400hp Electric Supercar? Ok

[TwoJ's]

Awesome. I can't wait until battery technology catches up and all-electric cars will be realistic.

My only problem with this car is the way it is set up; it needs four motors, not two. Electric motors are over 95% efficient, and if they simply have one motor for the front and one for the back wheels, they are losing a significant amount of power through gearing. In the future electric cars will have a brushless DC motor for each wheel, and a controller than can distribute power near-perfectly. Couple that with regen and you've got yourself one awesome car.

[Nic01101011]

looks outrageous - as a super car should. i like it

[Wiglaf]

Awesome. I can't wait until battery technology catches up and all-electric cars will be realistic.

My only problem with this car is the way it is set up; it needs four motors, not two. Electric motors are over 95% efficient, and if they simply have one motor for the front and one for the back wheels, they are losing a significant amount of power through gearing. In the future electric cars will have a brushless DC motor for each wheel, and a controller than can distribute power near-perfectly. Couple that with regen and you've got yourself one awesome car.

not really, since they can simply use a 9:1 diff and dump the transmission entirely. you gain at least 5~10% of otherwise lost power there. really you only need one motor at the back, adding more just adds more torque.

[TwoJ's]

Well, you wouldn't need a transmission at all anyways, right? I'm relatively inexperienced with this, but why would you need to gear an electric motor down? From my power systems class I remember much about stepper motors and generators, but very little about DC motors.

[Wiglaf]

I tried to calculate the feel of the car's M20 to what tesla's electric setup would feel like. the motor revs to 12k so a gear reduction was in order to get the best acceleration for a reasonable top speed (built into differential).
The grey lumps are wheel torque in each gear for M20, the blue lines are the AC motor. The thicker line is the single speed (no transmission).
As you can see, the torque it makes in the single-speed line is higher than M20 in 2nd gear, and stays higher for other gears up through 115MPH.
The light grey shading (M20T) is from the turbo car, not really a fair comparison but gives me an idea what things feel like when looking at it. I was considering adding a second electric motor which should match it to turbo levels better.

[learningcurve86]

interested in how it does in the race... i'll read the article at lunch... will they do battery swaps? recharge is out of the question (i assume...)

[iamsam]

wow that actually looks AWESOME. There definitely could be a future in this that i would approve of. I always feared a future dominated by smarts, priuses, geo metros, etc, not badass looking things like this.

[guibo09]

interested in how it does in the race... i'll read the article at lunch... will they do battery swaps? recharge is out of the question (i assume...)

i think this could be awesome for electric car development. they should allow battery swap with only two packs. the second pack has to recharge quick enough to be ready for the next pit stop.

improving battery weight and charging speed will be essential and they also happen to be the electric car's biggest problems.

[s0urce]

^I think it's great to see electric cars going into the circuit. This just means electric car technology will rapidly increase. Think about all of the technology available on today's showroom car simply because of formula 1.