EV goes 375 miles @ 55MPG -- and charges in 6 minutes!
 

Electric Car Drives 375 Miles at 55 mph, Recharges In 6 Minutes - All Cars Electric

Converted Audi A2 claims new electric vehicle distance record: 372 miles — Autoblog Green

http://www.blogcdn.com/green.autoblo...mobil-a2-3.jpg

The battery pack is 115kWh and there are still 4 seats in the car -- wow. This could be it?

Double Wow! That is absolutely amazing!!

The Audi A2 is probably the best car America never got. I would love to have an A2 in my garage, parked next to the Insight, with one of them converted to EV.

Obviously, the defining feature of this EV is its battery. 115KWh is enormous. It's also probably over 2000lbs of battery, which would be more than the weight of the rest of the car. Hence the rather poor showing of 253Wh/mi at the battery at 55mph. If they had used cheap LiFePO4 cells, it would still cost over $50k for the batteries alone. Such a car can never be a daily driver.

That claim of charging a 115KWh battery in six minutes should raise more than one red flag. That would require an average charge rate of 1.15 Megawatts! The article also didn't mention how long the batteries would last if you applied such enormous current to them every day.

It's a nifty record car, but they should have added a boat tail and shot for 500mi.

At some point, adding more battery reduces your range by increasing rolling resistance. I wonder how close this car was to that point.

I would have NO range anxiety with that one! :eek:

...where do they "plug" it into for that kind of "recharge," (a) into an ELECTRIC chair or (b) directly into Boulder DAM (wink,wink)???

http://hikaru.tea-nifty.com/robo/ima...615_giga_e.jpg
That whole 6 minutes to charge time worries me....does it require a bolt of lightning to obtain that? :D

It's so ugly though :turtle:

If you wanted to recharge it in 6 minutes, you'd need more than the local grid could supply. You'd need an even bigger battery of your own.

115kwh battery recharged in 6min...if you had access to a 480V industrial connection it would still be >2000A.

You really only need a battery a third that size anyway.

It'd be cool to be able to leave 1/2-2/3 of the batt pack at home when you know you won't need it to save the weight and gain the space!

Supposedly this battery was only about 300 kg, giving well over 300 Wh/kg...

I want to believe this is true, and I also want to see some independent testing to confirm it.

The best EV conversions on the road only need ~100-120 Wh/mile highway(Reverend Gadget's GT6-bodied Triumph Spitfire, John Bryan's Karmann Ghia, Aptera 2e, ect.). A 100 kWh pack would give range sufficient for a road trip in a car like that... without needing to stop and charge.

its do-able. at my work we could do it just about. we run electric arc furnaces at around that power everyday.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Or was that the beer holder? Anyway, I love the A2. Now that paint job though...

Incredible feat for an incredible car. Keep em coming, that's how the ball gets rolling.

That's twice the expected value, so [citation needed].

Das Wunder von Berlin | Das elektrische Fahrtenbuch

380V, 260AH, 300 kg

If this is real, then the end of the ICE age is here.

They are also saying the batter is 97% efficient, which a bit better than current batteries (which are ~94% as I understand it?).

They had ~18% charge left, and since we don't know what the DOD is, a wild ass guess is they used ~90kWh, and this works out to ~240Wh/mile. Which is very plausible, though not outstanding. At 660 pounds, this battery could be used in Dave Cloud's Dolphin and since it is 1,300 pounds lighter, it could get below 100Wh/mile -- and have a range of about 1,000 miles!

That would be a revolution!

Edit:

From Toecutter's link:

So, the 6 minute charge is future/theoretical limits of the battery. The actual time is 4 hours; which is still very impressive.

Who really needs to charge that fast or go that far tho? for most people that kind of range is over a weeks worth of driving, for me it would be closer to a month of driving.

50k@2500 cycles (battery cost-depreciation).
$20 per full cycle (every 375 miles under perfect conditions).
not including the electricity cost.
18.75 cents per mile in battery depreciation.
say 25 cents a mile in electricity and battery depreciation (at least).
they have a very long way to go.

regards
Mech

Where are you getting the cost from?

In a more efficient car (the Illuminati Seven gets lower consumption than this A2, and Dave Cloud's Dolphin is much lower), that battery could go up to 600-800 miles.

Yes, it's doable, but is it doable without reducing car & contents to a puddle of molten metal?

"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"

Direct current at what voltage? Cables for charging must look like a couple of Anaconda's mating.

Right, and 4 hours is plenty fast already.

115KWh costs $50k in LFP today ($478/KWh), per electricmotorsport.com. I'm sure their LMP battery with three times the energy density costs far more than $50k today.

Lets put 800 pounds of passengers on top of the 660 in battery. That's 1460 pounds of payload that has nothing to do with the vehicle, drive system, structural integrity or collision absorption ability. I doubt very seriously if the vehicle was ever designed to handle that much additional mass in braking, handling, or any other driving dynamics.

55 MPH steady speed. We all know that is about the ideal speed for high mileage. At that speed my old Insight would average 70 MPG, manuals would do much better.

I am not anti electric vehicle by any stretch of the imagination, but a statement like the ICE is dead was made many decades ago, and we are still using ICEs for the vast majority of transportation modes on the planet today, and projections are that will be the case for decades to come.

It's sad that advocates of high efficiency transportation do not support every method of accomplishing that goal, by whatever means accomplishes the end result, as long as it is clean.

The record for MPG today in a ICE vehicle is over 12,000 MPG. I don't use that knowledge to make statements like the battery powered car is dead. Two advocates of different means to the end result sitting on opposite sides of the fence and tossing grenades at each other will never improve the progress of maximising efficiency.

As far as life expectancy of batteries and any claim that they would loose nothing in capacity in a decade, can you show me a single example of that being the case with any battery technology that has ever existed. Maybe the NASA flywheel battery?

regards
Mech

Sorry, but your math is not right. $20 to go 375 miles is a little over 5 cents per mile ($.053), not 18.75 cents per mile ($.1875). That would be $70.31 to go 375 miles. The lifetime average for my car is a little over 7 cents per mile.

I will have to defer to the EV gurus as to the electrical cost per mile.

My CarBEN design would probably be under 1,600 pounds with the DBM Hummingbird battery. How is this hard to make crash worthy? And have you seen those uber-high mileage vehicles? This Audi A2 EV still seats four people. They did the drive at night, so with lights and heat, too. It got about 140MPGe on this run.

We don't know the cost -- it probably will be expensive, especially until some other company comes out with a similar battery cell. It costs about 2 cents per mile for electricity.

I think Dave Cloud's Dolphin (or my CarBEN?) would go 600-800 miles on the 115kWh Hummingbird battery.

It has also lost the IC engine, transmission and accessories (replaced by electric stuff, if at all), and the fuel tank and accesories - that's going to make a significant weight saving.
But it likely still weighs more than the ICE A2.

But it doesn't seat 4, and it doesn't take along a bit of luggage, does it ? ;)

The main point is batteries are getting lighter and more powerful.
Now all we need is clean energy production.

You don't think the chassis and brakes were designed to include the weight of the passengers and a few hundred pounds of luggage? Are you high?

A typical car of that (small) size would not be designed to handle 1460lbs or 662kg of load.
It only weighs around 1000kg (with ICE).

Old Mechanic included the weight of the passengers in the amount that he thinks the vehicle was not designed for.

Maybe the car should come with a sticker that says WARNING, the brakes cannot handle it if anyone actually sits in these seats.

Since the ICE was all removed, it must be within a couple sets of golf clubs of the original weight.

I see a few of those A2's about. Damn i wish i had one now! Mind you the ones i see are the tdi version so the EV is not that much of a jump! Though it is a jump all the same.
Now that i read some posts questioning the ability of the car i must point out that it is a very capable car. Strong and light. vorsprung and all that. I would not question their safety for a second. relax will you!!

I don't know if I'm an EV guru but I do have an EV so...
115kWh battery capacity
97% efficiency
$0.1201/kwh electricity cost (the national average)
gives:
(115kWh/0.97) * $0.1201 = $14.24 per "fill up"
divided by 375 miles give 3.8 cents per mile in fuel cost and 9.1 cents per mile depreciation + electricity.

But this depreciation assumes that the battery is ready for the recycler after 2500 cycles but that's not the case. This battery will still give it's rated output after 2500 cycles then will gradually lose capacity. It may still give another million miles after it's 2500 cycles. I say "another million" because 375mi range and 2500 cycles is 937,500 miles.

The regenerative braking of the electric motor would add a fair bit of braking torque.

A2 original weight 855 KG.

Smoke that.

Uh, it has a 5 speed transmission, and the original engine was 100 kg. The transmission automatically freewheels when you let off the accelerator so P&G is easy, but it is also illegal in many places in the US.

Do some research.

Weight listed with driver is 1290 KG versus the original 855 KG without driver.
1290 is probably over the original gross weight loading (I did not see that listed in the information I read).

Lets see if my math was better than the last post.

435KG more including the driver. Now add 3 passengers and luggage.
I'm about 90 KG.
Maybe 300 more KG for all of that.
Now we are at 1590 KG in a car designed originally at 855 KG + 4 passengers and luggage.

If you all want to pile on the take a shot at Old Mech gang, maybe you should at least do some reading about the original A2, which was quite a design tour de force, but you can bet it was not designed to survive collisions with a load of 745 KG additional in a 855 KG vehicle.

I would like to see some cost figures on the battery since the inventor says it is production ready. He should be able to give us a cost figure.

If you could buy the car, no longer produced, what would you think the cost of a complete, crashworthy, legal to operate in the US version would be?

100k?
200K?

I agree the main point should be the weight, energy capacity, and COST of the battery.

regards
Mech

Actually 855-1030 Kg depending on engine configuration... So even though it's not certain that they chose the one weighing in at 1030 Kg, it's designed to operate with that weight, so that's a safe figure to use...

With the loss of the ICE and added the battery you have a quoted weight with driver of 1260 Kg... That's 1170 Kg sans 90 Kg driver, making it a whopping 140 Kg heavier than stock...

Yeah granted... Add back the driver and four passengers at 90 Kg and some luggage and you will be in trouble... But unless the 90 Kg guys are really, really desperate to cuddle, there will only be 3 passengers, and possibly a child in the middle rear seat... So 1170 + 4*90 = 1530 Kg... And that's 10 Kg below the specified total weight with full load according to Audi...

So yeah, to keep the weight limits you have to either pack light (10 Kg for four people) or choose passengers or cargo...

Just like with any small car... ;)

I wonder what the Leaf would do for range with this battery, if it really is such a quantum leap in technology, to the tune of something that has not been seen in decades.

regards
Mech

Not sure but the Tesla Roadster has a ~50kWh battery and 244 mi range. Granted the Roadster probably has better aero but it's less than half the capacity and only 35% less range. I'll bet that there are a lot of people on this list that could sqeeze >350mi out of the Roadster and >500mi out of this A3. The 115kWh battery is definitely overkill, intended more to shatter the perceptions of Joe Sixpack than to be a real production intent vehicle.

I think that we can all agree that the end of fossil fuels isn't going to happen any time soon, but at least there has been a shift to more fuel efficient vehicles.

The original weight of the car tells you absolutely nothing about what its load capacity is. For example, a 19# bicycle is easily rated to carry 12 times it's own weight.

It sounds ridiculous when you imply it's overloaded when it has people sitting in the seats that it was equiped with.

I find it amazing that some here believe the claims made by the 27 year old inventor without any reservations whatsoever.

Recharging the battery in 6 minutes would require an electrical source that would be capable of providing more KW in power in 1 hour than your typical home requires in 1 month. Even 4 hours would require 22 kilowatts per hour or close to 30 horsepower through your home's electrical system.

The details of the battery are conveniently missing, just like the details of the Volts mileage were first mega hyped and the last detail available was the actual charge depleted mileage.

I have looked around for any real data on this battery and it just isn't there. The rationale is its some great secret, but the inventor states it will be cheaper than current designs and is production ready.

Why not provide details unless they do not support the claims made. Great secrets can not be sold without being revealed to the first customer who buys one.

Do you honestly think any customer is just going to buy the sales pitch without detailed testing?

Do you think this battery has been tested through 2500 cycles to confirm an otherwise unsupported claim?

Have you ever seen any chemical battery that looses no efficiency over 2500 full duty cycles?

Go on take some more shots at me because you WANT to be blindly led on by some showmanship, that conveniently lacks enough substance to confirm the sensational nature of the presentation?

Having been trying to promote what I believe to be an efficiency enhancing solution to vehicles regardless of their primary energy source, I can assure you those questions had damn well better be answered before you will see any real financial support.

It also smacks of a political stunt to imply that Germany has now taken the lead in battery electric vehicle technology.

If (and its a huge if), his invention is capable of doubling the efficiency of a battery as a function of weight and size, then he has a game changer. The Chinese will build it as soon as they get there hands on a single example, and they could care less about any patent rights he might hold, if his technology is even patentable.

When did skepticism of UNSUBSTANTIATED claims become the standard of conduct here, or anywhere else, that needed to be shouted down by anyone.

regards
Mech