How much more R&D can the internal combustion engine pay for?
How fancy are modern cars compared to the original cars?
SKYACTIV-X: first commercial gasoline engine to use compression ignition
231–240 of 241 posts
Re: SKYACTIV-X: first commercial gasoline engine to use compression ignition
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Norway it's 2025. Still too long? :)
When your country has only 5 million people and is a top petroleum extractor and exporter, sure, it's easy to subsidize electric vehicles. Realistically it should be 2020.
Those who will look for opportunity; those who don't seek excuses.
Re: SKYACTIV-X: first commercial gasoline engine to use compression ignition
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Electric cars are the real world example of loose coupling. Once your car is electric the source of the electricity can change (from Coal -> Gas -> Solar) and you don't have to change your car even slightly. So it doesn't matter about any of the arguments about whether an electric car is more efficient or not when the electricity comes from coal. What matters is that having electric cars enables us to move to a futur…
I'm as big fan of EVs as the next guy, and would love to see cities with clean air and no noise. But, there are few things that we forget about when we talk about zero-emmision cars. EVs pollute less, but they pollute too, and in cities as well. They emit dust (including the most harmful particles: PM10 and PM2.5) from break discs and tires. Difference between CO2 in power plants and in city centers matters, but not…
My main point was the loose coupling and getting off the hook from fossil fuels.
I shouldn't have made the point about city pollution as it just diluted the main point.
Nevertheless, the brake discs won't be any worse in electric cars, so it is an absolute reduction in pollution in cities. I've also only heard such things getting raise ever since we started talking about electric cars. When everyone is worring about NOx we forget about all the other polluting steps.
Coal power stations are the worst case scenario for electric cars and even with this things are on a par. But back on my main point with electric cars we can switch to Gas fired power stations and then to our own solar powered roof. With a Mazda ICE you're stuck on petrol.
Plus petrol in the long term can only get more expensive and solar can only get cheaper. Petrol is eventually going to run out and before that happens it's going to get very expensive. Solar panels and batteries will only get more efficient and cheaper to produce.
Battery recycling is definitely an issue and Elon Musk has quoted at the gigafactory opening that they can take all Tesla batteries back an recycle them fairly efficiently as their robots can strip the batteries apart as they have the schemas. Whether other car manufacturers follow suit is open to question.
As far as political reasons go, if everyone is driving electric cars I'm sure there will be much more political pressure to remove the polluting power stations because now CO2 is primarily the fault of the power stations rather than people driving around in their cars.
Re: SKYACTIV-X: first commercial gasoline engine to use compression ignition
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm as big fan of EVs as the next guy, and would love to see cities with clean air and no noise. But, there are few things that we forget about when we talk about zero-emmision cars. EVs pollute less, but they pollute too, and in cities as well. They emit dust (including the most harmful particles: PM10 and PM2.5) from break discs and tires. Difference between CO2 in power plants and in city centers matters, but not…
EV should consume less brake discs because small braking recharges the battery.
How does that work? I always assumed that they were still using the disc brakes but harnessing that somehow to recharge the battery
Re: SKYACTIV-X: first commercial gasoline engine to use compression ignition
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gasoline engines aren't going away for a while; even when every self-driving car is electric, there will be a market for people who want gasoline engines. If it gives a bump in fuel economy to the next (last?) generation of gasoline and hybrid vehicles, great! I also wonder if the maintainability of these engines will be the same as with diesel. That would be another big benefit.
Outside of Europe maybe. Inside, well, UK and France have already said no more ICE vehicles to be sold past 2040, and other countries are planning the similar (including India). That’s a big loss of market and consequent economy of scale.
Will hybrids be permitted though?
Re: SKYACTIV-X: first commercial gasoline engine to use compression ignition
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Electric cars are the real world example of loose coupling. Once your car is electric the source of the electricity can change (from Coal -> Gas -> Solar) and you don't have to change your car even slightly. So it doesn't matter about any of the arguments about whether an electric car is more efficient or not when the electricity comes from coal. What matters is that having electric cars enables us to move to a futur…
> Plus having electric cars that don't pollute in cities where there are lots of people and generating the electricity with coal fired powerstations outside of cities where there are less people has immediate benefits. While this is true, much as the rest of your comment, this sentence has made me think that pushing pollution away from the eyes of people is a really negative effect of electric cars. If pollution is n…
I kind of hope not. As bgarbiak points out [0], there's other things that we start talking about once the pollution of fossil fuels is out the way.
Also once people have electric cars the incentive to have solar panels on your roof becomes bigger. Then once enough electricity is generated through that the coal power stations just get turned off because they're not needed.
Plus there will still be the issue of CO2 generation, just that drivers won't be responsible any so like ex-smokers (who in my experience seem to be more anti-smoking than most) they'll probably be even more offended by the polluting power stations.
Re: SKYACTIV-X: first commercial gasoline engine to use compression ignition
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't forget that electrical grid transmission losses cause massive efficiency problems before centrally generated power ever reaches that car charging point -- on the order of 30% or more, and conversion from AC to DC at the charging port may account for another 10-30%. (Made up numbers, but they're in well within range IIRC) I don't think it follows that just because we have historically centralized power generatio…
> conversion from AC to DC at the charging port may account for another 10-30% Simple rectification has not so much loss, I think you are thinking about low voltage DC power supplies, and I think that chargers for large, high voltage battery piles are likely to be happy with rectified (maybe doubled) mains supply. The low voltage supply is first rectifying the input, then using an inverter to generate high frequency…
Large AC -> DC conversion has to do this too.
The simple "diode" rectification is no longer acceptable due to harmonics put on the AC side causing grid stability problems and emitted radio interference.
Re: SKYACTIV-X: first commercial gasoline engine to use compression ignition
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So this is ... diesel without the NOx NOx is not peculiar to diesel engines. Gasoline engines also generate NOx. All internal engines make NOx. As long as you burn fuel + atmospheric air you get NOx. The atmosphere is 78% nitrogen. Some of it gets oxidized.
The catalytic converter helps to manage this in a gasoline engine. Cats are more difficult for diesel, which led to the ammonia fluids that current diesels use to minimize NOx emissions.
I don't understand why not simply cool the exhaust gasses down with a big heat exchanger enough to condense the water vapour. That water would then react with the NOx to form dilute nitric acid, dilute enough to just drip onto the road with little environmental harm.
The same condensation process would also trap all the carbon particulates.
Re: SKYACTIV-X: first commercial gasoline engine to use compression ignition
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but stratified charge combustion produces significantly more NOx in cylinder because of the excess oxygen.
Which is exactly what most gasoline engines do, too.
Most gasoline engines are homegenous charge, and run within a few percent of the stoichiometric air fuel ratio. Diesels will run at 6x the stoichiometric ideal amount of air.
Re: SKYACTIV-X: first commercial gasoline engine to use compression ignition
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tailpipe#Criticism The biggest nail in the coffin of the long tailpipe fallacy is that you can drive an EV farther on the power needed to refine a gallon of gas than you can drive a ICE car on that same gallon. So, even if you built a gasoline engine that had absolutely no emissions, and oil bubbled up into crude lakes right next to every refinery, EVs would still be more effici…
Refining gasoline seems to be ~88% efficient per your source. While this isn't negligible, it hardly changes the argument.
Sure. And an EV can drive ~25 miles on the energy in that 12%.