On 18 May 2015 at 13:40, Lee Hart via EV wrote: > There is hope for going 186 miles on 24 KWH ... the Solectria Sunrise > went over 200 miles on a charge with its 26 KWH nimh pack on *many* > occasions, and even exceeded 300 miles with James Worden hypermiling > at the wheel.
This is true. A Sunrise prototype achieved 377 miles in the Tour de Sol. I should point out though that it was a specially prepared (read: stripped-out and highly optimized) prototype. So was the one that James Worden drove from Boston to New York (217mi), at speeds up to 65mph, with charge left over. This makes it hard to say what the Sunrise's real world range was. Others may know, but I've seen reports of 150 and 200 miles, so I'm going to make an irresponsibly wild guess and say perhaps 180mi. That would give us 145 Wh/mi at drop-dead DOD. Curiously, this efficiency is pretty close to the 150 Wh/mi that quite a few Solectria Force (Geo Metro conversion) owners have reported. This wouldn't be surprising. Their drivetrain was similar. The original Sunrise weighed a bit under 2300lb all up with battery. The Force's curb weight was close - 2100lb for the early model, 2450lb for the later one - even though it's a much smaller car. But the Sunrise had a big advantage over the Force in range. From what I can see, it came mostly from the fact that the Sunrise could carry a much bigger battery. A better comparison to the proposed Luka might be with Axel Krause's Mini- Evergreen. Although the Luka article is mum on dimensions, it looks to be closer in size to the two-place Mini-Evergreen than to the 5-place Sunrise. http://www.brusa.eu/en/development/applications/evergreen.html The Mini-Evergreen had a range of 220km (almost 140mi) at a steady 65km/h (40mph) round the Swiss countryside on an 18kWh battery. That's 129 Wh/mi. Now where have I seen that number before? Oh yeah, that's what you get when you compute the (unproven, speculative) Wh/mi claimed for this Luka EV. The Mini-Evergreen weighed 900kg (about 1985lb) including its 375kg (825lb) NiCd battery. Its aerodynamics couldn't have been anywhere close the Sunrise's slippery .17 CD, but looking at the photos of the Luka EV prototype, I'm not so sure that the Luka is much better. I'm no expert, but it looks to me like stylists had more to do with the Luka's shape than engineers. The Luka is supposed to weigh 1660lb all up. (I assume that includes the battery, but ...) That's 16% less than the Evergreen. So if it hits all its goals, then it might indeed have a chance at their efficiency target. My question is, will they get there? I don't know what Solectria's total Sunrise budget was, but I know they got something over a million bucks up front from Boston Edison and DARPA, and they worked on the car for at least 4 years. Lee Hart's effort to make the Sunrise into a kit car is a labor of love. I'm sure he's spent WAY less than Solectria did. But he's also been at it for about a decade now, and it looks like he still has a fair bit of work to go. Compare those - 4+ years, 10+ years - with the goals for the Luka. The article says nothing about the MW Motors budget, or where its funding comes from. It doesn't even tell us who's behind it, repeatedly and bizarrely attributing quotations to "MW Motors" and "the team leader." (This is a huge red flag, IMO.) Regardless, whoever it is wants to dispatch the project in LESS THAN A YEAR. To me, that says they're going to be throwing bushel baskets of cash into labor and contract work. Where's the funding coming from? From whom? How stable is it? We don't know. The article carefully sidesteps those issues. This makes me worry about a couple of things. One is that this might turn out to be another investor-trolling effort. The other is that it's sincere, but will end up like hundreds of other similar ones. The money tree sheds its leaves, the staff are let go, the workshop goes quiet. The doors are locked on the unfinished project. Bills go unpaid. Eventually a court calls for the assets to be sold to pay part of the debts. All the work, materials, and good ideas scatter to the four winds. Let's hope that neither of these scenarios happens here. David Roden - Akron, Ohio, USA EVDL Administrator = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = EVDL Information: http://www.evdl.org/help/ = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Note: mail sent to "evpost" and "etpost" addresses will not reach me. To send a private message, please obtain my email address from the webpage http://www.evdl.org/help/ . = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
