Tesla Model S P100DL Motor Trend all-time world record 60mph in 2.27s
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Especially the latest episode of Grand Tour did some kind of road test with a hybrid car and made a laughing stock of it. And they laughed about the "future of cars" if it would be like that (they used some ridiculous bmw hybrid). Driving very slow to preserve electricity and long charge times every 40 miles or something like that. Why didn't they test with a Tesla to give a realistic picture of "the future"?
For my family, it means owning my i3 for commuting and my wife's Toyota Sienna for family trips. For others, it could mean renting a car for a week or two when you take a long road trip.
As a fun note: As a BMW i3 owner, BWM offers me up to 2 weeks per year of complimentary gasoline car rental for road trips.
The GT people have standards which don't really apply to most people. Most of their shows involve cars that most people will never afford.
There's a pretty big assumption that travel beyond 60 miles (or 110 in the case of my i3) requires a car. There are a lot of ways to travel that don't involve driving. I travel frequently; it's almost always by air.
I don't know about that. They do it just to shit on EV's. (Disclaimer: I own an EV, but also like and watch Grand Tour). It's an entertainment show. They're not about objective analysis. It's the crank-call-radio-morning-show model applied to cars.
Their complaints about the i3 was low range (needing multiple recharges) and weak power (when range extended).
They could have used something like a Vauxhall Ampera, which is actually designed for the road-trip route they ran (all electric in London, powerful gas range extender for freeway driving at 80+mph).
They could have used a pure-EV car that actually had decent range like a Renault Zoe, which would have only needed a single recharge stop to make their entire trip, even driving at 70mph the whole time.
But they didn't. They didn't use a fair car to test, because then it would have been less funny.
Of course there's more to the story - Top Gear isn't exactly "objective journalism" and the team will create a story out of thin air when it suits the show. See also "M3 vs Prius" segment: http://www.bmwblog.com/2009/06/12/bmw-m3-vs-toyota-prius-its...
BMW did a very similar thing with their 330e model; the electric motor is primarily used to increase the power from the relatively small engine that is normally only on the lower-end 320.
That said, my original statement was mean to describe the objective of these hybrid cars; any additional "fuel economy" is probably best described as a side effect.
And I think only 2/3 even had that option.
That said, for 90+% of people, the Tesla S, and almost assuredly the Model 3, will be more than sufficient vehicles for people. The focus on acceleration is an amazing selling point and most people will never track their car. The ranges on these cars are pretty excellent and charging stations are becoming more and more common.
These cars aren't for me though, I'll gladly keep driving my BMW. The Tesla feels soulless while driving it and the skinny tires and the extreme weight shifts prevent you from hammering through corners which is were I believe driving is the most exhilarating.
Anyone who doesn't believe it, watch the video. Car and Driver took a Model S onto a track and in less than a minute it was limping in low-power mode as the batteries were overheating. They also ran into an issue where the brakes stopped working. This was just during one lap of a small race track.
The Model S is a luxury performance sedan, not a race car. It can't handle being pushed to its limits for any period of time. It just wasn't designed for that.
... I feel like there's a valid counterpoint here that asks "Then what did you engineer?"
It's a fair question if you're bragging about performance but unable to endure even moderate track conditions.
You can dig up lots of videos where they race Teslas against Lamborghinis and Ferraris. Up to 60 the supercar is barely hanging on, but at that point the Tesla is tapped out while the supercar still has plenty of acceleration, and it completely leaves it behind.
0-100 mph is still a pretty common performance indicator in its own right, it's just less commonly used compared to 0-60.
And they're doing that. Mainly hybrids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koenigsegg_Agera. Electric for the start, gas for the win.
Going from 0-60 is a nice perk (quick), but until these cars can hold that speed longer (fast) many car enthusiasts aren't likely to bite.
The most important part of your comment was the other parameters, not of speed but of the car itself. A friend of mine is a Ferrari owner who admires what Tesla can do but will die before he gives up the hard roar of a powerful engine.
There's an old expression around the speed shop that fits here:
"People buy power, but they drive torque."
And its electric FTW in a big way if you believe in that koan.
High revving high power output engines (for example Formula 1 until 2004, which still holds half the lap records) have a low torque number, but more rev-range to apply to the gearbox allowing higher actual output to the wheels in the end. Essentially the torque number is just power divided by revs (Newton per meter in SI units).
So an older Formula 1 car that revs to 18.000 rpm has a far lower torque number than your mom's diesel road car. Yet that F1 car does insane acceleration from 0 to 200 km/h and has 700+ bhp while the road car would have around 100 maybe 150 bhp.
As far as practical power, electric is far more useful than gasoline for aggressive city and interstate driving (unless you have a long stretch of open pavement). The lack of transmission gives a distinct advantage in surprise-passing a gasoline sports car. The thrill of instant power cannot be overstated!
EDIT: or diesel
This could actually REDUCE refill times (if the swap out is efficient enough). If temperatures could be controlled to allow it to run in an all out mode, this could be a competitive edge?
Or would this be somehow disallowed? I imagine this would be akin to swapping out the complete fuel tank in a car instead of refueling the tank, and I have no idea about racing rules.
Have you ever watched Formula 1 or NASCAR? They can fill 20 gallons of fuel in ~10 seconds. Do you really think a battery swap system could even come close to competing with that?
And most cars refuel every 14 laps, and races are about 384 laps. Totals over 5000km in 24hrs. That's a lot of batteries...
I still think this is a pipe dream with current battery tech for other reasons (weight, power density, overheating, etc.), but from a logistics standpoint it might actually be possible.
EDIT: thanks for noticing, added metric equivs. The difference was just in the sources I found reporting the units differently.
It never took off, I guess because the infrastructure never existed, and because of the aforementioned armor issues. It's too bad. I always thought battery swaps would be an ideal way to deal with the aging of these batteries. Depreciate the value of the battery based on some formula and allow people to get a newer one once their battery passes some usage threshold, seamlessly, and bill them for the upgrade.
They replace whole nose assemblies in <30sec in F1. Audi some years ago replaced the entire rear transaxle & suspension assembly at LeMans in < 5 minutes in the middle of the night, because they'd anticipated the potential need for it and done the prior engineering necessary (iirc, that car finished 2nd and their other one won).
Reliability and safety would take some real work, just like the high-speed fuel rigs previously used in F1.
There's also the issue of cooling the electric motor.
[1] http://www.pointthepower.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Scre...
Well, not really (see Formula-E). If you want a battery that can sustain high power output (high specific power, e.g. LiFePO4), you have to go to a different chemistry than what Tesla uses (high specific energy, LiNiCoAlO2). Tesla could make a Model S that went fast around a racetrack, but it would mean sacrificing range. Since the 0-60 is mainly a gimmick, it's not worth sacrifising usability for.
> The lack of transmission gives a distinct advantage in surprise-passing a gasoline sports car.
Not sure if the advantage is that great: in the case of a modern >250 hp gasoline sports car with the de rigueur dual-clutch semiautomatic gearbox, the person in the sports car would plant their foot and be in the engine's optimal torque band within ~0.3 seconds. So I doubt there is a disadvantage of the equivalently-powered gasoline sportscar in this situation that is not dwarfed by the noise of human reaction times.
It'd be interesting and fun to see how far you could push the current model with just some software changes and some improved cooling. People have modified air-cooled Porsches to do hill climbs, and so on, so there's certainly some existing expertise in this area. Everything that comes to mind, given the Model S's design, is pretty elaborate however.
It does not include dragsters or other custom vehicles, which may be equipped with nitrous injectors, non-street-legal equipment, or other major concessions to daily driving.
This was apparent in Friday's episode of <strike>Top Gear</strike> Grand Tour where Hammond raced a Porsche 918 hybrid supercar against the Bugatti Veyron, and then against "some old Nissan van." Which (as you may have guessed, sorry for the spoilers ahead) happened to be souped up with a 1900 HP engine, and easily beat the supercar.
It's also apparent when looking at this electric project car: https://phys.org/news/2016-06-electric-car-world.html which, at 1.5 seconds, seems likely to approach the limit of wheeled vehicles.
A lot of the mods used to increase power considerably also decrease the MTBF of many components within vehicles.
Tesla defines "production cars" to exclude cars built in very small volumes, for obvious reasons (otherwise Tesla wouldn't be "fastest"). In related news, the Tautology Association of America has offered Elon a complementary lifetime membership.
No car produced in greater volumes is quicker, and many which are produced in smaller volumes and/or for a lot more money are slower. That's a significant fact that's not diminished by shed-built customs.
>The Tesla does not hold the advantage forever, though, because higher speeds give the advantage to horsepower over instant torque. The Ferrari LaFerrari hits 70 mph a tenth of a second quicker; the Porsche 918 and McLaren P1 pull ahead at 80 mph, and these hypercars all continue to pull away at higher speeds.
Warning! Personal anecdote ahead! As a (poor) car enthusiast, I look for an aggregate of numbers, but ultimately it comes down to that ineffable quality of "feel". For me, personally, 0-60 times aren't as important as handling quality. Yes, I've driven a P85D (Ludicrous mode) "in anger". In sports car terms it's a one-trick pony. It's a hell of a trick, but it's not for me.
In the same episode they also did a drag race between a Golf GTI and an BMW i3. While the latter was faster off the line, due to the instant torque thing, once they got past 80 the Golf got away by a lot. That's the beauty of the combustion engine, once it revs up it goes ballistic.
The Koenigsegg Regera combines a powerful twin-turbo
V8 combustion engine with three electric motors and
cutting edge battery power via new powertrain
technology called Koenigsegg Direct Drive. This
revolutionary technology removes the traditional
gearbox, making the car lighter and more efficient.
Super cars also handle exceedingly well.
Sorry but the this fixation on 0-60/100/etc is just pathetic. Show me five hundred mile range, show me five minute recharge, because those are the issues that will advance the position of EVs
Now it's "well it doesn't go 500 miles and it doesn't charge in 5 minutes, and okay, it is the quickest to 60mph of any production car in the world, but only on a full charge and that sucks!!!"
EVs keep getting better. Another 10 years from now, what will anti-EV people be saying?
Pointing out facts is now "anti-EV"?
Many a car can be optimized for acceleration:
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/22/12004422/fastest-accelerat...
You might get some diesels going that far, but 500 miles is not really common among gasoline engines. I'm not sure why that's your metric for a quality electric car.
http://insideevs.com/expected-tesla-model-s-fails-lap-nurbur...
edit: a quick Google of forums and articles suggests the car has a problem overheating when you drive it above ~100 MPH
http://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-s-formula-1-racing-circ...
If your plans for the day somehow involve a crash helmet and the Mulsanne Straight, yeah, you're going to find it a little limiting and it's the wrong tool for the job. But seriously, it's a 4-door sedan...