All those S's and C's...
...it's too much for me.
Bit like the current flowing through that 110V socket - too much.
World's fastest production car to gain electric twin
Shelby Super Cars has announced details of the Ultimate Aero EV, the 'leccy brother to its $620,000, 1287bhp, 257mph production car world speed record holder. SSC reckons the Aero EV will be the fastest electric car ever when it hits the road later this year. The Aero will be driven by SSC's electric powertrain package called …
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Friday 23rd January 2009 19:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Another toy for the rich
"Shelby Super Cars has announced details of the Ultimate Aero EV, the 'leccy brother to its $620,000, 1287bhp, 257mph production car world speed record holder.:
Guessing that the 'leccy version will be in the same price neighbourhood leads me to believe that I won't be affording one in this lifetime.
I can't see buying any battery car if it's going to cost 10k-20k more than the petrol version, have less mileage capability, most likely NOT last as long (I mean, seriously, how long does ANY car battery last?). Yessir, another toy for the rich and famous...
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Friday 23rd January 2009 19:12 GMT Paul
From a standard power outlet?
Guessin that it'll need a battery energy capacity of at least 30KWH to give 150 miles of endurance (for a head-shaped figure, one gallon of petrol contains ~9KWH of energy). Charging in 10 mins therefore requires more than 180KW of power, a current of over 1600Amps at 110V. This is beyond the capacity of household power supplies; a copper busbar witha cross section of around 1200mm would be required required to carry that sort of current.
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Friday 23rd January 2009 19:12 GMT Allan Rutland
It's Bollocks!
Shelby is mostly known for slapping a huge engine into small light things and it going like hell. Ok, he is a kinda "genius". But if all the claims on this drive unit are true...300mph top speed, 1200hp equivalant, 200miles on a 10min charge...then yes, he is a genius, and he'll be tripping up over car companies lining up to license this thing.
Somehow though, I can't see it, and sadly it maybe time for someone to look more closely at checking him into an old folks home before he causes his company a few head aches. Until it happens, will say what Alun didn't...it's bollocks!
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Friday 23rd January 2009 19:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
10Mins/200miles? Just not possible.
A bit of napkin math quickly proves this claim bogus. The standard US '110V' outlet is rated at 15A. Let's be generous and say we've actually got 124V on this (never seen one even close to 110V outside of a brownout.) That makes for 1860W. For 10 minutes, that's 310W/h, assuming they've managed a 100% efficient charger.
Now, a gallon (US) of petrol gives something around 33KW/h of potential. Let's assume that's going into an engine at 17% efficiency (no idea what the basis of that number is, it's just the I use.) That gives us 5610W/h of usable work.
Assuming these guys have perfected the 100% efficient motor to go with their 100% efficient charger (unlikely since it has water cooling) that gives us 1/18th the work of a gallon of gas. I don't care how efficient the running gear and aerodynamics are, you're not going to get 200miles out of 1/18th of a gallon of gas.
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Friday 23rd January 2009 19:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
...possibility of several years between charging !
From their previous press release: "The drive train under development will feature a revolutionary power source allowing for extended time between charging intervals with the possibility of several years between charging."
http://www.shelbysupercars.com/news-071208.php
Read further down and it talks about new investors... reads too much like a scam in these cynical times!
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Friday 23rd January 2009 19:12 GMT Andrew Molyneux
10 minutes?
10 minutes is "the time it typically takes to fill up a tank of gas"? My car's 53-litre tank typically fills in around a minute at my local Tesco, so we're talking about either an extraordinarily large fuel tank, a very slow fuel pump, or possibly a combination of the two.
Incidentally, if this "Nanotechnology Rechargeable Lithium Battery pack" can power a 200bhp car for 150-200 miles on a 10-minute charge, I want one for my laptop. I'd probably never have to worry about charging it for the rest of its useful life :-)
Paris, because it might take 10 minutes to fill her tank.
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Friday 23rd January 2009 19:13 GMT Steve Todd
10 minutes from a 110v socket?
Thats a maximum charge of 275 Watt hours. To drive a car 150-200 miles you need 50,000 Watt hours or more. Unless your wall charger has it's own set of fast discharge cells that can charge for over 30 hours, and then dump that charge into the car in 10 minutes, then it isn't going to happen. Even in the UK, using 240v and a 30 Amp fixed feed, it would need a 7 hour charge.
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Friday 23rd January 2009 19:13 GMT Sampler
Hydrogen Fuel Cells
Give up with all this battery nonsense and start rolling out Hydrogen fuelled based electric motor cars - the one of Top Gear the other week was perfect for the needs of today, clean abundant power supply, similar to less costs of a current motor and fills up at a petrol (or hydrogen in this case) station the same way a regular car does at again similar costs (now, so when being massed produced economies of scale should make that quite a bit less).
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Friday 23rd January 2009 19:19 GMT Ken Hagan
An estimate
100 bhp is about 75 kilowatts, and if your battery can deliver that sort of power then you can probably make a car round it.
To have a range of 200 miles, a full charge must be able to power the car for long enough to actually travel 200 miles at reasonable speed. Let's call that 5 hours, or 300 minutes.
So the claim is that charging up can be done at 30 times the speed of running down.
That means your expecting to deliver roughly 2.25 megawatts through that 110 volt supply, which is about 1000 times more welly than a domestic socket.
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Friday 23rd January 2009 19:19 GMT Matt Reilly
10 min charge time: what it would mean
If we're talking about driving 200 miles and charging for 10 minutes before the next
200 miles, that's a tough problem to solve:
Assume 50 mph and 20HP and PERFECT energy conversion (just for sake of argument)
that is: we're only asking 20HP out of the engine to maintain 50mph.
(200 miles / 50 mph) * 20HP * 0.7KW/HP = 56 KW-hrs * 60KW-min/KW-hr = 3360 KW-minutes
That's how much energy we would spend in a 100% efficient conversion.
Now let's replenish the energy store in 10 minutes: 3360 KW-minutes / 10 minutes = 336 KW
from the charging source.
At 110V that's 3KAmps.
That's an interesting number ;) Note that if it only took 2HP to drive us at 50mph, we'd still
be looking at 300 amps at 110V.
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Friday 23rd January 2009 21:27 GMT Edward Grace
Yawn....
'SSC's "Charge on the RunTM" onboard charging system allows for 10 minute full battery recharges on a 220V service''
'Charge on the Run'? .... err sorry "TM"...
Does that mean it's got an ordinary petrol engine too or that you have to drive the thing with a dirty great umbilical cord plugged in to the 'lecy socket back on the ranch?
I smell environmentally friendly flower feeder...
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Friday 23rd January 2009 21:27 GMT Stephen
Its not the Voltage that matters, its the amps
It is perfectly possible to do a quick charge if the socket you're using can handle the amperage required. Most standard household sockets are only rated for 13A (UK) 15/20A (North American)
However a standard 32A socket could easily do a quick charge. and it isn't expensive to have one fitted.
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Friday 23rd January 2009 21:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
Perhaps they actually borrowed the electrical system...
...from the Delorean in the "Back to the Future" movies.
10 minutes on a standard electrical outlet wouldn't even provide enough charge to run a decent sound system for 200 miles at highway speeds. (well maybe at 257 miles an hour it would)
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Friday 23rd January 2009 21:27 GMT Eric Olson
A title
Lots of numbers being thrown around here, all assuming either the US or UK standard household plug. Be that as it may, it's possible they are also talking about a specific distribution model, a type of fueling station that is able to deliver industial levels of power through a "hose" to your "tank." Light on detail the press release is... but with the right equipment, it's probably possible to push a large amount of current through to a battery that is designed for maximum surface area to cut down on charge time. Now, whether the technology is actually there, doesn't cost as much as a house, and is reliable, that's a whole other matter. It's nice to dream, though.... and I tend to err on the side of dreaming big and seeing what can be done rather than focusing on what can't be done. Remember, it wasn't more than 50 years ago that the idea of a computer thousands of times more powerful than what they had then in a package that fit in a small box would have seemed ludicrous.
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Friday 23rd January 2009 22:13 GMT Steven Hunter
@Sampler
"Give up with all this battery nonsense and start rolling out Hydrogen fuelled based electric motor cars ... and fills up at a petrol (or hydrogen in this case) station"
I guess you have an aitch-two station in your area and everywhere else you want to drive? Also, perhaps you've invented a new energy efficient and non greenhouse gas producing method of producing hydrogen which is also cheaper than gasoline or electricity? Oh, you'll also a volume efficient way of storing the aicht-two on board the vehicle so as to giveit a range equal to current gasoline powered cars and still have some amount of trunk space.
'Cause those are the obstacles still preventing fuel-cell based cars from being produced.
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Saturday 24th January 2009 03:51 GMT MrOptimistic
Think outside the box
The calculations here are making assumptions that no new technology is involved. It's like a car company talking about 500 BHP and people talking about how difficult it would be to tie 500 horses (British horses, mind you) to the front of the car.
There are a couple of ways of doing this that come to mind.
1. Electricity could be the secondary source of power. The car would potentially be using very little of electricity for driving purposes, maybe only for headlights and for controlling the primary source of power which could be a new invention. Then it wouldn't be classified as an electric car I guess, so this option is unlikely.
2. The initial charge could potentially take several hours or days, and then the 10-minute charges would simply "top up" the batteries. There could be a functional reason for not being able to use the car for more than 200 miles without such a recharge, or "200 miles" could be a number being quoted just for helping the potential buyers compare these against current cars.
GO - because the reliance on gas is a bad idea.
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Monday 26th January 2009 10:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
If only
@Sampler
Hydrogen is not and will never be more than a way for car companies and politicians to show off and pretend they're "green". The reason it isn't feasible is because free hydrogen is rare and has to be captured from somewhere. The easiest source is natural gas. Producing hydrogen from natural gas also produces carbon dioxode, which is what we're trying to eliminate, and it doesn't break our dependence on fossil fuels. The other way to get hydrogen is to reduce water through electrolysis, but you end up putting more electricity into the process than you would get from it through re-oxidizing your hydrogen in a fuel cell. You'd have to have some sort of magical entropy-defying perpetual motion machine to endlessly produce free hydrogen to take advantage of it.
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Monday 26th January 2009 10:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
BS
"onboard charging system allows for 10 minute full battery recharges"
If you re-read that as "a full battery takes 10 minutes to recharge" that makes more sense... also pointless, but they're american.
As for the huge currents involved, imagine how hot the cables would get - there's a reason the national grid uses very high voltage and thus lower current!
And all those calculating the power/range/current/etc... You seem to be assuming that all the automotive energy is coming from that charge; in reality it probably charges the batteries under braking/coasting, so you can probably halve your charge current.
Still smells remarkably like the male equivalent of a cow pat.
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Monday 26th January 2009 10:24 GMT Ken Hagan
@Michael
"fr far nesses sake is there anyboady who thinks the charging times qouted here can be done?"
Probably. To save you the effort of scrolling, my debunking calculation reckons the claims of the article are off by 2-3 orders of magnitude, but that is based on the remarks in the article about a standard 110v supply.
There's nothing to stop filling stations having access to much higher voltages. (For safety's sake, the battery would have to be removed from the car and sent through a completely automated charging system. Having lifted it out, you'd probably be as well to drop back in a different battery that you'd charged earlier, but let's assume there are legal objections to that idea.) At 11000 volts (available at a substation near you, albeit in AC form rather than DC), the required current is just a few dozen amps.
As someone else observed, however, unless the charging process is 100% efficient, some proportion of the total energy transferred is going to be emitted as heat. You don't need to do the maths here; that's equivalent to saying that some proportion of the heat generated by setting fire to a full tank of petrol will be released over the charging period. If that charging period is just 10 minutes, you probably wouldn't want to stand too close to the equipment. But again, if the charging process happens inside a fully enclosed robot, it can use whatever cooling mechanism it likes.
So, in conclusion, just lift your industry standard battery out of the car, drop it into a liquid nitrogen cooled 11000 volt concrete bunker (did I mention the risk of explosion?) and Bob's your uncle.
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Monday 26th January 2009 10:24 GMT Steve Todd
OK, let's flip the question around
Is it possible to put 200 miles of charge into a vehicle in 10 minutes, using an industrial grade supply? Let's start with the assumption of a 50KW/hr battery (the Tesla has a 53KW/hr unit, and runs for an official 244 miles on a charge so it's a reasonable starting point). That converts to 50,000 x 60 x 60 = 180M Watt seconds. That amount of energy needs to be delivered in 600 second, so thats a charge rate of 300,000 Watts/second. Now there's very little chance that the battery pack is going to be anything as wimpy as 110v, lets bump it up to the same voltage levels that they use to drive electric trains, 750v. 300,000/750 = 400 amps. Add 10% to allow for inefficiencies in charging and we get 440 amps. That's a hefty but do-able number, and it's still less than $10 for a charge at US residential rates.
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Monday 26th January 2009 10:24 GMT david wilson
Website changing
They're obviously editing the website.
Yesterday evening, it said
"SSC's "Charge on the RunTM" onboard charging system allows for 10 minute full battery recharges on a 220 outlet."
Now it says
"SSC's "Charge on the RunTM" onboard charging system allows for 10 minute full battery recharges on a 220V service."
So I guess it probably did say "standard 110V outlet" when Alun Taylor wrote the original article
I wonder when they'll change it to "industrial 3-phase outlet - slower domestic chargers also available"?
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Monday 26th January 2009 10:24 GMT Ken Hagan
@Michael again
"fr far nesses sake is there anyboady who thinks the charging times qouted here can be done?"
To be entirely fair about the response I just gave, although it probably *can* be done, it would be very stupid to do it that way. Much better is to use the standard mains supply and plug your car into it overnight. Ten hours, rather than ten minutes, reduces the other numbers by a factor of 60, at which point the equipment is quite feasible. (Still, you'd want to locate it inside a locked garage. That would be a problem for many. Perhaps it is time to review the nation's housing stock.)
A nationwide network of fast charging stations would represent a huge capital outlay by car manufacturers. In contrast, domestic recharging would be a very small capital outlay by the person who bought the car. I think the latter is vastly more likely.
Very few people go on journeys that require more than one tank of petrol before they reach their destination. I'm assuming that hotels would have such equipment and that friends and relatives who were putting you up would be willing to let you use your equipment. It would be trivial for the equipment itself to state clearly how much energy it had delivered, so you could settle up afterwards.
And finally, transport apparently represents about 40% of the nation's carbon footprint, which is more than electricity generation. Domestic charging would represent a huge business opportunity for electricity generation and distribution companies, and with only a modest amount of "smarts" built into the domestic units the power companies could use them to smooth out the baseline load. The power company would broadcast a preference for "up" or "down" and the millions of chargers would respond. I'll let someone else work out the PID constants, but I'd be surprised if the diurnal variation couldn't be smoothed out entirely. The spikes around Eastenders finishing time would be harder, though they could certainly be made more manageable. That's good news for anyone who isn't running a gas-fired power station. (Note for foreign readers, I gather that's more a problem in the UK than elsewhere -- the size of the spike that is, not Eastenders, which presumably blights large parts of the globe.)
So yes, it is all perfectly feasible and will probably happen, but probably not exactly as described in the article.
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Monday 26th January 2009 10:24 GMT Robin Trow
World's fastest production car goes leccy
Before anyone gets carried away over the specification for the Shelby Supercar, let's put some numbers to the claims. My car (Honda Civic IMA Hybrid) achieves about 50 mpg (UK gallons) and therefore, consumes energy at the rate of 65 kW.h/100 km, assuming the engine and transmission are 25% efficient, that's about 16 kW.h/100 km at the drive wheels. To travel 200 miles (320 km) it will consume 52 kW.h at the drive wheels.
If the supercar can match this mileage, the batteries will need to take on 58 kW.h (assuming the electric motors and batteries are about 90% efficient) in 10 minutes, which is charging rate of 350 kW. With a UK domestice supply at 230V single phase, the current required is just over 1,500 A. Quite a bit higher than any domestic supply I know of.
If a 3-phase supply is used, the current reduces to 500 A. Which is a medium sized industrial supply. For the technically minded I have assumed the power factor is unity, it will probably be less than 0.9 and the current (but not the power) will increse proportionately.
On this basis Shelby Super Cars are talk through their tailpipes and any charging system would require a major industrial installation.
As with most claims about alternative energy sources, the claimants are more interested in attracting publicity than putting down the facts.
It's an unfortunate fact that petrol is a very compact energy source and replacing it with something else is going to be very very difficult.
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Monday 26th January 2009 10:24 GMT Christopher A Light
Here we go again....
MORE Electric Car bollocks...
Am I the only one around here who's getting fed up with it?
These Electric Con-men have set up on gullible venture capital and now the VC tossers need some sort of return on their 'investment' - personally I'd sooner invest in a chocolate kettle manufacturer than an Electric Con-man - all these guys can think to do now is scam a bit more cash by making wildly improbable claims. Before they disappear.
Want to lay money on any of these 'hi-performance, quick recharge' BS artists being in 'business' in a couple of years? Anyone? Surely someone...?
Oh ye of little faith!
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Monday 26th January 2009 10:24 GMT david wilson
@ Michael Sanders
The 'A123' and similar 'safe lithium' cells can be recharged very quickly, somewhere in the region of 10-15 minutes, assuming you can get the power into them.
The issues with recharging a car in 10 minutes include not only having a good connection to the mains supply for the building where the car is charged, but also having a feasibly thin cable going to the car.
I assume no-one's thinking of a plug-in home charger using ultracapacitors to charge up slowly from the mains and then release all the power in 10 minutes (to avoid needing a powerful mains connection). Since the energy density of supercapacitors (Wh/kg) is many times lower than batteries, the charger would have to be many times heavier+larger than the car's battery pack.
In any case, what's the big deal with having a 10 minute charger working off a conventional outlet? Who actually needs that?
If there were recharging stations which were the equivalent of petrol (gas) stations, they could easily have large connections to the power grid.
On the other hand, a home charger is typically going to be used overnight, particularly as it would make a great deal of sense to charge vehicles overnight if possible, when electricity is typically cheaper due to lower demand.
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Monday 26th January 2009 10:24 GMT Dodgy Geezer
A few corrections...
@Stephen Hunter
"I guess you have an aitch-two station in your area and everywhere else you want to drive? Also, perhaps you've invented a new energy efficient and non greenhouse gas producing method of producing hydrogen which is also cheaper than gasoline or electricity? Oh, you'll also a volume efficient way of storing the aicht-two on board the vehicle so as to give it a range equal to current gasoline powered cars and still have some amount of trunk space.
'Cause those are the obstacles still preventing fuel-cell based cars from being produced."
So no obstacles, then? Because none of those are obstacles to a car being PRODUCED. They might be obstacles to it gaining rapid market penetration, but that's a different matter.
Incidentally, gasoline or electricity vary so much in price that you can hardly claim that hydrogen has to be cheaper than either before we can start producing. And since global warming is a lie, greenhouse gas concern is a bit overrated...
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Monday 26th January 2009 10:24 GMT Heff
wait wait I got it
the car does 257 miles an hour, right?
So it doesnt need to run for 300 minutes to cover 200 miles. It needs to run for -handwave- under an hour.
there. I solved it. I cn haz cupcake?
I cant help but feel this is deeply hacked PR gibberish. somewhere at the other end of the stream of clear BS is an engineer who said guardedly "you could top it off, to run again, in ten minutes, under the right conditions, from a domestic 220 outlet." or that ten minutes a day was the expected charge time for most commuters, or something.
the right conditions meaning the battery is still holding say 80% charge, the AESC uses charge-whilst-braking technology, etc, etc....
I cant even do the math (cant haz enuff fingurz) and this is so clearly unfeasible. the first thought that sprung to my mind was that a 10 minute charge is totally possible, provided you isolate and connect each individual cell to its own outlet; then you're only pulling;
(13a/220-240v domestic) x (cells) x ten minutes = 4 and a half billion power cords.*
-H
*+/- 5%. I strive for accuracy.
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Monday 26th January 2009 10:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Core-shell silicon nanowire anodes?
Maybe they've somehow out-distanced the researchers at Stanford and already produced some Silicon anode lithium-ion cells?
According to the researchers:
"And the wires have a high charge-storage capacity—about three times that of carbon—and retain the capacity at the 90% level over 100 charge-discharge cycles. The core-shell nanowire design enables a very fast cycle, about seven minutes, and can provide a very large amount of power."
http://www.physorg.com/news151667477.html
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Monday 26th January 2009 10:24 GMT Stewart Haywood
This is what they are talking about
They have managed to demonstrate a battery pack that will run a vehicle at 60mph for 2 hours on a 10 min charge.
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070530005396
It is a 35kWh pack that is charged wiith a 250kW charger.
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Monday 26th January 2009 10:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Capacitors - Not batteries
The technology exists to store energy in capacitors rather than the standard types of batteries that everyone seems to be assuming will be used in this vehicle.
These types of products are already on the market, power tools that can be fully charged in less than 60 seconds and last almost as long as the old types of batteries... But even if they don't last as long, a 60s charge time instead of several hours... Will win every time.
So it is entirely plausible that this type of technology could be scaled up for vehicles.
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Monday 26th January 2009 10:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
@ MrOptimistic
Perhaps you missed the bit where it said "The Aero will be driven by SSC's electric powertrain package called AESP - All-Electric Scalable Powertrain ..."
So it's ALL-ELECTRIC. Not hybrid, not some magic solution requiring a 10 minute charge as a 'catalyst'. BeSides, how do you imagine some 'super-battery' could hold a lifetime's power and then release it steadily.
"..This means that in a typical eight-hour day, the car using this technology could go 200 miles, charge for ten minutes - the time it typically takes to fill up a tank of gas - then drive 200 more miles, charge for ten minutes and continue on.”
So they're talking about the 10 minute charges replacing your current trips to the petrol/gas station.
As other people have pointed out, the filling hoze on your car is perhaps 50 times the cross-rection of the fuel line to get fuel into the tank at a far faster rate than you can empty it, the same thing applies with electricity. This kind of power is not possible to deliver from a 220V outlet (here I believe we are talking about a 30A 220V 4 pin outlet user in Canada&US for dryers).
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Monday 26th January 2009 10:26 GMT Charles Manning
There's only one way this could work
220V vs 110V does not fix the problem. If you're trying to jump the Grand Canyon then jumping 220ft vs 110 ft still doesn't qiuite make it.
There is only one way this can work: they don't charge the vehicle directly. Instead you keep a mother of all battery banks in your garage and "trickle charge" it **only** 15A. When you get home you hook up your car to the battery bank and it charges the car from the battery bank in 10 minutes using whatever number of kA required to make the sums work.
One big problem with any major switch to leccy is being able to upgrade both the grid and generation to supply peak charging demand as everyone comes home from work and plugs in. Putting a leccy car in the driveway will probably double, or thereabouts, the average household electrical usage. The leccy chargers will not be able to all run at once but will need to be centrally scheduled (like electrical hot water heating). Plug in your leccy and that 2-4 hour charge might happen immediately or it might happen later in the night. If you need to leave for work at 4am you might have a duff battery.
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Monday 26th January 2009 10:26 GMT Steven Jones
@MrOptimistic
quote:-
"Electricity could be the secondary source of power. The car would potentially be using very little of electricity for driving purposes, maybe only for headlights and for controlling the primary source of power which could be a new invention. Then it wouldn't be classified as an electric car I guess, so this option is unlikely."
I love the idea that the most likely reason this isn't powered by some new unknown-to-automotive-engineering power source is that "it wouldn't be classified as an electric" rather than the frankly incredible notion that some small specialist
I've no idea what item (2) is trying to say at all. A 10 minute top up charge with a standard domestic output might be fine if you want to do it every mile or two.
There is "thinking out of the box" and there is fantasising. There's a simple answer to this conundrum. The press release is either full of bovine excement or it has been misreported in some way. The alternative is a fantastical technical breakthrough that fundamentally breaks the laws of physics.
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Monday 26th January 2009 10:26 GMT TeeCee
Re: The update and "standards".
Now it's a standard 220V socket. Good luck with finding one of those at the side of the road then. It's a bit like saying for a conventionally fuelled car, "fuelled via a standard F1 filler hose / socket". i.e. outside certain specialist locations you might just as well have gone with a proprietary fitting (probably better suited to the task being designed for it) for all the good it does.
Anyhow, even doubling the voltage, we're still in a world of pain trying to stuff enough watt-hours down the pipe in ten minutes to run two 500bhp motors for any appreciable length of time.
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Monday 26th January 2009 13:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
Bollocks
I will say it! even if Reg wont.
a standard 110v @32 amp or a 220V@16 Amp
220*16 = 3.52 KW
For Ten Minutes:
3520*60*10 = 2.112 MegaJoules
Divide 2.1MJ by 321.87 KM (200 Miles)
= 6.561 Newtons Force Per meter..
At 100% efficiency!
This is equivilent to a weight of 666grams pushing the car for 200 miles
SO I call Bull-Shit!
There is no way an average force of 6.5N will accelerate a car and overcome air resistance for 200Miles! unless its down hill all the way. Especially when you account for inefficinecies involved in battery charging and motor driving etc.
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Monday 26th January 2009 13:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
Hmm
If this is using the honking-great-battery-in-the-garage method of recharge, it'd a) see a lot of worried firefighters b) massively increase the cost of the thing (though if you're buying a Shelby I don't think that'd be too much of a worry) and c) please wind-power advocates.
If everyone has one of these things (bear with me...) with a bit of electronics enabling power to flow back onto the grid, they could be used instead of pumped-water storage. Assume 53KWhr packs (quoted above for the Tesla's pack) per house, 25 million houses in the UK, we have 1,325 GWhr of energy storage, which is more electricity than we currently use per day (around 1050GWhr (based on 382TWhr generated in 2004). Even with the growth you'd expect from everyone driving electric cars, thats a handy reserve. Even if it isn't enough to buffer wind generation, it'd stop the use of inefficient gas turbines for unexpected demand.
Of course they could just be talking utter rubbish, which is far more likely.
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Monday 26th January 2009 13:14 GMT TJ
Enhancement of the AeroVironment Phoenix SUT Technology
As Stewart Hayward points out, it sounds very like SSC has adopted an advanced form of the system demonstrated by AeroVironment in 2007 with their Phoenix SUT (Sport Utility Truck). "The milestone demonstration by AeroVironment saw the 35kWh (kilowatt-hour) battery pack developed for use with the Phoenix fully-charged in less than ten minutes - enough to power the five-seat utility for 100 miles."
See http://www.aerovironment.com/chargingsystems.asp
and the links in the right side-bar, in particular:
http://www.gizmag.com/go/7446/
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Monday 26th January 2009 13:14 GMT Steve
Who remembers the Gravia lamp?
This must be from the same people who gave us the Gravia lamp:
"To light Gravia, the user places a mass [50 lbs] approximately 48" above the ground, that, in falling, powers a mechanism, generating electricity. Gravia harnesses the potential energy imparted by the user, rather than relying on any existing electrical infrastructure.
The design goal of Gravia is to provide light in a room (600-800 lumens roughly equal to one 40 watt incandescent lightbulb), over a period of 4 hours, using people to generate power."
The really scary thing is that this shite won 2nd place in the "Greener Gadgets Design Comp 2008"
http://www.core77.com/competitions/greenergadgets/projects/4306/
Paris must have been judging!
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Monday 26th January 2009 15:47 GMT Steve
@ StillNoCouch
"Maybe a 10 HOUR charge ?"
Some quick maths:
10h x 60 x 60 x 240 x 13 = 112MJ
200 miles @ 30mph = 6.7 hours
112MJ over 6.7 hours = 4.6kW = 6bhp. That feels about right for a constant 30mph.
Interestingly, that charge will last 150 seconds at 1000bhp, that's a powered range of about 10 miles (and perhaps 5 more for coasting down).
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Monday 26th January 2009 15:47 GMT Stuart Halliday
Battery Life
I've not heard anything about the battery life of Lithium batteries on these cars.
Lithium ion batteries last maybe 3 years tops and as the battery on one of these cars is probably 50% of the cost of the car, I can't see many people buying one when every 3 years you need to spend another $10,000 to keep it on the road.
That'll be one hell of a service bill!
P.S.
Your electric Cooker in the home runs off 30A @ 220V, so that's probably the maximum rating for a domestic charger, not 13A @ 220V. :-)
I imagine in the USA, their electric cookers run off a higher current to compensate for the lower voltage.
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Tuesday 27th January 2009 04:01 GMT Glenn
A lot of "experts" on here need to do a bit more research...
Does anyone know the amp levels on a 220v power supply - NOT a 110v domestic socket but the type that powers electric ovens etc? As this is the type of line that will power charger, not the same as the one running your laptop, plus some clever electronics that nobody on here would stand a chance of understanding. FYI - some electric water heaters run 220v 120 amps, so where does 16 amp max at 220v come from?
http://www.tanklesswaterheatersdirect.com/shop/tanklesswaterheaters/tankless-water-heaters-sortelectric.asp
Also, has anyone bothered to read up on "Nanotechnology Rechargeable Lithium Batterys" - these don't use the carbon based micro strings that current Li-on barreries use, instead they use silicon ones that are much more reliable, lasts longer, and should charge much-much faster than carbon based ones.
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/nanowire-010908.html
Also, with 100% torque @ 0 rpm (e.g. 100% efficiency - not something the US may understand when it comes to engines - "What, it does more than 3 miles to the gallon?" or "We took that 7 litre 400hp engine boss, here's our new sports car - it will do 0-60 in 8 seconds - WOW!!!") in theory this may be more possible than you think. But hey, 640k of memory was enough for everyone - right?
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