SLIGHTLY OFF TOPIC … or maybe not for those interested in energy efficiency.
For certain, this long video below will be of interest to anyone contemplating the purchase of an electric car… or to electric engineers. The speaker – Sandy Munro is an automotive expert who reverse engineered the Model 3 – and his unbiased comments are very insightful – ESPECIALLY related to the electric motor design. You can start the video about 10 minutes into it when he starts to talk about the Halbach array which makes the reluctance type electric motor far superior to any other electric motor in terms of efficiency and low weight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVnRQRdePp4 The Halbach array is the key. Best advice for those who want to make the switch to electric sometime soon: change is on the way and it will not hurt to wait until Tesla or someone elect gets the body right… while retaining the drivetrain advancements, and also powering it with the next generation of batteries (following the purchase by Tesla of Maxwell – the ultracap folks) who, as expected, already have a hybrid batt-cap supposedly ready to go into mass production. This should be the beginning of the end – towards the near-death of the ICE, which will probably never really die even after LENR is perfected, but may continue only as a small “range extender” like the Mazda Wankel (already prototyped)… but that is another subject. This Tesla Motors saga has been a truly remarkable industrial and societal change. Tesla is now worth more than GM or Ford, making it the most valuable U.S. automaker. A few years ago both of those genius companies thought Tesla was doomed to failure. Right. Even Toyota failed to get involved in a timely way. Jones
