Cars on a track have high acceleration, followed by extreme braking.
If this energy could be buffered by a large capacitor, the main battery could just be slowly discharged to a capacitor to provide energy for the race. The capacitor would provide and absorb fluctuating energy to speed up and slow down.
I also imagine complex ev battery architecture could be simplified if the energy in and out doesn't have to be radically managed.
I see it somewhat like running an internal combustion engine at one efficient RPM instead of having to run at all RPMs and use a gearbox.
that last bit i find interesting. You not just get to run it at efficient rpm it can also be dramatically smaller and have better acceleration. It could even continue to run after reaching the destination (since you have an engine it might as wel do work for you)
I was using that as an analogy, but there's no reason you couldn't have a weird hybrid car with a generator, a capacitor and electric motors. No batteries.
No reason in principle, but for practical reason that probably will never become common. Seems more likely we'll get "hybrid EVs" with batteries and capacitors working together, capacitors acting as buffers for batteries. Until the technologies converge into a single thing that does both, but I'm guessing that'll take decades rather than years. (Then the only question that remains will be, will they be called batacitors or capatteries? :-)
One big use would be ev road racing.
Cars on a track have high acceleration, followed by extreme braking.
If this energy could be buffered by a large capacitor, the main battery could just be slowly discharged to a capacitor to provide energy for the race. The capacitor would provide and absorb fluctuating energy to speed up and slow down.
I also imagine complex ev battery architecture could be simplified if the energy in and out doesn't have to be radically managed.
I see it somewhat like running an internal combustion engine at one efficient RPM instead of having to run at all RPMs and use a gearbox.