Tesla racing series: Electric cars get the green light – Roadshow
cnet.com
cnet.com
So what if we add in a manual style gear box and fake clutch pedal to an all electric car so that any of the old-fashioned petrol cars can be simulated? With active suspension the full stall experience can be added too. Even the handbrake could be faked for 'handbrake turns'.
For a 'track day' you could choose between many retro 'super-cars' and 'drive' them without the inconvenience of having to get in them or pay the repair bill for crashing the original 'antique'.
In reality, whilst the 'driver' is having great fun thinking he is experiencing what grand-dad's noisy car was like, the car can be driving itself, much like how a horse gives the impression that steering input is needed but is okay on autopilot.
We are good at evolving!
In the future our great grandchildren will look at comments like that with disgust, much the same way we think about harvesting whales or elephants today. Heathens
Right now a Tesla on a track should be good in a 1/4 mile drag race, but is pretty much a joke for any serious number of laps. Here's a Car and Driver effort that found "by the exit of Snake, about 40 seconds into the lap, the 5010-pound P85D entered a reduced power mode (roughly half of the max)"[1]. The Tesla wound up finishing the lap with the same time as a Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8.
[1]https://www.caranddriver.com/features/tesla-model-s-p85d-at-...
Its funny that they're doing this with full-scale vehicles. I think a smaller scale would be more accessible to smaller and therefore more teams. It would also mean that a team could take more risks - imagine an 'unlimited' class that just specifies max dimensions and weight (and maybe allowed power source). That would be fun to watch I think.
I don't know if this would be more ridiculous on a pure electric.
A Tesla weighs about 50-75% more than a BMW M3/Alpina or a Maclaren 650 and the suspension, breaking and handling on those is much much better.
It's rather useless in racing situation. You want 4-wheel braking then, this may throw off your balance. I believe regenerative braking is not very effective when compared to full-blown racing brakes as well. It's great when you're stopping at traffic light from far away, but not when you brake hard.
On top of that, this is not limited to electric cars. Some regular cars have it too. For example non-e Golfs got it.
The problem with the Tesla is that the suspension, steering, breaks etc. aren’t exactly sport class and that it weighs more than a Ford F-150 pickup.....
After all, front brakes do need more power. Otherwise rear wheels are easy to lock out. ABS would kick in reducing regenerative braking. I guess they'd need much stronger front brakes and have regenerative braking kick in progressively with how the brake pedal is applied?
Of course, they could do 4-wheel regenerative braking even with one driving axle.. But that'd be another can of worms.
I'd love to read full paper [0]. Looks like they're looking into this exact problem.
[0] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4077342/?tp=&arnumber=40...
I would say that racing in a Tesla is like racing in a Ford F-150 hauling a working jet engine in the back with the breaks and suspension of a Ford Mondeo.
That said, there are many practical limitations that may apply.
As you brake, car dives in, taking force off rear wheels. With linear braking, it may be too easy to lock them up. Which is especially dangerous if you're still braking when entering the corner.
The "linear braking torque" you are talking about seems to be a completely unrelated concept referring to how the brakes react to inputs from the pedal. A braking system can have both of those, none, or any single one.
I feel the thermal engine motor noises so wasteful and disgusting. Going to wild nature and watching all animals flee because of stupid kids with their quads making unnecessary noise over 100 decibels makes me desire to punch those guys in the face.
The only time I went to F1 when I was a kid the sound was so high that you could feel it even with your hands on your ears. I found it painful and tacky.
I am engineer myself, and I see all this sound as waste energy that does not go to move the car. Barking dog never bites. All talk, no action.
Hemp supercapacitors (similar power density as graphene supercapacitors and li-ion, lower cost than graphene)
Active cooling. Modified passive cooling.
Biocomposite frame and panels (stronger and lighter than steel and aluminum (George Washington Carver))
"Soybean Car" (1941) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean_car
Not a great comparison as it looked completely stock, but still expected more somehow.
I imagine it would be possible to chop out the computer and roll your own, change some suspension components and tyres.
I suppose you could remove the electric motor and put in a different one. Add or remove battery capacity.
Internal combustion engines must be orders of magnitude more customisable.
I think that's just about all you can do to improve on it, though.
Yes, actually.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMQjcukphpA
https://electrek.co/2016/07/21/tesla-hacker-1000hp-electric-...
Driver of the Tesla might have been inadequate, anecdotes and many videos online show it (and even electric mopeds against some pretty fast stuff!), at minimum, taking the early lead, as you indicated.
Competition helps you avoid deceiving yourself. Your competitors set the benchmark and you're either better than the rest or you're not. Once you have a target to aim at you can refine and improve until you match and then beat the rest.
And then they will use you as the new benchmark to beat.
You would only need to sandwich the intercooler between the hot and cold heat exchangers with a (fairly powerful) automotive refrigerant pump connect to them. The cold heat exchanger would go in front of the intercooler.
I'm going to start talking about this to some enthusiasts I know and see if I can convince one of them to do it.
It was a homebrew hack by people in the Honda Civic / del Sol community decades ago, I recall it fondly.
My mechanic has been a mechanic for both IMSA and World Cup Challenge teams, and he went over some of the changes that are seen from road-going versions of what he normally works on (Porsches). Things like heat exchangers have better conductive materials, coolant lines will make multiple passes instead of a single pass, and there are more lines (to increase the surface area of the line), packed in more densely. Coolants used are optimized for a specific temperature range, since they don't have to deal with global conditions of a road car all over the world.
More complex machining for passive cooling (heatsinks) of transaxles, higher airflow towards brake rotors (with specific shield designs, part of which are backed out to catch more air).
The biggest change? Fewer fans, and only as many as required, as they inhibit airflow. Convection does the job well enough as race cars aren't sitting in traffic in hot climates, and aren't sitting around long enough to heat soak from being stationary (but are why the pit crews have blowers). As much aero design goes into routing air for maximizing cooling as there is for creating downforce.
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Formula 1 and WEC (which are more like ground aircraft than anything resembling a road car) are a different story though. Things like the intercoolers for turbochargers are absurdly complex. You're talking four passes through the intercooler, and lines that are basically long surgical needles, with ~13000 packed into each intercooler. All hand built, all very expensive.
>racing such a computer-controlled car without a good way to interface with them seems untenable.
Seems like a nice challenge for the hacking community, and again racing might provide the right narrow focus and motivation to get the job done.