Lamborghini Unveils a Self-Healing Electric Supercar Concept | Hacker News Reader

Lamborghini Unveils a Self-Healing Electric Supercar Concept

bloomberg.com

123 pointsantouank87 comments

> the company will develop in-wheel electric motors, which would eliminate the need for a single large engine.

A 'single large engine' is only needed in ICE cars, electric vehicles have a 'small' motor, and can easily have multiple motors. It's already being done by Tesla and Rimac.

To my knowledge, an 'in wheel' motor would not be desirable due to unsprung mass, so a motor on the chassis connected to the wheel with an axle probably what they mean. Having 4 individual motors would be a first (I think) for a production car, it would allow for some very impressive traction control

That design doesn't look like it has any springs anyway, so the whole thing is a giant unsprung mass, :p

Every time the idea comes up, "unsprung mass" is thrown like a pavlovian reflex. I'm curious about what they have in mind for solving the constraints. They aren't the less experienced people around.

Large outrunner motors like Emrax aren't much heavier than typical cast alloy wheels. Assuming wheel-motor eliminates disc brake components (sounds scary, right?) assembly will probably be even lighter.

http://emrax.com/products/emrax-268/

Thanks a ton for that

At least on a performance vehicle, that's still far too heavy IMO. 40ish lbs? The (cheap) wheels on my Miata are 11 lbs, without any exotic materials or crazy engineering. Almost quadrupling the unsprung mass is a hard sell performance-wise.

Which gen Miata? IIRC NA had something like 5.5x14" wheels which are tiny. But if we look at bigger production car wheels even modest 8x18" could weigh > 30lbs. Second, (unsprung mass/sprung mass) ratio is the thing that counts, not the mass itself. So, while 40 lbs wheel is terrible for the Miata, it might be quite ok for the vehicle twice Miata's weight.

They probably have nothing in mind. This isn't something they're planning to make so much as something that would be cool if the technology existed. The fact that in-wheel motors are put on the same level as "detecting wear and damage", "micro-channels containing 'healing chemistries'", and "supercapacitors out of carbon fiber panels that can be used to form the body of the car" gives an indication of how likely this whole affair is.

This is a concept. It's a bunch of designers sitting in a room thinking "wouldn't this be cool?"

I'd be surprised if any engineer had any input on this process.

Looking at those wheels, and all the fancy material science speculation, they probably expect to use the wheel structure as the motor. If the wheels themselves are acting as coils, then there isn't as much extra unsprung mass.

The wheels themselves can not act as coils because of eddy currents.

and the body can't act as a giant capacitor because it would guarantee the car would explode spectacularly if it ever hit something with enough force to compromise the body panels :-)

I think some designer pooped, err popped, out this 'look' and said "Ohh, I love how futuristic this looks!" let's have a thought shower on how many amazing technologies it might contain without constraining ourselves to reality.

Generally such exercises are useful for helping engineers think outside their generally conservative and self imposed parameters. Even when the actual concept is not really a viable design.

Also, an in-wheel electrict motor would:

1. suffer a lot more from wear and tear than a motor mounted to the chassis.

2. restrain the amount of space available for brakes. While it would be reasonable to say that a small city car could forego its rear brakes and use electric motors instead to deccelerate, coupled with brakes at the front, a four wheel drive supercar with four electric motors would have no chance relying simply on the stopping power of those motors and no brakes.

3. be very difficult to connect to a powerful cooling system. Even electric motorcycles with 30-40 bhp rely on water cooling, let alone a car 20 times the weight.

4. need serious protection from water damage.

A lot more wear- it's seriously nontrivial to make large flexing electrical connectors that will last through the stress cycles of loading and unloading the wheel. It also makes cooling waaaaaay more difficult for high power motors. Liquid is obviously challenging but air is also a huge problem- you run out of space for sinking heat. There's lots of air in that area but it's very, very challenging to prevent it from becoming turbulent and stagnant. Wheels are a big aero drag and it's a very hard choice to add more drag there.

Just to reinforce the brakes message: The braking power on the Bugatti Veyron is in excess of 1.1 megawatts. Braking requires 30% more power than accelerating.

>be very difficult to connect to a powerful cooling system. Even electric motorcycles with 30-40 bhp rely on water cooling, let alone a car 20 times the weight.

This is true- Teslas besides the model 3 and several bikes use liquid cooling. I want to point out that this is not a necessity for motors <200 kW though. Manufacturers are uniformly switching to IPM motors (aka PM synchronous reluctance motors), including Tesla. These motors are much more efficient and allow for cooler high power operation. For instance the Chevy Bolt's 150 kW motor (a weird but decent design) is fully enclosed and cooled pretty much passively.

Previous motors were either inefficient at high power (induction motors) or inefficient at low power (PM motors)- in order to reach low-power efficiency they had to be undersized and required extreme cooling to reach high power.

I’m car illiterate. Why is the braking power proportional to the engine rather than mass or drag or something? Or did i misunderstand?

It's a rule of thumb for "normal" cars.

If anything it takes less power to stop just as fast as you accelerate because of this wonderful thing called the atmosphere.

The problem is that stopping as fast as you accelerate is still too slow to be satisfactory in a lot of cases.

On low end cars that don't have enough power to roast the tires at any speed in any gear you need more braking power than engine power because you need to be able to use 100% of available traction to get from 60-0 for obvious "think of the children" reasons.

Nobody cares if your Yaris doesn't have enough engine to use every available bit of traction to get from 0-60.

Basically "you should be able to brake 30% harder than you accelerate" is a good rule of thumb for economy cars.

When you start talking high horsepower to weight ratios or other vehicular "extremes" rules of thumb don't really work.

Braking power is proportional to mass and velocity. Larger mass moving faster needs bigger brakes.

Electric motors can be used to provide some braking via regeneration, but even so braking generally comes down to "how much heat can you dissipate". A small, slow (relatively speaking) city car won't have as much heat to dissipate, so there are more options when braking.

I'm not sure if that's what the great parent meant but think about two sports cars on the race track: on every lap at the end of the straights, the better accelerating car will be going faster and therefore need better brakes to slow down to make the next corner.

> Even electric motorcycles with 30-40 bhp rely on water cooling, let alone a car 20 times the weight.

FYI my Zero SR motorcycle, which has 70+hp, uses passive cooling only.

I think you just showed me what my next major purchase will be. Those look awesome!

In case people are interested, a prior HN submission, Maker of In-Wheel Electric Car Motors Goes to China[1], had some interesting details on in-wheel motors.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15570079

I think 100 kWh batteries and dual-motors should become standard in all EVs within the next 10 years. The second motor should be of huge benefit in snow for only like a $1,000 more (10 years from now).

Four motors will probably offer diminishing returns for "passenger cars", but sure I could see them become standard in higher-end cars, mainly because of that cool factor as well as the performance/acceleration one.

For buses, trucks, semis, tractors, and whatnot, four or more motors will likely be a requirement.

Why do you think 100kWh batteries will become standard within 10 years? Most cars could do fine with 200mi which would really require about 50-60kWh max - assuming a standard sedan and not a sports car.

Tesla is really on the vanguard here. I wouldn't expect the highest-end Tesla configuration to be standard until at least 10 years later unless China or other countries (current US administration/congress will definitely not) really push the ball forward from a regulation/support standpoint.

My money is on electric motors proximally mounted to the wheels which are in turn connected with constant velocity joints. This also opens up the avenue for four wheel steering and increased maneuverability if all four wheels could be turned arbitrarily while power is modulated to each wheel individually.

Unsprung weight would make this a terrible car to drive - it would handle like a truck at best. The motors should be mounted where differentials currently go. Four motors, with an axle out from each.

Reading this, I'm reminded how little I understand why so many car people aren't excited about electric cars: all sorts of engineering problems to re-think and ideas to try out.

> Having 4 individual motors would be a first (I think) for a production car

It looks like the Mercedes SLS Electric Drive already had it back in 2013: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_SLS_AMG#SLS_AMG_...

Doesn't look like they were integrated into the wheels, though.

Also, I take a slight issue with calling a vehicle that cost over half a million and sold less than 100 units a "production" car. :P

> Lamborghini also intends to make the supercapacitors out of carbon fiber panels that can be used to form the body of the car—so the Terzo Millennio draws energy from its own body. In other words: the car itself is the battery.

So does that mean that if you happen to have an accident, there is a chance that a good chunk of your battery gets short circuited? That sounds somewhat dangerous...

Yeah, and I bet that carbon fiber burns real nice.

Don’t forget that it’s functionally equivalent to asbestos when it come to inducing cancer in the lungs. It doesn’t break down. Little carbon fibers just sit there and disturb the lung lining.

Yep, buy a container of carbon nanotubes and you can't move for warnings about wearing a mask and wearing gloves. 5g of SWNTs, and about 5kg of paper with warnings on :)

> That sounds somewhat dangerous...

Good to see Lamborghini going back to their roots )

That car is like fire! ... literally.

Something on the order of 300 Wh/1-2 MJ, yeah. It would cause a large fire or a small explosion. That's around equivalent to a couple hand grenades.

This is a concept and the article mentions that many of the technologies do not yet exist.

Tesla's competitors are so great at making electric cars...in theory.

So is Tesla :-)

He asked for this, ha ha

At least Tesla has had Model S, 5-8 years before everyone else.

Also, Model 3 is already shipping. So it actually exists. Unlike this car. It's just that Tesla can't produce as many as it wanted due to certain battery production bottlenecks (so not even an issue with the rest of the car).

Just accept the zinger with grace.

They are losing less money though...in practice. ;)

Thanks, we've added “Concept” to the title to clarify.

There are many different shades of "concept"... This particular case seems to be very close to showing off an amazing idea of how sleekly warp nacelles could be integrated with gull wing doors. The Ford Nucleon was closer to implementation than this.

> Supercapacitors store energy physically and don’t generate the heat of lithium-ions, but as of yet they don’t offer as much power.

This probably should read "don't offer as much energy". Almost every mainstream media article about electric cars mixes up these two concepts, sigh.

For a mainstream audience, the difference probably isn't that interesting. I certainly got the point they were trying to make.

They don't store energy physically. They trap electrons. They hold a static but still electrical energy differential. "Physically" sounds like they store mechanical energy. Either way, I'd hate to get into an accident in a car with capacitors build into its structure. Smash into a wall and there would be a bit of a lighting storm. Current carbon fiber cars burn like torches. With electrical energy stored in amongst that carbon, this car might go off like a bomb.

No they actually mean power. Supercapacitors can energy faster than lithium batteries can(more power). While batteries have power densities hundreds of watts per kilogram, supercapacitors can release thousands of watts per kilogram. Now if we ignore the bullshit with carbon fiber supercapacitors it sounds like what lambroghini really wants is an energy storage system with more energy density and power density than we have today.

Integrating something with a high power density into a vehicle frame might not be such a good idea. If we really do get capacitor level power densities, then the stored energy in the frame could be released really fast during a crash. If the stored energy is enough and released fast enough we essentially have a bomb. There is even the potential for the energy release to cause a relatively localized EMP.

> Supercapacitors can energy faster than lithium batteries can(more power).

You accidentally a verb.

This sentence no verb!

This article reads like the cars my friends and I would "design" when we were in third grade.

  Oh yeah? Mine is gonna have 800 horsepower and will be amphibious and have wings like the batmobile!

Even if you are pointing out this car is more fantasy than reality, I think this anecdote is more telling about the shift in perspective towards electric vehicles.

When children design the Batmobile of the future, it used to feature a rocket launcher. Now it might have a "self-healing" battery.

Before change can happen in reality, what we aspire to, or what we consider desirable has to change.

Buckminster Fuller's serious proposals for his Dymaxion Car aren't very far off from that!

So cool! Thanks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_car

My other car is a Dyson Sphere

I drive a car with low clearance, but that Lamborghini is just ridiculously close to the ground. You’ll scrape the bumper just pulling out a regular drive way. It sure as hell will need to be “self healing” for someone to legitimately be driving that.

I suspect its probably not even meant to be road legal - like the Sesto Elemento.

Lamborghini have had "lifters" as an option (and now stock, I believe) on all their cars since the Diablo in the 1990s. It's a horrendously unreliable hydraulic damper extension system, but it does solve for that issue. Press a button and the front of the car rises 2-3in to clear bumps and especially dips.

This doesn't work if the wheel wells hug around more than half the wheel and are fixed in place to the chassis. The real reason it's so low is that it's a concept not meant to be driven.

Most of their concepts are like that; I wouldn't expect a model for sale to be that low.

I have a car as low as an Aventador, without a front-axle lift, and a similarly bad approach angle.

You don't take steep inclines head on. Period. You take them at an oblique angle, and get the closest wheel up first. It takes a few more seconds, but you don't scrape.

I've gone up into entrances without issue where I've seen stock Toyota Camrys (which have nearly 2 inches more ground clearance and a much better approach angle) scrape. Take your time and it's a non-issue. My car has a sacrificial portion of the front splitter that's cheap to replace if I were to scrape it, but it's so easy to not scrape it it'll be a long time (decade plus?) before I need to.

Does it put itself out if it catches fire? Lambos always seem to be on fire.

I too, have lost my share of Lambo's in various fires.

What could be more thrilling than driving a car that randomly bursts into flames? Makes sense to me.

Rich people have too much money.

I'm not rich and I had a car that burst into flames twice.

This would be really fascinating if the technology was there and they had a working prototype. What they actually have is a bag of promises and a little graphic design.

So if the carbon fiber body is going to be a capacitor, wouldn't there be a risk of electric shock in case of some damage to it?

That's where the magic autoheal comes in.

But yeah, that would be a pretty big safety risk. It's a concept, these panels don't even exist yet. Actually it's not even sure if they'd even be possible. Safety only becomes a factor once they can start making them, I think.

If these concepts aren't constrained by what is currently (or ever) possible, why not make it capable of spaceflight? Or teleportation? Or a "submarine mode" a la James Bond's Lotus? Supercapacitor body panels seems positively dull in comparison.

No, because the capacitors discharge very fast. The problem is they want capacitors that discharge fast and have a high energy density, which means that during such a crash we could get an explosion or maybe even an EMP.

Just what kind of roads is this kind of car made to drive on? I mean the clearance.

Roads? Where we're going, Marty, we don't need roads.

It would be cool with a car that self heals scratches and maybe even cleans itself.

Corrected headline: "Lamborghini Unveils Borderline Science Fiction Plans for a Concept Car"

Don't you want a car that can't traverse speed bumps though?

It's electric, couldn't we just leave some strong magnets under the road surface?

What's with all the auto-playing videos these days? I don't even know how to turn this video off....

There should be an add-on that just basically stops one from even opening a website with this kind of practice.

I left as soon as the video started playing.

Just FYI for Mac users, latest Safari has this feature built-in.

The way apple has stood up for consumers through built-in Safari features is straight up inspiring, with autoplay disabling and tracking disabling.

Considering they lag horrendously in pretty much everything else, it's a bit of a desperate ploy for attention...

I installed an add-on in Firefox called "Disable HTML5 Autoplay". Works great.

cmd+w works. I did gather that Google / Chrome wanted to auto mute autoplaying videos.

I use adblock with element hiding helper in Firefox to block videos by clicking on them, especially with the new awful trend of position fixed videos that follow you when you scroll down to avoid them.

Turn off autoplay in 10 seconds (Firefox): (1)Open a new tab to about:config (2)Type in autoplay (3) Double click the obvious one. Done.

Funny, I threw the idea 2 days ago on IRC.

> <someone> "regenerative crashing" lol

MIT, please stop spying on #IRC, thanks

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