Nissan to Race All-Electric at Le Mans in 2014

[AP1]

http://www.autoweek.com/article/20130226/alms/130229850#ixzz2M2AEhr7P

 

[thankyouOB]

i love this.

 

[Nubo]

Awesome!!

 

[timhebb]

Appearances like this could be instrumental in changing the public perception of EVs, especially if the cars do well.

The common misperception that all battery-powered vehicles are merely sluggish, glorified golf carts would be shattered decisively. It could get people into showrooms that might never have considered electric vehicles before.

I have to wonder how they plan to manage the range/recharging issue - battery-swapping?

 

[LTLFTcomposite]

Appearances like this could be instrumental in changing the public perception of EVs, especially if the cars do well.

Even more so if this race attracted an audience.

 

[Drivesolo]

Wow... really?... wow!

Great news. It does raise a lot of questions. Considering Nissan's first attempt at a purpose built EV racer was the Nismo RC, this Le Mans car would have to be a monumental improvement over it, by like an order or of a magnitude better. Battery swapping is almost definite. But what batts can they be planning to use for energy density? The current LiFePO4 24KWh pack wouldn't be able to take a Leaf around the circuit de la Sarthe for more than 15 minutes of driving at race pace. They'd probably need at minimum a 300bhp motor. If that photo is of their Le Mans car, it doesn't look like it'll be taking advantage of the efficiencies that the DeltaWing had so my guess is that they're planning something significantly more than 300bhp. If they're gonna need to pit more than once an hour, even if they can out pace most of the cars there, it's really gonna hurt them. Could they be thinking a range extended EV as a series hybrid? I'd think Nissan would only attempt to make this move if they knew that the could keep pace w/ the back markers. I'm guessing (hoping) that the engineers behind this project really know what they are doing and getting themselves into. Anything better than a last place finish would really do wonders for the impressions of EVs.

I hope whatever tech they use will come into play for a future mass produced performance EV soon.

 

[timhebb]

Appearances like this could be instrumental in changing the public perception of EVs, especially if the cars do well.

Even more so if this race attracted an audience.

Hope you're not France-bashing here, but yes, for American fans obviously NASCAR and Indy-car race appearances would carry more weight, i.e., attract larger audiences. Still, Le Mans is pretty prestigious, and a good enough place to start.

 

[ksnogas2112]

Flaming awesome! LeMans is a huge feather even in the experimental category. I know where I'll be next year during the race, watching it. Hopefully it's on Speed TV so I can watch.

 

[Electric4Me]

Win on Sunday, sell on Monday... It will be fun to watch as the technology improves. I would speculate that they'd use a fast battery swap technology for endurance racing.

 

[AP1]

The leading car in the last race made 33 pit stops. If Nissan can battery swap really fast, they may make it.

 

[Drivesolo]

I need some enlightenment; is there a battery chemistry exist today that has ~10 times the energy density of LiFePO4 and conceivably be used for this Nissan Le Mans car? Not theoretically, since I don't think Nissan would make this announcement based theories, they must already know what they will be using. Have any lithium nano batteries been made that are large enough or have been applied to experimental EVs? Just wondering, I think that would be key for Nissan's success.

 

[Electric4Me]

Agreed! I would bet that the car would need more than the 21 kWh in the Leaf battery per lap! (~13 km/lap)

 

[LTLFTcomposite]

Agreed! I would bet that the car would need more than the 21 kWh in the Leaf battery per lap! (~13 km/lap)

I must be missing something. Isn't that like 8 miles? Even sucking up the juice way faster than a Leaf would it seems you'd still be good for a few laps. Assuming you don't turn the heat on of course.

 

[kovalb]

This is finally a chance for racing to be interesting again. It has grown boring with NASCAR cars that bear no relation to what's in the showroom, and Indy cars that are all too similar. Cheers to both Le mans and Nissan.

What I would love to see are some real 21st century far out technologies on display. Let's power the car with a high power microwave beam and have it self driving -- otherwise the driver probably couldn't survive the radiation. The technology exists. I just wouldn't want to be around when that beam starts going out of aim. But as NASCAR says... accidents happen.

 

[Electric4Me]

Agreed! I would bet that the car would need more than the 21 kWh in the Leaf battery per lap! (~13 km/lap)

I must be missing something. Isn't that like 8 miles? Even sucking up the juice way faster than a Leaf would it seems you'd still be good for a few laps. Assuming you don't turn the heat on of course.

Okay, okay, I pulled that out of my ass, but now I'll try to back it up! :lol:

What you're missing is how fast they're going and how much fuel that uses!

You can see on pg 6 of the 2014 rule book that the allocation of fuel is being reduced from 6.13 L/lap to ~4.5 L/lap.
http://www.lemans.org/wpphpFichiers...rence_de_presse/technical_regulation_2014.pdf

Wikipedia states that gasoline has 9.7 kWh/L so that means these cars are burning >47 kWh/Lap of gasoline. Of course the electric drivetrain is much more efficient, but it still takes a lot of energy to average 150 mph on the Le Mans racing circuit. I read that the Audis were pitting about every 11 laps for fuel so if you pit much more than that you'd be way behind. Of course, as the rules advance to restrict fuel usage that will change everything.

 

[DaveEV]

Agreed! I would bet that the car would need more than the 21 kWh in the Leaf battery per lap! (~13 km/lap)

I must be missing something. Isn't that like 8 miles? Even sucking up the juice way faster than a Leaf would it seems you'd still be good for a few laps. Assuming you don't turn the heat on of course.

OK, so the 2021 winner drove 5151 km and pitted 33 times. Let's say on average they took on 45 liters of fuel - let's round that to 1500 liters which is about 3.4 km/l which is about 8 mpg. Doesn't sound too far off.

So they're burning about 4l of fuel each lap which is about a gallon / lap.

Each gallon of fuel has about 33 kWh of energy - if you assume that the ICE is about 30% efficient (no idea how close that is for a race engine), that means about 11 kWh went to propulsion. An EV under those conditions probably won't be more than 80% efficient, so you'll need about 14 kWh / lap - let's just round it to 1000 Wh/km = 1 kWh/km.

So you'll need at least 5000 kWh of energy over 33 pit stops which means that you'll need to load up at least 150 kWh of energy with every pit stop. That's a big battery - twice as big as the Model S battery and over 6 times bigger than the LEAF battery!

 

[GRA]

Wow... really?... wow!

Great news. It does raise a lot of questions. Considering Nissan's first attempt at a purpose built EV racer was the Nismo RC, this Le Mans car would have to be a monumental improvement over it, by like an order or of a magnitude better. Battery swapping is almost definite. But what batts can they be planning to use for energy density? The current LiFePO4 24KWh pack wouldn't be able to take a Leaf around the circuit de la Sarthe for more than 15 minutes of driving at race pace. They'd probably need at minimum a 300bhp motor. If that photo is of their Le Mans car, it doesn't look like it'll be taking advantage of the efficiencies that the DeltaWing had so my guess is that they're planning something significantly more than 300bhp. If they're gonna need to pit more than once an hour, even if they can out pace most of the cars there, it's really gonna hurt them. Could they be thinking a range extended EV as a series hybrid? I'd think Nissan would only attempt to make this move if they knew that the could keep pace w/ the back markers. I'm guessing (hoping) that the engineers behind this project really know what they are doing and getting themselves into. Anything better than a last place finish would really do wonders for the impressions of EVs.

I hope whatever tech they use will come into play for a future mass produced performance EV soon.

As has been pointed out repeatedly, the Leaf doesn't use a LiFePO4 battery, it's LiMn2O4.

 

[LTLFTcomposite]

Ref posts above from Electic4Me and drees

The curious part of that analysis is the extrapolation from gasoline consumption to electric in a race car. It should be possible to get some validation, wasn't Tesla showing a model S being driven at ~110 mph on the autobahn? Any idea how many mpkWh they were getting on that run?

Here's another comparison, a Leaf takes 6 kWh to accomplish what a comparable car could do with one gallon of gasoline. So instead of going 25 miles in a Camry on a gallon of gas, a race car would only cover 8 miles (one lap), and a corresponding EV race car would take 6 kWh to do the same lap with a proportional 1/3 efficiency. So your Leaf pack should be good for three laps. Maybe closer to 2400kWh for the whole race.

Who knows. It's fun to think about.

 

[DaveEV]

EVs will have the benefit of regeneration under braking which the gas/diesel cars don't have the advantage of.

Interesting statistic - cars are under full throttle 72% of each lap with the fastest cars topping out around 330 km/h (205 mph).
http://www.racecar-engineering.com/articles/le-mans/le-mans-24-hours-2012-technical-preview/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Last year's winning car the Toyota TS030 hybrid is specified to have 395 kW max power and weighs 900 kg (< 2000 lbs).
http://www.ultimatecarpage.com/car/4966/Toyota-TS030-Hybrid.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

To determine upper bounds let's assume that the car is under 100% power for 3m30s (about the time it takes for these cars to run a lap)
If we assume that the 72% reference above is in regards to time with a lap time of around 3:30 at best, that's ~2m30s at 395 kW or 16.6 kWh spent at full throttle - roughly in the same ballpark as my earlier 14 kWh / lap estimate if we assume the rest of the time spent under partial throttle is able to be captured back under regenerative braking.

The real question is - how is Nissan going to squeeze a 150 kWh battery into a car which weighs under 2,000 lbs! A battery pack alone could easily weigh that much - a fairly high energy density li-ion cell rated at 200 Wh/kg would weigh 750 kg. That's going to be one heavy race-car. You really need the magical Envia 400 Wh/kg cells which would cut the pack weight in half to 375 kg which would probably be manageable. Still - a racing V8 probably weighs under 150 kg and carries about 50 kg of fuel - the battery alone still weighs nearly twice as much.

Fun stuff for back-of-the-envelope calculations!

 

[Electric4Me]

EVs will have the benefit of regeneration under braking which the gas/diesel cars don't have the advantage of.

The 2014 rules show that all cars will be "hybrids" with KERS so that's part of how they will drop their consumption by ~25% for that year.