Good thread
Original posts can be found here for those in the dark (sorry again to Jase for the thread rape) -
http://www.clio197.net/forum/showthread.php?p=37756#post37756
To continue with Graeme's post...
If you could get the same performance at the same cost from an electric car as a petrol why wouldnt you buy one? Reason being you cant.
Take the Tesla Roadster for example, which claims to have the same performance as the Lotus Elise ... very cool, have you seen the cost of it? Starting price of £86,950.
Performance is retrospective. Look at the first cars when the IC engine was still in its infancy. There were no 200mph+ supercars, only motor carriages that could muster walking pace.
The technology needs time to be developed.
Yes the Tesla although mega cool is mega expensive. Again, the original motor cars were just for the rich and well-to-do and were used as a play thing, same as for passenger flights, once upon a time you spent a poor mans yearly wages for a 1 hour flight, now we get pissed off if we have to pay 3quid for earbuds on a skanky RyanAir crate to Magaluf.
Technology and R&D need to get their teeth into it (as Renault are doing) and it will become an affordable reality... with performance
On another note, why do all these electric cars need to run on battery life like its a damn mobile phone?? Once the car starts moving cant they make it charge off the momentum of the wheels turning ??
I appreciate your saying "why dont you fit a generator to each wheel" and as said wheel turns, it turns the generator and makes electricity.
In the perfect world yes...
But sadly Physics is a cruel mistress. As its far less efficient to generate electricity than it is to use it in an electric motor to create motion.
A generator of course will apply a load. So a motor turning a wheel with a continual generator attached, you would be loosing some of the energy that could be providing performance and range.
Yes you would get some energy back, but will be very little concidering the losses. If we could do it the other way round, that would be perpetuation, which is the holy grail... but ultimately impossible!
However, this is where Regenerative Braking comes into play.
Back up one step in a sense. But this time we have an electric car where 2 or maybe all 4 wheels are driven by an electric motor. However each motor also has the underpinnings of a generator built in.
When accelerating, or at constant speed, the generation elements are completely shut down and sustaining minimal (if at all any) load on an any of the axles. The motor elements are purely turning the wheels from electricity stroed in batterys.
However, when you come off the accelerator and start to decelerate or indeed brake, then the generation elements come into play.
So a back to school simple science of kinetic (stored) energy. The car continues to travel using this kinetic energy to now turn the generators on the axles which in turn create some electricity and replenish the batterys. OK its never going to do a full charge, but it may add a percentage to the range.
Believe it or not, but electric trams have been using this for years! When they decelerate they pump the converted energy back into the national grid through the overhead lines. Also some buses and trucks have been using it for a while.
