THE Goodwood Festival of Speed is rapidly becoming Britain’s de facto national motor show. Its backdrop, Goodwood House, is home to the Dukes of Richmond, the first of whom acquired his title by the clever expedient of being an illegitimate son of Charles II.
But there is nothing antiquated about the festival itself, which features a 1.9km (1.2 mile) sprint up a hill by some of the world’s newest and fastest cars. At this year’s event—held last month—they were joined by a dozen or so electric and hybrid cars.
Most of these vehicles, such as Tesla’s Model S and BMW’s new i8, were powered by lithium-ion batteries, sometimes backed up by a petrol-driven engine that drives a generator and may, in a hybrid arrangement, also drive the wheels directly. One, however, was not like this. For instead of batteries, the Toyota TS040 hybrid (pictured above) has a supercapacitor. When the car needs a kick that its 520 horsepower 3.7 litre V8 petrol engine cannot provide, an additional 480 horsepower is available from two electric motors connected to this supercapacitor. And when the car is decelerating or braking, the motors work in reverse, as generators, to chargeThe amount of electricity present upon the capacitor's plates. Also, the act of forcing of electrons onto the capacitor's plates. See CoulombA coulomb is the unit of electric charge. It is named after Charles-Augustin de Coulomb.1 coulomb is the amount of electric charge transported by a current of 1 ampere in 1 second. It can also be defined in terms of capacitance and voltage, where one coulomb is defined as one farad of capacitance times one volt of electric potential difference.. the supercapacitor up again.
