Tesla Roadster vs Nissan Leaf RC

[protomech]

Race Car, not Radio-Controlled.

50 km race in Japan.



The Tesla won, though the Leaf RC was 5 seconds faster on the fast lap. I guess they went very conservative on energy (same 24 kWh pack as Leaf street car, so only 750 Wh/mile to use). Similar to Mugen at IOMTT maybe?

At 2012 Refuel the Empulse RR was 16 seconds faster than the fastest Roadster, and 10 seconds faster than the fastest Roadster in 2011. Steve Atlas dropped another 5 seconds in the Laguna Seca TTXGP race .. you could make a reasonable argument that given excellent racers that are comfortable with the track, the Empulse RR was 15s faster than the Roadster on a 2:00 type lap. Likely even faster now.

Brammo should go race in Japan. They'd be huge there : )

[FreepZ]

It's nice to see that (as far as I can tell) all the cars started and they all finished. We're not so lucky with electric bikes at the moment, although Brammo has been very good about starting and finishing races.

[protomech]

The Leaf and the Tesla Roadster are series production vehicles, produced in quantities of several thousand. Only the converted AE86 was not, though at least its mechanical bits were series production quality.

You just can't compare series production to one-off race. Look at Nobuhiro "Monster" Tajima's motor failure at Pikes Peak. Huge budgets and significant schedule pressure do not guarantee reliability.

All four production Zeros have been dead reliable, all season long. They're also very slow.

The Empulse RR was very reliable in races last year, and fairly reliable in races this year. SNAFU at Infineon, and Eric and Steve's bikes have been taking turns with performance glitches in qualifying (LS and Miller, Steve) and race (LS, Eric). Maybe the reliability last year was due to not racing in 2010.

Either way.. you can basically have very reliable last year's performance or mostly reliable this year's performance. EV performance is advancing so quickly that if you want to stay at the top, you have to accept the risks.