Electricity And Cars.

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a big advocate of renewable energy and that I like playing with electricity. With my grandfather's establishing of Rampersad's Electrical in 1936, it could almost be seen as genetic. The family business, still going and presently being run by my cousin, could be described as managing the psychological needs of little electrons, assuring they get what they need to generate magnetic fields that cause what everyone else in the world understands: motion.

Suffice to say that I like this stuff a lot. And that today I had a cell go bad in a 5 year old battery in the pickup - something that a lot of people couldn't believe. It helps to be kind to your battery. Water it.

What is hard for me to understand is how battery technology has lagged so much - and how refinements to electrical motors haven't yet produced more advances. Granted, Tesla Motors has come a long way with a 300 mile range on an electric car (not to mention the acceleration with only a single speed transmission). It has even inspired Renault to compete, though it lacks range and top end.

Why does the Renault lack the range and top end? Without having looked at either car, I'm pretty sure it is the battery technology. The Renault brags that the batteries can be 80% charged in 20 minutes which, to the uninformed, sounds better than the Tesla Roadster. And yet it has less range and less top end. While there may be some variance in the windings of either motor (and thus its efficiency in the application), the charge time indicates that there is a battery difference. Period.

Within the comments to the Huffington Post article, here, worldsam mentions that the real need is to have replaceable battery tanks - so you can charge one while you use one. Yet anyone who has moved batteries associated with renewable energy around knows that batteries aren't light. Picture a car battery on steroids. It isn't light - gravity typically likes batteries right where people leave them.

The only way that batteries can really weigh less at this time is if they don't need to store as many happy electrons. And the only way to do that is to assure that less electrons are needed per unit time. And that gets back to the electric motor - something that hasn't changed all that much since Nikola Tesla patented them.

Any gearhead will tell you that to reduce the need of a powerplant - be it a 426 Hemi or a 429 Cobrajet or a 1.3 Liter wankel or a 12/24 DC motor is... reduce weight. Less weight means there is less load. Less load means that less power is needed to handle inertia and momentum. And yes, that includes the weight of the driver.

But how much can you reduce the weight of the car if the weight of the battery is a large proportion of it?

More advances are needed in electrical motors as well as batteries - and while Tesla Motors seems to be leading the pack (and is in the black while doing so), until competitors come in and some serious R&D money is spent on both the motors and batteries there won't be serious progress.

Don't get me started on hybrids.

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