Quote:
Originally Posted by Piotrsko
You're forgiven for creating a Hunh? moment.
Anything special about the arches/wheel wells?
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The subject of EV cooling drag became so controversial that I wanted to investigate systems I had access to. And Tesla owners, so far, have been very generous, allowing crazed madmen like me to 'live' under their cars while charging.
The Model S system is similar to Porsche.
They're extracting ram air at the low frontal stagnation point, and directing it to both sides, cooling on one, AC Condenser on the other, then dumping the higher-pressure air into the wheel wells ahead of the front tire face.
The volume of the wheel houses are minimized.
The underbody trailing edge of the wheelhouses 'blend' into the belly pan, as the 1st-gen Insight wheelhouses blended into the body sides.
You can't actually see any of the heat-exchangers or their flow volume controls.
The leading edge of the hour-glass, wheel-flop voids have deflectors molded-in, implying that they want the flow to 'jump' the void, then re-attach, once past the void, as MIT did with their MANTA solar race car by Goro Tamai's team ( photographs ). The SolarWorld GT also did this ( got to spend all day with this car ).
I don't know how to quantify anything I see. In the future, I may get access to any SAE Papers which explain and quantify specific car technology.