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Better yet, will it exist by their initial launch date?
Better yet, when will 200 miles on 10 minutes of 120 volts be possible?
ROFL…you know how many amps that would take? You can’t put 3 hours of (high) energy through a wire the size of your finger in 10 minutes. Sorry. NEXT!
Man I must have had really, really shitty physics/EE teachers/professors.
I’m with golf4me in calling some serious bullsh*t. Even with some type of supercapacitor it would take longer than that to get sufficient charge to store that much energy. I’m sure ignoramuses will fall for it, though, which is no doubt why they are blatanly lying.
Hahaha. No way. (120 volts) * (15 amperes) * (10 minutes) = 1,080,000 joules. A single gallon of gas has 132,000,000 joules.
The highest-current household 120V circuit I’ve seen is 30-amp service. Perhaps I’m oversimplifying, but it seems that the maximum amount of amp-hours one could possibly transfer in 10 minutes is 30A * 10 min * (1 hr / 60 min) = 5 amp-hours. By way of comparison, a typical laptop battery might hold 4000mAh which is 4 amp-hours. Something just doesn’t compute.
Did someone just invent a room temperature superconductor?
Poor Ol’ Shelby must really need the money. His name has been appearing on everything but animal crackers for the last decade or so.
Even with some type of supercapacitor… Ah, but you’re forgetting about the flux capacitor. A side benefit is that if you get it up to 80 mph it’s capable of time travel. Even in the movie, didn’t they need a nuclear reactor – a least until they got hold of the “Mr. Fusion” thing.
There used to be a great paper on how to “evaluate claims for electric vehicles, hybrids, fuel cells, and low-emissions vehicles” on the http://acpropulsion.com web site (the folks who made the motor/controller/charger for the GM EV-1 and for the Tesla as well as many other serious electric vehicles. Unfortunately, they have revamped their web site and I can’t find the paper (used to be with a collection of articles under the “Resources” heading.
OK, I found a version on the wayback machine at http://web.archive.org/web/20051113031610/www.acpropulsion.com/PDF+files/Ques_env_vehicles.pdf
Note that the white paper is over ten years old, yet it is the most coherent presentation of how to evaluate claims that I have found.
Note to editors: might be worth following up with these folks . . . . Maybe TTAC could use (or derive from) some of the criteria identified in this piece.
Reminds me of the clown that claimed to get 110 mpg in his carbureted 400 horsepower 5.0 ’87 mustang. All the media ran with the story and didn’t stop to figure out that it wasn’t physically possible.
http://videos.streetfire.net/video/100-MPG-Muscle-Car_169809.htm
All the household chargers I’ve seen so far are 240V, so maybe it uses the dryer hook-up in your garage.
Nice barn find. Better than that bugatti thing. Apparently the flux capacitor has been found! Without Michael J. Fox’s help.
746watts in one horsepower and maybe 1500w out of a regular plug. Load up 2 HP for ten minutes and get hundreds back for hours. Magic.
Heh this is pretty ridiculous, they should have at least done the math so they look half way serious like EEStor.
EEstor claims their non existent ultra cap would take 3500v at 300A for 3 minutes to charge. The math works out on that to get the 52kwh cap charged, assuming zero resistance in the cap/charging circuit (sort of impossible but I digress). FYI, the most kwh I have ever used in my home in a single day has been 35. Assuming I had to charge the cap every second day or half charge every day, my bill would more than double or even triple.
Another way to look at it, at current prices that’s about $7 (CAD) per charge. Lets say my current car gets 30mpg and gas is $3/gal, it costs me $15 to go 150 miles. (incidentally the battery in the Tesla is also this size so the numbers work for that too)
Assuming the car only requires one cap and the resulting car only cost as much as my current one and said car gets about 150 miles on a charge and you’re willing to put up with the range limitation. I guess that would be worth it. Of course the reality is this is all in theory, EEstor hasn’t built a cap or a charger that anyone has actually seen. The only car so far with these specs is over $100,000 and takes at least 4 hours to charge.
One with a cap would take a very expensive electrical service hookup, one that would soon require a significant upgrade in the electric grid if it became popular, which I’m sure would cause electricity prices to sky rocket, you can forget those off peak rates some of you enjoy now. Your electricity is probably supplied by a company with a complete monopoly in your area with token government regulation, well you can see where this is going. Suddenly you’re laughing as you drive by gas stations and crying as it costs you $1.50 to microwave a burrito when you get home, and you have no recourse, we can all find ways use less gas, do you think you could use less electricity?
Anyway, that’s my little rant on capacitor based EVs as the future of transportation. My money is on hydrogen as the next energy storage medium, but honestly hope I’m dead by the time we can’t burn gas anymore.
A few more numbers, to add to those people have already given in their comments.
A fantastic mileage figure today for a state-of-the-art electric car would be 5 miles per kilowatt hour. So to go the 150 to 200 miles they claim as range, you would need at least 30 to 40 kilowatt hours of electricity stored in your battery.
If you are limited to 110 volts and 10 minutes, to get 30 kilowatt hours of electricity into the battery you would need to use over 1,600 amps. For 40 kilowatt hours, over 2,000 amps. Afraid not.
Tesla says that for its Roadster’s 200+ mile range you need to charge its 53 kilowatt hour battery for 37 hours if you use 110 volt power. That works out to about 13 amps. Tesla claims that a specially wired 220 volt 80 amp home charger can charge the Roadster in 3.5 hours. That’s about the limit for home power.
It is possible to charge an electric car’s battery in 10 minutes. Phoenix Motorcars has demonstrated that. You need to use high voltages and/or high currents, though, and those require a special power line and a lot of circuitry. Definitely not a home project.
Shelby SuperCars was founded by Jerod Shelby, who is no relation to Carroll Shelby.
I was talking to a high-powered silicon valley CEO a few months ago, and he posits that green technology is the next big bubble.
This is exact proof of his claim. 10 minutes? Complete horseshit.
But does it fly? Even with the greater efficiency of EV, this doesn’t compute.
To bring this up again. Lutz has repeatedly sold the Volt as a tool towards energy independence for the USA. Which is just as ridiculous as the claims for this vehicle. To move anything across a given distance requires work, the amount of work required is related to mass and friction, and it doesn’t really matter whether some of the energy used to generate work comes from gasoline or the electricity grid, as long as the energy that enters into the distribution net (gas, electricity, hot air) comes from abroad.
It is only when you significantly reduce the overall dependency upon energy from abroad that you can speak of having achieved greater energy independence viz foreign sources.
Lutz could have spent more time thinking of the other end of the equation: the amount of mass to be moved, and the work generated by wasteful and oversized powerplants. If he had reduced those through seeking efficiencies, the US would now be well on its way towards energy independence.
But then basic physics, as exemplified by this polyanna vehicle, is not a requirement in automotive management or marketing.
bluecon:
“746watts in one horsepower and maybe 1500w out of a regular plug. Load up 2 HP for ten minutes and get hundreds back for hours. Magic.”
Succinct, and (essentially) correct.
A shame that people (Edit: i,e., The Shelby folks) distort the truth like that and give detracters new ammo – EV’s have a future, but they’re not the answer of every transportation question.
The big thing is that battery EV’s can recover braking energy – thus are thermodynamically more efficient. Supercapacitors are ideal for storing this recovered energy more efficiently, as batteries introduce hystereis losses due to their “slow” chemistry. A proper combination of batteries/supercaps could result in a very impressive efficiency/performance combo which many people would find useable.
As to the other use of supercapacitors: Introduce charge from 110V power over hours of time to a pack in the garage, then connect them to EV with high VA cable – a very quick charge would be possible (but only at a theoretical max of 50% of capacity, due to “balancing”.
Not for Grandma, or the faint of heart, however, ad any electrical fault in the high voltage/current setup would really start a fireworks show (shh! Don’t spread that around!)
IN the town that I live in, we had a huge influx of McMansions over the last several years. Until recently, the electric utility had a tough time keeping up with the massive amount of power consumed by the air conditioning systems. Power failures on hot days were almost guaranteed. I can only imagine what will happen when more plug-in electrics arrive.
When you talk about high voltage, high current power, you can’t forget the electro-magnetic forces. It isn’t just about the flow of electrons. Get close enough and you better not be wearing or carrying anything that can be magnetically attracted. 440V industrial d boxes are scary things. I don’t think Joe Average is ready for these any more than the power grid can support them in quantity.
findude : There used to be a great paper on how to “evaluate claims for electric vehicles, hybrids, fuel cells, and low-emissions vehicles”…
Thanks for posting this, it is a concise piece of writing obviously composed by an experienced engineer. Even the title, “Questions that Should be Frequently Asked”, gets right to the point.
I’d love to see Tesla, et al. answer these questions about their own vehicles. Methinks many an investor would think twice after reading the replies!
I think you are all missing the point here. They never said that you could charge this at home in 10 min….all they said is….given the right facilities, the car CAN be charged in 10 min. In other words, the car has that capability. If you are one on the few who can afford one these, I’m sure the necessary ‘facilities’ can also be obtained. As for the rest of us…we are stuck with the overnight charge…assuming you could ever afford the car in the first place…