I wonder who took it upon themselves to taste all the different kinds of crude oil to classify them by flavor... Job for a grad student?
Wasn't oil used medicinally for a while after its discovery? Not ingested, but rubbed on your skin to ease joint pain?
More than for "a while". Oil was discovered hundreds, thousands, of years ago. It used to seep out of the ground in many places (See the opening sequence of The Beverly Hillbillies). Only once we started pumping it did all the surface seeps dry up.
Honestly this is a good move, I just have a quick question: Does anyone anywhere have video footage of a Rivian actually being driven? Like, not in a commercial, someone genuinely driving it. I just want to know if they are anywhere close to having a production vehicle. If they have a single production vehicle that does what they say, then OK they "just" have to figure out scaling up the manufacturing. If they don't…
I'm not sure making a single vehicle is harder to build than a large scale plant is... but I did find this via a quick google search: https://www.rivianforums.com/threads/preproduction-rivian-r1... I wouldn't assume it's not a submarine commercial though...
Petrol is a large tax source in the UK -- every mile you drive in a petrol car funds your local school.
Governments can tax EV owners to offset the loss of fuel taxes. In many US States, the fees payed by EV owners exceed fuel taxes. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/electric-car-state...
I think it's clear the lifecycle calculation favors the EV, but I don't think it's night and day[1]. Likely the emissions associated with the manufacture of the ICE and EV vans are similar (the batteries in the EV may even make it a little worse). But there's no doubt that the EV is a huge improvement in use, and switching a large portion of the trucks in our cities to EV would be giant win for air quality. As you sa…
> 1: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20... . That article compares the footprint of building a new car vs keeping and existing already built car, not ICE vs EV lifetime carbon footprint. The actual reduction in lifetime carbon footprint for an EV is around 50% vs and ICE, as described here: https://blog.ucsusa.org/rachael-nealer/gasoline-vs-electric-... Not sure if you'd call that night and…
That’s also at American grid levels, and most of the remaining emissions are down to fossil fuels on the grid. Eliminate fossil fuels from grid generation (France for instance is mostly non-fossil already) and the reduction from gasoline to electric is closer to 80%.
Am I the only one who finds the spare tire location an absolute deal breaker? You have to unload the payload, and lift up the payload bed floor in order to access the spare. Now, I suppose this doesn't matter much to Amazon. But I have had the experience of being out the back-country where cell phones don't work, miles from a highway, changing a truck tire by myself. If I had to spend 1 or 2 hours unloading the truck…
Warning: petty partisanship ahead. Our last Republican governor in Illinois spent some quality time trashing this company, which sure looks shortsighted in retrospect: https://www.adaptbn.com/home/2018/5/16/breaking-rauner-criti... He also made a point to trash all of Central Illinois as a place to do business, which is a heck of a strategy for business development. https://www.news-gazette.com/news/rauner-apologizes…
Some friends used to make an annual trip down there. It was where the DSMs were built so it was a fun drive down in our loud rattleboxes. Neat they're using the plant again.
They don't build them like they used to. Probably for a reason. My dad heard gossip at the plant they had to move away from the racer boy turbo platform because they were just too astronomically expensive to insure–because they were invariably driven by 20-something guys who wrapped them around trees.
And as an adult male who has driven a WRX: yes, that tracks.
The typical internal combustion engine is only ~30% efficient, getting only ~10 kWh of energy out of that gallon.
Indeed. That does not, however, impact the actual energy available in a gallon of gasoline. Technically the 6kWh of energy spent on refining (or any other work) is itself subject to inefficiencies in generation, transmission, etc. It would also suffer from inefficiencies in the electrical storage and motive portions of an electric vehicle as well. And at the end of the day even if there were perfect 100% conversion i…
That is incorrect. You have to compare the 6kWh where it is used (at the refinery) and the 10kWh available on the vehicle. Both numbers already include the inefficiencies and therefore are comparable.
Which gives to a mere 4Wh of additional power extracted from gasoline.
Am I the only one who finds the spare tire location an absolute deal breaker? You have to unload the payload, and lift up the payload bed floor in order to access the spare. Now, I suppose this doesn't matter much to Amazon. But I have had the experience of being out the back-country where cell phones don't work, miles from a highway, changing a truck tire by myself. If I had to spend 1 or 2 hours unloading the truck…