Monday, September 10, 2012

Still waiting on my electric car




At last!

A completely electric “super car!”  It can go 600km on just one charge.

And it’s fast!  It can go from 0 to 60 in 2.8 seconds.

But wait!  There’s more!  It’s available to you all at the low, low price of $980,000.

You read that right.  Just $980,000! 
The nifty sports car comes from Rimac Motors, a small outfit out of Croatia.  It operates on a principle Rimac calls “torque vectoring,” where four electronic motors power each wheel independently.  This allows for thousands of corrections each second. 

Too bad about the price tag.  Not surprisingly, Rimac reports that the first order for its car comes from the Saudi royal family.  I suppose there’s a bit of irony there, Saudis buying electric cars, but they've got the money for the sticker price and at least they won’t be polluting the atmosphere as they tear around town at 300 kph.

Electric cars are closer to home and a bit more affordable than that nearly one mil price tag.  Toyota and Tesla (the car company, not the band) have partnered to produce the RAV4 EV.  The idea here being to meld the hybrid efficiency and practicality of a Prius with the speed of the Tesla Roadster.  The reviewer for that New York Times article seemed impressed by the speed of the vehicle and the absence of power loss that seems to sometimes plague hybrid vehicles.  Then the writer went into a whole lot of car geek details that fail to interest me.

Again, however, the RAV4 EV has a hefty price.  Nothing like the Rimac, mind you, but upwards of $50K is not my idea of an affordable car.  It’s going to take a while, but technology should hopefully progress to a point where electric cars will no longer be cost prohibitive and become genuine alternatives to what we have currently.  I know, I know, conspiracy theories abound about Big Oil holding this tech down, but I’m tired and don’t really want to meander into such fields at this time.

As I’ve admitted before, I’m really not a car guy.  That said I wouldn’t mind cruising around in that Rimac supercar.  I’m imagining hitting the accelerator and going from 0 to 60 in under three seconds…and the engine making no sound at all.  I could pretend I’m in the Batmobile in stealth mode or something equally juvenile.

Speaking of comic books, one sentence in that NYT article I linked to didn’t sit right with me.  In it, the author writes the following: “Elon Musk — Tesla’s chief executive, a practicing rocket scientist and the inspiration for the billionaire Tony Stark character in the “Iron Man” films…”

Yeah not to sound spleenful, I’m pretty sure that the inspiration for Tony Stark came from Stan Lee and Steve Ditko long before Musk ever entered the picture.



   
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1 comment:

  1. Here's a follow up article http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/

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