You would have to migrate the industry over to carbon fibre body work or some other technology like aerogel if thats even possible, to get the size of a hummer or larger. Smaller cars = fuel efficient in peoples minds, so the industry drops the duracells into a small econo box , and the salesman points the starry eyed to the new wave of the future for automobiles.
Its marketing
Declan
I dunno, yuppie with a wallet. Looks like the same crowd to me. If if’s not economical then it’s going to be purchased by a rich tree hugger.
Or a sports car nut who wants to own the highest tech something. Decently sizable amount of them.
I think I see what you mean… do you agree it is a bit gizmo-rific compared to an ordinary car, or even what one might consider an ordinary electric car?
I think that it will be a bare bones vehicle compared to a similar size car with a gasoline engine, its first six months of real world application from folks who buy them, will either kill the concept right out in terms of an all electric car, or make it really hard to come up with anything straight electric in the future.
There will be somewhat of a green cachet if the price of gasoline goes skyward like it did last summer, I definitely remember that alot of prius owners were very much preening , regarding that.
I think I would take an all electric car more seriously if the batter was simply rated for 50 miles on a charge, and used a concept that I seen bumper cars use in fairs when I was a kid, intead of having the thing at the back of the car reach the mesh in the ceiling, the car would draw power from the road.
Declan
Really? Power from the road? I’m not sure if you’re joking or not 
I’m thinking… a car with a powertrain like the Volt- electric motor, battery, generator. Try to get rid of the gizmos- just use gauges. Back off on the advanced materials a little, but ok. Consider an anti-trust move against Chevron for their blocking of NiMH batteries, consider using those in place of the more expensive Lion batteries.
I bet $15,000 could be shaved off the Volt’s price tag if one acted as if that were important. So- a plug-in with a 40-mile electric range, $25k, you get a tax credit, and it isn’t a clunker.
Sound feasible? Desirable?
You would need the composites to bring down the weight , those batteries are going to be heavy so you need to shave weight. Mechanical gauges might be feasible , but one of the things you can do is to keep the instrument cluster offboard. Those GPS gizmos can run up to about 8 hours or more, and will display speed and direction, since oil and gas are no longer required. Just a software mod would be required to tell remaining battery time, and the GPS can act as the key as well.
Id keep the price were it is , even raise it. But mandate that it replace taxi and municipal vehicles, its and easy way of getting real world experience and feed back to GM without the bad press if something needs to be changed in the next rev.
*Perhaps you have seen street cars or buses that have some contraption that connects up with wires strung above, now I cant see people agreeing to have wires strung willy nilly around their town or city , it would look just plain ugly. So instead of drawing power from overhead wires , I would assume that you could go the other way and have a grid emeshed into the tarmac, and have the vehicle drag something similar to the booms on street cars and buses.
The onboard battery would only need enough power to get from the grid to home, sorta the last mile and a reserve.
Declan
I’m not convinced weight is an end-all technical problem. I’ve seen capacitor batteries that were really light weight. there is plenty of empty space in a car that could be filled with a lighter battery. They are also experimenting with lead acid/capacitor technology which would be cheaper than current batteries (no pun intended).
You mean like this big?
Of course “lightweighting” and making a larger vehicle more aerodynamic helps a manufacturer use smaller batteries and offer a vehicle with the same range for less - like this one.
The first thing you said is going to be “a problem”. If people don’t want that hybrid or that sub compact, it will just sit on the lot. If it just sits on the lot, the car maker, the salesman, the whole “system” has made no money. It has lost money. The system has already spent money in making and trying to market it, but there it sits, collecting dust on the lot. Americans like SUVs. They like big/fast/fun cars. They may not want a high mileage “shoebox”. We can talk all we want about mileage, efficiency, ecological impact. but people simply won’t buy what they don’t want. They want their Escalades, Hummers, Coupe de Villes, and high powered “street racers”.
Jacking up the gas tax might not hurt the Sunday driver, but it would hurt people and companies that have to drive - contractors, freight haulers, delivery services, people who have to commute by car, etc. Making arbitrary mileage standards does no good if the technology is not there - the bigger the truck and the heavier the load, the more fuel you have to burn, just to get from point A to point B.
I think it would be smarter to set this mileage requirement in increments. and gradually increase it as the technology gets better (if it can). Also, there would need to be exceptions - depending on the vehicle and its intended purpose (large freight) - there should be exceptions.
Composites are nice, but they really aren’t necessary (I don’t think GPS is necessary either, people have been driving for 100 years without it). Compare two quotes, one about the Volt’s Lion battery and one about the Panasonic EV-95 NiMH battery, which can’t be built because Chevron bought the patent
So… The NiMH battery does in fact weight more than twice as much. But it can store 3.4 times more kWh than the Lion battery in the Volt. And consider we’re talking about the year 2000 for the Panasonic EV-95.
It shows the potential to say, trim a couple hundred pounds off the NiMH battery, include a fuel-burning generator, and with the extra power drive a larger vehicle made of conventional materials, getting equal or greater electric range than the Volt. The kind of car you’re used to, it is just an EV. If you plug it in regularly or give it solar, it could consume so little fuel it would amount to 150mpg or more. Potentially zero gas.
Interesting concept. Just glancing at the site it talks about vehicles that get less than 15 mpg but it’s financial comparison uses 10 mpg. A bit of monetary slight of hand without any cost figures to work with. I didn’t see any production dates so it’s hard to tell when it’s going to hit the streets.
I believe that you are a bit confused.
The Li-ion battery pack planned for the Volt can be cycled through a bigger window, just like the NiMH battery can - in each case however deep cycles are avoided in order to preserve battery life.
I may be mistaken but I believe that the only battery type that can tolerate cycling through 100% SOC (full depth of discharge or DOD) are the Li titanate batteries, such as those by AltairNano or EnerDel.
Weight off the battery , plus a lightweight frame would improve running time on the battery, longer times between recharges, losing weight is a good thing in the auto industry now , believe it or not , even keeping the car physically clean on the outside will improve gas milage.
The GPS thing was simply a matter of replacing the existing instrument cluster, right now a normal car probably has the gas gauge , speedometer, temp and a bunch of idiot lights that tell you something has gone wrong.
I was thinking along the lines of something like a garmin, that would simply fit into an empty slot and fufill the role of the ignition key and provide rudimentary functions like the present day instrument cluster does. All running on an internal battery thats recharged inside the house, instead of leeching power off the battery, not that I think it would be that much , but every little bit helps.
Declan
Then those drivers are extremely stupid, sitting there with all that power and not knowing how to launch, which really isn’t that hard. Also, even a bad start for a car like the recent GTO configuration would catch up and surpass a Cooper S no problem. Coopers in any production configuration are not what I would qualify as a fast car. Fun to drive, quick? Yes. But not 13 second 1/4 mile fast. No way.
What is the definition of “lightly modified” in your book? The XRS engine you describe “only” puts out 180 hp stock. Enough to make that model of Matrix pretty fast, but not on par with an M3 or an M5.
M3’s put out up to and over 300hp stock and regularly run 0-60 times in the 5.5 second range. No Matrix in any configuration can match those power numbers at all.
The 2005 plus models of the BMW M5 have over 500 horsepower and about 400 ft/lb of torque. No Matrix known to man is going to take one of those either. And that engine redlines at 8250rpm, too.
Sorry, you must have been racing people whom don’t know how to drive. I also think your story of “hanging with” a Lancer Evo to be dubious at best, too.
There’s just too much power difference, even with a stupid driver.
That distinction isn’t so relevant anymore. Outfitted with modern suspension components, superior brakes, tires and more horses than any equivalent production muscle car from the 1960’s isn’t a valid comparison nowadays.
The new Challenger SRT8’s and Charger SRT8’s are most certainly sports cars.
The Neon SRT4 was a fun car and fast, and also a sports car. The new Caliber SRT4 can’t hold the Neon SRT4’s jock, mostly due to unmanageable torque steer, both cars being FWD. But both cars are not reliable. I owned an SRT4 Neon (2002) and it was a blast racing with other comparable cars. But I knew to steer clear of Corvettes and the like…too much power to beat, unless the driver is old or an idiot.
A stock OZ model Lancer isn’t going to beat any fairly recent Corvette in any performance measurable, unless the driver is 90 years old and clueless. Sorry.
So… are you saying that the Panasonic EV-95 NiMH battery claiming to store 30 kWh is the same as the Volt’s Lion battery claiming to hold 16 kWh, that is, those numbers are theoretical maximums rather than ‘in practice’ net yields? Because I’ll grant you, the answer isn’t obvious from what I’ve been reading.
Still… at 30 kWh the Panasonic EV-95 has almost double the ‘theoretical’ storage capacity as the Volt’s Lion, so the cycling windows seem irrelevant. IOW, the energy density, by weight if not volume, is pretty much the same. I haven’t seen price figures for the Volt’s battery, but I assume it is a lot more expensive?
My main point is along the lines of this: Imagine something like a Volt, only with a cheaper-yet-higher-capacity NiMH battery. Say this imaginary Volt2 has double the battery capacity (a la the example above), but overall has 25% more mass than Volt1, since it uses cheaper materials. There’s a little ‘fuzzy engineering’ here, but wouldn’t you still get greater range with the Volt2, all other things being equal?
Other points- I understand that Lion batteries are supposed to be superior, it is just that in the case of the Volt, they are not.
And, I’ve heard of those Lithium Titanate batteries, namely that they can charge in 15 minutes. Do you have any specs for them? Prices?
-And, as for picking up power from below the streets- man, that sounds like A Lot of infrastructure. What if you could plug them in, at home and at work, and they included a square meter or two of photovoltaic film? Maybe some other ‘in transit’ charging method is feasible, but wires under the streets doesn’t seem very practical.
Well at some point your going to be looking at an infrastructure upgrade anyways. The current battery school of thought is to have the car pull into a retrofitted gas station( realistically its gonna be a walmart) and swap batteries.
There are technically feasible solutions to the battery issue and will probably also include battery technology that has yet to be invented some time in the future, the inground wiring might be unfeasible for a lot of reasons, but it does have history with the overhead method, but it does get away from needing a lot of battery storage now.
How deep it has to go into the asphalt, I dont know. Can it be etched into the surface without needing a lot of raking, again , I dont know, will it have the added bennifit of never needing to plow streets again, no more icy roads, again I dont know.
It just struck me as being the one possible solution and yet for some reason its never been mentioned.
Declan