Electric cars give ordinary people access to race car horsepower - NRK Oslo og Viken

A couple of decades ago, you could have been searching for a long time for a car that would go from 0 to 100 km / h in 3-4 seconds. This acceleration was intended for those who could afford to buy expensive supercars and professional drivers on the racetrack.

This is almost the norm for new cars.

– Now you have cars on the road going from rally cars, says rally driver Anders Grundal.

He has won a total of 18 Nm of gold in motorsport, and holds the record for the most gold medals in Norwegian motorsport history.

At Gulskogen in Drammen, he sells electric cars that are faster than his own racing car.

– I understand that people think it’s great fun, but you have to treat these cars with great respect. He says things happen really fast when you can reach high speeds that fast.

Gives less room for error

The fact that Ola and Kari Nordmann can reach top speeds at zero slip gives us much less room to make mistakes in traffic.

It’s eating into the maneuvering space you need to have in order to interact safely in traffic, says Dagfinn Moe, a traffic behavior researcher at Sintef.

According to Statistics Norway figures, two out of three passenger cars newly registered in 2021 were electric cars. All electric cars now make up 16 per cent of all cars in Norway.

– These are cars with power that you can only dream of when we only have combustion engines. Mo says they are faster and have sharper acceleration.

She chose the electric car for the drag race

The fact that electric cars accelerate to their speed does not mean that they are good at decelerating.

Batteries make electric cars very heavy so the braking distance will be much longer. The race car weighs nothing, says Grundahl, so it stops at the track.

The Grundal race car has 300 horsepower. A car that is very much trained to master.

The only thing you need to buy a 500 hp car is a regular driver’s license.

– Now it’s not that you need to use every horse, even if you have it. But I know which car I would choose if I was going to be in a drag race.

Since electric cars are often newer than fossil cars, they are equipped with many modern aids to create a good traffic flow. Adaptive cruise control, lane warning, anti-roll brake and anti-lock braking to name a few.

Too much help can make you weaker. You can start to trust the electronics a lot, and everything will work out. Mo says the driver is responsible.