Electric GT Series Breaks Cover at Autosport International Show

I've got a question, though. Are full-electric racing cars capable of running an endurance race with a real chance of victory (assuming same level of performance with other cars)? I mean, taking a one-hour pit stop to recharge the battery can be really frustrating.

If they were being purpose built they wouldn't be taking 1 hour to recharge a battery. They wouldn't car swap either - they'd just change the battery outright. As lengthy as fuel stops are in most endurance series due to really low fuel fill rates I'm pretty sure they could come up with a process. At one point we thought a failed rear end was a DNF, then Audi swapped the back half of an R8 in 3 minutes...

It's way more likely though that cars like the Nissan ZEOD are where it will be, which are electric by charged by a small gasoline engine, rather than a hybrid. Why that concept continues to get very little traction I don't quite know...
 
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Why that concept continues to get very little traction I don't quite know...

The chevy volt springs to mind, but it's a technological dead-end: There is simply more payoff in trying to make a full battery powered car work as opposed to having what amounts to an aggregator that does nothing but being dead weight until the batteries start running low.
 
Good to see electrics stepping forward in research by series like this one. Oil and its alternatives will most likely never end, just get more expensive, and by that time instead of having manufacturers spending millions on hybrid/electric cars it is better to spend on making new batteries rather than on very expensive fuel.
 
The chevy volt springs to mind, but it's a technological dead-end: There is simply more payoff in trying to make a full battery powered car work as opposed to having what amounts to an aggregator that does nothing but being dead weight until the batteries start running low.

Except it's proven the batteries always start running low, that's why they need recharged. :p

Frankly, I think this "problem" of electric cars is being looked at from the wrong end - trying to go full electric even though the technology isn't fully there to make it practical without the "I need to wait for my battery to recharge" thing and it hasn't become standardized enough to make widespread swapping practical.
 
Except it's proven the batteries always start running low, that's why they need recharged. :p

Frankly, I think this "problem" of electric cars is being looked at from the wrong end - trying to go full electric even though the technology isn't fully there to make it practical without the "I need to wait for my battery to recharge" thing and it hasn't become standardized enough to make widespread swapping practical.

I keep seeing people say the technology isn't there, the technology isn't ready. Well...how do you get it ready? You can't get it to the point that we want it without development, and development includes real world running, not just in a lab. Petrol technology (from oil from a well all the way to 100mpg hybrids) never started at the current level. It's taken a century to get it here.
 
I think they looked into battery swapping for FE. It's not the standardisation of the batteries that is the problem but that to avoid damaging them in an accident they need to be extremely well protected and so not easy to change in a hurry.

In the UK at least a decent proportion of people get in their car, drive to work and park there all day before coming home. There is plenty of time to keep the batteries charged.
 
Except it's proven the batteries always start running low, that's why they need recharged. :p

Frankly, I think this "problem" of electric cars is being looked at from the wrong end - trying to go full electric even though the technology isn't fully there to make it practical without the "I need to wait for my battery to recharge" thing and it hasn't become standardized enough to make widespread swapping practical.

Right, but in that case I would argue that the traditional hybrids are a more succesfull concept: It's more efficient to transfer fuel directly into power rather then fuel into electricity and then transfer that electricity into power.

Seeing those LMP1 cars in Assetto Corsa does make me wonder how well they would function if they took the limiter off.

Also, that Nissan GT-R LM car. Pity that never worked out.
 
Right, but in that case I would argue that the traditional hybrids are a more succesfull concept: It's more efficient to transfer fuel directly into power rather then fuel into electricity and then transfer that electricity into power.

No it isn't. I posted a few pages back about this.

In a traditional petrol vehicle, the petrol has to be pumped onshore and then goes through the refining process, and then transferred to petrol stations where it finally gets put into the vehicle to produce power. A standard car engine operates at around 40% efficiency. Diesel is a little bit higher, but only a couple of percent, and diesel has more energy per litre than petrol. But for the sake of this discussion, they are as near as makes no difference the same.

For electrical power, on the assumption you're still using oil and gas as the initial fuel source, the oil and gas is separated off shore (on the oil platforms themselves) and pumped back in separate lines (gas and oil tend not to be mixed when pumping on shore). The gas in its natural form can be used in a gas turbine generator without any refinement, which is already saving energy. The gas turbine generator itself tends to be absolutely massive, which means they can use heavier stronger parts that are too heavy for a gas, and the result is they can get more efficiency out of them - around 60%. So right off the bat, you're gaining 20% efficiency in the vehicle itself, before taking into account the savings on no energy loss through refinement and transportation to the site.

Cars which use the petrol engine to charge the battery don't really achieve anything. The Fisker Karma for example achieves absolutely no saving in fuel what-so-ever, making the electric side of things nothing but a gimmick, since you still need fossil fuels to power the vehicle. Should you use the plugin option, then you're still losing energy as you're lugging around a giant petrol generator for no reason at all.

And people keep talking about hybrids are a more successful concept, completely ignoring what a hybrid does. A traditional hybrid simply recovers already spent energy. It still requires an energy source to power the vehicle. So making everything a hybrid is fine, it'll save energy and lower your fuel bills, but it isn't a replacement for the energy source, and since petrol engines can only currently use petrol that originated from an oil and gas well, they have a limited time span. By contrast, an electric motor doesn't care if the electricity was generated from a gas turbine, a wind turbine, wave power, coal, or nuclear. As long as you can generate electricity, you can power the vehicle - which means they are 100% sustainable.

Hybrids save fuel. They do not change the fuel source. Creating electricity in an oil and gas power plant generator is more efficient than using petrol to power a car. These are the basic facts which get missed a lot during these discussions.
 
Cars which use the petrol engine to charge the battery don't really achieve anything. The Fisker Karma for example achieves absolutely no saving in fuel what-so-ever, making the electric side of things nothing but a gimmick, since you still need fossil fuels to power the vehicle. Should you use the plugin option, then you're still losing energy as you're lugging around a giant petrol generator for no reason at all.

This is what I meant :)
 
This is what I meant :)

Ah, crossed wires (see that! Electricity reference! ;) ) Yeah, you're completely right about cars like the Karma that charge battery from the fuel. You lose a little bit of efficiency during any energy conversion, so you'll have a net loss in that car. What it can boast is the torque of an electric car. But then why wouldn't you buy the Tesla, which is a better car anyway, since they were able to do a lot of creative things with the car as they could remove the engine, transmission and fuel tanks.
 
I think there is a lot of skepticism because it is a change from the norm, but I think it would be quite interesting as a support series. There are a few points which are being lost I think
1) A Tesla P100D is a really fast car. Instead of comparing it to V8 Supercars, maybe we think of it more like a Trans-am series. These are going to be faster than your typical production car based series. Trans-am races usually last 45 minutes or so and are divided into 2 separate sessions.
2) It's not like the existence of this series is somehow detracting from others. I love loud GT and prototype cars just as much as the next guy, and the existence of this series isn't going to kill DTM, Blancpain, WEC, etc. It's only going to happen a few weekends a year and it's a chance for some other proof of concept ideas to be tried out that might improve some other series (I'm looking at you Formula E)
 
It's no where near as simple as what you're making out. The first proper motor car to run disc brakes for performance was a Jaguar at Le Mans. Only after that did a production car run it. Similarly, carbon fibre may have been invented for and by aerospace, but it made its introduction to cars in motor racing. And now we have production vehicles with new materials. And then theres all the safety improvements. And then LED headlights.

It is completely wrong to say that most road car technology comes from racing cars. But it's equally wrong to suggest that it is a myth. As usual, it is a shade of grey. Some tech makes it. Some doesn't. Some needs racing adaption before it can be used in a production vehicle.



Since power stations can be created that are clean (such as solar, wind, wave), and are increasingly common (especially here in Scotland), that makes it quite a good change. However I suspect you're trying to imply that because there are power plants, that are for example, oil based, that somehow this cancels out the gain from an electric car, which isn't the case.

For a regular petrol car the hydrocarbons need to be pumped onshore and refined several times over to get it to the petrol stage. Each part of the process is using energy, which makes the final product less efficient. And then you need petrol tankers to take the petrol to the petrol station, thus using more fuel during that process. And then the petrol engine in a car only operates at about 40% efficiency. The rest is lost to heat, sound and vibration.

With an electric car, on the assumption that the car is charged using electricity sourced from an oil and gas power plant, you still need to pump the hydrocarbon onshore and do some refining, but less than the petrol stage. Most oil and has power plants tend to be alongside the refineries, or a short distance from them (for example. Sullum Voe Gas Plant and Shetland Power Plant), which means that you cut out the transport costs of the fuel afterwards. And even for plants further away, you tend to have pipelines built and it's pumped to it. And then, when it does finally get put into a generator, because the generator is *massive*, it can be built using much stronger and heavier materials that you couldn't use in a car engine, which means that you get much more efficiency out of it. A modern gas turbine generator used onshore is around 60% efficiency. So ignoring all the other loss of energy during transport and refinery, and looking only at the burning of a hydrocarbon to produce energy, you're gaining 20% efficiency off the bat. Since the gas used in a turbine generator is usually unrefined, and simply separated straight off of the oil, there's no loss of energy when doing it (unlike petrol). This is how oil rigs generate power - they use the gas either directly from the well, or separated from the oil straight out of the well, into generators.

Source: I work in the oil and gas industry, and the renewables, specifically wind turbines.

AND, since this is talking about Tesla in the electric GT series, the primary source of electricity for Tesla cars are the Supercharging stations, which not only are 100% solar (so clean), but also generate enough surplus to put into the grid, in theory, lowering your electric bills (in reality, the money goes to big bosses, but that's hardly Teslas fault). And since the acquisition of solar city, you'll be able to buy electric solar panels for your home that look like normal roof tiles, bundled with your Tesla.

I'm no hippy. I don't like the green agenda. I like a Corvette C7.R v8, all 67 litres of magnificence. I don't like electric racing cars because they feel emotionless. But lets not pretend that just because we all love the noise, passion and smell of a petrol racing engine, that electric cars, especially the Tesla range, are not a positive step for the world as a whole. If I won the lottery, I'd buy a Bentley Continental, with its huge engine. And I'd rev the hell out of it so I can hear it in all its glory, and I wouldn't care less about the fuel I'm burning. But beside the Bentley Continental will be parked a Tesla Model S P100D, because it's an incredible machine, and we DO need to be moving to electric vehicles for most things. But that doesn't mean we can't have a good old fashioned internal combustion engine for us petrol heads.

Edit: People need to look at the bigger picture of global activity. The actual impact motorsport has itself is so tiny it cannot be measured. But it does take motor racing moving in a direction for road cars to follow. Hybrids really were not the in thing (none of us want a Prius). But since LMP1 and F1 have been running energy recovery systems, we've started seeing supercars with similar tech, and even plugin hybrids from the likes of Audi. It isn't about where the exact technology originated, but the bigger picture as a whole and attitude of people.
Nail on the head. :thumbsup:
You win the internet today for cutting through all the BS and lies, and delivering it so eloquently.
 
I understand the need for technology to move forward, but how can any type of racecar that doesn't make noise be enjoyable? For me, anyway, if there's not an exciting engine note, then racing loses its visceral appeal.
 
Thank you Chris. :)

I think the problem with the internet is it tends to simplify very complex issues. This comic is a good example:

2014_05_26_16_19_21.png


It makes the author look intelligent because he's made a witty one line comment that is apparently so smart that it completely nullifies the decades of work done by engineers with a deep knowledge of the subject. Yeah it's all fine as a joke and a wee poke at anyone who thinks their Toyota Prius strokes baby hedgehogs as it drives by, but it completely misses both the finer details and the issue as a whole. Believe it or not, those smart engineers getting paid big bucks to design these systems know a lot more about it than we do. ;)

As for the original topic itself, the Electric GT Series, I agree with Johnnymat. It's just not exciting really. I'll give the first race a watch and they get credit for using proper race tracks, and trying to make the car look like a real racing car rather than a hot wheels toy - so proper effort has been made to make this a real racing series, and that gets a lot of respect IMO. Elon Musk also retweeted an article about the Tesla P100D EGT. So whilst Tesla may not officially be supporting the series and car, it is on their radar. And it does 0-60 in 2.1 seconds, that's pretty cool no matter what it's powered by.
 
It makes the author look intelligent because he's made a witty one line comment that is apparently so smart that it completely nullifies the decades of work done by engineers with a deep knowledge of the subject.
Arguments these days are won on emotion and short phrases that are easy and catchy to grasp, at least politically (e.g. Trump). Fools behind keyboards spouting utter nonsense are suddenly considered factual and reliable sources of information. Actual facts play no role in the debate anymore, and it's the exact same case when it comes to the electric vs fossil fuel argument.

The technology is so new still and it's developing at an astonishing rate, so who knows, in 50 years time the electric car may be so good we could be looking at sub-6 minute laps at the Nordschleife.

I'm also in favour of keeping petrol racing as the main headline act as it's just more impressive in virtually every way, but in a few hundred years or more, when the oil does run out and there's no other choice, then it's pretty cool to know that going fast will still be possible :)
 
One potential big plus of electric race cars in crowded countries like the UK is that most circuits now have severe restrictions on noise levels. My two closest tracks (Castle Coombe and Thruxton) only have a few race meetings a year now because of noise complaints from local residents. The Brands GP loop also cannot be used very much for the same reason. Electric cars and motorbikes could be a good solution for those tracks.

Fans not liking "silent" cars is generational and will fade away when race fans have grown up seeing and driving electric cars. By then we'll all be in the old folks home boring everyone with stories of V12 Ferraris. ;)
 

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