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EV Schadenfreude
If you would rather spend your vacation hunting for charging stations, calling customer support to try to get them to reset the charging stations, hunting for places to spend the night when your Ford Lightning runs of out charge and has to be towed, or trying to figure out why a fast charger is only giving you a trickle charge, than attending a car show in Colorado, an electric vehicle is for you!
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Published in Environment
I assume you mean gas CAN. (Or jug, whatever.)
I’ve got my eye on a 30-gallon with wheels and a hand pump.
I love gasoline engines and manual transmissions, so I won’t be switching to an electric as long as I have good conventional choices. But never is a looong time. I think if in the 1980’s you had told someone that in 2022 you could buy a computer for about one week’s wages that would have a 4 million MB hard drive and 8000 MB of RAM they would have thought you were high on cheap drugs. Or a 28″ or even 32″ color monitor only about an inch thick for less than half a week’s wages.
I’m not expecting a stupendous breakthrough in battery technology next week, but who knows what will be available in 25 years?
Sorry, but your comparison is off.
Batteries, unlike computers in the 80s, are a mature technology.
Computers won’t have the same jump in the next 25 years either just using silicon.
Apples and donuts.
Humans have been wearing clothes for thousands of years, and innovations in thread are still happening. Humans had been farming for thousands of years before the green revolution of the 1960’s. Humans have been heating their homes for thousands of years and the industry still makes improvements in furnaces. I find it hard to believe that we have nearly reached the zenith of battery technology.
OK.
Clothing did not advance until the advent of synthetics. That was last century. The green revolution was a radical shift.
As I have now said three times, it would take a radical shift in battery technology.
Now, you may belive, outside any evidence, that such a thing is around the corner. I don’t.
We might was well be saying that suddenly, the ICE will get a lot more efficient.
Which is one reason that fuel cell vehicles are even better than EVs, but the transport and storage mechanisms haven’t been worked out yet. Once again, I see the current EVs as replacement for city driving and for high density intercity driving where the volume supports the charging infrastructure. Tesla has done that well, the other vendors not as much because they don’t own the stations.
Fuel cells can solve the issue by using a more portable fuel source. In fact, a hybrid of fuel cells and battery storage makes sense as well.
Only if the combination of fuel cell conversion to electricity, and then the electric motor to movement, works out to be more efficient than internal combustion.
Also the fuel used for fuel cells doesn’t just come out of the ground either. I expect it would most likely be hydrogen, which – in addition to the costs and weight of storage for a vehicle – would probably also be produced with electricity, hence adding maybe two more stages of conversion/efficiency loss.
We have elections in California?
“Where does milk come from?”
“The store. Do you think I’m an idiot?”
Like opium.
Which is great until there is an unexpected storm and cars are stuck on the roads.
And will have less miles to the gallon I think
Or as a prominent physicist in 1898 once declared “All the discoveries in the field of physics have already been made.”
Good thing Albert Einstein wasn’t overly influenced by that sentiment.
I guess that is why the earliest automobiles used steam engines or were electric.
The horse and buggy usually averaged 6 miles an hour. So there was little demand for cars to go more than 20 miles an hour.
What cars were in their earliest days involved being a rich person’s novelty item. A way to say “I have enough money that I can afford this weird transportation gizmo.”
Mwah, hah, ha, ha, snort!
Because:
Fuel cells are a joke because hydrogen, in addition to be ridiculously difficult to compress down into any reasonable level of energy density (even to be as good as batteries), it is also ridiculously corrosive and prone to diffuse straight through metal containers.
Fuel cells are only “good” when a a very large very high pressure storage container (like a rocket fuel tank) is paired up with a tiny reaction cell and compared to a similar mass of batteries.
As to batteries getting much better, I suggest you acquaint yourself with the physics of chemical energy band-gaps, which define the ultimate energy storage per mole of a given anode/cathode paired chemistry. (Not counting the parts of the battery that provide physical structure.) The search for better batteries is the search for new chemistry, since existing chemistry is near its theoretical limits. Quantum mechanics dictates the limits of chemistry, which doesn’t appear to be much better than now.
Similar in concept to the Rankine engine’s ideal for thermal transfer engines, where getting within a couple percent of ideal is common with today’s internal combustion engines and turbines.
Mind you, liquid fuels are also chemical energy storage, using molecular bond energy, which is already much more intense per atom (with up to four covalent bonds per carbon atom) than band gaps.
Compare mass used for containment and structure between liquid fuels and batteries. Compare energy per participating atom between liquid fuels and batteries. Compare mass per participating atom between liquid fuels and batteries.
Multiply it out and you have an orders of magnitude energy density advantage for liquid fuels. Just on the basic physics.
Electric-only vehicles are dumb. Along with the charging networks supporting them. Someday, nuclear power will make it practical to make synthetic liquid fuels (existing processes–look up syngas) without fossil feedstocks. That is the long-term future.
This is totally misunderstanding science. In no way did Einstein overturn the understanding of classical physics as understood in 1898. Relativity was an addition to how physics worked. He did not “overturn” anything.
When a technology is mature, there are only incremental improvements. Yes, we still improve furnaces today, but the furnace of today is not that more efficient than the furnace of 25 years ago. It is better, but there are trade offs. They use less power but they also don’t last as long. Internal Combustion Engines are also a mature technology. By the way, electric cars are as old as ICE cars. They have had a long, long time to turn into replacements and have not.
Batteries are a chemical store of energy, were chemical processes release energy. Rechargeable batteries let you reverse the process. This process is less useful in cold weather. They don’t work as well. There is no, none, nada, zip chemicals batteries on the horizon to replace lithium Ion batteries, which stinks, because we don’t have enough lithium to replace all the cars, anyway. EV is a pipe dream. They will not work. The technology is not there, and it won’t be there.
Unless, someone invents a totally new type of power storage. The best way to store energy we have, the best way, is in hydrocarbons. That is the second most dense power storage we have. It beats batteries hands down.
The best, most dense, store of power, are radioactive fuels. No one seems to want to use those.
Leave it to Phil to say it better than me.
I am going to leave it there an be done.
My thinking on EVs. Firstly, they will take a long time to be easy to charge and to charge on any street corner on the way to work. That’s the good side, the bad is that it may be a very long time, even with the current dramatic push to install as many charging stations as we already have of gas stations.
Like early autos, there are a lot of bugs to be worked out yet. I don’t concentrate on EVs but from here at R> I’ve seen videos of trucks that don’t live up to half their range: that upon being fully charged say that they will travel 400 miles with a trailer (and map out an itinerary based of location of chargers) and yet don’t get even 200 miles, and the itinerary needs to be continuously changed, causing travel in a zig-zag instead of the quickest most efficient route.
And considering just the known computer technology, I’ve seen one video in which the truck computer shows a 500 mile range with a trailer, and a 280 mile range without a computer. The test drivers just shrugged it off, but I believe the truck ended up needing to be towed.
On another topic, where is the energy for the batteries coming from? It’s almost all coming from burning hydrocarbons. And then being turned into electricity, with associated loss of energy at the additional step. How does getting energy from hydrocarbons ever reduce greenhouse emissions? This may be considered a loss leader of sorts, and only temporary to get the EV show on the road faster, but even in twenty years, where are we going to get the electricity from? Are solar cells ever going to be efficient enough to integrate into the upper surfaces of a car and run it for free? Will sunshine even ever provide enough energy over the footprint of a car to run it? Or will we have to devastate the earth and change the earth’s ecology with with millions of acres of solar farms?
Given this lag in technology between wishes and reality, why does government propose to mandate such a sudden change when its outcome is unrealistic, a novelty that is impossible to reproduce, even at enormous costs, what transportation capabilities we currently have?
It seems to me that every legislator with one eye and half a brain can see that the best way, the way most sure of success and causes the least hardship to the public, is not to mandate the change and force technology to catch up, but is to let technology lead the change and finally come up with, and naturally phase in, an electric form of transportation that is as easy, and as cheap and as reliable as we currently have and let the economic choices be voluntary. All other things being equal, people will choose the environmentally cleanest way to get around.
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Why the government has chosen such an improbable and disruptive course of shutting down oil production and mandating cars that still require oil production to run is that they want failure, or at least to forcibly limit the public’s access to personal cars.
Have others here heard of this man?
Stanley Meyer – he created a car that could run on water – it could go one third of the way across the nation on 20 gallons of water. He was assassinated.
In all fairness, the item he water-powered was more like a dune buggy.
But still, who knows what the automobile industry would be like if he had been left alone to keep tinkering?
https://mysteriesrunsolved.com/2020/04/stanley-meyer-death-water-car.html
From the above link:
“During his lifetime, Stanley Meyer owned thousands of patents including items in the field of banking, oceanography, cardiac monitoring and automobile. A patent is a form of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, selling and importing an invention for a limited period of years, in exchange for publishing an enabling public disclosure of the invention. In all of his patents, the most popular and controversial one was the ‘Water Powered Car.'”
Usable quantities of hydrogen are currently produced by reformulating natural gas. So yes, it does come out of the ground. Oh, and the reformulation requires gobs of additional energy. So you take a fossil fuel, burn some of it (along with the released carbon) to drive the conversion of the rest into form even more difficult to use in transportation than the original form.
Meh.
Oh, and that like an order of magnitude easier than splitting water with electrolysis. Which is why that latter simply isn’t done.
Meanwhile, gas just sits there in a tank at room temp and pressure.
Sits there.
Some dreamers think that will be enough. With the space requirement and energy transfer equivalent pace, we need about ten times as many quick-charge stations as liquid fuel stations. Maybe more, when you start counting trucking.
No problem, they’ll just make it so that long-haul trucks are powered by overhead lines.
I did not state that Einstein overturned the field of physics.
However he certainly added to it. So please consider: my take on the meaning of the quote from 1898 was that such an abundant expansion was not something the earlier scientists expected to happen.
But it did.
But that doesn’t get rid of “fossil fuels.”
Same exchange for years:
Clerk: “Paper or plastic?”
Me: “Plastic. The sooner we use up all the earth’s oil, the sooner we’ll go to a hydrogen economy.”
Clerk: ??? !!
It looks like the irony is more than I expected.
But it does nothing to disprove my point at all.
And I hate to break it yo you, but the discovery of Einstein makes any sudden discovery add on to Chemistry pretty unlikely.
No he didn’t.
Not so much anymore, but it seemed like about 20-30 years ago everybody seemed to know somebody who knows somebody who is related to somebody who knows somebody who invented a carburetor that can make any car get 200 mpg. And that guy was killed by the Arabs! Or maybe they just threatened him with so much violence to his entire family that whenever he hears the word “carburetor” he pees his pants and goes into a catatonic shock. Or those bastards at General Motors bought the patent then buried it in a vault somewhere.