ZENN Motor Company Details Plans for Highway Capable ZENN Powered by EEStor!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the present stage of development of EEStor's project is that they have succeeded in refining to the necessary purity the material they plan to use as the dielectric in their super-capacitor.

They have not actually demonstrated a super-capacitor. It's all well and good for Zenn to announce that they plan to build an 80-mph 250-mile car around EEEStor's super-capacitor, but you might want to postpone your celebration until EEEStor actually manages to fabricate a capacitor and demonstrate that the touted dielectric actually works. Then they still have to mass-produce them at a reasonable cost. And the fast-charging will require a high-amperage, high-voltage charger which at today's prices is likely to cost around $100,000 and require heavier transmission lines than exist in residential neighborhoods today.

The new Zenn car is probably about ten years behind the Volt in terms of realistic development schedule.

 

My point was that EEStor is probably at least a decade away from commercializing an ultra-capacitor. Someone's going to have an affordable electric car on the road long before that. Tesla has put its Roadster on the road for $100,000. The next car available will be less. And so on. Zenn may be one of the early affordable entrants. But the EEStor announcement is meaningless.

 

And I sincerely hope I'm wrong about the time frame. A commercially-viable ultra capacitor would radically change the entire automotive landscape for the better. But I'm not going to let the prospect of an ultracapacitor "some day" prevent me from driving on batteries today. (And you obviously agree with me, since you, too, are driving on batteries. )

 

Five-minute charging is an inherent potential of capacitors. It will require chargers that do not yet exist, so it will not be a real feature for some time yet. For the near future, the car will charge in several hours at home using 110 or 220 volts, and 20 or 30 amp circuits. Actual home charging will be limited to about 6 kilowatts on a dryer circuit, or 2 kilowatts on a "regular" circuit. (Or about 3 kilowatts if you run 110 volts off a 30-amp circuit, as I do for my Xebra.)

The important thing about fast charging is not for home use or near-term use. It's the long-term potential for a new infrastructure of fast charging stations on the highway. That will require a huge investment, but will enable long-distance electric driving. The ultra capacitor, if it becomes a reality, will make fast charging technologically possible, once the decision to make the investment is made.

Safety in this context is not a problem. Providing the systems are regularly inspected, you can design a plug that does not become live until it's fastened in place and no high-voltage connectors are exposed. Will there be accidents? Yes. Are there accidents with gasoline? Yes.

A bigger safety issue than the charging system is the capacitor itself. Capacitors can discharge explosively if there is a short or a breakdown of the dielectric. Careful measures will have to be taken. And we'll accept the risk, just as we accept the risk of driving a gasoline bomb.

Nobody needs a fast charger at home. As you point out, the wattage involved would be very dangerous. But what's more important in the home than fast charging is off-peak timing, and that issue is trivial and can be built into the charger for maybe five cents worth of computing power and a few bucks for the relay.

 

I am less than impressed by grandiose announcements with typos in them.

Note the redundant use of "dollars" after having used a dollar sign. Nit-picking? Perhaps. But it looks like some guy throwing off an email in 5 minutes rather than a serious public relations effort that had any attention or effort applied to it.

And the fact that the EEStor capacitor does not actually exist yet, means that before the CityZENN can actually be sold, EEStor must actually invent the capacitor, then must design the process for mass-manufacture, then must build the factory, and finally actually produce them in quantity.

No wonder they didn't bother to take another 5 minutes to proof-read the announcement.

I expect to see the CityZENN on the roads about a year after the Volt. Which is to say some time around 2050.