Mr. Butler: Good on yer! Kick ‘em when they’re down is the rule. Right square in the punctillios!

“And then there’s the fact that these guys can’t even spell “discreet”.”

Um…

I suggest that you discreetly revisit your dictionary. “Discreet” and “discrete” are different words with… er… two discrete meanings…

DK

Didn’t these tossers ever play with Meccano when they were kids, or visit the Science Museum?

Guess not.

Bullsh*t travels at the speed of sound!

Watchout for the 1st gormless politician to mention “wind-powered” cars.

Actually it might be correct in this instance.

Easy: it goes faster!

“It does: if the battery is a teeny tiny hold-nothing capacity, it charges very quickly.”

That’s not what the context is. They article, scientifically illiterate as it is, is talking about charging time, with an implication of “for the same number of Ampere hours”. If you need more capacity, just fit more batteries. The limiting factor would be energy availability.

Serf-

You can’t do anything with those assumptions, because without friction your turbine won’t turn. Whatever derives power from the wind has to impede its flow, and the more it does so the more energy it can derive (the energy has to be extracted from the wind by slowing the wind down). But by impeding the wind, you create drag, which the engine requires energy to overcome.

The more energy you try to extract from the wind, the more energy you need for your engine; and because of inefficiencies (second Law) the extra power required for the engine will always be greater than the energy derived from the turbine. There’s no way around that. If there were, you would have perpetual motion.

Assume the motor is 100% efficient. Assume that “rac[ing] around a track for at least an hour” uses all of the specified motor power, 212 kW. Sunlight will supposedly charge the battery in 1.5 hours.

So in 1.5 hours the battery will need to accumulate 212kWh.

Solar flux at Earth surface at noon at the equator is about 95 watts per square foot.

I make the solar array required at 100% efficiency to be just a tad under 1500 square feet. A square surface that size is just a bit under 38 feet on a side.

Ignore the whole air-motion energy recovery story. The “charges from the car’s skin” story is hooey.

And then there’s the fact that these guys can’t even spell “discreet”.

It does: if the battery is a teeny tiny hold-nothing capacity, it charges very quickly. Even from solar.

I was going to send this story to Ben Goldacre as (alas yet another) example of fucknut arts graduates let loose on an engineering story. If they’d done their job and just recycled the press release we could have stripped away the marketing shite ourselves.

Also-

“But a new prototype battery could see this time reduced to just six minutes.”

The charging time has nothing to do with the battery. It can’t charge any faster than the solar cells can provide energy.

Either our dynamic duo of designers are physics ignorami, or it’s a scam seeking naive investors. And another example of how the journalistic profession’s claims of how they are the guardians of standards in reporting are complete rubbish.