In general, I underestimated the progress that electric vehicles would make over the last ~2 years. Most manufacturers have at least one decent EV on the market now. Where I live (Toronto, Canada), EV charging infrastructure still needs a lot of improvement but it's an inevitability now.
(The car’s engine power is 1914bhp, which is about 1400kW, the car’s battery is 120kWh.)
But my point kinda remains, the relatively poor range isn’t mentioned. The range of the Nevera is 40% of a similarly performing car that is approaching 20 years old now.
And the Veyron can be refuelled in minutes!
Is that supposed to be unimpressive? The fact that EVs is catching up to or beating (see Pikes Peak) ICE in almost every category except range, in the few years since EV development was rebooted with the Nissan Leaf and Tesla Roadster, is kind of insane.
And yeah, range for EVs is now consistently around half that of pure ICE vehicles. Which is impressive enough considering how it was just a few years ago, but it also means that, since a 2x battery improvement which is quite likely (at least 1.5x improvements are being achieved in cells that are already past the laboratory stage and in early trial production), it's almost inevitable that EV will beat pure ICE on range. Well, you could always sacrifice trunk space for extra gas tank or use serial hybrid or something to get really good range with ICE. But point is EVs are clearly getting to around parity level or "good enough"
> And can be refuelled in minutes!
That'll always be a benefit. Probably the only one.
But it really doesn't matter for 99% of usecases. Around 20-30 minutes is OK since you can just leave the car and do whatever you want. Most of the fast chargers around me are next to super markets, shopping malls, hardware stores, etc. Most people will charge overnight, and yes, that goes for public street side parking too. Oslo already has public street side charging poles all over the place. You've got solutions to retrofit street lamps, and now you've got this as well which should be cheaper/easier than poles: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/arms-manufacturer-giant-r...
The company was using an oval track with 2 different 4km straitawas to briefly hit that speed.
I guess maybe you get priority treatment when you're dropping north of $40K on tires every 15 minutes... :-)
Point taken of course!
Blew up the turbo though, and had to limp it another 2 hours to get to my destination. I also got to learn how to replace the turbo and weld the manifold, since I'd cracked it.
Still, amazing memory. Scary as heck, and to this day I'm surprised I didn't die.
Survivorship bias. In all other timelines you died, you can't be surprised ;-)
Same applies for me as well. I've been lucky more than once.
That the Nevera can do 5 minutes with 'only' 120kWh is actually amazing. Petrol has an energy density of 12200Wh/kg. At 0.79kg/l, the Veron had a total capacity of 963kWh. That's 8 Times more energy, yet still less than 2 times the range.
MPG went rapidly south in the second half of the rev counter.
They added the speed limit back (again IIRC) because someone got several tickets and sued saying (along the lines of) "there's no way I can tell if I'm going too fast without the speed limit".
This was plainly apparent to me 3-4 years ago and I'm a "jalopnik" level of automotive reader (as in idiot with keyboard level expertise)
So the hypercar people get to charge with a straight face a multi-million dollar car that's faster than their previous versions, but make wayyyyy more money. The Plaid Model S is a !!!150k!!! hypercar beater, and it's a sedan. If Elon wasn't a moron of marketing, that car would have been selling with many many many variants (see: BMW) each adding 50-100k to the price until you got up to the 500-700k range.
On paper, yeah. But they are manufactured in pathetically small quantities.