I know they don’t have a grill due to not having a radiator and it being more aerodynamic, but replacing it with a flat sheet of plastic or metal doesn’t seem like the best way to go about it. If aerodynamics were the main goal wouldn’t the air that hits the nose make it less efficient? It makes sense to me to shrink down the front bumper as much as possible or create vents that give the air a more efficient path. Is it purely an aesthetic thing?
In: Engineering
To move gas powered cars burn gas inside a piston, which expands and pushes the piston outward. Of all the energy in the fuel, about a quarter of it ends up helping you spin the wheels and drive the car forward, most of it just makes warm exhaust gasses that go out the tailpipe. On the way out these hot gasses make parts of your car hot, especially the engine. The car needs to get rid of that heat or the engine will melt, so it flows cooling fluid through the engine. The heat is dumped into the air using a radiator which has the cooling fluid flowing through it and a bunch of thin metal films with a fan blowing on them to give lots of surface for the air to hit the metal with cooling fluid inside. Also as the car drives air gets pushed through the grill and into the radiator grill. If you drive faster and your engine works harder and needs more cooling, you also get more air flow into the radiator so more cooling.
Electric cars are very efficient, you don’t need a big cooling system because almost all the energy that comes out of the battery goes into pushing the car. So no need for a big radiator on the front with air shoving into it. You can just make the front smooth, which let’s the car drive more smoothly through the air anyway. Having a grill on the front slows you down, like swimming with a shirt on.
Latest Answers