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posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 26 2018, @12:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the shocking-news dept.

Car companies, starting with Volvo last summer, have laid out plans to electrify entire lineups of vehicles. But the fine print makes it clear that the coming decade and beyond will focus not just on massive battery packs powering electric motors, but also on adding a little extra juice to the venerable internal combustion engine.

Increasingly, that juice will arrive in the form of new electrical systems built to a 48-volt standard, instead of the 12-volt systems that have dominated since the 1950s. Simpler than Prius-type drivetrains and less expensive than Tesla-scale battery power, the new electrical architecture both satisfies the demands of cars made more power hungry by their gadget load and enables the use of lower-cost hybrid drive systems.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/electric-cars-48-volts.html


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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday February 26 2018, @10:12PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday February 26 2018, @10:12PM (#644247)

    Well, the 100-Watt LED chip arrays normally run on around 32-34 Volts.

    So what voltage you have to start off with is really a tiny consideration. Many designs are extremely tolerant of quite wide input voltage range.
    We have made some extremely clever innovations in SwitchMode power conversion in the last 30 years or so. We can convert DC from one form to another just about as easily as a gearbox handles RPM/Torque tradeoffs.

    Yes, that's the whole point. You don't need 12V to drive LEDs, since you're going to use a SMPS to drive the LEDs no matter what the vehicle supply voltage is. So you'll just redesign your LED drive circuit to use a ~48V supply instead of a ~12V one. The problem is all these crazy posters here who seem to think we're going to have big 48V-12V converters in cars for several decades to power everything electronic, because they can't seem to understand the idea that electrical devices in the car will simply be driven directly with 48V when cars start coming with such systems.

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