Motors 0-60 in 4 seconds. 130Mph top speed...

They do have electric car races though, except, they arent as exciting or as well publicised as other forums of car competition. No noise, only blood, sweat and tears.

One thing: Sposen it rains or you go through a deep puddle?

 

lol how deep are you expecting puddles to be on a sprt car that spends all its time on tarmaced surfaces. a electric car actually cud be better for that type of off roading cos you can completly submerge the motor and if its water profted proberly it will carryin on goin while if you submerge an noramly engine it will die wen the water grs into the air intake. ps srry 4 my crap spelling

 

Cool! It adds no carbon to the atmosphere! Awesome.

except for the carbon produced when making and recharging it

 

but its so much easier to ignore that

 

errr with the spiralling prices of domestic electrcity supplies... what's the price per recharge compared to petrol p/litre?

 

I suppose this is where the solar kit comes in.

 

But why wait until you get an electric car for a solar kit? Just get a government grant and do it now. It pays for itself in 5 years of you giving back to the grid and even on cloudy days they are something like 30-40% efficient.

 

If it was a 3.5 minute charge time then it would be a feasible, but 3.5 hours is still way too long! Just imagine you didn't notice it was getting low and then suddenly you've got to pull over somewhere for 3.5 hours to charge up!

The irony that the people championing electric cars are the very same people decrying nuclear power is not lost on me

 

Oh god... here we go.

Look.. it's rubbish, OK? 250 miles is pathetic! What happens if you DO need to go 200+ miles, and can't recharge the thing when you get there?

It sounds crap.. simple as that. Anyone who wants a performance car does NOT want it to sound like a hyped up milk float.

Also, electric cars are NOT the answer to global warming et al. While they may be expounding about it's ability to be solar charged, I live in England... 50 odd degrees north in england actually, and often dont even see the sun for any length of time for months on end in winter.. great use THAT is to me. So. I'll be sucking power from the grid.. great... not really doing anything to combat global warming then.

Imagine fitting a big ice install in that? Range would be reduced to what.. Oooh... 200ft?

It's crap.

The answer is hydrogen, and I'm sick of people wasting time inventing electric cars that do nothing to ease the burden on non-renewable sources. All the money invested in that could be spent to research the storage of hydrogen problems that are currently the only real obstacle to have genuinely eco-friendly cars, that actually put more oxygen back into the atmospehere, have no performance impediments, and actually use REAL engines.

There... rant over.

Electric cars are for idiots who don't know what they're on about, so there...

 

Pook: The point of solar cells is that you dont need the sun, just photons, which happen during daylight anyway otherwise you wouldn't be able to see.

Um, you mean electrically splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen? Which also burns greenhouse gases to do that

You're just a sound whore, Pook BROOM BROOM not Vrrrrrrr.

Also, imagine how many kids are gonna be knocked over cause it's so low they cant see it and it's almost noiseless...!

 

Yes I am... cars should make nice noises.

Initially you would require electricity to create hydrogen, yes, but A: the amount used to create the amount to drive 250 miles would be less than the amount used to charge that massive bank of batteries to drive the equivalent distance in that stupid electric car. Also, solar and wind farms located offshore, or in remote places are actually feasable on a large scale, and these can be used to create hydrogen. Small scale localised solar gen never works very well tbh, and while you don't need sunlight, you do need it to be bright, and as no one is forthcoming with any figures about how long it takes to charge that car via solar on a cloudy day, I'm going to have to assume the charging times are rubbish. They're probably rubbish on a sunny day actually, and the chances of your car actually being charged when you actually need it are, let's be honest, not good.

There's always the possibility of eventually using hydrogen to fuel power stations, and using a percentage of the output to create more hydrogen. Feasability studies have been done for this, and it's perfectly workable. The problem is storage of liquid hydrogen, which is a PITA, but hey... necessity is the mother of invention and all that.. The only reason we haven't solved that problem is that there's no real need to yet, and there's still too much money to be made by using oil. Oil companies only fund research into electric stuff because they know that it's not really a threat at all, and no one takes it seriously, and on a large scale (meaning we all ditch fossil fuelled vehicles and buy electric ones) it would simply cause economic, and enviromental disaster. They can appear to be all warm and fuzzy to the media because they seem to be finding alternatives, but in reality, they're just investing in a P.R exercise, knowing there's no hope whatsoever of electric vehicles being accepted en mass.

You have to admit, that a fuel that doesn't create any carbon emmisions, and only produces oxygen and water as exhaust; allows the continued use of existing internal combustion engines, and still allows sound whores like me to get excited by big V6s and V8s has to be a good thing, yes? I mean... where's the down side to that?

BMW were actually at one point researching a way of producing hydrogen from the electrolysis of the exhausted water, and compressing it back into the fuel tank. No idea what happened to that idea, but theoretically they were suggesting a 3 litre 300bhp car that did the equivalent of 50mpg with no carbon emmisions.

The reality is, the problems facsed by hydrogen powered cars becoming a reliaty are tiny compared to those faced by the prospect of developing a real world, every day electric car that will make people sell their petroleum powered cars... and even if you DID convince them to do that, just think of the enviromental impact of that.

Massive amounts of money for research into renewable sources, ironically, comes from oil companies.... Hmmm... You really think they're gonna go for hydrogen when there's reserves of oil to make billions out of yet? No.. me neither.... so they divert what amounts to small change into researching dumb assed electric vehicles that essentially, are useless. Car companies do the same to an extent as well. They're not REALLY interested in the environment.. they just want us to think they are. If they were serious, they'd have cracked the mobile storage of liquid hydrogen problem, as that's the only real, viable alternative to oil right now.

You raise a good point too: Electric cars being quiet. DO we actually want that?

 

It doesnt produce oxygen, it USES oxygen to make the water. You have to combust hydrogen in oxygen to make water. By the electrolysis process in the first place you produce the oxygen.

You CAN store huge amounts of hydrogen, but you need a LOT of expensive heavy metals to do it, or, you need a cryotank which is more dangerous.

But you're right, nothing will happen until we burn out all the Oil, and WW3/4 ends after such oil drought. But I suppose, by then, we wont need it.

 

It does produce oxygen, but you're right also, you have to burn hydrogen in oxygen... well, in air anyway, but that's true for all combustible materials surely. However, what comes out of the exhaust pipe of an engine burning hydrogen is water and oxygen: fact. While burning all combustible materials uses oxygen, which would you prefer, one that puts out CO2, CO, hydrocarbons and sulphur dioxide etc, or one that doesn't?

Still doesn't alter the fact that to produce a car that uses electricity would somewhere along the way mean we have to consume large amounts of electricity to charge the thing, and unless we gl fully nuclear in generating electricity, we're damaging the environment still (many would argue that going fully nuclear is worse, and they have a good point). There's always a catch, but hydrogen does seem like the sensible, lowest impact solution... to cars anyway.

 

You have talked so much rubbish I have to step in. First of all if you burn hydrogen you get WATER and if its burnt in air you get NO and NO2 neither of which is great.

Now comparing the production of hydrogen with running electric cars.

Due to the laws of thermodynamics running a car from a battery is ALWAYS going to be more efficient than using a fuel cell (which does not BURN hydrogen but reacts it with oxygen to create a potential difference). First of all producing hydrogen requires alot of electricity and usually the more electricity required the more efficiency is reduced. Then you have the storage mediums which are going to have to be exotic. One option is cryo tanks where hydrogen is compressed into liquid hydrogen this requires again alot of energy which is non recoverable. Other mechanisms use exotic materials which either require horrific amounts of energy to produce or cause more damage extracting them than the energy used compressing the hydrogen for use in a cryo tank.

The fuel cell itself is at the theoretical maximum 87% efficient though numbers in the 60% range are the most attainable yet. These also have their environmental impact. The materials used are very exotic, rare and hard to extract requiring more energy.

This doesnt include how to create an infrastructure to pump millions of liters or VERY explosive hydrogen to where it is required.

Now looking at a battery solution. First of all the infrastructure is already in place to move the energy around. The efficiency of the battery is entirely dependant on the motor used as the ratio bettween the internal resistance of the battery and resistance of the motor will dictate the energy loss. And because of this many small batteries in parallel (as seen in that car) are much more efficient than one big battery. The materials used in a battery can be fairly hard to extract. The main one is lithium which has to be extracted using electrolysis and as such requires some energy to extract (would have to look up how strong the Li-O bond is compared to the H-O bond but I expect it to be weaker). The main problem with batteries is the energy density which is improving all the time.

So batteries imho are a better long term solution.

On another note 250miles is pretty good my Renault Clio gets 300miles on a tank. The main issue is that it takes time to recharge. However this time is mainly dependant on the power supply to the car. Li-Ion batteries can get to 90% charge very fast (sometimes in 10mins) but obviously this requires more power than most plugs can provide.

 

It's the other way around. Even if the battery costs stay the same, Fuel prices will keep on increasing.. so in the very near future the battery's plus electricity will be cheaper then fuel.

L

 

And what do you imagine will happen to electricity prices if electric cars start becoming popular?

 

I think youve missed the point realy. one anyone with a sports car like that is not going to doin huge long haul trips anyway. its main use is goin to be showing off as u cudnt carry enuf lugage in it to travel far distances anyway.


The car is being devloped to encouage further investment in electric cars which will mean greater investment which will leed to more effiant batteries and motors. how far did the frist combustion engines tgo before they rn out of juice or had to replace the clutch. iam sure when people frist started driving ic engined cars other people said it never take off.


The thing is yes it need to produce Co2 to make the electricy to power it but it relises less co2 per a mile than a regular car. no these are not the complete answer but there a step in the right direction. We need a combination of a things to sort out our co2 emmistions inproved effiantcy i think is our best option ie stop producing huge useless SUVs that do 10 mpg and encouage more use of public transport.


end fo rank
ps srry 4 teh crappy spelling we a spell check on ere

 

Just want to add another thing how do u think they produce hygdrogen?
At the moment we extract it from water useing electrosis which requires us to produce electricy so what does that leave us with

Coal gas other fossil fules - porduces co2 and other nasty gases

renewables- at the moment these can not produce electricty on a large scale

hydro electricly- bad for the enviroment actually realises large amounts of co2 frm stuff roting in them not to mention the conrete used makeing them

Nuclear - i think we all know about this one
so a electric car is just same properly more effiant co2 porducer than a electric car.plus we dnt need more oxygen in our automosphere the level of O2 hasnt change much for thousands of years.

May i quote to you one of the fundmetal laws of phyics energy can not be destoyed or creater only converted and moved.
Ie even if the system was perfectly effiancy by useing the powerplant to spilt the water then refuel itself there would be no net gain in electri

Current hydrogen powered cars do not have internal conbution engines the hyrogen oxygen rection is far so powerfull far a engine to contain. what they do is combine oxygen and hydrogen to produce a electric current in a special fuel cell and that powers and elctric motor

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-cell.htm

 

Which has nothing to do with hydrogen combustion, just the effect of sucking air into an engine. NO and NO2 are removed by using a catalyst anyway.

Lynx is right, Hydrogen reacts with oxygen (ie combusts) to produce dihydroen oxide: Water. Oxygen is given off during the electrolysis process of splitting water into its component hydrogen and oxygen.

As said: electrolysis is incredibly energy intensive, moreso than just charging a battery and most of the energy in combustion is wasted as heat and noise, despite the fact it's water being produced. Producing energy on a large scale is going to be more efficient but you get more out of it by charging a battery, then you do in electrolysis. You want energy efficiency afterall.

Lovah: It takes 5 minutes to refill a car, not 3.5 hours was my point.

If you could spend 3 minutes recharging and petrol pumps put in electric chargers in, then it would be feasable. But it's chicken and egg: noone will put in chargers unless there are people going to use them, and noone's gonna buy any unless there are places to charge. It's like LPG atm, you dont know whether the next stop actually has an LPG pump.