You could go years without "fueling" if we had nuclear powered cars. Hmmm, "fuel up" every 12 years. Sounds good to me.

Maybe the power source is to tap into the delusional minds of all the die hard Ford owners?

Well, it will have to be revolutionary if they unveil anything. The car is supposed to have a 500 horsepower electric motor. At 746 W/HP that equals 373 kW. That is a lot of power.

Somehow, they have managed to convince venture capitalists to support the project. Maybe, just maybe it does have merits.

Years between charges? My Prius does that already.

Just add gas.

My first thought was Shelby is a well known name and I doubt they would mislead -- but it's Jarod Shelby, not Carroll Shelby. So who knows.

Only thing I can think of that would be able to drive a 500hp motor and take "years" between charges would be some sort of miniature fission reactor.

Which I cannot believe the government would allow them to put into a production vehicle.

Maybe they use a long extension cord.

Tom

Could be a sasquatch on a treadmill....

It would have to be nuclear since the physics wouldn't make sense otherwise (no, I haven't made the calculations...)

I read a few months ago in BusinessWeek about a company called Hyperion (http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/) that makes small nuclear power modules that are something like batteries that are supposed to be able to power a small town for years.

Don't know if these could fit into a car, if they would be cheap enough, safe enough or legal. Not to mention about whether people would want these to be driving around on the highways.

Also how about something like this (but it would take a lot of them): BetaBatt, Inc. Direct Energy Conversion Technology

I can't speak to their claims for their new electric car, but these guys are apparently for real. They set out to build the world's fastest production car and did it. Watch this video from Jay Leno's Garage website with CEO Jerod Shelby:
Jay Leno's Garage
Over and over, Jay says in essence, "they said they were gonna do something, they did it, and now they have the world record." Jay is skeptical at first, but completely won over after a test drive.
In the interview, Jerod mentions Shelby working on exciting green project". It may be a powersource that is real, but only practical on cars that sell for $500,000.

Maybe it's powered by the driver's ego



Naw, seriously...Shelby's been around forever, and is a well known name to any racing fan. If it's years between charges, it would have to be some completely new chemistry and may not seem like a conventional battery at all.

Or maybe those new Nano-wire Li-Ion batteries with something like 10x the capacity (so if you only fuel up once every 3 weeks, that would be 30 weeks - close to a year).

Nuclear would fit the bill, but doesn't quite sound street legal.

No no no ... not fission . . .

FUSION. It's already been done!



Flux capacitor and all.

Jarod Shelby? I know Carroll Shelby is well known, but I've never heard of Jarod Shelby. But I'm not a major gearhead...

Here's a more current link on the hyperion.

Next Big Future: Hyperion uranium hydride nuclear reactor gets eastern european customer

$25 million a station, and even if it could be scaled down (doubtful IMHO) to fit in a car, not very many people could afford them.

As for the BetaBatt, I get the impression it's for very small scale applications (i.e., microprocessors or smaller, etc.)

Dave M.

Looks like just a typo to me. Long time between charges and many years between (battery) changes would make sense.

Oh man! You got me! I actually went and looked that up on google...


Edit:
Correction for mr zorg: "googled"

Doh. Looked it up? ROFL. Soooooo not a geek.

I have a plausible explanation but I would be utterly shocked if this made it into a production vehicle of any kind.

Radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs, are handy little devices. They use the heat of nuclear decay to generate eletricity (on the order of a few hundred watts) for an extremely long time. We're talking decades. And while it would be hard to get enough juice out of one to drive a car directly, what if you have a big battery as an intermediate storage device? It becomes a plug-in hybrid that needs no plug. It's kind of a neat idea except that you have a bunch of special nuclear material in your trunk. Suddenly the EMF fears don't seem like a big deal!

So I am a nuke and I thought this was BS.

Nano flashlight

I guess not. I am attached to a big time University and I can't believe I haven't heard of this. Pretty nifty, thanks for the link.