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Audi abandons combustion engine development

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Re: Audi abandons combustion engine development

#91

Post by dv_dt »

xyzzy21 wrote: post #89
kashprime wrote: post #5

ICE’s have over a century of development behind them now. I’m not going to miss them, but I wonder if there’s a way to ‘archive’ this kind of specialist mechanical engineering knowledge. It may come in handy one day. It’s depressing to read about engineers having to go to the Smithsonian to study the lunar lander to relearn some of the innovations and improvisations made at the time.

No there isn't. Technology knowledge is extremely ephemeral and easily lost once you stop using it because so much of it is "tacit knowledge" that is only preserved by active use and passed by mentorship/apprenticeship. We've lost many technologies this way. In some cases like FOGBANK and the recent B2 bomber heat exchange system, there was enough incentive to reconstruct it from scratch at great cost. For most lost…

Well yes and no. Sometimes you can bring the industry back, but with a newer generation of technology. High capital investment industries like manufacturing I think are particularly amenable to generational leapfrogging because the original capital investors are very tempted to keep operating old methods for the margin. This gives an opening for any entity willing to make a new capital investment.

This is essentially what China did to a lot of US manufacturing, as well as SpaceX to old line aerospace giants.

Re: Audi abandons combustion engine development

#92

Post by jvanderbot »

rasz wrote: post #60
jvanderbot wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just paid a blacksmith to teach me to forge weld. Someday maybe bored middle-class folks will pay to learn to change oil on a v8 between marathons.

Brazing? like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz9H850dtqY ?

Nope: like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j814AqiKVvE

Re: Audi abandons combustion engine development

#93

Post by samus »

Aperocky wrote: post #16
devoutsalsa wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t remember the lunar lander, but I do recall reading how each rocket engine on the Saturn V was one of a kind, because the engineers had to assemble each one by hand, and each acted slightly differently. So there’s no way to reproduce a specific Saturn V engine now, but there also never was back when the Saturn V was still flying.

Would we do any differently today? I think we gravitated towards smaller and more numerous engines (that are easier to construct to the same exact copies), but nobody since has built anything remotely as large as the Rocketdyne F1.

SpaceX pursues its business on a much larger and, most importantly, more regular schedule. In this case it is possible to standardize and mass produce many parts.

Re: Audi abandons combustion engine development

#94

Post by samus »

pmastela wrote: post #8
kashprime wrote: post #5

ICE’s have over a century of development behind them now. I’m not going to miss them, but I wonder if there’s a way to ‘archive’ this kind of specialist mechanical engineering knowledge. It may come in handy one day. It’s depressing to read about engineers having to go to the Smithsonian to study the lunar lander to relearn some of the innovations and improvisations made at the time.

For posterity, I wish all this information would make its way to a public repo as to not be lost in the sands of time.

What purpose should such a repo serve? The most common ones are museums. Yes, they are not perfect, and it is easy to oversimplify and misinterpret what is presented there.

If you want to preserve it for survivors of civilisational collapse, then it has to be codified and simplified first. Well done, a civilization could jump tech levels much quicker than if they had had to bootstrap everything first.

Re: Audi abandons combustion engine development

#95

Post by samus »

burlesona wrote: post #52
flukus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been wondering if the cutoff is actually much earlier. Say 50% of cars on the road are EV, how many gas stations can continue to run profitably with 50% less customers? Even getting and refining the gas requires massive global supply chains to transport and refine, what happens when there's a 50% drop in customers? Do they lose their efficiencies of scale? Do prices rise substantially as this happens? I suspect…

Gas stations are an interesting case, because most of them make most of their money selling snacks and beer. The gas money largely goes to the oil company.

Then they are gonna be safe. s/gas/EV charging

Re: Audi abandons combustion engine development

#96

Post by flukus »

lfowles wrote: post #62
flukus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is right, but gas is still the main reason people stop there. If people aren't stopping to buy gas then they will not be making their impulse/convenience purchases and the gas station still loses their profits. It's somewhat more complicated because many also function as convenience stores, but most convenience stores near me have already died so I doubt that would save them.

On the other hand if you're stopping there for a charge, you'll be spending longer and have more time to consider just popping in for a snack.

That will work for some, most notably the big ones on the side of highways, but I assumed most people would be charging at home, at least for city driving. The earliest adopters will also be the most wealthy that are more likely to have rooftop solar to leverage.

Re: Audi abandons combustion engine development

#97

Post by rasz »

jvanderbot wrote: post #92
rasz wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brazing? like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz9H850dtqY ?

Nope: like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j814AqiKVvE

Ah, so its purely from a historical preservation angle. Is there a point with $80 Amazon stick welders available?

Re: Audi abandons combustion engine development

#98

Post by sjwright »

jeppesen-io wrote: post #31
sjwright wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if we get to 99% EV within fifty years, it’s going to be a long while after that before EV takes over 100.000% of ICE.

fifty years? no way. But even if you're right, what point are you trying to make?

My point is that there's a long tail of vehicles out there. Whether the fleet transition from ICE to EV is fast or slow, getting the long tail fully transitioned in a similar timeframe is implausible.

Heck, we haven't even transitioned 100.000% away from horses yet.

Re: Audi abandons combustion engine development

#99

Post by sjwright »

pmorici wrote: post #23
sjwright wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if we get to 99% EV within fifty years, it’s going to be a long while after that before EV takes over 100.000% of ICE.

There are something like 1.4 billion vehicles in operation world wide and 80 million new vehicles are sold every year. That is at most 17 years once new vehicle sales are effectively 100% electric which will probably happen around 2030. The value of used gas cars will deteriorate rapidly as the spare parts and repair networks disappear and electric vehicle costs become much cheaper pulling forward demand for the tran…

I was talking about the proportion of the worldwide fleet, not proportion of new sales. Remember, not all vehicles are passenger cars. And not all vehicles always near electric infrastructure.

Re: Audi abandons combustion engine development

#100

Post by sjwright »

p1necone wrote: post #18
sjwright wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if we get to 99% EV within fifty years, it’s going to be a long while after that before EV takes over 100.000% of ICE.

I don't know about that, consider other tech that got superseded by new methods. It only took a couple of decades for there to be no companies manufacturing CRT TVs any more.

The use cases of vehicles are much wider than the use cases of TVs.
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