Considering electric cars are the future, and smelly, air polluting, roaring and inefficient petrol cars will die out in couple of decades..
are there any plans to implement electric cars in LFS?
Still, it's fastest road-legal electric car to have been ever driven on Nurburgring, and 200 km (which is 40 laps on Nurburgring, btw) could be extended by making the battery-pack swappable by pitstop team.
Ethanol engines, like petrol ones, have torque limitations. :3
That's what gearbox is for. Also it's not like electric motors have unlimited torque, it's significantly higher, but it's nothing particularly cool. Higher torque means the need for stronger(read more expensive) drivetrain, I don't see how this is a win. We won't have enough electricity to power these cars anyway with the plans to shut down nuclear power plants emerging all over the world.
As you see, you need only 10 mins to charge 'em up, so as Ernests mentioned, the pit crew could charge them while racing and in pitstop they would replace the batteries.
550kg battery swap after each 9 minutes lap? Sounds like the physically strongest pitcrew in world... Ok,in shorter tracks and in some energy saving mode the car would do 20+ minutes in one stint,still way too less to be competitive yet. Batteries is still the weak point for electrical cars,need really a huge breakpoint in their delevopement to see electric cars racing seriosly.
This and impossibility to kill ourselves is the reason,why we can continue in virtual racing (since in real world it's stoped due environment and safety reasons) aim for higher standarts - faster and more powerful cars!
Both you and I will be long gone before the future generations will run out of oil.
If the can't manage to release a car for the past two or three years then this still remains as a dream and I'm pretty sure it will for a long long time.
Who told you Electric cars are efficient and less polluting?
Currently a typical petrol engine is around 35% efficient, a Diesel around 45% and an electric engine about 20%. That includes the transportation and refining of the fuel and generating and distribution of the electricity.
What an Electric engine does is produce more pollutants but just moves them from the car to the areas where the electrcity is generated.
Bear in mind also, most of the Electricity is generated from burning fosil fuels and there are considerable losses in transmitting that power via the national grid.
Also currently most electric cars are much heavier than petrol or diesel cars and therefore less efficient.
And then there's the issue of the large amounts of energy used in producing the batteries plus the potentially toxic disposal or energy required to recycle the materials.
The only way you are going to make Electric engines produce less pollution is to make sure all the electricity is produced in Nuclear power stations. And in order to replace the current number of fuel based cars with electric cars you'd have to at least triple the number of Nuclear power stations that we currently have. And that won't go down too well with the anti-nuclear crowd.
Electric cars aren't cars. They are machines for people who think "oh my gawd this planet is dying and it's my fault and I can save it by driving in the most unfun and unsexy way anyone could every imagine"
Also, electricity MAINLY is produced from atomic plants, partially also from hydroelectric, solar and wind ones. All except atomic ones are renewable, and atomic ones are very efficient.
Stefani24: that's what people were saying 100 years ago about petrol cars, while driving their steam engined ones.