The 161mph $129,000 Fisker EMotion:
Henrik Fisker's new electric car project is finally here, unveiled in full at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Get past those show-stopping ingress points however, and you find something that'll give a certain electric car company something to chew on...
We must first discuss the looks. Henrik – famously responsible for the design of the Aston Martin Vantage and BMW Z8 – clearly hasn't lost his touch. There are elements of his former hybrid motor, the Karma, and everything has been sculpted in the name of the tech underneath.
It's built from carbon fibre and aluminium, and features elements designed around the LiDARs dotted at the front and rear of the car. The door handles are flush, operated via your smartphone. It's big, too: 5m in length and 1.4m in height, around the size of a BMW 5 Series. The wheels are similarly huge: 24s as standard, on low rolling-resistance Pirellis.
Sulky Dutch model not included with the base model.
Previously:
Fisker Relaunches Electric Car Effort
Fisker Automotive Comes Back Under New Name, Plans to Launch Electric Car
Related Stories
After declaring bankruptcy in 2013, Fisker Automotive may be coming back with a new electric car:
Three years after hybrid sports car manufacturer Fisker Automotive laid off the majority of its workforce, the company is back in business with a new Chinese owner and plans to unveil a luxury electric car this summer.
Renamed Karma Automotive, the electric car maker has moved from Finland to California and is working on a new car to be named the Revero, according to The Wall Street Journal . Chief marketing officer Jim Taylor was vague on the exact timing, saying only that the car will be announced in July or August, and orders will begin later this year.
"If you manufacture all kinds of hype then fail to deliver on time, it undermines your credibility," Taylor told the Journal. "We are being careful about making promises [because] things happen in car development."
The caution is understandable given the company's history. Its original car, the $100,000 Karma plug-in hybrid, won praise from celebrity customers and a $529 million loan from the Department of Energy to offset development costs. But the loan was frozen due to delays in launching the car, and Fisker laid off 75 percent of its workforce to avoid bankruptcy.
Former BMW designer Henrik Fisker announced plans Tuesday to relaunch his electric vehicle efforts three years after a bankruptcy with his venture that made high-priced cars popular with celebrities.
Fisker's effort aims to revive his rivalry with Tesla, promising a premium, all-electric successor to his 2012 Fisker Karma with "a patented battery that will deliver a significantly longer life and range than any battery currently on the market," a statement from the reconstituted company Fisker Inc. said.
The relaunch comes after a high-profile bankruptcy by Fisker Automotive, which received $192 million in US government loans and left $139 million of that unpaid.
[...] In addition, Fisker is developing a "mass-market, affordable electric vehicle that will retail for less than its competitors, but will feature a longer electric range," it added.
Now that the bigger car companies are getting into the electric vehicle (EV) market, has Fisker missed its window?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10 2018, @10:54PM
Sigh...
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday January 10 2018, @11:10PM (11 children)
> ranges of more than 500 miles on a single charge, and charging times as low as one minute
Exclusively available at the nearby nuclear power plant, I suspect...
"That big thing isn't the spare tire, it's the instant-charge connector..."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 11 2018, @12:06AM
How about a 1-minute fast charge for 80 miles? That would be good enough.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 11 2018, @12:19AM (8 children)
Some of Fisker's battery tech predictions seem to border on fantasy...
500 mile range in a vehicle the size of a BMW 5 series... Tesla's fast-charge quotes 170 miles of range for 60KWh of charging, so assuming similar efficiency, 500 miles of range should be on the order of 175KWh.
Now, to deliver 175KWh through a 50A connector in 5 minutes, you just need 42KV, which should sustain an arc in air >4cm in length - a damn impressive arc if it's delivering 50A @ 42KV.
My question is: when the main breaker to my house only carries 48KW, where in the hell am I going to find a 2.1MW outlet? The connectors to handle that kind of power exist: http://www.ges-highvoltage.com/redakteur/EN/downloads/GES_catalog_series-100_hv-connectors.pdf [ges-highvoltage.com] but they hardly look suited to quick connect/disconnect.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 11 2018, @12:30AM (3 children)
From here: http://www.ges-highvoltage.com/redakteur/EN/downloads/GES_catalog_series-100_hv-connectors.pdf [ges-highvoltage.com] the B155 connector pair should handle our needs, (50kV, 80A) and the connector is just a bit over 4cm in diameter - but, again, doesn't look like something I'd use for a vehicle charger, and just the thought of 2.1MW of power on tap would make me a little woozy while handling the connectors...
Speaking of spike load on the electrical grid - a large wind turbine only outputs about 1MW when it's crankin', just picture a neighborhood of 1000 homes, everyone getting home between 5:45 and 6pm, plugging in for a quick charge...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Thursday January 11 2018, @01:10AM (2 children)
Two things:
- They said "under one minute", not five minutes, so your 2.1MW is generous.
It should be, using the 175kWh, at least 10.5MW.
50kV/80A only gives you 4MW (minus losses and margin), so you need three of those.
- Modern big wind turbines are in the 2-5MW range, newer really big ones 10MW, and I read about 15MW ones coming up (offshore?). You still probably want supercapacitors somewhere if you're gonna suddenly plug 10MW, which is more than a high-speed train.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 11 2018, @04:01AM
Under one minute, damn - I must have just blocked that out, yeah, 11+MW is out there, like 250 homes all cranking their heat, appliances, and incandescent light bulbs at max output. So, I suppose a 175kWh super-cap could charge up for 4 hours on your house feed then zap your car full in 60 seconds? Now we're also talking about over 200kV @ ~55A, striking plasma arcs at nearly 8", and there's not a connector in the catalog for that (though there are some that will do half that power...)
Can you picture a "normal" fueling station for this scheme? Of course, if these imaginary batteries exist, then the fueling station can have a bank of them underground, but I'd hate to be anywhere around if all that energy decided to convert to heat in less than a minute....
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 20 2018, @03:28AM
By the way, 500 miles range is still costing 175kWh ~$20 in electricity, in my neighborhood at least. Now, that might be 3x better than gasoline lately, but it's hardly free.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by leftover on Thursday January 11 2018, @01:57AM (3 children)
Blithely tossing around extrapolations is one thing ... BUT. Have any of these people ever been up close and personal with even a modestly powerful electrical mishap? It is most truly a brown-underwear, lifetime perspective-changing thing. And fast, has anyone mentioned fast? Any fire suppression equipment still existing after the plasma dance might deploy to suppress secondary fires. Really not a home garage kind of thing.
Google for some accident photos and videos, then remember them when megawatts come up in conversations.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 11 2018, @04:12AM
I was thinking about the safety protocol on this thing - I'm not sure you could safely ramp up to 15MW of energy transfer in less than a minute. I could understand if it fired in a 100W test pulse, checked for safety, then a few milliseconds later tried a 10KW pulse, more readings, then a 100KW pulse, more readings, but once you're above 100KW, I don't think you can safely just jump to 10MW, I think you'd want to be stepping up in 100KW increments to check for creepage, crawlage, arcy sparky path making, etc. and I'm not sure a few milliseconds are long enough to read sensors to be sure that such nasties aren't starting to form on some stray salt or moisture near the connector...
When your load is supposed to be sucking down 12MW of power, from the perspective of the current delivery switch: how can you tell the difference between that and a plasma bridge short?
For that matter, what does a 12MW high speed switch even look like?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Thursday January 11 2018, @01:11PM (1 child)
Can be made safe for some values of "rechargeable".
Specifically, take the enclosure of a primary aluminium-air [wikipedia.org] battery, purge the spent electrolyte, including the aluminium hydroxide suspension, with water under pressure, replace the spent aluminium electrodes, pump the new electrolyte - I imagine the entire cycle can be performed in under a minute - it's mechanical in nature.
Recover the aluminium from alumina in aluminium smelters, which will happily gobble tens of MW non-stop in a made-safe environ.
See Phinergy [wikipedia.org] in action [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by leftover on Thursday January 11 2018, @05:02PM
That is exactly my thought of the best candidate for "recharging".
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Thursday January 11 2018, @12:57AM
Must have decided to prove it, and thrown the whole show into darkness.
I kid you not, blackout occurred at the s show.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by mmh on Thursday January 11 2018, @12:58AM
Not one of the sites in TFA will load images without javascript.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday January 11 2018, @01:11AM (5 children)
Can I take it that vegan skin softer than leather?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by KilroySmith on Thursday January 11 2018, @03:44AM (1 child)
It depends on whether the vegan that the skin was sourced from used quality skin-care products.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 11 2018, @04:17AM
Well, it's highly likely that the vegan used skin care products that weren't animal tested, so it's possible that they died of a nasty rash....
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by arslan on Thursday January 11 2018, @05:04AM (2 children)
Cows are vegan right?
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday January 11 2018, @06:14AM
Well, most, but not the ones fed bits of sheep..
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Informative) by Rivenaleem on Thursday January 11 2018, @09:36AM
Mad Cow disease spread because cows were being fed other cows who had the disease. So no, Cows are definitely not vegan.