Charged with Electric Vehicle News and Views
2014 V8 Supercars - Adelaide - Nissan Time Attack - Rick Kelly in the Nissan LEAF Nismo RC vs Todd Kelly in the Nissan Altima V8 Supercar vs Neil Crompton in the Nissan GT-R Road car.
A 1/4 mile drag race video of 2x Tesla Models S P85's going head to head. This may be the quietest drag race you'll ever hear.
Robert Llewellyn reviews the UK built 2nd generation Nissan Leaf from Oslo Norway.
Electric luxury car Tesla Model S was named by Consumer Reports magazine on Tuesday as its overall top pick for 2014, while Japanese models took just five of the top 10 spots, their worst showing in the 18-year history of the annual rankings.
The battery-powered Tesla Model S was chosen best overall for its "exceptional performance and its many impressive technological innovations," Consumer Reports said, noting it was "pricey" at $89,650.
Tesla Motors said it expects to deliver about 35,000 of the model this year. By comparison, the best-selling car in the United States last year, the Toyota Camry, sold about 408,000 in 2013.
Consumer Reports hasn't named a best overall since a Lexus model took the top honors in 2010.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has confirmed that his company has met with Apple but added that it is "very unlikely" that Tesla would be bought by the company.
“We had conversations with Apple,” Musk said in an interview with BloombergTelevision. “I can’t comment on whether those revolved around any kind of acquisition.”
When asked if the electric automaker is for sale, Musk answered, “I think that’s very unlikely because we need to stay super focused on achieving a compelling – creating a compelling mass market electric car. And I’d be very concerned in any kind of acquisition scenario, whoever it is, that’d be become distracted from that task which has always been the driving goal of Tesla.”
Last week, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Tesla met with Apple’s top deal maker Adrian Pernica leading to speculations of a possible Apple acquisition of the electric car company that has been going from strength to strength. The report also caused Tesla shares to soar as much as 11 percent to an all-time high of $215.21 on Thursday. The shares closed at $209.97, up 8.4 percent.
Here's a unique way to promote Electric Vehicles!
Los Angeles based Ayumi Kim works for a certain well-know California based electric vehicle manufacturer and initially got the idea to start this project as a way of sharing some of the left-field questions about electric vehicles she gets asked on a daily basis.
Ayumi, along with illustrator friend Sarah, have written a humorous FAQ that answers such real-world concerns as ""Can you plug a chainsaw into the cigarette lighter?" or "What happens if I hit a wombat with this car?"
Most of the booklet IS kid friendly, it being a coloring book and all, but there may be one or two questions that are PG.
The girls are looking to raise the modest sum of $3,500 to cover printing costs so if you're looking for a way to promote the cause and help them publish "educational materials to promote sustainability and green thinking" a pledge of US$15 will secure a copy.
Source: Kickstarter
This year, the FIA Formula One World Championship is set for a wholesale change of the technical regulations that have doubled the power of the KERS system. because of the harvesting demands of the energy recovery systems, rear braking can be controlled electronically for the first time.
The braking system concept is totally new, taking the form of a brake-by-wire system for the first time at the rear wheels. This has become necessary due to the significantly increased performance of the ERS, which requires much greater variations in rear wheel braking torque than previously. With brake-by-wire, an electronic system measures how hard the driver presses the brake pedal and then – using the additional information from energy recuperation – determines in a split-second the amount of braking pressure that should be fed through to the rear brake callipers.”
Because the ERS (Energy Recovery System) is so much more powerful on these new cars compared to the KERS on the 2013 cars, harvesting energy when the car is braking – 161bhp of energy compared to 80bhp with the KERS – it is essential that the engineers install a system to compensate for the powerful effect that has on brake balance and braking stability. This makes it acceptable for the driver and doesn’t destabilise the car with a sudden balance shift. A lot of the lap time in modern F1 comes from stable braking.
How does it work?
An F1 car has two brake systems for safety – front and rear – so that if one fails the other will stop the car. For 2014, the rear brake system has the brake-by-wire, which assesses how much brake pressure the driver has called for when he presses the pedal and an electronic system modulates the power to the rear brakes, allowing for the ERS effect, that is taking energy to charge up the kinetic motor generator unit (known as MGU-K). It smooths out the process, slowing the car in a consistent way at the same time as ensuring the maximum energy harvest for the ERS.
Ideally, the driver would feel nothing unusual with this system, in that it should provide consistent, stable braking on demand. The job of the new rear brakes system is to ensure consistency. Some people might argue that the electronic assistance to the driver makes it a “driver aid” and in the sense that without it, it would be difficult to maintain a brake system that the drivers would be happy with. This damps it out. But as it’s written into the regulations it doesn’t fall foul of the regulation saying that the driver must drive “alone and unaided” – a rule that prevents the use of traction control, ABS and countless other technical goodies.
While FIA and pit lane boffins label everything with an acronym and make it sound overly technical, effectively formula One cars are adapting the 'brake pedal feel simulator' that most road car hybrid drivers, especially Chevy Volt owners, will be very familiar with, and from all reports it's taking the drivers some time to get used to it.
Robert Llewellyn takes a zero carbon electric road trip through Wales in his Nissan Leaf.
Total distance travelled 418 miles (670 km), Total CO2 output. 0.0, Total fuel cost £0.00p
Chris Harris drives the new $1.2 million McLaren P1 at the Yas Marina Grand Prix circuit in Abu Dhabi UAE. Before taking to the track at night, Chris Harris chats with Chris Goodwin, the Chief Test Driver for McLaren Automotive to discuss the technology of McLaren's latest offering, perhaps the definition of the modern day hypercar.
Fair warning, the McLaren Chris Harris drives in this video is the XP7, the pre-production prototype for P1. The car has had a long life over the past 15 months, driving around the world and clocking over 40,000 hard miles.
Bloomberg's Matt Miller is at it again, making a career move out of shorting Tesla Motors.
We've seen Miller's tabloid style video reports on Tesla before. It could only be classed as 'light entertainment' at best!
