RINGMEISTER27

So is this the death of motorsports?

El Crampitan

What a ridiculous question to ask.

"Is something indicative of future motorsports efforts the death of motorsports?"

No.

Hurs

Here is the future of motorsports, directly from Porsche newsroom:

"The interactive possibilities offered by the Mission R are also aimed at a young and enthusiastic motorsports community. It is pre-equipped to provide a livestream broadcast from inside the car, and the driver can connect with their fans at the touch of a button. Fans can in turn communicate directly with the driver, for example by sending them likes in real time."

It's not about being the fastest anymore. Whoever gets more Instagram likes wins the "race".

"Gentlemen, start your engines turn on your webcams!"

El Crampitan

And that is remarkably gimmicky.

That being said, if motorsport serves as the best possible test bed for platforms, then this program will only assist as we move forward. I'm not an EV die hard, but if this program helps develop a solution that will actually provide what is needed to make it so I can drive a Porsche in 50 years, then I'm all for it. Charging speeds, battery durability, alternate energy stores, power delivery refinement, heat management, I could go on. Those are all areas that the race teams will torture test and find answers to.

rjf

So there’s an old phrase, right, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck … maybe it’s a duck! 😀

Or in this case, as noted by Autoblog, a Cayman-sized sports car …

https://www.autoblog.com/2021/09/07/...oncept-munich/

Porsche757

Probably depends on which side of the EV spectrum you align with. I am a purist, so a normal-aspirated 6 cylinder engine with its accompanying sound is priceless.

sobiloff

No misconception here. I wasn’t referring to Moore’s Law (which hasn’t even been a valid semiconductor law for over a decade). I was referring to progressive improvements in battery tech, whether it’s solid state (Porsche’s current target) or something else. Maybe you still have to stop every 30 minutes, but when “refueling” only takes 15 seconds? That’s still some fun racing.

Hurs

15 sec battery recharge will never happen. Batteries function on the ion diffusion principle. There is only so many ions you can push through the material before temperature increase becomes unmanageable. This is the biggest problem with electric car hype: most people simply do not understand physical and chemical limitations involved.

Internal combustion engine was invented in 1794. Think about the progress made since, and the engineeting efforts required to squeeze just a couple of more horsepowers out of modern engine.

You know when the modern battery was invented? 1800. Just six years after the regular ICE that we know and love. Do you think scientists were just sitting on their hands for the last 200 years, and only now decided to start working on batteries? There won't be any "progressive improvements in battery technology". Don't believe the hype.

Did you know that the very first Porsche car was in fact electric? No, not the Taycan. Porsche P1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_P1

There us a good reason internal combustion became dominant. For typical use scenario, any electrical powertrain is inherently inferior to an internal combustion one. This is not a matter of opinion, this is scientific reality. And worst of all, electric mobility doesnt actually change anything. You just replace one finite resource (oil) with another finite resource (lithium). In fact, oil is better, because you can make it out of renewable resources (bio-diesel for example). You can produce oil by growing plants, (which also happen to capture CO2). You can't grow Lithium.

This is why I applaud Porsche's efforts in the area of synthetic fuels. They are running a bit under the radar, because everyone is going nuts about electric mobility.

To quote Richard Feinman: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature can't be fooled."

Denny Swift

How long ago was it when we said your exact quote, but with the word “automatic” instead of electric? Not many. But that argument is long dead (or at least unwinable).

Within 10 years, probably even sooner, virtually all “sports cars” will be electric. Buyers are chasing horse power and Ring times above all else so when 2,000 bhp electric sports cars that lap the Ring 20 seconds faster than current cars are for sale, very few “car guys” will be interested in ICE cars.

Hurs

'Ring times are limited by suspension setup, aero and tires, not horsepower. No street-legal electric car will ever beat street-legal internal combustion one on the Nürburgring. Won't happen. There will never be an electric LeMans winner for as long as ICE cars are also running alongside. In fact, I dont think there will ever be any all-electric endurance racing at all. Hybrid, yes. But never all-electric. You can't fool Nature.

In 2014 LeMans an experimental hybrid Nissan RC ZEOD has managed to successfully complete one lap running on electric power only. One lap.

Archimedes

And they’ll never, ever be a device in your pocket that has 100x the computing power of the first spacecraft that went to the moon…

Oh and you do know that 2014 was seven years ago, right?

Hurs

Wait, what?!? SEVEN YEARS?!? Well, surely, lots of progress has been made in battery tech since then, I am sure there are by now at least several of all-electric cars successfully competing in LeMans...

Speaking of the Moon... How long since the first spacecraft went there? 50 years? I am sure with the pace of the technological progress since then, we now have regular weekly passenger flights departing to various moon bases... I mean, those pocket devices surely changed the propulsion technology, all rockets must be electric by now.

Archimedes

You might want to call your stock broker on your rotary phone and see how your Amalgamated stock closed today. It must be hard for you to read your ticker tape machine with your head in the sand.

Dan Nagy

I just want to mention that new batteries are high in the R&D agenda.

Here is one below, but there is a lot of other development like sodium-ion batteries, bulk metallic glasses for casings, graphene electrodes, and on and on. We should have longer lasting and quick charging batteries to market soon.

Ex: The graphene aluminum-ion battery cells from the Brisbane-based Graphene Manufacturing Group (GMG) are claimed to charge up to 60 times faster than the best lithium-ion cells and hold three time the energy of the best aluminum-based cells.May 13, 2021

Hurs

See, this is what I mean when I say that people seem to not understand the fundamental issues behind battery technology. Why would "development like sodium-ion batteries" would result in longer lasting batteries?!? Sodium-based batteries by definition will have lower energy density and operating voltage than lithium-based one. Aluminium is even worse than sodium. This is basic chemistry. The electron configuration of sodium, its position in the periodic table of elements is not going to suddenly change, no matter how many press-releases are published.

The only advantage of sodium-ion batteries is because sodium, unlike lithium, is abundant and therefore cheap. It might be useful for large-scale energy grid storage applications where lithium would be prohibitively expensive. For advanced automotive applications sodium is terrible.