De la technologie à la poésie par Grégory Iauch et Romain Hervé

 Le compte-rendu d’élèves :

Même si tu es chère

Tu restes nécessaire

Parfois tu n’es pas fiable

Mais tu restes incontournable

Vive la nouvelle technologie !

Mais il y a toujours des conflits :

Fais un petit lifting pour nous aider

Et améliore tes capacités

T’es longue à la charge

Mais rapide à la décharge

Si seulement tu durais plus longtemps

Ce serait plus tentant

Tout ça c’est une histoire d’argent

Un jour tu seras la star des voitures

Et on espère pas trop tard dans le futur

Tu nous diminues le taux de pollution

ça vaut bien plus que du pognon !

Grégory et Romain
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 Le texte d’origine en Anglais :

Source : http://auto.howstuffworks.com/electric-car.htm/printable

The Batteries

Right now, the weak link in any electric car is the batteries. There are at least six significant problems with current lead-acid battery technology :

• They are heavy (a typical lead-acid battery pack weighs 1,000 pounds or more).

• They are bulky (the car we are examining here has 50 lead-acid batteries, each measuring roughly 6" x 8" by 6").

• They have a limited capacity (a typical lead-acid battery pack might hold 12 to 15 kilowatt-hours of electricity, giving a car a range of only 50 miles or so).

• They are slow to charge (typical recharge times for a lead-acid pack range between four to 10 hours for full charge, depending on the battery technology and the charger).

• They have a short life (three to four years, perhaps 200 full charge/discharge cycles).

• They are expensive (perhaps $2,000 for the battery pack shown in the sample car).
You can replace lead-acid batteries with NiMH batteries. The range of the car will double and the batteries will last 10 years (thousands of charge/discharge cycles), but the cost of the batteries today is 10 to 15 times greater than lead-acid. In other words, an NiMH battery pack will cost $20,000 to $30,000 (today) instead of $2,000. Prices for advanced batteries fall as they become mainstream, so over the next several years it is likely that NiMH and lithium-ion battery packs will become competitive with lead-acid battery prices. Electric cars will have significantly better range at that point.

When you look at the problems associated with batteries, you gain a different perspective on gasoline. Two gallons of gasoline, which weighs 15 pounds, costs $3.00 and takes 30 seconds to pour into the tank, is equivalent to 1,000 pounds of lead-acid batteries that cost $2,000 and take four hours to recharge.