Why don't we just build high speed electrified rail and busses. Why this rollout of electrified golf carts? My car is fast and fun to drive, that's part of it's job alongside getting me where I need to go.
If I just need to get somewhere, I want to take a clean fast train like Japan and then walk.
That /just/ is bearing a lot of weight there. And what is Volkswagen going to do to build highspeed rail, they're a car company so they're making cars...
The US is trapped in a local maximum due to history, geography and finally politics. There's a lot of local resistance specifically to highspeed rail because to stay highspeed the trains usually bypass smaller local towns so they don't get the benefit but all the negatives of it's construction.
> Why don't we just build high speed electrified rail
Good luck convincing all those Americans the rail line has to run through their property to freely give up the right-of-way. You're already dead in the first few hundred feet of rail when the first person says "fuck off, no" and starts challenging your eminent domain.
The current safety and mpg targets for car manufacturers incentivize them to produce 'cars' of a certain size and weight to avoid compliance with stricter standards on smaller vehicles.
As such, the manufactuers have incentivized customers to buy SUVs for a few decades now.
Waymo should call up Volkswagen and place an order to ensure it goes into production.
Waymo should have a mixed fleet of 2 adult passenger vehicles like this one, 4-5 passenger models as well as some vans. It'll save them a lot of money, and will make streets safer by normalizing small vehicles.
> Volkswagen just build the world's most aerodynamic road car ever.
A drag coefficient of 0.158 is not quite setting a record.
Hyundai achieved a drag coefficient of 0.144 with the Aero Challenge concept car [1], and Aptera claims a coefficient of only 0.13.
Of course it would be preferable to consider drag area, the product of drag coefficient with frontal area, instead. Sadly, the latter is often not publicized, although to VW's credit, it is for this vehicle.
Aptera is getting pretty close to shipping first customer cars this year, or at least seems to be, while this is a one-off research prototype - I think your comment is not quite fair.
And with barely three millimeters of clearance you can effectively sweep the roads while you drive! Wake me up when I can safely enter a driveway with one.
Seemed to have been produced a bunch for never making it into production
> A limited production of 250 began by mid 2013 with pricing started at €111,000 (~ £119,000). As a plug-in diesel-electric hybrid, the XL1 was available only in Europe and its 5.5 kWh lithium-ion battery delivered an all-electric range of 50 km (31 mi),[3] had a fuel economy of 0.9 L/100 km (310 mpg‑imp) under the NEDC cycle and produced emissions of 21 g/km of CO2.[8] It was released to retail customers in Germany in June 2014.[3]
The lower is your state of charge, the more you are willing to reach the destination with your remanining capacity :) The time spend riding slower is usually not so different than when you drive normally, and it reduces the inconvenience of looking for a charger almost at the goal.
China has already solved the range problem by speeding up charging. When you can recharge 5 hours of highway driving in range during a 5-minute bathroom stop, an additional few hundred miles just isn't that useful anymore.
You could also go the other way and use the improved range to shrink the battery, but with the ongoing battery cost drop that's not exactly a gamechanger either - and fast-charging long-range Chinese EVs are available for their domestic market for a fraction of the cost of entry-level Western models as well...
Don't get me wrong, improving aerodynamics is a nice goal, but with the ongoing push towards gigantic SUVs there's zero chance anything even remotely resembling this concept car will ever see the light of day.
This car is roughly 3-4x more efficient than the average Chinese SUV, which typically consume well above 20 kWh/100 km (which energetically, though not in terms of emissions, approaches what an efficient compact ICE car consumes). It does this range on a 50-something kWh battery pack, instead of a three-digit kWh battery pack. Since consumption is so low, range added per minute of charging is up there. Everything can be smaller, lighter, made with less resources, creating fewer emissions, byproducts and downstream effects etc.
Yes, driving truck-sized cars with two-ton batteries the size of a french-door fridge also works and also easily moves 1.5 people per trip.
Increased charging rate also means that fewer charging stations can serve more cars. One Megawatt charger can serve 4x as many cars as a 250 kW charger in the same span of time.
Sub-10-minute charging is going to be standard in new Chinese EVs very soon. There are already many new models on the market this year with charging times between 5 and 10 minutes. There will soon be cars with Megawatt charging speeds that sell for $15k.
As I understand it, Chinese manufacturers have optimized for a different set of parameters than European manufacturers. The Europeans emphasize range, but the Chinese are more willing to trade range for cost while optimizing charging rate.
Both are irrelevant for your sub-100-mile daily commute, and the additional initial charge for a twice-a-year road trip is a rounding error.
The additional range is nice for home charging when you regularly do 500-mile-plus daily round trips, but that's way beyond regular commute ranges, and someone like an on-location service technician will have the company pay for it anyways.
I won't say that nobody does it, but we're definitely talking about edge cases here.
Either way I think the benefit for me would be after the vehicle is well-worn and only has 10 or 20% of its original range remaining.
If it was so much more efficient than average to begin with that could make the difference whether it was still viable for daily use including short commutes for a number of additional years when almost all other vehicle choices would require a new battery at that point.
Batteries are a bit like capacitors, and I think people are aware how some of the shoddiest capacitors were placed on motherboards for a while there before people figured out how substandard their lifetime was after it caused so many premature failures.
However the engineers who used about twice as much capacitance as the minimum to start with, whether it was intentional or not, were not struck nearly as bad.
This just makes the Tesla Model S P90D, from 14 years ago, just look even better. 509km range (in the lab) and incredible acceleration, and looks pretty normal and practical. And it doesn't make you bring your own phone and bluetooth speaker for infotainment.
How is the infotainment tablet in a 14 year old Model S performing these days? Haven't they progressively worsened its performance through software updates and then sold you a hardware upgrade to fix it for several thousand dollars?
I'd rather just bring my phone, which gets replaced every 4-years or so anyway.
I thought that was a pretty direct response to "And it doesn't make you bring your own phone and bluetooth speaker for infotainment."
As far as I'm concerned, not being able to bring your phone to the infotainment system is a negative, not something to brag about. I had my last car until it was 19 years old, and I have zero faith that an in-car computer will perform adequately for that long.
The other specs of the Model S are still very impressive and I don't have anything to add about on those.
Maybe they learned from their blunder with the ID Buzz. At this point though I simply don't trust any legacy automaker when it comes to producing and supporting EVs for their lifetime.
I’ve not looked it up, but I’d venture to guess that a ‘73 Fleetwood was one of the longest cars made. And, as you alluded to, absolutely bonkers length from wheel center to each bumper.
Our Hyundai has the opposite problem. Because the flat battery pack allows the wheels to be shoved to the corners, it looks smallish but has a longer wheelbase than Hyundai’s large Palisade SUV. Which makes it a pig to park.
>It’s also the most efficient EV in its class, consuming just 6.89 kWh/100 km without charging losses.
>The VW Mission Efficiency covered 1,278 km (794 miles) on a single charge and still had 164 km (102 miles) of range left at the end of the trip.
But at 6.89kWh/100km for a 1278km trip equals 88kWh battery and it is stated later that the battery is a 54.9kWh one and that was recharged during the journey.
> The 54.9-kWh net battery was recharged only once during the journey....
It would be nice to have an article that makes sense from time to time...
I regularly drive 450+ miles to a family camp and need to stop at least once just to stretch my legs/change drivers/eat. The drive can take anywhere from 7-9 hours depending on traffic. 900 miles range is cool but it's not worth a huge price premium. Sort of like the Concord; while it's technically possible it's not worth the money.
The extra range seems to mostly come from big increases in aerodynamic efficiency rather than just jamming a huge battery into the chassis so I'm not sure it would demand a huge premium, at least not because of the BOM.
In the long term we are all dead. But I think you mean that VW fleet electrification effort is dead. Which is not true either. You're underestimating the willingness of people in Europe to buy domestically produced cars. Even if they are not the state of the art from the perspective of picking up the latest EV technology. Don't forget the new china propagated LFP batteries are not better than the already existing NMCs. They may be cheaper, NMCs got cheaper too.
Sure, but that was before European manufacturers started making already-installed seat heating a subscription service, started selling your data - including location - to anyone willing to pay, released EVs which were 5+ years behind Chinese options, and sold them at well over 2x the cost of the alternatives. Oh, and a huge chunk of those "European" brands aren't even European anymore.
Most Europeans happily pay a premium for a well-engineered semi-local product, as we saw with the German manufacturers during the ICE era. But paying significantly more for a significantly worse product, just for that "Made in Europe" label? Not happening.
VW & friends don't even seem to be aware yet that they are in a fight for survival, and that's what is dooming them. They are more interested in lobbying for tariffs and EV rollout slowdowns than in actually building EVs.
1. It's at speed of 42 miles/hr. You can't compare those numbers to EPA or even WLTP numbers.
Hypermiling records using Tesla cars:
- 1078 km, Tesla S, 25 mph,
- 975 km, Model 3, 20-30mph
- 909 km, Model 3, 50mph
The last one is comparable and available today.
2. It has solar panels. That tells me those are not serious people (or a PR stunt).
Solar charging math on area that small is so brutal that adding cost / weight of solar panels on a car is sheer stupidity. Adding few miles of range per day (on sunny day parked outside) doesn't make sense.
You're more likely to have a regular outlet in your garage and recharge 100 miles overnight.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 31.6 ms ] threadIf I just need to get somewhere, I want to take a clean fast train like Japan and then walk.
I'm not clear how something that ran up to 138 kmph (85 mph) during an (intentionally low-speed) efficiency test, would be equivalent to a golf cart?
The US is trapped in a local maximum due to history, geography and finally politics. There's a lot of local resistance specifically to highspeed rail because to stay highspeed the trains usually bypass smaller local towns so they don't get the benefit but all the negatives of it's construction.
Good luck convincing all those Americans the rail line has to run through their property to freely give up the right-of-way. You're already dead in the first few hundred feet of rail when the first person says "fuck off, no" and starts challenging your eminent domain.
Part of the difference may come from using the easier WLTP testing cycle than the EPA cycle the Cybercab probably uses, but only part.
Cybercab is most efficient electric production car, 165 Wh/mile
As such, the manufactuers have incentivized customers to buy SUVs for a few decades now.
https://www.volkswagen-newsroom.com/en/press-releases/missio...
This is concept car that has no planned release date.
Waymo should have a mixed fleet of 2 adult passenger vehicles like this one, 4-5 passenger models as well as some vans. It'll save them a lot of money, and will make streets safer by normalizing small vehicles.
> 188 inches (4,775 mm) long, 69 inches (1,744 mm) wide, and just 55 inches (1,392 mm) tall.
A drag coefficient of 0.158 is not quite setting a record. Hyundai achieved a drag coefficient of 0.144 with the Aero Challenge concept car [1], and Aptera claims a coefficient of only 0.13.
Of course it would be preferable to consider drag area, the product of drag coefficient with frontal area, instead. Sadly, the latter is often not publicized, although to VW's credit, it is for this vehicle.
[1] https://www.azernews.az/region/245135.html
> A limited production of 250 began by mid 2013 with pricing started at €111,000 (~ £119,000). As a plug-in diesel-electric hybrid, the XL1 was available only in Europe and its 5.5 kWh lithium-ion battery delivered an all-electric range of 50 km (31 mi),[3] had a fuel economy of 0.9 L/100 km (310 mpg‑imp) under the NEDC cycle and produced emissions of 21 g/km of CO2.[8] It was released to retail customers in Germany in June 2014.[3]
> 6.48 kWh/100 km
At a constant 68km/h in perfect conditions (no up/down) and no additional consumers of energy (climate control).
Even on a real route they apparently got some useful stats with 7.51 kWh/100km including charging. Cool.
My car is around 17-20 kWh/100km at a 64kWh battery for a medium cost car in germany. I wish it was even close to that efficiency.
ordinary cars can get to 13kWh/100km which ain't that far from 7.5 you mention
You could also go the other way and use the improved range to shrink the battery, but with the ongoing battery cost drop that's not exactly a gamechanger either - and fast-charging long-range Chinese EVs are available for their domestic market for a fraction of the cost of entry-level Western models as well...
Don't get me wrong, improving aerodynamics is a nice goal, but with the ongoing push towards gigantic SUVs there's zero chance anything even remotely resembling this concept car will ever see the light of day.
Yes, driving truck-sized cars with two-ton batteries the size of a french-door fridge also works and also easily moves 1.5 people per trip.
Sub-10-minute charging is going to be standard in new Chinese EVs very soon. There are already many new models on the market this year with charging times between 5 and 10 minutes. There will soon be cars with Megawatt charging speeds that sell for $15k.
As I understand it, Chinese manufacturers have optimized for a different set of parameters than European manufacturers. The Europeans emphasize range, but the Chinese are more willing to trade range for cost while optimizing charging rate.
Being able to bring more energy with me is a very useful.
The additional range is nice for home charging when you regularly do 500-mile-plus daily round trips, but that's way beyond regular commute ranges, and someone like an on-location service technician will have the company pay for it anyways.
I won't say that nobody does it, but we're definitely talking about edge cases here.
I’m a mountain biker I want to put a tow bar rack on the back with the bikes.
That will reduce range on its own and added with the long journeys to bike parks I would prefer to be able to not have to charge if I can avoid it.
Or at least to have more options on when, where and for how long I stop.
If it was so much more efficient than average to begin with that could make the difference whether it was still viable for daily use including short commutes for a number of additional years when almost all other vehicle choices would require a new battery at that point.
Batteries are a bit like capacitors, and I think people are aware how some of the shoddiest capacitors were placed on motherboards for a while there before people figured out how substandard their lifetime was after it caused so many premature failures.
However the engineers who used about twice as much capacitance as the minimum to start with, whether it was intentional or not, were not struck nearly as bad.
Bad take.
I'd rather just bring my phone, which gets replaced every 4-years or so anyway.
As far as I'm concerned, not being able to bring your phone to the infotainment system is a negative, not something to brag about. I had my last car until it was 19 years old, and I have zero faith that an in-car computer will perform adequately for that long.
The other specs of the Model S are still very impressive and I don't have anything to add about on those.
https://photos.classiccars.com/cc-temp/listing/165/1814/3484...
1973 had some of the longest Cadillacs in decades.
Not everybody was aware at the time, but the turning radius was actually smaller than the Volkswagen beetle.
Not the turning radius of the whole car, just the wheelbase ;)
Our Hyundai has the opposite problem. Because the flat battery pack allows the wheels to be shoved to the corners, it looks smallish but has a longer wheelbase than Hyundai’s large Palisade SUV. Which makes it a pig to park.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Insight#First_generation...
>It’s also the most efficient EV in its class, consuming just 6.89 kWh/100 km without charging losses. >The VW Mission Efficiency covered 1,278 km (794 miles) on a single charge and still had 164 km (102 miles) of range left at the end of the trip.
But at 6.89kWh/100km for a 1278km trip equals 88kWh battery and it is stated later that the battery is a 54.9kWh one and that was recharged during the journey.
> The 54.9-kWh net battery was recharged only once during the journey....
It would be nice to have an article that makes sense from time to time...
Most Europeans happily pay a premium for a well-engineered semi-local product, as we saw with the German manufacturers during the ICE era. But paying significantly more for a significantly worse product, just for that "Made in Europe" label? Not happening.
VW & friends don't even seem to be aware yet that they are in a fight for survival, and that's what is dooming them. They are more interested in lobbying for tariffs and EV rollout slowdowns than in actually building EVs.
Hypermiling records using Tesla cars:
The last one is comparable and available today.2. It has solar panels. That tells me those are not serious people (or a PR stunt).
Solar charging math on area that small is so brutal that adding cost / weight of solar panels on a car is sheer stupidity. Adding few miles of range per day (on sunny day parked outside) doesn't make sense.
You're more likely to have a regular outlet in your garage and recharge 100 miles overnight.