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DeLorean considering all-electric reboot

newdelorean.com

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Re: DeLorean considering all-electric reboot

#261

Post by Ancapistani »

Tor3 wrote: post #219
gambiting wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least here in Poland you can only take the exam in the car provided by the testing centre, you can't have the exam in your own car(with some exceptions like when you need to have a car adjusted to your disabilities)

I believe that's the case all over Europe. That the US apparently or supposedly allows taking a car driver's license exam in your private car is.. extremely surprising.

US drivers’ licensing is much less rigorous than Europe’s as I understand it. In Arkansas, where I live, I got a “learner’s permit” at 14 having passed a short written test. I got my full license at 16 after passing the road test, which consisted of driving for perhaps ten minutes with a cop in the passenger’s seat. I had to drive around the parking lot, navigate and park between traffic cones, then drive the testing route. The testing route started in an industrial part of town with very little traffic and consisted of driving about a mile to a residential neighborhood, circling the block, and coming back to the testing center. I remember being surprised that I didn’t have to demonstrate parallel parking or even driving on a highway.

I think I “studied” for the written test by skimming the handout brochure at school during lunch, and had no issues. The driving test was a joke; I’m very confident my 7-year-old could pass it today based only on her having driven utility vehicles (e.g., a Kubota RTV) around our family’s property and having watched us drive from the back seat.

Apparently Arkansas revised the licensing system in 2009, and now there is an “Intermediate” license for people under 18. That license is restricted from driving from 11pm to 4am (with exceptions), prohibited from using a cell phone while driving (with exceptions), and all passengers must be wearing a seat belt. If you’re married, in the military, have graduated high school (or equivalent) or have been legally emancipated you can get your full license at the age of 16 years and six months.

This discussion had me curious about how the very different licensing regimes might impact outcomes, so I looked up some statistics on motor vehicle fatalities.

    US (2018):
    * 12.4 per 100k residents
    * 14.2 per 100k vehicles

    Europe (2016)
    * 9.3 per 100k residents
    * 19 per 100k vehicles

    Poland (2019)
    * 7.7 per 100k residents
    * 13.5 per 100k vehicles
Honestly, I don’t think there’s a substantial impact. The US has 838 vehicles per 1k residents compared to Poland’s 719. I strongly suspect that US drivers drive substantially more miles per year on average, which would more than account for the per capita numbers.

Source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

Re: DeLorean considering all-electric reboot

#262

Post by VLM »

saberdancer wrote: post #217
Armisael16 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They could even do a stickshift EV if they wanted to, though most car companies seem to not think it's worth the complexity/maintenance, and I get the impression that electric motors are hard on transmissions. Electric motors have a wider power band, so there’s less need for gear shifting. They could get more efficiency with multiple gears, but it’s be a smaller benefit than in an ICE vehicle. One of the big early…

I'm not sure of the power curve for an electric vehicle, but if you add gearing, you introduce losses due to gearbox and you increase complexity. It's likely that it is not worth it in most applications. Only cars that used gearboxes in EV space (two speed) are usually intended to be able to hit 200mph so they need extremely wide rpm range from their electric motors. I know Rimac used one and Taycan (not surprising s…

Hybrids often use gearboxes. My wife's Prius was essentially an extremely heavy 70 HP equivalent EV.

0 to 10 it was a very fastest car although the acceleration curve flattened out fast and it was between hard and impossible to have enough traction to max it out.

I don't hear much about prius transmissions being destroyed.

Something interesting to think about, I wonder with demographic trends etc if 0 to 10 is a more useful measure of daily driver performance and experience than 0 to 60. My wife's car does 0 to 10 at every stop sign, and technically my car is faster at 0 to 60 but I only did that twice a day at most for the commute, for sportiness reasons I might prefer the worlds fastest 0 to 10 car over a theoretically faster 0 to 60 car.

Re: DeLorean considering all-electric reboot

#263

Post by offtop5 »

elihu wrote: post #7

> National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has completed a regulation permitting low volume motor vehicle manufacturers to begin selling replica cars that resemble vehicles produced at least 25 years ago. Congress enacted a DeLorean Motor Company-backed bill backed by the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) DeLorean Motor Company, and others into law in 2015, which streamlined requirements for…

I don't get why they need to exactly reassemble old cars..

A car is ether safe or not. I'm somewhat ok with looser safety requirements as long as customers have to sign a waiver ( and I guess remove the backseats,stop people from putting car seats in the back )

Re: DeLorean considering all-electric reboot

#264

Post by VLM »

Tor3 wrote: post #219
gambiting wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least here in Poland you can only take the exam in the car provided by the testing centre, you can't have the exam in your own car(with some exceptions like when you need to have a car adjusted to your disabilities)

I believe that's the case all over Europe. That the US apparently or supposedly allows taking a car driver's license exam in your private car is.. extremely surprising.

In my state they roll a lot of safety inspection type stuff into the test.

There are no standards for "how to engage the hazard blinkers" across manufacturers so the testing process verifies that at least one time in their driving experience all drivers turned the hazard blinkers on in their private car, and maybe they helped their kids or grandkids figure it out later in life.

I've driven several manual transmission cars and its always so awkward for the first couple minutes as there is no standard "feel". EU test inspectors must provide enormous amounts of leeway during testing. Every time I've driven a new manual car the very first time I let the clutch out is always at least somewhat unexpected. So the USA testers get to use smoothness as a proxy for experience. If you let the clutch out like a guy who's never done it before, you are probably lying about the many hours of required yet otherwise unverifiable pre-testing driving experience.

So in summary it enforces safety education and proves some level of experience.

Re: DeLorean considering all-electric reboot

#265

Post by luma »

sandworm101 wrote: post #248
Armisael16 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They could even do a stickshift EV if they wanted to, though most car companies seem to not think it's worth the complexity/maintenance, and I get the impression that electric motors are hard on transmissions. Electric motors have a wider power band, so there’s less need for gear shifting. They could get more efficiency with multiple gears, but it’s be a smaller benefit than in an ICE vehicle. One of the big early…

>> You could limit the initial torque in software, but that’d kill the joy of the EV. All electric cars are torque-limited. They simply have to be. A static electric motor, of the type needed for higher speeds, given full voltage would not only snap bits of the drivetrain but rip apart its own mounts. So they are all limited to various degrees. The limiting factor on low-speed power for EVs isn't the motor. It's the…

Is this still true with the use of SynRM motors (as deployed by Tesla)?

Re: DeLorean considering all-electric reboot

#266

Post by beatboxrevival »

sokoloff wrote: post #258
beatboxrevival wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You took that quote out of context. "...creating snowcats when he purchased the Logan Machine Company" I'm aware of his automotive history. Just wanted to provide a different perspective of what other things he was doing around the same time.

Sure. If the question is "How did John Delorean start manufacturing snowcats?", then I completely butchered the quote. If the question is "How did John Delorean get his start?" it seems to me like "at General Motors" is a better answer than "by buying LMC".

There was no question posed. I was simply injecting a random piece of trivia (which I acknowledged). Now that you understand my intent, why do you keep pressing? These are the types of responses that make people not want to comment on news.yc.

Re: DeLorean considering all-electric reboot

#267

Post by VLM »

Ancapistani wrote: post #261
Tor3 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that's the case all over Europe. That the US apparently or supposedly allows taking a car driver's license exam in your private car is.. extremely surprising.

US drivers’ licensing is much less rigorous than Europe’s as I understand it. In Arkansas, where I live, I got a “learner’s permit” at 14 having passed a short written test. I got my full license at 16 after passing the road test, which consisted of driving for perhaps ten minutes with a cop in the passenger’s seat. I had to drive around the parking lot, navigate and park between traffic cones, then drive the testing…

WRT fatalities its not apples to apples comparison as USA highways are incredibly expensive with concrete barriers between oncoming traffic and in Ireland the highways between cities are literally two lanes no barriers much like USA farm roads yet with interstate highway levels of traffic.

Meanwhile the cars involved in the accidents are often unimaginably small and lightweight in EU. Rolling a typical Irish car off the road must have an outcome much like rolling a golf cart would, certainly fatal to the occupants, whereas rolling a typical USA SUV into the ditch will ruin the trim and probably the glass but the occupants should be unharmed if they're wearing seatbelts.

Re: DeLorean considering all-electric reboot

#268

Post by sandworm101 »

luma wrote: post #265
sandworm101 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> You could limit the initial torque in software, but that’d kill the joy of the EV. All electric cars are torque-limited. They simply have to be. A static electric motor, of the type needed for higher speeds, given full voltage would not only snap bits of the drivetrain but rip apart its own mounts. So they are all limited to various degrees. The limiting factor on low-speed power for EVs isn't the motor. It's the…

Is this still true with the use of SynRM motors (as deployed by Tesla)?

All electric motors boil down to magnets pulling and pushing on each other to make movement. Whether the torque protection is via software, circuitry, or mechanical wizardry doesn't really matter. They all need it somewhere to prevent static magnetic forces from pulling everything else apart.

Re: DeLorean considering all-electric reboot

#269

Post by VBprogrammer »

viraptor wrote: post #188
fy20 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Prius has that too. It doesn't need to, but as you say, they wanted it to feel like a regular car.

It makes more sense to me to be honest. If I want to roll just a little bit to get a better position in a parking box, I don't want my foot to leave the break or be super careful about accelerating. I want to just barely move / not-be-stopped, and this implementation works just fine.

Yeah, my father-in-law drives an automated manual car which doesn't do this automatically. It's actually a strange car to drive because of that, it also changes at a snails pace so you have to drive pretty leasurely.

Our car which is the Ford Power shift dual clutch system which changes pretty much seamlessly and does creep on its own.

Re: DeLorean considering all-electric reboot

#270

Post by drewzero1 »

elihu wrote: post #7

> National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has completed a regulation permitting low volume motor vehicle manufacturers to begin selling replica cars that resemble vehicles produced at least 25 years ago. Congress enacted a DeLorean Motor Company-backed bill backed by the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) DeLorean Motor Company, and others into law in 2015, which streamlined requirements for…

Older EV conversions often kept the stick shift, but you had to know what you were doing while driving (foot off the accelerator in neutral!)

A few years ago I read _Life with an Electric Car_ by Noel Perrin, which is a fascinating look into the re-emergence of EVs and the limitations of early 90s battery technology. His car was a ~1990 Ford Escort which had been converted to battery power by a company in California, and his goal was to pick it up at the factory and drive it home to Vermont.

I'm still not completely ready for an all-electric future, but the book did make me appreciate how far energy storage has progressed in the last 30 years.

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