In today’s latest edition of the WebRidesTV.com look of the 2007 Los Angeles Auto Show, we see the ever beautiful Jessica interviewing Iciro Sugioka, the Chief Science Officer of Volvo, about the all new C30 Concept from Volvo. This concept is actually termed a “recharge hybrid” that you could potentially plug into a socket at your home to recharge. Each wheel has a motor that can produce 1000NM of force, which equates to roughly 200hp from the entire car. Also, this ride will only use the gasoline engine to power the batteries, rather than directly powering the car. So essentially, this ride is could very well be the first production car that will fully drive off electricity! Not only that, but the gasoline powered generator will only start after the electric engines have drained most of the battery’s power, at which point the driver must have driven at least 60 miles.
Electric motors also offer several things over their gasoline counterpart. Probably the first thing that people notice is that the electric motor has no torque curve, as opposed to a gasoline motor. Instead, when you start accelerating, you are using 100% of the car’s power, and this will continue until you let go of the throttle. Also, electric motors are proving to become more efficient, that is they require less electric power to produce more kinetic power. This means that you don’t have to carry as much weight in batteries, and the dependence on the gasoline engine to accelerate is virtually nonexistent.
Another feature that the new ReCharge brings to the table is the complete absolution of a transmission. Instead, the new wheel motors move without any gears – thus eliminating the power loss due to the physical laws of leverage. This, coupled with the smaller gasoline engine, developing battery technologies and the 60 mile range will probably make the Volvo ReCharge’s post-2015 production class a very popular car, indeed.
