EVs have a weight issue that fundamentally constrains their overall design. It is really a tough engineering problem to try to shave weight off of everything, because you are starting out with a 700kg battery replacing a 400kg engine + transmission, so you are ~300kg in the hole, and need to remove 300 kg from the rest of the car. That's why they do crazy stuff like use the battery as part of the structural frame, to save on metal there. Every extra kilogram reduces range. Solid things are made hollow. Metal is replaced by plastic. Fabrics are thinner or replaced with lighter-weight engineered materials. Lots of things are removed. Physical buttons gone, flourishes gone, handles gone. Seats are made thinner and with less material. See how they brag about a simpler new steering wheel that is 400g lighter?
All of that and still they come up with a 2300 kg compact two row SUV.
So, if you are going to be redesigning everything anyway to try to get rid of as much weight as possible, why not hire a designer known for sparse, minimalistic, clean design? It makes sense. It may not be what Ferrari buyers want, but you can't really blame Ferrari for giving it a try. We'll see how well it sells.
I think you are wrong on the "weight issue" regarding EV. ICE cars have a weight issue as they consume more gas depending on the weight, which is the case to a much lesser extent in BEV.
At high speed, aerodynamics become the main factor reducing range.
With urban stop and go traffic, regenerative braking lowers the weight's impact massively.
BMW's i3 was constructed with the same mistake: let’s reduce weight to gain range, which didn’t pay off. It added to the cost due to expensive composite materials, lesser to the range.
Manufacturers learned from BMW's mistake and build the body with conventional metal sheets.
Nevertheless reducing weight has its advantages: using less material saves expenses and helps driving dynamics.
Range is a minor factor.
Ferrari will sell all that they make. If you want to purchase one of the highly desirable low-volume models you can't just walk into a dealership and write a check. You first have to purchase a few of the high-volume models to earn enough "points" on their internal customer priority list. A lot of rich guys will buy a Luce just for that purpose, and then leave it in their garage or maybe drive it to the country club occasionally.
For the type of buyer you describe this vehicle parked in the garage, to speculate, may be capable of doing double duty as an automated battery backup for the estate nearby to store energy during times of excess grid capacity and to discharge during periods of high demand or grid interuptions. I would be interested to know if the vehicle includes this capability, or if it could be easily modified to offer this capability. Probably is preferable to an onsite diesel generator for example even if it is not an exactly comparable situation, just due to lower local emissions.
You've got to be kidding. The people who can afford multiple luxury cars aren't going to mess around using them as backup batteries just to save a few bucks on generators for their mansions.
Weight doesn’t make all that much difference to EV range: aerodynamics are a much more important factor.
Handling and “sports car feel” are affected by weight, though, and this is the real reason that Ferrari would want to cut weight to a minimum on their EV.
I wonder what the speed/weight tradeoff is on a Ferrari though. Eg on a Bugatti they can put in a beast of an engine (heavy) because their buyers care only about power output and if it gets 8 miles to a gallon who cares.
On an electric sports car, where does the break lie between extra weight for a powerful battery and too much weight to make the car go vroom?
Side note: I wonder if, in 20 years, petrol cars will the preserve of the very rich and the very poor.
Manufacturers like Ferrari, Porsche and Lotus focus on HP per KG. This is why they build ultralight versions of their cars. Porsche's 911 GT series trade glass windows with plexiglass and badges with stickers. Ferrari omits carpets and inner body panels leaving welds bare. Lotus re-invents everything make things lighter and with less material.
Mercedes, Bentley and Bugatti likes to build road missiles. Fast and comfortable, luxurious cars with insane straight line performance and stats, but not made to be thrown from corner to corner in a track. Since these cars are heavier and have somewhat higher center of gravity, they can't pull higher G numbers on skid pads and tracks. They also have somewhat slower lap numbers (Maybe Mercedes' SLR McLaren is an exception to this, but it's half McLaren, so...).
If you want to go to the edge of it, see McLaren and Pagani. They take the track-optimized, lightweight car design to extremes. Esp. McLaren.
Edit: I mixed up CLK-GTR with SLR. My bad, brain haze. Sorry.
> Side note: I wonder if, in 20 years, petrol cars will the preserve of the very rich and the very poor.
Sure, except the very poor will be eco criminals (due to being unable to maintain their equipment to relevent emission standards/pay the associated offset fees) and will be selectively hounded and exploited by law enforcement.
At some point, the petrol stations start closing, and petrol vehicles start having range anxiety. The antiques get served by a little EV bowser service that comes round and delivers, but you won't be able to drive them in cities.
(diesel will hang on a lot longer, so there may be a period of refinery retuning and petrol stations serving only diesel?)
Well you cant just get rid of Gasoline in the refinery process. Crude oil essentially gets destilled. The different fractions are split based on boiling point/weight. Heavy fuel oil-> Diesel-> Kerosene->Gasoline-> Naphta-> Propane/Butane whatever. That is why making new Plastic is so incredibly cheap. You need (i think) ethylene to make plastic. Ethylene is a byproduct of oil refining. If no one buys it, the whole refinery grinds to a halt because you are not allowed to burn it anymore. They practically give this stuff away. Same thing would happen to gasoline. If fewer people need Gasoline, it will become crazy cheap since you cant really do anything with it, except burn it. So it really isnt that easy. IF you get rid of Diesel/Gasoline you will also get rid of the entire petrochemical industry.Elastomers, plastics, lubricants. A huge lot depends on the sweet dino juice.
Cracking and chain lengthening* were covered in my GCSE in chemistry, and given GCSEs are the UK school leaving qualification, anything in them can't be particularly difficult or mysterious in industrial practice.
Not claiming this would be free or anything like that, just that a well-known possibility exists.
* I forget the technical name, my GCSEs were 26 years ago
Plastic isn't a single material. Some plastic materials (e.g PE, polyethylene or PVC, polyvinyl chlorine, but also others that use ethylene derivatives as intermediates) require ethylene, but there certainly are plastic materials which are produced without any involvement of ethylene or other petrolium derivatives.
Laws can always change as more and more people make use of loopholes to avoid taxes. Same how EVs lost their subsidies as more and more people are buying them. Governments always adapt to losses in tax revenue by finding new things to tax, it's the only thing they're efficient at.
At some point EVs will be cheaper on the sticker price and cheaper to run. The US car industry is desperately trying to prevent this, but it looks like China is crossing that point.
(I would be very interested in sticker price / fuel price / subsidy / tax accounting EV vs ICE breakdowns from inside China)
That's extremely cute. The Euro version is as low as E13,000: https://nikrob.lt/ ; let's not forget that depreciation will make secondhand versions even cheaper.
And in some jurisdictions, there are "incentives to scrap older, more polluting cars in exchange for a grant or discount towards a newer, cleaner vehicle"
Horses were always for the rich - knights would use a horse in battle and ride the horse other places to show off their money. The "common man" walked - you (unless you are handicapped - yes I know you are very out of shape) can walk as far in a day as a horse. When the "common man" needed to haul a load they would prefer oxen which while slower than a horse were overall a lot cheaper to feed.
We think about farming with horses, because in the American West the type of plow that worked best needed faster speeds than the oxen could handle and so for 100 years the horse is what farmers used. Horses were also useful for cowboys chasing cows - again an activity most common in the western planes.
Keep in mind that, especially for performance cars, the instant torque and low center of gravity (because those cells can go in the floor) really helps.
Yes, the added weight is bad for handling which is a shame especially in a car like this.
The weight savings aren't that big of a deal, they do that in every car and it's mostly marketing. But if you're one of those brands that can sell the same car, but use some fancy metals and such for a 50k markup, why would you not.
The Porsche Taycan and related Audi e-tron GT are considered basically the best-handling production cars built so far, and these come in at around 2.4 tons or something. They are of course quite low for EVs, barely taller than a 911 iirc.
Even the ridiculous 1019 hp Taycan Turbo GT Weissach edition (a 4-door car with no rear seats, such are the compromises made for the track) at best achieved 7:07.55 around the Nurburgring.
A gas 911 GT3 RS with less than half the horsepower laps it in 6:49.3.
The 911 by most measures is the slower car (10.9s 1/4 mile vs 9.2s for the Taycan, 184mph top speed vs 190 etc). The difference is the 911s superior handling and braking and that mostly comes down to the difference in weight.
I don’t think most automotive folks or enthusiasts (apart from the track crowd) would agree that car handling and chassis tuning can be expressed in a lap time, even if it is nordschleife.
The problem is people are conditioned so hard on the "drive till empty then fill up" method of car ownership, that it's totally incomprehensible to imagine not being able to put 300 miles in your car in 5 minutes.
Topping off everyday at home just doesn't register. Driving 7 hours with only one 30 minute charge doesn't register.
It either needs to function like a gas car, or it's not even worth considering.
There are millions of people living in cities that do not own their own home, that cannot charge every day (speaking as an EV enthusiast that rents somewhere that thankfully has public charging across the street). For those that are able to charge at home, there is definitely a mindset shift that needs to happen. I have seen the lightbulb over my friends heads turn on when I ask them how they would like it if their gas cars could fill up 1 gallon per hour at their house, and if so why would they care how long a gas station fill up takes.
From what I've heard from auto engineers I know, using the battery as part of the structure is not really done. Transfering mechanical stresses to the battery is something you just do not do.
Additionally the battery must be protected in the event of the crash, so its casing must survive intact.
I mean, it's possible that some manufacturers might do it a little bit to put it on the marketing brochure, but the additional design headaches and safety concerns mean that there's just not that much to gain.
> From what I've heard from auto engineers I know, using the battery as part of the structure is not really done. Transfering mechanical stresses to the battery is something you just do not do.
This is technically true, but structural batteries are not the same as stressed engines like on a motorcycle. In the latter, the engine fully replaces a frame member with essentially just the engine block. With structural batteries the cells themselves are not taking on any stress (they could, but yeah its not a very safe idea) but the outside containment is stil doing double duty. Its a pretty minor weight savings because the battery case does not need to be as strong as the frame does, but its not fair to say that structural batteries are not done. Even when they are just bolting on to a subframe, they're still usually doing things for frame stiffness.
All of that and still they come up with a 2300 kg compact two row SUV.
So, if you are going to be redesigning everything anyway to try to get rid of as much weight as possible, why not hire a designer known for sparse, minimalistic, clean design? It makes sense. It may not be what Ferrari buyers want, but you can't really blame Ferrari for giving it a try. We'll see how well it sells.