A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
The motors have never been the problem, it's always been the battery. See train engines, they are a diesel generator with electric motors.
This is where history pisses me off. We should have been headlong into battery research after the oil embargoes. Could have been 40 years faster.
I think people forget that petroleum is condensed and distilled solar energy. One gallon of gasoline is the results of years of solar energy.
Spelling
oops you posted irrelevant pedantics that verge on misinformation 😧
sure it’s distilled solar energy that cannot be renewed. relevant language highligted. no one “forgets,” this. literally no one. it’s just not relevant to a timespan less than millions of years. cheers! ☀️
I hope you are not talking about battery locomotives.
With overhead wires the train has a practically unlimited battery capacity.
There are use cases for battery trains. In remote, mountainous locations where the cost for electrifying a track is very high it is not uncommon to use electric trains with batteries. Here in Germany we have several regions where diesel trains have been replaced by them.
"On the other hand gas has a much higher energy density than batteries and a much faster refuel rate."
It's exactly this. Convenience. We've become accustomed to how convenient it is and don't want to be put out.
On the other hand, it's super convenient to never go to a gas station again, and to wake up to a full tank. So if you drive less than 60 miles a day, and have acess to another car for long trips, an electric is even more convenient.
That's basically 90% of every car owner.
It's one of those things where people feel like they're going to take a road trip every weekend, but most people are just using their car to commute to and from work and maybe take one or two longer trips per year. The time saved by not having to stop at a gas station throughout the the year is less than the additional time taken at a fast charging station for the rare road trip.
Unfortunately, people tend to buy vehicles to best accomplish 1% of their driving. I live in the suburbs and almost every house has a giant pickup parked in front. Not because people are in the construction business and need to haul a lot of stuff, but because once a year they might go to Home Depot and it feels good to put their two bags of mulch in the back.
Are those two things actually important?
Electric motors are a lot more efficient, and battery technology is quickly approaching the place where you can get the same range with an electric motor as with an ICE.
As for refuel rate, I spend no time waiting for my car to charge because it charges at home while I'm sleeping, so the refuel rate doesn't matter.
Plus the technology to battery swap is well in use for electric vehicles (see Nio, who have thousands of battery swap stations in China and some in Europe too). 3 mins and you have a full battery.
But remember, electric motors also require next to no maintenance and can last for many years of runtime. Pros and cons.
And no gearing, so no complex moving part assemblies..
Unfortunately, brushless motors are also trivial to waterproof.
Real answer: power density. Pound for pound, gas still contains more energy than our best batteries. The weight of energy storage is still a massive deal for anything that cannot be tethered to a grid or be in close practical proximity for frequent recharging, from rockets, planes and cars (sometimes) to chainsaws and lawnmowers (sometimes).
Gas engines have decent range. Gas engines are cheaper (as the electric engine prices are artificially inflated, just look at Chinese prices), with gas engines you can listen to the sound of the engine to diagnose problems before they occur, batteries don't degrade (you still have car batteries, but when they degrade, you can still drive a car for as long as with the new battery. You can refuel it in a couple of seconds. Anyone can make one sided arguments. There isn't a best thing for everything.
The reason why you may be able to diagnose an ICE by sound is because they're complex. That's not a positive. An electric motor has just a few moving parts. If it goes bad you don't really need to work to figure it out and fix it.
The rest of the arguments can be made, but as you imply they're disingenuous. The sound one is just not a benefit at all.
Range anxiety is largely a perception thing. The vast majority of car journeys are well within the range of an EV, you just need to get in the habit of plugging in like you would your phone. For journey's long enough for it to be more than a single charge you really should be stopping for more than a few seconds anyway as you need recharging.
you just need to get in the habit of plugging in like you would your phone
Yeah but not everyone lives in suburbia with ample plug-in options available to them. Where I live the street-side charging spots are usually occupied, and the parking spot that I rent has no charging.
For journey’s long enough for it to be more than a single charge you really should be stopping for more than a few seconds anyway as you need recharging.
True to some extent, I have to check my travel logs but I do feel like stopping for an hour every 300km or so is longer and much more often than I would normally stop on long road trips. My (diesel) car has a range of well over 1000km so often I stop for only 15 minutes for a coffee and to stretch my legs, or just for a restroom stop and a driver swap. We usually plan just one big stop (1h) for dinner. Most destinations I've been to I could reach without refueling at all.
There's also the issue of contention for charging spots. On gas stations near the big highways towards popular destinations you often already have to queue to get gas. This will become worse when EVs become common place and people occupy a charging spot for an hour instead of a fuel pump for 30 seconds to top up.
Little anecdote: every year around the holiday season, there are several company wide e-mails from EV driving co-workers requesting to swap cars (with a co-worker who has a CE car) to go on holiday. So I think the practical experience may not be as rosy as you paint it.
just look at Chinese prices
The prices of chinese EVs are artificially deflated! They heavily subsidize their EV manufacturing sector.
Gas engine makes good noises. Checkmate.
It's incredible how certain people are conditioned to think the sound of a gas motor and shifting because your puny motor is out of optimal torque and rpm range are manly.
He is not wrong, but he is not adressing the actual criticism of electric vehicles, so it is kind of pointless.
This comic is clearly about lawn mowers people. Who discusses cars when wearing a hat like that?
It's about the battery, nerd. 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
We'll just do what trains do.
Replace the battery with a massive diesel generator. Run that to get power to the electric motors.
Best of both worlds!
Gasoline motors can be recharged in a couple of minutes.
My EV sits in the driveway and soaks up excess production from my PV setup.
My main problem is it's never really empty enough.
If I'm on the road, a high voltage DC charger gets me from 10% to 50% in about 10 minutes. Barely enough time for a coffee and a leak, then it's another 2 hours of driving. Rinse, repeat.
Sure, you can't barrel down the Autobahn for 10 hours straight without stopping but who wants that?
Electric cars is not the solution. Sure, it's an improvement, but for a real solution you need to get people out of personal vehicles on onto public transportation. Trains, trams, busses, whatever. Build it in a way that doesn't suck. Assuming american, the US had (past tense) amazing train/tram networks decades ago. Every warehouse had a rail spur, and since walking was considered ok people weren't obese fatasses.
I drive a scooter. It is possible to live without a car, although it does have some difficulties sometimes. If your job is within 10 miles of your home or less, then you don't need a car for your commute. If I can do it so can you. I'd still rather take a bus, if it existed.
From personal experience, you also need a garage to keep an electric car in if you're in an extreme cold climate, those batteries can fail if in the deep cold for long enough and those car companies do NOT have the replacement parts in stock to fix it quickly.