Hillhater said:
Please be real, we all know Z22 can only do 50 miles at a steady, cruise. If he uses any of that potential performance, he would suck that 17 kWhr pack dry before he got to the end of the street !
I'm aware of its ability to suck down its available charge in mere seconds. Still, 17 kWh / 50 miles range = 340 Wh/mi for the Zombie 222. This 340 Wh/mi is from a 3,500 lb pig of a Mustang conversion with thick, sticky, lossy drag radials, the aerodynamics of a brick, and a big, lossy differential designed to handle more than the 1800 lb-ft of torque this beast can put out. The 2,940 lb 1st gen Nissan Leaf still needs like 250-300 Wh/mile cruising on the highway at 60-70 mph with its economy-oriented tires. Intuitively, I can tell that the Leaf's aero drag isn't a whole lot better than the Mustang's given this comparison... probably no more than a 25% improvement for the Leaf in CdA value over this brick of a musclecar. The Leaf's CdA is probably around 7.0 sq ft versus roughly 9.0 for the classic Mustang(don't have the frontal area for either memorized but do know their drag coefficients for their stock forms), and their weights are close.
...and if he put a Lifepo4 pack in Z22 he would not be able to get anything like the performance he has.
The only advantage Lifepo4 has is availability, and ease of construction. In nearly all other metrics of battery performance it has been superceeded.
True, but 500 lbs of cheapo CALB LiFePO4 CA cells can still yield 200 horsepower reliably and repeatedly. That's plenty for an electric drive. The Leaf has roughly half of that amount of power and it can do 0-60 mph in 9 seconds. A light weight sub 2,500 lb conversion with dual motors could be made to run 12s in the 1/4 mile off of 200 battery horsepower(look at the AC Propulsion TZero). For any A to B commuter, this is more than enough performance, and still fares well for a sports car.
There exists even better batteries for a drag racing application than the Zombie 222 has in it at the moment, but I think that Mr. Medford and Mr. Wayland are at a point where they don't have enough controller or motor in that car to make use of all of that power a 200C battery can deliver, even though their system has plenty of power generated. A Soliton Shiva and THREE Netgain WarP 11 HVs might now be necessary to push this tech to its performance limits in a street legal automobile.
I like to imagine what a sub 2,500 lb AWD purpose built machine with a sub 3.5 sq ft CdA body, with 1,200 horsepower at the wheels and 5,000 lb-ft of motor torque would look like... If I had the money, I'd try to get something of that sort built...
With 200C batteries, it may now be possible now to build a street legal EV that matches the performance of the fastest street legal gassers, running 6s in the 1/4 mile with 200+ mile trap speeds and sub 1.0 second 0-60 times, for potentially less money than the fastest gassers took to build but still at least a six-figure sum none-the-less...
Currently, street legal EVs are flirting with the high 9s, and they aren't even using the best solutions available, but is still an expensive and heroic effort the same. If given the resources, I know Wayland and Medford could do much better than 9s, but they probably won't be doing it in a heavy tank of a musclecar.
And Radical is a street car in the USA and Europe.
