Submitted via IRC for Bytram
[...] Last weekend, we were on hand to witness French racing driver Romain Dumas and car maker Volkswagen stamp their authority on all 12.4-miles (19.99km) of the [Pikes Peak International Hill Climb] course, destroying the course's existing record and setting the first sub-eight minute time in race history. What makes the feat even more interesting around Ars is that the car in the record books is all-electric, marking perhaps the first time in major motorsport that a battery electric vehicle has beaten the internal combustion engine fair and square.
In retrospect, if any car has an advantage at Pikes Peak it's the EV. The start line is already at 9,390 feet (2,862m) above sea level; the finish line is an even higher 14,110 feet (4,300m) and much of the course is above the tree line where there's 40 percent less oxygen to breathe. Consequently, internal combustion engines will lose power—significantly—as they climb the route, even with the aid of forced induction or crafty fuel mixtures.
But electric motors don't care about partial pressures of oxygen, and these will output the same power and torque whether they're at the top of the mountain or the bottom.
More about the course can be found at Wikipedia and the Official Site.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @02:46AM (8 children)
Oh murrrder! Don't make me laugh!
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @03:02AM (5 children)
The Pikes Peak hillclimb has few rules.
VW did not cheat.
What have YOU accomplished in your worthless little life that no one will notice when it is gone ? NOTHING.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @03:04AM (4 children)
You must be a democrat.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @03:43AM (1 child)
You must be a Nazi.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @01:59PM
You must be shapeshifting illuminati reptilian anunaki,
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @12:06PM (1 child)
What the fuck does political affiliation have to do with anything ?
Some day you're going to get the shit beat out of you, and you're going to deserve it, you sad little bitch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @01:23AM
Yep,definitely a democrat, delicate little flowers with no fucking sense of humor at all.
You post like a stalker incel... So bitter
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday July 01 2018, @10:51AM (1 child)
Was that with or without cheat mode engaged?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @03:24PM
Yes well, that was the humorous implication in my original post, but some partypoopin' sore loser SJW antifa wacko had to jump in all ruin it all. As we saw in Portland, these people are dangerous, making bad people look like the good guys.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @02:57AM
The Porsche 919 Hybrid Evo just set a record (5:19.546) at Nürburgring. Almost a minute quicker than the old record.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @03:15AM (2 children)
The batts were charged from diesel generators. Carbon neutral, etc, but diesel. Excusable, being in remote place.
OTOH, VW can do electric cars if they put the effort into it. And record breaking ones, no less. As posted above, they can also do hybrids, Porsche is same group.
Put a monkey in their board room (another in Bosch's), trained to bite anyone that says diesel. VW seems to have a focus problem, not a technical one. Other brands my require similar measures, specially German ones. If board members don't change, use them to repeat the "diesel is clean" breathing test that hit the news months ago.
Most brands should have started seriously moving away from "only-ICE" 10 years ago (cars, vans, trucks... everything) instead of some minimal tests and releasing their first public avaliable vehicles recently, some with pretty obvious self defeating designs (BMW i3? after Mini E test? WTF! you may dislike new fat "Minis", but at least they sold). 10 years ago Prius was already ~10 years old and it looks like pretty much any European compact car or station wagon. Newest plataform shares power train with other models that can be hybrid or ICE, so no excuse about being unable to fit into "normal" designs, Toyota can.
If they are serious, they could even start good-will projects to retrofit old cars with electric systems. Currently only a few entushiast do that at their own risk. They would make nice city cars (some German cities want to ban diesels completly), and give cars with problems in the ICE parts some extra years of life, instead of going early to the junk yard. This way they would also show they know it's not just Recycle, but also Reduce and Reuse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @03:28AM
I forgot, the PML Mini QED was 2006. Non VW related, other than using a Mini as base. It was hybrid, with better range in electric mode then Mini E, and even more by using the ICE. https://www.treehugger.com/cars/electric-mini-0-60-in-4-seconds-it-has-motors-in-its-wheels.html [treehugger.com]
VW, F- on effort.
All shareholders of car manufactures should ask for CEOs' pay to be returned since 1998. They clearly have no vision of future, not even caring about contingency plans, and just thought only-ICE could keep on and on. If they had started their own, Telsa would be have been a blip instead of hitting the news periodically and Toyotas would not be the dominant taxi car in some cities.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @07:22PM
Did you have to Godwin the thread that early? C'mon man.
(Score: 4, Informative) by suburbanitemediocrity on Saturday June 30 2018, @04:34AM (3 children)
Most electric records should not be surprising. All you have to do is look at things like power density/volume and power density/mass. Electric cars existed before gas engines.
The only reason that gasoline beat electric was convenience in the way that most people used cars...well, technically electric cars at the very beginning were more convenient than gas, but as gas became more convenient it passed a minimum threshold.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @11:48AM (2 children)
Exactly, energy density -- that is why the electric car can climb Pikes Peak once, then needs hours of recharge. While there is regen possible on the return back down the mountain (if the onboard electronics supports it), this probably can not be used to recharge the battery straight away because of temp limits (battery is very hot after the climb, have to wait for it to cool before charging).
The ICE Pikes Peak specials probably have a lightweight, small gas tank with only a small reserve of fuel, it's racing, why carry extra weight. But, if the engineers were asked to double (or 10x) the range for a longer event it would cost very little extra weight or packaging volume. Gasoline has an amazingly high energy/mass ratio.
Conclusion -- Range means something very different in racing where the powerplant is at high output much of the time. This is very different than "range anxiety" for normal driving at low average power.
Looking at it another way, I don't think that Tesla Model S has done more than one or two fast laps of a racing circuit before it slows down with battery overheating (or runs out of charge).
(Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Saturday June 30 2018, @01:34PM (1 child)
I remember in about 1994 or so when my boss (also a physicist) had just read about the new Lithium batteries. He was really excited and came into work wanting to make a dragster that would trivially beat anything in the world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @01:46AM
Your boss didn't think big picture the way that EJ Potter did, why use any batteries in the car at all!
https://thekneeslider.com/e-j-potter-and-the-super-slot-car/ [thekneeslider.com]
Article has pics of the car and the generator/cable trailer.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday June 30 2018, @04:35AM
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:35AM (2 children)
VW probably paid off the timekeeper, and it was really 9 minutes something.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday June 30 2018, @08:34AM
No need to pay off the timekeeper. VW has great engineers. They know how to build a mechanism into the clock so that it goes slower whenever a VW is measured. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:30PM
More accurate to what actually happened, when the engine computer detects its on the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb via careful pattern matching of the throttle and break pedals, the dashboard clock suddenly changes to only count 40 seconds per displayed minute.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @08:48AM
(Score: 3, Informative) by MostCynical on Saturday June 30 2018, @08:53AM (2 children)
https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DqlpwngBzTB0 [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DuTv0dy6qokk [youtube.com]
The course is now tarmac all the way to the top, so "old" records on partial dirt can't really be compared.
But here is a nice comparison (noise, gear changes, speed of reactions..)
https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DUEuZG37gFdM [youtube.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @02:00PM (1 child)
Romain Dumas (electric 2018 7:57.148):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAJaGAMWjHM [youtube.com]
Sébastien Loeb's (ICE 2013 8:13.878):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y20CLumT2Sg [youtube.com]
Monster Tajima (ICE 2011 9:51.278):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBaIlQOGgwc [youtube.com]
Monster Tajime (electric 2014 9:43.90):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6wI_lBj3mc [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @02:57PM
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:28PM (1 child)
There's usually a large enough factor of safety that it doesn't matter, but 40% air pressure means 40% cooling efficiency. For commuter car, who cares, but for a race car, its an issue. Just put on 50% or so bigger heat sinks and bigger fans and it'll be OK.
I've occasionally thought about that for extreme overclockers, you can sell some dudes multi thousand dollar liquid coolers, so why not put an overclocked PC in a pressure chamber pumped full of hydrogen gas like the power plant alternators do for cooling? Just for the pure "holy cow" overengineering effect alone, that would be pretty impressive. Sorry guys I can't log in yet, the partial pressure of O2 in my pressurized hydrogen cooling case is too high, the rig might explode...
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday June 30 2018, @09:28PM
"Cool rig.. Love how you've put your hydrogen cooling plant next to the furnace."
from "overheat/slow down" for a car, you've suggested an exploding basement!
Every transcode or MMPOG becomes an opportunity to die, for real!
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex