[parpfish]

I think that an ideal race league would use WRC-inspired homologation rules and little else (except for some safety features)

Any chassis size. Whatever aero you want. Any engine size/configuration. The only constraint is that it needs to be something you can put into production.

we’d get to see a Cambrian explosion of weird race car variants that would make race day strategizing wild. and we’d really get to showcase cool creative engineering. And we’d eventually see the benefits of that engineering trickle down into normal production cars we all drive

[rgmerk]

It's been done. Look up the Can-Am series. At best, it would last a couple of years until the cars got way too fast for the tracks, and the manufacturers were no longer prepared to invest in it because there was no commercial return in it for them.

The idea that there is any significant relationship between what makes a good production car, even a sports car, and a racing car was always dubious and today is frankly nonsensical.

The way to make a car fast round a race track basically comes down to the amount of downforce it can produce, and the power of the engine. Downforce is almost completely irrelevant to road driving, as taking corners fast enough to generate cornering forces of over 1G is frankly suicidal on the road.

As for engines, aside from the fact that the internal combustion engine is doomed in road transport (despite what the current administration thinks), producing an engine with performance that exceeds what even good drivers are capable of handling without electronics doing the job for them was solved at least 20 years ago, and continues to be a solved problem despite tightening of emissions standards.

In any case, while lighter, smaller, lower cars remain the preferred option for motorsport applications, all anyhbody wants to actually buy, particularly in the United States, is gargantuan SUVs and pickup trucks, which makes any application of motorsport technology for the road moot.

[parpfish]

I didn’t think can-am cars were homologated?

It’s easy for a manufacturer to make a couple hand crafted cars with insane specs. But by requiring homologous, it adds a unique kind of restriction where it’s a car that they have to be able and willing to make at scale. That requires buy-in from industrial engineers as well as business/marketing folks

Edited to add: just learned that homologation doesn’t mean exactly what I thought it did. So my parent thread should have been about “sec-style homologation” specifically and not just “homologation” generally. The idea is that you need to have a car built in production in order to be homologated

[rgmerk]

The old Group A touring cars of the 1980s and early 90s are perhaps closer to what you’re thinking of.

Nissan built the R32 Skyline GT-R and killed the category (and birthed a legend in the process, admittedly).

[paganel]

There is no power-network in existence, not in the medium-to-long term, that would allow tens of millions of cars (mauve hundreds of millions if we talk at the continent-wide level) to get all electric, the physics isn’t there and it won’t be. You’re correct though, it could be that the next US administration will try to copy the bureaucrats here in Europe and try to go the let’s-ban-the-petrol-engine route, which would, in practice, mean that only the well-to-do consumers (like most of the users on this forum) will be able to still have personal cars.

[ViewTrick1002]

Electrifying the transportation sector is generally seen as a 15-25% increase in grid demand.

These are vehicles which most can schedule their charging to take advantage of low electricity prices and therefore low demand.

The uprating needed is quite insignificant.

[paganel]

> Electrifying the transportation sector is generally seen as a 15-25% increase in grid demand.

Quote on that? A developed country like the US has problems even now, see California (with the yearly fires there) or Texas. And how do you solve the "last-mile" connections without regularly starting fires everywhere? (on account of all those higher-voltage thingies being closer to residential units).

[rgmerk]

The 15-25% of demand number is pretty similar to the number I've seen in multiple places. Furthermore, cars have an economic lifespan of approximately 20 years, so that increase in demand will take place over a couple of decades.

Furthermore, if you're smart about it, you charge the vehicle at times when the grid is oversupplied with electricity. This typically occurs between midnight and about 5-6am, and in areas with a lot of solar, during the middle of the day. This is already widely implemented, with utilities in many jurisdictions offering things like EV charging time-of-use tariffs, and customers with rooftop solar systems (which are much cheaper in, say, Australia, than they are in the USA) installing smart chargers which are configured to run when they have a surplus of electricity from their home solar systems. This will ensure that EVs are making use of the existing grid, rather than increasing peak demand and requiring new grid infrastructure.

Furthermore, "vehicle to grid" systems can allow EVs to feed electricity back into the grid at peak times (with their owners getting paid for this service).

Given all of the above, while EVs will contribute to an overall increase in demand for electricity, they will do so in such a way as to minimise the need for extra infrastructure, and they will do so slowly enough as to allow such infrastructure to be built.

[paganel]

> if you're smart about it, you charge the vehicle at times when the grid is oversupplied with electricity.

Like I said, this EV mania is targeting the well-off middle-classes, those that “are always smart about it”. The populist backlash against all this is well-warranted,

[tossaway0]

There’s no power network that holds capacity for the chance of future demand. They add capacity as the demand increases, because the money comes in to pay for it.

These AI datacenters right now are a prime example. They needed more power, and suddenly they’re building it for them.

[lisbbb]

I guarantee none of those "100% EV" people have experienced winter in Montana, or summer for that matter. Even the Dakotas are not EV friendly. It's more of a city thing. Go nuts in the city--I'm all for EVs in certain applications.

[KeplerBoy]

Most cars only drive a few miles each day. It's not that big of a challenge.

[pmontra]

I favor little regulation and tight cost caps. Example: you get 100 millions, 100 kg of this kind of gasoline per race, do whatever you want.

Any chassis size is probably not a good idea because cars collide with each other and they must do it safely. So maybe rules should define a box that cars must fit into, with the parts that get in touch with other cars at given places and with given shapes. Example: we don't want spear like nose cones at the same height of the heads of drivers of other cars. No halo can protect against that.

The problem with little regulation is that manufactures will be frightened to enter because it's easy to have a championship in which the one with the bright idea wins all the races and the other ones are scattered 2, 5, 6, 7 seconds behind.

We had something like that with the CanAm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can-Am

A lot of innovation and crazy designs.

[wqaatwt]

> tight cost caps. Example: you get 100 millions

The effect of that in F1 was a huge increase in team profits and significant decrease in real wages for ordinary employees of those teams.