i would not mind saving the environment in one of these!!

http://www.teslamotors.com/index.php?js_enabled=1

cool, too bad it's $100k .

 

The future is here

 

peak torque at 0 rpm! Taht's awesome! I wanna get one!

 

Dude that car is sick, thunder gray for me, looks better with the carbon fiber accents,too

 

Here's what I dont get: Why not implement an extra electric motor to drive an alternator (or some form of energy generator) to charge the battery any time it starts depleteing and make it so the car never has to worry about running out of power? It's not like it would have to be a super heavy, super high torque motor. Just something capable of spinning an alternator to keep the battery charged.

That aside, that car is awesome.

 

wont work j. that would require a motor and alternator with over 100% efficiency.

 

yep yep^^^ thats also like perpetual motion. it jsut cant exist. the work required to spin an alternator that good and move a car would drain the srap out of the battery trying. its just crazy science. if it didnt have to move a car, mabye you could set up somethign like that. now mabye throw on multiple alternators to like drive shafts or spinning objects and make the battery drain slower, that would make good sense.

 

they have something like that. regenerative braking. when the car is not being moved by the motor, the motor acts like an alternator (motors and alternators are really the same thing anyways, just depends on if it is turning or being turned). so anyways, the best way to describe this is to compare it to engine braking, except its an electric motor/alternator instead of an engine. when you hit the brakes in a normal car, you are changing the cars energy from movement into heat, via the friction of the brakes. thats a lot of wasted energy, and in electric and hybrid cars, they recapture some of that wasted energy. unfortunately, due to the laws of efficiency, you cannot have the batteries be charged while the motor is moving the car. if this were possible, we would never need to burn another drop of oil, or have any power plants, or anything else. alternators are not magical devices, the energy input will always be higher than the energy output. an alternator just converts one type of energy (motion) into another (electricity). but energy is lost in this process, through heat, friction, etc. lets say for arguments sake that you had ideal 100% efficient conditions. if you had a motor turning an alternator, which charged the battery that ran the motor, and all of this was running at 100% efficiency, it would only be able to run itsself for an indefinate period of time. were you to add in lets say a lightbulb, the system would eventually run out of energy and stop. ok, sorry for the little physics lesson, i get carried away sometimes .

 

But whats to say the alternator would have to work at 100% effiency? If the alternator is able to charge the battery at a greater rate then it is discharged then wouldn't it make sense that it would work? I'm just pulling this all out of my rear so bare with me. Power multiple alternators through a series of gear reductions (further lowering the amount of power consumed by the althernators motor) and use multiple batteries so you're not just charging one rapidly draining battery. Sure we're getting impractical. But is it possible?

So if the alternator had a greater output then the battery is capable of couldn't it keep the battery charged? That is of course considering the battery is more then capable of powering such a machine.

Now I'm no physics major but wouldnt the fact that the cycle relies on a source electricity mean its not considered perpetual motion?

 

once again, good ideas, but efficiency comes into play. there will always be energy lost. 100% efficiency is impossible to attain (at least with current and forseeable technology). totally impossible.

 

But if the alternator only had to work at 60% efficency to keep up a rate of charge high enough to keep the batteries charged and the alternator only aborbed an amount of energy equivelant to less then 40% of it's output...

this is all theoretical...I'm not asking if I can go build this in my garage

 

nope. energy does not just appear out of thin air. your system, by itsself, has a set ammount of energy. all of the moving parts, regardless of what speed they are running at, will create friction, which creates heat, which dissipates into the surrounding environment. that heat is some of your energy being lost. it wont, under any circumstances, be able to continue indefinately without recieving more energy from an outside source.

 

two words . . . .crystalic fusion

 

Of course not indefinitely...eventually a battery would lose its life (not hold a charge). But I still dont see why if the battery (the energy storage and original source of energy) supplied the energy necessary to spin the alternator (the source of new energy) it couldnt continue in a cycle til either the battery couldnt take a charge any longer or the alternator couldnt supply the charge anymore? As we know the electrical system in your typical automobile is completely self contained until something decides to give out. The battery stores the energy while the alternator supplies the battery with more energy. It's the same prinicple I'm talking about. Why then would this work in that instance and not in another, given parts that could actually meet the heavy demands of an all electric vehicle? Thats why I'm not grasping this. You're essentially telling me a system that we all use on a daily basis isn't possible. We dont plug our cars in every night to charge our batteries. It's a closed system with no outside power source. The battery dicharges while the alternator recharges it. Thats the same exact thing I'm talking about here. We obviously have batteries capable of powering these motors. So why not throw an alternator (or 2 or 3) into the mix to supply some of that power back to the battery?

I'm not talking about using your typical gasoline automotive alternators and batteries. I'm talking parts engineered for this heavy duty purpose.

Batteries supply power to electric motors. One of those motors spins the alternators, the other/s spin the wheels/tranny/diff. The alternator, while spinning is now producing energy (its not coming out of thin air now) and sending that energy back to the battery (more energy then the battery is displacing at a regulated rate). Why is this such an impossible scenario?

 

your gasoline engine is the outside power source in a cars electrical system. you replenish it's energy with gasoline. if you are using the batteries you are charging to power the motor that spins the alternator to charge them, it wont work. too much energy is lost. nothing to do with the batteries cycle lifespan.

 

Its time for . . .BILL NYE THE SCIENCE GUY!

http://www.nyelabs.com/

 

But thats assuming that the charging system (as a whole) is consuming more energy then it's producing. If the charging system only consumed 50% of its total output then it could theoretically sustain itself. And thats assuming it even has to consume that much of its output. This is also assuming the battery can supply more power at any given time then is being drawn from it. This energy isnt being created out of thin air. It's being created by the alternator. An alternator can create energy without any electrical input what so ever. If you spin an alternator by hand it will create energy. Some would say this is creating energy from "thin air".

Technically speaking, the gasoline replenishes the energy of the reciprocating engine thats driving the charging system. It doesnt replace the energy within the charging system itself. The alternator is still creating the energy. In this case the electrical motor just happens to be the drive system for the charging system.

 

an alternator does not create energy, it converts energy. if you spin it by hand, it takes the energy of the motion of your hand, and converts it to electricity. and some of that energy is lost as heat to friction, which is where efficiency comes into play.

 

yes, yes...energy can not be created or destroyed. Only transfered from one form to another (hey I remembered something from school )
So, some of that energy is lost. That lost energy is the charging system consumption. So, if the charging system is efficient enough to generate more energy then it's consuming then why wouldn't this work?

you can tell we've got a whole lot to do

 

it would work if that were the case. but that would require over 100% efficiency, which is impossible to attain.

 

we'll have to continue this later. i have to go pick up my wife

 

Try this out for size people. You have a battery supply that powers the drive motor(s) that power the wheels. It is simple, attatch alternators to the wheels and route that power generated back to the battery supply. This way the motion of the car or rather the rotation of the wheels will turn the alternators and charge the batteries...no need for extra motors or any of that crap just let the CAR recharge the power supply and not the POWER SUPPLY recharge the power supply. The two on each rear wheel could charge the batteries and you could have 4 more up front to run the rest of the car leaving the batteries to run the drive motor(s) and not the accessories in the car.

Another take would be to turn each wheel in to a generator...either way here is the pic.

Attachment 5152

 

Another problem that comes into play is that you can't have more than one alternator feeding the same battery because you cannot have two separate alternators sharing charging duties within themselves.

 

thats what i said already. but i thought about it. make it some hwat like a hybrid. sept get a little 4 horse honda powering a crazy generator to charge the battery while its runing. im not saying make 100 percent efficiency jsut find a way to extend the battery life besides the braking. which i did read.

 

Sure you can, and I am sure the electrical engineers could work that out.