A bit off topic - electric car progress

[flecc]

Chinese, it will be cheap enough, undercutting the Prius probably, and that's sold really well all round the world.

I like the concept, almost full time electric, but still high performing and capable of the odd long trips. They claim a huge electric range as usual, so I cut that down to a guess at 80 miles, but it wouldn't matter if it was only 40 miles since the overwhelming majority of car journeys are less than that, shops, school runs, to work journeys etc.
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[the_killjoy]

I do feel the optimum way to have a high efficiency /low cost solution to an electric car is to restrict the propulsion propulsion to electric but use a small high efficiency constant speed diesel engine to cut in to keep the batteries charged.

It seems the way to go as it avoids the complexity of duplicated drive systems.

 

[HarryB]

The Chinese BYD electric car can live anywhere. It uses home rechargeable batteries and operates as an exclusively electric high performance car everywhere until the battery runs out at around 80 miles (they claim much more of course!). Then it's petrol engine cuts in and takes over.

See the cleverness? The great majority of all car journeys are within it's electric range, but it can still undertake the odd long journey like any other car. Therefore it's electric most of the time and a true hybrid, unlike the Toyota Prius etc which are petrol cars and not hybrids, all of their energy derived from petrol.

The BYD car
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I am sure all the main players have similar concepts in the pipeline but they won't undercut the chinese on price. Electric cars? Where's the catch - Telegraph

I like the last sentence - I hope they take advice from the electric bike manufacturers!

 

[flecc]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/environment/4387745/Electric-cars-Wheres-the-catch.html

I like the last sentence -

Quite true, and it's ironic that another manufacturer is having trouble with those LG Chem batteries. As I so often observe, battery progress is as much myth as fact, optimism playing too big a part in announcements.
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[prState]

I'd refer battery makers to the ways of Demings.

here's an excerpt from Wikipedia

W. Edwards Deming - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ford customers were requesting the model with Japanese transmission over the USA-made transmission, and they were willing to wait for the Japanese model. As both transmissions were made to the same specifications, Ford engineers could not understand the customer preference for the model with Japanese transmission. It delivered smoother performance with a lower defect rate. Finally, Ford engineers decided to take apart the two different transmissions. The American-made car parts were all within specified tolerance levels. On the other hand, the Japanese car parts had much closer tolerances than the USA-made parts - e.g. if a part was supposed to be one foot long, plus or minus 1/8 of an inch - then the Japanese parts were within 1/16 of an inch. This made the Japanese cars run more smoothly and customers experienced fewer problems.

A number of Japanese manufacturers applied his techniques widely and experienced theretofore unheard of levels of quality and productivity. The improved quality combined with the lowered cost created new international demand for Japanese products.