The Japanese Electric Vehicle Club has just earned one of the most coveted spots on Earth – a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. They did it by smashing the current record for longest electric vehicle trip on a single charge by driving their custom built Daihatsu Mira a whopping 623 miles. For all of us electric vehicle enthusiasts out there this is exciting and sad at the same time. We’re excited that the JEVC proved electric vehicles can go the extra mile — or miles — but sad that this is a custom vehicle which means we can’t go out and buy one right now.
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This was not an official project of Daihatsu Mira, but they can’t be unhappy about the press. The Japan Electric Vehicle Club seems to have wanted to smash that world record to pieces and chose this car to do it with. The little electric car ran technology built around 8,320 Sanyo li-ion cells (totaling about 807lbs) which make up about half the weight of a commercial Mira.
The trip took 27 and a half hours and was driven on the Tsukuba circuit in Shimotsuma, Japan — which means they were driving at a grandma’s pace of 23 miles per hour on average. Although the closest commercial vehicle to this amazing record is the Nissan leaf — which we wrote about here — clocking in at 100 miles per charge, we’re hoping that the electric car makers take a few hints from the JEVC and start implementing whatever genius technology they used to zoom zoom the distance from Portland, Oregon to San Francisco, California without having to stop for any juice.
+ Japan Electric Vehicle Club
Via Engadget
I am interested in buying new or converting my holden-opal vectra 1997 model to a compressed air car. I live in Victoria Australia.
Any new electric cars are unlikely in the near future to get past our archaic mandated Automotive Australian Standards to be permitted on the road. The standards were relevant for the much heavier combustion engine vehicles and the particular camber on our road. I am keen to reduce my carbon footprint and I currently use public transport 90% of my travel activity.
regards
Lisa Simpson
Lets see, the half of the car was a battery
400kg multiplied by aprox 150 watthours / kg equals 60 kilowatthours of energy. Therefore it uses 6 kwh on 100km, or in gasoline/diesel 1,5-2 litre/100km. Where is this really efficient, going on a flat oval at constant speed of 40kmh? To compare it somehow more to a real car: fuel efficiency decreases by a factor of 2 when you double the speed, its mainly because of air resistance which grows by a factor of 8 related to the speed. This car would need 3-4l at 90kmh with a combustion engine. 400kg of batterys is a) not only to heavy and impractical as you could never ride with 4 persons and luggage in such a car, and b) expensive like hell due to the rare resources in metals like lithium. So another green hype car for the history books.