Electric Car Goes 375 Miles On One 6-Minute Charge 603
thecarchik writes with this quote from AllCarsElectric:
"We all know that battery packs are the weakest link in electric vehicles. Not only are they heavy and expensive, but they take a long time to recharge and on average can only provide around 100 miles per charge. A German-based company has changed all that with a new vehicle capable of driving up to 375 miles at moderate highway speeds. ... It doesn't end there. The company responsible for the battery pack, DBM Energy, claims a battery pack efficiency of 97 percent and a recharge time of around 6 minutes when charged from a direct current source. Unlike the small Daihatsu which was heavily modified by a team in Japan earlier this year that achieved a massive 623 miles on a charge at around 27 mph, the Audi A2 modified by DBM Energy was able to achieve its 375 miles range at an average speed of 55 mph."
What kind of direct current source? (Score:3, Interesting)
Am I gonna need 2000 amp breakers for the garage?
Re:What kind of direct current source? (Score:3, Interesting)
Only if you don't have 10 kV outlets...
I notice a lot of suspicion (Score:1, Interesting)
Let's be practical. Fossil fuels won't last forever and neither will nuclear. Ultimately you are either going to run your cars on pure electric from an alternate source or biofuels and at the current rate of growth you can't grow enough biofuels. Solar roadways with roof top solar and some wind can easily replace the missing fossil fuels without having to worry about storing waste until we evolve into another species, tens of thousands to in some cases millions of years. Ultimately some form of ultracapacitor will run the majority of cars. The odds of most cars being electric in a 100 years is a 100%. The odds of most using some form of electric motors in the next 25 years is extremely high. Everyone in the Slashdot world practically worships nuclear but even it would be electric. If you want either nuclear or solar to take over you'd better embrace electric cars or you'll eventually end up on horses again and then we'll all be debating hay prices.
Re:Power required to charge? (Score:4, Interesting)
It is possible that the charger "Cheats" too--
It might contain a very large capacitor array that allows for the boost charging speed, at the expense of the recharger itself requireing several more minutes, to even several hours to "recover" afterward. (That is to say, the charger itself is a glorified high-voltage regulator attached to a very large ultracapacitor bank. The rapid discharge rate required by the battery's charging station would neccessitate such a solution if 150kw service was unavailable/inpractical. When the battery pack is attached, the capcacitor bank discharges to fill the battery, but then the capacitor array has a required recharging period before it can be used again; a process which could occur while the driver is on the road.)
Such a "cheating" solution would pose a significant risk should a short occur inside the charger though.
House Battery Swapping (Score:5, Interesting)
Solar photovoltaic and fuel cells generate direct current. Usually they go through an inverter, that loses 10-25% of the energy (as heat, and burns out the part for replacement about every 5 years). A battery like this would mean keeping that energy without losing it. Leaving a battery charging at home while driving the car around, then swapping it into the car when the car returns home - or reverse the positions for batteries charging at work or at whatever daytime destination. That battery can also power household devices, like the many devices that really consume DC, which waste power running from wall current into rectifiers.
This kind of device could improve not only transit energy, but also residential (and commercial sites that reverse the locations).
Re:When can I buy one? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Power required to charge? (Score:4, Interesting)
74kwh in 6 minutes is 740 kilowatts. They said specifically that this could be achieved with a "DC current source", so they clearly aren't talking about a standard 220V outlet. More likely, to actually achieve this you'd need a large capacitor as suggested by a post above. 74kwh supercapacitors are damned expensive, so I doubt if anyone would put one in their house.
What would be practical, though, is for a bank of supercapacitors to be located at a gas station. There could be six, eight, or however many different capacitors, and when you pull up to the "electricity pump" it would connect you to one of the charged ones. Then the capacitor would go back to charging from a ~30kw mains circuit (for about 3 hours). If all the capacitors were drained, a big red light would turn on at the pump and you would have to wait for one of them to finish charging (or get a partial charge).
Even if the gas station *did* have a 1 megawatt feed line, this kind of huge instantaneous load spike would not be nice to the electrical grid, so capacitors would be the preferred method of implementation. The gas stations could even wire them up to feed power back to the grid if it needed stabilization, or it would be the one place you could charge your phone when a storm knocks out the neighborhood.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Power required to charge? (Score:3, Interesting)
Once you are there hot swapping the packs with a life becomes the way to go with even lead acid. People are so focused on perfection here that they miss the opportunity for just better.
Re:How long does it last? (Score:3, Interesting)
Then, sadly, you would waste energy through heat dissipation twice instead of once.
Rubbish (Score:2, Interesting)
To propel a honda shaped car at around 60 Mph takes 30KW of power to overcome wind resistance. It does not matter how efficient the storage and conversion is. that is the baseline set by drag. inefficiency just adds more. and anything with less wind drag than a honda shaped car would be like riding in a tubular suppository; ie pointless.
So.. to go 375 miles at 60 miles per hour will take over 6 hours. 6 hours = 360 minutes. 360/ 6 = 60. 60 * 30KW = 1.8 Mega watts.
So physics says the if you want to charge a car to go 375 miles and the car has the same drag as a honda then it takes 1.8 megawatts if you want to charge it in 6 minutes. that's the minimum. bad batteries and motors require more.
My feeling is that delivering that much wattage would probably melt it unless there was some serious cooling going on. Lets suppse that half the power goes into heat. To remove heat takes-- typically-- about an equal number of watts to the heat you want to remove. This varies by altitude and humidity but it's a good ball park.
SO add atleast another 50% to that ignoring the storage efficiency.
Re:Power required to charge? (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess the point is that gasoline packs an awful lot of energy into a small space, and replacing it with electricity requires changing the way we think about electricity.
Not from the USA (Score:3, Interesting)
Just look at the mental state of the people who plan to "take back their country". The Tea Party morons deny global warming. http://www.newser.com/story/103446/among-tea-party-widespread-global-warming-doubt.html [newser.com]
The Conservapedia thinks that Relativity is a liberal plot: http://newsdesk.org/2010/08/conservapedia-calls-theory-of-relativity-a-liberal-conspiracy/ [newsdesk.org]
The Texas Board of Education (take that title with a grain of salt) is putting Christian thought into text books, including trying to teach creationism http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/09/24/texas-state-board-of-education-confirms-irony-is-dead/ [discovermagazine.com]
The forces of stupidity have a lot of practical power, and they are using (abusing) it. The net result will reduce the USA to a third world country. Most of the people reading this post will live to see it happen. Well, the USA had a good thing going for a while, at leas from 1945 to 2000 or so.
Re:How long does it last? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How long does it last? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is, however, trading reliance on oil as a fuel source for reliance on lithium as a storage medium. Admittedly that's more conducive to recycling, but while I'm no expert on batteries, I'm pretty sure it's not trivial to turn a dead, degraded cell into a shiny new one.
It's a shame we haven't managed to get particularly far with hydrogen as a storage medium - it can be produced straight from fossil fuels to ease the transition, and then produced directly from water once we get the power generation infrastructure up to scratch. No reliance on a non-renewable power source or storage medium.
Doesn't have to be batteries. Flywheel storage would be a perfect solution to this problem - replace the underground fuel tanks with a flywheel storage bunker and spin it up when there is energy to spare.
Re:How long does it last? (Score:3, Interesting)
At 20USD per kg lithium can be extracted from sea water in a near inexhaustible amount 230 billion tonnes
Re:I'm skeptical (Score:3, Interesting)
How about the fact that they charged up the Audi A2 once (not in 6 minutes though), and then drove 600km (375 miles) from München to Berlin? More info here: http://www.lekker-mobil.com/ [lekker-mobil.com] (the site is in German).
The summary title is misleading. Just because the battery can be charged in 6 minutes from a suitable DC source, doesn't mean that anybody actually has that sort of kit about, or even that the car will have a suitable connector. I'm guessing you can charge it fully in less than 2 hours from a standard 32A 400V 3-phase AC supply - these are quite common in Germany, and the picture showing them charging the car looks like it has one of those.
The most interesting thing about this battery is not the mad charge time from some über-Goliath capacitor, it's the size/weight and efficiency of the thing.
-- Steve
The vehicles uses 8-1 kWh, HP is irrelevant. (Score:4, Interesting)
According to this German article [www.zeit.de] and another German article. The engine uses between 8-15 kWh in normal use.
The trip was 605 kM (377+ miles) at 130 kM/h (81 MPH) or 90kM/h (56 MPH). The 130 in one article seems wrong, and a commenter posted a correction. So, likely it was 90 kM/h.
At the end of the trip the battery pack still had a 18% charge, but the inventors say the range is 600 kM (
So charging to 97% in six minutes required a 79% charge or 90kWh or about 0.9 MW in 6 minutes.
You could drive it for more than 375 miles on a single charge, depending on how deeply you want to drain the battery. Still, who wants to drive more than 7 hours a day. Now if you had just three available stations. you'd be able to drive then entire North-South distance of the US (in 29 hours - I've done it in 21). With seven stations, you'd be able to drive across the US (in 56 hrs ). 377 miles on a "tank" is fairly standard. that's about the range in my cars. There are certainly better ranged cars. The one thing the article breezes over, is that over 55 MPH, you'd likely see polynomially decreasing range.
Re:How long does it last? (Score:3, Interesting)
I know Americans are stereotypically quite large people but how large do you have to be to be too large for an A2???
As for the performance remember that energy consumption of a vehicle will over average terrain be proportional to its wind resistance not its weight.
Bearing that in mind, what kind of use case for a vehicle requires even half the performance demonstrated here? (assuming a larger car would have at most twice the wind resistance) If you're going on long continent crossing journeys the range of the car and time taken to recharge it is greater than how often you should be stopping for a break so that you aren't a hazard to other road users.
And that's assuming that this technology doesn't scale, i.e. that twice as large a car could just have two of these battery packs giving the same recharge time.