Transformed Camaro to an electric car at Montreal Auto Show was impressive. The designer has removed the gas engine from under the hood and replaced it with dozens of batteries and an electric motor. This electric car delivered 100 miles after charging the batteries for 8 hours, not bad for daily commute. You can charge the car overnight with a 110 volt outlet and the next day drive it to work or run errands.
Moreover, you can install Lithium batteries at a cost of $10,000 and total driving distance will jump from 100 miles to 400 miles. And even get more driving distance with Hydrogen-cell batteries. But the first question that comes to mind “how practical this electric car really is with these kinds of long hours charging batteries?” For example, what if driving back home after a long day at work you forget to plug-in the car to an electric outlet? And your batteries happened to be flat dead that day. For sure you are in for a big surprise next morning. I guess this will be a good excuse for not showing up to work next day “dead batteries that can’t be jumped”. Not a bad excuse though. But seriously, is 8 hours of charging batteries in tune with the fast paste world that we are living in. What about in case of emergency and no juice in the batteries. Obviously, this is impractical and we need faster energy delivery mechanism to charge these batteries, or new battery technology that gets charged faster. One idealistic claim comes in mind is straight from Shelby’s press release:
SSC’s Nanotechnology Rechargeable Lithium Battery pack is rechargeable in only 10 minutes on a standard 110 outlet and has a 150-200 mile range on a single charge. This means that in a typical 8 hour day, the car using this technology could go 200 miles, charge for 10 minutes (the time it typically takes to fill up a tank of gas), then drive 200 more miles, charge for 10 minutes and continue on. Some other EV technologies necessitate an overnight charge creating a class of “commuter electric cars” and are not practical alternatives to gas combustion automobiles.
Now 10 minutes charging and putting out 150 to 200 miles that’s something remarkable from an electric car and very convenient. For some this claim is unrealistic and the technology must come from out of this world, but technology never failed to surprise everyone. If we time traveled to sixties and seventies and talked to these folks of the decade about iPhone features that will come, for them that would have been science fiction for sure. It is just a matter of time for electric cars to come in full circle, nanotechnology, Pico technology or and anything in between or beyond the answer for sure is hidden in time.