Electric Race Car

This is an engineering exercise, and not ground breaking in any way.

This car is specialized for short runs and will probably be comparable to gas powered race cars which can spin all wheels, until the batteries go flat. The batteries look liie common lead acids types. The vehicle has the advantage of high torwue at zero rpm and can climb hills that way, but so can a gas car with a torque converter.

All things will flow from better battereis that are capable of storing as much energy as gasoline...sadly, thet will never happen as gasoline uses ambient oxygen in the air and batteries are layered devices. In a similar vein super capacitors will never equal batteries.

Aurizon, don't forget about the amazing advances going on at this moment into fuel cell research...

A touch a methane power maybe?

yes, fuel cells accompanied by batteries or supr capacitors look worthwhile for the future.

Right now no fuel cell small enough to put on a small car like that will generate that high current for a short period. That sports car is a special purposes short endurance machine. A smaller fuel cell that charges a battery with a capacitor for start up acceleration peak would work for a passenger car or small delivery van. This would allow the fuel cell to be sized for average loads. This is similar to hybrids with a diesel and a battery plus capacitors that are on the market today(minus the capacitor...not quite there yet).

I think this fuel based hybrid will be the early winner, followed by the same thing with an ethanol fuel cell because they are now scaling up lab research into volume production of alcohol from biomass cellulose.

They can do the same with long haul trucks, but some trucks will be different for the high hills in the mountains that will need bigger batteries for the long grades.

We have 200 years of diminshing oil/coal reserves and the price increases as we go that route will spur these developments.

Isn't there being nothing ground breaking in it the point PlbMak was trying to make. Producing something like this on a shoe string budget in a shed may not be that impressive. however imagine what could be done. Each year the current vehicle manufacturers each spend hundreds of millions of dollars engineering and tooling up for what turns out to be nothing more than cosmetic changes. If just one manufacturer spent half the amount on developing an electric car imagine what could be achieved..

It's high time hyper conservative management got their collective fingers out of a certain orifice and invested in some new technology.

Hi Masu, that's the point exactly! When you look at for, example, Mercedes Benz R&D budget, which easily runs into the millions, and how fast technology advances generally, you have to assume that no real money is going into this field at this time.

I suggested to IEEE several years ago that they sponsor a race series along the lines of NASCAR to promote electric racing. Offer substantial prizes, set rules etc. The early races could be short range increasing each year untill the racers actually caused some real research. All it would take is some publicity on the major networks to get it moving. Then we would see some progress. I believe this would cause electrical manufacturers (GE? Westinghouse? ABB?) to become involved and the "petrol heads" to remove their heads from that orrifice and start paying attention to the declining resources their sport depends on.

I think its an excellent idea. It would be best to design the races so they showed off the acceleration and breaking that you can get from an electric motor. There are only a couple of high performance street legal electric cars out there at the moment, one is the Tesla and I cant remember what the other is called. Both however can beat just about anything out there to 100Km/Hr and can break even better.