, your going to create a dog of a car, that weighs loads, uses a shocking amount of environmentally
harmful heavy metals, is a pig to drive and has 75% of its "Green" energy produced by fossil fuel power stations.
Just spotted that tesla are making a family car now linky and it revived an old idea.
Now I'm not sure what kind of electric motor power you'd need to get decent speeds but I was thinking it would be possible to just slap an
electric motor on the engine side of the gearbox in some way or the other.
Any idea what kind of motor would be powerful enough? Fitting 2 or maybe even 3 (size allowing!) would be an option
There have been several Sevens built with electric power they can have quite good performance but their range is usually woeful!
Most builders dispense with any kind of gearbox because of the massive torque available from the electric motor.
The expensive part is getting good batteries and the right electronics to control the motor but I have heard of people buying battery packs out of
crashed Priius hybrids.
quote:
Originally posted by niceperson709
There have been several Sevens built with electric power they can have quite good performance but their range is usually woeful!
Most builders dispense with any kind of gearbox because of the massive torque available from the electric motor.
The expensive part is getting good batteries and the right electronics to control the motor but I have heard of people buying battery packs out of crashed Priius hybrids.
My understanding is that a variable resister is a very bad way to control large motors drawing big currents so you need more sophisticated
controllers.
Your idea about using a small petrol engine to charge batteries has some merit but and this is a big but You would need something bigger than you
suggest to charge the traction batteries.
Why do you think that a Prius has a 1,5 litre engine?
If you are serious a better route might be to get written off Prius and fit its entire drive train into an "atomesque"chassis
There's a very usefull site here which goes into detail about motor, battries, controllers and
everything really.
It's a US site, though, so some of the stuff may not be available here.
There is also a UK based company here who sell a lot of the stuff - never bought anything from them, though,
so not sure what they are like?
looked into this subject myself, all boils down to massive cost to get it going and would take ages to pay for itself (if it ever does), battery
replacement every few years also has to be added on top too. Lithium batteries although very good cost an incredible amount even for a small car so
most folk are stuck with the old heavy lead batteries which haven’t improved much at all. Most electric cars have lame ranges still.
I use a small motor bike to really save money, can't really complain with 110mpg...
quote:
Originally posted by Ninehigh
I've been thinking of that too recently.
Maybe a small petrol engine (say 50 or 125cc) that would be used purely to run alternators to charge the batteries.
As for controls would a variable resistor work? I'm thinking the same kind of system used in Scalextric controllers.
priuses arent really that good though...fair enough its hybrid, but you can get the same mpg from golfs.
and the batterys created huge amounts of acid rain in north america where they destroyed large areas of forest to get the metals.
so apart from that hybrid smugness, you dont gain much.
and for these plug in cars its rediculous, cause the power in the socket has to be made somewhere too...usually a big coal fired power station...and
when theres already too much demand on the national grid...
iif you look at trains they often use a engine (diesel or gas turbine) to directly turn an alternator which feeds through switch gear to the electric
motors in the wheel bogies.
I thought this might have some merit in a car as not only could the engine be used at a constant optimal speed for efficiency but due to the electric
motors torque, the whole drive train – clutch, gearbox, diff etc can be ditched and replaced with just the electric cables. 4 wheel drive becomes very
easy as does traction control if each wheel has its own motor.
The battery on a Prius doesn't have that much capacity [I've got one], so wouldn't power a car without a petrol engine for many miles.
quote:
Originally posted by Mr Whippy
iif you look at trains they often use a engine (diesel or gas turbine) to directly turn an alternator which feeds through switch gear to the electric motors in the wheel bogies.
quote:
Originally posted by MikeRJ
quote:
Originally posted by Mr Whippy
iif you look at trains they often use a engine (diesel or gas turbine) to directly turn an alternator which feeds through switch gear to the electric motors in the wheel bogies.
There are a very good reasons for this though!
a) Motors have maximum torque at zero RPM, just what you need to get many hundred tonnes moving.
b) More efficient than e.g. a torque converter.
c) Much easier to bolt a motor onto a bogey and run electric cables rather then distributing engine torque directly with lots of driveshafts and UJ's.
Why don't they take the regenerative braking a bit further and have generators constantly driven from unpowered wheels?
Small 125cc 4 stroke air cooled bike engine turns an alternator at constant rpm, front wheels generating more, rear wheels driven by the motor.
Most of us are not goign to be able to use them motors that oems use. The ones I've seen in hybrids are coils round the flywheel which becomes
the stator.
quote:
Originally posted by coozer
Why don't they take the regenerative braking a bit further and have generators constantly driven from unpowered wheels?
Small 125cc 4 stroke air cooled bike engine turns an alternator at constant rpm, front wheels generating more, rear wheels driven by the motor.
Most of us are not goign to be able to use them motors that oems use. The ones I've seen in hybrids are coils round the flywheel which becomes the stator.
quote:
Originally posted by Mr Whippy
iif you look at trains they often use a engine (diesel or gas turbine) to directly turn an alternator which feeds through switch gear to the electric motors in the wheel bogies.
Ultimately, with out trying to sound bah humbug , your going to create a dog of a car, that weighs loads, uses a shocking amount of environmentally
harmful heavy metals, is a pig to drive and has 75% of its "Green" energy produced by fossil fuel power stations.
quote:
Originally posted by deezee
Ultimately, with out trying to sound bah humbug
Well my point was the petrol engine did nothing to actually drive the wheels therefore you wouldn't need one as big as in the Prius
My mum's got one and on a week in wales you get better mpg in a diesel mondeo 
Surely lithium batteries would be designed to last a good 10 years though?
Another recent thought was one of those gas turbines, but then again that might be even worse.
We could always press Honda to put the fr-v into real production and stop pandering to Calafornia