OK, good, that way I can buy two of 'em for a cool mil.

 

Sorry, but what we need is a practical electric car that people actually can afford to buy. I couldn't care less about someone making an electric car with super performance that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Might as well not make these, as far as I'm concerned. A few millionaires will drive around in them and that's it. No tangible impact on the world, nor even a sliver of hope of having any such impact.

We need more cars like the Zap Xebra. Actually what we need is to relax the BS safety standards so that NEVs don't have to be artificially castrated and forced to run at 25 MPH when they are physically capable of going 40+. An NEV is an utterly useless POS if it can't go at least 30 to be legal on a 40 MPH road, and preferably actually do 35 or 40 so it can stay with the traffic.

The difference in speed between 25 and 40 MPH is not going to be a serious danger, in fact it would actually be safer on roads with higher speed limits. Probably the biggest danger in an electric car that can only travel at relatively low speeds is being hit by someone else.

But anyway we're getting off topic here. The problem with this car is it goes 0-60 in like 5 seconds, and your bank account goes from $500K to bankrupt in just as little time.

 

For a practical, family sized electric car to be cheap, it really needs to be a plug-in hybrid. This way you can get by with a small battery (say, 30 mile range rather than 300 mile range). When you run out of battery charge, a small backup gasoline engine fires up to take over for longer trips.

The big auto companies claim that having two powerplants like this is economically unfeasible, but I don't agree.

For a 30 mile range, you'd need about 8 kWh of battery storage. With today's lithium-ion 18650s (as used in the Tesla), that would weigh 40 kg, consist of 900 individual cells and cost (at $3 per cell) $2,700 for the battery alone.

That obviously adds a lot to the sticker price of the car, but remember, the ICE can be downsized massively, from, say, a 2 litre engine to a three cylinder 660 cc unit (there are masses of these to choose from in Japan) while keeping acceleration the same or better. That saves a lot of money. Then there's no gearbox to worry about, so more money saved there. Soon, it adds up to about $2k in savings.

So a plug-in hybrid powertrain can be developed today to (a) fit entirely within the space normally filled today with a large gasoline engine and transmision and (b) come out at a cost differential of maybe $2k over a base gasoline-only vehicle.

The EVs are coming, but it will be via the Plug-in hybrid first.

 

I agree that plug-in hybrids will be first. I still can't get very excited over this Tesla thing though. I guess it's a nice proof of concept, but then again, what exactly is it proving?

Can you really get Li-ION batteries that cheaply? I thought they were quite a bit more expensive than that. Most EV conversions today use lead acid because of their cheapness, but Li-ION is way better in terms of weight.

What sort of 3 cylinder engines are available in Japan? It seems like the only car in the US to use a 3 cylinder engine in recent years was the Geo/Chevy Metro and of course the Insight. Are there a lot of smaller engine cars in Japan, maybe due to higher gas prices?

 

They are VASTLY expensive if you go to a battery manufacturer and ask for big, bespoke lithium-ion cells for an EV project. Figure on $2000 to $3000 per kWh.

But go to the mature end of the market, 18650 cells are the AA-size batteries used to make up all digital camera, laptop, camcorder batteries etc. The market for this established format is fiercely competitive and prices are falling year on year. You can buy a 9 Wh cell for $3, which is about $330 per kWh, a tenth the price that most car manufacturers complain lithium-ion is "meant" to cost.

This is why AC-propulsion, Tesla and Wrightspeed all use 18650s to build up their large LiIon battery packs. Lithium is not that expensive!

Japan has a tax system that allows so called "micro-cars" many privelidges. Some rules relate to maximum length and width etc but one of the rules is that they may not exceed 660 cc in engine capacity. These are hugely popular in Japan (millions of them on the roads), available from all of the big domestic manufacturers and some of them are amazingly fast for their engine-size. The Honda Beat and Suzuki Capuccino in particular are little gems.

 

Bwilson or Double Trinity, or Hot Georgia or Go Navy (if you read this): maybe one of y'all technical types can help me out with a question:

My friend said screw Tesla, 'cause they're all about going fast and the point should be about efficiency. So I asked him how the potential speed of the car effects the efficiency. I mean, it's not an ICE... so if I step on the "gas" and tell it to use 20KW watts, what does it matter if the engine is a 60KW engine barely capable of moving the car or a 500KW engine able to propel it from 1-60 in under 4 seconds?

He responded with this:

But this still doesn't really tell me why or how much efficiency is lost.

And I responded, doesn't the "transmission" vary the "load" so it falls within certain parameters?

 

http://www.wired.com/news/wiredmag/0,71414-0.html

http://blog.wired.com/teslacar/index.album?i=0

 

Yes and no. As a general rule, you want to maximize efficiency and generally that is achieved by lower power levels but it ain't necessairly so especially in the case of variable speed, permanent magnet motors. It is a question of the inverter, controller and motor design.

But there are some losses that can't be avoided:

- air drag which is proportional to the square of the velocity
- friction which tends to increase in a slowly increasing, linear fashion except for brakes
- braking losses which even with regenerative braking will exist
- I**2 current losses that are proportional to the square of the current

Really it is a question of design and the technologies used to implement the vehicle. Super conductor magnets, pressure lubrication, magnetic bearings, super-cooled electronics, higher voltages, boundry layer and aerodynamics and careful design and testing could make it a very efficient vehicle. But really, we need a test article to find out.

Bob Wilson

 

Hey, it's a cool car. As long as people associate electric cars with things like that Zap Xebra, electric cars will never get off the ground. I think Tesla is taking a fine approach to prove electric is cool. Cars have always been more about a viceral response than logic, and a car's affect can be far more reaching than just to the clientele that can afford it. Everybody knows Porsche, few can buy it. Good luck to Tesla. I hope they do very well.

 

Actually, by using a larger, higher power rated motor they can get BETTER efficiency than using a smaller motor. It's the exact opposite of what you expect with a gasoline engine. So their approach is more efficient, not less (at least when you drive it sensibly! ).