Motor snippets from around the world
E-Toll battle gets real, Elon Musk’s plan for subterranean cars, and you don’t need petrol to set a Ring record
GLOVES ARE OFF AS E-TOLL COURT PAPERS
Johannesburg:
The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA) has moved to the next round of the civil challenge against the e-toll system implemented in Gauteng by the South African National Roads Agency Ltd (SANRAL).
OUTA has served SANRAL with its responding pleas to the summonses issued for outstanding e-toll payments against OUTA’s contributing supporters.
Effectively, this becomes the “test case” which will highlight why OUTA believes the Gauteng e-toll scheme was introduced unlawfully. The matter is being heard in the Pretoria High Court.
“We regard the e-toll system as unjust and illegal for a number of reasons,” says Ben Theron, OUTA’s Chief Operating Officer. “We have gathered our facts and prepared our case over the past few years, so as to present compelling arguments and merits which will speak for themselves.”
“The real fight is now only beginning,” says Wayne Duvenage, Chairman of OUTA.
BUILDING TUNNELS UNDERGROUND TO BEAT THE TRAFFIC California:
Elon Musk has announced a futuristic vision of transportation involving underground roadway systems beneath bustling cities such as Los Angeles. The South African-born innovator and founder of Tesla and SpaceX, has established The Boring Company to dig a network of tunnels (hence ‘boring’) to relieve traffic congestion in cities.
A video released by The Boring Company (see it at https://goo.gl/gvwxgV) explains how the concept would work. It shows a Tesla car amidst gridlocked traffic driving onto a metal lift in the road that lowers the Tesla underground to a road network in which individual cars are transported at high speeds (up to 200km/h) on sled-like platforms between destinations – doing away with traffic and associated collisions.
Musk says a trip from the Los Angeles suburb of Westwood to LA Airport would take five minutes, as opposed to around an hour during rush hour.
The Boring Company has a lengthy tunnel and a prototype for the high-speed sled, located underneath the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Musk has stated that his boring machine, nicknamed Godot, can dig approximately 1.6km per week.
If we see significant enough advances in tunnel boring and new materials (perhaps at the heart of Musk’s invention), the cost will likely decrease sharply and make Musk’s futuristic tunnel system more achievable. No doubt it will cost users of the system a pretty penny to beat the traffic, however.
ELECTRIC SUPERCAR TAMES THE RING Nurburg, Germany:
The ring has a new king. In October 2016, the prototype Nio EP9 electric supercar lapped the Nordschleife of the Nurburgring, in damp and slippery condi- tions, in 7min05.12s, to become the world’s fastest street-legal electric car.
But the Chinese-based company said at the time the car could go a lot faster given more favourable conditions, and last Friday the EP9 knocked nearly 20 seconds off its own Nurburgring record, with a lap of 6.45.9.
That makes it the outright quickest streetlegal car ever to lap the famed circuit, ahead of supercars like the petrol-powered Lamborghini Huracan Performante (6.52.01) and petrol-electric Porsche 918 Spyder (6.57.0).
With four electric motors, each with its own gearbox, the EP9 pushes out an incredible 1000kW of power and claims performance figures of 0-200km/h in 7.1 seconds and a top speed of 313km/h. It is not stated how often the battery needs a recharge however.
Only ten units of the EP9 electric supercar willl be built to order at $1.48 million (R19.5-million) each.