New nordschleife lap record for road-legal electric car

It's nice when a group of students can give big companies a run for their money

 

Bloody hell.

 

Go Finnish nerds!

 

Sweet... I totally forgot about the Raceabout!! I remember driving that thing back in LFS days. So they've gone Electric now, thats pretty awesome!

 

Nice, but this is basically just a well sorted kit car. They used 3rd party batteries, 3rd party engines, 3rd party suspension and I strongly suspect 3rd party carbon work as well, since helsinki doesn't have an autoclave. They just put it all together, but honestly this isn't a technological show-piece. It's just a good use of existing technology. This is basically something each of us, with enough time, money, and some knowledge about engineering and solidworks could do.

 

So the future is shiftless cars.

 

Well, it's like Koenigsegg said with the Regera, at a certain point the degree you have to make the gearbox heavy-duty to withstand the crazy power (torque @ 0 rpm is basically unbounded in electric motors, it goes up until something melts - the Teslas have a flat Nm up to 1000 rpm because it's electronically limited) isn't worth the weight it adds. I'd expect 2-3 speeds to come back into play once they're durable enough to help, maybe like the stacked overdrives that drag cars use.

Electric motors in principle have a fixed horsepower + a fairly low redline so gearing doesn't help them as much, in practice they do have an ideal operating range.

 

...well, honestly, there are a lot of electric motors that are used for eV's and their redline is higher then most combustion engines. Now that you mentioned Tesla, the first model, Roadster had redline around 12k rpm, the current Model S has readline @ 16k rpm. That is not low at all...
Other thing, the electric vehicles cannot be driven as standard combustion engines. In combustion engines, you need to rev it as low as possible in order to have low MPG. In electric vehicles on other hand it doesn't matter, the fact that a motor is 300kW for example, if you push it to the limit (simply speaking) it will use around 330kW through whole range from 0 up to redline. This is also a reason why they don't need gearing (by wich I mean on transmissions).

Tesla made first Roadster as 2-gear model, but the initial torque was so high, that most of the transmissions broke. Then after few years of testing they came to conclusion that gearing is no necessary in eV's because of characteristics of electric motors. Current motors that Tesla uses have same torque up to ~40% of rpm range, and then kicks it top power all the way up to 65%, after that it degrades to about 50% of power up to 100%. With current gearing it means that you have almost ~96% of energy usage in range of normal driving conditions (0-160km/h). Do you need it any better?

Of course it would be nice to have all that torque at up to max speeds, but hey, eV's came far today.

Another great electric motors that are used by some manufacturers of eV's are YASA electric motors, also having redline from 4500 (for strongest) up to 9000 (for weakest). I'd say they can replace every diesel or petrol combustion engine, and you wouldn't notice it except the noise.

...still, we are far from using them cheap, problem is the batteries or any other source of electricity.

Cheers...

 

Yes, because making an electric car that laps Nordschleife as fast as Pagani Zonda S or Audi R8 V10 requires just little bit of tinkering really.

 

You jelly?

 

Impressive.

 

An electric performance car would be interesting to drive in the sim.

 

Wonder what happened to this project?
http://www.assettocorsa.net/forum/index.php?threads/tesla-model-s-85-performance.11820/

 

...nothing, working on it to finish it Just started making model for Tesla Roadster 2.5 Sport and then I'll release whole package of Model S P85+, Model S P85D, Model S GTe, Roadster 2.5s and Roadster GTe.

...as I said, it is announced for 1.3 to fully support KERS on track, so you'll have pure eV in game.

Cheers...

 

Thanks Lock.
That is fantastic, can't wait to give them a go.