[ct-fiskerbuzz]

I was perusing through some of the material on Fisker's "blog" (http://www.fiskerurl.com/2011/11/17/ever-electric-vehicle-with-extended-range/) and I noticed that the A123 battery produces 241HP of power and the ICE produces 260HP. Combined, when put in series, the system should be able to generate 501HP of power. I know the "Q-drive" electric motors each produce 201HP of power to total roughly 403HP, so I wonder what happens to that extra 100HP? Does it get used to charge the battery in Sport mode (is that why Sport mode 'freezes' your electric-only range)? Fantasizing for a bit, it would be cool if Fisker had an "Overdrive" button where it pumped out (for a limited period of time) that extra 100HP... I'd imagine 0-60 acceleration time could be improved 25% to 5.0s...

Yes, the limit is based on the electric motors. I don't know enough about their design to tell whether they (and the inverters and so on) could take an overvoltage/overcurrent situation for short periods.

I'd like to see "sport" actually raise the electric range (maybe as an option, something you could tweak with the control panel, kind of like the climate control, you'd have "target for raising electric range", or maybe even two "targets": min and max hysterisis values, as it were).

 

[ct-fiskerbuzz]

When I drove the dealer demo 2 weeks ago, we left the lot with 13 miles of electric charge. I kept it in Sport mode the whole time. When we got back it had 16 miles of charge. So I'm thinking it raises the range. I saw it myself.

I also saw the value climb from some small single-digit value to a slightly larger single-digit value in my initial "around the parking lot" test drive. I think that's from—or mostly from—using the hill modes and regen braking though, rather than from just having the engine running.