Recharging The Electric Car – As Fast As Lightning?
So if you’re in the least bit green and simultaneously a car nut, you’ve probably heard by now of the Tesla Roadster. It’s a purely electric sports car. What do I mean by sports car? Well, how does 0 to 60 in 3.9 seconds sound? Yeah. It can move.
But the one thing about electric cars is what do you do when the battery goes dry? When you run out of gas in a normal car, you just go to a gas station and fill ‘er up. No biggie. In and out in minutes.
But when you run out of juice in an electric car, you plug it in, and wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. Not very convenient for long distance trips.
Until now!
Introducing the Lightning, UK’s hot new electric sports car!
Built along similar lines, the Lightning is an all-electric road-eating monster. The performance can put most sports cars to shame. And since electric motors are so incredibly simple compared to an engine in something like a Ferrari, it’s also a lot easier to maintain. But again, there’s that whole long long wait to recharge the thing, right? Wrong!
At least in theory…
The Lightning uses a new battery technology. Unlike the lithium-ion batteries and lead-acid batteries traditionally used in electric cars, the Lightning uses NanoSafe™ batteries. These are lithium-titanate batteries manufactured with nano titanate particles instead of lithium-ion’s use of graphite. They’re supposedly a lot faster to recharge, are more stable at extreme temperatures (something batteries just don’t like), and contain no toxins or heavy metals.
And if you noticed, yes, in there were the words “a lot faster to recharge”. Something which Lightning hopes to take advantage of. In theory the Lightning’s batteries can be recharged to 80 per cent in just three minutes.
In practice however, this requires a three-phase industrial power line, something your typical home (and even a lot of businesses) just don’t have.
Yet.
Perhaps one day, in a world where alternative fuels catch on, you can drive up to your “filling station” and get a tank of petrol, a tank of ethanol, a tank of bio-diesel, a tank of hydrogen, or even a quick charge of your batteries from an industrial power line, all in one nice convenient station.
In the mean time however, Lightning owners will have to live with the fact that while they recharge their nifty sports car from their home line, the recharge time is really not much different than that of any other electric car. And they’re still screwed if they want to travel beyond the range of their batteries.
Something where hybrid cars, like the Toyota Prius, still reign supreme in that they still can just top off their tank of gas from any old gas station and keep truckin’ all night long.
Still, if anything interesting comes from this, it’s that cars are no longer necessarily held down by the crappy battery technologies that we’ve been using since the dawn of time (lead acid) or by those used in the last few decades (lithium-ion). We’ve got something new: lithium-titanate AKA NanoSafe™. Hopefully we’ll be seeing these used in new cars. And just as hopefully, the industry will continue to research and develop even newer and better battery technologies to vault the electric car into the twenty-first century.
And maybe one day, we’ll even have the ultimate green-hybrid. A flexible-fuel hybrid that can take petrol or ethanol to power either a normal car engine (like a Prius hybrid has) or perhaps some sort of electric generator, has a hydrogen tank for filling up a hydrogen fuel cell powered electric motor, and even has some NanoSafe™ batteries for also powering the electric motor and operating as a recharge point for regenerative braking. It’d be the ultimate hybrid. Who knows? It could happen.
kent beuchert:
Arah is not completely at sea here, but for some reason, he imagines great difficulty in creating high
July 24, 2008, 3:05 pmcapacity recharge stations. Those are the least of our problems ahead although, as he correctly points out, those who own the $250,000 plus Lightning will have problems on the road at the present time. Anyone who owns one of those vehicles will have many vehicles, all capable of travelling vast distances – we’re not talking about minimum wage folks here, you know. Nor would I suggest that these folks will have a great deal of trouble getting more juice into their mansions – like a simple 2 phase 200 amp service panel – that would cut the recharge time down considerable, since, as I recall, those cars are sporting only 50 kwHr capacity battery packs (which will almost never be completely discharged) – it doesn’t appear that recharges will hold you up very much, unless you are REALLY impatient. As I recall,
the Fisker Karma is planning on building a plug-in quasi dual-mode serial hybrid using a battery pack for a 50 mile range, which amounts to around 10 kwHrs, which should be
rechargeable in just a few minutes
with that dedicated 2nd service panel. That car is going to retail
about $20,000 less than the Tesla.
Marian:
Simple and beautiful – I’ll find a way to afford the electric upgrade to my home service – I’ll take 2 !
July 24, 2008, 7:21 pmArah:
Hey Kent, I wouldn’t go putting words in my mouth here. I don’t “imagine great difficulty in creating high capacity recharge stations”. I just don’t see one. Anywhere. Nor do I see it happening any time soon. It’s not difficult. There’s just no demand for them … yet.
Frankly, I think the whole “electric car” concept is a bit of a dud. Not that it should be, but hydrogen fuel cells seem to be the buzzword to beat. And if it’s not a fuel-cell car, then it better be a regenerative-braking-powered hybrid. I’m not sure why the industry has something against just plugging in a car. Even plug-in hybrids seem to be more rumor than reality.
Which is a shame, because right now a good battery (with or without an optional tank of gas for when the battery runs dry) is a much better storage medium for electricity than molecules of hydrogen.
(Which is the only “clean” way to produce hydrogen right now, electricity + water = hydrogen. Much better than the pollution creating method of reformation, AKA reforming natural gas into hydrogen and CO2. But still, the electricity used to produce the hydrogen would be much more efficiently spent just charging a battery to power the car.)
To me it’d make the most sense to produce plug-in hybrids for the here and now, and leave off the hydrogen fuel cells until the technology to produce clean hydrogen is a bit more ready.
But for the people who have more than one car, or only make short trips, electric cars can suit them just fine. And cost a heck of a lot less to run than filling up a tank with gas. (Especially when you look at the sports cars.)
July 25, 2008, 1:37 pmEli Ally:
electric motors would sometimes overheat if they are not properly ventilated:;;
August 12, 2010, 9:00 pm