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Students break acceleration world record for electric vehicles
- mburee 4y agoWhy wouldn't they incorporate design from top fuel dragsters? They reach 100mph (!!) in under a second.
- kfajdsl 4y agoThis is designed for the formula student electric competition, not just to go fast in a straight line.
- eenell 4y agoWhy would an EV incorporate tech from top _fuel_ dragsters? What tech besides tyres and aero would they adopt?
- antonvs 4y agoFlames, smoke, and the occasional explosion perhaps?
- m463 4y agoI'm pretty sure top fuel dragsters are all about tires and aero and only inconsequentially the power source. It might be an easy problem to solve acceleration to 100km/hr since you don't have to carry batteries to go an entire 1/4 mile
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ominous_prime 4y agonot many other vehicles have the ability to transfer >6000ft/lbs of torque down to the pavement to be able to accelerate at 5gs
- orangepurple 4y agonot to mention each run down the track is a stunning controlled demolition of the engine
- orangepurple 4y agoThe clutch which fuses itself into a solid unit instantly
- Animats 4y agoWheel spinning and burning rubber? Electrics going for maximum acceleration usually don't do that, because once the wheel is spinning relative to the pavement, friction is reduced and there's less acceleration. Watch videos of Teslas in launch mode.
- robocat 4y ago> burning rubber The burning rubber is to heat the tyre rubber to get the rubber to maximum adhesion, just before doing the run. > Wheel spinning Maximum acceleration occurs with some tyre slip - spinning a little but not a lot: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Masayoshi-Tomizuka/publication/46439292/figure/fig1/AS:668912408612881@1536492554746/Adhesion-coefficient-vs-wheel-slip-acceleration.png https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Masayoshi-Tomizuka/publ... https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=tire+adhesion+versus+slip+graph https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=tire+adhesion+versus+slip+... I am guessing you know that, but just clarifying.
- antonvs 4y agoDid you watch the video? They do exactly that.
- sbierwagen 4y agoThe video shows it using kart tyres, and I would be interested to see what it would do with proper drag radials, since they change shape quite a lot during a launch: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/columns/a26089565/drag-racing-tires-explainer/ https://www.caranddriver.com/features/columns/a26089565/drag... >The massive torque channeled through the rear axle shifts the load of the car rearward and tries to twist the tire on its 16-inch beadlock rim. The sidewalls wrinkle as the tire—generally running between 6.0 and 10.0 psi of pressure—shrinks in radius by more than six inches and the tread effectively balls up at the front of the contact patch. That compression of the tire expands the contact patch to almost 250 square inches—larger than two side-by-side sheets of 8.5-by-11-inch paper. The compression of the tire also means that the final-drive ratio is effectively shortened for a harder launch. By the time the tire has released the torque stored in its wrinkled sidewalls and tread and grown back to its original size, the Top Fueler is already pulling more than 4.00 g's of acceleration. >After the car launches, inertia grows the tire to as much as 38 inches in diameter, simultaneously lengthening and narrowing the contact patch. This effectively lets the final-drive ratio grow taller for higher speeds and reduces rolling resistance as the vehicle hits terminal velocity. Effectively a big CVT with no moving parts.
- sethgrisham 4y agoIt's a track car designed for road races, not drag racing. This car is essentially meant to be a jack of all trades, whereas top fuel dragsters are probably the most purpose built car of all time.
- NaturalPhallacy 4y ago100 km/h is 62 mph
- whycombinetor 4y agoYes, zero-to-60 (in mph) or zero-to-100 (in km/h) is the standard acceleration measure for cars across the world.
- aidenn0 4y agoNot for drag racers though, which are usually measured in speed attained from a standstill over 1/4 mile.
- elif 4y agoDo you mean duration and not speed? Sure the readout gives a max speed reached but the numbers they compete over, and the numbers which establish car classes, are the time duration for the 1/4mi run.
- squeaky-clean 4y agoDragsters definitely measure their acceleration for bragging rights, it's usually a 0-100mph metric though. And of course bragging rights mean nothing if your car doesn't win the actual race. Top-Fuel dragsters race only 1000ft because they're so insanely fast it's dangerous to let them go farther and build up even more speed.
- unwind 4y agoI extend the award of most confusing expression to you, for "0-100 mph metric". I know that "a metric" is not the same as "the metric (system)", but I really had to stop all neurons and think a little. Also, are 1000 ft a quarter mile? I have no idea, so I had to Google and it's not, that'd be 1,320 ft.
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
- moritonal 4y agoThat video was brutally edited. I guess it's marketing but it somehow manged to be two minutes long and reduced the actual content to look like a toy car slowly launching without any frame of reference before quickly cutting to a bird? Like, watch Mythbusters or Slow-mo guys and try again.
- Animats 4y agoYes. There's so much slow motion and fast motion there's no sense of how fast the thing accelerated. Admittedly they're trying to dramatize something that took 1.2 seconds, which is hard. But still.
- renewiltord 4y agohttps://youtu.be/xjDK0LhKkMs?t=85 https://youtu.be/xjDK0LhKkMs?t=85 to cut to the chase. It's hard to discern from a routine Tesla with the pedal down perhaps because we're bad at telling small amounts of time apart.
- kube-system 4y agoAnd it’s hard to judge speed from a video anyway. https://youtu.be/54Oy75Bnu_Q https://youtu.be/54Oy75Bnu_Q
- renewiltord 4y agoGood one. The static camera shots from distance with human references are probably better on this video anyway https://youtu.be/bO7HlsAbhQk?t=50 https://youtu.be/bO7HlsAbhQk?t=50
- Nition 4y agoVideo games use this trick all the time. When the player sprints or gets a speed boost, give them some actual boost, but also increase the FOV.
- spinningslate 4y agocame here to say this. I mean, if the car actually did break a record - and I'm not questioning that - then actually showing it happen, in a visually recognisable way, might be, you know, a good idea?!? Dubious video aside, congratulations to the students. It would be great to see/hear what they did to achieve it. For example: I'd imagine traction off the line would be a big challenge for something so small (and presumably light). They did warm the tyres (video at least showed that) but what else? Traction control? Most likely yes. Anything novel in its implementation? Be good to get some detail behind the result.
- notum 4y ago257HP on a vehicle that weights less than some people. Exceptional! Congratulations to the team.
- mattfrommars 4y agoThe title should add for electric vehicles. Aren't top fuel dragsters quicker?
- semi-extrinsic 4y agoYes, IIRC they're doing somewhere around 0.7s? There's even been road legal tuned-up versions of the Nissan GT-R doing around the 1.5s mark.
- topspin 4y agoJalopnik claims 0-100 MPH (161km/h) is 0.86 seconds.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- LeifCarrotson 4y agoStudents break acceleration world record...for electric vehicles. This isn't close to the record for dragsters; if they can increase the energy density per unit mass there are traction and downforce improvements that can be used to improve this. It's very hard to beat chemical energy like detonating gasoline or nitromethane - you're looking at roughly a factor of 100, with ~40 MJ/kg for gasoline and 0.4 MJ/kg for a lithium ion battery - especially if you're racing through a 15 PSI gas that you can use in your chemical reaction without having to accelerate it onboard. I suspect that traction control for an electric motor may someday allow electric vehicles to exceed the records held by internal (well, mostly internal) combustion engines. You could keep the tire at exactly the right amount of slip for maximum acceleration, rather than trying to balance centrifugal clutches to get just the right amount of power at the right time. I wonder what the record is for a vehicle that can pick up electric energy from a tether/rail/overhead wire...though cables that can carry megawatts of energy are probably pretty heavy. Edit: I think the most interesting category here is the typical friction-propelled, human-carrying vehicle of either chemical or electric power sources. Railguns, rockets, fan cars (using active downforce), and vehicles which engage the ground by rack and pinion are qualitatively different. When the question is accelerating your own mass forwards using the friction developed by your own mass being pulled down by gravity, there's an interesting optimization problem trading off weight and power.
- MontyCarloHall 4y ago>cables that can carry megawatts of energy are probably pretty heavy Required cable thickness (and thus weight) is proportional to current, not voltage. Conductors to carry megawatts of electricity could be fairly light as long as the voltage is extremely high and the amperage relatively low.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jvanderbot 4y agoAnd magnetic force is a function of current, and magnetic force is what drives wheels. Technically you are correct, but thick cables are actually needed to do lots of translation from electricity to movement.
- zwieback 4y agoYay, my Alma Mater - the city of Mercedes, Bosch and Porsche. You'd expect some cool car stuff coming from there.
- jws 4y agoThat's an average acceleration around 2g. This seems beyond the limits of tires and friction. Do aerodynamic down forces kick in fast enough to make more force usable against the road at these relatively low speeds? Do the tires have more than static friction going for them (say, fine scale interlocking with the pavement)? Drag racers can do 3gs, but that's at higher average speed.
- agloeregrets 4y agoAero might play in a tiny way at the 40-60 MPH space, not meaningfully enough. As for tires, no actually you can go much further than this. The big detail is wear and heat caused by tire softness and pressure. Road car tires can't enable 0-100KPH much faster than 1.9s or so purely because they can't be so soft as crusing on the highway would cause excess wear(practicality), heat (Danger), and friction(Range). Drag Racers can accelerate way faster, 0-60MPH in .8s.
- ihunter2839 4y agoThe aero packages for these vehicles create a pretty significant amount of downforce at relatively low speeds - for example, our car last season produced ~140 lbs of downforce at 35 mph. Edit - A lot of that comes from the rear wing though, which the green team didnt run for this particular event.
- Karstographer 4y agoThese formula student/fsae cars have aero packages which tend to be designed around 30mph average track speeds, so they will get contribution from that, especially in the latter half of the run. Even so, the tire friction involves both physical interlocking due to deformation and chemical adhesion. You can see the tire warmers in the video being removed in addition to their approach burnout which imparts additional heat into the tires, so that the tires more effectively stick to the ground. For all of the questions about why they don't compete with dragster techniques, the student race series they participate in has very strict regulations regarding vehicle layout which forces them to be more of an autocross car, these kinds of (heavily couched) records being produced are really somewhat incidental.
- 1970-01-01 4y agoFFS. The run is about 82 seconds into the video. In the amount of garbage time leading up to it, they could have shown it 56 times. https://youtu.be/xjDK0LhKkMs?t=82 https://youtu.be/xjDK0LhKkMs?t=82
- thomastjeffery 4y agoBy putting 4 spaces in front of your link, HN has formatted it as a code block instead of a clickable link.
- raydiatian 4y agoFor the amount of spaces he put in front of his link slowing me down on my way to YouTube, I could have watched the car accelerate to 100 two or three times.
- dang 4y agoWe've fixed it now.
- 1970-01-01 4y agoI do this intentionally to make the YT identifier very easy to copy and open with 3rd party apps.
- ivanjermakov 4y agoMore than that, the actual record part haven't delivered a good sense of acceleration
- amelius 4y agoWhat are those solder joints at 0:50 in the video?
- dangrie158 4y agoLooks like bond wires, probably for some FETs that are glued down to the board. I guess part of the motor controller
- amelius 4y agoInteresting. Any idea why they didn't use commercial FETs that come prepackaged?
- Ralo 4y agoI've been a huge fan of drag racing, and the engineering behind it. I've seen the influx of electric cars making their way into the scene but they never seem to be competitive, and that comes down to their top end. The extreme end of combustion engines, you really got top fuel dragsters. Not much faster land vehicles than those. The flaw with those, they got about 2 uses tops before it needs to be completely gutted and rebuilt, not great as a weekend track car. As well, it's somewhere around $1000/second to drive it. You can sit more in the middle with people getting 1000hp daily drivers. With dynamic tuning, flex fuel, etc you can get the best of both worlds. As well, DCT AWD transmissions make grip/shifting issues a thing of the past. However, these middle ground drag cars can still get eaten by a $130k bone stock tesla*. The extra weight, infinite torque, and zero shifting is a real advantage, even if their top end isn't as strong as their ICE counterpart. I've always dreamed of building a hybrid car with tiny tiny battery packs. Maybe enough charge for 4-5 passes. Enough for a day at the track. But have a fully built high revving ICE. You get the launch in full electric, your ICE can be fully spooled, and ready to switch over automatically. Perhaps the smaller batteries couldn't put out enough power? Who knows. *Plaid
- masklinn 4y ago> Not much faster land vehicles than those. Top fuels top out around 350 mph. The land speed record is 760 (manned, for unmanned it's a rocket sled exceeding mach 8). The land speed record has been above 350 since 1938: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railton_Special https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railton_Special There are in fact a fair number of much faster land vehicles.
- Ralo 4y agoYes, their top speed is much much faster. But put that same vehicle on a 1/4 mile race track, racing a top fuel dragster. The top fuel dragster produces around 5g's at launch, the top speed cars are very very slow to build up speed. So much so, they usually require a pilot vehicle just to start them, like you trying to start pedaling your bicycle in 5th gear. You'll want a push. It's a different type of racing. > Not much faster land vehicles than those. Its a poor choice of words, perhaps 'quick' is a better word?
- ccn0p 4y agoanybody else let down from the video? there was no just simple observer perspective in real time. maybe because it would have been funny going really fast for 20 meters.
- slowhand09 4y agoI'm surprised you had to dig a bit to see it is in KM. A US audience might assume MPH.
- nsxwolf 4y agoI'd love a straightforward view of what that really looks like, instead of a bunch of fancy camera work.
- ncmncm 4y agoI wonder if they are allowed to put a fan in to suck it down to the road surface, offering better static friction to the tires. You would of course start the fan before the wheels. That would mean you could get by with lighter-weight tires, an important concern.
- tshaddox 4y agoThat's what this electric fan car does: https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a40424619/watch-an-electric-fan-car-break-the-goodwood-hill-climb-record/ https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a40424619/watch-an-electri...
- Maarten88 4y agoI wonder how that car (McMurtry fan car) would do in an acceleration record attempt, I'd guess it is in the same ballpark performance. And it is also electric.
- ihunter2839 4y agoYes, this car uses powered ground effects (PGE) to achieve the necessary downforce at low speeds (they mention this in an instagram post) In Formula SAE in the US, PGE systems are not allowed, but in the European equivalent they are. Take a look at the Speirling at Goodwood Festival of Speed for an awfully mean fan car. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtvT2XYlcOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtvT2XYlcOY
- jcmontx 4y agoNow take the tech and apply it to the next gen of Formula E!
- raydiatian 4y agoOhhh, it’s 100 kmh
- kleiba 4y agoAmazing: there's one girl on the team!
- js2 4y ago0-100 kmh (~ 62 mph) in 1.461 seconds exposes the driver to ~ 1.94 g. For reference, a top-fuel dragster can do 0-100 mph (~ 161 kmh) in about 0.86 seconds, exposing the driver to nearly 5g. https://jalopnik.com/the-fastest-0-60-time-a-person-could-actually-survive-1792093851 https://jalopnik.com/the-fastest-0-60-time-a-person-could-ac... http://www.procato.com/convert/ http://www.procato.com/convert/
- jmpeax 4y agoWhat an incredibly frustrating video. Here is the actual run without all the unnecessary fast-and-furious computer graphics rubbish at the start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjDK0LhKkMs&t=76s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjDK0LhKkMs&t=76s
- megraf 4y agoCall me old fashion, but I'd really gain more out of the demonstration videos if they linked to the time the record (or whatever content) started. Yes, it's a beautiful video.
- lowestprimate 4y agoThe acceleration record is probably the manhole cover launched via nuclear explosion. Accelerated to 125,000 mph in a millisecond. https://www.businessinsider.com/fastest-object-robert-brownlee-2016-2#so-the-next-time-you-look-up-at-the-stars-remember-brownlees-story-somewhere-out-there-a-manhole-cover-launched-by-a-nuclear-bomb-is-probably-speeding-away-from-earth-at-about-125000-mph-18 https://www.businessinsider.com/fastest-object-robert-brownl...
- dwaltrip 4y agoCrazy. At what speed / acceleration would a manhole cover burn up from friction with the atmosphere?
- zaptrem 4y ago"StackExchange: Could the end cap of the Pascal B (1) survive its trip through the atmosphere?" https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/488151/could-the-end-cap-of-the-pascal-b-1-survive-its-trip-through-the-atmosphere https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/488151/could-the...
- 93po 4y agoTo clarify for anyone unfamiliar - this isn't a manhole cover in the traditional sense. It was a 2000 pound hunk of solid steel. It makes this story much more plausible because a regular manhole cover would blow into a million pieces
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gzer0 4y agoThis is akin to a 2003 Astrovan beating a 2022 Lamborghini Huracan; always gives me a good chuckle. [1] https://youtu.be/UrYe9LewtF0?t=19 https://youtu.be/UrYe9LewtF0?t=19
- rconti 4y agoI was surprised to see this (apparently?) beat the McMurtry Automotive "batmobile" fan car. They claim 0-60mph (0-97kph) in "under 1.5 seconds" which sounds like it would in fact be slower than 0-100kph in 1.461s. The McMurtry uses fans to suck the car to the ground to increase grip. The Stuttgart car just did this with light weight! https://www.motor1.com/news/593012/mcmurtry-fan-car-goodwood-record/ https://www.motor1.com/news/593012/mcmurtry-fan-car-goodwood...
- Tepix 4y agoThe stuttgart car also uses fans.
- Tepix 4y agoFantastic achievement, congratulations to the students at Uni Stuttgart and i look forward to your future world records!
- ricardobayes 4y agoSo wings _do_ work, then?
- sammalloy 4y agoHonest question: why has it taken so long? I remember reading an article about the EE department at SDSU running a similar test in 1989. That was 33 years ago. Why aren’t we all driving electric cars by now?
- imdsm 4y agoAs jmpeax said, incredibly frustrating video. Here is a better video giving you an idea of the acceleration against a Porsche 911: https://youtu.be/YYjYqWdHZ8w?t=78 https://youtu.be/YYjYqWdHZ8w?t=78
- jakzurr 4y agoComments were fascinating! The article wasn't too bad, either.
- joshspankit 4y agoIf we’re really lucky, we’ll get a new style of sport racing tailor-made for cars like this