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We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Beginning

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Re: We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Beginning

#151

Post by iguy »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #83
maxxxxx wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think steam engines prototyped a lot of the needed technology like lubrication, manufacturing of precision shafts and heat resistance which then could be applied to the gas engine.

We didn't have "good" machine tooling for mass production of metal parts until the 1880/1890s. The technology existed but it was all exotic and high priced because we just weren't good at making metal stuff.

Depedns on your definitions of "good" and "mass". UK railways crossed 500 million people a year sometime before 1880, and as many journeys as the population sometime in the 1840s. That's sounds like a lot of metal wheels & rails to me, certainly not space-ship exotic. Although of course things continued to grow from there.

Re: We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Beginning

#152

Post by C1sc0cat »

AstralStorm wrote: post #144
chadcmulligan wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bicycles / scooters have a limited application though - families with young kids, long trips, older people, people with injuries, its raining, are just some of the groups / times these are excluded. Cars still are superior general purpose solution for travel.

You'd be surprised how much a simple bicycle or scooter cab can accomplish in solving this objection. These are very popular in Asia. The main limit is carrying capacity - maximum power - and you really do not need that much stuff. This works long range too, and could work even longer range should there be proper cargo trains for bikes. But there aren't. The trip time is typically needed to be less than 10h or you ne…

They are popular in Asia because relatively speaking Asia is poor.

Just like the flying pigeon bike was massively popular in china back in the 70's, I even saw one being ridden at Cranfield university by a Chinese masters/doctoral student in the late 70's early eighties.

Re: We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Beginning

#153

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

oblib wrote: post #47

Early models of Ford's Model T had adjustable carburetors to run on ethanol with gasoline as an option. Not electric, but renewable, sustainable, and I'd assume (maybe wrongly) mostly carbon neutral.

The problem with ethanol is that the most efficient plants for making it also happen to be food crops.

Re: We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Beginning

#154

Post by iguy »

graycat wrote: post #79
smileysteve wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we're also omitting the steam car. Where the maintenance and dirtiness were their major detractors, refined fuels and new burners solve these. Steam engines can and could have been refilled at any gas station, could run on any multi fuel including biodiesel. They theoretically require less maintenance, no oil changes, no cooling system. They'd also have had greater range and greater top speed (though less acceleratio…

IIRC basic thermodynamics shows that ordinary steam engines can't be very efficient. So, don't get good MPG or miles per bucket of coal, or whatever fuel. IIRC the main reason for diesel-electric locomotives for trains and large ships was that it was significantly more efficient than just steam, at least steam with just a boiler and pistons. Of course, really large ships generate steam and then run it through a steam…

> basic thermodynamics shows that ordinary steam engines can't be very efficient

No this is not true, see other comments / Carnot cycle. Steam can be extremely efficient. But diesel engines are much simpler and more compact, it's a trade-off.

Re: We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Beginning

#155

Post by avar »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #121

Some of the reasons why petrol won: There was no electric grid to speak of - even now there is concern the grid can't support all EV's, once you were outside the cities (and there weren't many back then) the grid was spotty. The miracle of being able to pour some cheap liquid in an engine and drive for miles is a considerable achievement. Lead acid batteries weren't very good and were expensive (and still are) and do…

> [...]a small electric commuter car to drive round at 30mph for short distances but even today there are none like this[...]

These are called microcars[1] and a lot of models exist. E.g. the Canta[2] (both petrol and electric models) and Biro[3] are quite popular in The Netherlands. There they're given preferential regulatory treatment, e.g. you can park them on sidewalks and drive them down bicycle paths.

The problem with a small car that can go at max 30 mph is that a moped is a much better fit for most use cases for such a car. An advantage of a car like the Canta or Biro is that they're fully covered, so you won't get wet in the rain. But you can also get good moped rain covers, and mopeds are a lot cheaper.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Microcars

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canta_(vehicle)

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estrima_Bir%C3%B2

Re: We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Beginning

#156

Post by chii »

dmitriid wrote: post #127
jdietrich wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an interesting example of technological synergy at the dawn of the steam engine industry. To build an effective steam engine, you need a precisely ground piston and a precisely bored cylinder, otherwise you can't get useful working pressures. Grinding the piston is laborious but straightforward - you just need two centers and a cutting tool to achieve a rotationally symmetrical part. Boring the cylinder is mu…

This also shows the curious paradox (if it’s a paradox) that we can’t easily re-create many of the industries from scratch. We’ve had many intermediate steps that we discarded along the way. In other words, modern industry is the product of modern industry.

It's the same for semiconductor fabrication.

The plans and steps all require a computer (cept for the simplest of chips which would'be been originally hand-designed). This means that if there's some planetwide disaster that wiped all electronics, we'd have to restart from scratch as even viewing the blueprints of a chip requires a chip!

Re: We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Beginning

#157

Post by C1sc0cat »

Swizec wrote: post #14
tomjakubowski wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tesla, for example, still doesn't have an official Nurburgring lap time because it simply isn't able to drive at racing speeds for long enough without the battery overheating and reducing power output to avoid damage Now I'm really curious: with a limit on the Tesla's performance to keep the battery from overheating, what's the fastest time it could do? That they don't have an official lap time for this reason stri…

> But you can't actually drive either to its limit for more than a couple minutes? Lame. Notice all of Tesla's marketing is about acceleration, not lap times. They beat any other car hands down on the drag strip. But cornering is just not their forte (too heavy) and driving fast for a long time is hard (too much power draw).

You saw that when top gear compared the original tesla vs its donor car - the Tesla had amazing acceleration but wallowed going round corners when compare to the ICE Lotus it was based on.

Re: We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Beginning

#158

Post by clouddrover »

gambiting wrote: post #138
raxxorrax wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think there is a limit in chemical density that cannot be overcome without significantly changing technological principles of current batteries. Maybe hydrogen fuel cells would be a better solution after all if we can find an efficient way to contain it. Easier said than done...

Energy density of hydrogen per litre is few orders of magnitude lower than that of petrol. Really the only saving grace of hydrogen vs batteries is the speed of refueling.

> Really the only saving grace of hydrogen vs batteries is the speed of refueling.

And range, weight, and (eventually) price. Batteries need to improve in all these areas.

Fuel cell cars are expensive at the moment because they're produced in such low volumes. But Toyota thinks that if they produced FCEVs at scale they could build them cheap:

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/26050/exclusive-toyota-hydroge...

Re: We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Beginning

#159

Post by rightbyte »

kozak wrote: post #143
chadcmulligan wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone invented a cheap round trip processing method CO2 -> petrol then EV's would have a hard time I suspect

But we would still need batteries to store regenerative braking energy (i.e. it would be a hybrid).

You can have a flywheel for that.

Re: We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Beginning

#160

Post by Tade0 »

closeparen wrote: post #82
llukas wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people stop saying X minutes to fully charge? This is not how it works in reality. Last 5-10% is essentially trickle charge so it is better to skip it and charge more often but faster. Just compare average charging power between 20-80% part of the curve and 80%-100%. It is ~4-6x difference depending on supercharger type: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/03/08/supercharger-v3-shockin...

Because parent referred to using almost the entire range (350 mi out of 370 is 95% assuming no margin for error).

I could easily halve that longest hop and a few others, because that's how many superchargers are along the way.

Edit: I checked and the longest, indivisible hop in my route is 180 miles.

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