electric ranger?

[rurouni20xx]

the carts we had had 6 12 volt batteries side by side, you shorted one battery the rest followed, you could only use their brand of batteries too for some reason. skrewd the cart if you used another kind (somebody tried) i cant remember what brand or whatever but that was one of the features was great battery life and stronger motor etc. proved to be a line of crap for that line of carts.

 

[Wicked_Sludge]

thats exactly my point. shorting one out of 6 batteries is bad. shorting one out of 20 batteries....not such a big deal.

sounds like a pretty poor quality, knock-off company you worked with (no offense). ive never seen any electric vehicle that gave a damn about whos batteries you used. as long as the voltage is correct your golden. maybe that company did something to its motor controllers so that they could corner the market and sell more of their batteries

 

[rurouni20xx]

thats what i thought everybody in the shop screamed no when they seen one come in the doors. i personally thought it was a pos like everybody else but they insisted on keeping them in stock. luckily i left them in feb 06 and the journey since then has been a lil ruff but worth it.

 

[2004ranger]

plus lead acid batteries are garbage nowadays. They use lithium polymers, lithium ions and lithium phosphates now. Some people use the lead acids still but they are much heavier and do not produce as much power and the lithium battery's do. My dad has two electirc sparrows and they haven't been any problems battery wise. volts x amps= power. We run high volts so the battery doesn't pull as many amps. excessive amps will pull the batteries down a lot faster then higher volts. If you wanna be impressed look at the Aptera's. They get 100 miles per charge which equals 300mpg. or you could get a hybrid one

 

[rurouni20xx]

my version of a golf cart...

 

[bobbywalter]

i know one thing, even smaller stuff isnt cheap.



to set up little bobs jeep turned out alot more costly then i anticipated. i just finished the list a few days ago and it added up to 1800 bux


i told bob he aint getting 4wheel steer and drive, he was pissed.

then i told him its either the jeep or a gasser motorcycle with a kick start over his current electric bike and he said kick start bike.. 3 year olds, you gotta luv em

the electric bike is nice though, but he has been fawking the house up with it all winter

 

[rurouni20xx]

your right bobby, but heres the fun thing, when you get bored and the kid outgrows it, throw in a leftover trk battery in it and have fun w/ it yourself...lol. go on youtube and watch the kids w/ powerwheels w/ car batteries in them drifting down the street, you may even get the itch to try it yourself one day...lol.

 

[Wicked_Sludge]

lead acid batteries have a low energy density (around 12 watt-hours per pound), but they are still by far the cheapest mass-available electrical energy storage on the market. lithium ions are nice, at about 5 times the energy density of lead acid, but they also cost about 5 times as much as lead acid. nickel metal hydride costs are coming down...and they offer at least twice the energy density of lead acid.

one thing id like to see in person is whats knows as a "hot" battery...in particular the sodium sulfur battery. this is supposedly what was used in the ford ecostar (european electric escort of the early '90's). they operate at over 600 degrees and have even better energy densities than lithium ions. plus, they can be discharged to 100% DOD over and over and over with minimal impact on battery life...do that with any other common chemistry battery and it will be killed in short order.

something i would like to someday find a way to impliment myself is a vehicle utilizing mechanical energy storrage in the form of a flywheel. they have about the same energy density as lithium ion, but should theoretically be more effecient at charging/discharging (up to 90% or so) and will last indefinitely (no replacing expensive battery packs). plus, theres basically no limit to how fast you could charge such a vehicle. if you could draw enough amps from the grid, you could charge your flywheel enough to drive 50 miles in a matter of 30 seconds.

 

[sevenwalls]

Actually, if I can talk Jim Oaks into doing it, I will convert a Ranger for him. He wants one that is fiberglass panelled for lightweight and wants to be able to go on trails for 5 hours and then take it back to camp to charge. It is just as safe as a regular truck and some would even say it is safer. All you do is use the AGM batteries from Oddysey, I have 2 in my truck, and they are totally safe in case of a rollover.
If he wants to expend the money, $5000, then we could put a pack of Lithium Ion batteries in it instead and it would have enough power to toast anything short of a rocket. The electric cars these days are doing 0-60 in 3-4 seconds. 110 mph top end electronically controlled. 1/4 mile in 10 to 12 seconds. Do that in your ICE car. Of course you can if you spend a lot of money on building a hot rod with turbo or nitrous but its not cheap.
I noticed "rurouni20xx" saying something about the power consumption. They only cost about $1.00 per charge. Say one charge a day. $30 bucks a month. Thats not even a tank on my truck right now. Plus the electric companies will put a separate meter, to charge your batteries with, outside and charge you a lower rate for being "green", a little incentive by the government.
They are the up and coming thing, I am convinced, and I am starting my own company in SC to convert the ICE vehicles over to electric. Wanna send me some business?

 

[sevenwalls]

[/QUOTE]something i would like to someday find a way to impliment myself is a vehicle utilizing mechanical energy storrage in the form of a flywheel. they have about the same energy density as lithium ion, but should theoretically be more effecient at charging/discharging (up to 90% or so) and will last indefinitely (no replacing expensive battery packs). plus, theres basically no limit to how fast you could charge such a vehicle. if you could draw enough amps from the grid, you could charge your flywheel enough to drive 50 miles in a matter of 30 seconds.[/QUOTE]

Actually they are experimenting with supercapacitors. The idea is that they would be used on startup, where the draw is so huge on the battery packs, to get the car moving very quickly with virtually no draw off the traction battery. They also have ratings in the millions as to how many times they can be charged and discharged so they will be a permament fixture in the vehicle, not one replaced every 5 years or so.

 

[2004ranger]

The whole thing about electirc no matter what battery you have. meaning i dont care how efficent your battery is is the coefficient of drag. On electric cars it means a lot!!!!!

Edit: well actually on everything it means a lot. also there are things out there to make the Internal combustion motor more efficient but people will just not use it such as the Coates Rotary Valve cylinder head. Take a gander at that sexy cylinder head!

 

[Wicked_Sludge]

anything that rolls down the highway has to deal with drag coefficient...so im not sure what your point is there.

there are thousands of variations of the internal combustion engine, all of which try to increase its efficiency. the problem is, you are limited on how efficient your motor can be by the materials its made of. steel, iron, and aluminum are all pretty good conductors of heat, heat that should be going into motivating the vehicle...but instead its soaked up and radiated into the atmosphere. this limit puts a cap on most ICE's at under 50%. an electric motor, on the other hand, can easily reach 90% or higher....meaning electric vehicles not only cost less to operate, but your actually using less energy to do the same amount of work as an ICE would. none of this matters unless your a greeny weeny and want to save the world by using as little of the worlds power as possible. for me, its all about the savings at my wallet (call me selfish).

 

[bobbywalter]

the oddesey batteries for bobs jeep were 600 bux of the cost for what i had planned, controllers were 400.. his jeep has run on a big marine/trolling battery since he hatched, he had a lil jeep for inside and the big bastard for outside, but he tears the motor boxes out of them too fast. then the bastards quit selling me the boxes.

now i am thinking of just stepping down from the custom motor and gear units i worked up and going to a cheaper oddesey battery setup and using cheap scooter parts seems 4 250 watt motors should be ok with a couple cheap controllers?

that way he can have both, a bike to ride on the trails with the rest of us, and a jeep to fawk the yard up with.

super capacitors? hmmm. that gives me someideas.

 

[2004ranger]

i know what your talking about wicked. i said
"Edit: it means a lot on everything."
now you were saying with heat absorption. You could get your pistons coated to stop that from happening and so on but yes so far we can only get around 50% efficiency maybe. but even if we reach 50% efficiency of mass produced motors that would help a lot. The coates valveless cylinder head also stops heat absorption. and since you don't have an exhaust valve that stays hot you could up the compression or turbo the piss outta it. and its not just the motors either its also reducing transmission parasitic loss. even the DOHC motors have parasitic loss not as much as the OHV or SOHC but if you run the coates it will reduce your valve train parasitic loss quite a bit. They have also been working on a ICE motor that uses spark when getting up to speed but at cruise or idle it runs like a diesel motor. i forget exactly whats its called. But for some reason people think that oh 10% here and there isn't much but it really is. Anytime you can reduce parasitic loss i would do it. Also electric motors love to run about 80% that is when they are most efficient so they aren't as efficient all the way throughout the power band i guess you'd call it?

 

[Wicked_Sludge]

as i said before, there are litterally thousands of variations of ICEs out there, from different engine strokes (like the otto and atkinson cycles), to hot intakes and fuel system tweaks...you name it its out there. if your interested in preventing thermal loss, look at ceramic motors. its been done. but even they have a theoritical thermal soak limit.

electric motors on the other hand will never reach an efficiency as low as 50%, even in their most inefficient state. and with tweaking and special modifications to the motor, very near 100% efficiency can be had....which is just physically impossible for any ICE to accomplish.

im not counting parasetic drivetrane losses in the arguement because no mater what your motivating force is, it will still require some form of drivetrane. although if we were to bring that into the arguement, electric motors again have the upper hand. an electric motors efficiency band is much MUCH wider than an ICEs, meaning it needs fewer (read: one, for most cases) gears to keep the motor in its most efficient range. fewer gears means fewer bearings, less weight, less parasetic drag, and higher overall efficiency.

in short, even the least efficient electric vehicle is more efficient than the most efficient ICE vehicle (say that five times fast). thats just where our technology is today. and unless we discover some loop hole in physics, thats the way it will remain indefinitely.