The car industry had a chance to modernize years ago, but went to some lengths to avoid doing so. This amazing ad by GM, for an electric car it was made to make, is an amazing work of inverted art. Every element is designed to make you unsettled by the product and what it represents. [via Consumerist]
Blast shadows and baby carriages: How GM killed the electric car
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I’m still confused as to why electric cars don’t have a transmission.
An electric motor has peak torque right from the start, compared to a combustion engine that has a peak torque somewhere later, 4000+ RPMs. A transmission exists to give you usable power (e.g. more time spent in and around peak torque) across a wider range of speeds by letting you increase the revs more quickly or more slowly.
Hence, with an electric motor, no transmission.
Electric cars don’t have a transmission because they don’t need one.
Internal-combustion engines only develop adequate torque over a relatively limited RPM range. You need to keep the car in that range in order to get reasonable performance, so you shift from one gear to another as you increase speed. If the engine ran directly to the differential with no gearbox in between, you’d effectively be pulling away from stops in 4th.
Human beings on bikes have the same problem but moreso, which is why bikes commonly have 20+ gears these days.
Electric motors develop plenty of torque at 1 rpm, so the gearbox is extraneous.
4000 RPMs is an arbitrary example, of course it all depends on the size and configuration of engine, rev limit, tune, etc.
I remember when Ben Rosen founded Rosen Motors specifically to invent a hybrid electric car using a flywheel design back around 1992 (IIRC), and the major automotive companies turned down his offer to license the technology he R&D’d with Rosen Motors because of a combination of “not invented here” and unwillingness to take on a resource dependency. (This was also when gasoline was hovering around $0.90/gallon.)
The prototype hybrid engine Rosen Motors developed installed into a GM Saturn sedan.
hrm… that all makes sense as to why an electric car doesn’t need a transmission. An electric motor has plenty of torque. I’m not confused about that. It just seems that running at an electric motor at higher rpms would require more energy, and thus drain the batteries quicker. A transmission would allow the vehicle to maintain higher speeds without requiring the motor to maintain a higher rpm, but I suppose the energy consumption at different rpms must not be significantly different, or else there would be a transmission.
Regardless that’s the main reason I’d never buy an electric car; I can’t stand a car without a clutch.
Why the hell are you all talking about peak torque when you’ve just seen what is probably the rarest thing in the world: an advertisement whose brief was “UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD THIS AD CREATE THE DESIRE TO PURCHASE OUR PRODUCT”
After watching this commercial, I have only one thing to say: “Mommy make it stop!”
God, that was awful.
It’s obvious the ad is deliberate sabotage. Has there been any other car commercial in the automotive history that didn’t show the damn car?
If you would like to see more on how GM killed the electric car, watch the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car”. Shows exactly what GM did to kill off the EV1.
and they get a bail-out! good money after bad
That was an awful commercial. Do any of the people who approved that thing still work for GM?
re: #5, the Rosen Motors flywheel – How much energy would the flywheel store? If it was a lot, what would happen if the car was in a crash? What if the car rolled or spun out?
I think it is great that BoingBoing got its hands on the next Battlestar Galactica episode trailer. Atmospheric, monochromatic, grainy, darkly foreboding voiceover… can’t wait for the next episode. Is EV1 the last Cylon, maybe?
I love the insane conspiracy theories of why GM didn’t produce the EV1 in 1996…
…when it is so freakin’ obvious that gas prices where dirt cheap in 1996 that not enough people would be interested to justify production, and GM had to recall the pilot vehicles because of legal liability and regulatory obligations.
Let me explain something to you folks, GM is a corporation and their goal is to make money. They would have no problem selling sausages made of babies if they thought it would make money, let alone electric cars. They decided not to continue the EV1 because the EV1 would not have been profitable in the era of cheap-gas and dot-com fortunes that gave us the SUV boom. The people at GM aren’t waxing their mustaches and saying “Mouhahaha! How can we make our cars burn more oil, because that is the evil thing to do! Mouhahaha!”
I seem to remember the original Rosen flywheel was a 30gallon steel drum filled with concrete, mounted transversely between the rear wheels, although I might be thinking of another vehicle. Production models were supposed to use lead instead of concrete to reduce the size. But anyway, the coolest thing about the Rosen Motors cars was the hyper-efficient gas turbine engine running on air bearings. Completely awesome, near-enough-to-zero-friction near-enough-to-zero-wear and you could stick your face into the exhaust port without getting burned.
stuiethegod, I think it just has to do with expected speed of the car, etc. For example, a Tesla does have a 2-speed transmission – or at least was planned to have one at some point in the development cycle. That’s a sports car so should have some high speed ability.
It might be that production electric cars end up commonly having a transmission, who knows. It’s a cost/benefit thing.
Another point is that a transmission has an inherent efficiency loss. Gears create friction which loses energy as heat. So the energy lost all the time by having a transmission might offset or even more than offset the efficiency gained through RPM reduction.
The argument that low gas prices killed the electric car only makes sense if GM was run by chimpanzees. Anyone with an even moderate understanding of what oil is and where it comes from can tell that oil demand will increase while supply decreases in the long term. If a $5/m a year CEO can’t plan for the long term, they should be fired, immediately and without a parachute.
Nevermind all that, I was promised flying cars! Where are the flying cars??
@ W014
“re: #5, the Rosen Motors flywheel – How much energy would the flywheel store? If it was a lot, what would happen if the car was in a crash? What if the car rolled or spun out?”
Your car already has a flywheel. I assume even in this case the flywheel is only engaging the axle when you push on the petal.
The effect having a huge weight would have on your handling is another question. Let me just say, I have no desire to drive a car on the ice and snow that has an enormous lead weight in the rear of the car. I also question the effectiveness of an enormous flywheel as you have to get is spinning. So very nice when you come to a stop sign at the bottum of a hill, but a pain in the ass when, starting from a dead stop heading up a hill.
The commercial is remarkable.
I have seen some ideas for transmissions for electric cars. They do use more electricity, but I think for most part the power lost in a transmission is more then they can save.
This is why some are developing magnetic transmissions that can regulate the speed of the motor and capture lost kinetic energy and turn it back into electricity for the battery.
PS: just google “Magnetic Transmission” I tried to post some links this morning but my comment didn’t get approved.
That was the scariest commercial I’ve ever seen.
I think I’m going to cry.
Title should be..
Blast shadows and baby carriages: How to stop worrying and learn to love the bomb(and the electric car)
I just don’t get why we would care about carbon emissions in a nuclear winter.
Can GM produce the EV1 today? If it were available for pre-order today, thousands of people will snap it up immediately. Even if those numbers were to small for GM, they could simply sell the tech to a smaller company.
Okay, here’s my pitch :
[entire ad, up until]
…How does it go, you’ll ask yourself.
[beat]
AWESOMELY. IT GOES TOTALLY [bleeep]ING AWESOMELY.
The GM EV1. Totally [bleep]ing AWESOME.
#15- “hyper-efficient gas turbine engine running on air bearings”
Yup. Pretty awesome. That’s these guys, now. Sadly, they don’t put’em in cars anymore…
That’s a good way to put it.
Deliberate? Hell no. Anyone who’s familiar with GM is aware that endemic incompetence and repeatedly mishandled fiascos are one of the company’s longest standing traditions.
They didn’t bungle that opportunity to keep electric cars down. They bungled it because they’re America’s “slow” auto company.