Fastest Electric Car Tech - Cool Stuff: How It Works - S01 EP02 - Science Documentary
foreign on this episode of cool stuff I'll find out what drives the world's fastest electric car put myself on the firing line in one of the most advanced armored passenger vehicles in the world thanks to one of the fastest most sensitive digital cameras on the market the world is full of cool stuff [Music] truly how come I'm not feeling any heat and I want to know how it works I'll be riding the Leading Edge of innovation pulling apart Today's Hottest Technologies and presenting them in ways you'd never imagined join me on a journey into the Hidden World of cool stuff [Applause] electric cars aren't known for their electrifying speed but Ian Wright the designer of this X1 prototype is ready to face off against an Italian supercar and I'm along for the ride are you ready Scott Let's Race let's put the helmets on the X1 has a top speed of 112 miles per hour the Lamborghini can reach 205. know who's gonna win well think again all righty [Music] the X1 has no gearbox no clutch and a motor with just one moving part you can fill the tank at any 220 volt wall socket but on this tight track it's just beaten one of the world's Premier sports cars it's the X1 Secret well for starters it's unusual engine [Music] a typical internal combustion engine has more than 200 moving parts the electric X1 has just three main components batteries to supply the power an inverter to control the current and a motor to drive the wheels the x1's Lithium-ion batteries pack unbelievable power 400 volts at 4000 amps about what you get from a small lightning bolt next the inverter this power unit converts DC into AC by switching the DC current on and off thousands of times a second by varying the switching ratio the inverter acts as the x1's transmission controlling the motor's torque and speed [Music] finally the x1's high performance motor red lines at 14 000 RPM and generates around 300 horsepower that's twice as much as your everyday family car and the X1 is half the weight [Music] [Applause] but the real reason it can beat out a Lamborghini on a tight course is its ability to maintain Optimum Torque from the start of the race to the Finish if you look at all the different parameters to optimize and race cars the ability to accelerate out of the turns is the most important thing and let's talk to see how this works let's go to instant replay okay hold it right there after 50 feet we've already got two car lengths on the Lamborghini that's because the X1 is operating at a constant Optimum torque and the Lamborghini is not [Applause] in any two-wheel drive car you've hit maximum torque just before your Wheels start slipping cars need to change to change accelerate it's an attemptible for them to maintain that perfect Edge particularly off the starting line when the trouble with the standing stop with a gas engine is you've got to match the the talk to what the wheels want and that means you've got to slip the clutch or slip the wheels so one way or another you don't get you know precise control of the torque but with electric mode as you do program the x1's computer to run an Optimum torque whenever the car accelerates on any track surface [Applause] tires can handle 1500 foot-pounds of torque before they start slipping so the computer keeps the tires just a fraction below that critical number at all times [Music] and the X1 maintains its maximum acceleration at the start on the straightaways and around corners far my stint in the passenger seat of Ian Wright's X1 electric car has been mind-blowing and as I discovered the electric motor has an added advantage you can really see this with our thermal image camera gas powered cars lose up to 80 percent of their energy through heat loss and friction the X1 loses just 20 percent in these thermal images blue is cold red is hot and white is super hot even after a couple of laps pushing 100 miles per hour the X1 is cooler than my hard-working film crew and much cooler than the Lamborghini especially around the engine compartment and all that heat is wasted energy [Music] now the X1 faces a tougher challenge we've already wiped the floor with a sports car but can we beat a real race car this is John condren's NASCAR 550 horsepower 350 cubic inch V8 are you ready to race us well I'm willing to give it a little test will be just fine do you think you can beat us here in this electric vehicle well I don't know I've been watching you earlier today and this thing is very quick let's race start it up actually we're starting aren't we we asked that start it up [Music] [Music] what does it feel like to beat a NASCAR oh that's cool I didn't think we would really you don't think so they're proper race cars you know it's a true frame it's on race tires yeah it's 550 horsepower so and you just you left it in the dust off the line that thing is really quick it's crazy there's no wheel spin uh the constant velocity joints on that just keeps spinning and spinning and I'm just watching the whole back end of the car it's kind of neat watching us from behind it is it's very interesting nice view no it's not a night no it's not a nice view off the starting line the NASCAR's performance is no better than the Lamborghinis in the X1 we hit 60 miles an hour in 170 feet about the width of a large intersection [Music] once again Optimum torque maintained by the onboard computer outruns pure muscle we've all got more power than we need it's controlling the tool another decisive factor is the weight of the car the car is nearly 3 000 pounds thanks to its 100 pound motor and 540 pound battery pack the X1 weighs in at only 1500. half the weight to haul off the starting line but as I'm about to find out the x1's advantages don't end at the racetrack if you're building gas engine cars if you build a really fuel efficient one it'll be slow but that's not true for electric cars I mean this car does 0 to 60 in 3.0 seconds it does zero
to 100 miles an hour in 6.8 and yet it does the equivalent of 170 miles per gallon in City driving High performing and energy efficient I think this really could be the car of the future [Music] it's like a scene from a Hollywood movie except I'm really here white knuckling it in the passenger seat okay see that guy he's coming after us the truth is scenes like this play out in real life all over the world just one we've got a red truck behind us as a diplomat elected official or wealthy businessman suddenly finds himself targeted by the bad guys [Applause] it's chasing us he's getting them right on our tail the chase is on the odds don't seem to be on our side we can't get rid of this guy but despite appearances it's Advantage us you see the car I'm sitting in is actually a four-wheeled fortress let's drop the spikes [Music] oh it worked welcome to the world of Maximum protection I'm at the international armor Incorporation high-tech Chop Shop were for about a hundred grand you can transform your everyday car into a real Road Warrior [Music] take a regular car that would be in any showroom Nationwide completely disassemble the Car Armor it and put it back together so the client is protected but nobody else knows that he's driving an armored car this standard SUV body is being bolstered with bulletproof Steel some of the Steelers steel they're already been put in the card ballistic Steel is right here in the B post area you can also see that the firewall for this particular car is all taken care of as well this takes about three days to put this together because all of this steel comes pre-cut when the guys are done the vehicle will look just like a regular old SUV but it will be twice as heavy and virtually impenetrable [Music] at International Armory they modify cars not just to survive the odds straight bullet but to withstand a serious armed assault your average cars galvanized steel May prevent rust but it sure can't stop high-powered rifle fire from 30 feet the lead actually went all the way through because of the speed and velocity of that specific ground this would have gone through the outside door into the passenger compartment and killed or severely injured the occupant inside the car look out for this guy but it's a different story when the car is lined with Ballistic Steel the bullet pierces the door's outer skin but the quarter inch ballistic steel below not only stops the bullet it shatters it on impact no perforation whatsoever bullet totally disintegrating on impact if you have a car made of this type of material you're going to be very safe yeah safe enough to be able to take multiple hits on the piece of Steel and still get still get out of the Kill Zone to understand how this works I needed a crash course in Steel as I discovered there are more than 3 000 grades of Steel but they all contain the same basic ingredients iron and carbon the more carbon the harder the steel but carbon also makes the steel more brittle so what they do is carefully Heat cool and reheat the steel this process called tempering produces steel that's both strong and supple oh the strength and steel used in these Armored Cars has 20 times more carbon than the steel in normal cars [Music] the factory also adds high levels of chromium a very hard metal and nickel a very dense metal it's a blend that's tough enough to stop an 1800 mile per hour bullet voted stopping a bullet with steel is one thing safety off but I had to wonder how do you stop it with glass the answer transparent toughest Nails substance called polycarbonate resin thermoplastic safety on in bulletproof windows layers of this polycarbonate are sandwiched between panels of regular glass it's multi-layers of glass and polycarbonate and polyvinyl butyl which is a material that actually glues the panels of the glass together and it's a thick sandwich typical car windshields are about 1 8 of an inch this bulletproof glass is two inches thick once that glass is adhered and put in an autoclave and baked that's what gives it its Clarity and its curvature and then the safety on the inside is the polycarbonate to keep those rounds from going through here's what happens when a bullet meets bulletproof glass as it tears into the layers the bullet's energy is transferred to the plastic [Music] it runs out of momentum before it can make it through to the other side and into the car this is the inbound surface of the glass all that energy was stopped by the multiple layers of glass and then the inside the inside occupants of the of the vehicle would have been protected by this polycarbonate layer on the inside of the glass panel but just in case you're dealing with a particularly pesky Hitman this amazing car has one more trick up its sleeve a nice common here electrified in the car electric handles wired to deliver a nasty 120 volt shock just like sticking your finger in a power socket [Music] and so ends my cameo in this action film but in real life cars like these are saving people's lives all over the world [Music] much of our Lives goes by in a blur slow things down and there's a whole other world out there the bullet I've just fired is slicing through the air at 3 200 feet a second but all I can see is a puff of smoke the human eye simply can't process an image that moves at more than 60 frames per second to catch the action you've got a photograph at high speed a thousand times faster than a normal camera Go Up High yeah well I have to for more help understanding high-speed photography I've turned to Ken Hahn from NAC image technology here's the cartridge and then see it ejecting out and look at that see it floating there is ejecting well if you think about it your normal video camera is 30 frames per second Motion Pictures are 24 frames per second here we're running at 1 000 frames per second and above thank you a shot recorded at one thousand frames a second then played back at 30 frames a second will be seen as slow motion to capture the detail in these shots you can see your shoulder going back yeah Ken is using nac's latest digital high-speed camera memory cam K5 it shoots at more than 300 times the rate of normal human vision [Music] people have a digital camera at home this is just like a digital snapshot camera except it's taking snapshots very very fast most digital cameras rely on a Charged coupled device or CCD to convert light into electrons which is fine for normal photography but doesn't provide the light sensitivity you need at shutter speeds of more than a thousand frames or more instead high-speed cameras use an incredibly sensitive sensor called a CMOS short for complementary metal oxide semiconductor a normal video camera can only register 30 frames a second this baby handles more than 2 000. and we then store that data in RAM memory such as what you'd have in your PC on the camera [Music] memo cam has 16 gigabytes of RAM memory that's around 15 times more than an average home computer but it needs every byte because for each second of action the camera records it uses up one gig of memory [Music] it's a massive amount of ram but you've got to remember the memory cam is extracting huge amounts of information in a very short time [Music] 60 seconds of recording time would be hours of playback time oh my gosh and the added advantage of digital technology is yep we're ready you're never gonna miss the shots cameras that record on film a digital camera can keep rolling indefinitely we can constantly overwrite that memory we can constantly record and when we hit the trigger actually what we're doing is telling it to stop recording press a button and you've just captured the last 10 seconds [Music] high-speed photography opening up a whole new world with a camera that's faster than a speeding bullet all right [Music] in the fast lane it can be a thrill a minute dose of danger or that magic moment when a blurry World Turns crystal clear we'll see you next time on cool stuff [Music] thank you foreign
2023-10-24 20:04
