It is clear you did not read the links - well properly. 12 years ago a Prius prototype had supercapacitors and they could store enough energy to give 10 standing racing starts 0-60 on electric motor only. They went to batteries only in the released model. That was around 12 to 15 years ago. They have improved greatly since. Look at the Shanghai bus. I posted the text.
You must learn to read. What you don't understand get back.
Every time Drivel calls someone a "plantpot" I get this image in my mind of little Weed between Bill & Ben. Must be having a Reggie Perin moment
IME generalisations are usually not very general.
are you saying there wasnt loads of jap made tat on the market in the
70s?NT
are you saying there wasnt loads of jap made tat on the market in the
70s?We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Doctor Drivel" saying something like:
Heh. These have been waffled about for years on the 'net. If the Shanghai and District Number 42 Bus and Chow Mein service actually have it working I'd be impressed. So far, it's all been hot air and vapourware, designed to relieve punters from their excess money.
The route number is given. You must now be impressed.
Doctor Drivel coughed up some electrons that declared:
In message , Doctor Drivel writes
Including the bit about low energy density - 20% of current battery technology
Never mind - it's a nice buzzword for you to impress the nurses with
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Tim S saying something like:
A hangover from when they were actually pretty crappy. By the 70s I had bought, along with Snap-On, some Kamasa tools, which I still use. Ironically, the later (90s onwards) Kamasa aren't as good.
Exactly. It is a worthless comment.
Maxie, have you been on the piss again?
Yup. I'd bet on it. But these makers still major on the terrific performance and give the range in the same breath. Which are radically different.
It's a 'concept' which has been around for a long long time. The holy grail really.
I've heard that one before...
I think you are not being quite fair or realistic.
Two things make the BEV a proposition these days, when it wasn't before.
One is the advanced electronics we can use to get the efficiency out of the controllers and so on, and the other is the lithium in the batteries.
Its always been possible to develop automotive batteries but with cheap fuel, there was no commercial incentive. Its been the laptop palmtop and mobile phone that has driven LIPO development.
But with energy at the price levels we have seen, BEV's suddenly make sense commercially, as well as ecologically.
If you think about it, there is a potential for the car battery business to be an industry on the scale of the oil industry. Not as big, but getting on that way.
Once Ford, GM and Chrysler are in Chapter 11, that should clear the dead wood out..
There are HUGE returns to be made from the company that does indeed develop and patent the battery of the future.
And world economic conditions are actually highly favourable.
The batteries exist, but they are expensive and fragile. They can be made safer by adjusting the chemistry, and they can be made cheaper by going into serious volume production. There is probably less in an electric motor, controller and battery (in labour content`) than an IC car power train.
Both of which are only small advances on the scale of things.
Err - you're assuming electricity will be cheap. My bet is as fossil fuels become rarer electricity costs will rise in step. The investment required to produce electricity from non fossil sources will require vast investment - and that can only be recovered in one way.
Of course the potential exists. If only people would stop talking crap about battery powered cars with the same range and performance as we're used to.
All of those are spending billions on research.
As I said - the holy grail.
There are always 'principles' that exist waiting only for some way of making production a reality. Far more than ever see the light of day.
No. Lithium batteries are about 3 times lighter than NiCd, and about half the weight of NiMh.
And if regenerative braking nets you 25% more miles, you are up to a potential improvement in power and range for a given weight of maybe 300%.
If that is a small advance, Id like to know what a big one is..
We've been over this time and again. Discounting windmills, the actual lifetime cost of a nuclear unit of electricity is around 3p. Even if sold at 5p...
With 50Kwh being about the same sort of energy as around 50 liters of fuel *burned in an engine*, you have a relative fuel cost of nuclear around £2.50 a half tank, or road diesel around £50.
Now thats not the whole story, because the battery costs, has a limited lifetime, and takes energy to make, but it gives some idea..
Spending money is not directl correlated wit results. They are not spending billions on electrc cars anyway. They are spending billions on ways to leverage the technology they know. Liquid fuel cars.
Remember that a BEV makes about 85% of all investment in existing car plant totally redundant. Its cheaper to start from scratch. Tesla have done more than anyone else with very little investment.
Not really. There are theoretical limits on lithium batteries: they will never have the range of a fuel car but they will be good *enough*, and the crossover point at which they become cheaper to run overall than IC cars is by my crude estimation, a couple of years away.
But everythig already exists.
Its like sitting there in 1975 saying 'well we have these micro chips, and Ram chips and CMOS chips, in principle we could probably make a computer for less than £100 using a TV as monitor in two years time' and having people like you scoff at the very idea...
Technological progrss happens because a lot of small things come together at a certan pont in time.
If te eleisabethans had had IC engines, which were probably withing their abilities to amke, they could have probably constructed an aircraft.
Frank Whittles gas turbine engine was practical at inception in the late
20's; what it needed was advances in metallurgy.You an take a 1925 Rolls Royce engine, dynamically balance it, and double its power output.
Electric cars have been here since the last century. All they needed as a decent battery.And for liquid fuel costs to rise substantially above electricity.
Today, those conditions exist.
Which, as a proportion of a fully laden vehicle, is?
You've been supping at the dribble font. Regenerative braking may well help in town driving but will make little difference for motorway use.
As I said you're taking a possibly worst case scenario and translating it into an average.
Oh NO, the idiots are at it again. Such bozos. 75% of the energy in a fuel tank is wasted, Only 5% of the energy, and less, in a battery is wasted. Go figure. Fully laden? What the hell is the plantpot on about? Lunatics!!!
The Natural Philosopher coughed up some electrons that declared:
And the government would start trying to find a way to colour electrons pink. Or put a tax on such car batteries to make up for the lost duty on liquid fuels.
:-O
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