Note this refers to the activities of Volkswagen Motorsport GmbH [1], which races VW brand cars (and sometimes Skoda apparently?). It does not apply to Volkswagen group as a whole, which would have included Audi, Porsche, Lamborghini and many more brands.
Agree. Big meh in the sport. Eco considerations aside it's amusing that they're using this as a platform. Racing is largely not about the powertrain. And emissions are... whoops we made them up.
My fault for not pointing out the irony more explicitly. VW is reportedly paying $15bn+ for cheating on emissions. If they had said they are axing all of their diesel vehicles and replacing them with electric I would be jumping for joy. They basically chose to take the smallest pain point for the largest reward by touting these credentials. Having actually built F1 cars you should think of them as aeroplanes that never take off. All of the top racing is aero dependant more than anything nowadays.
The VW EV record breaking pikes peak car was amazing. A friend was a marshall on the track and she told me no one was allowed to touch the car for an hour after the run until they had grounded the static successfully.
My feeling is this announcement is largely pr since VW aren't a force in motor racing and that EV's are really only good at drag racing up to 140 mph and hill climb. The high stresses of racing exhaust batteries within a few laps. Perhaps some racing R&D will help solve this major EV issue.
They no longer do this. In yesterday’s race Felipe Massa finished with 0.5% of charge left, but most of competition was at 3%.
It’s a league with a lot of overtaking, small circuits and confusing realisation - its super hard to know who’s who on track without prior research because they never display which car number is who during race - something that’s a must have when most of the grid is black and red variation. Also because circuits are small and street tracks, there is a lot of camera hopping which makes it hard to get idea of the pace.
I feel they should do three races 35min+1 lap on proper race track instead, but maybe theres reason against it?
They've wanted to concentrate on street circuits in cities. Traditional series (F1, IndyCar, etc.) generally have troubles getting permission to run city street circuits (and yes, I know they exist for both of those, just saying the permits are hard to get, at least initially) in some part due to noise. Since the FE cars are essentially no noise, they have tried to go to cities that may not have other races.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of street circuits, but the FE races tend to be pretty good. I too would prefer to be on "proper" tracks, but that hasn't been the goal of FE, at least for now.
Ultracapacitors are HIGHLY unlikely to ever be used as a main power source for any vehicle.
1: The performance is just not there, has no indication that it will improve revolutionarily, and is growing slower than batteries.
Formula E uses a 250 kg, 54 kWh, 250 kW battery that does about 30 laps. Nawa is apparently[1] at 15 Wh/kg and 100 kW/kg, which would be 15x heavier for the same weight. The car would have to stop every two laps (three minutes!) to recharge- and more likely every single lap, since the actual thing will require lots of other components besides the capacitors. I'm not sure you can even call it racing when you can only complete two laps at a time.
The extreme power of supercapacitors (25x more than the best li-ion) is unfortunately unusable. They need to store several times more energy to be useful. Even as assistance, they're still usually much too heavy to be worthwhile. In fact it can be argued that li-ion is already starting to surpass the power density that can be used in vehicles- VTC4 cells (an older, but notoriously powerful chemistry) can push 3.5 kW/kg when fully charged, or 1.2 megawatts for a 54 kWh battery. That's 300 horsepower from a 64 kg battery.
Batteries are pushing the power higher and higher very quickly, since fast charging is so desirable. Capacitors are not improving very much at all; you can turn to nanotechnology to increase surface area or to hybrid types. "Hybrid" just means mixed with battery-like chemistry, so it's strictly worse. Nanotechnology is mostly outside near term manufacturability, but even the theoretical stuff is very limited. Increasing the surface area leads to linear gains but gets harder with n^3 since you're cramming features on top of features... and returns are already pretty bad.
2: Capacitors are very inconvenient power sources.
Capacitor voltage drops with e^-t, all the way down to zero. Battery voltage drops by 40% when fully depleted, but 70% of the battery energy is in a region with <10% drop. That means it's very easy to optimize for a certain voltage, while a ton of the capacitor voltage is unrecoverable. When the voltage has dropped by 40%, as in a battery, there's still 35% of the full energy left. In practice that means those Nawa capacitors will not even reach 10 Wh/kg.
Now consider accelerating a 1 tonne car to 160 kph (100 mph). The kinetic energy at 90% efficiency (neglecting friction, and drag) is 315 watt-hours, requiring a 32 kg capacitor. If you used VTC4 cells instead you could have another 5 kWh energy with 115 kW peak power output- enough for 2.8 more laps. MJ1 cells would give you 8 kWh at 40 kW peak- 4 extra laps. There's a reason f1 goes 90 minutes to two hours while formula E is only 45 minutes.
Ultra- and supercapacitors (supercapacitors is more technically correct) may see use in racing or high-efficiency vehicles as boost assistance, but only if the cost comes down very significantly. They are not taken very seriously for use in EVs commercially.
That makes sense. It refocuses the engineering talent.
We don't really need any more technical breakthroughs for electric cars. Just volume. Batteries are getting cheaper as production volume increases, and faster than expected. Down 80% in the last decade.
What the world needs is a $20,000 electric car comparable to the Toyota Corolla, the best selling car. VW might be able to do it.
There are physics limitations on batteries. I am not sure there will be a breakthrough. Obviously its worth investing in materials research, but for an average person commuting within a city, the technology seems there. The breakthrough needs to be the price.
AFAIK they’re all still not using solid state electrolytes. Those look like a breakthrough comparatively. There’s probably lots of room to breakthrough.
There are several battery chemistries with the potential to get 5X capacity. Maybe we can do without that but it sure wouldn't hurt. It could help price too, if you need 1/5 as much battery.
For the average person, the batteries need to be recharged at least at a similar rate and range to filling a gas tank.
My understanding is this still requires a battery breakthrough, or at least significant improvement.
The average person is a tenant without home charging as an option, they require a gas station substitute or better - ideally an obsoleting solution eliminating this waste of time altogether.
Imagine if a battery breakthrough enabled 2000 mile ranges with a 5 minute recharge, and effectively unlimited charge cycles so the battery outlasts the vehicle lifetime with zero degradation of range.
If such a thing were in EVs today, ICEs would all but vanish practically overnight.
I think it's obvious we're still not quite there, but it is getting close.
> For the average person, the batteries need to be recharged at least at a similar rate and range to filling a gas tank.
The top Model S can charge at 250 kW, or 15.4 miles or range per minute. Theoretically the fastest gas pumps in the US (10 gal/min) do 250 miles per minute (fleet average for new cars), but in practice you really mean a 5 minute fill-up, so ~75 miles per minute. Not that it's any faster to plug in a charger than insert a pump, but <5 minutes is basically irrelevant. So currently the best commercial electric cars are losing by ~5x.
A 5 minute fill up means charging at ~12-13 C. Hybrid cells regularly do 10+ C[1]. The batteries in F1 cars charge or discharge 3 times per minute[2], on average. It will not be long until full size BEVs can do 5 minute charges. The much bigger problem is actually getting the power to charge them; big charger-side batteries are expensive.
Gasoline is already super energy dense and a car full of gasoline only gets like 3-400 mile range. Getting comparable range and < 20 min charging time is a lot more reasonable and likely.
Almost all cars are always parked for more than twenty hours a day. Instead of extremely fast charging we can just put chargers at every parking spot, including curbside parking.
You're thinking of daily commuting. But some people do long drives where you don't want to stop for 24 hours to charge the car to continue. Even 2 hours is not nice.
Once we replaced the cars of all people who don't do that so often that renting a different car for the trip is not an option we can think about that problem again. Maybe supercharger technology has improved from today's 30 minutes by then.
People really need to think carefully before dragging out the "they can rent a car" thing.
The issue isn't that it's not an option, it's that people don't want to do it. Most people would much rather drive their own car than a rental. Renting a car is usually something you do as a last resort.
Another point is that the rental is not always available, at least at a reasonable price.
I drive most of my kilometres during certain seasons: Christmas, Easter holiday, school holidays (when visiting parents etc).
These are exactly the times when very many others also want to make similar trips, so the rental companies are out of capacity, or rather, there is surge pricing.
Yeah great, people also don't want to breathe toxic car exhaust and they also don't want to live in a +4 degree world. Sometimes you have to deal with minor inconveniences.
A question to those who downvoted this comment: why?
I'm genuinely curious. It was not nasty in any way, it was readable and presented a good argument. That you disagree should not be a reason to downvote.
I don't think 2000 mile range would be that important, but >1000 km would be useful (I have a diesel car that can do this).
The comment is civil, but I would also think full of bad reasonings. First of all, you don't need to refuel an electric car like a gasoline one. A large part of the cars can be charged at home over night. Alternatively, at work during work day. A car spends most of its time parking somewhere. After all, you are driving it, to be somewhere. Work, mall, etc. A lot of these places could offer low-power outlets for slow charging.
Gasoline cars used to offer ranges not so much more than 400 kilometers, only very modern and Diesel cars increased that number significantly. Elektric cars have reached (and in Tesla quite exceeded) that range. More improvements will happen too. But a > 1000 km range isn't what is holding electric cars back. I actually think, few electric cars will ever reach that range, unless there is some crazy breakthrough with batteries, as it makes more sense to have smaller and cheaper batteries than optimizing for an use case which doesn't matter much.
> A large part of the cars can be charged at home over night. Alternatively, at work during work day.
Most people live in buildings, not houses. Same applies for work. You don't get to charge there. A dedicated charging station that replaces gas stations is needed.
> A lot of these places could offer low-power outlets for slow charging.
I have no experience with US, but in many major cities in Europe, it's hard to find any parking space, let alone the one with a charging outlet. It's a problem that would require a lot of infrastructure.
Anyway, those are all valid discussion points. No reason to downvote. People on HN want electric to succeed and that's fine. But downvoting anyone who points at problems... are we on Reddit now?
Adding power outlets to public parking spaces does not require breakthroughs or innovation. 25% of all lots in the parking garage built several years ago next to my previous work were prepared for or had charging sockets.
Like with the majority of parking in Sweden you pay with an app or sms, and the hourly rate is higher if you charge.
It does not require much technical innovation, but it does require quite a lot of investment, and also some administrational red tape must be handled (how to allow and how to encourage it in terms of certifications, construction permits etc).
I really wish batteries were a standardized, removable part. People could join a coop type thing where they drive up, swap in a fully charged battery, leave the old on a charger, and go.
The problem is these battery packs tens of thousands of dollars (I think, given costs per kWh) and aren’t standardized. Seems like something the auto companies should be open to standardizing. They’ve done the same with oil - because they had to accommodate the fuel literally burning away.
Edit-I get that they’re heavy, but that can be standardized away, too.
I used to think this too, but funny enough people seem to want to have their own batteries rather than using loaner ones that have possibly been abused by others.
Also in some cars the battery pack is used to add strength and rigidity to the body, thus saving weight and adding efficiency. Harder to pull this off if it’s removable.
> people seem to want to have their own batteries rather than using loaner ones that have possibly been abused by others
I think that's a rational desire when you've bought the battery with your vehicle.
If there were an option to have the vehicle delivered sans battery then enter into a swap program of your choosing which provided the battery that you never actually owned (why would you want to, really, it's _the_ expensive wear component most likely to be meaningfully obsoleted repeatedly), then people would probably feel very differently about it.
Mark my words. If this attempt at electrifying vehicles fails the non-serviceable batteries will be in the short list of reasons. There is no one giving an irrefutable reason they can’t be supported. Other than the manufacturers want an artificial push to replace vehicles like smartphones.
Edit-Ok found a slightly convincing argument. The battery pack in a Tesla 3 weighs 1000lbs. It’d require a swap station in order to support removing them. I still say it’s doable. It has to be supported if we want to avert catastrophic climate change.
This is a breakthrough that batteries need to get.
The crazy thing is the economic trade off here. Those batteries are around half the cost of the car. So splitting the two would make the car that much cheaper while the battery could be like a lease program.
This would really get me to switch to one - just paying for the car sans battery, and having battery swap stations. Sadly the available charging infrastructure is a nonstarter for me. I don't have a big house or a garage so even charging off of 120v plugs does not work.
Yes, they’re leaving the vast majority of apartment occupants (like myself) and probably other types of residencies in the cold. It’s not that oil doesn’t have a similar problem. A tank of gas easily weighs over 100lbs (per a quick search). It just benefits from being a liquid.
We make it work with two Teslas living in an apartment with no chargers on site. Need either charging at work or a close Supercharger or nearby fast public chargers to make it work. Preferably at least two out of those three.
In that case see point two, about the battery being part of the structure of the car.
Could maybe pull it off with a different design, like maybe the Tesla Cybertruck exoskeleton could work with this scheme? Would be cool if it could work and if swaps were fast like in that one Tesla demo that never came to market.
If they didn't stick with it, nobody will. Also, standardizing batteries across companies is just silly. Electric cars basically are batteries. If you standardize the most important element of the car, you will kill innovation.
Superchargers on long trips (~1600 km per hour charging with v3) are sufficient. It's 15 min of charing per 400km or 4 hours or driving. Charging at home/work everyday is actually more convenient than tracking discharge and going to some special place every couple of days. Building chargers at parking places is not expensive. From what I gather it should not be more than a few thousands. In bulk it's probably even cheaper.
Even if they were standardized, would it naturally be workable as an exchange system similar to water cooler and propane bottles?
Battery packs are massive, complex, sensitive to abuse and expensive to replace. Those are very different qualities from water bottles and propane tanks.
I'm genuinely curious if we have any successful exchange system examples resembling EV batteries to reference as precedence.
Actually possibly old style taxi cabs? Drivers rented the cars day to day, as I recall. Yes, not as much a technical issue as a legal issue. Really only need to nail the legal framework though, I think. Desktop computers didn’t start standardized, but it’s pretty mature now. I’m definitely curious if there’s not a hard reason keeping this from practicality.
There are plenty of nice to haves in terms of breakthroughs. However if all that improves is the cost, that completely kills ICE cars in the next 10-20 years because the current batteries are more than good enough in terms of range, durability, safety, charging speed, temperature management, etc. Even the price is not that bad actually. Can things be improved? Sure, massively probably. And that's actually continuing to happen for the foreseeable future.
But even if that weren't the case, the current market pretty much proves that for a lot of drivers we've hit the "good enough" point.
IMHO the main issue is driving cost down further since EVs are still on the expensive side and somewhat scarce. The fact that with total cost of ownership it actually does make sense for a lot of people doesn't matter; we need cheaper batteries. Funnily enough, there are hardly any unsold units in this market. Even at the currently high price, most manufacturers struggle to meet demand and are selling everything they manage to produce. So it will take a while for cheaper vehicles to get interesting enough to produce in volume (margins per kwh are higher on the more expensive ones).
Just scaling up production is going to address prices in the next few years. IMHO VW and Tesla are going to be working hard to undercut each other with the entry level price in the next few years. They are both heavily investing in being able to scale production and I expect that they will be getting results from that. Both are aiming for mass production. A few other manufacturers are trying to do the same but I think in terms of volume those two will be competing for the #1 and #2 position for the next few years.
Range and charging are solved for people who can plug in at home. Using shared/public chargers is a huge time commitment, both in queuing for the charger and going back to move your car off it when it's done.
"Less cobalt" is another one in there that the battery industry has been working on, and has made a lot of progress. (It's related to price, but also related to not wanting to be constrained by the availability of a conflict mineral.)
Not just cobalt, there aren't enough rare earth minerals to have battery production at required scale. Extraction of those is extremely expensive process as well, then the question is what to do with used batteries. We are trading one known externality (air pollution) for a bunch of unknown externalities, passing the buck.
There are unknowns. Batteries can be recharged hundreds of times and some are already reused for home solar power packs. A bigger unknown is mass battery recycling. Right now prices of batteries are going down so fast there isn't much financial demand for recycling.
My understanding is that Lithium based batteries (and lots if not all others) have unfavorable properties at human-cold temps. When at -5 or -10C say they work pretty poorly, slowing charge, discharge and capacity.
I refer to heating and cooling the battery pack. When charging, the battery gets hot and it can reduce the lifespan, that's probably why leafs seem to suffer faster range loss. Similarly lack of this hurts range when it's cold.
And the benefits go beyond cars. I would like to replace all my tools with electric motors but the energy density isn't there yet. I just got back inside from cutting down a 5.5" diameter tree branch that fell on my electric fence with a battery powered reciprocating saw. I need to go back out when the battery recharges (had to cut multiple large limbs) to get one more branch.
I have gas chainsaws, but I prefer the electric saw because it's much quieter, much lighter and easier to maneuver. I'm waiting for the day when I can buy a battery that lasts as long as a tank of gas.
I am quite happy that the cost is dropping though.
I have a battery electric chainsaw that would have eaten that branch for lunch. I don't get the chance to use it very often, but it's a joy when I do. It won't take down mature trees, but I'd have to get permission from the city and a certified expert for that anyway. It will limb just about anything.
The best decision I ever made powertool-wise was sticking with a single line of tools for both construction and yard tools, so I have at least 10 or so batteries that fit in every tool I own. I have drills, saws, nailers, lights, leaf blower (that thing drinks battery), hedge trimmer, weed whacker, and the chainsaw all ready to take the exact same battery. One thing I've never had to do is wait for a battery to charge.
> We don't really need any more technical breakthroughs for electric cars.
I'm curious if people will miss the deafening sound of the raw engines to the point it hurts the business, at least for live shows. I'm not a racing fan (beyond occasionally going to local Indy races) but I've seen a lot of comments online complaining about the whirring sound of hybrids.
There will probably still be combustion cars just for the fun of it. But agreed re: the larger firms not getting as much R&D value from doing it.
In a generation, going to see an internal combustion engine vehicle may be like going to see a steam locomotive.
Here's the biggest steam locomotive, restored by Union Pacific, the Big Boy.[2] Behind it is a run-of-the-mill Diesel-electric from about 2005, an EMD SD70ACe. It's there for backup, in case the steam engine fails. It has considerably more tractive effort than the Big Boy. The steam locomotive needs substantial daily maintenance. The Diesel needs to go into the shop once every six months.
Experiencing the intense doppler zoom as the racers fly past is a big part of the experience, no doubt.
But I am equally certain the people with a stake in racing will find some way to make the mechanicals sound both good and useful. Auditory feedback is too important to discard. And speaking just as a fan, I'd be thrilled to watch a race that sounded like a Tie Fighter dogfight.
I have to say after driving a non-gasoline car for a few months, the sound of a loud internal combustion engine sounds trite and tacky, even when I watch a movie.
Just finished watching "Bullit". It would be amusing to edit the soundtrack to replace the Charger and Mustang V-8 notes with the whir of a couple electric motors. It would be sort of strange to see the tire smoke and hear the squeal of rubber along with an electric motor.
I think the electrical motor whine has its own charm, to which viewers will get attuned to in some time. Anyway most people watch races through televised video, which doesn't convey the sounds of the racetrack with any much fidelity, the sound of F1 broadcasts are rather dull too.
The Turbohybrid is truly an amazing feet of engineering, and it's incredible how much aerodynamics work into getting these cars to do their thing. They're hitting 230mph, when they fly around corners it's like watching a fighter jet.
In contrast, Formula E cars are topping out at 170mph, corner like they're full of cinderblocks, and are still running shorter races to compensate for their lack of battery life. They don't have the same level of racing talent either. (e.g. Verstappen and Hamilton.)
Never paid particularly close attention to formula E, but the current generation of turbo-hybrids have horrible problems with dirty air (due to the current chassis regs, not the engines). That’s the main reason there’s little close up racing in F1. Following cars take a big hit to their downforce and they overheat quickly in dirty air (just look at Bottas retiring last weekend). This is something the FIA think they’ll fix by bringing back ground effect in 2021.
Then you have the seperate problem that there’s only 3 competitive constructors in F1 at the moment (and even then 1 of them is quite far above the other 2 - apart from those races where Ferrari was cheating with their fuel injection).
Formula-E, infact may be having too much of close-in action, some of the race highlights looks like bumper cars, with more than 10 cars at a single corner.
I think that’s down to formula e being very-nearly a spec series. Formula e fans get very defensive it not being a spec series, but the regulations (and lack of big time money) make the cars much, much more similar than they are in F1.
The powertrain is pretty free nowadays in Formula E, but the rest of the car is almost entirely spec, which inevitably means there's a lot of similarity. It also means they can spec something where the aero doesn't produce so much dirty air.
I think keeping the development limited to the powertrain is the right move for Formula E; there's plenty of other series where money is thrown at the rest of the car, so let developments happen where the series stands out.
"We don't really need any more technical breakthroughs for electric cars."
Did you misread the headline? They are ending all non electric racing. Presumably because they think we don't need any more technical breakthroughs for ICE cars, but we do for electric cars.
We need another breakthrough though - a massive increase in power production. Current power grids are totally incapable of providing sufficient energy should all cars become electric.
Well that is one way to avoid issues with emissions testing – I guess their new strategy is to run far away from internal combustion engines. They're already in the process of rolling out what is supposed to be the next best thing to Tesla's supercharger network so it makes sense.
Governments should take notice. The "corporate veil" should not be a carte-blanche to crimes (especially the stochastic kind with small but significant reductions of millions of lives or the entirety of human population).
Seems like the laws only apply to foreign corporations, though. If you're Koch, feel free to pollute the air and rivers after funding the appropriate (re-)election campaigns.
Are they abandoning all forms of endurance racing? Batteries have made incredible advances in the last decade...likely to the tipping point for consumer cars and even some forms of racing. But they don't have the ability to compete on range, and due to physics limitations, likely never will.
Fuel cells are likely going to fill that gap in commercial and industrial markets, but I can't see them taking over in racing. You can either get high power density PEMs running on complex systems to support pure hydrogen fuel requirements, or low power density SOFCs running on simple hydrocarbon fuels. Neither is going to work well for racing.
What about hydrogen ICE? Very green on the consumption side and probably can have decent power density. (Though hydrogen obviously requires somewhat larger fuel tanks than hydrocarbon for the same energy).
I do wonder if racing cars for a brand has any meaningful PR value. I mean is there anybody out there buying Mercedes because they won the F1 championship?
I suppose it’s much like a halo product, which also won’t make you go out and immediately buy a Mercedes of course, but as with all advertising it may plant a seed.
Sure, the article only briefly mentioned it, but it's in the picture at the top. I went down a rabbit hole with some links I found at the bottom :)
It debuted at last years Pike's Peak race, It's quickly turned into one of the best electric race cars in the world. It broke the overall record at Pikes Peak, and is the only car the ever reach the top in under 8 minutes. It also recenly set the electric record on the Nürburgring.
Some people have turned "ICE vehicles" into a disparaging remark. I prefer to call them 'koala crematoriums' (please consider donating to any of various koala rescue funds).
Should refer to all cars, since they all pollute, electric just pollutes relatively less. Still need all the cement infrastructure and everything else. Ride a bike. Use public transport.
[1] https://www.volkswagen-newsroom.com/en/press-releases/ready-...