I had an interesting talk with a guy who had recently bought an Ro80 last summer when I was in Switzerland. He'd owned it for about 18months and it was a late 1975 model with only around 60000kms on it. It was immaculate, both body and engine. ISTR that not only was the engine an issue but they could develop terminal tinworm very quickly too.
Still for a 56 year old car design, they still look fresh and modern now. People say they must have looked amazingly modern at the time. Well they did, a friend's dad had one when I was still in junior school and it was truly space aged in looks.
Toyota hybrids have been driven by the electric motor ?only for yonks. The IC engine just runs the generator. Not sure if the generator/alternator is combined with the starter motor. Neighbours 19-reg Corolla starts and stops its petrol engine without any internal noise. All you see is a change to the coloured arrows on the display showing which way the electrons are flowing.
Torque may appear to be "free", but you need to have the motors on a cooling system, the battery pack has to be lithium cobalt to provide the current for that torque, big motors are heavier, the reduction gear needs to be made bigger (to withstand the peak torque). There are already comments that the Hummer has too high a curb weight for safety. And at some point, there are going to have to be rules about car design, to rein this trend in. Heavier vehicles beat up roads, and there is never enough money for roads maintenance.
A minimum requirement for a vehicle, is it must have the horsepower to counter wind losses at highway speed. And it needs a level of acceleration, to merge into traffic on highway ramps.
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"Golf carts for the people", need to be dialed down a notch.
And the vehicle styling is still too important compared to aerodynamic considerations. There's an insistence that BEV vehicles have to look like their ICE counterparts, so everything has to "look like a brick, with snarling teeth on the front". At least some companies are getting it, by chopping a few feet off the height of some of their vehicles. Between first appearance, and the production version, the Tesla Semi lost some height. And some Ford van, also got a bit of a shave on height as well, at least, for one version of it.
When we make inefficient cars, it comes out of our electrical grid, and it's not hard to see this is not going to work in any case. There's no movement in the grid, to preparing for BEVs.
So it is more than just making cars at the right price, so people can afford them. There are already a few cars like that. It's also making a fleet that is efficient enough, that the electrical grid can take it.
What you want is maximum torque _at the wheels_. This is achieved by having maximum power at the engine end of the gearbox.
It matters nothing whether the engine is putting out 100ft-lbs at 2000 RPM, or 50ft-lbs at 4000RPM. By the time it's been through the gearbox the result is the same.
Engine torque is, and has always been, an irrelevance.
It is however a proxy for width of the power band. Which does matter.
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