9 ms·

35kWh on a boxy vehicle? As mentioned in the article, more like 150mi range on the standard the US uses to calculate range, and a smaller battery than some Zero

by rconti 8y ago

35kWh on a boxy vehicle? As mentioned in the article, more like 150mi range on the standard the US uses to calculate range, and a smaller battery than some Zero motorcycles. Not tiny, but it's not exactly a slippery vehicle; low mass could help it do better than a tesla-type car at lower speeds, but worse at higher speeds, I imagine. Charge to 90% and you're at 135mi range, leave a safety margin and now you're looking at 100mi real world. Not bad for most day-to-day, but when you look at real world usage and the safety margins most drivers like to use, it starts getting dicey. Been in a Great Wall or two. Fine cars. I wouldn't want to crash in one, but they're engineered to a price point.

adrianN 8y ago
This is supposed to be an urban car. Almost all trips in cities are less than 20km (Berlin is about 30km across, Beijing maybe twice that). Even a 160km range is plenty if there are chargers where you park your car. I suppose China is building charging stations to match their accelerated introduction of EVs in their cities.
- smush 8y ago
  I'm sorry but I can't afford to own two+ vehicles, one for urban, one for long range. For the purposes of the article, 'long range' equals one tank of gas (~250 miles in my 90s SUV) for an ICE. I am behind the concept of EVs in general, but IMHO they aren't quite practical for suburban (which is in EV terms in long range territory) usage. (yet!)
  - adrianN 8y ago
    If you drive more than 100 miles per day more often than once a month, then an EV is probably not for you. Otherwise you can just rent a car for the days where you need the range. Just like you rent a transporter when you buy new furniture instead of driving one every day to the office.
  - magduf 8y ago
    You don't need a vehicle for long range travel: when you want to do that, you either fly or take a train. What, your country doesn't have good trains for intercity transport? Maybe you should work on that.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
      ...have you seen our country? It's nice that Europe is dense enough to use trains, but let's not pretend that your solutions scale.
      - magduf 8y ago
        The northeast US is more dense than Europe.
      - username90 8y ago
        That is a bad excuse, USA is denser than Sweden yet Sweden still has enough trains that you don't have to take cars between basically all cities with more than 10k inhabitants, even those in the mostly depopulated Swedish north.
        prostoalex 8y ago
        USA also holds a dubious record of building the most expensive rail in the world https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html?_r=1 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
    - zdragnar 8y ago
      What, your country doesn't have 20% of its population living in idyllic rural areas that cover 97% of your nearly 4 million square miles of land? Let's not pretend that what works for some people will work for everyone. It would be beyond unfeasible to take a plane or train everywhere I typically go in a given month, and 100mi range would be pretty dicey, especially when it gets brutally cold in winter and I need extra power to get heat and get through snow on the roads.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    How often do you actually drive these long distances? At some point it's much less expensive to just rent a car when you need to travel that far.
    - Marsymars 8y ago
      Well personally, the overwhelming majority of my driving km are longer distances. I work from home, and mostly use my car to carpool to ski hills in the winter, and crags and trailheads in the summer.
    - prostoalex 8y ago
      One problem with that approach is that those long distance trips tend to coincide with everybody else in America taking those long distance trips (Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, end of school year) with surge prices for rentals as a result.
- Markoff 8y ago
  it depends what you count as Beijing, i used to ride bicycle sometimes from eastern Beijing to western part and it's easily 40-50 minutes in heavy traffic with numerous traffic lights, i don't think it would be even 30km across actually using car in Beijing it's pretty stupid, why would you do it? it's flat as pancake, ideal for biking same as Bangkok, you don't even need car for grocery since you can have it delivered for free right to your door, even if you don't have elevator, more convenient and cheaper than shopping with car, subway station it's always pretty much less than 1km walk unless you live in Beijing suburbs shame there is not done elevated LRT, since buses are useless and there are no trams/trains either so only solution to avoid traffic jams it's subway, elevated LRT could have more frequent stops in places subway can't reach or where it's not possible to upgrade capacity anymore
ummonk 8y ago
I don't imagine too many people doing a round trip commute that would make a 100mi real world range dicey even after a safety margin.
- seszett 8y ago
  Well, actually my round-trip commute is about 300 kilometers/200 miles (Antwerp, Belgium to Lille, France - it's fine because it's only once a week, I would never do that more frequently) and when I was looking for a new car just a few weeks ago, I realised that it made using an electric car just not practical at all, especially if I'm not guaranteed to be able to park in front of my house to charge it, or to have free EV parking spots at work. Obviously most people have shorter commutes, but here in Belgium it's actually not that uncommon to have long commutes. I see more Teslas in the city of Antwerp than on the highway.
  - carlob 8y ago
    But you have excellent trains in that area! Ok Antwerp-Lille has a change in Bruxelles, but you still can do the trip in under 90 minutes.
    - seszett 8y ago
      They're actually really not that good. Antwerp-Lille by train is more like 2 hours and 30€, one-way. So even if we don't take into account the extra time it's still about twice as expensive as by car (about 12€ one-way on diesel) and then the train does not depart from my home, and I still have a metro to take in Lille to get to the office. If the various transport networks were better integrated though, it could be at least as fast and as convenient as by car. A first step would be not needing between six and four different tickets for a round-trip: De Lijn for the tram in Antwerp (and/or Velo passes for the shared bikes) SNCB for the train departing from Antwerp, Transpole for the metro in Lille (and/or V'Lille for the shared bikes) and SNCF for the train departing from France.
      - holografix 8y ago
TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
My daily driver is a Honda Jazz, cos it's tiny and fairly reliable. Weekender is the VW T5 Transporter. This Great Wall Motors ORA R1 would be ideal for me as a daily river. I'd only need to charge it once a week! > I wouldn't want to crash in one, but they're engineered to a price point. Great Wall Motors sell vehicles in Australia, so presumably they've passed all the relevant crash tests? Not sure about the ORA R1 though, obviously. Edit to add: ObsoleteNerd's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18775462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18775462 supports your claim that you probably don't want to be in a Great Wall accident.
peteretep 8y ago
> I wouldn't want to crash in one I feel like this is a regulatory issue; my wild-ass guess would be that in the EU, at least, they'll have to be engineered to be a minimum level of crash-safe.
- sparkpeasy 8y ago
  If so, it'll weigh a lot more. It's easy to make a light vehicle that isn't reinforced.
ajuc 8y ago
About 50 HP. That's pretty OK for a small city car like that, especially with electric engine which has nice torque from the start. Boxyness doesn't matter much at 30-50 km/h. It has similar shape and size to Fiat 126p - the car that motorized several communist countries in 70s-80s (and is still used in Cuba). They made millions of them. It had about 600 kg empty mass, and 24 HP. I assume this weighs more because of batteries, but surely not twice as much? It wasn't comfortable (back seats were designed for people about 160 cm tall :) ), and certainly wasn't safe (famously - the structural integrity during a crash depended on a spare tire being in it's intended place in the front trunk, and even then any serious crash was deadly). But there were almost no heavy cars on the roads then, and you weren't supposed to drive it over 80km/h anyway - it felt like you're in a formula one when you exceeded 90 km/h, and it took over 40 seconds to achieve 100km/h speed :) I would be OK with driving this in city traffic, especially if it was allowed on bus lanes and if access to the city center was paid for ICE cars.
- C1sc0cat 8y ago
  50Hp is a bit low for a car - a Vespa Scooter has 22Hp Btw
  - ajuc 8y ago
    My Fiat Punto has 54 HP at 860 kg and it's perfectly fine for urban driving.
  - et2o 8y ago
    That's the biggest engine ever put in a Vespa. For a long time (until the 1990s) they were legally limited to 1.5 Hp in Italy. That Vespa also costs nearly as much as this car.
    - C1sc0cat 8y ago
      this is the 300 they have done 500cc
  - llampx 8y ago
    Which Vespa scooter? A 150cc scooter is pretty big and you need a proper motorcycle license for it, and that has 12-13 bhp. Smaller scooters have even less.
danieldisu 8y ago
I can see many people buying one of these in european cities once they start heavily benefiting electric cars vs ICE ones. The main problem is charging, but that could also be fixed by installing chargers in the financial districts where only electric cars can park...
cuu508 8y ago
The article says 35kW motor, not 35kWh battery.
- rconti 8y ago
  my apologies, lack of sleep and too much exposure to american units. I even read what it said, and thought it was erroneously written as 'motor size' rather than 'battery size'.
baybal2 8y ago
I would not be surprised that they were measuring the range on a perfectly flat road in vacuum. My knowledge of engineering suggests me that Great Wall guys are lying.
- adrianN 8y ago
  200 miles / 33kWh is about 6 miles per kWh. A Tesla Model S does about 3 miles per kWh. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that a much smaller car with a 35kW engine instead of a 580kW engine could be twice as efficient, but maybe my knowledge of engineering is not as good as yours. Care to elaborate why they're lying?
  - anonetal 8y ago
    As another comparison point, my volt does about 3.5 miles per kWh at 60-65mph on a highway and close to double that at 20-30mph in cities. And it’s not that light.
  - baybal2 8y ago
    To double the specific impulse of a vehicle, their losses at cruising speed have to be 3-4 times smaller in real life. They claim the weight at around 1t. Half that of Model S, but still I don't see them realising such efficiencies.
morganvachon 8y ago
> I wouldn't want to crash in one This is what is keeping my wife and I from getting her a Nissan Leaf. She drove a Nissan Versa (basically the same platform but traditional gas engine) until she was hit by another car. The accident was caused by a person in the oncoming lane not seeing her and turning left, striking her driver's side door. The other person was in a mid sized SUV (first gen Jeep Liberty) and was only going about 15MPH when she struck my wife's car, but the force pushed my wife's driver side door all the way into her seat and against her hip. The Versa was severely frame damaged and not driveable; the only damage the Jeep sustained was losing the bumper cover. Thankfully my wife was not hurt apart from some bruising and soreness on her hip, but if the other car had been going faster (say, at an intersection) she could have been seriously hurt or killed. She is now driving our Crown Victoria, a full frame vehicle with five star crash ratings all around and reinforced doors due to being a former detective's car. Her fuel economy sucks, and she was just moved to a more remote office at her job which makes the Vic a very expensive commuter car now, but we're leery of getting her a subcompact (gas, hybrid, or electric). It's probably an irrational fear; such an accident is probably a once in a lifetime thing, but traffic is insane where we live and work so we both feel much safer with her in "The Tank".
- marketer 8y ago
  I would argue that a Nissan Leaf would be overall safer than a Crown Victoria. First of all, the 2nd generation (2018/2019) Nissan Leaf seems to have a comparable weight as the Crown Victoria. From the data I've been looking at online, it's around 25% less weight than the CV, but definitely more than a Versa. Also, this weight is likely better distributed throughout the car instead of being concentrated in one place. Another factor to consider is that the CV is an older vehicle (did they stop making them in 2012?), and in general newer cars are safer due to strong materials and safety features/design. Also, the likelihood of a fire during an accident is greatly reduced (although still non-zero, as demonstrated by Tesla).
  - tudelo 8y ago
    Yet he said the crown vic has "reinforced doors due to being a former detective's car." Also, are fires really that much of a worry when you get in an accident? I have seen very little of that happening... More likely probably that your alternator causes a fire.
mikestew 8y ago
35kWh on a boxy vehicle? 24kWh has been pushing Nissan Leafs around for eight years. and a smaller battery than some Zero motorcycles. Well, you made me look, at least. Because if they can fit a 35kWh battery on a bike, I’m buying one tomorrow. They don’t, of course. The biggest thing Zero makes is a tenth that size.
- mclehman 8y ago
  They don't, but their bikes top out at 18 kWh, not 3.5 kWh as you're implying. The power tank add-on is 3.6 kWh which could be the source of the confusion.
  - mikestew 8y ago
    Thanks for the correction. 18 kWh ought to do the job, then. Not quite in “buy it tomorrow” territory, but close enough I should give them another look.

by rconti 8y ago

adrianN 8y ago

This is supposed to be an urban car. Almost all trips in cities are less than 20km (Berlin is about 30km across, Beijing maybe twice that). Even a 160km range is plenty if there are chargers where you park your car. I suppose China is building charging stations to match their accelerated introduction of EVs in their cities.

smush 8y ago
I'm sorry but I can't afford to own two+ vehicles, one for urban, one for long range. For the purposes of the article, 'long range' equals one tank of gas (~250 miles in my 90s SUV) for an ICE. I am behind the concept of EVs in general, but IMHO they aren't quite practical for suburban (which is in EV terms in long range territory) usage. (yet!)
- adrianN 8y ago
  If you drive more than 100 miles per day more often than once a month, then an EV is probably not for you. Otherwise you can just rent a car for the days where you need the range. Just like you rent a transporter when you buy new furniture instead of driving one every day to the office.
- magduf 8y ago
  You don't need a vehicle for long range travel: when you want to do that, you either fly or take a train. What, your country doesn't have good trains for intercity transport? Maybe you should work on that.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
    ...have you seen our country? It's nice that Europe is dense enough to use trains, but let's not pretend that your solutions scale.
    - magduf 8y ago
      The northeast US is more dense than Europe.
    - username90 8y ago
      That is a bad excuse, USA is denser than Sweden yet Sweden still has enough trains that you don't have to take cars between basically all cities with more than 10k inhabitants, even those in the mostly depopulated Swedish north.
      - prostoalex 8y ago
        USA also holds a dubious record of building the most expensive rail in the world https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html?_r=1 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
  - zdragnar 8y ago
    What, your country doesn't have 20% of its population living in idyllic rural areas that cover 97% of your nearly 4 million square miles of land? Let's not pretend that what works for some people will work for everyone. It would be beyond unfeasible to take a plane or train everywhere I typically go in a given month, and 100mi range would be pretty dicey, especially when it gets brutally cold in winter and I need extra power to get heat and get through snow on the roads.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  How often do you actually drive these long distances? At some point it's much less expensive to just rent a car when you need to travel that far.
  - Marsymars 8y ago
    Well personally, the overwhelming majority of my driving km are longer distances. I work from home, and mostly use my car to carpool to ski hills in the winter, and crags and trailheads in the summer.
  - prostoalex 8y ago
    One problem with that approach is that those long distance trips tend to coincide with everybody else in America taking those long distance trips (Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, end of school year) with surge prices for rentals as a result.
Markoff 8y ago
it depends what you count as Beijing, i used to ride bicycle sometimes from eastern Beijing to western part and it's easily 40-50 minutes in heavy traffic with numerous traffic lights, i don't think it would be even 30km across actually using car in Beijing it's pretty stupid, why would you do it? it's flat as pancake, ideal for biking same as Bangkok, you don't even need car for grocery since you can have it delivered for free right to your door, even if you don't have elevator, more convenient and cheaper than shopping with car, subway station it's always pretty much less than 1km walk unless you live in Beijing suburbs shame there is not done elevated LRT, since buses are useless and there are no trams/trains either so only solution to avoid traffic jams it's subway, elevated LRT could have more frequent stops in places subway can't reach or where it's not possible to upgrade capacity anymore

ummonk 8y ago

I don't imagine too many people doing a round trip commute that would make a 100mi real world range dicey even after a safety margin.

seszett 8y ago
Well, actually my round-trip commute is about 300 kilometers/200 miles (Antwerp, Belgium to Lille, France - it's fine because it's only once a week, I would never do that more frequently) and when I was looking for a new car just a few weeks ago, I realised that it made using an electric car just not practical at all, especially if I'm not guaranteed to be able to park in front of my house to charge it, or to have free EV parking spots at work. Obviously most people have shorter commutes, but here in Belgium it's actually not that uncommon to have long commutes. I see more Teslas in the city of Antwerp than on the highway.
- carlob 8y ago
  But you have excellent trains in that area! Ok Antwerp-Lille has a change in Bruxelles, but you still can do the trip in under 90 minutes.
  - seszett 8y ago
    They're actually really not that good. Antwerp-Lille by train is more like 2 hours and 30€, one-way. So even if we don't take into account the extra time it's still about twice as expensive as by car (about 12€ one-way on diesel) and then the train does not depart from my home, and I still have a metro to take in Lille to get to the office. If the various transport networks were better integrated though, it could be at least as fast and as convenient as by car. A first step would be not needing between six and four different tickets for a round-trip: De Lijn for the tram in Antwerp (and/or Velo passes for the shared bikes) SNCB for the train departing from Antwerp, Transpole for the metro in Lille (and/or V'Lille for the shared bikes) and SNCF for the train departing from France.
    - holografix 8y ago

TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago

My daily driver is a Honda Jazz, cos it's tiny and fairly reliable. Weekender is the VW T5 Transporter. This Great Wall Motors ORA R1 would be ideal for me as a daily river. I'd only need to charge it once a week! > I wouldn't want to crash in one, but they're engineered to a price point. Great Wall Motors sell vehicles in Australia, so presumably they've passed all the relevant crash tests? Not sure about the ORA R1 though, obviously. Edit to add: ObsoleteNerd's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18775462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18775462 supports your claim that you probably don't want to be in a Great Wall accident.

peteretep 8y ago

> I wouldn't want to crash in one I feel like this is a regulatory issue; my wild-ass guess would be that in the EU, at least, they'll have to be engineered to be a minimum level of crash-safe.

sparkpeasy 8y ago
If so, it'll weigh a lot more. It's easy to make a light vehicle that isn't reinforced.

ajuc 8y ago

About 50 HP. That's pretty OK for a small city car like that, especially with electric engine which has nice torque from the start. Boxyness doesn't matter much at 30-50 km/h. It has similar shape and size to Fiat 126p - the car that motorized several communist countries in 70s-80s (and is still used in Cuba). They made millions of them. It had about 600 kg empty mass, and 24 HP. I assume this weighs more because of batteries, but surely not twice as much? It wasn't comfortable (back seats were designed for people about 160 cm tall :) ), and certainly wasn't safe (famously - the structural integrity during a crash depended on a spare tire being in it's intended place in the front trunk, and even then any serious crash was deadly). But there were almost no heavy cars on the roads then, and you weren't supposed to drive it over 80km/h anyway - it felt like you're in a formula one when you exceeded 90 km/h, and it took over 40 seconds to achieve 100km/h speed :) I would be OK with driving this in city traffic, especially if it was allowed on bus lanes and if access to the city center was paid for ICE cars.

C1sc0cat 8y ago
50Hp is a bit low for a car - a Vespa Scooter has 22Hp Btw
- ajuc 8y ago
  My Fiat Punto has 54 HP at 860 kg and it's perfectly fine for urban driving.
- et2o 8y ago
  That's the biggest engine ever put in a Vespa. For a long time (until the 1990s) they were legally limited to 1.5 Hp in Italy. That Vespa also costs nearly as much as this car.
  - C1sc0cat 8y ago
    this is the 300 they have done 500cc
- llampx 8y ago
  Which Vespa scooter? A 150cc scooter is pretty big and you need a proper motorcycle license for it, and that has 12-13 bhp. Smaller scooters have even less.

danieldisu 8y ago

I can see many people buying one of these in european cities once they start heavily benefiting electric cars vs ICE ones. The main problem is charging, but that could also be fixed by installing chargers in the financial districts where only electric cars can park...

cuu508 8y ago

The article says 35kW motor, not 35kWh battery.

rconti 8y ago
my apologies, lack of sleep and too much exposure to american units. I even read what it said, and thought it was erroneously written as 'motor size' rather than 'battery size'.

baybal2 8y ago

I would not be surprised that they were measuring the range on a perfectly flat road in vacuum. My knowledge of engineering suggests me that Great Wall guys are lying.

adrianN 8y ago
200 miles / 33kWh is about 6 miles per kWh. A Tesla Model S does about 3 miles per kWh. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that a much smaller car with a 35kW engine instead of a 580kW engine could be twice as efficient, but maybe my knowledge of engineering is not as good as yours. Care to elaborate why they're lying?
- anonetal 8y ago
  As another comparison point, my volt does about 3.5 miles per kWh at 60-65mph on a highway and close to double that at 20-30mph in cities. And it’s not that light.
- baybal2 8y ago
  To double the specific impulse of a vehicle, their losses at cruising speed have to be 3-4 times smaller in real life. They claim the weight at around 1t. Half that of Model S, but still I don't see them realising such efficiencies.

morganvachon 8y ago

> I wouldn't want to crash in one This is what is keeping my wife and I from getting her a Nissan Leaf. She drove a Nissan Versa (basically the same platform but traditional gas engine) until she was hit by another car. The accident was caused by a person in the oncoming lane not seeing her and turning left, striking her driver's side door. The other person was in a mid sized SUV (first gen Jeep Liberty) and was only going about 15MPH when she struck my wife's car, but the force pushed my wife's driver side door all the way into her seat and against her hip. The Versa was severely frame damaged and not driveable; the only damage the Jeep sustained was losing the bumper cover. Thankfully my wife was not hurt apart from some bruising and soreness on her hip, but if the other car had been going faster (say, at an intersection) she could have been seriously hurt or killed. She is now driving our Crown Victoria, a full frame vehicle with five star crash ratings all around and reinforced doors due to being a former detective's car. Her fuel economy sucks, and she was just moved to a more remote office at her job which makes the Vic a very expensive commuter car now, but we're leery of getting her a subcompact (gas, hybrid, or electric). It's probably an irrational fear; such an accident is probably a once in a lifetime thing, but traffic is insane where we live and work so we both feel much safer with her in "The Tank".

marketer 8y ago
I would argue that a Nissan Leaf would be overall safer than a Crown Victoria. First of all, the 2nd generation (2018/2019) Nissan Leaf seems to have a comparable weight as the Crown Victoria. From the data I've been looking at online, it's around 25% less weight than the CV, but definitely more than a Versa. Also, this weight is likely better distributed throughout the car instead of being concentrated in one place. Another factor to consider is that the CV is an older vehicle (did they stop making them in 2012?), and in general newer cars are safer due to strong materials and safety features/design. Also, the likelihood of a fire during an accident is greatly reduced (although still non-zero, as demonstrated by Tesla).
- tudelo 8y ago
  Yet he said the crown vic has "reinforced doors due to being a former detective's car." Also, are fires really that much of a worry when you get in an accident? I have seen very little of that happening... More likely probably that your alternator causes a fire.

mikestew 8y ago

35kWh on a boxy vehicle? 24kWh has been pushing Nissan Leafs around for eight years. and a smaller battery than some Zero motorcycles. Well, you made me look, at least. Because if they can fit a 35kWh battery on a bike, I’m buying one tomorrow. They don’t, of course. The biggest thing Zero makes is a tenth that size.

mclehman 8y ago
They don't, but their bikes top out at 18 kWh, not 3.5 kWh as you're implying. The power tank add-on is 3.6 kWh which could be the source of the confusion.
- mikestew 8y ago
  Thanks for the correction. 18 kWh ought to do the job, then. Not quite in “buy it tomorrow” territory, but close enough I should give them another look.