electric car x prize.

[kunkmiester]

Was thinking about this after some talk on another thread, here's what I was looking at:

400 Mile range(a bit over 5 hours at 75MPH, half a day's travel)

Less than one hour recharge time(allows lunch and some touring while waiting, before finishing the day)

Seats for at least 4, with 300 more pounds for luggage, with a 24 cubic foot trunk(3x2x4)

Range to match a gas car, short enough recharge time to not inconvenience a road trip, and space to actually carry a family and their luggage. This might cost a fair amount, but the point is to get people to actually build a practical electric car, rather than a super streamlined one seater or a high priced sports car. Once you've shown it can be built, then you get to lowering the price.

[GIThruster]

I think you misunderstand the problem. Tesla and several others have already made great strides and the price on the Tesla S sedan is amazingly low for what you get. The problem is still the batteries. What you're asking for is completely contingent upon caps/batteries. The car manufacturer has nothing to do with it.

If you leave out the quick charge criteria, then any automaker could build what you're asking for, but it would cost $250,000 or more and most of the cost would be in the batteries. Auto makers around the world as well as high tech battery folk are all already extremely motivated to give us what we need. So a contest is not needed here. There is already hundreds of millions of dollars being funneled into this worldwide.

[Skipjack]

The problem is still the batteries. What you're asking for is completely contingent upon caps/batteries. The car manufacturer has nothing to do with it.

Agreed!
They are making some progress with batteries though. It is not revolutionary, but evolutionary. I think that Musk is betting on this for his long term plan. I would wish that progress was faster, but you take what you get.
There are two components that add up to one day hopefully make a critical mass for electric cars.
1. The price and efficiency of batteries improves.
2. The price of electricity goes down or at least does not increase.

The first one is obviously more important right now, but the electricity price is of importance as well (though below a certain cost, you can use to make hydrocarbons to power cars, so that allone is not going to help).

[GIThruster]

The price of the best batteries we have right now can't fall much lower because it's set by the cost of lithium and it is not cheap. What would make a huge difference is if someone could create caps that have the energy densities of batteries and are constructed cheaply--what EEStor has promised for ages. Sounds like a long wait for a train that don't come.

Regardless, if we can get normal utility out of the Tesla S, then we can begin developing standards for electric cars such as a standard public plug for recharging and wireless recharging. There are already a handful of competitors working the wireless recharging problem and one or more of those schemes will go public soon if they haven't already. Market forces will decide which wins out, and we'll see them go into use first for things like electric city busses in garages, depots and parking lots. Then if sufficient numbers purchase something like the Tesla S, we can hope to see wireless charging stations in places like SpaceX's CA operation and most of the Hollywood studio lots. Then municipal DMV's will start switching to electric and we'll see that infrastructure develop much as it has for natural gas. Only after we see wireless charging spread in these small ways can we expect it to be picked up by mandate. Probably the fascists in California state legislature will be the first to require it in some way--something like mandatory wireless recharging in all building parking lots that house more than 10 cars. LA is the perfect place to see this happen with the terrible smog troubles they have.

Electric cars are better than gas. They shunt power to the wheels so carefully and deliberately that the electric car is vastly more capable of 4-wheel drive with the power to the wheels matched to the requirements caused by the varying turn radius created while driving. There's no power wasted the way there is in a mechanical drive-train.

Just needs batteries.

[Skipjack]

The price of the best batteries we have right now can't fall much lower because it's set by the cost of lithium and it is not cheap.

Yes, but there are ways to get more out of the same amount of lithium, by e.g. increasing the surface area or by using certain alloys.
Batteries have been improving constantly for years now and there hardly is a day that goes by that does not have a paper or report on new ideas of how to improve them. Granted most of these ideas have some critical flaw that prevents them from becoming a commercialy viable product (e.g. not enough charging cycles, or manufacturing is too expensive, need for exotic components, etc, etc), but every now and then something sticks and progress is made. I say that we will see a doubling in capacity at half the price every decade or so. Call it Skipjacks law

[GIThruster]

Batteries have been improving constantly for years now and there hardly is a day that goes by that does not have a paper or report on new ideas of how to improve them.

I haven't looked carefully at the market in the last year but until that time I think it's fair to say all the really important advances in the last half decade were in electrode design, boosting not energy density, but power density. Thing is, Lithium batteries already have high enough power density for cars. What they don't have is the energy density we want for cars, and that can't be altered by changing the geometry of the battery or the electrodes. For a breakthrough in energy density theoretically we'd need a more energetic material than Lithium, and that's not easy to come by. I can tell you, you won't see the kind of energy density with silicon air that you see with Lithium. Those batteries will never make it into cars.

Remember too, that whatever you use needs to have a huge number of recharges available in its lifetime, not operate at very high temperature, not create a lot of waste heat, not explode when injured/penetrated, etc. Making better batteries is a tough nut to crack.

[MSimon]

Gibbs free energy is the limit. And that is not going up. Constant for 100+ years.