's at motorway speeds, 70mph. 24kWh model.
I really enjoy the free destination charging too, even if it is only with a couple of quid.
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AmiMoJo is full of shit. 0-60 in a Leaf is over 10 seconds. She might be beating people off the line for a second or two, but after that it's ZZZzzzz..... http://www.caranddriver.com/ni... [caranddriver.com]
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All (or at least the vast majority of) petrol/electric hybrids and pure electric vehicles on the road do have such a system. It's called regenerative braking.
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Even pure gasoline cars (e.g. BMWs) have that. As they figured that in tough times the car uses so much current (e.g. for AC) that it makes sense to draw the energy from the battery instead from the generator and refill the battery during regenerative braking.
Re: My brain hurts (Score:5, Informative)
1) EVs do have kinetic energy recovery; it's called regenerative braking.
2) Gasoline vehicles that have them are known as hybrids.
3) All systems, including KERS, have purchase price, mass, and maintenance penalties, which is why they're not universally adopted.
4) The particular approach of flywheel-based kinetic energy storage has good W/kg but poor Wh/kg, W/l, and Wh/l. It has catastrophic failure mechanisms, limited storage time, and tends to offbalance vehicles. Flywheels have been becoming less popular with time in vehicles, not more - being overtaken by electric systems, which are increasingly compact and lightweight vs. their power output.
5) All kinetic energy recovery mechanisms suffer from losses. I haven't looked into the round-trip efficiency of flywheels, but round-trip efficiencies of conventional hybrids are often 40% or less, while for li-ion EVs they're often more like 60-70%. The problem is that you're storing and withdrawing power quickly, which reduces efficiencies, and all losses hit you twice - motor, drivetrain, controller, wiring and battery. Hybrids are hit worse than EVs because the packs are smaller (meaning higher-C charge/discharges) and the packs are generally NiMH, which is less efficient than li-ion.
6) Braking losses are only dominant in city driving. In combined driving they're significantly reduced and in highway driving they're almost an irrelevant fraction of the total. Aero losses dominate at high speeds while rolling losses dominate at low speeds.
7) The biggest energy benefit of a hybrid isn't recapturing braking losses, as most people assume. It's that it lets you operate with a much less powerful engine, without the vehicle feeling underpowered, thus helping the engine stay in its optimum power band (IC engines operate most efficiently when fairly near their maximum torque capability). Hybrid vehicle efficiencies don't drop that much when the hybrid system is broken (losing regenerative braking and stop/start), but they lose responsiveness.
8) Rolling losses, for the most part, come down to your tires; there's a balance between 1) grip, 2) rolling resistance, and 3) price. Choose two. (I could throw in other factors like noise, comfort, wearing, etc, but let's keep it simple)
9) Reducing aero losses comes down to reducing your cross sectional area and your drag coefficient. A reduced cross sectional area means that you can have a long car but not a wide or tall one. Reducing the drag coefficient means breaking with styling choices that people prefer in cars in favour of making it look more like an airplane (see the Aptera [google.is] as an example of taking it to extremes).
Note that things that look aerodynamic often aren't; many "sleek"-looking race cars actually have high drag coefficients (on purpose - to add downforce). General principles for achieving a low drag coefficient include:
* A relatively blunt, steadily-curved front end. The popular American car style of a massive front end is right out - you want the length on the other end.
* Steady transition to a highly raked windshield (within the limits of strength, weight and visibility.. and construction, as multi-axis bending windscreens are more expensive than single-axis)
* A slowly tapered rear end, down to as small of an area as you can. Tapering can be on two axes (teardrop) or either axis alone (airfoil-shaped)
* If you can't achieve a slow taper at any point due to internal space constraints, truncate it sharpy, ideally with vortex generators; otherwise you'll get flow separation and drag a low pressure wake, which is Very Bad(TM).
* Adjust the vehicle angle to have zero net up or downforce.
* Reduce or eliminate the air intakes on the
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That requires a little over 90 mph average speed. It's aerodynamically pretty awful, so you could probably make it go quite a bit faster. For comparison, Formula E cars top out at 140 mph, but they're also aerodynamically far superior. The problem is that both have very limited range. A Formula E race lasts 50 minutes. And this car doesn't have great range, either.
I get that developing electric cars is a way to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, but I think we could do more to make electric and gasoline powered cars more efficient. For example, I don't really understand why cars don't have a kinetic energy recovery system in them. Some race cars have a KERS, which makes them quite a bit more efficient in road courses. For city driving, a KERS could make cars more efficient with the accelerating and braking that occurs. It won't do a lot for highway driving, but it'll really help with city driving.
Formula E cars aren't street legal. They'd need many modifications to make them compete with this street legal car. Many of those modifications would significantly reduce their performance (bumpers etc).
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It may look aerodynamically awful, but the article claims otherwise.
"Despite the car's boxy shape, it's remarkably aerodynamic (with a Cd of 0.28)"
Fastest in what way? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Fastest in what way? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would hope one of the requirements to be a "street-legal" car is that it can turn, at the very least...
If we make a horrendous assumption of constant acceleration we can get a maximum on it's 0-60 time:
s=1/2 at^2, t=9.87s, s=400m gives a=8.21 m/s^2
60mph = 60*1600/3600 m/s= 26.67 m/s
t60 = 26.67/8.21 = 3.25 seconds.
So we can conservatively conclude this vehicle does 0-60 in under 3.25 seconds.
Someone with better knowledge of the acceleration/velocity curves of cars can probably correct me on this, but I'm assuming that acceleration reduces with velocity rather than increases, due to wind resistance etc. If this is right 3.25 should be considered a maximum - if the acceleration reduces above 60mph, say, then the car must accelerate to this velocity in even less time to get a quarter mile in 9.87s.
From the data given we can only conclude that its top speed is somewhat higher than 400m/9.87s = about 40m/s or 90mph, but of course that would assume instant acceleration to 90, in all likelihood its top speed is far higher.
0-60 (Score:2)
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 (m
Re:0-60 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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No. They took a real 1970s electric vehicle, replaced the major parts that make it go with modern equipment, and took it to a dragstrip. 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.
Just criticizing the claims, not the project (Score:2)
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 poin
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Cool project too. But "world's fastest street-legal electric car"? Going to have to back that claim up with some actual evidence.
The slip is in TFA, so you can compare its time.
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Wow, a whole 50 miles. That's... damn near useless.
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. I'm not referring to this specific car but the sort of market that commercial vehicles like the Twizy already serve. 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. Obviously range anxiet
Average range vs range variation (Score:2)
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. I
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"Street Legal" means not only can it turn (have you ever even been to a drag strip, even custom built dragsters can turn) but it can brake, has working lights, restraints, even a rear view mirror!
Stop trying to talk shit about something you have zero knowledge of and educate yourself before you look like a fool again.
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Drag racers have been hearing the same tired arguments for decades. It's kind of like saying sushi is better than ice cream.
Sushi is better than ice cream. If you live on sushi you can be fit, depending on how much rice and fatty fish you put together. If you live on ice cream, you're going to be fat.
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Well I wasn't talking about health, it is about which one is the better dessert. Which goes back to my point that comparing the two is kind of stupid. :-)
Everyone always says you can't compare apples and oranges, but I just showed that you can compare sushi and ice cream, especially if you forget to mention what your basis of comparison was supposed to be :)
I think that what is a better street car is a valid point to raise if part of the point of the vehicle is that it is street legal.
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but I wouldn't call one faster than a Veyron until it beat it around a track with corners.
Ahhh the no true racetrack fallacy.
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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.
A Veryon did the 1/4 mile in 9.7 seconds, if you go to any drag strip there are very few street legal cars that are going that fast. It's not as easy a putting a turbo or nitrous on a stock car and ripping out the extra weight.
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You took the time to post all this BS w/o reading the article...yes, I know, it's /. And no, it's not a vehicle that's useful to the public, but as I posted just above, many improvements to normal vehicles have come from racing. They didn't claim it was something you'd want to run out and buy. Now that the stick out of your rump.
Unsubstantiated claims (Score:2)
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.
Fun project with needless claims (Score:2)
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 nee
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Range (Score:2)
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 t
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You USofA posters should start to understand that the USofA is a very very very special special place on earth. Not because it is particular "special" or "good" but because it is extremely original different from the rest of the world.
E.g. No one outside of your "country" is driving his kids around 45miles (aka 80km) per day.
Why the fuck would they?
More interesting question: why do you USofA citizens think you are the measure for the rest of the world?
In september I have a new project, less than 10km away
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Useless to most people (Score:2)
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 hand
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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.
If it had a very quick charge, it could serve a sufficiently large slice of the population that it could sell enough units to be worth buying. It would also fit a lot of existing situations, like taxi use or local deliveries. If it were cheaper to do a conversion, you'd see more EVs; a lot of them have about that much range, but to do that well is still spendy.
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As I recall, the average commute is above 50 miles/day, which means this is useless as a commuter for more than half of us...
Then, consider that commuting is only a part of what most cars are used for and the percentage of people who can use a car with a 50 mile range drops further, and basically ends up to include only those who can afford a car for *just* commuting who own other vehicles for other uses.
I don't know about you, but I have a hard time affording just the cars I need so there is no way I'm ad
Hope its a strong roll cage (Score:2)
.. 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.
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They probably had to add a roll cage just to give the vehicle sufficient rigidity not to twist into a pretzel when giving it the beans.
What? 1.8 GW? (Score:2)
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?
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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 = <<< 1.21 GW
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Frame reinforcement (Score:2)
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.
With a 50 mile range this would suit Meatloaf (Score:2)
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
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Street Legal? (Score:2)
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It's from the early 70s, it's possible that they weren't required. I have a 1970 motorcycle and it has no turn signals, legally.
Brakes (Score:2)
The end of the run might be as exciting as the start.
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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.
Regen doesn't really require any notable additional weight. It does require more expensive and complex control electronics, though, which is why controllers without regen are cheaper.
Article is not even correct (Score:2)
Really? (Score:2)
So Tesla doesn't count?
http://gas2.org/2014/10/09/tes... [gas2.org]
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What do you mean? We are talking here about the fastest in the quarter mile, which it does at 9.87 sec. The Tesla P85D does it in 10.9 sec, so this is faster than the Tesla in that respect (and others, e.g. 0-100kph is 3s vs Tesla's 3.2).
Of course the Tesla is a production car and not some modified for drag racing awkward vehicle, which make its feats impressive, but it doesn't mean the summary is wrong.
Oh, I get it. (Score:2)
It's about time.
So,do we know the physical limits on the Q mile? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?"
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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...
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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.
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Also on all spacious public roads when police aren't looking :-P
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You've clearly never been pulled over for http://www.criminaldefenselawy... [criminalde...lawyer.com]
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Depends on the state you're in. Minnesota has an "excessive acceleration" law on the books. However, IIRC, it does not define a specific acceleration that is too much.
AFAIK the standard most places seems to be loss of traction. If they can hear your tires, you're accelerating too quickly.