What a bunch of F1 KERS

I only click leccy tech articles for the pic

KERS recovers energy which would otherwise end up as heat in my car brakes.

When I think of the size, air flow around, and temperatures of my car engine and radiator and exhaust system and compare it with the size, air flow and temperatures (barley warm a lot of the time) of my brake discs I am expected to believe 20 to 30% of the energy my car uses ends up in the brakes?

I don't think so, not even close. For most cars and most usage I doubt a KERS system would recover enough energy to justify lugging around the extra weight never mind the cost.

Buses on start/stop town routes? Maybe, just.

KERS in F1 is just greenwash to fool the stupid.

I suppose I'm just easily impressed but knocking 1/5 to 1/3 off your cars fuel bill sounds pretty good to me.

Still petrol prices have gone down a lot recently so whose bothered. Unless they go up again.

I think even knocking off 2/3 of the potential to allow for corporate BS a 6-10% reduction would still be quite good.

Perhaps they should focus on some cash recovery tech instead. So they're still in business next year, like.

...but only if you drive your road car in F1 driver mode... i.e., hard on the accelerator after hard on the brakes. I doubt the typical urban cycle would see such efficiency improvements. Nice to see that optimism still prospers in these hard times, I suppose.

Paris, because she likes to be driven hard.

The KERS systems being used in F1 this year are almost insignificant on an F1 car -- they are by regulation limited to 60 KW charge or discharge rate, for a maximum of about seven seconds (400 KJ capacity, to be precise). That's fairly small when you have a petrol engine putting out 600 KW as well.

But for conventional cars it is quite a lot of energy. It's enough to accelerate a small car from 0 to about 70 km/h using the KERS alone. It's about one third of the battery capacity of a Prius, but a flywheel will take vastly more charge/discharge cycles than a battery will -- and at far higher rates too.

If this year's F1 experiment is successful and safe then they will allow larger amount of energy to be stored in later years. That's when it becomes really exciting for road cars, but even this year's units are quite a useful size for stop/go city driving in smallish cars.

I know pretty much for a fact that Sony and Ferrari started collaboration in this way over 16 months ago? Have to say would be quite funny to see a Porsche, Ferrari even a Range Rover beat the congestion charge

The flywheel type of KERS has been tried before in busses and so on. It sort of works but you need a big heavy flywheel running very fast to be any good, which makes it both expensive and difficult to use, and the added weight puts it at a disadvantage.

Maybe it can be made to work better with some very clever computer controls that those F1 transmission jonnies have proven themselves so good at.

But surely the best way forward is to have electrical (battery) storage for recovered kinetic energy in an electric/hybrid vehicle.

Or does mechanical energy storage just sound stupid...

Difficult mechanisms for energy input and output and maintaining a flywheel with all its forces in a moving vehicle just sounds dangerous..

I'd prefer batcaps...