Volkswagen Axes All Non-Electric Racing Programs Worldwide
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
[1] https://www.volkswagen-newsroom.com/en/press-releases/ready-...
This move barely makes a dent to the automobile or racing industry.
VW doesn't really have extensive racing programs comparing to other marques like BMW, Mercedes, and of course VW group's own Audi and Porsche.
Look at any semi-successfull touring car series: its prettu much guaranteed that a third of grid will be race cars from VW group.
Formula E races run for 45 minutes plus 1 lap. They are street circuits though which helps the cars:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQUd-C2DJyk
> Perhaps some racing R&D will help solve this major EV issue.
Ultra-capacitors for fast in-race charging is a way forward. Nawa is trying to get their capacitors into Formula E:
https://newatlas.com/nawa-technologies-carbon-ultra-capacito...
I don't watch it, not because there would be anything wrong with the cars but the tracks they race on aren't great.
It’s a league with a lot of overtaking, small circuits and confusing realisation - its super hard to know who’s who on track without prior research because they never display which car number is who during race - something that’s a must have when most of the grid is black and red variation. Also because circuits are small and street tracks, there is a lot of camera hopping which makes it hard to get idea of the pace.
I feel they should do three races 35min+1 lap on proper race track instead, but maybe theres reason against it?
Personally, I'm not a big fan of street circuits, but the FE races tend to be pretty good. I too would prefer to be on "proper" tracks, but that hasn't been the goal of FE, at least for now.
1: The performance is just not there, has no indication that it will improve revolutionarily, and is growing slower than batteries.
Formula E uses a 250 kg, 54 kWh, 250 kW battery that does about 30 laps. Nawa is apparently[1] at 15 Wh/kg and 100 kW/kg, which would be 15x heavier for the same weight. The car would have to stop every two laps (three minutes!) to recharge- and more likely every single lap, since the actual thing will require lots of other components besides the capacitors. I'm not sure you can even call it racing when you can only complete two laps at a time.
The extreme power of supercapacitors (25x more than the best li-ion) is unfortunately unusable. They need to store several times more energy to be useful. Even as assistance, they're still usually much too heavy to be worthwhile. In fact it can be argued that li-ion is already starting to surpass the power density that can be used in vehicles- VTC4 cells (an older, but notoriously powerful chemistry) can push 3.5 kW/kg when fully charged, or 1.2 megawatts for a 54 kWh battery. That's 300 horsepower from a 64 kg battery.
Batteries are pushing the power higher and higher very quickly, since fast charging is so desirable. Capacitors are not improving very much at all; you can turn to nanotechnology to increase surface area or to hybrid types. "Hybrid" just means mixed with battery-like chemistry, so it's strictly worse. Nanotechnology is mostly outside near term manufacturability, but even the theoretical stuff is very limited. Increasing the surface area leads to linear gains but gets harder with n^3 since you're cramming features on top of features... and returns are already pretty bad.
2: Capacitors are very inconvenient power sources.
Capacitor voltage drops with e^-t, all the way down to zero. Battery voltage drops by 40% when fully depleted, but 70% of the battery energy is in a region with <10% drop. That means it's very easy to optimize for a certain voltage, while a ton of the capacitor voltage is unrecoverable. When the voltage has dropped by 40%, as in a battery, there's still 35% of the full energy left. In practice that means those Nawa capacitors will not even reach 10 Wh/kg.
Now consider accelerating a 1 tonne car to 160 kph (100 mph). The kinetic energy at 90% efficiency (neglecting friction, and drag) is 315 watt-hours, requiring a 32 kg capacitor. If you used VTC4 cells instead you could have another 5 kWh energy with 115 kW peak power output- enough for 2.8 more laps. MJ1 cells would give you 8 kWh at 40 kW peak- 4 extra laps. There's a reason f1 goes 90 minutes to two hours while formula E is only 45 minutes.
Ultra- and supercapacitors (supercapacitors is more technically correct) may see use in racing or high-efficiency vehicles as boost assistance, but only if the cost comes down very significantly. They are not taken very seriously for use in EVs commercially.
[1]: https://insideevs.com/news/338275/ultra-capacitor-tech-again...
We don't really need any more technical breakthroughs for electric cars. Just volume. Batteries are getting cheaper as production volume increases, and faster than expected. Down 80% in the last decade.
What the world needs is a $20,000 electric car comparable to the Toyota Corolla, the best selling car. VW might be able to do it.
You sure?! Battery technology is in dire need of breakthroughs.
My understanding is this still requires a battery breakthrough, or at least significant improvement.
The average person is a tenant without home charging as an option, they require a gas station substitute or better - ideally an obsoleting solution eliminating this waste of time altogether.
Imagine if a battery breakthrough enabled 2000 mile ranges with a 5 minute recharge, and effectively unlimited charge cycles so the battery outlasts the vehicle lifetime with zero degradation of range.
If such a thing were in EVs today, ICEs would all but vanish practically overnight.
I think it's obvious we're still not quite there, but it is getting close.
The top Model S can charge at 250 kW, or 15.4 miles or range per minute. Theoretically the fastest gas pumps in the US (10 gal/min) do 250 miles per minute (fleet average for new cars), but in practice you really mean a 5 minute fill-up, so ~75 miles per minute. Not that it's any faster to plug in a charger than insert a pump, but <5 minutes is basically irrelevant. So currently the best commercial electric cars are losing by ~5x.
A 5 minute fill up means charging at ~12-13 C. Hybrid cells regularly do 10+ C[1]. The batteries in F1 cars charge or discharge 3 times per minute[2], on average. It will not be long until full size BEVs can do 5 minute charges. The much bigger problem is actually getting the power to charge them; big charger-side batteries are expensive.
[1]: https://www.greencarcongress.com/2014/09/20140915-s500phev.h...
[2]: https://www.mercedes-amg-hpp.com/formula-1-engine-facts/
The issue isn't that it's not an option, it's that people don't want to do it. Most people would much rather drive their own car than a rental. Renting a car is usually something you do as a last resort.
I drive most of my kilometres during certain seasons: Christmas, Easter holiday, school holidays (when visiting parents etc).
These are exactly the times when very many others also want to make similar trips, so the rental companies are out of capacity, or rather, there is surge pricing.
I'm genuinely curious. It was not nasty in any way, it was readable and presented a good argument. That you disagree should not be a reason to downvote.
I don't think 2000 mile range would be that important, but >1000 km would be useful (I have a diesel car that can do this).
Gasoline cars used to offer ranges not so much more than 400 kilometers, only very modern and Diesel cars increased that number significantly. Elektric cars have reached (and in Tesla quite exceeded) that range. More improvements will happen too. But a > 1000 km range isn't what is holding electric cars back. I actually think, few electric cars will ever reach that range, unless there is some crazy breakthrough with batteries, as it makes more sense to have smaller and cheaper batteries than optimizing for an use case which doesn't matter much.
Most people live in buildings, not houses. Same applies for work. You don't get to charge there. A dedicated charging station that replaces gas stations is needed.
> A lot of these places could offer low-power outlets for slow charging.
I have no experience with US, but in many major cities in Europe, it's hard to find any parking space, let alone the one with a charging outlet. It's a problem that would require a lot of infrastructure.
Anyway, those are all valid discussion points. No reason to downvote. People on HN want electric to succeed and that's fine. But downvoting anyone who points at problems... are we on Reddit now?
Like with the majority of parking in Sweden you pay with an app or sms, and the hourly rate is higher if you charge.
The problem is these battery packs tens of thousands of dollars (I think, given costs per kWh) and aren’t standardized. Seems like something the auto companies should be open to standardizing. They’ve done the same with oil - because they had to accommodate the fuel literally burning away.
Edit-I get that they’re heavy, but that can be standardized away, too.
Also in some cars the battery pack is used to add strength and rigidity to the body, thus saving weight and adding efficiency. Harder to pull this off if it’s removable.
I think that's a rational desire when you've bought the battery with your vehicle.
If there were an option to have the vehicle delivered sans battery then enter into a swap program of your choosing which provided the battery that you never actually owned (why would you want to, really, it's _the_ expensive wear component most likely to be meaningfully obsoleted repeatedly), then people would probably feel very differently about it.
Edit-Ok found a slightly convincing argument. The battery pack in a Tesla 3 weighs 1000lbs. It’d require a swap station in order to support removing them. I still say it’s doable. It has to be supported if we want to avert catastrophic climate change.
This is a breakthrough that batteries need to get.
Could maybe pull it off with a different design, like maybe the Tesla Cybertruck exoskeleton could work with this scheme? Would be cool if it could work and if swaps were fast like in that one Tesla demo that never came to market.
https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/videos/battery-swap-event?redire...
If they didn't stick with it, nobody will. Also, standardizing batteries across companies is just silly. Electric cars basically are batteries. If you standardize the most important element of the car, you will kill innovation.
Superchargers on long trips (~1600 km per hour charging with v3) are sufficient. It's 15 min of charing per 400km or 4 hours or driving. Charging at home/work everyday is actually more convenient than tracking discharge and going to some special place every couple of days. Building chargers at parking places is not expensive. From what I gather it should not be more than a few thousands. In bulk it's probably even cheaper.
Battery packs are massive, complex, sensitive to abuse and expensive to replace. Those are very different qualities from water bottles and propane tanks.
I'm genuinely curious if we have any successful exchange system examples resembling EV batteries to reference as precedence.
https://www.topgear.com/car-news/big-reads/power-shift-batte...
But even if that weren't the case, the current market pretty much proves that for a lot of drivers we've hit the "good enough" point.
IMHO the main issue is driving cost down further since EVs are still on the expensive side and somewhat scarce. The fact that with total cost of ownership it actually does make sense for a lot of people doesn't matter; we need cheaper batteries. Funnily enough, there are hardly any unsold units in this market. Even at the currently high price, most manufacturers struggle to meet demand and are selling everything they manage to produce. So it will take a while for cheaper vehicles to get interesting enough to produce in volume (margins per kwh are higher on the more expensive ones).
Just scaling up production is going to address prices in the next few years. IMHO VW and Tesla are going to be working hard to undercut each other with the entry level price in the next few years. They are both heavily investing in being able to scale production and I expect that they will be getting results from that. Both are aiming for mass production. A few other manufacturers are trying to do the same but I think in terms of volume those two will be competing for the #1 and #2 position for the next few years.
(three suggested answer would be charge rate, capacity and price)
I sort of think that if you look at progress over the last 15 years, factors of 2 aren't dire.
My understanding is that Lithium based batteries (and lots if not all others) have unfavorable properties at human-cold temps. When at -5 or -10C say they work pretty poorly, slowing charge, discharge and capacity.
The Chevy Bolt (released for the 2017 model year) has a battery cooler and heater. If I recall correctly, the Volt (even older) had a similar system.
I have gas chainsaws, but I prefer the electric saw because it's much quieter, much lighter and easier to maneuver. I'm waiting for the day when I can buy a battery that lasts as long as a tank of gas.
I am quite happy that the cost is dropping though.
The best decision I ever made powertool-wise was sticking with a single line of tools for both construction and yard tools, so I have at least 10 or so batteries that fit in every tool I own. I have drills, saws, nailers, lights, leaf blower (that thing drinks battery), hedge trimmer, weed whacker, and the chainsaw all ready to take the exact same battery. One thing I've never had to do is wait for a battery to charge.
I'm curious if people will miss the deafening sound of the raw engines to the point it hurts the business, at least for live shows. I'm not a racing fan (beyond occasionally going to local Indy races) but I've seen a lot of comments online complaining about the whirring sound of hybrids.
There will probably still be combustion cars just for the fun of it. But agreed re: the larger firms not getting as much R&D value from doing it.
In a generation, going to see an internal combustion engine vehicle may be like going to see a steam locomotive.
Here's the biggest steam locomotive, restored by Union Pacific, the Big Boy.[2] Behind it is a run-of-the-mill Diesel-electric from about 2005, an EMD SD70ACe. It's there for backup, in case the steam engine fails. It has considerably more tractive effort than the Big Boy. The steam locomotive needs substantial daily maintenance. The Diesel needs to go into the shop once every six months.
[1] https://qz.com/232833/this-is-the-sound-of-electric-cars-rac... [2] https://youtu.be/n_OGGct1r5s
But I am equally certain the people with a stake in racing will find some way to make the mechanicals sound both good and useful. Auditory feedback is too important to discard. And speaking just as a fan, I'd be thrilled to watch a race that sounded like a Tie Fighter dogfight.
In contrast, Formula E cars are topping out at 170mph, corner like they're full of cinderblocks, and are still running shorter races to compensate for their lack of battery life. They don't have the same level of racing talent either. (e.g. Verstappen and Hamilton.)
Then you have the seperate problem that there’s only 3 competitive constructors in F1 at the moment (and even then 1 of them is quite far above the other 2 - apart from those races where Ferrari was cheating with their fuel injection).
I think keeping the development limited to the powertrain is the right move for Formula E; there's plenty of other series where money is thrown at the rest of the car, so let developments happen where the series stands out.
Did you misread the headline? They are ending all non electric racing. Presumably because they think we don't need any more technical breakthroughs for ICE cars, but we do for electric cars.
Fuel cells are likely going to fill that gap in commercial and industrial markets, but I can't see them taking over in racing. You can either get high power density PEMs running on complex systems to support pure hydrogen fuel requirements, or low power density SOFCs running on simple hydrocarbon fuels. Neither is going to work well for racing.
It debuted at last years Pike's Peak race, It's quickly turned into one of the best electric race cars in the world. It broke the overall record at Pikes Peak, and is the only car the ever reach the top in under 8 minutes. It also recenly set the electric record on the Nürburgring.