Autoblog

lame test @ Dec 18th 2005 10:50PM

This is a lame test. It tests a purpose-built car against a street car.

How about getting Speed TC car against this? Or a Grand Am Cup ST car?

A race car is a lot different from a street car. You remove a lot of weight. You put on R compound tires. You re-gear that car so it may only do 125mph, but it gets out of corners quicker. You put in brakes and a gearbox that are harsh but last.

For example, how long will this electric car run? figure that out, then take your race car and not only put in enough gas to run that distance (saves weight), but also modify the gas tank to only hold that much gas (saves more weight).

Note to other poster, on the track, race cars are faster than motorcycles because motorcycles can't corner fast enough. But I understand the spirit of your post, you're right on here, and the article poster isn't.

For another comparsion, try racing them for 30 minutes. The street car can do that, the race car can too. A Speed (SCCA) Touring Car race is 30 minues or so. Let's say it spends 50% of its time at wide-open-throttle, the rest braking or coasting. Let's say you want 200HP equivalent (low for the class, but electric has a broad torque band). 200HP = 120,000W. If you are at WOT 50% of the time, that's 60,000Watt-hours/hour. If you go a half-hour, that means you need 30,000Wh. Regerative braking wouldn't add a lot since whenever you brake harder than you can accelerate, it means all that extra braking is coming from the brakes, not the motor, and so it is lost energy. And race car drivers brake last minute and very hard.

LIon has 200Wh/kg (from Wikipedia). That means you need 150kg (330lbs) of batteries. How's that going to affect your race car performance? The batteries will take up 60L in your trunk (that's not so bad actually). The cost of the battery bank would be north of $30,000.

And if you tried to run a Grand Am Cup race for 3 hours, how would you refuel it?

This is the same stuff as the T-Zero guys. They used a purpose-built car to mislead people about the real performance characteristics of electric cars.

And I like electric cars. I just don't like misleading info on them.