Would a 14% increase in thermal efficiency translate into a meaningful reduction in carbon emitted per mile driven? This is interesting technology, but I'm not sure it will prolong the internal combustion engine, at least as far as mass market consumer transportation is concerned.
I'm thinking this might have interesting applications as a range extender of EVs, like e.g. available for the BMW i30. A vehicle with 150-200km electric range and an optional extender could be quite compelling for lots of usecases.
It looks like this would make for a pretty heavy engine, with four cylinders to do the work of 1-2 in a more traditional engine. So it might not be worth the trouble in a car, but may be useful in stationary or marine applications.
Yes, hybrids are definitely a viable use-case. There are also other applications where a combustion engine makes much more sense, especially if this design can be used for smaller engines like chainsaw engines and lawnmower engines.
The article doesn't mention what kind of fuel this new engine uses, but if it can run on ethanol, or synthesized hydrocarbons like E-diesel then this could definitely be a good thing.
> Thankfully electricity is not available everywhere, e.g. in the middle of a forest.
Well, do you easily find a refueling station in the middle of the forest? If you brought spare fuel containers, why wouldn't you bring all-the-same spare batteries?
Energy density is probably quite important for something handheld like a chainsaw. I doubt batteries are able to replace that except for some light garden use.
This. A 5l can of fuel is easier to drag along and I suspect current battery tech won't be good enough for professional use.
I have a chainsaw that runs on mains power. It's really nice (and quiet) for smaller tasks close to the house, but it doesn't help once you get outside extension cord-range.
40 volt electric chainsaws are fine for anything under 6 inches in diameter. That covers almost all household use cases as well as many trail thinning situations.
They are getting there, at least for lawnmowers. Robot movers are getting close in price to traditional mowers. There are a good selection of chainsaws for gardening and light usage that are electric.
But if you, like me, use 2-3l of bio-fuel a year during only 2-3 days on the chainsaw there are not many options and not much to save. Even added up all the fuel used on chainsaws is microscopic compared to for instance savings going from giant trucks to smaller trucks or cars, which is an easy fix by changing regulations in US to not favor giant trucks and subsiding fuel
> Would a 14% increase in thermal efficiency translate into a meaningful reduction in carbon emitted per mile driven?
Yes (as long as the engineers don't seriously mess up).
Nearly all of the energy released by burning gasoline is in the form of heat. ICE engines use that heat to expand gases, and capture the expansion as mechanical motion. Modern automotive ICE engines capture roughly 40% of their combustion output as mechanical work. The remaining 60% of the energy, still in the form of heat, is lost through the radiator and the tailpipe. Improving that ratio allows you to burn less fuel to get the same work done. Carbon is emitted by burning fuel, so burning 14% less fuel (yet accomplishing the same work) would result in approximately 14% less carbon being released for the same task.
Off the top of my head, here are some reasons that improving theoretical thermodynamic efficiency might not reduce carbon emissions:
* The extra parts to increase the efficiency (the fourth piston) could sap more energy in friction than they capture from the waste heat. (This would cause the engine to not actually have the claimed thermodynamic efficiency -- it's back to producing the same amount of waste heat as before, just in a more complicated way.)
* The combustion could be hard to control and inefficient, sending unburned fuel out the exhaust pipe. (This lowers the combustion efficiency, but doesn't actually change the thermodynamic efficiency -- it's still producing less heat per gram of burned fuel.)
* The higher compression ratio, and the different mixing pattern caused by the sliding valve, might cause more-potent greenhouse gases to be produced than CO2. (This doesn't change the efficiency at all, but it does affect the environmental impact similarly to burning more fuel in a less-efficient engine.)
History is littered with the corpses of 'better' IC engine designs... the basic problem is you need to retool your entire factory and re-design your vehicles. If you are doing that today, why not just jump straight to electric motors?
Because they can't satisfy every need just yet. Imagine we still have horses even with engines being around for more than a century. And adapting to a newer IC tech might actually be cheaper and easier than redesigning for EV tech. Manufacturers already have the experience, logistics chains, much of the designs, etc.
Some transitions are never complete because sometimes there's no "one size fits all" option for the manufacturer or the consumer.
Perhaps generators or heavy construction equipment would benefit from something like this. Lower pollution, lower costs for the operator, while still offering some flexibility that electric tech may not even in a decade.
There are still hundreds of thousands to millions of work horses around the world. I'm still very much for improving old tech where it's possible and makes sense, even if it's niche.
Yes thanks everybody knows what efficiency is. It factors into transportation, only in the effect it has on fuel weight. Essentially, on how it effects kWh(delivered)/kg.
Between this, camless motors, motors that can switch between different combustion cycles and variable compression ratios there is technically still a lot of improvement to be had. Whether or not the political climate will allow those improvements to come forth is unfortunately uncertain
I think it's less a matter of political climate and more just that these improvements are "too little, too late" when electrics are already taking over markets.
How long would I need to wait for these theoretical improvements to go from lab to reliable, mass market cars? Why aren't they here already, why would I wait a decade or two (for what, a 10%-20% improvement?) if I can buy a full electric car tomorrow?
I don't object to improvements, but it's a race, and it seems like ICEs are losing that race unless they can do something impressive on a very short timescale.
I don't think this benefits ICs at winning the race, that ship has sailed. Rather it benefits "us". ICs are going to be around for a while depending on the application. They might as well get more efficient and less polluting.
We're still improving on DSL and coax as long as they have to be around even if fiber is better.
I'm not sure that's an apt analogy; if you have DSL instead of fiber, it's probably because fiber wasn't available at your location (or would've required you to pay some company thousands to dig up trenches and lay new infra).
If electrics take the mass market, as I think they will, then new ICEs will largely just vanish from the market, and anyone who needs a normal family car can and will buy electric. Improvements to ICE tech don't go into old used cars because we don't upgrade their engines. The only ICEs that would be sold new are ones built to meet special needs, but they're probably going to be uncommon enough that improvements in them don't benefit "us" in a meaningful way; instead they become something you can largely ignore.
Like, nobody is campaigning for fuel efficiency / pollution mandates for ATVs, tractors, supercars, or excavators, because they aren't a blimp on the radar. In these applications, fuel economy tends to be a very secondary concern anyway.
I think it's reasonably apt. I wouldn't buy an electric car if charging wasn't available in my area[1], just like I currently don't buy fiber because it's not available in my area.
Over time, more areas will have fiber, and more people will be able to make the choice, or even have no choice but to buy fiber. Likewise, over time, charging access will grow and gasoline access will shrink, and more people will own electric cars. During the transition, there will be lots of people who might yearn to own an electric car (just as I currently yearn for fiber), but don't because the vehicles will be expensive, they won't be able to charge at home, and their routine places won't offer car charging. For those people, having access to less-dirty ICE cars will be a strict, if less-than-maximum, improvement over owning older, dirtier ICE cars.
[1] I can't charge at home because my neighborhood only has street parking, and the parking spots are on the other side of the street from my home.
> it's probably because fiber wasn't available at your location
EV charging infrastructure in many countries is rarer than hen's teeth. It's also much more expensive compared to fuel infrastructure that's already paid for and in place for decades.
> fuel economy tends to be a very secondary concern anyway
Fleets of vehicles always have fuel consumption as a prominent concern. But the pollution might also be since legislation could very well start covering construction or industrial equipment.
> If electrics take the mass market
"Mass" never meant 100%. We are surrounded by outdated tech that is still around because it fills a need even if just in a niche. Despite people insisting the fixed phone and snail mail have been superseded by mobiles and email, both of those legacy options are still there. Even selling 10% of the current volumes of ICEs still justifies improving them.
ICE motors have been evolving for over a century now so the improvements will become ever smaller. Despite that slowdown in progress, the energy density advantage of fuel over batteries still vast. Regulation should, in my opinion, be be aggressively pushing towards reducing vehicle size and weight instead of focusing on the fuel. Having a 2 ton car to move a 60kg person from stop light to stop light is just insane
One of my personal fantasies is that the United States imposes a maximum road speed limit of 45 miles per hour (72 kilometers / hour). As a result, cars get lighter, more efficient, and safer, and trains become more popular and practical means of traveling long distances.
45 miles an hour seems like a reasonable compromise speed. At 65% the common highway speed limit of 70 mph, it's still fast enough to cross most states in a day, to travel between nearby cities in an hour or so, and to do errands in an afternoon. But a car at that speed has only 41% the kinetic energy as at 70 mph, making colisons less lethal, and has similarly less wind resistance, requiring smaller engines and less fuel.
I'm conflicted on this because I'd like those gains in safety and efficiency. I think it'd also allow us to live with smaller & curvier roads, which I think are romantic and kinda relaxing. (I'm quite bored with the wide straight flats they build; those also ruin the scenery and generate lots of noise)
On the other hand, cars have been getting safer and faster and more efficient, roads have been getting wider and safer.. only speed limits haven't been lifted to match. A part of me wants to live the utopia where I can get where I want to be in less than half the time it takes today. That'd make the difference between going to my parents for a coffee after work vs having to reserve a full day (if not a full weekend) for the trip.
I think speed limits have informally (and unevenly) been rising to match the capabilities of new cars and roads. I visited a new area recently, and was shocked to see that traffic was flowing at 90 mph (!) in a 70 mph zone.
I was glad I wasn't driving, because not only is that a greater posted-vs-actual speed difference than I've seen before, but I've never actually driven that fast in my life. I'd have been torn between driving 80 in the right lane and being constantly passed at 10-15mph, or being white-knuckled behind some other vehicle and setting a personal landspeed record.
In my case, rural Finland, it's been the same for as long as I remember. Maximum limit is 120 km/h on freeways (and there are practically none of them where I usually drive), elsewhere on bigger inter-city roads it's 100 km/h during summer and 80 km/h during winter. Lesser roads, never more than 80 km/h.
And traffic never flows significantly faster than the limit. A few km/h over the limit at most. There are some weirdos who drive much faster and are constantly overtaking others, but relatively few people drive like that. If anything, it seems to me that speeding has become less common over the years as the police have tightened the limit at which they'll fine you.
I am from the Czech Republic. Left lane on highway is informally reserved for "going fast", as in 160-200+ km/h. Right lane is around 120-140 km/h. Oficial speed limit is 130 km/h. Regional roads are limited to 90 km/h, but people travel as fast as 160 km/h on the largest ones. Town areas are limited to 50 km/h unless said otherwise and it required automated radars to get drivers to go less than 90 km/h in many towns on major roads.
People are basically behaving like it's German autobahn everywhere. Even the informal rules have adjusted - in a major city, you not only respect the right hand rule, but also give right of way to all vehicles on the more major road. The conflict is resolved by blinking headlights.
Honda used to be the most popular brand here (90's and first few years of 00's).
Safe traffic speed is a tautology since (at least per current civil engineering doctrine) speed limits are based on the Xth percentile (where X is usually somewhere in the 75-90 range).
Speed limits themselves only have a passing correlation to safe traffic speed. Almost nobody actually follows them intentionally at scale (traffic just moves at the maximum safe speed which just sometimes happens to be at or below the posted limit) which is why most municipalities are abandoning the "slap a sign with a low number on it" approach for "traffic calming" road features. Traffic moves at what it considered to be the highest safe speed for the conditions (a bunch of factors too long to list). You're seeing high differences because there's many roads that have speed limits that are unrealistically low for light traffic conditions (often below the designed speed of the road) and traffic density (as opposed to visibly or a sharp curve) was the road condition that was the bottleneck on speed on most busy roads. 'Rona has widened that bottleneck so of course you're seeing bigger differences between the posted limits and the traffic speed on those roads (which is probably all roads if you only ever drive during daytime hours in urban areas).
Edit: kind of got off on a tangent there but the point I should have made is that speed limits are fixed whereas traffic speed is variable based on conditions. As conditions change both slowly over time and day to day/hour to hour the max safe traffic speed changes. With 'Rona chopping congestion across the board it's no surprise that you see traffic speeds much farther from the speed limit on roads where traffic volume was a big factor in the traffic speed.
You could just build better trains, it's going to take state or fed level money to do that anyway. If the trains were better, people would use them. In practice, todays 70 mph is not much different from 45 mph. You can't drive 70 mph nonstop, medium speed is lower.
Having a 2 ton car to move a 60kg person from stop light to stop light is just insane
That is solely determined by the energy required. And there is, where the electric car excels. A Tesla uses less than the equivalent of 2l of fuel for 100km or in other units achieves 120mpg. In situations you describe, it fares even better, as 60% of the kinetic energy built up is gained back when braking using the electric motors. So mass is much less a problem with electric cars than with combustion engines, which can't recuperate the kinetic energy.
They are still better than any car with a combustion engine at highway speeds. They don't recuperate while driving at constant speed of course, but still they have the greater efficiency of the electric motor vs. the combustion engine. Usually they have better aerodynamics too. But the weight doesn't play a role there, only making the cars physically smaller - less air resistance - would improve the energy consumption at highway speeds.
To use 60% less fuel, the car needs to havee appropriately less mass, so you are talking about 700kg for a 5 seated car with passengers.
If you are talking about fossil fuel cars with regenerative breaking, you are talking about hybrids, which use their electric part for that, but their breaking power is limited compare to pure EVs by the electric engine power and the charging limits of the smaller battery.
I don’t disagree with you but I see that as an aside. Millions of people don’t need 2.5 ton SUVs to cart themselves to and from the shops. Yes ok BEV will do it better but we have had scales for longer than we’d had batteries
Why is this not a welcome change even considering the supply chain difficulties ? The thing is combustion engine fumes make up for a tiny fraction of carbon emissions. The major part is from industrial production (like cement factories, steel plants etc.) In fact, electric vehicles will only help if the electricity powering it was generated from renewable sources which is a significant fraction in certain countries but not most. Considering these facts I guess good combustion is still a welcome change.
>In fact, electric vehicles will only help if the electricity powering it was generated from renewable sources which is a significant fraction in certain countries but not most.
That statement is false. If an EV is run on electricity generated from coal only, the overall emissions output is close to that of a comparable ICE car [0]. Introduce some friendlier methods into the mix and your beating ICE by quite a margin.
The main source of emissions from an EV come from the manufacturing process. Even those can be significantly reduced when proper methods are applied.
ICEs are very inefficient. Even when powered by electricity from a coal plant, an electric car has less emissions than an ICE, simply because the coal plant burns coal more efficiently than an ICE. A more efficient ICE certainly helps, but coal to more efficient fossil fuels, like gas, helps even more. And many countries are rapidly moving to cleaner electricity.
But you're right that there are many other sources of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses. Those also definitely need to be addressed, but that does not mean car emissions don't need to be addressed as well.
> combustion engines fumes make up for a tiny fraction of carbon emissions
Not true. Transport (road/sea/air) accounts for 29% of US emissions. That’s hardly “tiny”. Of that, 59% is from light duty road transport. Burning fossil fuels for transport is a major contributor to global warming.
Cement and steel are serious problems as the chemical processes inherently emit CO2, but they are also centralised and therefore possible spots for carbon capture and storage.
(There is some work done on reducing iron with hydrogen, but you do need a bit of carbon for carbon steel)
Even with the increased electrification of transport, there's still a very strong case for liquid fuel - it just offers an energy density so much higher than batteries, especially in off-grid or remote situations.
Electric drivetrains open up an interesting potential for range-extenders which charge the batteries. The constraints are different than conventional engines - lower peak power, more-or-less continuous power output operation, no sudden torque changes. Different constraints generally mean a different optimal solution.
Li-metal batteries [edit: still an immature tech] are at around 14 MJ / kg, and gasoline is at 47.5 MJ / kg.
Moreover, suppose that you are really "off-grid". Meaning, you are off any fuel supply network!! In this case precisely, you would be saved by electric-related techs, such as photovoltaic.
If I run off to start a farm, and I buy an existing OTS used tractor, it will have a tank that I can pour almost any flammable liquid into to make it run. If I want to plug the tractor in... well, that'll get the engine to turn over, but it won't get it moving anywhere.
If I build myself a cabin in the woods, I can burn wood or wood pellets to keep cook food, or keep warm during the winter. Alternatively, I could purchase batteries, PV panels, and the necessary charge control electronics, in order to run an electric heater.
Burning recently-alive biomass does release carbon, but it's carbon that was in the atmosphere as recently as a few months ago. It isn't zero emission, but it doesn't contribute a long-term increase to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
Other emissions like particulates can be worse from wood burning. And most of the CO2 is likely to have been collected over a much longer period than a few months. Without a significant tree planting effort it is likely to increase CO2 levels.
A forest is a carbon store. Burning trees puts carbon from this store to the atmosphere.
To count it as carbon neutral is an accounting mistake, that could be very costly...
Burn the dead leaves and you shrink humus (or annihilate it, depending on how much you do it), another huge carbon store. So that makes it yet another accounting mistake.
More generally, it is good practice to separate well atmospheric carbon (CO2) and captive carbone (anything in solid/liquid state). Just show that faithfully in the accounting method, and a lot of good will follow.
Would you then just unnoticingly burn them for energy, and keep telling the customers that you just captured a net amount of carbon?
PS: oh you are jacquesm! :) didn't notice. How are you?
PPS: some critic about the link you sent me ("wood-energy.extension"): I disagree with what they say, in that fallen wood too is a carbon store, and in a forest at equilibrium the amount decomposed by fungi/bacteria is roughly compensated by the newly fallen wood. So that's just a carbon store, and if you begin to burn it you shrink this store.
Not at all, except if you mean arctic winter (when it's technically night all the day).
Also, electric offers you the plethora of choices in methods to produce your energy. If it's not photovoltaic, you still have many solutions. Could as well be eolian, or a dam, or hundred of people riding generator-bikes (half-kidding), or etc.
It's funny to think about, but if you do the math even dozens of humans riding bikes contribute so little energy compared to what a building requires it is totally negligible and would never be worth the cost beyond a gimmick.
It's not quite that bad. Solar panels that point directly at the sun during the summer solstice will still receive 91% the density of light during the winter solstice. ( cos(24deg) ~= 0.91 ) Where I live (about 40deg north), the winter solstice is 63% as long (9.5 hours) as the summer solstice (15 hours). Even a thick blanket of snow, or 100% cloud cover, will only reduce power by about 50%.
---
Under the worst possible conditions (not considering temperature), on the shortest day of the year, with 100% clouds and a thick layer of snow, PV panels would produce 14% as much power per day as on the longest day of the year with 0 cloud cover.
It depends. Electric motors also have losses in their controllers, which removes another 5% or 10%. If you want mechanical power output and have 1kg of pre-charged batteries and 1kg of liquid fuel, the efficiency of electric motors might close the density gap. Lets assume 95% efficient controller+motor (slightly optimistic) and 30% efficient ICE (somewhat pessimistic).
1kg * 14 MJ/kg * 95% = 13 MJ mechanical
1kg * 47 MJ/kg * 30% = 14 MJ mechanical
It comes out pretty close!
If you want mechanical power and also heat (for keeping people, animals, or equipment warm, decreasing the viscosity of fluids, etc), ICE is definitely the way to go.
-- edit --
/u/ash points out Tesla's energy density is is 0.576 MJ/kg
One can't really charge a battery with power spikes from randomly hitting the brakes. Only part of the braking energy is recoverable, for example when braking to reduce speed while descending a long slope. Braking strategy should also be different in this case: similar to engine braking in regular vehicles. Since most EVs rarely have a multi speed gearbox, regenerative braking should be built into the brake pedal.
Do you have a link to back this number? Are these batteries rechargeable? Does the measurement include wiring, cooling, cell connections and overall structure of the battery pack?
For comparison, Tesla's (Li-ion) battery pack energy density is 160 Wh/kg, which is 0.576 MJ/kg:
I used that, and actually I may have missed the bit where they explain that "lithium metal as an anode were suggested for future high-energy-density batteries", implying that it's still an immature tech.
At that point you need to consider the whole car. The engine needed to extract energy from that fuel is much bigger in the ICE car. And it also needs cooling, etc.
Comparing just the gas tank to several subsystems of a battery electric vehicle is not really an interesting comparison. The closest comparison at that level is just gas vs just cells.
Overall electric is still lower energy density per weight, but is also far more efficient. The whole Tesla pack has the energy of just a couple gallons of gas but can go 400 miles.
I have driven through parts of the western US where it is 100 miles to the next gas/petrol station. There are farms and ranches in these areas but they are connected to the electrical grid with wires. It seems like having an electric tractor and charging at the farm would be more convenient than transporting hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel from 100 miles away.
Tractors are bursty. They are heavily used at planting and harvesting. Farmers can't spend long periods of time recharging in the middle of planting season. And it would be too expensive to buy 12 hours of battery capacity for a couple times a year.
Actually, batteries win on refuel time. Swapping batteries is much faster than filling a tank. Gas wins on meantime between refuels and in other categories. Farmers can and happily will spend super long periods of time recharging if they can operate during the recharge.
My own initial experiences have been mixed. Overall advantage still goes to gas. But I think we're very close to getting this battery thing figured out. Just a few years away. When we look back it will seem like it happened overnight.
>>Actually, batteries win on refuel time. Swapping batteries is much faster than filling a tank
By that logic, you could say that there is absolutely no difference, because if you can imagine a car where the battery can be swapped, you should be able to imagine a car where the entire fuel tank is swapped. A tractor arrives at a station, and instead of filling up 500 litres of diesel, the entire tank is simply replaced with a full one. It wins again since fuel tanks are cheap - they are just metal and plastic after all, you can have several just sitting there, full or empty.
The fact that no one has done it yet suggests that this really isn't an issue - commercial diesel filling stations usually run at much higher pressure than your regular pumps, a truck/tractor tank fills in minutes because of a much higher flow rate.
That is very silly and disingenuous argument to make and a total straw man.
Swapping gas tanks provides no advantage and you conveniently ignore the whole point of the batteries which is that you don't need any fuel infrastructure to fill your tanks!
> Actually, batteries win on refuel time. Swapping batteries is much faster than filling a tank.
Swapping batteries implies either having multiple batteries, which adds to you costs significantly, or it implies adding yet another proprietary service company putting the screws to you in your supply chain.
Swapping 2000 lbs+ of batteries is faster than filling tank? When is the last time you hauled thousands of pounds? It ain’t fast, let me tell you that.
Perhaps you've never seen a 1500 lbs steer get its hooves trimmed. Or a 1 ton bail get loaded and unloaded in seconds. Or somebody change the tire on a tractor.
Farmers have machines and equipment for almost everything. Swapping out a flat pack? POC
Tractors use a lot of horsepower constantly. Cars are burst. Put the pedal to the floor on a Tesla and you are up to the speed limit in seconds at which time you back off. Take your Tesla to an infinite straight track and put the pedal to the floor and the battery will be dead in a few minutes. (though probably something else will break first)
A tractor will go through fuel faster than you can imagine if you've never worked with one. Plowing a field or running some powered attachment while you have the creeper gears engaged will cause a nice little vortex in your fuel tank.
> Moreover, suppose that you are really "off-grid". Meaning, you are off any fuel supply network!! In this case precisely, you would be saved by electric-related techs, such as photovoltaic.
Albeit in theory true, here in the outskirts of the Sahara, I have yet to find a village where I can get an electrician to fix my solar panels, though a few bottles of gasoline can be found everywhere.
I was using off-grid in the most straightforward of senses - off the electricity grid. That doesn't necessary mean stationary or without weight limits (as solar would require) - it could mean long distance trucking, or logging, construction, or even the maintenance of electricity pylons (which probably can't be turned on during that process).
All those require huge amounts of energy, and batteries are not yet nearly there (as others point out, your numbers for battery energy density are out by a factor of 30).
If there was a Nobel Prize for understatement, this comment would take it hands down.
New "breakthroughs" in battery energy density are a dime a dozen. They're proving incredibly difficult to bring to commercial viability, and there's no evidence that that's going to change.
Hydrogen tops out at 142 MJ / kg. Disappointing that so few here are aware of this basic fact.
It seems obvious that if you want the density of liquid fuels, hydrogen is the answer. Compromising yourself with a lower energy density substance stands as a very difficult problem to solve.
I’m surprised there hasn’t been more development of engines optimized as range extenders. That seemed like an obvious next step from the Prius, for example.
But I think the peak of that opportunity has passed. The market in Europe and China is going to flip to pure electric in 5-8 years, with the US 5 years later. The window for developing new models that fit into that transition is shrinking. There will be long term demand for range extended vehicles, still in 15 or 20 years, but it will be niche.
>The market in Europe and China is going to flip to pure electric in 5-8 years
That's way too optimistic for Europe.
Maybe with the exception of Norway and Europe's largest metros like London, most of Europe will stay on ICE for a long time.
The price of electric cars here is too high for most incomes and the cheaper ones have too little range compared to ICEs.
Not to mention the charging infrastructure is still lacking.
Right now they're still toys for the rich man with a house and not tools for the average joe.
I'd rather we invest the money in public transport and cycling infrastructure to rid the cities of cars but unfortunately the auto industry lobbies too strong in Europe for that to happen.
I'm also just really not sure the battery capacity will be able to scale that quickly. As it stands we are basically making EVs as fast as we make batteries.
Electric cars are going to become extremely compelling very soon. A 300 mile electric car is close to the same cost as an IC engine over it’s lifespan. But, where IC engines have a hundred years of development and economies of scale electric cars are getting significantly better very quickly.
Charge infrastructure is expanding rapidly due to current rates of adoption which further makes electric cars more appealing every year.
While electric cars will cost less over their lifespan (due to much less maintenance), they still cost a lot more initially, and I think that's the biggest hurdle right now.
A lot of people can't drop $40k on a car, but they can spend $25k up front and another $15k over the life of the car.
I think the major changeover will be when I can buy the equivalent of a Honda Accord, but fully electric, and for the same price.
The Tesla Model 3 was supposed to be that, but in reality, it still costs more.
And that ignores the fact that the majority of car sales are not new cars, so the average purchase price of a car is lower still. Even once the majority of new car sales are EVs, we still have a long way to go (with both energy generation and the long period before the majority of miles driven are in EVs).
Not really in the market for one, but in the US the 2019 Hyundai Ioniq (range of ~120 mi, so not ideal if you don't have a charger at home) is $99/mo with $1000 down for a 3 year lease, which is dirt cheap. I'm guessing after three years the battery will still be valuable, so they can be aggressively pricing it this way.
I think if Tesla had better leasing, you'd see way more of them
I have no idea how the price is so low in the US then, that's insane. We looked at the Ioniq for my wife last year and it was something like £3000 upfront and then £400 a month for 4 years - it's just a lot of money. For comparison, you could have a brand new VW Polo for £1000 upfront and £200 a month - and there's absolutely no way she could use £200 worth of fuel every month, even if petrol doubled in price.
California has this concept of a “compliance car”. There’s a legal requirement to sell X electric cars, so the manufacturers practically give away small, cheap cars to enable their IC business.
Fiat-Chrysler did it with the 500e, and back in the day the big 3 did it with subsidized Cavaliers and Escorts.
What are you talking about? EU is tightening the screw on manufacturers so hard that they are literally panicking right now, as there is literally no way they can meet the regulations as is. Currently there is a requirement that fleet averages have to be below 100g/km for CO2, soon that falls down to 75g/km and then 50g/km - with every car sold above that threshold incurring heavy penalties. We're seeing literally every manufacturer rapidly moving towards hybrids and pure EVs, because there is no way to meet those targets otherwise - VW has completely axed all ICE versions of the Up(and their Skoda and Seat equivalents) going full electric, just to bring their averages down. Even Fiat, whose market was always low-end, cheapest of the cheap vehicles, axed ICE Fiat 500, and has gone full electric. Panda(!!!) is now a hybrid! Even Dacia, which is literally bottom-bin of cars, is introducing a hybrid and potentially a full EV soon.
All of this is only happening because of the pressure from EU regulators.
Currently there is a requirement that fleet averages have to be below 100g/km for CO2, soon that falls down to 75g/km and then 50g/km.
To see how these norms are effectively impossible to meet with ICEs, note that these translate to fuel efficiency of 4, 3, and 2 liters/100 km, or for American folks, 58, 78, and 117 mpg respectively.
The advertised US price likely includes the $7500 federal electric car incentive (which goes to the leasing company) and may even include the $2000 California rebate (subject to income eligibility limits.) Sales tax (VAT) is also excluded from advertised prices in the US.
I would imagine the upcoming release of the VW ID.3 is going to be a game changer in Europe.
€23.000 ID.3 vs €20.000 ICE Golf in Germany, from what I understand the Golf is one of the best selling cars in Europe. Also I believe many European countries exempt or greatly reduce emissions taxes on EVs, so that difference could probably be made up quickly.
One thing that always worries me about buying an electric car is the possibility that the rapid technological advances might destroy the resale value of existing models. That sounds like what this VW model might do.
Next gen electric cars are going to hammer the resale price of both ICE and current EV cars.
Might even be worse we're on the verge of the big global warming panic. At the same time the current pandemic has been showing that the world under a semi command economy is more resilient than neoliberals gaslighted everyone into believing. And thus governments have a lot more wiggle room than they thought. One might find that the resale value of your ICE car is zero.
The cost of electric cars goes down every year. We've gone from $100,000 for a useful/ good electric car to ~$30k (Chevy Bolt EV) in less than 15 years. We're already seeing pricing parity on higher electric cars and soon with the Cybertruck, lower end cars will come within the next 10 years or so.
An engines go back to at least the 1600’s with precursors all the way back into the first century AD. Except cars are really their own thing with their individual needs.
Electric cars are vastly more than just a battery and electric motor. Regenerative breaking, power distribution, heat management, possibly a simple transmission etc etc. The amount of innovation in this space dwarfs what’s happening in the IC space because the problems are so new.
I don’t think weight is much of an issue at this point. EV Acceleration in normal driving is fine and their range keeps going up. The new Roadster for example is aiming for a 200kWh battery and still has crazy acceleration. Cost seems like a bigger deal, but economies of scale are driving that down quickly.
EV’s hit 2.5% of total sales in 2019. 2020 is likely going to be odd, but scaling production still seems to be the bottleneck.
An EC engine is a long way from 100% efficient. Model 3 Long Range is 310 mile range on a 75kWh battery. Cars are not hitting 310 miles on 2.3 gallons of fuel.
For the most extreme comparison, a Bugatti Chiron gets an EPA 11 MPG so the roadster is arguably the equivalent of a 56 gallon fuel tank where the Chiron is stuck with 26 gallons.
PS: A better comparison would be a similar ~200,000$ two seater but none of them are optimized for fuel efficiency.
A bit of a tangent but it'll be interesting to see what effect an all electric vehicle future has on the design of roadways, bridges, etc. I imagine that many things will need to be rebuilt to handle the additional load.
To use your own example, they're designed to handle a certain quantity of 18 wheelers but they're not designed to handle traffic that is entirely composed of 18 wheelers.
Raising the average vehicle weight from 1.5 to 3 tons will definitely have an effect.
But not as much as it would seem, since road damage is a quadratic function of weight and one truck does as much damage as 9600 1 ton cars. Doubling the weight of the car would maybe narrow that by a few percentage points, but vehicle miles for any personal vehicle at essentially any weight is a rounding error compared to one truck.
Roads are designed for a certain amount of "axle weight" [1] which basically means to carry a heavier load you need to add more axles to distribute the load.
I would guess electric cars are still negligible in that metric, though.
They're already built for it. The '73 Pontiac Bonneville I rode around in as a kid weighed 4300 lbs. And as sibling comment mentions, anything not a car or light truck will outweigh anything with batteries. Our Sprinter-based RV weighs 10K lbs. empty, and it is a small RV.
Numbers for Portugal: In the last quarter of 2019, EVs (pure+hybrid) accounted for 4.6% of new vehicle sales, an 80% YoY increase. At these growth rates and start point, the 5-8 year estimate looks sound.
Is there reason to expect exponential growth? Seems a bit doubtful to me. What was the YoY increase for other recent years? With linear growth, you'd be looking at 37 years with these growth rates and start point.
It caps out at 100%, so of course it's not going to be exponential growth. It is likely to be a logistic curve though, and we are still in the roughly exponential leftmost portion of it. Once there's mid-double-digit market penetration it's going to slow down a lot to roughly linear, then eventually, asymptotic.
several battery breakthroughs that will dump the cost way bellow the holy grail of car batteries of $100/kwh that makes them on pair with ICE cars. Some estimates predict that they will go way bellow $80 in 2021-22, Means end of 2022 beginning of 2023 will be flooded with even cheaper comparing to Model 3 cars with better quality batteries. Good quality $25-30k electric car will be a new reality. Those segments attack bestsellers like Toyota Camry etc... I'm pretty sure the price war will push them even lower within 1-2 years. Means full line of EV's from very cheap to luxury by 2024-25 on a scale from multiple companies.
As a result we will have cars on the market that cost the same, perform better, and cheaper in a lifetime from service and fuel perspective.
Millennials and GenZ also very eco-friendly, which means younger people are eager to buy EV's.
The only delay could be new battery terra-factories rollout lag. That might give an extra 1-3 years lifetime for ICE.
After that the traditional car market will be shaking as never before.
great read on this topic - https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium-ion-b.... As usual, more nuanced than I naively thought. "Put simply, something that looks like a future breakthrough today might end up simply being another point on the curve, by the time it is developed and engineered into a viable product and brought to market in a decade’s time."
>Millennials and GenZ also very eco-friendly, which means younger people are eager to buy EV's.
Actually, they're more likely to prefer a car free lifestyle unless of course they have a six figure job in finance or at FAANG but that's like 1% of Millennials and GenZ in Europe, the rest are broke AF.
It has held at exponential growth for ~5 years. It can't be exponential, it has to be a sigmoid, but I'd expect similar growth rates for a few years more.
The 4.6% you mention is not only small but also not useful here as it includes hybrids as well, not just pure EVs. Remove the hybrids and the number of pure EVs plummets
Let's face it, pure EV adoption is a lot slower than we'd like to and lying to ourselves about it doesn't help.
Hybrids are a gateway. I view them as in the same category as pure EVs, only "earlier technology". I own a hybrid, and I'm 90% sure my next car will be pure EV (3 years from now). I don't know any hybrid owner planning to ditch the electric motor on the next purchase, and know several planning to ditch the combustion engine on the next car.
Yes, I agree with your point but this doesn't address your previous argument that a 4.6% market share in 2019 of hybrids and EVs combined out of which maybe 2% pure EV will result in a market dominance of pure EVs in 5 to 8 years. Such an exponential growth is no way possible in such a short time no matter how much you love EVs.
Hybrids are easy to justify buying as you don't depend on charging infrastructure or lack thereof but once you switch to pure EV that becomes your bottleneck which rules out drivers who don't have chargers available at their home or at work or who want to drive long distances on vacations with family or who don't have too much money to spend on a car.
I do not entirely disagree with you, I just don't have your certainty of the outcome. Predicting non-linear curves is next to impossible. A tiny movement in the beginning of the curve produces wildly different results. What I stated is different: 5-8 years for the market flipping towards EVs is _plausible_.
In other words, I can't prove with certainty that the market will flip, but I wouldn't bet on the contrary.
Still no one can answer the question of where do you charge one if you rent an apartment with no parking or a terraced house with no driveway. Don't get me wrong, I'm planning to go 100% electric in the next few years, but then we're lucky enough to have a house with a double driveway - I have no idea how it can possibly work for people without dedicated parking.
Sure, but this simply doesn't exist. It's Sci-Fi at this point. A lot of countries are planning a complete ban on petrol/diesel new cars within 10-20 years, yet there are no such signs of such systems(and I suspect there won't be, since every single manufacturer uses different batteries of different shapes and sizes, in some EVs the batteries are simply not removable without hours of work first). Doing this would require standardization, and seeing as we're still in the early innovation phase, that would practically be suicide for the tech.
I don't know if it'll require upgrades to the power grid. You've already got 240v in Europe, so that's only ~10 hours to charge a Tesla. But could it handle thousands of EVs charging simultaneously?
If there's any place in the world that can do this it's Europe.
From top to bottom, it would fit about 40 cars - but there's only 6-8 street lamps? Ok, so maybe the council could fit a new charging post every 10 metres or so - but then the question is, with what money? There's hardly any cash to keep maintaining the roads at all, where would they find the money to dig up every single street in the city and put in charging posts? Even if they are paid, you'd wait a very long time to make your money back, and then there's another issue I have - at home, I can charge my car at about £0.12/kWh during the day and £0.05/kWh during the night. But public charging points I can see around at crazy expensive - like £0.30-£0.40 per kWh. At that point, it's literally cheaper to drive a good diesel.
1000x this! People never stop to ask themselves who will pay for the infrastructure needed to upgrade the existing public electrical networks in our cities to support everyone charging their EVs on the street.
Lots of European cities are broke at this point and have much bigger problems to fix right now than EV charging stations and if private companies would install them across the cities, the charging costs would be high enough to make EVs ownership unappealing.
Add the fact that EVs here are more expensive than in the US and you have the reason why most EVs right now are only owned by upper class people who can afford to have their own private charging station on their own property.
There's a reason diesel ICEs, as dirty as they are, are still so popular in Europe. They're cheap to run.
Ironically, as green as it may be, Europe will fall behind China and the US at mass EV adoption.
Unless they'd be given away for free, expecting EVs to take over the market here in 5 to 8 years is dreaming at best.
Lots of European cities are broke at this point and have much bigger problems to fix right now than EV charging stations and if private companies would install them across the cities, the charging costs would be high enough to make EVs ownership unappealing.
These European city planners should have listened to Strongtowns and other New Urbanists, and instead of encouraging suburban development style which makes prohibitively expensive for cities to maintain streets, instead followed the dense urban pattern of American cities.
Western Europe will do it as means to incentivize auto sales after the pandemic. Car sales fell 80% in Europe. President Macron has already announced such a plan yesterday. This includes infrastructure:
"The number of battery charge-points will be tripled to 100,000 by the end of next year."
The key to this is you don't build too many of them.
The wires aren't the problem; you've already got a power grid carrying kilovolts along the same streets to power the buildings. The cost is the charging ports. So start with one, reserve the space for EVs and make it expensive.
Then people won't want to use it. Most of the time they'll charge at work or some restaurant that installed a charging port to drive customers to its business. Which is why you only have to start with one -- the first one on the street is just for emergencies. You might have ten EVs in the area and one charging port because at any given time only one person is willing to pay that much to use it. Which also means that it's regularly in use and can recover its costs quickly. But then it's there if you really need it, so more people can feel comfortable buying EVs.
Then once there are more EVs, you can install more charging ports -- they're paying for themselves, after all, as long as you don't install so many they don't stay in use.
Then once you've paid off the capital cost you can lower the price, so more people use them, so you can build even more. When you have 10 charging ports but 9 are already paid off, you only have to charge 10% of the original premium to pay off the 10th. So in the long term you still end up with plenty of charging ports on the street at only a slightly higher price than they are in other places.
The best thing would be to make them expensive when the vehicle is >70% charged so it incentivizes drivers to free the charger equipped parking spot when the vehicles is full of almost full. That way the charger becomes available to others.
>I don't know if it'll require upgrades to the power grid. You've already got 240v in Europe, so that's only ~10 hours to charge a Tesla. But could it handle thousands of EVs charging simultaneously?
Rest assured it will, and not only on the power grid.
Back of the envelope calculation.
A modern lamp post (one every 30 mt or so) is (led based) 60-80-100W, if infrastructure (cables) are not so recent, previous generation of street lightning were 150-250W per post.
Cables are dimensioned accurately to carry that kind of current/power.
A charging every 30 mt needs to serve 6-7 cars, we are talking of 7-10KW, i.e. 7000-10000 W, something like 40 times the power the infrastructure was designed for.
And each 300 mt stretch of street will need something in the order of magnitude of 70-100KW, and since all cars will be charged at night, there are very little to be spared for non-contemporaneus power usage.
Our city had to ban cords running across the sidewalk after too many slip and fall incidents.
In areas where the street lights are set onto the property side of the sidewalk (or even into lawns) rather than on the sidewalk abutting the street (most NA residential areas I think) I don't see this idea gaining a lot of traction. Or at least not remaining for long past the sidewalk turning into an obstacle course for the elderly and others with limited movement.
Charging at home or at work is best with electrics, but the gas station model is still possible. With a range of 500-600km and high power charging at 1000-1500kph, which is all being done right now, you can go somewhere and charge once or twice a week. It's not quite as convenient at 20-30 minutes, but it's possible; when combined with some sort of destination, like a grocery store, it's more time-efficient.
Yes, except that as I pointed out in my other comment - public stations around me charge about £0.30-£0.40 per kWh(and I know that rapid stations near motorways charge even more) - at that price, it's literally cheaper to drive a diesel. Yes, we can make an argument that once people have no choice, they will pay that money to charge anyway. But privately-owned infrastructure has no reason to be free or cheap, except for the very initial period when say shopping centres are trying to attract EV drivers. Once they are essential infrastructure it's hard to see them being cheap.
Why would you you expect shopping centers to stop wanting to attract EV drivers? It's practically their dream to have everybody wandering around in the mall for an hour or more with nothing better to do than buy stuff because they're waiting for their car to charge.
Privately owned infrastructure has good reason to be cheap, that is, competition from of their privately owned businesses. Food distribution network is much more essential than EV charging, and yet food is now cheaper than ever. What matters is not how essential something is, but rather at what cost the service can be provided. If a charging station can expect many customers use it, which will quickly amortize the capital costs of construction, you’ll see charging prices at those stations go not much higher than the operational costs. Otherwise, if the prices are high, this incentivizes new businesses to enter the market and undercut existing producers.
Lots of essential infrastructure is cheap because of competition, like for example electricity generation. There is no reason to believe EV charging will be different.
Of course, it might also turn out that while electricity costs are low, other costs of running charging business are high. If that’s the case, that doesn’t bode well for EV adoption in among people who don’t live in houses.
>>There is no reason to believe EV charging will be different.
This is exactly what I'm saying though - motorway petrol stations are insanely expensive, because they have no competition - a company wins a contract to run the only petrol station on a given stretch of the A1, so they can charge obscene prices for petrol. Same is already happening with electricity - some providers along motorways charge an insane £0.69 per kWh, it would be cheaper to fill up another car with premium unleaded and use it to charge the electric car at that point.
> Privately owned infrastructure has good reason to be cheap, that is, competition from of their privately owned businesses
I've been reading HN for years and people from the USA keep writing that this didn't happen there for fiber and other telecommunication service. Is it going to happen for EV chargers?
US actually has pretty good fiber penetration and internet speeds now (it used to be quite a bit worse a few years ago). The biggest difference between fiber and EV chargers however is that fiber only makes economic sense if you have extensive network, while EV charges can be installed locally by smaller entities. Additionally, installing electric equipment is easier than digging up whole towns, because you don’t need as much political buy-in, less permitting is necessary etc.
> Still no one can answer the question of where do you charge one if you rent an apartment with no parking or a terraced house with no driveway.
The first customers are people who can install a charging port where they normally park their car. That's probably more than half of car owners, and gets you to at least a double digit percentage of cars as electric.
At that point there are enough electric cars that a charger starts getting installed anywhere there's a lot of parking. Then more people can buy EVs, and do, so more chargers get installed. By the time most cars are electric they'll be everywhere.
You charge at charging stations that are nearby where you live, just like people do with gas stations now.
You can charge while you get groceries (or a haircut, or dinner, or whatever) and then go on with your day. Certainly not as convenient as charging at home, but not impossible.
Still surprising how members of this website are still mostly blind to the obviousness of fuel cell cars. Just turn that excess electricity from renewables and convert it to hydrogen, powering a fleet of hydrogen powered vehicles. Solves all infrastructure issues being brought up. Furthermore, it's possible to power large vehicles like semi-trucks or ships, even aircraft at some point in the future.
On the other hand, I'm constantly surprised how anyone anywhere still thinks that fuel cell cars are a good idea.
There is zero elemental hydrogen on Earth. 99% of the one we use is a byproduct of fossil fuel industry. Yes, you can produce it from electrolysis, but not only the hydrogen produced this way will never "break even" it's actually much worse than "even" since you then need to spend a whole load of energy to compress it and bottle it. Why not...just put the electricity into the existing grid and charge automotive batteries directly? After all, fuel cell cars are electric cars, direct combustion of hydrogen was experimental and extremely inefficient.
That brings me to my next point - hydrogen has the smallest molecule of all, which means that it evaporates naturally through any container you put it in. 70kg lead bottle only holds 1L of hydrogen, and it naturally loses all of it in 2-3 weeks. So no underground carparks, garages etc because of the explosion risks.
But finally - there is no infrastructure for hydrogen. It's like trying to build a network of petrol stations....from scratch.
And batteries are definitely good enough to power larger trucks, it's just the cost that's prohibitive(enough cells for a large semi would cost many times more than the truck itself).
I must inform you that you're mostly spreading ignorance or obsolete information with claims like those. Most of the claims you're making are either wrong or many years out of date.
> There is zero elemental hydrogen on Earth.
Not actually true. As I understand it, reserves of natural hydrogen do exist underground, similar to how helium is sometimes trapped underground in certain formations. These could potentially be huge source of hydrogen, although right now it's just speculation.
> Yes, you can produce it from electrolysis, but not only the hydrogen produced this way will never "break even" it's actually much worse than "even" since you then need to spend a whole load of energy to compress it and bottle it.
Since we live in a world of zero priced, and sometimes negatively priced renewable electricity, this is a non-issue. In fact, it's irrelevant. The biggest motivation for green hydrogen right now is the fact that we have far more green energy that we can use for large stretches of time on the grid. We're currently "curtailing" that electricity, which is a fancy word meaning that we're throwing it away. Turning what is in effect a waste product into a valuable new fuel is a big gain.
> Why not...just put the electricity into the existing grid and charge automotive batteries directly? After all, fuel cell cars are electric cars, direct combustion of hydrogen was experimental and extremely inefficient.
Largely because we can't match production with demand. As I mentioned above, we have huge surpluses during parts of the day, but also we have huge shortages at other times. Using hydrogen as a load balancer is an excellent idea right now. We can do this to a certain extent using batteries or pumped water, but we quickly run into the limits of these technologies. Hydrogen can be stored in far larger quantities than any battery in the form of underground salt caverns.
> That brings me to my next point - hydrogen has the smallest molecule of all, which means that it evaporates naturally through any container you put it in. 70kg lead bottle only holds 1L of hydrogen, and it naturally loses all of it in 2-3 weeks. So no underground carparks, garages etc because of the explosion risks.
Carbon fiber tanks have long since solved this problem. We know this since you can buy FCEVs right now, and they are perfectly fine vehicle with none of the above issues. Indeed, I've seen quite a few hydrogen skeptics review these cars, and while they maintain their skepticism of the idea of hydrogen, they seem to be at a loss at describing any kind of real shortcoming in the technology itself.
> But finally - there is no infrastructure for hydrogen. It's like trying to build a network of petrol stations....from scratch.
This is changing. There are now hundreds of hydrogen refuel stations around the world, and many more being built. This is particularly true in Asia, where governments in that region have sponsored huge hydrogen infrastructure buildouts.
> And batteries are definitely good enough to power larger trucks, it's just the cost that's prohibitive(enough cells for a large semi would cost many times more than the truck itself).
There many problems with battery powered semi-trucks. Cost is one of them, and weight is another big one. Furthermore, recharging them in a few minutes is a huge selling point, and batteries cannot deliver on that need. FCEVs are a much better answer for long-haul trucking than BEVs.
I should probably say in the process of flipping rather than have flipped over that time period, it’s not going to be 100% or 80%, but the s-curve transition will be well underway, and car manufacturers will have their hands full developing the technology.
> The price of electric cars here is too high for most incomes ...
Where is 'here'?
Here in Australia the price of pure electric cars is way too high - and not helped by federal government (lack of) subsidies, tariffs, policy preferences for fossil fuel, lack of charging infrastructure, etc.
I recently scoped out comparable ICE vs full electric new vehicles, and 'around the same' quality/comfort/range/size we were looking at roughly 3.5x the cost for electric. A 5y cost projection for an ICE that does 4.5 litres / 100 km, even with anticipated (higher) servicing costs, doesn't get us to a compelling proposition.
The Prius is the wrong kind of hybrid for that, as the Prius is a parallel hybrid; both the electric and the ICE power train terminate in a planetary gear for shifting power around between the two power sources and the wheels.
What you're looking for is a series hybrid, like the Chevy Volt. In a series hybrid the only thing the ICE powertrain does is run a generator to keep the battery topped up. This allows the ICE to run in its ideal power band range permanently, reducing its size and making gasoline only travel much more efficient while lowering vehicle cost.
Make them pluggable into the car (vs. towable) and standardize on the interface, and there could be market for renting the generators (like e.g. you do with city bikes - take them from one station, drop off on another).
Attach it to the tow hitch framework like a bike rack. :)
I suspect that would really mess with the load dynamics on most passenger type cars, as the generator would be pretty heavy. I don't think you'd be able to lift a big enough one into the trunk area, and attaching it to the back of the car would be a pain too. I think towing solves a lot of issues for the idea.
You would need a 20-30kw generator+fast DC charger as the built it AC charger in most electric cars is not fast enough to maintain a charge at highway speeds (especially while towing something).
Like other commentators have mentioned, if a u-haul like network of these were made, if you ran out of charge somewhere, they could drop one of these off to get you going again, as a depleted battery pack will charge slowly, making the van full of batteries potentially more expensive (you would have to pay for an extra 15-30m of their time).
20-30kW might be a bit higher than needed unless the trailer is oversized to provide extra cargo capacity in addition to carrying the generator. You don't need a generator big enough to prevent the battery from draining at all; you just need to extend the range enough to cover a full day of driving while offsetting the extra drag from the trailer. 10-15kW is probably plenty for a trailer that only carries the generator: that would double the highway range of a Model S and would weigh about 700 lbs while being compact enough to have very little aerodynamic drag. A 30kW generator would be enough to double the range even if the trailer doubled the energy consumed per mile, and that's only going to happen with a pretty large trailer.
The 1st generation Chevy Volt works (almost) the same way as a Prius, and does not normally operate the way you've described it. The 2nd gen is similar, but borrows some of the "2-mode hybrid" design from the 2008-2012 Chevy truck transmission (in order to have two gear ratios in electric mode--much more elegant than the Taycan).
Both have a planetary gearset with engine on one gear, output on another, and an electric motor on the third. The difference lies on which gear the second electric motor is placed (motor shaft on the Volt, output shaft on the Prius), as well as some additional clutches and brakes in the Volt.
And you'll find the Volt outperforms the i3 Rex in terms of hybrid efficiency and performance. When the i3 is in range extended mode it's pokey; and only meant to go a short distance before one gets a charge.
Is that a limitation of series hybrids, or is that a consequence of the engine used in these specific models? The gasoline engine in the 2nd generation volt has 3x the power of the one in the i3 (75kW vs 25kW).
Probably both? I do know that GM ended up going more "parallel" with Gen 2 than with Gen 1. And Gen 2 has more torque than Gen 1, despite switching to a lower displacement engine and going to an Atkinson (tuned for electricity generation) cycle.
The Chevy Volt is not a series hybrid. It can operate like one, in some modes, but GM actually found, especially for Gen 2, that a mixture of series and parallel is most efficient.
When the Volt runs out of battery, it's almost not noticeable apart from engine noise. The performance characteristics in hybrid mode are almost identical to EV mode in terms of torque/acceleration.
It's an engineering marvel. I love mine. Shame GM killed it.
Still, though, series hybrids like the Volt and BMW i3 just use regular inline-4 gas engines taken from their other production lines.
The Volt has basically the same engine as in the Chevy Sonic or Cruze, and the i3 range extender option uses the same engine as their C600 series scooters. Those engines are designed with a quick throttle response and a wide power band to operate over an RPM range sufficient to drive a vehicle through a regular transmission.
I don't doubt that for the same time and money, it was far better for GM and BMW to take advantage of the economies of scale around those products than to design an engine specifically to function as a range extender, but if they really took this as a core function or started from scratch I expect they might select a medium-speed industrial diesel engine instead: something optimized for a particular speed and power output that does that one thing optimally.
I hope they customized the injection mapping, but the GM LUU engine is still a naturally aspirated gas engine with 10.5:1 compression and 73.4 x 82.6 mm bore/stroke ratio, measurements which primarily came from the ICE-only target applications it was designed for.
Again, completely untrue. A) Volt not a series hybrid B) the gas engine in Gen 2 Volt was not taken from their production line, it is an Atkinson Cycle engine designed for generators, not for their crappy ICE trucks and SUVs.
C'mon, can people research before opining?
"While it shares many parts with the new 1.5L I-4 used in other GM products, the Gen II engine’s combustion process and calibration are specific to the Volt. Its larger displacement not only improves fuel efficiency but also provides more torque, which contributes to the Gen II Volt’s surprising quietness."
While it's true that liquid fuel is more energy dense than batteries, you have to remember that most Internal Combustion Engines are only around 20% efficient.
So even though you're carrying around a huge amount of potential energy in the form of gasoline, your engine can only covert about 20% of that into motion.
Exactly. It feels like it's just trying to offer some hope for the oil industry. I'm not convinced society needs this.
Though if there really are use cases where electric cannot work and we are forced to accept fossil fuels, I guess a slightly more efficient engine is nice.
ICEs have a lot of life left in them yet. Hydrocarbon fuels are energy-dense and easily transported, stored, and transferred. It will be a long time before every use case can be practically and economically covered by electric motors.
Electrons are energy-dense and easily transported, stored, and transferred. That's probably what a lot of people have missed about the technological revolution that just happened.
> ICEs have a lot of life left in them yet.
> [...]
> It will be a long time before every use case can be practically and economically covered by electric motors.
Let the near-future prove you wrong on both statements ;)
The maximum density of Li-metal batteries [edit: still an immature tech] is around 14 MJ / kg, whereas gasoline is the highest energy-density fossil fuel at 47.5 MJ / kg. This is not a huge gap at all.
Wikipedia says energy density of Li ion batteries is around 0.5 MJ/kg, which is about 100 times less than hydrocarbon fuels.
And no, electricity isn't easily stored nor transmitted compared to hydrocarbons. Electricity, of course, does have a number of major advantages which is why we use it.
Yes electricity is more easily transmitted than fuel. Compare: pipeline vs electric line.
And no I'm not speaking of Li-ion. Sorry but I was speaking about Li-metal, a still immature technology.
So that weakens my argument. On the other hand, that shows that the path to improvement is huge, and could why not surprise us by becoming better density than fuel.
> Yes electricity is more easily transmitted than fuel. Compare: pipeline vs electric line.
Lets do that. High voltage electricity transmission has losses about 4% per 1000 km (HVDC somewhat less, but is a point-to-point system so less flexible than the common AC transmission). By comparison the pumping power required for transporting liquid hydrocarbons is less than 1/10th of that. Also, a high voltage transmission line is an eyesore requiring about 50m wide right of way, whereas a pipeline of equivalent capacity needs a much narrower corridor.
I'm not saying we shouldn't go for electricity, but we need to be frank about the upsides and downsides. (Most experts seem to agree that in order to decarbonize our societies the basic recipe is to 1) Clean up electricity generation. 2) Electrify everything.)
I used Li-ion for the battery comparison, since that is the best rechargeable battery technology that actually exists. I'm highly skeptical that a new battery technology with two orders of magnitude better energy density is possible. It's very hard to get anywhere close to the energy density stored in the chemical bonds in fuels. Or, well, yes we do know of fuels with better energy density than chemical fuels, namely nuclear fuels.
I could be wrong, but seems like a pipeline is extremely hard to build, with lots of volume of material, concrete or steel. It seems lighter and easier to build an HV electric line. I see HV lines everywhere, but very few pipelines.
Also, pipeline operations (leakage etc) seem a PITA.
That was my idea behind thinking electricity is easier.
However, the sheer ratio {transport energy} / {transported energy} is indeed in favor of pipeline, as you mentionned.
I found that it costs between $2.9 million and $13 million per mile to build a new pipeline, whereas it costs $285,000 per mile for a HV line and $1.5 million per mile if you build it underground.
Too little, too late. There's no way these will arrive in time on the market in volume and be good enough (power, reliability, etc) by the time EVs reach critical mass.
Stats say that something like 90% of the people that drove an EV want to buy one next. I doubt this would be true for the two-stroke engine.
> "Of course, it's not like we're going to be seeing entry ignition engines popping up in road cars any time soon. The method is unproven, and carries a bunch of unknowns regarding cooling, balancing, and reliability. Still, it's a sign not all is lost in the world of fuel-powered engines."
Electric cars are well on their way to proving themselves. This new technology is too late to slow down the electric takeover. Its only use is to make those vehicles that are unable to switch to electric (probably because of fuel density or a need for rapid refueling) cleaner. Which is still useful, I guess. Though I'm hoping they won't be necessary at all.
Investment into productionizing these kind of advances has pretty much stopped.
It's a bit like hard drives... As soon as the SSD arrived, everyone saw that hard drives would eventually die out, so manufacturers pretty much stopped new technology development. Sure, there have been a few small advances, but seek times and data read speeds haven't gone up for a decade, and capacities have only crept up.
IC engines are the same. It might take them 30 years to die out, but in those 30 years there won't be any significant
tech advances, because every company that makes them is only optimizing for cost in a shrinking market.
I don't think that's entirely true; like ICEs, HDDs still have various niches were they are very valuable. Notably when storage density is the most important factory (data hoarding, backup solutions, etc.) and most of your access will be linear or random reads will not happen that often.
While not many new things in HDD space have made it to market, there is still quite a few big things in development, the new HAMR technology (and friends from other vendors) are projected to be able to double/triple capacity.
SSDs sadly still cost a lot if you need 50TB of them. Comparatively, my 50TB NAS cost me about 15$/TB. Most SSDs still hover around 90$/TB and go up to 120$/TB depending on use case.
Similary ICEs have two big advantages over non-combustion alternatives: energy density and price. A modern ICE is complicated but not terribly hard to construct, in part because processes exist but also because the things that happen in an ICE can largely be achieved by using common materials like steel, titanium, ceramics, oil and rubber. Gasoline and Diesel are very energy dense (and bad for the environment and climate) and can be lit/triggered by a simple electric sparkplug.
Comparatively running a hydrogen (non-combustion) engine is very hard to achieve as hydrogen is an element that really wants to set itself on fire and if it does so, the result is not very conducive to safe operation (hydrogen flames tend to be invisible and it loves to explode or atleast deflagrate).
Electric engines are much more efficient than any ICE but suffer from energy density problems (solvable by using a hydrogen fuelcell but that has above mentioned issues). If not for that, it would be the next thing and people are working on that. I have no doubt that despite that, ICEs will continue to be used where alternatives aren't possible or expensive.
> Notably when storage density is the most important factor
Flash storage is denser than HDD storage. For an easy example, think about stuffing. 3.5" enclosure with 1TB microSD cards.
As for SSDs, here's a four year old article on Samsung shipping 15TB SSDs in a 2.5" form factor.
HDDs are unlikely to reclaim the density crown from flash. That said, HDDs do still maintain quite a price advantage, which is typically more relevant than storage density for archival solutions.
The $/byte figures all remain in favor of HDDs.
And, as always, a relevant xkcd tells us that one of the highest bandwidth data transfer solutions remains overnighting a milk jug of microSD cards: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
These are two different metrics. Density is simply bytes/volume. Price is $/bytes. The first has no factor for price. The second has no factor for volume.
If you are optimizing for volume, you will have all flash-based storage. If you are optimizing for price, you will have all HDD (I think. Not sure on tape pricing).
If we want to optimize for another measure, that's fine. But we can't redefine density just because there are price differences. It's like saying my Mazda is faster than a Ferrari, because the Ferrari is so expensive.
So, practicality is a different measure to optimize for, and a much more complex and situational one. We can observe that many bulk storage solutions use HDDs rather than flash storage. This provides evidence that HDDs are practical for bulk storage. It tells us very little about density.
I think we're talking past each other. Both today, and in terms of potential, flash-based storage has a higher storage density, where storage density is the simple math of bytes/volume.
You keep coming back to "practicality", and this is harder to define. I welcome a proposed definition, so we can talk about this more clearly.
As a first pass, I might consider "practical to access" as being a combination of available at retail, and able to be readily attached to consumer hardware through a combination of onboard motherboard IO connectivity and expansion cards.
Here's a list of hard drives available at retail[0] that shows the largest retail HDD at 16TB and 3.5" form factor, vs SSD at 15.36TB and 2.5" form factor. These are available at retail today, and in standard form factors, with standard physical interfaces (SAS and SATA).
Without even getting into volume, but just looking at a single dimension, width, we can see that the HDD is 40% larger, physically and only 4% larger in storage capacity. The story only gets worse if we move to volume, because the 2.5" form factor is smaller in every dimension than 3.5". An enclosure to hold equivalent storage based on these two drives would be smaller for the SSDs than for the HDDs.
Perhaps practicality just means something that you could find without needing specialty hardware? Datacenter stuff is huge:
If we move to things you might find in a datacenter, we can find some articles (both from 2018). One talks about an existing 100TB 3.5" SSD - still in a standard form factor and with a standard interface (SATA/SAS).[1] In another article from the same year, Seagate was introducing the largest HDD, a 16TB model, and discussing the potential to hit 60TB by 2030.[2] Again, this is at the same time that a 100TB SSD became available.
Price is also something that has come up a couple times. I do not know if price is synonymous with practicality to you? I would appreciate clarification on the matter.
SSDs are, as I have mentioned previously, more expensive per unit of storage than HDDs. This is not up for debate, but I feel almost as if you think I am debating it.
So, for a specific use case, it is very easy for one to make a judgment call that HDDs are a better investment. But I do not see any argument to be made that HDDs are denser than flash-based storage. Again, density is storage capacity per unit volume.
A specific example, archival storage, would likely not benefit from an all-flash storage solution, but would be better served with HDDs. The tradeoffs for archival typically favor cost and often don't need the read and write performance of an SSD. As we agree, HDDs have better capacity per unit price.
If practicality and price are synonymous, it becomes a bit of a weird measure. We'll be taking a double ratio, of price/bytes/volume. But lets do it:
So, we've got an HDD at $12,215,100/TB/mm^3 and an SSD at $29,534,605/TB/mm^3. If this is the measure that practicality represents, then yes, HDDs have a lower number. If this is your definition, then I am sorry for misunderstanding you.
On the point of density, though, it seems clear to me, and I hope to anyone else looking at the data, that flash-based storage is denser (bytes/volume) than HDDs.
SSDs have been mainstream products for at least a decade now. Ten years ago, the largest HDD we had was like 2 TB. We currently have 16 TB HDDs and people are expecting us to have 50 TB HDDs in 2026.
And not only that, 16 TB HDD is quite affordable. Just 500 dollars for a Seagate IronWolf. Meanwhile a 3.2 TB Seagate Nytro will set you back about $1800. SSD mass storage is an option for only those with deep pockets.
Hell, not even tape drives have gone away yet. Amazon Glacier is just one example.
It's also to note that SSD capacity hasn't strictly improved, it's been gained through massive compromises that severely impact their lifetime and performance.
More than that, a 5 year old nas drive can outperform a modern cheap ssd in throughput easily.
Most, but not all of the capacity and affordability increases of SSDs have been due to compromises elsewhere. If you plot the characteristics of "the cheapest flash you can buy" over the years, few of the curves are monotonic.
Physical memory cell dimensions decreased steadily until the arrival of 3D NAND, whereupon cell sizes jumped back up and have been relatively stable since. SSDs incorporate more advanced error correction with each generation of controllers, so today's drives can get more usable write endurance out of the same physical cell size.
Number of bits that can be stored per cell has been increasing. Each time we cram another bit into each memory cell, performance and write endurance drop. But in between those major shifts, successive generations of flash tend to get faster and more energy-efficient over time. Today's 3 bit per cell TLC NAND is much faster than the TLC from 5 years ago, and has better write endurance thanks to the transition to 3D NAND. Today's SLC NAND has comparable performance and write endurance to the planar SLC that disappeared from the market over 5 years ago, but now it's several times cheaper.
And most of the compromises that have been made with NAND flash over the past 10+ years are purely academic. The vast majority of use cases do not need flash rated for 100k P/E cycles, and excess endurance beyond your needs provides no tangible benefit. Most of the endurance that has theoretically been sacrificed was never needed in the first place. Most of the performance lost has been offset by using more flash in parallel and by eliminating bottlenecks elsewhere.
The only metric by which a 5 year old NAS hard drive—or any hard drive—will outperform a modern cheap SSD is in long-term sustained sequential write throughput. Even the slowest modern cheap SSD will offer at least twice the sequential read throughput, and orders of magnitude better random read or write throughput. And it's not like the write throughput of modern SSDs is abysmal: gigabit Ethernet is a more significant bottleneck when filling a 1TB or larger dirt-cheap consumer SSD. So unless you're trying to use cheap consumer SSDs in an expensive NAS with 10GbE, the poor write performance of low-end SSDs won't come into play.
Of course there has been improvement in absolute terms, but our current state is much more than just that, which skews the results when thinking about where we are. The opinion is definitely not popular on hackernews, but I still want to throw it out there.
Cheap SSDs can tank below 70MB/s after cache, which is less than a gigabit connection, so it can totally affect your performance even in the smallest local networks.
You don't have to sustain writes for long at all to start seeing the compromises hidden in cheap SSDs, especially if they're using their TLC as SLC cache, in which case you run out faster and faster.
Yeah, it's spinning disk backed. What's different is the drives are aggregated up on hosts under the design assumption that most of the drives will be powered off most of the time, allowing a lower cost per byte.
It's totally backed on "we have loads of hard drives with spare storage capacity but no IO capacity, so sell it off cheap, but make sure it doesn't perform too well or it'll eat into our other products".
Nearly all cloud providers have more storage bytes than they have IO (ie. each individual hard drive receives so many read/write requests per second that if they filled the drive all the way to full some read/write requests couldn't be handled and would be unacceptably delayed)
There have been quite a few advancements in mechanical drives post SSD.
The “cloud” and all your data still primarily runs on mechanical drive and their density is now higher than ever.
And the development road map for mechanical drives is still expanding.
HAMR drives will be on the market in 2021-2022, then you have BPR, MAMR and even GMR drives on roadmaps and research papers.
The only reason you think development has stopped is because other than for home NAS mechanical drives have pretty much disappeared from the consumer market.
Hard drive development hasn't stopped. It just changed direction, because pursuing better seek times is pointless when it is impossible to increase RPMs enough to catch up to even low-end SSDs.
Perpendicular magnetic recording hit the market around the same time SSDs started to go mainstream. Since then, hard drives have advanced with the introduction of helium filled drives, multi-stage actuators and shingled magnetic recording. This has enabled an order of magnitude increase in drive capacity, and substantial increases in sequential transfer speed. Dual-actuator drives and HAMR/MAMR are in the process of moving from the lab to commercialization, and will respectively bring an increase in random and sequential IO throughput (but not latency) and more density increases (which always bring some sequential throughput improvement, too).
What's really been missing from the hard drive R&D scene is more Nobel-class discoveries like giant magnetoresistance to allow for big jumps forward.
This is a very good analogy. Perhaps the best I have heard. Also SSD was with its own 'range anxiety' in that space was always a lot less in your configured system than the spinning disk equivalent.
However, advances in automotive are also driven by legislation. The three cylinder turbo charged engines you get in regular European cars are there because of the legislation and that cheating diesel doesn't sell any more.
With this continual ratcheting up of legislation there is an incentive for manufacturers to improve the ICE technology. Particularly when efficiency is across the fleet so those inefficient SUVs have to be offset by lean hatchbacks.
This means there is incentive for golden bullets, solutions that promise the earth and allow ICE to linger on for longer. Not many of the legacy auto makers can compete in EV sales. They could make the product but the Tesla is hard to beat. They all fall short except when in the subcompact segment where Tesla don't have a product offering.
I don't think that's true so much, the free valve innovation from koenigsegg looks like a big deal. the myriad of hybrid adaptations to the ice will keep it very competitive for a long time.
"seek times and data read speeds haven't gone up for a decade"
They hadn't gone up in a decade prior in any substantive, meaningful way. It's a limitation of the medium. There have been measures to increase density, but that's about it.
IC engines will continue to advance, but like magnetic hard drives they're pushing up against the bounds of reality in increasing efficiency.
That's not even remotely true. Increasing emissions standards and economy standards means that ICE development continues apace. Nissan, for instance, recently put into production a variable compression engine, and all manufacturers are pairing ICE advances with electric for even larger gains.
Honda has a nicely sized sedan that gets 55 MPG city out of a drivetrain unit that is amply powerful.
Most of them produce small 4-cylinder engines that are as powerful as the V-6's that proceeded them, all while producing less emissions and offering greater fuel economy. Even Ford, Chevy, and RAM are putting gas 4-cylinder engines in their mid-size trucks are just as capable at 8-cylinder engines used to be just not very long ago.
Emissions and fuel economy standards will continue to tighten, which means that ICE development will continue for a long time.
Most of those improvements are not really new technology, but instead technology from European cars (where gas taxes are high) just imported into the USA (where previously people didn't care about MPG much because gas is much cheaper).
It is a global effort, and not one limited to the US. Besides, the biggest improvements in ICE fuel economy and power are from Japan, not Europe. Europe hitched its wagon to the diesel engine, and we all know how that turned out.
Sure, turbochargers and hybrid tech aren't new in an of themselves, but that doesn't matter because there's still a lot of room for development left in them.
Even just 5 years ago, the idea of getting a roomy, nicely configured sedan that gets 55MPG city was a silly notion. Now, Honda sells them all day for $24k USD.
Anything recently put into production has been in development for years. The decision to begin development probably happened before people were even lining up to pre-order the Model 3.
This monster of mechanical complexity is brand new as of a couple days ago. What company is going to commit the next half decade to developing it while watching gasoline engines fade into the background? Especially after watching Nissan's new engine totally flop.
Boring. Even an IC engine operating at the Carnot limit would still emit carbon. Convert every IC on earth to a one with theoretically perfect efficiency and we still blast past 1.5deg warming in a few decades.
Plus the cognitive impacts of higher CO2, plus ocean acidification, plus the noise and pollution being exhausted at ground level inside cities, plus supporting barbaric regimes that mine the oil.
Just scrap it all and go full electric. Coming out of COVID lockdown is a great time to invest and mandate.
We're an awful long way from having battery storage on par with liquid energy storage, and battery tech improves steadily but not exponentially. Having good IC engine designs is going to be important for decades. We will need to start generating liquid fuel that is carbon neutral.
It is basically a split cycle engine and the "New" is a bit overblown by more than 100 years. Even similar non-spark based hot ignition was used back then:
"The Backus Water Motor Company of Newark, New Jersey was producing an early example of a split cycle engine as far back as 1891. The engine, of "a modified A form, with the crank-shaft at the top", was water-cooled and consisted of one working cylinder and one compressing cylinder of equal size and utilized a hot-tube ignitor system."
The Backus engine shares the pre-compressor piston with this design, but this engine also has the pre-pre-compressor piston (with different geometry) and also the low-pressure power piston. It seems to still be novel, despite sharing characteristics with previous designs.
"Fuel injection has been tried for 50yr, there's no way it will be commercially successful now"
-some guy in 1980.
History is littered with inventions that didn't gain widespread use initially then some little advancement(s) came along that make the inventions workable when revisited and tweaked. Repeating firearms and electric lightbulbs are two good examples.
I don't pretend to know which bucket this "new" engine advancement will fit into but I think your judgement is premature.
You're not wrong but to imply that Boch fuel injection was successful would be to wear some really rose colored glasses. Boch fuel injection was such a small improvement over contemporary cabruerators and such a downgrade in terms of maintenance and cost of ownership that it was more or less universally reviled by everyone who was not into technology for technology's sake. It never really achieved widespread use. If you wanted a glass half full perspective you could say it gave 1st generation throttle body based injector systems a low bar to exceed. Bosch mechanical fuel injection is almost a perfect example of an implementation of a technology not ready for mass market adoption that later became ready for mass market with the advent of new technology (cheap digital electronics in this case).
Volvo, Citroen and many others besides extensively adopted the Bosch fuel injection system and those cars performed better and were more fuel efficient than their equivalents without. Quite a few of them still run today, the big difference in price is what held back faster adoption more than anything else.
I've worked on those systems, they were clearly a game changer, incremental improvements got us to where we are today. Almost no single technology hits the ground running, especially not in inherently conservative domains such as automotive. Interesting implementation details made the Citroen one much harder to work on.
Electronics aren't perfect either, they make it a lot harder to keep such older vehicles functioning whereas the purely mechanical ones from an earlier era will quite likely last practically for ever.
Note that Diesel has had mechanical fuel injection for much, much longer and that it wasn't exactly new technology to begin with. It's just that the conditions in a gasoline engine are a bit different which needed a re-thinking of the concept.
All of the skeptical comments I've read here are talking about how ICE are already obsolete, since electric cars are cleaner, quieter, and simpler. I'm picturing this engine being used in other applications (even though the website, and the journal the engine is publushed in, are automotive).
Stationary generators and marine drivetrains come to mind. Those are less sensitive to the greater size and weight that this engine might have, and they benefit greatly from the ability to load fuel, store it, burn it as needed, and be refueled at any time, even while running.
As an example, my local university's datacenter has two rooms full of batteries for power backup. They instantly switch on, but can only power the datacenter for a short time. To protect against extended blackouts, there are two redundant diesel generators in the sub-basement, and enough fuel to run the datacenter for several months. Battery technology seems to have a ways to go before it'll be worthwhile to just have a basement full of batteries as long-term backup power.
People with those sorts of use cases are probably going to be relying on ICEs for a long time to come. In the meanwhile, efficiency improvements can make them less harmful to own and operate. And even after 150 years of developing ICEs, engineers are still coming up with ideas, maybe even practical ones, to gain those improvements.
Flow batteries are a possible solution. Energy density is substantially less though, so they may not be practical for applications where the battery is only rarely used.
The development of flow batteries with lightweight, inexpensive electrodes and efficient, dense electrolytes would definitely change the situation a lot. Fuel would be pumpable again, and you could transfer large amounts energy without it being integrated with the catalyst that can unsafely release all of that energy.
I think that the main thing is that in general the "fuel" for a flow battery can be stored at ambient temperature and pressure, and so the tankage is cheaper.
In their basic function though I agree they are very similar.
Complimentary to your point: I still hope biofuels become an important part of the renewable energy mix. Generate fuel for remaining fleet of ICEs, pump excess back into the ground.
The theoretical efficiency gain appears to be greater than the stated 14%. The article cites a video [1] which in turn cites 49% vs 63% maximum theoretical thermal efficiency for a traditional engine and for the Entry Ignition engine, respectively. That makes it a 14 percentage point increase which is 29% increase in efficiency.
I'm not sure which is worse, YouTube videos where all they do is summarize a written news article, or a written news article summarizing a YouTube video...
If you've never watched Engineering Explained, I'd recommend it highly. It's very high-quality content that deeply explains how engines and other components in cars work.
The video was released well before the article, and I believe the article was posted to spread the video more widely.
So how does this efficiency compare to gas turbines? Should gas power plants switch to this if it pans out? Or it might be good for portable generators.
This particular two stroke would need oil changes.
Some of the traditional ones did not because the oil was mixed with fuel to lubricate the seals that exist between the piston (part that moves up and down) and the cylinder (which houses the piston). In most engines that we refer to in cars, the lubrication happens from the bottom in the crankcase (where you see the rod beneath the piston).
This is not the same kind of two-stroke engine. The one you're thinking of pumps the fuel air mixture through the crankcase, which is why it cannot use the same oiling system that a typical four-stroke engine does. The oil would be diluted with fuel pretty quickly, and also carried into the combustion chamber and burned off. So adding the oil to the fuel is how you get around that, but then you're constantly burning oil.
Isn’t this much like how Diesel engines work? They compress air first to heat it to the point that when mixed with fuel it spontaneously ignites. Maybe glow plugs can make a comeback.
In the diesel case, fuel is immediately at its auto-ignition temperature when introduced. In this, the air-fuel mixture is heated until it reaches its auto-ignition temperature.
Diesel engines are based off a south Pacific people's invention who used a bamboo tube with piston to ignite a sliver of wood. Rudolph used it as inspiration for his engine design.
He also intended the fuel for it to be peanut oil or canola oil a crop farmers could grow for their tractors.
Glow plugs are still here sort of although now a heating grid. My diesel truck has it to pre-heat the air to make starting easier.
It sounds somewhat similar to a supercharged two-stroke design like the formerly very popular Detroit Diesels (8V71, 6V92TA, for example). None of those engines were very efficient though.
I am relatively certain that people will be rebuilding old Detroit and Cummins diesel engines in heavy equipment for at least the next 50 years, if not 100.
I have been surprised at how much 40V/80V electric systems are cutting into what was traditionally two-stroke light engines for string trimmers and mowers. The batteries are expensive though, and I don't know how many you'd need to have in rotation to be able to keep one fully charged and ready to go under continuous usage.
For the weed trimmer and lawn mower I purchased at U. S. chain Lowes, the magic number of batteries is 3. The mower came with 2, and the trimmer with 1. The charger can charge a battery almost as fast as the mower can consume them, so the third is needed for a little slack. You could get by with only two if you're content to get a beverage between batteries.
Theoretically, anyway; with our tiny yard this is seldom tested. Which why I'm annoyed by neighbors that buy a new gas-powered mower. There is not a yard within at least a 3 mile radius of me that can't be mowed by a modern, lithium-battery push mower.
> ...I don't know how many you'd need to have in rotation...
My lawn mower 5Ah @56V (EGO power) is good for half an hour. It charges from empty to full in maybe 40 minutes. In a trimmer same battery seems to last forever, maybe at least 2 hours.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadhttps://www.thoughtco.com/does-oil-come-from-dinosaurs-10920...
The article doesn't mention what kind of fuel this new engine uses, but if it can run on ethanol, or synthesized hydrocarbons like E-diesel then this could definitely be a good thing.
They are the ones that ought to go electric first. The easier ones.
Well, do you easily find a refueling station in the middle of the forest? If you brought spare fuel containers, why wouldn't you bring all-the-same spare batteries?
I have a chainsaw that runs on mains power. It's really nice (and quiet) for smaller tasks close to the house, but it doesn't help once you get outside extension cord-range.
But if you, like me, use 2-3l of bio-fuel a year during only 2-3 days on the chainsaw there are not many options and not much to save. Even added up all the fuel used on chainsaws is microscopic compared to for instance savings going from giant trucks to smaller trucks or cars, which is an easy fix by changing regulations in US to not favor giant trucks and subsiding fuel
Yes (as long as the engineers don't seriously mess up).
Nearly all of the energy released by burning gasoline is in the form of heat. ICE engines use that heat to expand gases, and capture the expansion as mechanical motion. Modern automotive ICE engines capture roughly 40% of their combustion output as mechanical work. The remaining 60% of the energy, still in the form of heat, is lost through the radiator and the tailpipe. Improving that ratio allows you to burn less fuel to get the same work done. Carbon is emitted by burning fuel, so burning 14% less fuel (yet accomplishing the same work) would result in approximately 14% less carbon being released for the same task.
Off the top of my head, here are some reasons that improving theoretical thermodynamic efficiency might not reduce carbon emissions:
* The extra parts to increase the efficiency (the fourth piston) could sap more energy in friction than they capture from the waste heat. (This would cause the engine to not actually have the claimed thermodynamic efficiency -- it's back to producing the same amount of waste heat as before, just in a more complicated way.)
* The combustion could be hard to control and inefficient, sending unburned fuel out the exhaust pipe. (This lowers the combustion efficiency, but doesn't actually change the thermodynamic efficiency -- it's still producing less heat per gram of burned fuel.)
* The higher compression ratio, and the different mixing pattern caused by the sliding valve, might cause more-potent greenhouse gases to be produced than CO2. (This doesn't change the efficiency at all, but it does affect the environmental impact similarly to burning more fuel in a less-efficient engine.)
Because they can't satisfy every need just yet. Imagine we still have horses even with engines being around for more than a century. And adapting to a newer IC tech might actually be cheaper and easier than redesigning for EV tech. Manufacturers already have the experience, logistics chains, much of the designs, etc.
Some transitions are never complete because sometimes there's no "one size fits all" option for the manufacturer or the consumer.
There are still hundreds of thousands to millions of work horses around the world. I'm still very much for improving old tech where it's possible and makes sense, even if it's niche.
But I really wish the main argument was our survival. We simply won't survive if we continue burning fossil fuels.
kwh/kg is a measure of density, not efficiency. Very different concepts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_turbine
(When I was a kid this thing was mythological and now it has a Wikipedia page. What a world!)
How long would I need to wait for these theoretical improvements to go from lab to reliable, mass market cars? Why aren't they here already, why would I wait a decade or two (for what, a 10%-20% improvement?) if I can buy a full electric car tomorrow?
I don't object to improvements, but it's a race, and it seems like ICEs are losing that race unless they can do something impressive on a very short timescale.
We're still improving on DSL and coax as long as they have to be around even if fiber is better.
If electrics take the mass market, as I think they will, then new ICEs will largely just vanish from the market, and anyone who needs a normal family car can and will buy electric. Improvements to ICE tech don't go into old used cars because we don't upgrade their engines. The only ICEs that would be sold new are ones built to meet special needs, but they're probably going to be uncommon enough that improvements in them don't benefit "us" in a meaningful way; instead they become something you can largely ignore.
Like, nobody is campaigning for fuel efficiency / pollution mandates for ATVs, tractors, supercars, or excavators, because they aren't a blimp on the radar. In these applications, fuel economy tends to be a very secondary concern anyway.
Over time, more areas will have fiber, and more people will be able to make the choice, or even have no choice but to buy fiber. Likewise, over time, charging access will grow and gasoline access will shrink, and more people will own electric cars. During the transition, there will be lots of people who might yearn to own an electric car (just as I currently yearn for fiber), but don't because the vehicles will be expensive, they won't be able to charge at home, and their routine places won't offer car charging. For those people, having access to less-dirty ICE cars will be a strict, if less-than-maximum, improvement over owning older, dirtier ICE cars.
[1] I can't charge at home because my neighborhood only has street parking, and the parking spots are on the other side of the street from my home.
EV charging infrastructure in many countries is rarer than hen's teeth. It's also much more expensive compared to fuel infrastructure that's already paid for and in place for decades.
> fuel economy tends to be a very secondary concern anyway
Fleets of vehicles always have fuel consumption as a prominent concern. But the pollution might also be since legislation could very well start covering construction or industrial equipment.
> If electrics take the mass market
"Mass" never meant 100%. We are surrounded by outdated tech that is still around because it fills a need even if just in a niche. Despite people insisting the fixed phone and snail mail have been superseded by mobiles and email, both of those legacy options are still there. Even selling 10% of the current volumes of ICEs still justifies improving them.
45 miles an hour seems like a reasonable compromise speed. At 65% the common highway speed limit of 70 mph, it's still fast enough to cross most states in a day, to travel between nearby cities in an hour or so, and to do errands in an afternoon. But a car at that speed has only 41% the kinetic energy as at 70 mph, making colisons less lethal, and has similarly less wind resistance, requiring smaller engines and less fuel.
Maybe I just think trains are romantic...
On the other hand, cars have been getting safer and faster and more efficient, roads have been getting wider and safer.. only speed limits haven't been lifted to match. A part of me wants to live the utopia where I can get where I want to be in less than half the time it takes today. That'd make the difference between going to my parents for a coffee after work vs having to reserve a full day (if not a full weekend) for the trip.
Trains are not really a solution around here.
I was glad I wasn't driving, because not only is that a greater posted-vs-actual speed difference than I've seen before, but I've never actually driven that fast in my life. I'd have been torn between driving 80 in the right lane and being constantly passed at 10-15mph, or being white-knuckled behind some other vehicle and setting a personal landspeed record.
In my case, rural Finland, it's been the same for as long as I remember. Maximum limit is 120 km/h on freeways (and there are practically none of them where I usually drive), elsewhere on bigger inter-city roads it's 100 km/h during summer and 80 km/h during winter. Lesser roads, never more than 80 km/h.
And traffic never flows significantly faster than the limit. A few km/h over the limit at most. There are some weirdos who drive much faster and are constantly overtaking others, but relatively few people drive like that. If anything, it seems to me that speeding has become less common over the years as the police have tightened the limit at which they'll fine you.
People are basically behaving like it's German autobahn everywhere. Even the informal rules have adjusted - in a major city, you not only respect the right hand rule, but also give right of way to all vehicles on the more major road. The conflict is resolved by blinking headlights.
Honda used to be the most popular brand here (90's and first few years of 00's).
Speed limits themselves only have a passing correlation to safe traffic speed. Almost nobody actually follows them intentionally at scale (traffic just moves at the maximum safe speed which just sometimes happens to be at or below the posted limit) which is why most municipalities are abandoning the "slap a sign with a low number on it" approach for "traffic calming" road features. Traffic moves at what it considered to be the highest safe speed for the conditions (a bunch of factors too long to list). You're seeing high differences because there's many roads that have speed limits that are unrealistically low for light traffic conditions (often below the designed speed of the road) and traffic density (as opposed to visibly or a sharp curve) was the road condition that was the bottleneck on speed on most busy roads. 'Rona has widened that bottleneck so of course you're seeing bigger differences between the posted limits and the traffic speed on those roads (which is probably all roads if you only ever drive during daytime hours in urban areas).
Edit: kind of got off on a tangent there but the point I should have made is that speed limits are fixed whereas traffic speed is variable based on conditions. As conditions change both slowly over time and day to day/hour to hour the max safe traffic speed changes. With 'Rona chopping congestion across the board it's no surprise that you see traffic speeds much farther from the speed limit on roads where traffic volume was a big factor in the traffic speed.
What do you mean by that? If you're covering long distances in the Western US, it's not at all uncommon to be driving 70+ for hours at a time.
That is solely determined by the energy required. And there is, where the electric car excels. A Tesla uses less than the equivalent of 2l of fuel for 100km or in other units achieves 120mpg. In situations you describe, it fares even better, as 60% of the kinetic energy built up is gained back when braking using the electric motors. So mass is much less a problem with electric cars than with combustion engines, which can't recuperate the kinetic energy.
And there are currently more fossil fuel cars on the road with regenerative braking than there are EVs ;-)
That statement is false. If an EV is run on electricity generated from coal only, the overall emissions output is close to that of a comparable ICE car [0]. Introduce some friendlier methods into the mix and your beating ICE by quite a margin.
The main source of emissions from an EV come from the manufacturing process. Even those can be significantly reduced when proper methods are applied.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/05/20/are-el...
But you're right that there are many other sources of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses. Those also definitely need to be addressed, but that does not mean car emissions don't need to be addressed as well.
Not true. Transport (road/sea/air) accounts for 29% of US emissions. That’s hardly “tiny”. Of that, 59% is from light duty road transport. Burning fossil fuels for transport is a major contributor to global warming.
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...
Cement and steel are serious problems as the chemical processes inherently emit CO2, but they are also centralised and therefore possible spots for carbon capture and storage.
(There is some work done on reducing iron with hydrogen, but you do need a bit of carbon for carbon steel)
Electric drivetrains open up an interesting potential for range-extenders which charge the batteries. The constraints are different than conventional engines - lower peak power, more-or-less continuous power output operation, no sudden torque changes. Different constraints generally mean a different optimal solution.
Li-metal batteries [edit: still an immature tech] are at around 14 MJ / kg, and gasoline is at 47.5 MJ / kg.
Moreover, suppose that you are really "off-grid". Meaning, you are off any fuel supply network!! In this case precisely, you would be saved by electric-related techs, such as photovoltaic.
If I want to burn dead leaves to run my car... well that sucks right now (moreover that isn't anymore 0 emission).
If I run off to start a farm, and I buy an existing OTS used tractor, it will have a tank that I can pour almost any flammable liquid into to make it run. If I want to plug the tractor in... well, that'll get the engine to turn over, but it won't get it moving anywhere.
If I build myself a cabin in the woods, I can burn wood or wood pellets to keep cook food, or keep warm during the winter. Alternatively, I could purchase batteries, PV panels, and the necessary charge control electronics, in order to run an electric heater.
Burning recently-alive biomass does release carbon, but it's carbon that was in the atmosphere as recently as a few months ago. It isn't zero emission, but it doesn't contribute a long-term increase to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
A forest is a carbon store. Burning trees puts carbon from this store to the atmosphere.
To count it as carbon neutral is an accounting mistake, that could be very costly...
Burn the dead leaves and you shrink humus (or annihilate it, depending on how much you do it), another huge carbon store. So that makes it yet another accounting mistake.
More generally, it is good practice to separate well atmospheric carbon (CO2) and captive carbone (anything in solid/liquid state). Just show that faithfully in the accounting method, and a lot of good will follow.
https://wood-energy.extension.org/is-burning-wood-carbon-neu...
But burning a preexisting forest is cancelling an existing carbon store and converting lots of solid carbon into atmospheric carbon.
The fact a forest is a carbon store is precisely why a startup such as Pachama exists: they help grow new forests to capture carbon.
https://pachama.com
Would you then just unnoticingly burn them for energy, and keep telling the customers that you just captured a net amount of carbon?
PS: oh you are jacquesm! :) didn't notice. How are you?
PPS: some critic about the link you sent me ("wood-energy.extension"): I disagree with what they say, in that fallen wood too is a carbon store, and in a forest at equilibrium the amount decomposed by fungi/bacteria is roughly compensated by the newly fallen wood. So that's just a carbon store, and if you begin to burn it you shrink this store.
Also, electric offers you the plethora of choices in methods to produce your energy. If it's not photovoltaic, you still have many solutions. Could as well be eolian, or a dam, or hundred of people riding generator-bikes (half-kidding), or etc.
I've wondered if it makes sense for gyms to be paying for electricity.
Free energy (but maybe only an epsilon), and no more deep vein thrombosis!!
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Under the worst possible conditions (not considering temperature), on the shortest day of the year, with 100% clouds and a thick layer of snow, PV panels would produce 14% as much power per day as on the longest day of the year with 0 cloud cover.
> Li-metal batteries top at around 14 MJ / kg, and gasoline is at 47.5 MJ / kg.
Wouldn’t this gap actually be very close considering that the efficiency of an ICE on gasoline is what, 30-40% at best (IIRC)?
1kg * 14 MJ/kg * 95% = 13 MJ mechanical
1kg * 47 MJ/kg * 30% = 14 MJ mechanical
It comes out pretty close!
If you want mechanical power and also heat (for keeping people, animals, or equipment warm, decreasing the viscosity of fluids, etc), ICE is definitely the way to go.
-- edit --
/u/ash points out Tesla's energy density is is 0.576 MJ/kg
1kg * 0.58 MJ/kg * 95% = 0.55 MJ mechanical
...not even slightly close.
1 kg * 142 MJ / kg * 50% = 71 MJ mechanical
The dominant solution above all else.
Do you have a link to back this number? Are these batteries rechargeable? Does the measurement include wiring, cooling, cell connections and overall structure of the battery pack?
For comparison, Tesla's (Li-ion) battery pack energy density is 160 Wh/kg, which is 0.576 MJ/kg:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/02/11/energy-density-advanc...
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/ee/c9ee0...
Comparing just the gas tank to several subsystems of a battery electric vehicle is not really an interesting comparison. The closest comparison at that level is just gas vs just cells.
Overall electric is still lower energy density per weight, but is also far more efficient. The whole Tesla pack has the energy of just a couple gallons of gas but can go 400 miles.
They are also quite weight sensitive, requiring additional induced drag to be overcome at heavier weights.
Gas still wins with a short refuel time.
My own initial experiences have been mixed. Overall advantage still goes to gas. But I think we're very close to getting this battery thing figured out. Just a few years away. When we look back it will seem like it happened overnight.
By that logic, you could say that there is absolutely no difference, because if you can imagine a car where the battery can be swapped, you should be able to imagine a car where the entire fuel tank is swapped. A tractor arrives at a station, and instead of filling up 500 litres of diesel, the entire tank is simply replaced with a full one. It wins again since fuel tanks are cheap - they are just metal and plastic after all, you can have several just sitting there, full or empty.
The fact that no one has done it yet suggests that this really isn't an issue - commercial diesel filling stations usually run at much higher pressure than your regular pumps, a truck/tractor tank fills in minutes because of a much higher flow rate.
Swapping gas tanks provides no advantage and you conveniently ignore the whole point of the batteries which is that you don't need any fuel infrastructure to fill your tanks!
A fuel infrastructure costs magnitudes less than just one battery pack. You just need a large tank and pump.
Swapping batteries implies either having multiple batteries, which adds to you costs significantly, or it implies adding yet another proprietary service company putting the screws to you in your supply chain.
For instance, don't forget the fuel suppliers, tank inspectors, etc, in the supply chain on the other side.
I was just commenting on the point of refuel time.
Farmers have machines and equipment for almost everything. Swapping out a flat pack? POC
Also, it's possible to use extended swapable batteries for such cases.
Albeit in theory true, here in the outskirts of the Sahara, I have yet to find a village where I can get an electrician to fix my solar panels, though a few bottles of gasoline can be found everywhere.
All those require huge amounts of energy, and batteries are not yet nearly there (as others point out, your numbers for battery energy density are out by a factor of 30).
If there was a Nobel Prize for understatement, this comment would take it hands down.
New "breakthroughs" in battery energy density are a dime a dozen. They're proving incredibly difficult to bring to commercial viability, and there's no evidence that that's going to change.
It seems obvious that if you want the density of liquid fuels, hydrogen is the answer. Compromising yourself with a lower energy density substance stands as a very difficult problem to solve.
But I think the peak of that opportunity has passed. The market in Europe and China is going to flip to pure electric in 5-8 years, with the US 5 years later. The window for developing new models that fit into that transition is shrinking. There will be long term demand for range extended vehicles, still in 15 or 20 years, but it will be niche.
That's way too optimistic for Europe. Maybe with the exception of Norway and Europe's largest metros like London, most of Europe will stay on ICE for a long time.
The price of electric cars here is too high for most incomes and the cheaper ones have too little range compared to ICEs. Not to mention the charging infrastructure is still lacking.
Right now they're still toys for the rich man with a house and not tools for the average joe.
I'd rather we invest the money in public transport and cycling infrastructure to rid the cities of cars but unfortunately the auto industry lobbies too strong in Europe for that to happen.
Charge infrastructure is expanding rapidly due to current rates of adoption which further makes electric cars more appealing every year.
A lot of people can't drop $40k on a car, but they can spend $25k up front and another $15k over the life of the car.
I think the major changeover will be when I can buy the equivalent of a Honda Accord, but fully electric, and for the same price.
The Tesla Model 3 was supposed to be that, but in reality, it still costs more.
Unless you’re referring to the psychological sticker shock only and not the actual cash flow implications.
I think if Tesla had better leasing, you'd see way more of them
Fiat-Chrysler did it with the 500e, and back in the day the big 3 did it with subsidized Cavaliers and Escorts.
All of this is only happening because of the pressure from EU regulators.
To see how these norms are effectively impossible to meet with ICEs, note that these translate to fuel efficiency of 4, 3, and 2 liters/100 km, or for American folks, 58, 78, and 117 mpg respectively.
€23.000 ID.3 vs €20.000 ICE Golf in Germany, from what I understand the Golf is one of the best selling cars in Europe. Also I believe many European countries exempt or greatly reduce emissions taxes on EVs, so that difference could probably be made up quickly.
Might even be worse we're on the verge of the big global warming panic. At the same time the current pandemic has been showing that the world under a semi command economy is more resilient than neoliberals gaslighted everyone into believing. And thus governments have a lot more wiggle room than they thought. One might find that the resale value of your ICE car is zero.
EVs are better cars for the majority of people. Once drive out price unequivocally beats ICE, EV adoption will skyrocket.
Electric cars are vastly more than just a battery and electric motor. Regenerative breaking, power distribution, heat management, possibly a simple transmission etc etc. The amount of innovation in this space dwarfs what’s happening in the IC space because the problems are so new.
EV’s hit 2.5% of total sales in 2019. 2020 is likely going to be odd, but scaling production still seems to be the bottleneck.
So sure the Roadster can hold what, 6 gallons? Like an econo-box. And weighs 2 1/2 - 3 tons. Much of that in battery.
Yes, weight is still the big issue.
For the most extreme comparison, a Bugatti Chiron gets an EPA 11 MPG so the roadster is arguably the equivalent of a 56 gallon fuel tank where the Chiron is stuck with 26 gallons.
PS: A better comparison would be a similar ~200,000$ two seater but none of them are optimized for fuel efficiency.
A bit of a tangent but it'll be interesting to see what effect an all electric vehicle future has on the design of roadways, bridges, etc. I imagine that many things will need to be rebuilt to handle the additional load.
Raising the average vehicle weight from 1.5 to 3 tons will definitely have an effect.
I would guess electric cars are still negligible in that metric, though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_axle_weight_rating
Actually, they're more likely to prefer a car free lifestyle unless of course they have a six figure job in finance or at FAANG but that's like 1% of Millennials and GenZ in Europe, the rest are broke AF.
Let's face it, pure EV adoption is a lot slower than we'd like to and lying to ourselves about it doesn't help.
Hybrids are easy to justify buying as you don't depend on charging infrastructure or lack thereof but once you switch to pure EV that becomes your bottleneck which rules out drivers who don't have chargers available at their home or at work or who want to drive long distances on vacations with family or who don't have too much money to spend on a car.
In other words, I can't prove with certainty that the market will flip, but I wouldn't bet on the contrary.
I don't know if it'll require upgrades to the power grid. You've already got 240v in Europe, so that's only ~10 hours to charge a Tesla. But could it handle thousands of EVs charging simultaneously?
If there's any place in the world that can do this it's Europe.
From top to bottom, it would fit about 40 cars - but there's only 6-8 street lamps? Ok, so maybe the council could fit a new charging post every 10 metres or so - but then the question is, with what money? There's hardly any cash to keep maintaining the roads at all, where would they find the money to dig up every single street in the city and put in charging posts? Even if they are paid, you'd wait a very long time to make your money back, and then there's another issue I have - at home, I can charge my car at about £0.12/kWh during the day and £0.05/kWh during the night. But public charging points I can see around at crazy expensive - like £0.30-£0.40 per kWh. At that point, it's literally cheaper to drive a good diesel.
Lots of European cities are broke at this point and have much bigger problems to fix right now than EV charging stations and if private companies would install them across the cities, the charging costs would be high enough to make EVs ownership unappealing.
Add the fact that EVs here are more expensive than in the US and you have the reason why most EVs right now are only owned by upper class people who can afford to have their own private charging station on their own property.
There's a reason diesel ICEs, as dirty as they are, are still so popular in Europe. They're cheap to run.
Ironically, as green as it may be, Europe will fall behind China and the US at mass EV adoption.
Unless they'd be given away for free, expecting EVs to take over the market here in 5 to 8 years is dreaming at best.
These European city planners should have listened to Strongtowns and other New Urbanists, and instead of encouraging suburban development style which makes prohibitively expensive for cities to maintain streets, instead followed the dense urban pattern of American cities.
"The number of battery charge-points will be tripled to 100,000 by the end of next year."
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52814074
The wires aren't the problem; you've already got a power grid carrying kilovolts along the same streets to power the buildings. The cost is the charging ports. So start with one, reserve the space for EVs and make it expensive.
Then people won't want to use it. Most of the time they'll charge at work or some restaurant that installed a charging port to drive customers to its business. Which is why you only have to start with one -- the first one on the street is just for emergencies. You might have ten EVs in the area and one charging port because at any given time only one person is willing to pay that much to use it. Which also means that it's regularly in use and can recover its costs quickly. But then it's there if you really need it, so more people can feel comfortable buying EVs.
Then once there are more EVs, you can install more charging ports -- they're paying for themselves, after all, as long as you don't install so many they don't stay in use.
Then once you've paid off the capital cost you can lower the price, so more people use them, so you can build even more. When you have 10 charging ports but 9 are already paid off, you only have to charge 10% of the original premium to pay off the 10th. So in the long term you still end up with plenty of charging ports on the street at only a slightly higher price than they are in other places.
Rest assured it will, and not only on the power grid.
Back of the envelope calculation.
A modern lamp post (one every 30 mt or so) is (led based) 60-80-100W, if infrastructure (cables) are not so recent, previous generation of street lightning were 150-250W per post.
Cables are dimensioned accurately to carry that kind of current/power.
A charging every 30 mt needs to serve 6-7 cars, we are talking of 7-10KW, i.e. 7000-10000 W, something like 40 times the power the infrastructure was designed for.
And each 300 mt stretch of street will need something in the order of magnitude of 70-100KW, and since all cars will be charged at night, there are very little to be spared for non-contemporaneus power usage.
In areas where the street lights are set onto the property side of the sidewalk (or even into lawns) rather than on the sidewalk abutting the street (most NA residential areas I think) I don't see this idea gaining a lot of traction. Or at least not remaining for long past the sidewalk turning into an obstacle course for the elderly and others with limited movement.
Lots of essential infrastructure is cheap because of competition, like for example electricity generation. There is no reason to believe EV charging will be different.
Of course, it might also turn out that while electricity costs are low, other costs of running charging business are high. If that’s the case, that doesn’t bode well for EV adoption in among people who don’t live in houses.
This is exactly what I'm saying though - motorway petrol stations are insanely expensive, because they have no competition - a company wins a contract to run the only petrol station on a given stretch of the A1, so they can charge obscene prices for petrol. Same is already happening with electricity - some providers along motorways charge an insane £0.69 per kWh, it would be cheaper to fill up another car with premium unleaded and use it to charge the electric car at that point.
I've been reading HN for years and people from the USA keep writing that this didn't happen there for fiber and other telecommunication service. Is it going to happen for EV chargers?
The first customers are people who can install a charging port where they normally park their car. That's probably more than half of car owners, and gets you to at least a double digit percentage of cars as electric.
At that point there are enough electric cars that a charger starts getting installed anywhere there's a lot of parking. Then more people can buy EVs, and do, so more chargers get installed. By the time most cars are electric they'll be everywhere.
You can charge while you get groceries (or a haircut, or dinner, or whatever) and then go on with your day. Certainly not as convenient as charging at home, but not impossible.
There is zero elemental hydrogen on Earth. 99% of the one we use is a byproduct of fossil fuel industry. Yes, you can produce it from electrolysis, but not only the hydrogen produced this way will never "break even" it's actually much worse than "even" since you then need to spend a whole load of energy to compress it and bottle it. Why not...just put the electricity into the existing grid and charge automotive batteries directly? After all, fuel cell cars are electric cars, direct combustion of hydrogen was experimental and extremely inefficient.
That brings me to my next point - hydrogen has the smallest molecule of all, which means that it evaporates naturally through any container you put it in. 70kg lead bottle only holds 1L of hydrogen, and it naturally loses all of it in 2-3 weeks. So no underground carparks, garages etc because of the explosion risks.
But finally - there is no infrastructure for hydrogen. It's like trying to build a network of petrol stations....from scratch.
And batteries are definitely good enough to power larger trucks, it's just the cost that's prohibitive(enough cells for a large semi would cost many times more than the truck itself).
> There is zero elemental hydrogen on Earth.
Not actually true. As I understand it, reserves of natural hydrogen do exist underground, similar to how helium is sometimes trapped underground in certain formations. These could potentially be huge source of hydrogen, although right now it's just speculation.
> Yes, you can produce it from electrolysis, but not only the hydrogen produced this way will never "break even" it's actually much worse than "even" since you then need to spend a whole load of energy to compress it and bottle it.
Since we live in a world of zero priced, and sometimes negatively priced renewable electricity, this is a non-issue. In fact, it's irrelevant. The biggest motivation for green hydrogen right now is the fact that we have far more green energy that we can use for large stretches of time on the grid. We're currently "curtailing" that electricity, which is a fancy word meaning that we're throwing it away. Turning what is in effect a waste product into a valuable new fuel is a big gain.
> Why not...just put the electricity into the existing grid and charge automotive batteries directly? After all, fuel cell cars are electric cars, direct combustion of hydrogen was experimental and extremely inefficient.
Largely because we can't match production with demand. As I mentioned above, we have huge surpluses during parts of the day, but also we have huge shortages at other times. Using hydrogen as a load balancer is an excellent idea right now. We can do this to a certain extent using batteries or pumped water, but we quickly run into the limits of these technologies. Hydrogen can be stored in far larger quantities than any battery in the form of underground salt caverns.
> That brings me to my next point - hydrogen has the smallest molecule of all, which means that it evaporates naturally through any container you put it in. 70kg lead bottle only holds 1L of hydrogen, and it naturally loses all of it in 2-3 weeks. So no underground carparks, garages etc because of the explosion risks.
Carbon fiber tanks have long since solved this problem. We know this since you can buy FCEVs right now, and they are perfectly fine vehicle with none of the above issues. Indeed, I've seen quite a few hydrogen skeptics review these cars, and while they maintain their skepticism of the idea of hydrogen, they seem to be at a loss at describing any kind of real shortcoming in the technology itself.
> But finally - there is no infrastructure for hydrogen. It's like trying to build a network of petrol stations....from scratch.
This is changing. There are now hundreds of hydrogen refuel stations around the world, and many more being built. This is particularly true in Asia, where governments in that region have sponsored huge hydrogen infrastructure buildouts.
> And batteries are definitely good enough to power larger trucks, it's just the cost that's prohibitive(enough cells for a large semi would cost many times more than the truck itself).
There many problems with battery powered semi-trucks. Cost is one of them, and weight is another big one. Furthermore, recharging them in a few minutes is a huge selling point, and batteries cannot deliver on that need. FCEVs are a much better answer for long-haul trucking than BEVs.
Where is 'here'?
Here in Australia the price of pure electric cars is way too high - and not helped by federal government (lack of) subsidies, tariffs, policy preferences for fossil fuel, lack of charging infrastructure, etc.
I recently scoped out comparable ICE vs full electric new vehicles, and 'around the same' quality/comfort/range/size we were looking at roughly 3.5x the cost for electric. A 5y cost projection for an ICE that does 4.5 litres / 100 km, even with anticipated (higher) servicing costs, doesn't get us to a compelling proposition.
What you're looking for is a series hybrid, like the Chevy Volt. In a series hybrid the only thing the ICE powertrain does is run a generator to keep the battery topped up. This allows the ICE to run in its ideal power band range permanently, reducing its size and making gasoline only travel much more efficient while lowering vehicle cost.
Tow your own generator.
I suspect that would really mess with the load dynamics on most passenger type cars, as the generator would be pretty heavy. I don't think you'd be able to lift a big enough one into the trunk area, and attaching it to the back of the car would be a pain too. I think towing solves a lot of issues for the idea.
Like other commentators have mentioned, if a u-haul like network of these were made, if you ran out of charge somewhere, they could drop one of these off to get you going again, as a depleted battery pack will charge slowly, making the van full of batteries potentially more expensive (you would have to pay for an extra 15-30m of their time).
If anyone did this, they probably would offer 15kW and 30kW versions, so both passenger cars and light trucks would be covered.
Both have a planetary gearset with engine on one gear, output on another, and an electric motor on the third. The difference lies on which gear the second electric motor is placed (motor shaft on the Volt, output shaft on the Prius), as well as some additional clutches and brakes in the Volt.
More info here: https://gm-volt.com/2015/02/20/gen-2-volt-transmission-opera...
When the Volt runs out of battery, it's almost not noticeable apart from engine noise. The performance characteristics in hybrid mode are almost identical to EV mode in terms of torque/acceleration.
It's an engineering marvel. I love mine. Shame GM killed it.
The Volt has basically the same engine as in the Chevy Sonic or Cruze, and the i3 range extender option uses the same engine as their C600 series scooters. Those engines are designed with a quick throttle response and a wide power band to operate over an RPM range sufficient to drive a vehicle through a regular transmission.
I don't doubt that for the same time and money, it was far better for GM and BMW to take advantage of the economies of scale around those products than to design an engine specifically to function as a range extender, but if they really took this as a core function or started from scratch I expect they might select a medium-speed industrial diesel engine instead: something optimized for a particular speed and power output that does that one thing optimally.
C'mon, can people research before opining?
"While it shares many parts with the new 1.5L I-4 used in other GM products, the Gen II engine’s combustion process and calibration are specific to the Volt. Its larger displacement not only improves fuel efficiency but also provides more torque, which contributes to the Gen II Volt’s surprising quietness."
https://www.wardsauto.com/engines/gen-ii-chevy-volt-propulsi...
So even though you're carrying around a huge amount of potential energy in the form of gasoline, your engine can only covert about 20% of that into motion.
The weight of combustible tank goes down as it become empty, while a battery weight remains constant.
This must have a huge decisional impact when manufacturing aircrafts.
- Uh, but, years ago, a P algorithm has been found...
- Yes, but if you want to stay in NP, I have a better one!!
This is the way I feel...
We have a 0 emission motor -- electric engine--
and people telling us that, if ever we would not like to use 0 emission, then they have a better IC engine...
Though if there really are use cases where electric cannot work and we are forced to accept fossil fuels, I guess a slightly more efficient engine is nice.
> ICEs have a lot of life left in them yet.
> [...]
> It will be a long time before every use case can be practically and economically covered by electric motors.
Let the near-future prove you wrong on both statements ;)
The maximum density of Li-metal batteries [edit: still an immature tech] is around 14 MJ / kg, whereas gasoline is the highest energy-density fossil fuel at 47.5 MJ / kg. This is not a huge gap at all.
And no, electricity isn't easily stored nor transmitted compared to hydrocarbons. Electricity, of course, does have a number of major advantages which is why we use it.
And no I'm not speaking of Li-ion. Sorry but I was speaking about Li-metal, a still immature technology.
So that weakens my argument. On the other hand, that shows that the path to improvement is huge, and could why not surprise us by becoming better density than fuel.
Lets do that. High voltage electricity transmission has losses about 4% per 1000 km (HVDC somewhat less, but is a point-to-point system so less flexible than the common AC transmission). By comparison the pumping power required for transporting liquid hydrocarbons is less than 1/10th of that. Also, a high voltage transmission line is an eyesore requiring about 50m wide right of way, whereas a pipeline of equivalent capacity needs a much narrower corridor.
I'm not saying we shouldn't go for electricity, but we need to be frank about the upsides and downsides. (Most experts seem to agree that in order to decarbonize our societies the basic recipe is to 1) Clean up electricity generation. 2) Electrify everything.)
I used Li-ion for the battery comparison, since that is the best rechargeable battery technology that actually exists. I'm highly skeptical that a new battery technology with two orders of magnitude better energy density is possible. It's very hard to get anywhere close to the energy density stored in the chemical bonds in fuels. Or, well, yes we do know of fuels with better energy density than chemical fuels, namely nuclear fuels.
Also, pipeline operations (leakage etc) seem a PITA.
That was my idea behind thinking electricity is easier.
However, the sheer ratio {transport energy} / {transported energy} is indeed in favor of pipeline, as you mentionned.
--
I found that you can bury HV lines: https://retasite.wordpress.com/burying-high-voltage-lines/
I found that it costs between $2.9 million and $13 million per mile to build a new pipeline, whereas it costs $285,000 per mile for a HV line and $1.5 million per mile if you build it underground.
P is a subset of NP, so no, you don't have even a better one in NP.
Stats say that something like 90% of the people that drove an EV want to buy one next. I doubt this would be true for the two-stroke engine.
Electric cars are well on their way to proving themselves. This new technology is too late to slow down the electric takeover. Its only use is to make those vehicles that are unable to switch to electric (probably because of fuel density or a need for rapid refueling) cleaner. Which is still useful, I guess. Though I'm hoping they won't be necessary at all.
It's a bit like hard drives... As soon as the SSD arrived, everyone saw that hard drives would eventually die out, so manufacturers pretty much stopped new technology development. Sure, there have been a few small advances, but seek times and data read speeds haven't gone up for a decade, and capacities have only crept up.
IC engines are the same. It might take them 30 years to die out, but in those 30 years there won't be any significant tech advances, because every company that makes them is only optimizing for cost in a shrinking market.
While not many new things in HDD space have made it to market, there is still quite a few big things in development, the new HAMR technology (and friends from other vendors) are projected to be able to double/triple capacity.
SSDs sadly still cost a lot if you need 50TB of them. Comparatively, my 50TB NAS cost me about 15$/TB. Most SSDs still hover around 90$/TB and go up to 120$/TB depending on use case.
Similary ICEs have two big advantages over non-combustion alternatives: energy density and price. A modern ICE is complicated but not terribly hard to construct, in part because processes exist but also because the things that happen in an ICE can largely be achieved by using common materials like steel, titanium, ceramics, oil and rubber. Gasoline and Diesel are very energy dense (and bad for the environment and climate) and can be lit/triggered by a simple electric sparkplug.
Comparatively running a hydrogen (non-combustion) engine is very hard to achieve as hydrogen is an element that really wants to set itself on fire and if it does so, the result is not very conducive to safe operation (hydrogen flames tend to be invisible and it loves to explode or atleast deflagrate).
Electric engines are much more efficient than any ICE but suffer from energy density problems (solvable by using a hydrogen fuelcell but that has above mentioned issues). If not for that, it would be the next thing and people are working on that. I have no doubt that despite that, ICEs will continue to be used where alternatives aren't possible or expensive.
Flash storage is denser than HDD storage. For an easy example, think about stuffing. 3.5" enclosure with 1TB microSD cards.
As for SSDs, here's a four year old article on Samsung shipping 15TB SSDs in a 2.5" form factor.
HDDs are unlikely to reclaim the density crown from flash. That said, HDDs do still maintain quite a price advantage, which is typically more relevant than storage density for archival solutions.
The $/byte figures all remain in favor of HDDs.
And, as always, a relevant xkcd tells us that one of the highest bandwidth data transfer solutions remains overnighting a milk jug of microSD cards: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
If you are optimizing for volume, you will have all flash-based storage. If you are optimizing for price, you will have all HDD (I think. Not sure on tape pricing).
If we want to optimize for another measure, that's fine. But we can't redefine density just because there are price differences. It's like saying my Mazda is faster than a Ferrari, because the Ferrari is so expensive.
So, practicality is a different measure to optimize for, and a much more complex and situational one. We can observe that many bulk storage solutions use HDDs rather than flash storage. This provides evidence that HDDs are practical for bulk storage. It tells us very little about density.
You keep coming back to "practicality", and this is harder to define. I welcome a proposed definition, so we can talk about this more clearly.
As a first pass, I might consider "practical to access" as being a combination of available at retail, and able to be readily attached to consumer hardware through a combination of onboard motherboard IO connectivity and expansion cards.
Here's a list of hard drives available at retail[0] that shows the largest retail HDD at 16TB and 3.5" form factor, vs SSD at 15.36TB and 2.5" form factor. These are available at retail today, and in standard form factors, with standard physical interfaces (SAS and SATA).
Without even getting into volume, but just looking at a single dimension, width, we can see that the HDD is 40% larger, physically and only 4% larger in storage capacity. The story only gets worse if we move to volume, because the 2.5" form factor is smaller in every dimension than 3.5". An enclosure to hold equivalent storage based on these two drives would be smaller for the SSDs than for the HDDs.
Perhaps practicality just means something that you could find without needing specialty hardware? Datacenter stuff is huge:
If we move to things you might find in a datacenter, we can find some articles (both from 2018). One talks about an existing 100TB 3.5" SSD - still in a standard form factor and with a standard interface (SATA/SAS).[1] In another article from the same year, Seagate was introducing the largest HDD, a 16TB model, and discussing the potential to hit 60TB by 2030.[2] Again, this is at the same time that a 100TB SSD became available.
Price is also something that has come up a couple times. I do not know if price is synonymous with practicality to you? I would appreciate clarification on the matter.
SSDs are, as I have mentioned previously, more expensive per unit of storage than HDDs. This is not up for debate, but I feel almost as if you think I am debating it.
So, for a specific use case, it is very easy for one to make a judgment call that HDDs are a better investment. But I do not see any argument to be made that HDDs are denser than flash-based storage. Again, density is storage capacity per unit volume.
A specific example, archival storage, would likely not benefit from an all-flash storage solution, but would be better served with HDDs. The tradeoffs for archival typically favor cost and often don't need the read and write performance of an SSD. As we agree, HDDs have better capacity per unit price.
If practicality and price are synonymous, it becomes a bit of a weird measure. We'll be taking a double ratio, of price/bytes/volume. But lets do it:
So, we've got an HDD at $12,215,100/TB/mm^3 and an SSD at $29,534,605/TB/mm^3. If this is the measure that practicality represents, then yes, HDDs have a lower number. If this is your definition, then I am sorry for misunderstanding you.On the point of density, though, it seems clear to me, and I hope to anyone else looking at the data, that flash-based storage is denser (bytes/volume) than HDDs.
Dimensions are from Newegg[3][4].
[0] Hamuko ↗ SSDs have been mainstream products for at least a decade now. Ten years ago, the largest HDD we had was like 2 TB. We currently have 16 TB HDDs and people are expecting us to have 50 TB HDDs in 2026. pg-gadfly ↗ It's also to note that SSD capacity hasn't strictly improved, it's been gained through massive compromises that severely impact their lifetime and performance. wtallis ↗ Most, but not all of the capacity and affordability increases of SSDs have been due to compromises elsewhere. If you plot the characteristics of "the cheapest flash you can buy" over the years, few of the curves are monotonic. pg-gadfly ↗ Of course there has been improvement in absolute terms, but our current state is much more than just that, which skews the results when thinking about where we are. The opinion is definitely not popular on hackernews, but I still want to throw it out there. eropple ↗ I was under the impression that Glacier is hard drive backed, not tape backed? jasonwatkinspdx ↗ Yeah, it's spinning disk backed. What's different is the drives are aggregated up on hosts under the design assumption that most of the drives will be powered off most of the time, allowing a lower cost per byte. Hamuko ↗ Some industry insider has claimed that it's tape-backed. There's also been speculation that it's actually based on optical media. londons_explore ↗ It's totally backed on "we have loads of hard drives with spare storage capacity but no IO capacity, so sell it off cheap, but make sure it doesn't perform too well or it'll eat into our other products". dogma1138 ↗ There have been quite a few advancements in mechanical drives post SSD. wtallis ↗ Hard drive development hasn't stopped. It just changed direction, because pursuing better seek times is pointless when it is impossible to increase RPMs enough to catch up to even low-end SSDs. Theodores ↗ This is a very good analogy. Perhaps the best I have heard. Also SSD was with its own 'range anxiety' in that space was always a lot less in your configured system than the spinning disk equivalent. Already__Taken ↗ I don't think that's true so much, the free valve innovation from koenigsegg looks like a big deal. the myriad of hybrid adaptations to the ice will keep it very competitive for a long time. [dead] hn_check ↗ "seek times and data read speeds haven't gone up for a decade" AmVess ↗ That's not even remotely true. Increasing emissions standards and economy standards means that ICE development continues apace. Nissan, for instance, recently put into production a variable compression engine, and all manufacturers are pairing ICE advances with electric for even larger gains. londons_explore ↗ Most of those improvements are not really new technology, but instead technology from European cars (where gas taxes are high) just imported into the USA (where previously people didn't care about MPG much because gas is much cheaper). AmVess ↗ It is a global effort, and not one limited to the US. Besides, the biggest improvements in ICE fuel economy and power are from Japan, not Europe. Europe hitched its wagon to the diesel engine, and we all know how that turned out. NullPrefix ↗ >Even just 5 years ago, the idea of getting a roomy, nicely configured sedan that gets 55MPG city was a silly notion londons_explore ↗ ~= 50 MPG AmVess ↗ Those were neither roomy nor nicely configured. rsynnott ↗ > Europe hitched its wagon to the diesel engine, and we all know how that turned out. pkulak ↗ Anything recently put into production has been in development for years. The decision to begin development probably happened before people were even lining up to pre-order the Model 3. grecy ↗ How many billions do you think will be poured into ICE R&D from 2020-2030?
And not only that, 16 TB HDD is quite affordable. Just 500 dollars for a Seagate IronWolf. Meanwhile a 3.2 TB Seagate Nytro will set you back about $1800. SSD mass storage is an option for only those with deep pockets.
Hell, not even tape drives have gone away yet. Amazon Glacier is just one example.
More than that, a 5 year old nas drive can outperform a modern cheap ssd in throughput easily.
Physical memory cell dimensions decreased steadily until the arrival of 3D NAND, whereupon cell sizes jumped back up and have been relatively stable since. SSDs incorporate more advanced error correction with each generation of controllers, so today's drives can get more usable write endurance out of the same physical cell size.
Number of bits that can be stored per cell has been increasing. Each time we cram another bit into each memory cell, performance and write endurance drop. But in between those major shifts, successive generations of flash tend to get faster and more energy-efficient over time. Today's 3 bit per cell TLC NAND is much faster than the TLC from 5 years ago, and has better write endurance thanks to the transition to 3D NAND. Today's SLC NAND has comparable performance and write endurance to the planar SLC that disappeared from the market over 5 years ago, but now it's several times cheaper.
And most of the compromises that have been made with NAND flash over the past 10+ years are purely academic. The vast majority of use cases do not need flash rated for 100k P/E cycles, and excess endurance beyond your needs provides no tangible benefit. Most of the endurance that has theoretically been sacrificed was never needed in the first place. Most of the performance lost has been offset by using more flash in parallel and by eliminating bottlenecks elsewhere.
The only metric by which a 5 year old NAS hard drive—or any hard drive—will outperform a modern cheap SSD is in long-term sustained sequential write throughput. Even the slowest modern cheap SSD will offer at least twice the sequential read throughput, and orders of magnitude better random read or write throughput. And it's not like the write throughput of modern SSDs is abysmal: gigabit Ethernet is a more significant bottleneck when filling a 1TB or larger dirt-cheap consumer SSD. So unless you're trying to use cheap consumer SSDs in an expensive NAS with 10GbE, the poor write performance of low-end SSDs won't come into play.
Cheap SSDs can tank below 70MB/s after cache, which is less than a gigabit connection, so it can totally affect your performance even in the smallest local networks.
You don't have to sustain writes for long at all to start seeing the compromises hidden in cheap SSDs, especially if they're using their TLC as SLC cache, in which case you run out faster and faster.
Nearly all cloud providers have more storage bytes than they have IO (ie. each individual hard drive receives so many read/write requests per second that if they filled the drive all the way to full some read/write requests couldn't be handled and would be unacceptably delayed)
The “cloud” and all your data still primarily runs on mechanical drive and their density is now higher than ever.
And the development road map for mechanical drives is still expanding.
HAMR drives will be on the market in 2021-2022, then you have BPR, MAMR and even GMR drives on roadmaps and research papers.
The only reason you think development has stopped is because other than for home NAS mechanical drives have pretty much disappeared from the consumer market.
Perpendicular magnetic recording hit the market around the same time SSDs started to go mainstream. Since then, hard drives have advanced with the introduction of helium filled drives, multi-stage actuators and shingled magnetic recording. This has enabled an order of magnitude increase in drive capacity, and substantial increases in sequential transfer speed. Dual-actuator drives and HAMR/MAMR are in the process of moving from the lab to commercialization, and will respectively bring an increase in random and sequential IO throughput (but not latency) and more density increases (which always bring some sequential throughput improvement, too).
What's really been missing from the hard drive R&D scene is more Nobel-class discoveries like giant magnetoresistance to allow for big jumps forward.
However, advances in automotive are also driven by legislation. The three cylinder turbo charged engines you get in regular European cars are there because of the legislation and that cheating diesel doesn't sell any more.
With this continual ratcheting up of legislation there is an incentive for manufacturers to improve the ICE technology. Particularly when efficiency is across the fleet so those inefficient SUVs have to be offset by lean hatchbacks.
This means there is incentive for golden bullets, solutions that promise the earth and allow ICE to linger on for longer. Not many of the legacy auto makers can compete in EV sales. They could make the product but the Tesla is hard to beat. They all fall short except when in the subcompact segment where Tesla don't have a product offering.
They hadn't gone up in a decade prior in any substantive, meaningful way. It's a limitation of the medium. There have been measures to increase density, but that's about it.
IC engines will continue to advance, but like magnetic hard drives they're pushing up against the bounds of reality in increasing efficiency.
Honda has a nicely sized sedan that gets 55 MPG city out of a drivetrain unit that is amply powerful.
Most of them produce small 4-cylinder engines that are as powerful as the V-6's that proceeded them, all while producing less emissions and offering greater fuel economy. Even Ford, Chevy, and RAM are putting gas 4-cylinder engines in their mid-size trucks are just as capable at 8-cylinder engines used to be just not very long ago.
Emissions and fuel economy standards will continue to tighten, which means that ICE development will continue for a long time.
Sure, turbochargers and hybrid tech aren't new in an of themselves, but that doesn't matter because there's still a lot of room for development left in them.
Even just 5 years ago, the idea of getting a roomy, nicely configured sedan that gets 55MPG city was a silly notion. Now, Honda sells them all day for $24k USD.
VW diesels from the 90s were doing 5 or 6 l/100km
I think this is somewhat exaggerated; it never really went above half the new car market, and is obviously down a lot now.
This monster of mechanical complexity is brand new as of a couple days ago. What company is going to commit the next half decade to developing it while watching gasoline engines fade into the background? Especially after watching Nissan's new engine totally flop.
My guess is virtually none.
Just scrap it all and go full electric. Coming out of COVID lockdown is a great time to invest and mandate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_cycle_engine
"The Backus Water Motor Company of Newark, New Jersey was producing an early example of a split cycle engine as far back as 1891. The engine, of "a modified A form, with the crank-shaft at the top", was water-cooled and consisted of one working cylinder and one compressing cylinder of equal size and utilized a hot-tube ignitor system."
-some guy in 1980.
History is littered with inventions that didn't gain widespread use initially then some little advancement(s) came along that make the inventions workable when revisited and tweaked. Repeating firearms and electric lightbulbs are two good examples.
I don't pretend to know which bucket this "new" engine advancement will fit into but I think your judgement is premature.
I've worked on those systems, they were clearly a game changer, incremental improvements got us to where we are today. Almost no single technology hits the ground running, especially not in inherently conservative domains such as automotive. Interesting implementation details made the Citroen one much harder to work on.
Electronics aren't perfect either, they make it a lot harder to keep such older vehicles functioning whereas the purely mechanical ones from an earlier era will quite likely last practically for ever.
Note that Diesel has had mechanical fuel injection for much, much longer and that it wasn't exactly new technology to begin with. It's just that the conditions in a gasoline engine are a bit different which needed a re-thinking of the concept.
The jetronic is now 50 years old:
https://www.bosch.com/stories/50-years-of-bosch-gasoline-inj...
To suggest that fuel injection had to wait until the 80's before it was commercialized is a ridiculous attempt to rewrite history.
Stationary generators and marine drivetrains come to mind. Those are less sensitive to the greater size and weight that this engine might have, and they benefit greatly from the ability to load fuel, store it, burn it as needed, and be refueled at any time, even while running.
As an example, my local university's datacenter has two rooms full of batteries for power backup. They instantly switch on, but can only power the datacenter for a short time. To protect against extended blackouts, there are two redundant diesel generators in the sub-basement, and enough fuel to run the datacenter for several months. Battery technology seems to have a ways to go before it'll be worthwhile to just have a basement full of batteries as long-term backup power.
People with those sorts of use cases are probably going to be relying on ICEs for a long time to come. In the meanwhile, efficiency improvements can make them less harmful to own and operate. And even after 150 years of developing ICEs, engineers are still coming up with ideas, maybe even practical ones, to gain those improvements.
In their basic function though I agree they are very similar.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiUnqlGzLw8
I wonder how much more efficiency can we continue to squeeze out from ICE?
The video was released well before the article, and I believe the article was posted to spread the video more widely.
Does two stroke mean it won’t need oil changes?
Some of the traditional ones did not because the oil was mixed with fuel to lubricate the seals that exist between the piston (part that moves up and down) and the cylinder (which houses the piston). In most engines that we refer to in cars, the lubrication happens from the bottom in the crankcase (where you see the rod beneath the piston).
This is not the same kind of two-stroke engine. The one you're thinking of pumps the fuel air mixture through the crankcase, which is why it cannot use the same oiling system that a typical four-stroke engine does. The oil would be diluted with fuel pretty quickly, and also carried into the combustion chamber and burned off. So adding the oil to the fuel is how you get around that, but then you're constantly burning oil.
He also intended the fuel for it to be peanut oil or canola oil a crop farmers could grow for their tractors.
Glow plugs are still here sort of although now a heating grid. My diesel truck has it to pre-heat the air to make starting easier.
Also, glow plugs are only used for starting.
I have been surprised at how much 40V/80V electric systems are cutting into what was traditionally two-stroke light engines for string trimmers and mowers. The batteries are expensive though, and I don't know how many you'd need to have in rotation to be able to keep one fully charged and ready to go under continuous usage.
Theoretically, anyway; with our tiny yard this is seldom tested. Which why I'm annoyed by neighbors that buy a new gas-powered mower. There is not a yard within at least a 3 mile radius of me that can't be mowed by a modern, lithium-battery push mower.
My lawn mower 5Ah @56V (EGO power) is good for half an hour. It charges from empty to full in maybe 40 minutes. In a trimmer same battery seems to last forever, maybe at least 2 hours.