The Car Ahead is Electric
 

All I will say is that there is a certain company that has reached the 400W/hr power density, with these batteries you could in theory using my crude calculations have a range thus:

a typical sealed lead acid battery is rated at around 35 W/hr
most existing electric cars that use lead acid at best have a 50 mile range

it has been proven using NiMH batteries that a car can travel 373 miles with charge left to spare.

anyways so using "seat of the pants" maths we find that:

400/35 = 11.4

50*11.4 = 570 miles per charge!!

Cool! So how does that translate into how many feet of video tape I can run through my camera if I use that battery?

Jay

How much watts does your camcorder does your take?,


Also I've found that EV1 (made by GE) also used lead acid and managed to do about 80~90 miles to the charge if these batteries where used in that car then you would be able to do 912 ~ 1026 miles per charge !!

Their are prototype cars based on li-ion and li-poly technology that can do 300 - 400 miles already - tzero is one and is very fast sports car but the cost of the batteries is prohibative. Looking at 30k - 60k for batteries that will only handle 500-600 deep discharges, or about 2 - 3 years of decent driving.

Even still, would like to know who makes these batteries, I head of a lead acid lead replacement that lightened the batteries by 2/3 and brought this modified sla battery to over li-ion performance, can't remember the name of the company. and way to lazy to google it up.

Edit: just realized that on the low end that is 150 000 miles, pleanty for the life of a car, opps

Yes, I'm aware of the Tzero, and solectra, amazingly a guy on this Board was actually part of the solectra team, I once got an email from him... is'nt DVinfo an wonderfull community!!

Also, you may or may not be aware is that Toshiba have made a break through with battery technology and have demostated a battery (li-ion) that charges to 80% charge in 60 SECONDS !! they plan to use this technology in EV's !!

ok so we have the technology to:

(1) Go the distance
(2) Have the performace, can easly outpace ICEs(internal combustion engines)
(3) "Refill" re-charge in 60 seconds, the average gasoline tank takes 4~5 minutes to fill


Arguments against EV's, "You will only move the pollution to the powerplants"

the counter to this is:

(1) Powerplants are alreay polluting, its easier to minimize/control pollution at on centralizes point that to control/minimize the pollution of millions of smaller "mobile" pollutants

(2) ICE are source dependent, i.e they can only rely on the polluting fuel, whereas the EV is source independent, i.e you could use whatever source you like to charge your EV, this could include renewable non polluting sources. With ICE you never have that option.

(3) An EV is much, much more efficient that an ICE, if you do the energy conversion it takes to make the car move, the EV comes on top.

P.S fuell cells are not the answer, please do your own homework on this, then you will know, why the politicans are pushing so hard for it.

Anhar Hussain Miah

This one runs on AIR!
 

Well.... Thisone runs on air! Great for cleaning the dusty lens too :)

http://www.theaircar.com/

Yep Guy Negre, the great Frenchman engineer, I have read about this man before however I dont think in the long run it will be viable.

In the engineering world we have a saying KISS, as in Keep It Simple Stupid !, in other words the fewer parts you have the less chance there is something will go wrong.

Take a look at an ICE engine, Just how many componets does it have!
It does seem ridiculas that it takes almost two tons of machine to move just around 80kg weight of a Human being!!

The concept of an electric car is really simple, BATTERY >> CONTROLLER >> MOTOR (granted its a little more than that, but the concept is not much more)

The problem is more likely that the amount of batteries required to power a car (li-ion or li-poly) costs anywhere from 30 000 - 200 000 dollars. When your batteries are more expensive than your car, then you have a slight problem. Price difference between a Pb-acid batter T-zero and Li-ion T-zero = $145 000 (265k-120k). Those are some expensive batteries.

Mass Production
 

True, but mass production is the answer.

the Chinese are taking the lead

http://www.thunder-sky.com/en/index.htm

But the America Companies are lagging:

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005...e_there_n.html


Anhar