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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
(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.