171–180 of 271 posts
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A rotary engine is not the same as a radial engine. Radial engines go in airplanes, rotary engines go in Mazdas.
Actually... rotary engines did go in aircraft. [0] Wankels go in Mazdas. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_engine
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…
One of Tesla's less obvious innovations is going beyond silicon to silicon carbide for high-power control: https://www.systemplus.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/SP18413...
Milk floats lasted a long time as ubiquitous home delivery EVs. Maybe we'll see their return.
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Another reason: Even today the energy density of batteries is SUBSTANTIALLY smaller than that of fossil fuels. [0] We frequently see this graph [1] showing how far batteries have come (they have! and we need to keep going) but not understanding this is part of the issue too. [0] is why we need to keep researching, but [0] is why electric was never going to win in the beginning. It is taking very advanced materials to…
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...
Battery technology has been, and to a certain degree still is the limiting factor for electric cars...and the fact is that gasoline is still a denser form of energy storage than batteries by volume, weight etc.. I'm saying this as a someone who prefers electrics over ICE...
I think that if, then only in terms of cost. Every quarter or so I do a 1500km(935 mile) trip and back. Nowadays it takes me two days, because I realized that spending around 20h behind the wheel without rest is simply dangerous. My car's highway range is about 440 miles - but I rarely drive that far without refueling because the longest distance between my usual stops is 350 miles. And once stopped I don't just fill…
The posters talking about 500 mile journeys without a single stop strike me as being frankly bonkers.
Yeah, you can do it. Unless your concentration is fundamentally different to most human beings, you shouldn't sit in a car for 8 hours straight without a break.
On the Model S, on an infinite distance journey, supercharging increases journey time by about 20-30% maximum over driving all the way without a break (takes about 20 mins to charge 120 miles or 20-60%).
Spending 12-13 hours to do a 10 hour drive is fairly normal for me even in an ICE car unless you want to like, eat sandwiches at the wheel and piss into a bottle whilst driving.
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.
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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.
The keyword being "UK". We can include the US and a bit of Western Europe plus Japan.
For much of the world a train was exotic even far into the 20th century.
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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.
Am I misreading the gp's cited chart? According to that, it seems like hydrogen is only a factor of around 4x worse in terms of volumetric energy density, and is better than petrol in weight density.
You can visit Thomas Edison's house with his lab near Newark NJ. There are two electric cars on display. Interestingly here it says in 1914 38% of all the cars on the road were electric; 22% gasoline, 40% steam powered. http://www.edisonmuckers.org/edisons-cars/
Assuming both sets of stats are correct, it sounds like something happened between 1914 and 1917 that led to the switch from electric (or steam) cars to ones powered by internal combustion engines. Perhaps the First World War?
[0] Parent comment reference, i.e. http://www.edisonmuckers.org/edisons-cars/
[1] Main story link, i.e. https://longreads.com/2019/06/13/we-could-have-had-electric-...
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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...
To me, there's not so much difference between batteries and fuel cells - one stores the redox reaction components outside the electrode/electrolyte setup, that's all. The advantage of hydrogen in this setup is the ability to pull oxygen from the air and then dump the reaction product.
I know there are many, many problems to solve for fuel cells and if you are scared of some burning batteries, this solution probably doesn't provide much consolation.
Perhaps we could have had electric vehicles sooner, but we would have needed clean sources of electricity, not coal powered generation, to make a difference.
Besides, if all the car were powered by electricity, we probably would have made the electric grid cleaner and switch to renewables far sooner. Because switching from coal to gas and gas to solar/wind would have had a positive impact on almost all types of energy consumption: train, cars, heating, lightning, etc. Instead we had to invest in both the electric grid and ICE to try to make them clean, instead of just the grid.