New electric sports car competes with Tesla
The Liv Inizio is a new electric sports car with Tesla-like specifications.
(Credit: EV Innovations)Note: This story was corrected to fix a typo in the company name after it initially published.
The Liv Inizio, an all-electric sports car with specs similar to the Tesla Roadster, is making its debut at the 2009 New York auto show. This new electric car is made by EV Innovations, formerly called Hybrid Technologies, which showed off the Liv Wise, a Toyota Yaris converted to an electric power train, at last year's New York auto show.
EV Innovations claims a 200-mile range for the Liv Inizio and a 0 to 60 mph acceleration time of 5 seconds. Top speed: 150 mph. About 15 inches longer than the Tesla Roadster and 6 inches wider, the Liv Inizio still manages to come in 300 pounds lighter. It uses a lithium ion battery pack to power its midmounted motor, and it has a recharge time of about 8 hours. A touch-screen LCD in the cabin displays trip information such as remaining range.
With corporate headquarters in Las Vegas and development done in North Carolina, EV Innovations uses its own battery management technology to offer electric conversions of existing cars, such as the Toyota Yaris, Smart ForTwo, PT Cruiser, and Mini Cooper, and original cars and two-wheelers.
The story uses EC Innovations, but the website says EV.
Sure would suck to run out of juice and nothing but a flat bed all the way home can help you out. I have to wonder how long it takes someone to gain enough confidence in the range of this car that they'd feel they could really drive somewhere. A plug in hybrid, even if it's with just a tiny diesel engine to get you home if you misjudge electric usage still seems like the way to go. At least until we develop 'flash charge' batteries and infrastructure to service them.
What will it's range be in 6 months? 175 miles, 150 miles.....in a year can I expect it to even make it to pick up my food stamps at the post office?
Google Maps tells me LA to NY is 2,971 miles.
If both high-end sports cars get their 300 mile range and recharge in eight hours that means they'll need about nine recharges, assuming they both start out full. So there will be 72 hours, three full days, required just to recharge the cars. If we say they do an average of 150 mph that's 19 hours of driving time, give or take, for a total trip time of 91.8 hours. We'll assume there's no time spent getting pulled over by the police for their 150 mile an hour hour jaunt.
If you race both against, say a 1985 Yugo GV (which holds the affectionate title of worst car ever created) and raced it against them you could probably say it could average 40 MPH. Even if we give the drivers 16 extra hours to sleep, eat, and watch a movie or two the Yugo still wins the race.
But just think of how we'd be saving the environment.
=)
And the lithium battery research folks (at MIT I think) just announced a breakthrough. They claim their new battery charges in 20 seconds. That fixes most of the gripes about electric cars.
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by steaven007
May 19, 2009 1:28 AM PDT
- this is a nice car
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