Thursday, April 1, 2010

So How Fast is This Thing?

Most of you are aware of the difficulties I had with the car regarding acceleration early on, and how it was my own dang fault. And most of you are aware that problem has been sorted. Which probably means most of you are wondering when I'm going to post some 0 to 60 times and what not. Here's the full story.

Right now I have the Zilla set to only draw no more than 500 amps from the batteries. The batteries voltage is 160, so that works out to 80,000 Watts. Netgain recommends that you push no more than 170 volts to the motor, and as you probably know, the Zilla can put out a maximum of 1000 amps. That means that the most power I can theoretically send to the motor is 170,000 Watts. So, as the system is configured right now, I'm allowing just under half the power possible to go to the motor.

"Why" you ask? That's a good question for which I have a couple of lame reasons. First, the Link 10 meter I have can accurately read only 500 amps. If I pull more than that, it won't hurt the meter, it just won't read it accurately. So that's not really a problem as long as I don't put myself in a situation where I need to rely on the meter to determine how much energy I've drawn from the pack. I don't want to run the pack dead and destroy the batteries. Second is that I just want to spend some time breaking the batteries in under less than full stress conditions. I don't know if this is completely necessary, but I seem to remember reading somewhere that treating them kindly the first 75 cycles can add to their longevity.

The bottom line is that I do intend to ramp it up at some point in the future, just not yet. I likely wont' leave it there, but I'll do it just long enough to get some readings and have some fun. I was thinking mid April.

Right now the car does 0-40 faster than stock. It really sets you back in your seat. Above 40 though, the acceleration begins to fall off. It reaches 60 in about 10 to 12 seconds which is higher than the stock 7 seconds, but certainly acceptable for everyday use. I've reached 80 on the freeway, and the car was still pulling. I can easily spin the tires in first gear, and the tires chirp in a hard start from second. There's no question that there's a beast under the hood, it's just leashed at the moment.

2 comments:

Gam0ra said...

Perfect! Now you know what the giant frankenstein switch is for. When it's thrown the car is in Full Out Racer configuration with everything set to allow the most power to the patch.

Jack Rickard said...

I don't think 500 amps is the limit on the Link10 Tim. It uses a 500 amp, 50 mv shunt. That means 50 mv full scale at 500 amps. That's not a limit. That's the shunt rating. Think of it as "resolution".

Jack Rickard
http://EVTV.me