electric cars

Post Reply New Topic

Anyone notice how crappy electric cars are? I think I know how to make one that is not so bad, when you need to charge up, instead of plugging in a wire, you attach a belt that feeds in small batteries, and pulls out the old, like a chain gun with batteries instead of bullets.

Plus, considering how much power would be required to move a car weighing hundreds of pounds, plus the radio and other electronics, that will take a lot of batteries. Which would cost a lot. What I think would work well is if they made one big battery (well probably several small batterys connected) that is rechargable and easily removable from a car, and can be used in all models. Then instead of spending hours charging thr car, just go to a place where you could take out your battery, put in a freshly charged one, and they charge the dead one and give it to the next person. Like a gas station, but with batteries.

They would be recharged, then fed in again later..... like a gas station, but batteries instead charged in, discharged empty batteries are fed into magazine chargers.

That is the idea silly.

Load in charged small cell batteries with one side, pull out empties, fill rack, when rack is fully charged, repeat.

In older electric cars, the cells were packed in any crevice where they would fit so this wouldn't work. In the Tesla Model S, they are all stored in a "slab" on the bottom of the car, which would make this more feasible, but the slab is designed for quick release and removal by compatible equipment. Because of that, it's faster to just release the whole battery pack than to feed individual cells out of it. Nice thinking though.

Electric cars are far superior to gasoline powered, except this issue

There are some neat concepts that you could run an induction strip down the middle of the road that could deliver power to you as you drive. Unfortunately, induction schemes generally have low efficiency. Another idea would be to have some sort of arm on your car that could reach up to wires running above the road, sort of like how street-cars work. I believe there is a pilot project that will begin in the next few years in California using this with freight trucks (although why on Earth they don't just use rail in this particular case is beyond me, since the trucks will only be able to run along a very specific route). The battery swap-out scheme is a good one but unfortunately we don't hear anything much about it right now. A big problem is the lack of standardisation, as someone else mentioned. And that's hard to fix--look how long it took us to even get standardized cell-phone chargers.

Of course, it's worth noting that when you take into account all of the environmental damage caused by manufacturing batteries and digging up the metals needed for them, electric cars might actually be worse for the environment than conventional ones.

I was thinking about this earlier today, why not have a car with an electric motor on each wheel, but instead of batteries have them be powered by a gas/diesel/whatever generator, kind of like one a train. You could have as much hp as on a sports car, on what I guess counts as a hybrid.