Lightning GT
With the oil reserves getting less day by day and the oil prices getting extreme expensive, we are looking forward to welcome new electric cars.
There has been many electric car concepts, but the most suitable for the daily use was the Tesla’s 130+ mph roadster (considerable as electric supercar), which moved into the production phase. Now the British company “Lightning Car” reveals their project, the Lightning GT.
The Lightning GT, which has very very impressive specs, will be a real hard competitor for the Tesla’s Roadster. This electric supercar has quite a monster under the hood. The 700 horsepower engine allows the car to speed up from 0 to 60 mph (0-100 kmh) in 4 seconds (just a little bit slower than Tesla). But what revolutionary is the new battery technology of the car.
The nanosafe’s Li-ion cells using nano titanate structures let the Lightning GT have a 250-mile (400 kilometers) range. Surprisingly a full recharge of the batteries takes about just 10 minutes. Yes you read it right, just 10 minutes. That is almost equal to the time that you spend to refuel your car in a gas station.
In addition to these, this new tech batteries have a life expectancy of between 12 to 20 years OR 15,000 recharge cycles, which gives you 3,750,000 miles (6,000,000 kilometers) as total, before the performance decreases significantly.
These datas are almost equal to the current cars. Batteries of the electric cars always have been a problem; some of them were too heavy, too expensive, too large or too long to recharge or too dangerous. With the Lighning GT’s shocking battery technology the disadvantages of the electric cars, like the range, the recharging time and the life of the batteries, that made people doubt if the electric cars will ever be suitable for daily use, have been removed.
In the batteries of the Lightning GT, Nanosafe Batteries by Altairnano, nano-engineered titanate was used instead of the traditional graphite structure. This is the reason why the batteries can be recharged 15,000 times before the battery drops to the a capacity under 85% of the real capacity.
Also in the test these batteries has showed none of the dangerous behaviors like overheating, punctures, drops, crashes, explosion etc. These nonasafe batteries has an extereme level of power density of 4000W/kg, much more stronger compared to a traditional gold battery which has a power density of 1500W/kg.
The only doubtful question left is that if the electric cars will be cheap enough so that everyone could benefit from them.
The Lightning GT is expected to hit the road next year. It will cost about $300,000.
