Zero-60 in 3.1 Seconds, Batteries Included

FloatsomNJetsom writes "Popular Mechanics has a very cool video and report about test-driving Hybrid Technologies' L1X-75, a battery powered, 600-hp, carbon-fiber roadster that pulls zero-60 in about 3.1 seconds, and tops out at 175 mph. Of course, there are few creature comforts inside, but that's mainly because the car's 200 mile range is meant for the track, not the road. Nonetheless, Popular Mechanics takes the car for a spin up 10th Avenue in NYC. Oh, and the car recharges via a 110 outlet. They also test-drove Ford's HySeries Edge, a hydrogen fuel-cell powered, plug-in series hybrid that, unlike the L1X-75, is unfortunately at least 10 years away from production and nearly 100 mph slower."

Not bad at all.

[Colin Smith]

How would a bike version do? Existing litre bikes can manage around 2.5 seconds... Or is gravity the limiting factor here, I have hellish problems keeping my front wheel on the ground.

 

American car companies

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, American car companies are heavily invested in the big oil companies. Which is why we have had shit for gas mileage for so long. It has taken some serious market blow-back to even get the "big" automakers interested in addressing the major shortcomings of their engine designs. Even with that, they have succeeded in getting "laws" passed to bail them out once again. Meaning they are hoping to not have to make cars with efficient gas-mileage any time in the future. As for competition, they just get more laws passed to curb any such from imports. It is easy - like stealing candy from a baby - the way America car companies play the American people.

Expect tons of these prototypes, like usual. But nothing seriously worthwhile in production, ever.

Re:I'm guessing not a family car..

[TubeSteak]

Because of it's nature, this type of car would have to be made out of very lightweight materials, and even then, panels as thin as possible. Seeing that the majority of car sells are in the sedan/family models, it wouldn't be reasonable for auto manufacturers to market and produce a car like this - that won't be very safe and crash survivable - on a large scale.

Lightweight materials (like carbon fiber) allow you to built very strong frames.
The only catch is that it is very expensive.

Price, not strength, is the reason you won't be seeing a carbon fiber sedan.

Global Warming

[Forrest Kyle]

I've heard that electricity generation produces more carbon pollution than combustion engine technology. So is this a productive application of technology?

Yeah, hydro dams do that

[SmallFurryCreature]

It is caused by the water dropping down, releases ton of carbons. As for wind power, those blades are made of carbon and they just evaporate in the sun. Nasty stuff.

When will people finally get it into their head that the move to electric/hydrogen cars means that you break the direct link between your source of energy, and the energy to put in a moving vehicle?

A wind powered car would be inconvenient, by an electric car whose electricity comes from windpower isn't.

A country like greenland could use geothermal energy to create hydrogen and ship it to the rest of the world.

But yeah, some power plants currently use carbon based fuels, so electricity causes carbon pollution. We wouldn't want to confuse you.

Re:Global Warming

[ironicsky]

That depends on how your power is generated. In Manitoba, we're mostly hydro electric, so the only bi-product is flooding behind the damn. If your in places that use coal, oil, gas, or any other carbon fuel to generate electricity then you will have this issue. But using renewable energy such as hydro electric, geothermal, nuclear, only product heat.

What is the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Every so often a story pops up like this and I find myself scratching my head. Considering that, in most areas in the world, there are speed limits of some sort, what is the point of having a car that can go 175mph or get to 60 in 3secs -if you can't ever use it-?

Even in places like Germany (i.e., Autobahn), drivers tend not to drive at top speeds, either due to being responsible/safety conscious or, lacking that, because they simply won't be able to (due to other drivers who aren't driving as fast.) Unless you're driving at a racing track for the day, I don't see many places where you could fully take advantage of the car.

It's similar to the people I see driving around London in their Ferraris. Yes, of course, Ferrari make some lovely cars, but when the speed limit is 20mph and you're constantly stuck in traffic, what is the point? I mean, seriously, my bicycle is quicker!

Brushless motors have pretty much unlimited power

[viking80]

With electric cars, the h.p. rating it typically limited to overheating the motor. As opposed to a motor with brushes, a brushless motor can take as many amp as you will as long as it does not overheat. That means a lot if you only want to accelerate for a few seconds. The same goes for the control electronics and batteries.

So while you may have 600hp to accelerate, you may only have 50hp of continuous power. This may be exactly what you want in a car, but the term may be somewhat meaningless.

Instead of a gas engines power/torque curve vs rpm, a power curve vs time would give us this information.

When?

[sithkhan]

When will we be allowed to build a sufficient number of nuclear reactors to power these vehicles? I enjoy the feel of my internal combustion engine, but for the efficiency of nuclear power for electricity, I'm ready to switch.

Free the atoms! Free the atoms!!
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Re:Make electric cars cool

[0racle]

They never sound right so it will never be cool enough.

Ford Hybrid

[drix]

Ten years from production don't mean shit when your company is three years from oblivion.

Re:MSRP?

[bazorg]

Sometimes conquering a specific 5% of total users means selling way more than 5% of the total market value. This is very clear on the beer market, I'm not sure about the automotive business. What I do know is that F1 racing has an impact on what may turn up on production cars some years later. If a company delivers an electric car that has extra performance compared to the usual suspects in the high-performance segment: Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini, BMW... they have a chance to get the attention of the people who are more willing to invest in bringing the tech to other market segments. Besides, all high performance vehicles put together might have a larger impact on emissions than a lot of regular cars. Selling these cars for more than what a house costs may be a first step in a desirable direction.

Re:I don't get it.

[Wolfier]

First, because a lot of people also want to drive their cars on the tracks.

Second, people who want a stable, safe, efficient vehecle doesn't mean they'll also want it to be slow.

Lastly, just because you don't want to do a 3.5 second 0-60 to reach 175, doesn't mean that "noone" wants to. Open you eyes.

Re:I'm guessing not a family car..

[thrillseeker]

there's no reason light cars can't be safe - people regularly walk away from 150mph crashes in F1 cars.

We can't even get people to wear seat belts and observe traffic laws - what are the odds we can get them to spend years developing high speed driving skills, to wear nomex garmets, full-face helmets, neck braces, undergarmet cooling systems, four point harnesses - and not have head-on collisions - and be willing to spend the several hundred thousand dollars for the carbon fiber bodies that F1 cars are using?

Re:American car companies are tanking

[zogger]

The big three (I will talk primarily US) are tanking and fast precisely because they never got it on mileage and reliability until the japanese had a solid decade or more advances on them. And for the most part they still haven't caught up. They obviously threw away that market because they didn't give a crap, and are mostly retarded to boot.

I used to have a 74 dart, held six adults, roomy trunk, I tried it once it would actually do 110 mph with the six banger in it, and it got around 25 miles per gallon, with just a fraction of the plumbing and electrical nightmare modern engines are.

Now it is 2007, what do you see? See much diff with US cars other than they cost huge gobs more, about impossible for the average joe to work on them much, and get maybe just a smidgen better mileage, or in some cases worse or just static, no improvements? I'm just talking performance and mileage now, not radar gps equipped DVD playing sensurround airbags stuff, just from the transportation angle, which is primarily what cars are supposed to be anyway. It's like about zilch progress near as I can see.

Nope, the big three US car makers been stepping on their dicks for a LONG time now. On purpose or just top heavy retarded management, no idea (my guess is equal amounts of both, and yep, oil is a profitable commodity, you sell a lot more at 10-25 mpg than at 45-65 mpg), but the results are there to see.

I'll tell you another reason, the top engineers go into racing where it is fun, change can go fast and is driven by engineering, they get paid pretty darn good and are held in high esteem. They are *valued* folks. In the car industry, engineers are way down the list of "attaboys" and paycheck compared to the bloated marketing and managing side, and those folks get "driven" by the vultures who demand ever increasing profits but have mostly no clue about quality. A first year rookie car dealer salesman makes more than an engineer working for years. And I don't want to hear that it's all the unions fault either, they build what they are told to build, they have zero say in how things go in that direction.

I was in the UAW in the 60s,and you could clearly see this coming, at least I could. Of course back then it was the horsepower wars,that mostly blinded folks and oil by the barrel was very cheap as well, but anyone who stopped and extrapolated a few decades out could see gas would get dear eventually and that reliability long range would keep a car company running in the red. Detroit and most of their management and "analysts" missed both of those obvious calls. And they are so obvious, that yes, you might tend to think there was some action on the side to make it that way on purpose, lose some in one industry, gain a lot more in another.

Sort of like "new and improved" bloated operating systems sell new computers, even though the old ones aren't "broken" or "worn out". One hand washes the other with lotsa cash it appears.

Heh, a reverse from slashdot normal computer to car analogy!

Re:I'm guessing not a family car..

[Anonymous Coward]

and if you put millions of these cars on the streets, people would stop looking for cops and slamming on their brakes causing multi-car pile ups, and start actually DRIVING and looking out for other cars.

Speed n Cars don't kill people, Stupid fucking drivers that don't pay attention to other drivers kill people. (and drunk drivers)

Re:When?

[AJWM]

did you ever think how much pollution and destruction comes about and is emitted from the mining all of that uranium?

Very little, even in absolute terms (and especially in relative terms). I'm no mining engineer but I've toured uranium mines and yellowcake processing facilities -- no real difference than any other hardrock mine, and a lot cleaner that e.g. the smelters used to burn the sulphur out of copper ores.

Recall that a uranium fuel pellet the size of your thumb can provide the energy equivalent of a couple of trainloads of coal. (Heck, strictly speaking the trace thorium in that coal can provide more energy than burning the carbon in it.)

Re:Global Warming

[Zobeid]

You have heard wrong. Your typical gasoline engine is about 20% efficient at turning chemical energy into motion. Your electric motor is around 90% efficient. That means, if you work through all the maths from start to finish, that the electric car always produces less pollution per mile driven as compared with the gasoline car.

If all your electrical power comes from coal-fired plants, that's the dirtiest source of electricity we have, and the electric car still comes out slightly ahead on pollution. When you bring in other sources of any energy -- any other sources -- the numbers get better. You can burn natural gas, or run nuclear plants, you can do wind, solar, geothermal, hydro power, and your cars don't have to change.

And here's another fun fact. . . Many electrical power plants in the USA produce excess energy at night, when demand is low. It's not practical to shut the plants down and "cold start" them again the next morning, so they sit idling and producing power that is wasted. If we charged electric cars at night during that time, we could power tens of millions of them without having to build a single new generating plant.

Re:electric

[hey!]

Why not convert our cars into gigantic slot cars while we're on the Interstate? Our electricity use would be metered and read off when we take the exit using the same technology used in wireless toll passes.

Actually, I'd go farther and have autopilot too, so the cars can draft on each other safely. But then you have to convince people that an automatic system that occasionally fails and kills people is better than a manual system where you're only as safe as the worst driver on the road and which routinely kills people.

Re:What is the point?

[hey!]

The point is that people's perceptions of electric vehicles is that they have to be glorified golf carts.

Now I happen to think there's room in the transportation world for glorified golf carts that are capable of typical commuting trips. But not everyone agrees with me.

So you have to educate people that the electric drive trains have a variety of possibilities.