Subj : Electric Car Fizzles
To   : ALL
From : TOM WALKER
Date : Tue May 10 2005 07:53 am

Well the British attempt to break the over 2000 Lb  Electric Car speed
record failed. In fact they couldn't even get the car to run.

As a piece of trivia on the Present Record holder it was in a car
powered by NiMH "AA" batteries. 12,000 of them arranged in a
series/parallel arangement. That group is prepairing a car to
breal theri own record of 245 MPH(they also hold the One Way
Record of 257.894 but without a return run it is not
official).The car will be powered by 6,040 MiMH "Sub-C" cells for this
attempt.

*****

Electric car fizzles in speed record bid
Team will try again next year
Sunday, May 8, 2005 Posted: 11:38 AM EDT (1538 GMT)

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (AP) -- A British team trying to set a speed record
for an electric car gave up because the mustard-yellow, torpedo-shaped
vehicle wouldn't start for a third morning in a row.

They plan to return next year for another try at topping 300 mph (480
kph).

The 34-foot-long (10.4-meter-long) "e(equal)motion" car ran well in
England and on a single practice run on a desert highway about 120 miles
(200 kilometers) west of Salt Lake City, but then ran into a series of
baffling electrical problems.

"In the end, we realized that whatever it was was not fixable at this
particular moment in time so we've abandoned the attempt," driver Mark
Newby said Saturday.

Engineers working around the clock were able to start the car in a warm
garage, but it shorted out on the test track.

First they blamed a battery problem, then condensation inside a drive
controller, which sends battery power to the car's electric motors. On
Saturday, another problem occurred in the controller unit in the nose of
the car.

Newby said he hoped to find out what exactly went wrong when the car is
inspected after returning to Great Britain.

"We were all fired up and ready to go," Newby said. "The problem is in
the area of one of the circuit boards, but we're not sure exactly what's
causing it."

Insurance and the team's permit to use a 7.2-mile (11.6-kilometer)
stretch of the highway both expired Saturday. They were trying to break
the record on a remote stretch of Nevada highway about 40 miles (65
kilometers) south of West Wendover, Nevada, a small casino town just
across the Utah state line.

The "e(equal)motion" sponsor, ABB, a Swiss manufacturer of industrial
motors and robots, supplied a pair of industrial motors for the car that
can briefly turn out 500 horsepower -- as much as a 2005 Corvette with a
7-liter, V8 engine.

The electricity to spin the motors came from a set of 52 batteries,
which put the vehicle in the more-than-2,200-pound (998-kilogram) record
attempt class.

The record for an electric car is 245 mph (395 kph), set by an American
team in 1999 using a similarly streamlined car powered by thousands of
"AA" batteries. That record, sanctioned by the Federation Internationale
de L'Automobile, was set on Utah's nearby Bonneville Salt Flats, which
are too wet at this time of year for speed trials.

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