Performance Hybrids: A Modest Proposal
Following up on Chris’s post from Wednesday about whether a hybrid can be a performance car (I say yes, there’s no reason why they couldn’t be). I have a modest proposal:
Take a Caterham 7 chassis (see picture above), no drivetrain needed, just the differential.
Bolt an electric motor directly to the diff. Don’t mess around, get something like the starter motor out of an ocean going tug. An electric motor with enough torque and power to send a pound of bacon to the asteroid belt.
Next, to the motor you hook up a couple of high performance capacitors and a couple, maybe four, batteries (the caps are for bursts of power, the batteries are for sustained usage).
Hooked up to the batteries (through a controller, natch) is a diesel-fueled generator; you know, something like a little household generator. Fuel it with bio-diesel, and locate it in the engine bay, just on the other side of the fire wall (centralize the mass boys, always centralize the mass). In front of the gen-set goes the batteries, in front of them, goes the capacitors.
Essentially, the thing works like a diesel/electric train. The generator turns at a constant, fuel efficient RPM, its sole job is to charge the electrical system, which in turn, powers the tug starter that drives the rear wheels. It would get incredible mileage, and it’s pollution would be just as low. Unlike a pure electric, it would have the range of any gasoline-fueled car (i.e. station to station). Unlike a gasoline-fueled car, it would pollute far less.
All of this stuff can mount very low, and I would be that the whole assemblage (the motor, the batteries, the capacitors and the generator) would weigh less than an inline 4, a six-speed tranny and a drive line.
Caterham can already make a a 7 variant that weighs less than 1000 pounds, and I bet this set up, at the curb, would weigh less then that. The performance envelope could easily be in the less than 5 Sec. 0 – 60 range, with concurrent breaking and skid pad figures.
And that is a set up that could seriously embarrass a whole bunch of cars (I’m looking at you, Fast & Furious crowd). That could be a car that could rearrange what people perceive as a “hybrid”.
Yes, yes, I know, this is a very minimalist car, but I bet you could do the same drive set up in an MR2. And I bet if you were to do some bespoke packaging, you could do something really nice with a Lotus Elise.
I’d love to do this myself, but I don’t have the garage space … so one, or a bunch of you, should give this one a go.
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