World's First 1 Megawatt All-Electric Race Car 106
New submitter MotoJ writes: A Latvian company has announced plans to race a one megawatt all-electric race car. It has a 50 kWh lithium-ion battery pack and is propelled by six YASA-400 electric motors. It provides 1020 kW (1368 hp) and a top speed of 260 km/h. It has a real chance to become the first overall winner of the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb competition with an electric vehicle. That's something to look forward to and curious who will pilot this machine. The race is on June 28, 2015.
The same company has an equally interesting all-electric off-road racer.
Re:Amazing! (Score:5, Insightful)
Three minutes at 1400 HP is no small feat.
The Bugatti Veyron fuel tank last about 10 minutes at full power, and it's only 1000 hp.
Re:Amazing! (Score:5, Informative)
It has the power to go as fast as the Bugatti, but (apparently) not the gearing. At 161mph it'll be using a heck of a lot less than 1MW, so the battery should last much longer than 3m.
The extra power *will* give it crazy acceleration even up steep inclines, which is far more useful on Pike's Peak than pure top speed.
Re:Amazing! (Score:5, Funny)
And if you run it back down from the top of Pike's Peak, it is recharged and ready to go again!
Try that with a gasoline-powered car.
Re:Amazing! (Score:5, Funny)
I think a big WhOOOOsh!! is in order here.
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Maybe if you don't factor in that almost all race cars that do Pikes Peak have turbochargers that are capable of shoving more air in the cylinders than they can handle.
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Well, it's an interesting analogy, because as you push performance with any technology, the less practical that feat becomes.
For example the Veryon can go 252 MPH, but only for about 12 minutes before it runs out of gas. Then you have to stop to put another 100 liters of gas in the tank. You'll also have to replace the $42,000 tire set because they've only got three minutes of life left in them.
I actually find the Formula-e races fun to watch, even though the speeds aren't that impressive the driving skil
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In less than 5 years, anybody that owns an ICE car (save something like a Rolls) will find that it is next to worthless.
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The hybrids and POS like I3 and Leaf go with very little distance so that they they can keep their profits up. Tesla has it right in making cars with swap-able batteries in which the primary battery has 200-250 MPC. Next year, Tesla will introduce a pack that you can rent that will allow you to get 400+ MPC, which is perfect for distance driving.
Now as to the costs and efficiency, EVs blow the doors off ICE. There is a reason why you can get nightt
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First, Multiple studies in the US show that we have PLENTY of power to charge 100% of our vehicles. Of course, that depends on 25% or less being done in the daytime. But hey, do not let facts get in your way.
Secondly, the charging infrastructure is already in place in America. All of our homes have electricity. As to long distance driving, Tesla will have the nation wired for high speed charging by end of 2017. [teslamotors.com]
Here is a better map of what is going on a [supercharge.info]
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What wins that, is great driving combined with great torque for quickness. br
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I've heard it's tires only last about 12 minutes at that speed? Sounds like a safety measure to me. :)
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Its tires. my god. Why do i keep doing that =/
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We forgive you. Acknowledging the problem is the first step to curing it.
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This always helps...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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You deserve kudos for recognising it as a mistake. Sadly this puts you in a select group of English-speaking nations the world over. :(
Not the first (Score:5, Informative)
There have been plenty of 1MW electric cars built prior to this one. There is a company named Evnetics that makes a controller called the Shiva, it's capable of 1.2MW continuously, and there have been numerous drag cars built with it capable of exceeding the 1MW level in bursts. I've also run across EVs using multiple Zilla 2ks which have an output exceeding 1,000KW.
This may be the first AC motored car to exceed 1MW though.
Re:3 Minutes (Score:5, Insightful)
with 1MW power, the 50KWh battery would be dead in 3 minutes at full throttle.. jeez.
Roughly equivalent to a gasoline car with a 2-gallon tank... lol. (1 gal=33KWh)
Do all these people posting 50kWh/1020kW 180s comments not understand racing? Or hybrid drive systems? Or Mountain roads? As TFA mentions, the Pikes Peak course contains over 150 turns, so you'll be off throttle or at partial throttle most of the time, especially with that much torque available, and regenerative braking will give some of it back.
Or perhaps the race car engineers that are building the race car don't know anything about the race they're building it for. That seems likely. /sarcasm
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with 1MW power, the 50KWh battery would be dead in 3 minutes at full throttle.. jeez. Roughly equivalent to a gasoline car with a 2-gallon tank... lol. (1 gal=33KWh)
Um...the car won't be going full woody all the way up the mountain. Due to the large amount of torque that the motors will likely be putting out, the driver will probably be feathering the throttle pretty lightly.....so it won't use that much power all at once...
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NASCAR, some gay American race where they go round an oval track? Pathetic, F1 is real racing, NASCAR is racing for redneck incompetents who can only turn one way.
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The only way to hit 160mph at Pike's Peak is vertically.
Re:Slow (Score:5, Informative)
260 kph in real units is only 160 miles per hour
Which is plenty fast for Pikes Peak. When Sebastian Loeb set the record with his 900-hp car, his maximum speed on course was 150mph.
Re:Slow (Score:4, Informative)
Source [tflcar.com]
And here's the onboad video, which is pretty amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y20CLumT2Sg [youtube.com]
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Yes, pretty amazing. People are standing right next to the road where race cars are travelling at up to 150 mph.
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Yes, pretty amazing. People are standing right next to the road where race cars are travelling at up to 150 mph.
So? People are standing right next to the road where race bikes are traveling at 200+ mph - (Isle of Man) Average is higher than measly 150mph
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I'm an Isle of Man TT marshal. Specifically I'm the Deputy Sector Marshal for Cronk-Y-Voddy Crossroads where the superbikes flash past at around 180mph less than 2 feet away from the spectators! [youtu.be]
Current TT absolute lap record holder Bruce Anstey set an average lap speed of 132.298mph [youtu.be] In the 2014 Superbike race.
More to the point of the electrically powered racing theme of this thread, the TT festival also includes a single lap (37.74 mile) race for electric powered bikes called TT Zero [wikipedia.org] and this race was w
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I haven't been out there for the motorcycle races in years but that was fairly common the last time I was out there for them. I got some nice photos of some of the better ones.
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I'm not really into motorsport so that vid was new to me. I watched all eight and a half minutes of his run, absolutely transfixed. The level these drivers operate at is simply stunning to observe, thank you for the link.
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Honestly, modern Pike's Peak race is kinda lame. Full tarmac start to finish, sadly boring grip driving.
Tip your hat to the old pre-2011 Pike's Peak which was mostly gravel road with some tarmac when driving was far, FAR more intense. Here's the legendary Ari Vatanen run in the 405 T16 from the 1990.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Featuring some crazy stuff like driving that monster of a car with one hand while shielding eyes from the sun glare with another through turns at high speed.
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Do you have a different gear box? 5 speed Miatas are gear limited at 125...
Re:Slow (Score:4, Insightful)
So? It's not an oval racer. It's built to a performance envelope defined by a specific event. The factors that are important here are acceleration, downforce, and mechanical grip; not top speed. Looking at the sketch in TFA, it's clear by the presence of the front wing that they're targeting massive downforce, which eats into top speed by creating drag.
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Leobs car tops out at 260ish kph BECAUSE IT"S FUCKING GEARED THAT WAY LIKE THE ELECTRIC RACER. Put different gears in and the EC will go a fair bit faster. Oh BTW, some of the fastest race cars on the planet - Group B - had lowish top speeds. But they got there reaaaaaaaaaaaal goddamn quick.
You are a fucking idiot with no idea about cars.
Re:Slow (Score:5, Insightful)
In a NASCAR or a Formula 1 race you might be right about 160 being slow, but this car is being designed for a race that is 12.4 miles long with 150 turns in it. I doubt there'll be much opportunity to get above 100mph much less 160.
It will shine in two aspects. Electric cars are not affected by altitude. Gas burners get weaker the higher they go, turbo and superchargers can only do so much high up in the mountains. The other place will be coming out of the before mentioned 150 turns. Electric cars may not be able to beat down gas cars for top speed, this is typically due to having only 1 gear rather than a lack of engine power, but they absolutely destroy them on the hole shot. It will have 150 opportunities to take advantage of that acceleration. The gas burners won't know what hit them.
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Heatsinks (Score:1)
At least one aspect of an electric car is affected, cooling. As altitude increases, the efficiency of heat-sinks [electronics-cooling.com] decreases. I hope they added some over-sized cooling fans, Apple didn't [apple.com].
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Just think, you'd be in charge of the fastest race car on the planet if it could be powered by arrogance!
3 minutes of glorious acceleration... and then? (Score:1)
Battery is dead...
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Dammit! You beat me to it!
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3 minutes of max acceleration is a lot of go time.
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3 minutes of glorious acceleration... and then?
Battery is dead...
Yea....in a straight line with no turns........but not the case here......
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How many knots of distance does it take to get to 200 degrees?
Electric motors have insane power to weight ratio (Score:2, Insightful)
... Its that pesky issue of energy storage!
Traditional ICE systems have it easy with the absolutely mind-boggling amount of energy that can be found in an ordinary tank of fuel. Who cares if you waste 80-90% of your energy heating the atmosphere when gas is a few bucks a gallon?
Re:Electric motors have insane power to weight rat (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not the same. (Score:5, Informative)
After the Sierra Club litigated to get the entire course paved, it's no longer the last holdout of Group B racing, and especially an electric misses the point of dealing with the altitude changes. An overall lap record at Nürburgring would be more impressive.
It would be more fitting to do a hard rest of all records from 2011 onward, as the elements that made it truly unique are about gone, and now it is just another technical road course instead of a nightmare of changes packed into 13 miles.
Any subsequent victory is just less impressive.
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One of the good things about Pikes Peak is that they didn't try to even the field with millions of rules, but instead just created new classes to make it more accommodating for everyone. One of the best parts was watching the big rigs scramble up the mountain even if they were only competitive against themselves. Seeing a semi tear up the road at you in a great cloud of dust was awe-inspiring.
As power increases past insane into truly insane, AWD starts to make more sense as the only practical way to get tha
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Agree. A race track up Pike's Peak, once paved, is exactly the same as the 1,000 other race track's up Mountain's like Pike's Peak. The track up Mount Kilimanjaro is impressive. So is the one up Mount Everest. Hopefully, they won't pave those tracks or they'll be as dumbed down and easy as the Pike's Peak hill climb. *sigh* I'm gonna go watch some NASCAR and pine for the gool ol' days.
In his autohagiography, 'The Confessions of Aleister Crowley' he writes that when Europeans first started trying to climb in the Himalayas they basically had to actually learn to mountain-climb for the first time; all the mountains in the Alps were well marked, almost paved footpaths up the mountains with no challenge at all. No-one knew how to climb the mountains in the Himalayas, it was entirely new. (Yes, Aleister Crowley was a pioneering mountaineer).
How about a race up an arbitrary mountain, picked at
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Agree. A race track up Pike's Peak, once paved, is exactly the same as the 1,000 other race track's up Mountain's like Pike's Peak. The track up Mount Kilimanjaro is impressive. So is the one up Mount Everest. Hopefully, they won't pave those tracks or they'll be as dumbed down and easy as the Pike's Peak hill climb. *sigh* I'm gonna go watch some NASCAR and pine for the gool ol' days.
Dude, you missed a couple!
Gotta be consistent! ;-)
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Pikes Peak has had a long history with aviation testing. Prior to accurate modeling, the only way to know if an engine would work at altitude was to risk failure at 10,000 feet, or drag the engine to the top of a mountain for testing. One of the first roads in the US to go that high was the Pikes Peak Highway, and the race and aviation tests followed soon after. The two go hand in hand. Indeed, there is a monument to Sanford Moss at the summit, as he midwifed turbos into aviation use.
While interesting to se
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Secondly, Tesla does JUST FINE in the arctic circle, in nothern Finland, Sweden, and Norway. Why do you think that cold will impact a car here? The ONLY way that it would impact it, is if the battery is cold. However, nobody starts a race with a cold engine, so, you do not have to have a cold battery.
As to bringing the vehicle in an ICE, that is tr
Binary units (Score:4, Funny)
1020 kW, that's almost 1 MiW!
Kill two birds with one stone (Score:3)
curious who will pilot this machine?
How about if Google Car's auto driver races the electric car up Pikes Peak?
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Jeremy Clarkson was sacked from Top gear so.
Way to ruin a show.
Whatever. (Score:1)
EV runs are going to be interesting this year (Score:3)
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You've got your math wrong somehow.
1509 meter * 1260 kg * 9.8 m/s = 18 MJ = 5.2 kWh.
Engine sound? (Score:1)
Doesn't say if they'll have a motor sound or it'll just be like a fast golf cart. Would be really humorous if it had engine noise.