Current mass produced batteries, which tend to hover around 260-300 Wh/kg. Higher density (but still under 500) are available, but in far smaller quantities for a very high cost.
The exciting part of this announcement is that if anyone can scale manufacturing, it is them.
While this is true, a tiny start-up with big claims is different from the world's largest battery manufacturer (CATL) already spooling up production with the intent to scale.
Eh, not really. Most "battery breakthrough!" press releases are about some new exotic chemistry while most mass produced battery improvements in the last 20 years have come from incremental improvements to existing chemistries and better packaging.
Meh, the devil's in the details with a lot of those announcements. A surprising number of them are things like... it will be 50% better 5-10 years from now!
That's actually incremental improvement if you think about it in annual improvement terms.
It is, except for the fact that the future isn't guaranteed, so there could be unforeseen problems with scaling up, and that 50% improvement never gets delivered. As mentioned upthread though, CATL has expertise in that area, and "end of this year" is so a trackable claim, unlike the claims about gallium-based batteries.
Have they? Other than lithium based batteries getting cheaper per kilogram so that year by year, more battery use cases have switched over from inherently worse chemistries? Even just ten years ago, eneloop were still the hot thing for many applications outside of laptops, mobile phones and the odd Tesla (ten years ago was when Model S was still the fresh new successor to the converted Lotus)
Is eneloop not still very much a thing? Maybe not the brand, but the technology. The vast, vast majority of consumer devices using standardized battery sizes are AA or AAA, and that means NiMH. To go lithium means 18650, and I don't really see much of that happening outside flashlights and other niche products.
Sure, if a device uses the form factor, then eneloop or the same approach by a different brand are even more ahead of pre-eneloop NiMH than they used to be: all the high-current use cases that were the weak spot of eneloop have long migrated to lithium-based.
But AA and AAA are increasingly rare not only because of price but also because of the ubiquity of USB charging, and because of the way the powerbanks that USB charging enabled weakened the "carrying spares" argument for AA a lot.
In essence: yes, the vast majority of consumer devices using standardized battery sizes continue to be AA or AAA (if we can agree in ignoring the ubiquitous CR2032). But costumer devices that use interchangeable standard size batteries have become super niche, at least outside a few fields where you expect years on a set of batteries. To go lithium means going fixed battery (unless you identify with the performance flashlight subculture, again something I very much agree with)
There are many companies making rechargeable lithium batteries in AA and AAA form factors. I have a few dozen I use for my door lock and Xbox controllers.
Lithium mostly exists as pouch cells in consumer devices, standardized batteries in general are rare. AA/AAA is mostly used on extremely cheap stuff, or stuff that one expects to last 5 years or more so nobody cares about recharging.
I hope we eventually get a consumer friendly standard for lithium though. It could be so much better than cylindrical cells, we could have all our cheap gadgets using micro versions of the power tool slide on shoe concept or something. Kinda unbelievable the ISO isn't trying to standardize prismatic type cells.
Form factor smaller than 1865 with energy dense formula is rare. Chinese made LFP but only a handful of mfgs make them anymore. So size doesn't matter, but it basically matters :D
Nothing except flashlights and yard lights seem to use them either. Probably because they're not exactly safe enough for frequent swapping applications, consumers will drop them on their tin foil crack smoking rig and make a fire or something.
Cost is just one of the interesting dimensions. For various kinds of transport energy may be more important than cost. I would be prepared to pay significantly more for an EV if had range of 1000 km rather than 500.
What battery pack that I can buy right now is 300Wh/kg? Sincerely curious because that's 50Wh/kg above what people are using in some very expensive UAVs.
The design of a battery for a phone is nowhere near the capability of C rate and discharge amperage needed to power multi hundred watt load electric motors. Totally different thing.
Battery people keep comparing apples, and oranges.
Battery pack energy density, battery, single cell, cathode, and their rated, nominal, and absolute capacity are all different things.
A single cell will always have > absolute capacity than the capacity at which the safety limiter will cut-off charging, and that will be > than the capacity to which BMS will charge/discharge the cell in daily use.
It may well be possible for a cathode material to excel in a small pouch cell, but have terrible thermals preventing its use in larger cells.
Very expensive UAVs use lithium polymer battery packs with continuous discharge rates on the order of 80C and above. To get higher energy density, look for lithium ion battery packs or lipo packs that reduce discharge rates to trade off for long-term storage capacity.
Compare to the discharge rate vs. energy density tradeoffs of plug-in hybrid EVs versus battery-only EVs: A Chevy Volt PHeV has a 16 kWh pack and 87 kW motor, a Chevy Bolt has a 65 kWh pack and not a 65/16x87=350 kW motor but 149 kW.
UAVs also have higher current requirement, and that means more weight "wasted" for chonkier electrodes Car batteries aren't pulling 50C worth of current
Traditional ICE starter batteries are optimized for this cold-cranking power rating, but they only have to deliver this for a matter of seconds before being recharged. They are not designed to deliver this continuously nor to ever be operated at low states of charge.
Conversely, a BEV traction battery has to support a wider range of loads at any charge state between its minimum and maximum charge levels, in order to have decent driving range. Like a starter motor, the BEV is not going to sustain high power output for very long, since a car only takes seconds to accelerate to legal road speeds. After that, it requires continuous output at lower power levels to maintain a cruising speed.
Even with lead-acid batteries, there are regular starter batteries and then there are deep-cycle batteries which have far less cold cranking amps but more durability when depleted to low charge states before being recharged.
The low density of lead-acid batteries is what makes them unsuitable for mobile applications. They might have 30-50 Wh/kg while various lithium ions might be 100-300 Wh/kg. And now this announcement is talking about 500 Wh/kg so 10x the best lead-acid batteries...
Most batteries that run starters are not energy dense, they're typically standard lead acid batteries.
FWIW, to provide the 225 amps (for a V8 starter motor) a Tesla car battery would only need a discharge capability of 3C (1C being around 80 amps), which is within its rated capabilities. This is also for batteries which provide higher voltages, so I'm vastly overestimating the C rate required.
C is the unit for charge/discharge rates, and is based off the capacity of the battery.
No, it is referring to what the starter motor in an ICE vehicle does. It was most likely a misunderstanding, but it is more similar in that it pulls very high loads like a drone battery does.
This person seems to be getting downvoted but they aren't totally wrong, electric car batteries are massively paralleled so that the amperage draw per cell is kept to a reasonable figure. They are confused about cranking amps to turn over an ICE vs. batteries used in all-electric cars.
The 18650 Panasonic cells used in an older Tesla model S for instance are rated at only 10A draw per cell as their nominal 1S voltage (4.20V when full).
It'll take time (maybe significant) before these batteries are available for direct purchase. The problem is demand current outstrips supply. Every high capacity battery already claimed, in tesla's case for their cars and grid storage applications.
CATL pushing this sort of capacity, though, is great news. It certainly will accelerate availability.
Read what I wrote again, I said 300Wh/kg is 50Wh/kg above what's used in expensive UAVs. There are setups out there using high amperage Panasonic cells at 250Wh/kg for 12S systems. You build a pack with 12S strings of high amperage rated Panasonic 18650 or 20700 and then parallel multiple of those strings together for large capacity (such as for something the size of a freefly alta X).
A small quadcopter that uses a gensace/Tattu 1200 mAh lipo pack is not an expensive uav. I think everyone who uses hobby size lipo knows their specs around 135-160Wh/kg.
I’m afraid these bans get systematically sabotaged by well funded ice lobby groups.
Just look at what happened to the EU’s ice ban for personal vehicles.
Spoiler: while new gasoline burning cars are technically banned after 2035 it will be completely legal to sell new gasoline burning cars by labelling them e-fuel only…
The timelines for ICE bans within a decade are ridiculous from a technology and market standpoint and terrible for the environment.
The best car technology is the one you don't use much. And we already have decades of cars in good enough condition to be driven weekly rather than daily.
EVs will barely scratch the surface of environmental issues with transportation. And they will create a new range of supply problems while also not solving traffic congestion issues that plague our cities.
It would be far more preferable to encourage people to use the same car for longer and especially to leave it in the garage when they can use other modes of transportation. Or, use car sharing rather than a personal car.
> You can continue to use the ICE vehicle you bought in 2034 in the EU until infinity.
Sure, if you can find fuel. By 2034 EVs will be enough of the market that gas stations are already closing (remember today new cars are 10 year old used cars, and there is every reason to think EVs will be half of all cars). There is still one on every corner, so you might not see this trend, but it will be in the statistics. By 2038 you will noticed it because many corners won't have a gas station at all. And of course the stations will already see this on the bottom line and will be less interested in replacing their pumps when the get old, and if they break they might just close that one island instead of fixing it. By 2045 fuel will be special order in most places.
Note that construction, freight, and other high energy use niches will still use a lot of fuel, so diesel will be available for a while longer. However those vehicles tend to use larger nozzles that won't fit in your diesel car. Gasoline will be hard to find - you can still make road trips, but you will need to plan your fuel stops like people plan EV charging today (on some roads you don't need to plan your EV charging, but there are others you must).
I live in a bedroom community of a major city. There are about 25,000 people in my town and there are 7 gas stations. There could be a single station in town and it would still not be inconvenient. Some basic math implies that this one station would be as viable a business as it is today even if only 14% of the vehicles on the road use gasoline. I would be shocked if there are fewer ICE powered cars on the road than that in 2035.
I pass multiple stations when I leave town to get to work. Where I work looks like here ( home ) from a station density point of view.
For longer trips, you may be right that you may have to plan. But there could be very few ICE cars on the road before one station every 400 km ceases to be profitable. And, unlike electric, nothing is stopping me from filling up a gas can before hitting a leg I am really worried about.
I cannot see “lack of stations” being a problem for ICE for a long time.
The cost of fuel could be a thing I guess but, if demand drops faster than supply, the economics of that do not really make sense.
Also, if I am somebody that uses a vehicle “once a week”, is this really the car I am going to take on a 1500 km trip through unpopulated areas? I cannot rent or borrow an EV for that trip?
What you are suggesting seems to be that ICE vehicles are going to end up being errand vehicles for farmers, or the old truck hooked up to the boat to go fishing once a month. Or that people that live and work locally need them for the occasional errand. For the latter use case, where I live at least, just the insurance cost would incent me to replace such a vehicle with a ride share subscription even now.
I think it is going to stay viable to run an ICE vehicle for a long time yet. I also expect fewer people will want to.
This announcement has the potential to push things like Teslas to 1000 km of range. What happens when it hits 2000 ikm ( over 1300 miles ). What are you going to want to head out of town in?
10 years from now, people that can afford it will have all gone EV. People who cannot will drive their ICE until it needs a major repair. And then they are going to go EV.
And the very remote areas that may have just 1 gas station are also least likely to have high EV penetration until the absolutely tail-end of the ICE-era.
I dont see how in 10 years most cars will be evs, when the ev sales percentage is 12% as of now.
Which equals to 9.5% of electric vehicles on the road today.
The increase in ev sales is in the low single digits per year, the math just doesnt check out.
EVs are not expected to have a constant growth curve. With the expected ban of ICE EV will be the majority in a few years, and by 2034 few ICEs will be sold.
I do expect ICEs will be just under 50% of total cars, you could argue they are more like 55% of all cars, but it won't be 75%.
I'm sure this will happen. But I think your timeline is way faster than it will happen.
I highly doubt gasoline will be hard to find in most places by 2045; I'd expect a lot fewer fueling stations, but I think even at 10% of the station count, gasoline will still be convenient and easy. And, if gasoline is less convenient, you can always use gas cans to extend your range. They're not too expensive, and not too inconvenient (epa 'anti-spill' nozzles that make it hard to fill without spilling not withstanding); long term storage is problematic, but if you're regularly using it, no big deal. Most gasoline powered vehicles have at least a 300 mile range, and it's not hard to find vehicles with a larger range.
They said something similar about radios and books quite a long time ago.
I'm afraid the problem of generating/transporting enough electrons to all places where cars, buses, trucks, need charging will not be solved completely within 10 years.
Turning gasoline into electrons is fairly straightforward. It doesn't make much sense for daily use, but for occasional corner cases (emergencies, backwoods, etc), it does. And corner cases are one of the big reasons people give against electric cars.
In my country (Poland) gas stations get more income from selling other things, mainly alcohol, because unlike other vendors they can stay open overnight. Margins on gasoline are extremely thin already. It makes sense for them to stay open regardless of the demand for actual gasoline.
This assumes future regulations will allow you to do this. There are already examples of commercial fuels today that sell fuel only to commercial customers at a different rate.
See "red diesel" in the UK - its just plain ole diesel taxed differently for commercial use, but illegal for use in privately owned personal vehicles. It's dyed red to allow its use in private vehicles to be discovered from the discoloration of engine parts etc.
Personally I expect rules on what can be pumped into what will be different by 2045 in a lot of places, and while it might still be possible it may not be so simple.
> See "red diesel" in the UK - its just plain ole diesel taxed differently for commercial use, but illegal for use in privately owned personal vehicles. It's dyed red to allow its use in private vehicles to be discovered from the discoloration of engine parts etc.
Maybe, but we're talking about the banning of ICE vehicles, not the banning of fuel.
I mean, "you won't find fuel because it will be illegal to possess it" is a substantially different argument from "you won't find fuel because no one will produce it anymore".
> Maybe, but we're talking about the banning of ICE vehicles, not the banning of fuel.
This is a bizarre point to make? Regulation of fuels and regulation or bans of ICE vehicles would obviously go hand in hand (it already does today!), if ICE vehicles were to be banned as discussed here. You can't have combustion without fuel... Controlling who can pump gas would be hugely important to the introduction of any hypothetical ICE ban.
My point also is not that fuel may be banned - it's that the regulations governing the pumps may be different than today, and that there is international precedent for this. If combustion really is largely relegated to commercial trucking by 2045, I'd be honestly shocked if the rules governing the pumps didn't change too in a lot of places.
look at the vast difference in fuel laws pretty much everywhere between today and the 1970s if inspiration required - remember we used to be able to buy leaded fuels?
It will be faster than you think, mostly because gas stations will be closing and so the inconvenience of fueling you car will cut that tail of - except for niches where EVs are particularly bad.
Spare parts and maintenance are likely going to be a problem first for ICE owners, rather than fuel availability. Who would be crazy enough now to invest in (and maintain) a factory for producing ICE-specific parts? Parts and skills for ICE will become scarcer and more expensive, making a new EV look economical to ICE owners in very short time. It has already been a few years now where it has been uneconomical not just to build a new fossil fuel power plant, but also to continue operating them due to maintenance costs. I'd suggest the same thing with ICE vehicles--it becomes easier/cheaper to run an EV rather than an old ICE quicker than people may usually assume.
The biggest cost of producing parts is making the tooling to mass produce them. Manufactures will retool to produce other stuff once they have enough of a given part, but if there's a shortage (or they think there will be one soon) they'll bring the old tooling out of storage and set up the line again. It's common for auto companies to supply new parts for decades after a car is made.
Heck, Mazda makes new parts for the original Miata.[1] While the first generation Miata is a recognizable car, it's not very popular. A total of 433,000 were produced. Maybe half are still on the road today. That may sound like a lot, but twice as many Ford F-150s are sold every year. If it's profitable to keep making parts for 200,000 vehicles, it's going to be a long time before most ICE cars run into shortages.
The investment in parts is already made. All they need to do is not scrap the tooling. Until the car the part went to is 15 years old that isn't worth doing as you will make more from selling parts than from the cost of storing the tooling. Common parts like filters will be around for much longer. Parts that rarely break will have the tools destroyed sooner, but with millions of ICE cars on the road there will be a lot of needs for parts even if the need is less than today.
It seems reasonable that most gas stations will add fast charging stations no? And then maybe add a coffee shop or quick food place that you can spend money at and be the real source of revenue for these locations.
Its not going to be a cheap or painless conversion, but there is absolutely a path forward for most gas stations I think.
some of them. I think most will drop fuel completely, some will turn into stores where local buy milk or something, but many will close completely as not needed since people charge at home.
In denser areas charging will move to mall like areas where people will get out of the car for longer. Gas stations are not generally not setup for people to hang out for 30 minutes, they don't have enough space for people to park that long. They are setup for use the bathroom, grab a snack and get out. Most people charging will want to get groceries or other supplies they are getting anyway (which is to say since they can't charge at their apartment they are going to look for places to shop where they can recharge)
In rural areas (truck stops) are more setup for spending more time. They often have small restaurants already so you can eat inside. They are more general purpose stores and often serve the locals as the place to buy things between trips to dollar general or the city. They have more parking (land is cheap so they will buy more if needed), so there is place to put in all the needed EV chargers. Plus they get a lot more customers who are on trip so long they couldn't charge at home.
It's an interesting problem. Aside from the toxic cleanup issue when decommissioning the underground fuel tanks or an attached service garage, the layout of a traditional gas station is also limiting. Unlike a modern truck stop off a major highway, the majority of urban stations have a small footprint optimized for road access and throughput, but not simultaneously lingering customers.
Even without the pump islands, there isn't much room for customer parking. These stations are often situated at corners with multiple driveways, small parking areas, and no adjacent street parking. Unless you can merge adjacent parcels for redevelopment, these small stations may only be able to support a convenience store, coffee shop, drive-through food stop, or some other quick turnaround. They don't have the right layout to support lots of simultaneous customers unless they are arriving on foot or by mass transit instead of personal vehicles.
Probably not, people charge at home or apartment and start everyday with 300 miles of range. No need to ever visit a charger unless you're on a long trip.
That combined with bigger stores like 7-Eleven, CVS, Walmart, etc.. adding their own charging stations will kill most gas stations.
By then people who need fuel will know to special order it. Because if you are the only one selling gas that means someone lives in a less dense area that can't get fuel at all. Either that or you have competition, they are just not across the street and so you have to keep prices low enough people won't drive the extra miles to your competition.
The urban greens in the previous Swedish government coalition wants to ban fossil-based petrol from being sold starting 2030 - which economically speaking is kind of the same thing.
Every ounce of oil coming out of the groud and getting burned ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere. Banning that has nothing to do with ICEs.
You can run an ICE on synthetic fuels. It's not as energy-efficient but only half the efficiency from a renewable source is still better than "full" efficiency from a fossil source. If you _really_ must use an ICE, there will be a way. It won't be cheap, but it's your choice. There is no human right for cheap ICE fuel.
It’s more or less the same thing because if your fuel price doubles you’re going to scrap that car and buy an electric.
Nobody is forcing you to do so, it just doesn’t make much sense to keep driving that ICE. When everybody is making that decision parts and maintenance will be more expensive and harder to come by too - accelerating the transition.
"Half the efficiency" is highly optimistic. Afaik making synfuels loses about 70% of the energy and then you burn the stuff in an engine that is at best 40% efficient. Meanwhile EVs have >70% wind turbine to wheel motion efficiency.
I'm not disputing any of that. It's just that in an EV you currently drive around over half a ton of battery with you on your 20 miles a day commutes. That's highly inefficient as well. You need energy to drive it around, you need a bigger car to house it, better safety systems to prevent that solid fuel bomb from going off, you need to source its raw materials, manufacture it, recycle it.
Imagine saving all of that for a much smaller battery (say, 100 miles range) which is enough for 45+ weeks of the year, and then for the rare case of driving further than that you bring gasoline with you, with its vastly superior energy density and thus range. Only for those few trips. It can well be super expensive, but who cares, it's only for that rare trip to the grandparents or the skiing resort. And then you don't need to care much about the bad end-to-end efficiency. After all, you don't care about that when taking a plane to Hawaii either, do you?
Currently, plug-in hybrids tend to just be used as gasoline cars because people are lazy and don't charge every night. There are gas stations everywhere, fuel is cheap, and you are used to filling up gas anyway. But once gasoline prices spike to 3x-5x because it's synthetic fuels, the dynamic will change, fewer gas stations around, the reduced economies of scale lead to further price hikes and boom, everybody will use their plug-ins mainly as EVs. Which is what I'm describing above. Which could outperform pure EVs because you don't need a 500 miles EV range anymore, you can make do with 100 miles.
If you want the same car to run 100 miles on battery and have the option to fuel it with synfuels you need to lug around useless drivetrain most days. The better option is to just rent a car with sufficient range for the long trip you want to make.
Or build public transit for the commute and don't use a car at all.
I'm personally on board with rentals for the occasional long trip or using and building out public transit. But most people are not. Especially not in NA.
I understand the drivetrain argument. What about a simple generator to recharge the battery on the go? Like the original BMW i3 had. That one didn't take off, but likely in part because it was ugly, too small to be practical, and the gas prices still being very low.
Maybe the ban should have specifically stated that all ICE cars must be convertible to EV ten years before the expiry date. DIYers are doing it all the time but not with newer cars as they are too locked down and complicated.
It's particular ironic in China, where >50% of their domestic energy production is apparently from coal. That being said, it could improve metro air quality a large degree because I'm guessing coal power plants aren't built in downtown Beijing.
China's CO2 intensity is about 550g/kWh currently (and falling rapidly). An EV takes about 15kWh/100km. That's less than 90g/km. About as much as a Prius.
I don't really see what CO2 has to do with the point I am making. It's massively better for air quality to have the coal burnt at a distant powerplant than to have a car burning coal (or fossil fuels) in downtown Beijing.
They will definitely get “sabotaged” if they turn out to not be even remotely realistic, for example if lithium production is nowhere near what it needs to be to replace all new automobile production.
While this is true in theory I don't see how it is relevant. The battery industry is in overdrive right now, new chemistries are being put to the test daily and multiple manufacturers are already working on productizing energy storage that doesn't use rare earths at all. Also, breakthroughs like the main post mema that you need less and less rare earths for the same bang.
It becomes increasingly certain that we won't need as much lithium as the fossil lobby would like us to believe.
The recent announcement (also from CATL!) of sodium ion batteries that are competitive with typical vehicle grade Lithium cells (LFP chemistry) means Lithium is unlikely to be the blocker people argue either. Lithium Ion is already potentially no longer the only viable battery chemistry at scale.
VERY few places are even thinking of banning ICE sales within 5 years - most timelines are 15 years - at which point, if you're looking at realistic projections - you won't even need to ban them. The sales will already be very low (in the places that are thinking about the bans).
The reality of these bans is that exception after exception is tacked on for a long time.
One of the cool things about this type of political maneuver is that it's a bit like the Fed Put. You can get the market to move in the direction you want without actually shooting your bazooka. Just by saying your thinking about banning ICE cars - you're going to get manufacturers and sellers preparing for that and shifting over as much sales as they can to non-ICE cars.
In the 10-year timeframe it probably doesn't matter. Ev drivetrain's and batteries are going to drop well under what ICE drivetrain cost will be simply because there's just so many less components and announcements like this and the sodium ions stuff really leads out a path to that economic super advantage
Well the FDP party which is in the coalition govt of Germany and torpedoed the EU ICE ban in the last minute and forced the inclusion of this e-fuel nonsense for the whole EU is run by a dude who likes to drive a Porsche and who is friends with the Porsche company. Porsche is the only major car producer in Germany that favors efuels. So uh, I think the FDP doesn’t like the ICE ban, because as a Laisser-faire party, they favor “open technology solutions” and want the “market” to decide on the best technological solutions for the climate problem.
> Why would anyone want to use e-fuel in 2035 instead of electricity
It will depend on their needs and if the device covers them. For example (as said already even here): long distance travel, practicality of refuelling (no, the need of some will not be fulfilled by leaving the car in charge nightly), decent technology (e.g. some will refuse to own an internet connected vehicle).
The very article you are responding to is touting energy densities that could lead to 1000 km in Teslas next year and the super chargers planned for the same time period would charge those cars in 15 mins. You do not even have to go out 5 years before “long distance travel, practicability of refueling” will favour EV owners. I just got back from a 2000 km EV road trip through the worlds second biggest country ( and one of the sparsest populated ). The longest leg between charging networks was about 300 km in the Rocky Mountains. The longest we sat at a charger was around 20 minutes. Most of that time was spent placing take-out dinner orders for the 5 of us in the car.
This is my first long trip in an EV vehicle but my wife drove about a 1000 miles through eastern Washington State a few weekends ago ( also mountains - even more remote ). She had to plan but there was certainly no risk of getting stranded. At least one of the hotels had overnight charging for free.
All this is today. These are going to be non-issues 5 years from now.
Long distance and refueling will be solved by 2035. They’re close now. I’m will to bet all new gas cars are going to be internet connect too, it’s already heading that way, and has little to do with EVs
> I’m will to bet all new gas cars ... little to do
Would you drive them? Would you own an internet connected door, vehicle, pacemaker? Some would rather find the keys out of the asylum.
You say «little to do», but the point was that we are informed of «gas cars» without wireless connection, whereas word is that for some reason all electric vehicles seem to be. We know that some «gas cars» are spared, but they say all electric ones will be bound to the wave of improper engineering, so this defines some hope or way out for the traditional making and rules out the new one.
A lot of gas stations have differently-sized nozzles for regular gasoline and diesel, and the fueling opening in the car is sized so that a diesel nozzle does not fit in a gasoline car. They should do something similar for e-fuel so people don't "accidentally" fuel them with classical fuel.
What you are forgetting is that diesel engines only work with diesel and gasoline ones only work with gasoline. This creates a natural incentive for the customers to not mix this up.
In the e-fuel vs trad-fuel story you do not have that incentive.
What you DO have, is an incentive to actually do the switch. Projections put e-fuel production costs at a 1500% premium over fossil fuels and wide spread availability is actually a hard scientific problem as even the announced global production capacity* of e-fuels is only enough for a few thousand vehicles.
* Apparently, to date, the biggest portion of announced e-fuel production misses either an energy provider or financial backing or both.
That was exactly my thinking actually..... I own an equestrian property as a hobby, I need a big diesel truck (1 ton) to haul horses, hay, tractor, etc... Sometimes for very long distances (>1000kms) for shows, etc... There are no viable options today, or in the near (10-15 years) future that offer viable alternatives in the form of an EV... at least not from traditional HD truck vendors.....
With Sodium batteries, range and infrastructure improvement and BYD showing they can make EV as cheap if not cheaper than ICE. I'm convinced a EV future in Eurasia is secured, how it will be handled in the west im not so sure given how they are Isolating themselves more and more becoming fortress NATO.
> I’m afraid these bans get systematically sabotaged by well funded ice lobby groups.
They'll be sabotaged by reality. Thinking ICE cars and gas stations will become a fading memory by 2035 is wishful thinking. Politicians get big headlines and praise for proposing ICE bans and such, but as the date draws closer the reality of "OK, maybe we're not quite there yet" sets in and the date will be pushed back again and again. There is a very long tail with ICE, and it's going to take a very, very long time to replace them. Wholesale upheavals of established technology are difficult.
For a noteworthy example in another domain, IPv4 has been on its last legs for how long now?
They're banning new ICE car sales in 2035: existing ones can continue to run. So the aim would be to mostly phase out ICE cars by something more like 2050-2060 (bearing in the mind the last generation of ICE cars will probably get a slightly extended lifetime to smooth the transition). That seems pretty realistic to me, perhaps with some exceptions for certain niche uses (which would probably be <5% of vehicles).
Sure, I’m mostly addressing the folks in this thread who are musing on whether there will be more than a few gas stations total in the country by 2035…
How is this related to IP? We are talking about legislature being written to force us to be more Eco friendly. No politician ever wrote or proposed legislation for IP versions.
It’s an analogous situation demonstrating how hard it is to unseat an incumbent, ubiquitous technology with another, and how long it takes, even if that alternative is superior.
> I’m afraid these bans get systematically sabotaged by well funded ice lobby groups.
Nonsense; it's just harsh reality landing on green wet-dreams.
They effectively propose a ban on cheap cars, and you expected ... what, exactly?
The only way they're replacing ICE vehicles is by making the EVs cheaper, and there is a limit to how high they can tax sales of ICE vehicles or fuels without a population revolt.
"The only way they're replacing ICE vehicles is by making the EVs cheaper"
Even if electric cars would be cheaper, faster and longer running - some people would rather die, than give up their ICE cars and motorcycles.
The strong lobby in germany against banning aren't the poor, but the rich who want to drive their roaring Porsche till eternity. They literally say that.
I can somewhat understand the appeal of an loud engine, the feel of the road etc., but personally I will indeed celebrate the day, all those loud polluting machines are gone from the cities and one other bright day also from the mountains.
But I am not sure if I will see that day, as cars have allmost a religious meaning to quite some people, especially here in germany, but not only here. But yes, the bigger problem in the short run will be economics. Otherwise all the old cars just will get sold to africa and go on running there. But china is mass producing cheap electric cars for example, so things are scaling up.
> Even if electric cars would be cheaper, faster and longer running - some people would rather die, than give up their ICE cars and motorcycles.
Well lets stop calling this the reason for unbanning until EVs get cheaper, faster and longer running.
I mean, sure, some people are like that, but we won't know how many there are until EVs are cheaper, faster and longer running. Painting the opposition to ICE bans as "they will argue the same even when EVs are cheaper, faster and longer running" is irrational.
If it’s really only about the rich, then just tax the heck out of the cars, or better yet the gasoline. If the price of gas includes the full cost of carbon sequestration then sure, why not? It’s still not a great look from the perspective of income inequality, of course.
That would force all the poor Joe Schmoes to switch from fossil fuel-driven vehicles to electric ones, but the billionaires (and probably many [most?] of the multi-millionaires) would still be able to afford burning fuel. All the billionaires and even the single-millionaires could of course also afford to switch to electric vehicles... but the poor Joe Schmoes can't.
So what you're proposing is basically "Let's make using cars (even more than it already is) something for the rich only!"
It's like people have forgotten that ICEVs started without any of that infrastructure in place. Even if we can't buy petrol from pharmacies, methanol and ethanol engines are a mature technology and the fuel is both cheap and easy to get. The practical reality is that lack of fuel stations is a pain in the ass, but the strength of ICEs is that they can be modified to run on different fuels. And fueling them is easy.
I live in Edinburgh, and there's regular complaints about flaring from the Mossmorran refinery, which lights up the night sky, produces smoke, and is incredibly loud.
People live on the other side of that highway, so I guess it's possible, but I used to drive through that area on a regular basis and the smell hard to forget.
Apart from that such facilities need to be large to be cost-effective.
It makes orders of magnitude more sense to have one centralized large refinery and then many dispersed holding tanks to distribute fuel. This model may sound familiar.
This gets thrown out quite a bit but I don't really buy it. If it is not designed for alcohol, it probably isn't going to work. Alcohol has too many weird interactions with stuff like aluminum.
Which was why I didn't say "all" or anything like that. But basically a lot of engines from Ford and Volvo can run on ethanol. Any old iron block can if you replace pipes and hoses. And so on.
Which is why I said converted. The wrong kind of rubber will get brittle from ethanol. But for an iron block, it's not rocket science. Any shade tree mechanic could do it.
most gasoline available in the eastern USA is E10. I go out of my way to get E0 for a vintage high-performance vehicle I drive on occasion, it's noticeably happier without the ethanol, even if it can drive on E10 without damage.
Close enough. E10 is enough to see most of the issues you will see with pure Ethanol. Most engines just need to run is different fuel maps. ideally you would make other changes (increase the compression ratio), but they are expensive.
I think at some point, the cost of operating gas stations will fall below a threshold that it doesn't justify keeping them open, even if there is still _some_ demand.
E.g. imagine if demand were cut in half -- I think more than half of the gas stations would shut down.
It will happen, but I reckon it'll be more like 2045 than 2035 (and even then they'll still be some gas stations, just far fewer and you might have to start keeping emergency supplies with you).
Here in the UK, we call them petrol stations. But "gas" is still appropriate, because 15 years ago LPG conversions were all the rage, and every petrol station had gas too.
Nowadays I can only think offhand of a single local retail fuel establishment that will sell you both US and UK "gas".
How much more generation do we actually need. For one, charging typically does not happen when the grid is at peak load, so a lot of spare capacity is available. Second, it takes approximately the same amount of energy to refine a tank of gasoline as it does to completely charge an EV, so it'll be a wash.
They're unlikely to succeed because if the massive tax on poor people (ICE bans) actually gets implemented, all of the poor people who are forced to buy an unaffordable EV will vote for populists promising to unwind the bans.
At least in the U.S., poor people buy used cars, while existing and proposed ICE bans effect new car sales. Any real economic effect will be delayed until after the ban, and in any event they'll still be buying used cars. I suppose used EVs might end up costing more, but they might end up costing less. Also, the immediate effect of bans might actually be to create a glut of cheap, used ICE cars.
None of that implies less risk of a populist backlash, though; not for any class of 'mericans, rich or poor.
They’re only banning sales of new EVs in the short term, and poor people don’t buy new cars anyway. By the time they are buying EVs, they’ll be much cheaper.
Manufacturers are also pushing this for ICE cars, so that’s not really a differentiation point between ICEs and electric. Hopefully we will get legislation to tame this trend for cars and other goods.
I doubt that. They are trying the subscription model, but used car drivers are more price sensitive and are likely to not fall for it. If the car doesn't have a lifetime subscription included used car drivers will soon get the word out don't buy that car. Car manufactures depend on their cars having a good resale value - people who buy new cars tend to trade them in every 3 years, and that only works out because the car has value to someone else.
It will take time for this to work out in the market. BMW is small enough to trick people, but the large car makers are not.
When I bought my used EV there were 2 options: Leaf or Zoe. As a high percentage of Zoe's had rented batteries, and the websites didn't have a filter for that, I didn't even bother test driving one.
You missed out - they’re giving away the batteries for almost nothing now to get rid of the lease. Mine was manufactured in 2011 (!) and is still at 93% of its original 22 kWh rated capacity after doing 90.000km, which is amazing compared to a Leaf.
The cheap EVs aren't here yet, but the technology has the potential to eventually become cheaper than ICE. 30% of EV cost is currently in the battery, and this will drop.
This! I mean, we saw the same with computing: the first PCs cost thousands of dollars, but by the start of the nineties they were much more affordable already. Mostly because of technology advances and mass production, but of course also because of moving chip/board production to cheaper countries. Same with mobile phones, smartphones, laptops etc. etc.
People interested in AI/machine learning are a small niche. Your AI/machine learning computer is about as interesting to most people as large agriculture sprayer is to your average car buyer.
Nah, a GTX 1060 6GB for $100 + any 10-year old i5/i7 is still surprisingly capable for messing about with ML. It's not fast but it gets the job done. Also, getting free compute for messing around in, say, Google Cloud is still pretty easy. If you get to the point where those 2 options become a bottleneck, you're probably informed enough to find work in the field and afford something nicer.
In much of the world, owning a car at all puts you above "poor people". While owning a car is sadly needed in some parts of the world to get to work or even the stores (US..), it's a massive financial burden for most people. If you care for poor people, thinking about how people can go about their daily lives without spending thousands of dollars each year on owning a car would be the way to go.
If you can afford a car you are not poor. In the US (and Europe) there are almost no poor people. What we call poor are still middle class by world standards.
I'm not sure I agree with this. In many parts of the US or Europe, you could easily be in a position where you can afford a car (and need one for work), but cannot afford housing. It's true that you might well still be well off by world standards (a car roof is still a roof), but I think I'd require "food, clean water, clothing and reliable shelter" to be a bare minimum for "not poor".
This is getting away from the relevant definition of poor. The person above was talking about how people will vote, so what matters here is whether they're poor relative to other voters within their own country.
This might be true in USA where society have built itself to be almost fully dependent on cars. As a non-american: I have not owned a car in 10 years. You are not forced to have to own a car by some force of nature.
You don't state where you live, but odds are good your country is mostly car dependent. Sure transit is useful for a few (10%) of people who live in the city, but if you look at the numbers in almost every country cars are the vast majority of transport if the country is rich enough to afford them. If the country isn't that rich you will see other things, but as they become richer they become car dependent.
For what it's worth, you might find this list handy the next time you find yourself in a discussion about car dependence and how it varies across the world.
The poorest folks I know are driving used Bolts. Money talks. Aside from the recent pandemic-fueled car price bubble, compliance EVs were really cheap on the used market.
It's less populist and more a talking point.
It's the perfect cover.
"We can't stop allowing the rich to destroy the climate because we care so much about poor people."
In '35 it's doubtful ICE will be cheaper than EV anyway (look at price development over last decade...)
Banning ICE will speed up this development.
Climate change will disproportionately affect people who are already vulnerable.
Tax carbon emissions and use the money to provide good affordable alternatives (public transportation) for people who don't afford an EV today.
ICE prices will continue to drop. SSD hard drives (the newer, more efficient and faster technology) prices have plummeted in the last 10 years, however spinning rust prices have also plummeted, making spinning rust the only choice if capacity-per-dollar is your metric.
You also mention climate change, but I don't see how an extra average degree of weather (if that materializes) will be worse than stripping poor people of transportation and condemning them to never having a job (since most lower rung jobs require a car).
Certainly, these poor people will absolutely eviscerate you at the polls if you level them with this massive poor tax.
As for public transportation, the US is incapable of building new rail infrastructure. California's $150,000,000,000 LA-to-SF train is an unmitigated disaster, Chicago's rolling stock is extremely old and falling apart and New York City takes 12 years to build 4 miles of new lines, at a cost that is quadruple what France would spend for identical infrastructure.
You're in a dream world. The same people who claim that a poor people tax helps them also support cash pits known as modern rail infrastructure in the US (it's more like grift and fraud, though).
The US is fundamentally incapable of building public transportation? Ludicrous. What's required is political will.
ICE prices will not drop faster than EV. It's much more mature technology.
If forbidding new ICE cars (in 7+ years) "strips people of transportation" we clearly need som kind of subsidies to alleviate that.
Climate change is a threat. It's not just something people talk about because it's fun. The current estimates predict 3 degrees of warming until the end of the century. That's assuming we stop burning fossile fuels some time this century. The disruption this would cause to agriculture and living conditions around the world are just staggering. If nothing else, consider the costs of 2 meeters sea level rise until 2100...
Preventing climate change is a cost saving measure.
You know how I know you aren't poor? You think anyone in the bottom quartile will buy a new car. This is hardly a regressive policy. It directly targets the wealthier populations.
That said, in the interest of honest debate, it will shift the used car market prices significantly initially until supply of used EVs spins up. Although this is very secondary.
Partly the use market exists in ICE because there isn't really a cheap new ICE, but with stuff like sodium ions and the fundamental simplicity of the EV drivetrain, what I think is going to happen is that you're going to get a much wider range of electric cars that will suit a lot more modes of transportation and people won't have to use old ICE Used cars to get around.
I think it's going to happen is essentially you're going to get like a $10,000 new EV you can buy that's going to be cheaper to use energywise/ fuel-wise than a clunker ice.
I think the driver this will be the Chinese / India markets where you have basically two to three billion people that will want cars at that price point and that stuff will eventually make its way into the US
It won't happen in USA until a majority of chips and EV batteries required can be reliably produced and sourced domestically. Until that point the continued production and sale of new ICEs will still be required as a matter of national security.
No, not for another ~15 years and then I'll still be able to buy ICE car.
EVs in current state are not so good and what's even worse new ICE cars are becoming shittier and shittier because of restrictions imposing on them
As an EV owner, I'm not sure what problems you're referring to.
Sure the infrastructure has a bit to catch up, but even without infrastructure, we're completely fine to use our EV for 90% of our commute (and our ICE car the other 10%).
But if density -- thus range -- were to double, infrastructure becomes even less of a dependency.
It's the main problem, as far as I can tell. I guess charging / "pump" time is an issue for cross-country road trips, but my personal needs would be entirely met by home charging.
Anyone with a house and an EV can do it. I don't have an EV yet but some friends just stayed for a week with a rented Tesla, and charging it up in the garage every night worked great, even with just a regular 120V outlet available.
So how many people is that? Don't estimate house ownership or house rents on your circle of friends.
What about cities, apartments with no means to install chargers? World is not urban sprawl where houses have garage and power available for charging cars.
I'm not going to keep googling this for everywhere but in developed countries at least, it doesn't appear that "home charging isn't a thing for vast majority of car owners."
I would say it depends on the country. Russia is still a major exporter of petroleum goods and can make the price very appealing to it's neighbors (but yeah, after they started the war, the situation is not so strightforward)
Not really because some amount of a barrel of oil is gasoline. The other uses of oil will still want their fraction and be willing to pay. The refineries will need to get rid of the parts of the crude that doesn't have a market to sell to the market they have.
There will of course be much less refineries. The other uses of oil are small niches, and so the world needs one-two small refinery to supply their needs. So there will be price shocks as the large refineries close.
The reverse scaling will be the problem more than the commodity price. As gas stations close, finding a refueling place will similar to what early adopters of EVs faced, but without the ability to do >90% of fueling at home or anywhere else the electrical grid reaches. Although maybe it'll become a thing for some people to store tanks of gasoline at their home. At that point I'd trade for a diesel vehicle, though, if I had a hard requirement of an ICE.
Farmers already keep tanks around to refuel at home. As do several of the other niches that I see as more likely to keep a gasoline car. If you live in the city you won't have a place to store fuel - but also won't need to since an EV is more likely to meet your needs.
Average car age in US and EU is somewhere around 12 years. EVs are still a minority (growing, but less than 50 % and it will stay that way for a few years).
Most of the ICE cars sold now will be on the roads in 15 years.
You should buy what works best for you. But if you really believe an EV is not better than an ICE car in nearly all objective metrics, you are doing yourself a disservice.
We do have a choice because, on paper, we do have a choice in choosing those countries’ politicians. I know I’ll never give my vote to a politician keen on banning gasoline cars.
It’s sadly also true that the technocrats actually taking those decisions are a lot less directly accountable, but nothing that a second “yellow vests” movement won’t be able to fix.
I on the other hand, I applaud the politicians who had the guts to push the ICE car sales ban against the push-back of the established cars manufacturers.
ICE cars are such a nuisance in cities by polluting the air. I look forward to a time when my children will be able to enjoy clean air in the cities.
I call this egoism. Modern ecologism just aims to make a nice walled garden around their voters, they don't care what is happening outside this garden.
In the reality, other parts of the country/earth is getting polluted to produce the goods.
I much prefer the older ways with polluting factory in the city, at least everyone could see what it takes to provide each good, and share its cost. The current way of doing things is to ban everything, which force manufacturers to produce elsewhere in the world and import it. Plus we are loosing knowledge in the process.
The thing is producing a product for the entire world in one place has massive economies of scale vs producing things locally in every other city or even 1 factory per country. While going back to Victorian-era local production would turn cities back into the garbage dumps they once were, I highly doubt it would end up lowering emissions.
> I on the other hand, I applaud the politicians who had the guts to push the ICE car sales ban against the push-back
I can't agree, because forceful bans are not the best way to accomplish change.
Simply keep improving battery technology to bring prices down and range up and it'll take a natural course once buying an EV becomes cheaper than an ICE car. Implementing bans makes it political and builds resentment which is counterproductive. Building a better product and letting the market decide works so much better.
Could you help us understand why you would like to keep buying gasoline cars?
(Edit: I see that you are being down voted. Perhaps elaborating on your desire to continue to be able to buy gasoline cars might help clarify your position better)
Some people like freedom of choice, I guess. Like in a democracy, where you can vote whatever candidate you like, except here is with your wallet. Others like dictatures.
Oh, I am no fan of ICE engines, at all. Hate them, personally.
But I know how harmful heavy handed-mandates can be. I have seen the damage such mandates have already made in other instances with voters being then easily recruited and radicalized by populist politicians.
This is a delicate issue, already highly politicized and deeply hypocritical for both sides. Completely curtailing people’s freedoms is not the way to approach it, if you want to change anything.
It's wild to imagine that people would widely violently protest against such a change. Like, I find it pretty amusing to look back at the old news broadcasts of people objecting to allowing women in bars or disallowing drunk driving or requiring cars to come with seatbelts, but those all just feel like they're from a completely different time. If people in this day will espouse similarly intelligent positions, it'll be so interesting.
I guess the problem is electric cars aren't cheap, even in SH market and public transport in some parts of europe and us just sucks. For example I can totally see banning selling ice cars in netherlands, sweeden, norway, israel and other regions with good transportation and richer people, but banning them in us, italy, greece, romania and other similar states (either because they're poor or public transport is bad) is a hard sell
They will become cheap though. As manufacturers move downmarket and the used Ev market grows. Maybe even cheaper than gas in the end - simpler, more reliable etc
One of the most popular cars in Romania (and a lot of EU)is 10k euro Dacia, it has a nice range and can be repaired pretty cheap. if you say electric cars with a somewhat similar range will get that cheap, even sh, well, I hope we'll get that future) For now we have a 12k euro dacia spring, that is heavily subsidized(18k normal price) and with a real range of 100-150km depending on weather and speed, so we have some way to go
Yes and no - the incoming ban will force investment in downmarket EVs, helping make them cheap. If it works as planned then it won’t actually need to be enforced by the time the clock runs out, because EVs will be better all round.
Funny little incentive paradox
If it was cheaper now for people to buy EV over ICE upfront (externalities be damned because "loin des yeux loin du couer" [not like most people buying EV now give a damn about the supply chain for the minerals that go into the batteries...]), there would be very little push back. It's really not that difficult to understand.
First of all, the poster was writing about the legal elimination of an option, which is does not fit such reduction.
Some people value the qualities that the current (pun happened) alternatives do not offer: they are inadequate for some use cases. This includes long travel and refuelling in minutes.
Furthermore, since societies are now suffering an epidemic of lunacy, electric cars can be extreme noise pollutants, because insane manufacturers and users have turned them into a loud cacophonic concert - I have seen them. They can be unbearable.
They also seem to be internet connected in a staggering amount of cases, and many refuse to drive "a smartphone with wheels", or more explicitly a madness with uselessly installed security holes and privacy compromisers. This is especially relevant for The Car, the device that was built for deliverance - "our way to escape", as Karl Kraus said.
> Furthermore, since societies are now suffering an epidemic of lunacy, electric cars can be extreme noise pollutants, because insane manufacturers and users have turned them into a loud cacophonic concert - I have seen them. They can be unbearable.
Well, isn't it then peoples choice to do that? Or do you instead argue for a ban of EVs? I don't get this point.
I've never heard an electric car making more noise than the road noise. Which of course is annoying in itself going at high speeds, but still less than an ICE. What you're describing is absolutely not something of the ordinary. ICEs revving their engine in residential streets, however...
No, you cannot have any freedom to be uselessly bothersome. That is basic in social rules. If you are missing that evidence, it is because societies have become extremely lax (especially in practical and mental effort. It's called a downfall).
> making more noise than the road noise
The topical noise is that which comes from the additional, artificial noises that are placed to warn the surrounding beings of the traffic, as a consequence of the fact that the vehicle would be less noisy because of the absence of the engine.
In a normal car you have the "natural" mechanical noises (hopefully muffled), whereas the lunatics have placed in a number of models a broadcast background sound that you could - if you never heard it - be assimilated to the starting sounds of operating systems in the nineties. Only, permanent during the running of the vehicle. The new noise is not "grey" as it was, but textured, like a chord of synthetic strings.
So, the prospect is of having streets full of running loudspeakers shouting their own unnatural chords. Which also means that even if you decided to live in an isolated spot of land you should not remain less then a few miles away from any street, if legislation and good un-common sense will not intervene.
> I've never heard
I have heard the scream from least two models from stellantis (probably from the same project); I am informed that the Bayern and others have researched sound textures of their own to promote the brand. I also have information that producers have contacted agencies to produce ringtones for their brand. Moreover, I have seen some implement beeps during parking operations - so your city will sound like a giant construction site.
--
Update: some passed by and left a silent note. Confirming the root point! The downfall is restricting people's freedom practically and creates a problem with freedom deontically.
Solutions are chosen for the balance in cost, risks and benefits. Noisy but useful, within boundaries, ok. (Note: some of us are bothered already by motorways miles away when in otherwise isolated woodlands - but we are aware that traffic somehow must flow, and know that we have to select more distant places.)
Electric cars are becoming a massive threat in terms of noise pollution because people have become dumb and passive - cannot perceive and cannot react. The issue is not intrinsic in the technology, but it is part of reality: opportunity for madness + latent madness → disaster.
> not ICE cars
You do not seem to understand: the noise some fools put into electric vehicles is completely different. As in, "not a hum but brass" - where "hum" can be annoying and "brass" will surely be. See my other post nearby.
Important also to consider the degree to which we choose (while improving our own environment) to get others to pollute on our behalf and suffer the consequences - as in the extensive environmental damage caused by lithium and cobalt mining. This is not an argument against EV or renewables by any means but let's ensure we maintain a realistic assessment of all pros and cons. Up to 70% of cobalt is produced in the Congo where up to 200,000 people work for around $3 a day. This is a good wage locally which conveniently translates to an excellent price for us in the West to enjoy clean air cities.
Then explain how polluting and making lots of noise is freedom? Is speed limits imposing on your freedom to drive as fast as you want? Seat belt laws imposing on your freedom to have your kids unsecured in the car? I seriously don't understand this mindset.
Even if we get this high energy density, I'm skeptical about its utility/impact. Right now we are barely able to mine enough lithium for our current batteries, which are used for phones and a few (percent-wise) EVs. As far as I know, and please correct me, we need to increase production by at least 8x for 5-10 rare earth elements in order for everyone to use EVs. Where are these extra rare minerals going to come from?
lifepo4 doesn't require any fancy materials but lithium, less energy dense at the moment, but also doesn't degrade as fast. Panasonic is currently producing ~260Wh/kg batteries for Tesla, so much of the mass market EVs will likely end up with those types of batteries. Looks like lithium production needs to go about 3x at current demand growth, but if cell density goes up, maybe less? Unfortunately this article does seem to be about the li-ion battery tech, but at leas you will need less materials for the same energy.
EDIT: this is for nuclear fuel enriched to 3% in a normal (not breeder) reactor 35000 MJ per 10g pellet
https://whatisnuclear.com/energy-density.html Only a tiny fraction of the total energy is actually used
Iron-air batteries (1,200 Wh/kg), and in general metal-air [1], might bring a surprise after 2024: December 2022, "Form Energy will site first American iron-air battery manufacturing plant in Weirton, West Virginia" [2].
[1] 2017, Yanguang Li, Jun Lu, Metal–Air Batteries: Will They Be the Future Electrochemical Energy Storage Device of Choice?https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.7b00119 Betteridge's law of headlines answers "no", but good overview.
The various "-air" batteries tend to have major downsides...
They tend to get heavier as they discharge. They usually aren't rechargeable (or if they are, only a few times or with much lower energy densities). They tend to self-discharge within a few weeks of non-use.
Yes, there are downsides, as always in engineering, it's a matter of managing the compromises for the current implementation and researching better solutions for the next iteration.
its worse actually for ICE because you are probably only accounting for engine efficiency but there are also transmission losses to the wheel. Further all the 3000 or so component of ICE weight fair bit too. I have not seen any analysis on combine energy to the wheel/Kg comparison between ICE & EVs but I'd bet it gets significantly worse for IC cars even at 500wh/Kg.
Doesn't gasoline habe to (typically) go through carnot efficiency limits though when it combusts?
IIRC, EV motors are 90% efficient with battery power --> road power conversion. A typical ICE engine is, what, 30% efficient and maybe a bit more with good turbo design. So practically gasoline is about 4000 Wh/kg?
Not sure what over 250 Wh/kg means. Wikipedia mentions Specific energy 100–265 Wh/kg and Energy density 250–693 Wh/L quoting papers from 2010/1 and 2016/7 [1]. Other sources mention similar numbers (100-265 Wh/kg or 250-670 Wh/L) [2], although the research is ongoing: "Tesla’s new 4680 cells have an energy density of 272-296 Wh/kg and which is considered very high by current standards" [3].
Thanks for the sources, as said this shows the article is highly suspect if your "maximum theoretical energy density" figure already is beaten by in-the-market devices.
Yes, it would seem preferable to reuse the same energy storage over and over again, as opposed to digging it out of the ground at huge expense, shipping it across the world, and then spreading it out into the environment as a cloud of toxic particles after one use.
You're forgetting to take into account that an electric drivetrain (power electronics and electric motor) is several times more efficient than a gasoline drivetrain (ICE motor and gearbox). It also weighs less.
You do have to lug the battery around even when depleted but electric motors are ~3 times more efficient than combustion engines, so if you got to energy density parity you would still have a much lighter car, all the time.
>This is a little under 2x the density of [the best] current batteries.
[brackets mine]
But the best batteries contain unacceptably high levels of cobalt. Practical EV batteries are made with nickel or iron, maybe vanadium someday, and have lower density than pure LiCoO2.
>CATL is already producing a ton of batteries, lending them some credibility.
A couple of years ago CATL claimed that they had figured out how to make durable sodium-ion batteries with a ferricyanide cathode, to be released in 2023. The press cheered about the end of lithium dependence.
Yesterday, not long before this announcement, it was revealed that CATL's "sodium-ion" battery contains lithium:
"CATL and BYD's sodium-ion batteries to be put into mass production will both be a mix of sodium-ion and lithium-ion batteries, according to local media."
While I agree that the blurb you quote strongly implies that the sodium-ion batteries contain lithium, I don't think the article itself really says that.
> CATL and BYD's sodium-ion batteries will both be carried in mass-produced vehicles within the year, and they [the vehicle battery packs] will both be a mix of sodium-ion and lithium-ion batteries, according to a report by local media 36kr today.
By my reading of that, and the rest of the article, it's saying that the vehicle battery will be assembled from of a mix of sodium-ion and lithium-ion battery cells, not that the sodium-ion cells contain lithium.
> With its pioneering AB battery system integration technology, CATL has achieved a mix of sodium ion and lithium ion, allowing them to complement each other and thus increase the energy density of the battery system, Huang said at the time.
Basically, a "battery system" using only sodium-ion cells does not yet have enough energy density to support their range targets, so they are using a mix of cell types to improve the energy density and increase the vehicle range.
Cobalt is practical if you want to make low millions of cars. It ceases to be practical if you want to make a billion cars. There just isn't enough of it readily available to scale.
Your EV probably has the usual NMC or NCA chemistries which have around 10-20% cobalt. I don't know of any car that uses a 100% LiCoO2 cathode — it's just not practical.
Yes, I'm always skeptical whenever battery breakthroughs are announced because it's easy to make a breakthrough in the lab, but almost impossible to transition it into mass production.
This has a lot of potential coming from CATL. However, there is no mention of price. I'm betting this is going to be very expensive.
This is why I generally skip over any "breakthrough" science/tech stories on HN.
News articles on breakthrough discoveries are mostly bullshit and even when they aren't, most of the time they don't affect my life in the slightest because the tech is impractical or expensive.
It may be interesting to read about science discoveries, but I don't want to take the time to sort out the bullshit from what's real just to find out that the breakthrough is irrelevant to me and society at large.
what is your time horizon? not commercialized today == bullshit?
i like these sorts of stories because they have prepared me a bit for some of amazing technology changes i have seen over past decades. by the time i can by an iphone i was at least expecting it. when email hacking stories started appearing in politics, i already knew the details. the first time i bought an electric car was not the first time i had thought about the issues of range and charge speed and so on.
surely not everything that looks promising becomes popular, but that is also useful information, to me, a person whose job is building/helping to build novel systems.
There's also kind of a grey zone in there of "no, I can't buy it, but if I was a major car manufacturer I could." I wish we had access to all the good stuff as retail customers, but that's just not how it is.
(This is especially frustrating on the EV conversion front, since the best parts are usually unobtainable except from salvage vehicles. The products specifically made for EV conversion are usually rather underwhelming compared to what the OEMs can get.)
Cool! What didn’t occur to me until I learnt it was that you get a multiplicative benefit with energy density when weight is a major factor (air transport, especially) because you need to spend less energy accelerating mass used by the battery itself.
Same with jet fuel on a plane. They calculate the amount to fuel carefully to be efficient but safe. Too much and the plane is heavier and uses more fuel. Too little and you might run out if put into a holding then diverted.
Obviously jet fuel is what it is it wont get more dense but a more efficient engine means less fuel needed means even more efficiency and so on.
The Qantas 16h 45m flight from Dallas to Sydney aims for Brisbane, and then turns to Sydney as the plane approaches Australia. (10th longest commercial route in the world).
This allows the plane to land at Brisbane and refuel if the calculations are done wrong. Couldn't find stats on how many times it's had to land in BNE.
Pre-COVID, it was apparently common to try and off-load passengers to single stopover flights to reduce fuel needs (I was one of those passengers, and the crew confirmed it was a regular occurance).
An example is Singapore Airlines' former New York to Singapore flight, which could carry only 100 passengers (all business class) on the 10,300-mile (16,600 km) flight. According to an industry analyst, "It [was] pretty much a fuel tanker in the air."
You might also run into some weather you didn't have to plan for and that changes the prevailing winds at the altitude you were previously cruising at or causes you to divert to fly around it.
It was something I had never considered but it is wild to think about. I believe it was Vaclav Smil that highlighted it to me. On its longest trip an A380(I think?) takes off weighing 400 tons and lands weighing 200 tons. That kind of thing is just cool to ponder.
I realized while working on heavy transport aircraft that they their weight can be (very roughly) 1/3 aircraft, 1/3 fuel, and 1/3 cargo, and being struck by how different these proportions are from the family sedan.
For a battery of arbitrary weight you need to spend the same amount of energy accelerating its mass, irrespective of how much energy that battery contains.
Right, I believe GP's point is that for a given capacity, you now need fewer kilograms of batteries to store it, meaning the percentage of overall capacity used to accelerate the mass of the battery itself goes down.
The article mentions aircraft multiple times. Once a range is achieved through available energy, reducing weight is a goal. The energy is more useful the less weight you need to move as then you can shave off a bit more weight as less energy was needed.
Your car may not need this as much, an aircraft does.
500-600 Wh/kg is the target for replacing average flight durations.
Fuel is one of the highest costs for an airline, so eliminating the majority of that will make the demand for any viable options go bananas, even with a much higher upfront cost.
Being seen as 'green' is a big bonus for the airline.
Less of the "S". With current flight patterns you need multiple gigawatts. Calculations based on 737s leaving Gatwick:
Energy density of the fuel: 9.6kWh/L
900 flights per day = one flight every 96 seconds
26024.706L per flight
Total energy per flight: 9.6 x 26024.706kWh = 250MWh give or take = 900GJ
Total power supplied from Gatwick in the form of aviation fuel: 900GJ/96s = 9.375GW.
That's not only outside the range of SMRs, it's bigger than any single nuclear power station that's been built, by a comfortable margin.
To make electric flight work you can't think in terms of the way the current industry is structured because it's so distorted by the energy density of the current fuel.
That's assuming an overnight switch from what we have to all electric, for one of the busiest airports in the world.
Thinking in terms of disruption (from the innovator sense), their top 3 destinations [0] are Dublin, Barcelona and Malaga. Skipping barcelona becauese it's as busy, I don't think it's out of reach to consider that a 737 could do a return trip to dublin or Malaga without charging.
Another perspective is that taking off is significantly more energy intensive than cruising. According to [1], takeoff is equivalent to an hour of cruising. One way of looking at this is it only makes sense for mid haul travel instead. If we replaced transatlantic flights, or similar (us to Europe maybe) the savings would be immense and significantly more achievable
Yep. The thing is, even if you divide the power needed by two (by being smart about which planes you charge, or by how much) and then by two again (for a smaller airport) you still need a full new power plant to supply it. It's well out of SMR territory.
The way you'd have to do it is something like the Tesla approach: put small charging stations for luxury planes in as many airports as possible (because nobody, but nobody, will fly a plane into an airport they can't fly out of), and build out from there. That way you can do something financially interesting at SMR scale, and build momentum for the next step on something marketed as aspirational. Because the hardest SMR to build will be the first. Once you've got one, installing a second should be an easy sell. And two leads to four, and so on and so forth.
This is, of course, making the further assumption that something can be done about charging times. Getting 90GJ into a 737 currently takes about 23 minutes. That's 65MW, which is a nontrivial problem to solve all on its own; anything that slows down the recharge means longer queues to turn around, which, one way or another, means more land area or fewer flights for the airport, and worse economics for the operator.
Jet engines are 35% efficient, I'd assume electric planes would be double that, does that change the calculation? Naively I'd say we 'only' need 4.5GW?
I feel like the back of the envelope calculation must have slipped a decimal point somewhere. 9GW is approximately 1/4 of the total electrical consumption in the whole of the UK. From memory aviation as a whole is only 2% of global emissions (although it might have an extra forcing effect due to being released directly into the upper atmosphere) where as electricity generation is 20-40% of emissions.
To paint a rough and ready picture, aviation emissions are very heavily weighted towards richer, less populous countries, whereas electricity generation (and particularly fossil fuel generation) is (to a lesser degree) tilted towards where the mass of population is: https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-flying#:~:text=W... vs https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric.... Note that the colour axis is a log scale. It's a compounding effect: more people => more energy; poorer => worse emissions and fewer flights per capita.
I thought I must have slipped a power of 10 too somewhere but if I did I can't spot it.
I found some reference to Gatwick using 2.6 billion litres of fuel a year. If I follow the logic above I get circa 8 billion litres. I think most of this is because a Boeing 737 has a 3000nm range fully fueled which they wouldn't be using normally. In fact I suspect it's impossible to take off fully fueled and with a full complement of passengers (it certainly is for lighter aircraft).
Between that and the efficiency difference mentioned elsewhere I think that explains about an order of magnitude. I'm totally willing to accept they'd need a 1GW power station to power Gatwick but 9GW seems high.
That weight constraint cuts both ways though, right? An electric plane charged for a 500 mile flight weighs the same as one charged for a 2000 mile flight, and the max landing weight of (e.g.) a 737 is substantially lower than the max takeoff weight. That means the maximum passenger load of the electric plane can never be as high as one fuelled by an energy source that leaves the plane over the course of the flight. So yes it's more efficient in terms of direct energy use, but it's less efficient in terms of the ratio of work done moving the passengers to work done moving the vehicle, first because you can't stuff as many on, and second because the mass of the vehicle itself doesn't drop over time.
EDIT: unless, of course, you have removable batteries that let you carry less weight for a shorter flight. That might be the only way to make this practical, and would have some other benefits: you could charge them off-site, for instance. It creates a hell of a logistics problem, but no bigger than liquid fuel.
Also, one factor to take into consideration is that the 9GW figure assumes that the refuelling is uniformly distributed throughout the 24 hours. That won't be true, I could believe peak usage being double the average. If that's true, the worst-case 9GW isn't what you need to work to, it's 18GW peak. If we go with the 2.6 billion vs 8 billion L ratio as telling us the true power requirement, that gets us back up to 2.925GW average, 5.85GW peak.
google and wolfram alpha tells me one fully tanked 737 stores 16 tons of kerosene, which translates to 261.1 GJ at 35% efficiency (72.5 MWh). doesn't sound too far off. assuming the same energy will be required for an electric airliner and you want to charge it to full in an hour... you probably need much more than 72.5MW power plant per aircraft because fast charging is nonlinear...? numbers which are hard to comprehend at scale in any case
Presumably they would use something like an electrically propelled ducted fan (basically the first stage of a high bypass engine). The noise I imagine would be reasonably similar.
I think a hybrid approach with a high bypass turbo fan powered by an electric motor. The fan could then switch over to a https://newatlas.com/automotive/inside-out-wankel/ when at cruising altitude. Using biofuels, or carbon air capture, we get long range and a closed carbon cycle.
Experiences vary. I was on a Tokyo subway train (Chūō-Sōbu Line(Local)). For a couple of minutes after boarding it was so quiet that it was eerie. When I started hearing quiet noises I relaxed.
Anyway, mass transit does not have to be noisy. It varies by custom and culture.
Most people should achieve far more weight loss from their belly than from their bike. But you can pay money to make the bike light and that is easier than working on yourself.
Average plane cannot fly with batteries; the weight is still too high compared to jet fuel and the range is too short. Only short flights of up to 1000 km and 90 minutes will be in reach initially, jet fuel minus efficiency loses is still over 3000 Wh/kg, 6 times more than these new batteries.
Furthermore, the energy needed for takeoff is significantly higher than the energy for cruising. For an hour's flight, it's close to 50/50. The impact is disproportionately skewed towards shorter fkights
No. It is not the takeoff as in "raising the wheels from the tarmac" part that is consuming most energy, but reaching the flight altitude. Real case, with smaller plane, I take off in 300 meters in less than 30 seconds at max power, than raise to 3000m in more than 10 minutes of 90% power. That makes the assisted takeoff less than 10% of the energy to get to cruise altitude.
I don't have the numbers for a jet fighter on a carrier, but I think it is in the same range. The takeoff assist is not for saving fuel, but to allow takeoff at the loadout of the plane that would require otherwise a longer runway or lighter loadout (less fuel and weapons).
We could, but it would require new aircraft. Passenger aircraft are not designed for that kind of stress. I'm not sure that passengers would like that much acceleration either.
I don't know that it would actually save anything though. Aircraft of carriers are held back while they throttle the engine to full throttle. Only after the pilot is convinced the engine will run long enough to take off do they release the brakes - probably using more fuel than a regular takeoff. (the other option is to get in the air and then discover the engine isn't running and so you crash land a few meters later). I'd want a real aircraft engineer to speak to this.
You could save some energy by catapulting a plane at a reasonable acceleration, like a glider is launched with a ground tractor wire. I flied gliders this way and I think the acceleration was not worse than a regular airliner. Problem is, the saving is not worth the cost and complexity.
The carrier example is wrong, the planes stay on the catapult only a few seconds while they go full throttle (this takes time), even with the burn rate it is not a significant quantity of fuel. Regular planes can do the same on the runway, I did it myself several times for fun, but it rarely bring benefits - the only place where it helps is with very short runways. In any case, the fuel consumption is not significant.
How about you elevator passengers up to a runway that is a thousand feet up in the air. Then use electric lines on the runway to power the takeoff to avoid using any onboard batteries until airborne. Just daydreaming here a bit!
It is easy, you put small BLDCs in the wheels. No need to push on air while you are on the ground. You could also have basically a super car drone or a maglev rail under the plane, launch it into the sky.
Yes that’s correct. Probably a better way of articulating what I meant to say is that unlike adding more battery mass which gives you diminishing returns as that additional weight must be carried too, improvements in energy density give you gains closer to 1:1. Though in retrospect this isn’t a very interesting or insightful statement, hah.
I just realized how much energy efficiency is being squeezed out of a Tesla. It's incredible.
A normal diesel fueled sedan such as the Chevy Cruze diesel runs at about 31mpg, which is 13.2 km/l or 15.3 km/kg. Diesel has a mind-boggling 12700 Wh/kg energy density[1], which translates to an efficiency of ~827 Wh/km for the Chevy.
By contrast, the Tesla Model S, has a ~540 kg battery[2]. At 272 Wh/kg (from the posted article), that's ~147 kWh of energy storage, and the Tesla can do a rated 650km on a single charge[3]. So that's an efficiency of ~225 Wh/km, which is ~27% of the energy required to run a normal car!
It just wouldn't have been possible to run cars on batteries without this efficiency bump.
The big reason for this is thermodynamics. A conventional internal combustion engine car has to convert chemical energy to kinetic energy - the absolute best theoretical efficiency of this might be 70%, but in practice it's more like 30%. Electric cars have to pay the same thermodynamic penalty, but they pay it at the power station (In practice, thanks to renewables, not all the electricity used to charge a car will come from hydrocarbons - but let's assume it does for ease of comparison sakes). It's much easier to build highly efficient hydrocarbon power stations - typical efficiencies range from 40-60%.
So when you look at the headline "efficiency" of an electric car, you need to take that thermodynamic penalty into account first.
A modern series hybrid like a Toyota Prius is effectively an electric vehicle and a gas generator (which means it has the same efficiency gains due to regenerative braking). That gets 52 mpg, which is about 493 Wh/km. If you generated the 225 Wh the Tesla needs in even the most efficient combined cycle gas turbine powerplant you'd need 375 Wh. Less - but not nearly as drastic as it first seems.
Renewables change the picture though - once you have significant renewable generation the carbon intensity of electricity starts dropping, which means that remote powerplant vs local powerplant argument falls apart. That is when the real power of electric vehicles kicks in - they can take their energy from anywhere.
It is a sign of the success of the oil industry that this analysis always takes the cost of electricity generation back to the source, but assumes that fuel stations pump from a perfect source of naturally refined/distilled hydrocarbons.
It is surprisingly difficult to get numbers on how much oil is used to extract, refine and transport oil.
The headline figure is maybe to compare 11.4 mill. tonnes CO2e emissions from "Scope 1 + Scope 2" (direct emissions from the company plus indirect emissions because they buy electricity and stuff), versus 243 mill. tonnes CO2e from Scope 3 (emissions from people burning the hydrocarbons sold).
If that figure is correct, you can add 1.6 percent to the car tailpipe emissions figures to account for production and refining etc.
But this is an oil & gas company that tries very hard and is among the best in the world for minimising emissions from production and refining. I would not be surprised if gasoline from US shale oil is more than an order of magnitude worse.
>EROI values for our most important fuels, liquid and gaseous petroleum, tend to be relatively high. World oil and gas has a mean EROI of about 20:1 (n of 36 from 4 publications) (Fig. 2) (see Lambert et al., 2012 and Dale, 2010 for references). The EROI for the production of oil and gas globally by publicly traded companies has declined from 30:1 in 1995 to about 18:1 in 2006 (Gagnon et al., 2009). The EROI for discovering oil and gas in the US has decreased from more than 1000:1 in 1919 to 5:1 in the 2010s, and for production from about 25:1 in the 1970s to approximately 10:1 in 2007 (Guilford et al., 2011). Alternatives to traditional fossil fuels such as tar sands and oil shale (Lambert et al., 2012) deliver a lower EROI, having a mean EROI of 4:1 (n of 4 from 4 publications) and 7:1 (n of 15 from 15 publication)
So the major difference between your numbers and the ones I cited, is that EROI is just "energy in versus energy out" and it does not change favorably if you do carbon capture or use renewables or whatnot.
Whereas if you compare CO2 emissions, you can do these things and in theory get down to zero emissions from production and refining of gasoline.
you are right -- EROI and emissions are different. If you add in things like carbon capture, emissions go down but energy-in goes up. Would it make sense to extract and refine gasoline with net-0 emissions if it took more energy than you get out in gasoline? _maybe_, but I don't think its a clear yes!
> It is surprisingly difficult to get numbers on how much oil is used to extract, refine and transport oil.
Damn, I've never thought about that before. In hindsight that feels like an obvious thing to consider but this is the first time I'm aware of that thought entering my brain. Thank you for provoking the thought.
What would be the equivalent consideration on the other side? Would it be something like inquiring into the energy requirements of creating and maintaining the electrical grid, especially given the increased load of wide-scale vehicle electrification, instead of assuming we get that for free?
Yes, people usually call this "Full lifecycle analysis". It takes about as much electricity (or energy) to refine a tank of gas as to charge an EV, so there isn't necessarily an increase in load on the grid by electrifying transport. However some energy generation used by refineries that isn't electricity from the grid would have to get re-arranged.
Anyway maintaining a more robust grid should be much cheaper than maintaining thousands of gas stations and the trucking routes used to keep them filled up.
In 2019, the world seaborne trade volume reached about 11.08 billion tons. Out of this, crude oil, oil products, and gas accounted for approximately 32.5% (3.6 billion tons) of the total volume. Coal made up another 8.4% (935 million tons). In total, energy products represented around 40.9% of the global seaborne trade volume.
It's important to note that these figures are from 2019, and the percentages may have changed since then due to various factors, including evolving global energy markets, fluctuations in demand, and the transition to renewable energy sources. The percentage may also vary depending on how you define "energy products."
This does come up a lot ... for ethanol production. How much fuel is used to produce ethanol is constantly discussed, with some people claiming it is barely break-even or even energy-negative.
But yeah, no one then goes on to give equivalent numbers for petroleum.
Always have to note that ethanol production from corn has dubious energy payoff. Switchgrass is definitely energy positive, but lacks a strong lobbying group to provoke similar investment and development.
It’s not something we often consider because, again, the energy density of carbon fuels _is a couple of order of magnitudes higher_ then batteries. It seems trivial because a fuel hauling truck is an _absolutely immense_ source of energy compared to the energy it consumes to move.
It's a path-dependent calculation, not a state-dependent calculation, so the numbers are all over the map. Take two cases:
(1) Alberta tar sands production, which relies on imports of natural gas to melt and process the tar sand into a crude oil equivalent, called syncrude. If the syncrude is shipped to San Francisco Bay for refining at Chevron's Richmond Refinery, then you have to tag on the shipping fuel used, the gas used in the refinery, and finally the tanker fuel used to move the fuel to a gas station in San Francisco. Finding all these numbers is not easy, it's often proprietary, but you can find that a lot of natural gas is used at refineries (bulk numbers):
(2) Sweet light crude from a pressurized reservoir that's refined a few miles away from the oil field and used in a nearby city.
The end-product, refined gasoline, has the same state property (energy density) regardless of how it was manufactured, but that's irrelevant for getting the energy that it cost to make it. I imagine the spread can be pretty wide indeed, as the above examples show.
My understanding is that a lot of natural gas is used at refineries because, for so long, it was effectively "free" - there was a limited market for it and it was a byproduct of refining the stuff you wanted (light and heavy oils).
The average energy required to extract fossil fuel energy is constantly increasing, as we go after harder and harder to get oil. It used to be easy enough nobody really paid attention to that, but now people talk about "EROI" or energy return on investment, to track the net energy gain of an operation.
Most people still have that simplified view that you just have an oil well and just pump it up. In the US, a significant portion is extracted with fracking, an environmentally pretty terrible method for extraction.
> It is surprisingly difficult to get numbers on how much oil is used to extract, refine and transport oil.
Not to mention the socialized costs of all the wars, military spending and human lives spent to secure stable sources of fossil fuels. If you actually break down the numbers and applied some basic ethics, I doubt fossil fuels have been cost competitive for decades.
It's funny how the USA feels like it has to get militarily involved to guarantee something that the producers are willing and happy to sell. Even moreso when you understand that the USA has plenty of oil itself available.
It's almost as if they want an excuse for running a massive military.
We're already looking at the human cost of some of the components needed for the batteries, like lithium and cobalt. That's what we'll be fighting wars over after we exhaust the supply of oil.
Lithium is considerably more ubiquitous than crude oil, however. And cobalt in batteries is already on the decline, we won't be using it much longer. Heck, most EVs sold today don't use any cobalt at all.
Extracting, transporting, refining oil costs a lot of energy. And that's before we get into the entire military infrastructure that has been built up simply to ensure the safe extraction and transportation of oil around the world.
EV driver here, I live in an apartment complex with no charging stations installed. I and many other neighbors who drive EVs have to go to a charging station to charge.
On the way to the charging station, we probably pass a dozen gas stations.
I love my EV but let's not pretend it's always more convenient. If you have the opportunity to charge at home/work then yes it's great, but you're still reliant on public charging infrastructure if you decide to drive outside your normal range, and it takes a lot longer to charge than it takes to fill up a tank of gas, even considering the speed of Tesla Superchargers.
I mean, it's like, 50 yards out of the way? You stop at whatever gas station you're driving past. I don't know anybody who makes a specific trip to go fuel their car.
The existence and popularity of sites like gasbuddy.com suggests that some number of people are willing to go out of their way to find the lowest price. I personally know people who will make a run to Costco for gas, even if they're not going to go in for groceries, because the price is good. There are at least a half dozen gas stations on the way to Costco.
Half the people driving out of their way to get gas are bad at math. The other half simply don't assign a dollar value to their time.
If your car gets 30 mpg, has a 16 gallon tank (that you refill at 1/4 tank, so you're buying 12 gallons), and you drive an extra 5 miles to pay $3.93/gallon instead of $4.00/gallon, how much did you really save?
I'll give you a hint: It's less than a nickel.
Meanwhile, you've probably driven at least 10 minutes that you didn't need to drive. 10 minutes to save a few pennies.
The math only gets worse as the gas prices go up and your fuel economy goes down. You need a greater delta to make the drive worth it.
This is exactly what gets me every time some German "institute" publishes a study how electric cars pollute more than gas cars. They count everything that goes into producing electricity, but never what goes into extracting, refining and transporting gasoline.
> It is a sign of the success of the oil industry that this analysis always takes the cost of electricity generation back to the source, but assumes that fuel stations pump from a perfect source of naturally refined/distilled hydrocarbons.
It's not like renewable energy doesn't take resources/energy to produce as well. It's just borderline impossible to get real numbers because you'd pretty much need perfect information on the supply chains.
Not saying that renewables don't still win in such a comparison.
Most power generation facilities are natural gas fired, using large aero derivitive gas turbine engines (essentially the same engine that is in the 747 - LM6000 vs CF6 for example) with a combined cycle steam turbine to capture the energy from excess heat. This arrangement has a thermodynamic efficiency of 60%. Even with electrical transmission losses, the efficiency is still far better (1.7X) than having the power plant located under the hood of the car.
Not to mention, policing one large facility for compliance with emissions is much easier than trying to monitor every single one of millions of cars on the road.
Even with a car, you aren’t necessarily regulating millions of individuals - primarily just manufacturers. I suppose there is the odd case where “old joe” removed his catalytic converter and is polluting more than others but that is probably rare.
I don’t get your point on centralization however - more efficient but less robust (just like in software).
For necessarily centralized industries like car manufacturing the regulations are written to protect the wealthy incumbents competition more than to protect consumers.
It's a different metric but it is generally accepted that F1 cars have reached an overall thermal efficiency of 50%, which is cool. This is taking into account energy recovery from kinetic (regenerative braking) and thermal sources (from the turbo).
note that this is true for spark ignition engines, but not all ICE, diesel engines can reach higher efficiency and there are even real diesel engines with almost 50% efficiency[1], obviously not in cars though.
> the absolute best theoretical efficiency of this might be 70%
While ICE are heat engines with a theoretical limit of 70%, they’re more specialised subsets described by the Otto (gas) and Diesel (… diesel) cycles, which have a much lower theoretical maximum.
Generation can be from clean sources and is already happening in some jurisdictions.
Even if a clean source is not available, the pollution can best be controlled at the source. In this period of history, hundreds of millions of people make billions of polluting trips every day in their communities.
Although owning any car is the poorest choice of all for the environment, there are two ecological benefits to driving a BEV or a PHEV.
* better efficiency than ICE
* zero emissions in the case of BEV, zero emissions *for most trips* in the case of PHEV
The Prius' efficiency comes from much much more than regenerative braking. Part is a focus on good aero and low weight, like many electric cars. But most is from leveraging the electric motors to allow the engine to run at max thermal efficiency (probably a touch above your 30% figure) at nearly all times.
ICEs are most efficient under medium-low RPMs and high load. The electric motors can sustain low speed cruising, letting the engine shut off entirely if it wouldn't be well utilized, and also fill in for high torque demand to keep engine power output lower.
> A modern series hybrid like a Toyota Prius is effectively an electric vehicle and a gas generator (which means it has the same efficiency gains due to regenerative braking). That gets 52 mpg, which is about 493 Wh/km.
Wait, does a new prius or something like a hyundai ioniq (also 52-53 mpg) not have the internal combustion engine mechanically coupled to the transmission and drive wheels anymore?
I've got Civic e:hev, which has kind of similar setup. ICE does drive wheels in some situations (high speed, much power required), but mostly is just EV. It does not even have a gearbox, so there is only direct coupling from ICE to the wheels that can be engaged or disengaged (this is done automatically, you have no manual control over this).
I really like this setup, because it gives economy, but also a range and I don't need to worry about where to charge the car.
Isn't Honda the dark horse of hybrids? I remember riding in one and the owner explained that apparently Honda chose a hybrid architecture that was different that everyone else. The car's transition from electric to ICE was quite noticeable.
Honda has had two systems, the earlier “IMA” system which is a mild parallel hybrid. And the current “E-drive” system which is primarily a series hybrid. Series hybrids are actually pretty old tech — it’s how diesel locomotives works. The Chevy Volt also works just about the same way.
Also how azipods work on some very large ships, the diesel locomotive concept scaled up even more, sometimes with big gas turbine for power generation.
I don't know how it was, but on the current setup you literally (in the literal sense of the word) feel nothing. The only differentiator is "EV" indicator on the dash.
Nope, still parallel hybrids. The closest we've gotten to a true series hybrid was the Chevy Volt, but even then, it was technically a parallel hybrid.
I also take issue with anyone calling a hybrid 'effectively an electric vehicle.' That is only true for PHEVs. A regular hybrid still gets exactly 100% of it's energy from gasoline.
They do, but also don’t, the Prius and the Ioniq are series-parallel hybrid so the ICE plugs into a power splitter which can feed into both the mechanical transmission and a generator.
Some do, some don't. As an example the Nissan Qashqai is available as a conventional hybrid, with mechanical transmission, and an "e-power" version, where the engine only drives a generator:
Though that makes me think that hybrids have a real future. Or hydrogen fuel cells.
Anything that doesn't require charging directly from the grid all the time, because although parts of the USA and Norway are ready for that, it's very tricky to get right globally.
Maybe hybrids like the Prius get to be so efficient that such cars will have a truly negligible impact on global warming.
We are on a path where EVs can be used as backup generators. It's fairly easy to imagine that in the near future you'll be able to use plugged in EVs to avoid brown outs or general outages.
I’ve stayed in places of the grid before in Asia. No gas stations for miles around, but they would have solar panels or a water wheel out back for electricity, if not very reliable. I imagine EVs would be even better for such places, just charge them via some local renewable, the battery deals with the unreliability of the source.
Hydrogen fuel cells in mass produced vehicles do not have a future since hydrogen does not actually like to react - you need a catalyst. And the best ones we have are based on platinum, which is very rare a expensive. If we produced any decent quantities of "hydrogen" cars, we would have such a shortage of platinum we would not be able to complete them. Of course there are claim this has been solved but to the best of my knowledge no such catalyst actually ships in commercial quantities. [0]
The second reason is that hydrogen is 1/10th the density of diesel even when liquid (which is as dense as it gets). Maintaining hydrogen in its liquid form is energy intensive. Hydrogen tends to leak through the smallest cracks and also because the atoms are so small tends to leak even through solid metal. To sustain the high pressures and degradation by hydrogen you need a very expensive tanks. You also need to handle the case, when the car crashes/ catches fire releasing all of the hydrogen somewhat safely. This tends to be a 6 MW flame upward of the car. Too bad if it crashed under a bridge or garage. This is much worse than a burning ICE/ BEV car.
Hydrogen gas stations have all of the problems with the tanks as well. That makes them very expensive. Battery charging stations are somewhat easier - everywhere you have higher voltage you can build a decent charging station. Big parking lots can have solar roofs fulfilling a part of the charging demand and keeping the cars colder in the summer.
At the same time you don't have any of the advantages of batteries - such as that you can charge them almost everywhere or when breaking. Hydrogen cars would need to be hybrids basically to improve on these, in this regard they are more similar to classical ICE cars.
Finally, making hydrogen ecologically and economically is not that easy in big quantities. In the end, you realize it is means to a longer operation of the infrastructure of classical fossil fuel companies. Unrelated to cars, you can put some hydrogen (up to about 8% it seems) into natural gas without noticeable change in properties when used for heating. But you can probably slap a green or at least "blue" stamp on the solution. In the end, all of this is just as damaging as the production/ burning of bio diesel/ gasoline spiked with ethanol. Putting hydrogen into cars would just make support this fossil fuel agenda without actually helping the environment much and quite possibly enable decades of even more damage to the environment and public health with profits mostly for just a few already filthy rich people.
Hybrids that emit carbon will still have a huge effect on global warming, simply because there are so many cars. There isn't a huge amount of headroom for efficiency increases, so you're only going to get anywhere near "net zero" by charging from a renewable grid nearly all the time.
According to this chart, road transport sector is responsible for 11.9 % of greenhouse emissions wordlwide.^1 Could you please expand upon how you define the huge effect it will have on global warming? Don't you think it's better to focus on other parts of that pie, where it's easier to implement widespread savings and change?
We are already moving our electric grid to renewables. Wind and solar are both cheap sources of power, and have a lot of potential to account for more of the electric load. Putting electric on renewables, plus switching cars to EVs (charged by renewables) should eliminate 50% of that chart - and this is something we can pull off in less than 20 years. Some of the other 50% is also easy to switch to battery powered, but they are all small niches that each need to be worked on separately. (If you are in one of those niches please think about this!)
> Don't you think it's better to focus on other parts of that pie, where it's easier to implement widespread savings and change?
I looked at the link and to me transportation does indeed seem one of the larger sources of emissions. Everything else seems either very fragmented (lots of entries with around 2%) or similarly if not more complex - like energy use in buildings for all of the appliances.
What am I missing here, what would be easier to address than the abundance and types of cars and possibly the lack of proper public transportation?
I don't think that one can even make the argument that we should look for easy wins when change is necessary everywhere, unless we want climate catastrophe - because of people working against improvements due to their personal interests, inefficiencies in regulation and enforcement, as well as any number of other factors.
11.9% is a pretty huge percentage. If it were like 0.1%, I might agree with you.
Imagine you were tight on money and then think about your grocery store bill. Wouldn't you try to save in all categories, even though, say meat, was "only" 11.9% of your total bill?
Carbon reductions need to be made in every sector.
Hybrids almost never emit carbon though. Because they're almost always running from the battery that you charged up from the wall before leaving home for your daily commute. And the daily commute is less, or maybe a little over the battery range. If it isn't then you have bought the wrong car, if you goal is carbon neutrality.
You can use a smaller battery, which means using less rare materials that are very expensive. There are a lot of indirect emissions with electric vehicles, and it's important to look at the big picture.
That's only true of plug-in hybrids. "Hybrid" just means a car with an electric and ICE drive train. Most hybrids aren't plug-in hybrids. They have no ability to charge their battery except from the engine.
I could not be more bored by people who go off on the indirect emissions tangent. Because it always mysteriously winds up at "so anyway, buy a vehicle/house/plane/whatever which directly burns fuel and will thus never be green".
It's an argument pushed by fossil fuel company's because it pretends the world is static and unchanging, as though the energy mix of the electrical grid can't vary, or that changes in fuel source and process for mining operations to be cleaner wouldn't drastically effect downstream users overall emissions profile.
It's always been my hope that my state (Kentucky) would get on board with EV's. A really smart marketer could court the powerful coal interests in the state and start selling EV's on the premise that they are powered by coal here. Eventually the power mix would change to be more sustainable
As to whether those hybrids have a 'huge effect' on 'global warming' depends on many factors but assuming the narrative around climate change - the term 'global warming' has been swapped for the latter since the average global temperature has gone down for a number of years after an earlier steady rise - in relation to the CO₂ hypothesis holds truth the main factor of importance is the source of the carbon used in the fuel. Fossil fuels add carbon to the atmosphere while synthetic fuels made from 'renewable' sources - biomass and direct carbon capture being the most likely ones - do not. Especially the latter - captured atmospheric carbon in combination with hydrogen from ocean-based wind and solar sources - would be a clearly carbon-neutral synthetic fuel source. If such a process could be made economically viable it could also solve the problem with storing hydrogen produced by those ocean-based sources:
CO₂ -> C + O₂
2 H₂O -> 2 H₂ + O₂
C + 2 H₂ -> CH₄ (methane)
Theoretically it is simple. Building an economically viable installation, not so. With the amount of attention the 'climate crisis' gets this should not be a barrier given that untold billions of euros are being spent. Take some of that money which currently goes to nonsensical political vanity projects and redirect it into a Manhattan-project style research and development project with the aim of not just finding some theoretical process but actually creating working systems which can be installed and used. The advantage of creating methane is clear since it enables existing infrastructure to be used for transport and power production - including ICE-equipped vehicles. Either create heavier liquid hydrocarbons using the Fisher-Tropsch [1] process or convert diesel engines to use methane.
> the term 'global warming' has been swapped for the latter since the average global temperature has gone down for a number of years after an earlier steady rise
You're just going to throw that out there? You'll cite the Fischer-Tropsch process, but not "actually global temperatures are declining"?
Here[1]. The temperature hasn't gone down. The narrative hasn't changed from global warming because of this (the term was in fact dropped because people are idiots and trying to explain what global temperature is measuring in terms of energy dynamics in the climate system doesn't work...). 2022 was the 6th warmest year on record, and based on all data the overall trend is up.
You are pointing at a single year, I am pointing at a trend [1,2]. The trend had been for the average global temperature to rise up to 2012 to 2016 - depending on which measurements you look at. After that period the average global temperature has declined by 0.06°C per year up to 2022. This change in the trend made the "global warming" moniker easily attacked "because the temperature are clearly going down". This is why "climate change" became the more common term [3].
May I suggest a less belligerent/dogmatic attitude when discussing this subject? If the narrative holds it won't change the conclusion. If new data shows the narrative to be false or misleading - e.g. ice core records show the atmospheric CO₂ concentration to lag behind temperature changes, not lead them, climate sensitivity wrt. CO₂ concentration is low, feedback mechanisms are unclear, there are far too many fudge factors in the climate models to make them reliable sources - it will be much easier to adapt to the new situation. We're not talking religious dogma after all but scientific theory, that which can and should be discussed lest it turns into the former.
Wow didn't even wait before busting out "what if CO2 doesn't cause global warming" and very obviously didn't read your own links.
Running the denialist playbook as usual: slip in a insinuation that the issue has stopped without evidence, then drop a bunch of articles which don't support it while continuing to say "what if all the data supported me?" And then started alluding to a conspiracy with language choices like "dogma". Throw in some upfront tone policing because heaven forbid you have to defend your position vigorously and the recipe is complete.
Go on: hit me with "climate cycles are natural" and then lean into how the media just don't talk about the controversy.
Please refrain from using terms like denialist, it does nothing to help the discourse. Also, that 'bunch of articles' I sent does support what I said, this being a break in the rising temperature trend. You seem to want to hear much more in what was said, why is that?
As to the 'conspiracy with language choices' I think you realise that this is no conspiracy but a simple fact - what used to be called 'global warming' is now called 'climate change'.
As to 'tone policing' I'd suggest reading your posts I replied to.
> denialist, it does nothing to help the discourse
When one party wins by default, they benefit from stalemate-seeking tactics. "Just Asking Questions" unfortunately works very well for this purpose. Dogma poisons the discourse, yes, but so does accidentally extending good faith to a bottomless well of bad faith questions, which has been the conservative playbook on climate change since forever. The counter-strategy is dogma.
In order to have a scientific discussion rather than a political discussion, we need to know your intentions, and that's extremely difficult on a pseudoanonymous internet forum. It sucks, but this is probably how it has to be.
> In order to have a scientific discussion rather than a political discussion, we need to know your intentions
The truth, freed from ideology. This will be hard to achieve given the enormous amounts of money involved on all sides - from "green new deals" via trillions of € in subsidies to even larger amounts of money on the fossil-fuel-status-quo side. With politicians who have made their careers on either portraying themselves as apostles of Gaia or ensuring the continuous flow of oil, gas and coal - and thus the continuation of an industry which more or less defined whole US states and several countries.
Just because it is hard - and probably impossible - to get the actual truth does not mean I want or need to cave and just follow one of the narratives. Given enough people looking for the actual truth it may become possible to reach it and act upon it but it better be sooner rather than later.
What is your purpose in asking such leading questions by the way? Do you agree that an actual scientific discussion - as opposed to one directed by The Science™ - is the better course? Also, who are the we who would like to know? I speak for myself, not for others. Who do you speak for?
Yes, read them. The scientific reports that is, not the condensed version presented in the media. If you read them well you'll find they do not support the climate doomsday prophecies which are being bandied around. The only way to use those reports to support those is to use the long-discredited - by the IPCC itself, mind you - worst-case scenarios yet it is those which the media and politicians use to support their doom cries.
When you're done reading at least the abstracts in the IPCC reports - but it is worth the time to read the actual reports themselves - you can also read a few other sources, e.g. Schellenberger's Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, Björn Lomborg's False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet and Steve Koonin's Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters. These give a far better view over what climate change entails and how it can be dealt with than the breathless fear-mongering as seen in the media and as spouted by politicians.
It's a much longer trend than 2012-2016. I remember 2011, the last time conservatives were playing the "global warming has paused" game, but then oops! It returned to trend. No Ls were acknowledged, of course.
What do the radiative flux measurements say this time around? They measure the derivative directly and are upstream of the most chaotic mixing process. Last time they said "sorry, heat is still piling up, globe's still warming." They were correct. What do they say this time?
2012-2016 is not the period of warming, it is the period from which the warming trend changed into a cooling trend. Seen over the last century the warming trend is far longer, the most recent one starting somewhere in the beginning of the 70's until the mentioned 2012-2016 frame. After that a slight cooling period followed, taking down the temperature by 0.06°C/yr until 2022. 2022 was another warm year so if 2023 will be warm as well the cooling trend is most likely broken. These sort-time variations are not significant when discussing 'climate' - roughly defined as 'the weather trends over at least a 30 yr stretch' - but they do control what makes the news.
One question: why do you state is is ´conservatives' who claim that the warming trend was broken? You don't know whether those people were conservatives nor do I. It does not make sense - and is extremely counterproductive - to equate a person's stance on single issues like 'climate change' with their political affiliation since these issues should not in any way be connected to political ideology. If they are connected they are by definition suspect since ideology trumps objective reasoning. Either the climate changes - and it does, no question there - or it does not, independent on whether you or I vote for whatever party we choose. Allowing ideology to taint the discussion just turns off a large part of the populace no matter which ideology it happens to be. It is just plain stupid for climate change to be a 'progressive' cause, crime reduction to be a 'conservative' cause, etc. These issues should be pulled out of the ideological realm so that they can be discussed by everyone without accusations of -isms by 'either' side.
The long-winded way is to use your OS's character map tool: find the glyph you want there and copy+paste. Under Windows 10+ there is the emoji keyboard (hit [win]+;) which also gives access to much more including super-/sub- script characters, which is a little more convenient than character map. Presumably other OSs have similar available too.
Better is to have support for a compose key sequence. Usually build in to Linux & similar, you just might have to find the setting to turn it on and configure what your compose key is. Under Windows I use http://wincompose.info/ and there are a couple of similar tools out there. In any case it is useful for more than super- and sub-scripts: accented characters & similar (áàäæçffñ), some fractions (¼,½,¾), other symbols (°∞™®↑↓←→‽¡¿⸘♥⋘»‱), and configurable too so you can make what you use most easiest to access (and if you are really sad like me you can do something https://xkcd.com/2583/ to type hallelujah too!).
On mobile devices a fair few “special” characters are usually available (though it depends what keyboard you have installed) via long-press on the right keys of the virtual keyboard.
One of the big sources of electricity generation here is hydroelectric, so I've been joking with my kids for a while that we have a water powered car. The first time I brought it up sparked a fun conversation as they wanted to understand how water makes electricity, and then started rabbit-holing on how magnets are involved in everything.
> Renewables change the picture though - once you have significant renewable generation the carbon intensity of electricity starts dropping, which means that remote powerplant vs local powerplant argument falls apart. That is when the real power of electric vehicles kicks in - they can take their energy from anywhere.
How close/far would you say we are as a society on "having significant renewable generation"?
They're still pretty close to each other right now. Renewables are at 21%, coal 20%, nuclear 19%. However, nuclear is flat and coal is declining. Renewables are still growing rapidly and will widen their lead significantly in a few more years. See the first embedded chart in the article, showing output trends since 2010. Also see the short term forecast at the end of the article:
"In our March Short-Term Energy Outlook, we forecast the wind share of the U.S. generation mix will increase from 11% last year to 12% this year. We forecast that the solar share will grow to 5% in 2023, up from 4% last year. The natural gas share of generation is forecast to remain unchanged from last year (39%); the coal share of generation is forecast to decline from 20% last year to 17% in 2023."
> A conventional internal combustion engine car has to convert chemical energy to kinetic energy - the absolute best theoretical efficiency of this might be 70%
You mean thermal energy?
Both cars are converting chemical energy to kinetic. The theoretical maximum for this is 100%. But one uses a thermal intermediate step, that reduces that maximum.
Lord I hope not. It helps with efficiency, but is no more renewable than carrying a rock upstairs and throwing it out a window onto some kind of generator.
This is a much more efficient process: somewhere between 75 and 95% efficiency, depending on the motor and the exact speed and torque (and of course they try to optimise for the best efficiency around the common operating points)
Ah. My point was more that there are losses assocated with these conversions and you can't move all of it to the upstream power plant. ICE vehicles burn fuel and create rotational mechanical energy which other than gear reductions doesn't require conversion. Electric does chemical -> electrical and then electrical -> mechanical with losses at each step here right?
Efficiency is important, but I'd bet the diesel electric design was mostly about simplification of the drivetrain and performance. An electric motor develops maximum torque at zero RPM and is very easy to modulate the amount of torque applied. A reciprocating engine has a minimum speed, so getting an extremely heavy train moving from a dead stop is tricky. Remember how old steam locomotives tend to spin the wheels regularly as they get up to speed.
Not entirely true, most transmissions have a system of torque converters and clutches. The torque converters convert rotational energy into fluid pressure to gain a kind of mechanical advantage. The clutches slip and make heat, usually to allow other parts of the transmission to interact without destroying gears.
Once you get to cruising speed the transmission usually engages something called a "lockup" that bypass all that to get as close to the 100% number for energy transfer as possible.
BMW claim that a diesel 3 series will get 61mpg. Volkswagen reckon a Golf 2.0 TDI will do 68mpg. Electric is still significantly better, but you didn't need pick a terrible diesel car as an example.
The UK also does for some God awful reason (especially infuriating considering it's sold by the litre at the petrol station).
In the United States and some other countries, a gallon is equal to 128 fluid ounces or 3.785 liters. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom and some Commonwealth countries, a gallon is equal to 160 fluid ounces or 4.546 liters.
In fairness the fluid ounces are also different, an Imperial (english) fluid ounce is 28.41306mL, while a US Customary fl oz is 29.5735mL. So the Imperial floz is 96% the US customary, not enough to account for having 25% more of them in a gallon, but it does lead to the Imperial gallon only being 20% larger than the customary gallon.
But wait there’s more! The US also has the “food labelling” fluid ounce which is not the customary one, instead it’s exactly 30mL.
And yet we claim to live in a science based society.
I mean, there are a million things, that do not need universal standards, but standards are imposed anyway.
But where one standard would be really helpful, like scientific values, we have many. And some people would rather go to prison, than adopt. (I think that happened in the UK, after they force switched to metric)
The UK also uses pints for dairy milk, but litres for plant-based milks. UK must be completely disregarded if you're looking to make sense about what units to use.
The UK may be the most confusing; fuel is sold in litres, but fuel efficiency is expressed in MPG, and furthermore the gallons aren't the same as US gallons. I guess at least the miles are the same!
Only since the 1958 International Yard and Pound Agreement tho. Before then the US used what is now known as the Survey Mile, which is why the survey mile exists (and survived until this year).
I suspect the British fuel system is designed to hide the cost per mile of driving, at least tacitly. At present it's difficult to work out without some external tool.
It's more like once it's established it's hard to change - if you started listing 'miles per litre' that would be like it was 'designed to hide the cost of driving', because I would have no idea how that compared.
(Quite normally for my age in the UK I think, I'm familiar with both metric & Imperial measurements, but generally fairly bad at converting. Except I know 568ml = 1 (UK! Not US!) pint - for which I can thank my alma mater Imperial and its student bars: Metric, and FiveSixEight. I could probably guess effectively at lbs and kg from butter/flour. Of course I know 2.54cm = 1". A yard is 'a bit' less than 1m. It's the bigger ones that seem more obscure/are harder to work out from familiarity I suppose.)
> It's more like once it's established it's hard to change - if you started listing 'miles per litre' that would be like it was 'designed to hide the cost of driving', because I would have no idea how that compared.
1. I think with liters, people typically reverse the relationship so it's liters/100km. Which is a much more intuitive unit.
2. If you're buying gas in liters, I think it'd be a lot easier to switch over to using liters for efficiency. You may not be able to compare easily to other vehicles, but you'd be able to estimate your personal fuel more easily.
I think it's the other way around. Distance per quantity of fuel is the intuitive measurement that humans understand and can relate directly to how much fuel they purchase. It could be argued that it is less intuitive when comparing two cars, however. Although better MPG is still strictly better, which is about the level of detail most non-nerds care about.
An other possibility is that the brits like having wonky things, just look at the pre-decimalisation monetary system, or the counties (https://youtu.be/hCc0OsyMbQk).
We only switched to selling by the litre in the early 90s (presumably for the sake of EU alignment), it was sold in Gallons until then. Expressing efficiency in MPG is just something that had "stuck" by then.
Not quite. The EU directive said that governments should if they wanted pass a law to say metric units should be displayed. The UK government chose to ratify that law, but with the caveat that imperial units could be displayed as well if shops wanted to display them (and most did).
At no point was it ever illegal do display the old units. There were no martyrs; there were only idiots.
What I absolutely love about this fact is that America is still using British Imperial units. After literally having a war over whether or not the US should be independent of British rule, you're still holding on to our measuring system despite the rest of the world moving on.
Clam down, we are just talking about how measure systems. And the previous ones existed not because of cultural differences, but because every king and tyrant wanted to decide which stick their vassals should use to measure the world.
My diesel 3 series (2.9 litre, late 90s design) would get 8.83 L/100 km (32 mpg UK, 26 mpg US) driving round town, stopping at traffic lights and averaging <20 mph and never getting past 3rd gear. This didn't require much care, just a question of not trying to accelerate too hard at low RPMs or doing a 0-60 run from every stop.
Engine technology will presumably have moved on in the past 25 years, and efficiency will have improved, but you'll still get crappy fuel economy for stopping and starting all the time.
Volkswagen has already been caught cheating (on its emissions) —- not sure I would trust their claims without an independent third party checking on that.
The Cruze is way better than that anyway, you'd need to be in an excruciating traffic jam to get that low mileage.
Well, my 12 years old (gas) Honda Fit does +40MPG being very "pedal happy" and near 50 driving normally, and my dad's 20 years old (diesel) Citroen Xsara Picasso does around 60MPG
20 years ago was kind of a sweet spot for diesel automobile fuel efficiency. Emissions were terrible though. Then they tried to clean up the tail pipe emissions and lost most of the efficiency gains.
Yep, although they're becoming better again. Not that I'm a diesel apologist, I hate it, but I guess we're used to smaller and more efficient cars in Europe (even with the SUV craze)
Due to dieselgate, there was a peak in diesel car efficiency around 2006. Post 2006 diesels get less fuel efficiency, because they had to tweak the engines to lower the combustion temperature to reduce NOX emissions. (which also reduces efficiency).
I had a BMW series 3. 61mpg is 3.8l/100km and that's… dreamland. You can probably achieve that in ideal conditions, driving 50km/h on a highway.
Very few people check the facts, and the only reliable way to know yourself is to take notes at the pump: gas pumped vs km travelled. I did check for a while and the numbers were quite different :-)
On a related note, for the VW ID.4, the manufacturer states 17kWh/100km which is actually achievable (much to my surprise) in city driving when it isn't cold. My real numbers are closer to 21kWh/100km. This goes up really quickly if you exceed 130km/h.
I would use something other than mpge. Tesla advertises numbers you won't see in the real world, more so than some other manufacturers (Porsche is an example that goes the opposite direction and under-promises). The EPA test isn't anywhere close to as objective as many people believe, there are ways to game it.
I do wish my Model 3 LR would actually go 358 miles on a charge, that's for sure, but it would have to get even lower Wh/mi than Tesla claims on the Monroney sticker. I suppose that's not the most egregious lie on Tesla's web site, however.
Engineering first? From the company with 1 inch gaps between panels? From the company that had no mechanical handles in the back, so if the electrical stuff stopped working (say, because the battery was on fire), passengers in the back had to finish a puzzle to find out how to get out of the car?
Physically, no, but practically there is little incentive. ICEVs are so inefficient to begin with that small improvements don't really move the needle much on fueling cost like they do with EVs. Combined with the fact that you necessarily have to carry a great deal more energy with you in an ICEV anyway.
Relative efficiencies also explain why city/highway efficiency is inverted between EV & ICE.
Gasoline is rather energy dense, but the ICE is rather wasteful.
There is a certain base load of energy being generated by an ICE engine, regardless of if you are moving or how slow you go. This is why carmakers experimented with things like rapid stop/start engines, regen batteries&motors, etc.
ICE becomes more efficient as you reach highway speeds, which is why highway mpg is better than city mpg.
Batteries by contrast are not very energy dense, while EV motors are extremely efficient.
The only energy being consumed is that which is needed to move the car, plus fight rolling & wind resistance, and power AC/heat. Wind resistance increases with the square of speed.
EVs as a result are most efficient at low speed, and at highway speeds become noticeably less efficient as you go from 55->65->75mph. This is also why running AC/heat has a noticeable impact on range in EVs.
Meh, the only reason EVs are more efficient in the city is because of regen braking.
An ICE car traveling at a constant 30mph is going to get much better fuel economy than an ICE car traveling at a constant 75mph. The difference is that <=30mph roads usually have a lot of stop-and-go.
ICE efficiency also more driven by RPM & therefore where you are in the gears. So ICE designers have decisions to make about which speeds to optimize for.
ICE peak efficiency tends to be more around 45mph than 30mph.
But yes, the less you brake in an ICE, the more efficient. Hybrids give you a bit of the ICE range/highway efficiency with the EV city driving efficiency, with the added complexity of having ICE & EV under one hood.
A modern 8-10 speed automatic transmission can easily put the engine at or near the ideal consumption RPM whether it's 30 mph or 80 mph.
If we really cared about efficiency, we'd have smaller motors. Throttling decreases efficiency, so the best mileage is going to be cruising at WOT (naively assuming no fuel mixture enrichment, which isn't always true). A classic example of this strategy is an old Geo Metro. Light, tiny motor, and barely capable of maintaining highway speed using peak horsepower.
Right, I think what sometimes gets discounted with EVs is .. they are really easy to make a no-compromise vehicle compared to ICE. You can make an ICE fast, but you'll pay for that at the pump.
You can make an EV that is as fast as a Porsche but highway cruises like a Prius.
It's up to the idiot behind the wheel if they prefer to go fast or go far.
I remember in high school my "fast for a regular car" Pontiac did 0-60 in about 7sec.
This is achievable in a Nissan Leaf or Chevy Bolt now. The most low price, vanilla and dated tech in EVs you can buy.
EV buyers will quibble about 0-60s in the 4 second range that aren't even sold as "performance". You used to have to buy a BMW of M designation to achieve these types of numbers in a 4 door sedan, and get the horrible MPG along with it.
The chunky hatchback crossover MachE GT Mustang EV is faster than an ICE Mustang Mach 1 which gets a mid-teens MPG..
Maximum heating power in my 2015 Tesla Model S 70D is 6 kW. Travelling for 100 km at 100 km/h costs about 25 kWh. I drive in shirtsleeves and barefoot in the Norwegian mountains at -20⁰C and the heater doesn't seem to be running hard. So unless you are traveling in severe arctic conditions the heater really isn't more than a few percent of the load.
Teslabjørn has a video where he turned his Model X into a sauna getting 40⁰C inside while it was -10⁰C outside.
Had a model 3 for 4 years, have another EV now.
It really depends on the type of driving.
Sure, if you are making a long road trip at high speeds then its probably negligible though still noticeable.
But being in Northeast US with constant traffic..
I used to have to park outdoors so the car would get cold soaked down to 20F in winter, and never really have sufficient time to warm up unless I was going for a 1hr+ drive.
Winter driving local roads, below-25mph stop&go, 2-5mi trips running errands..
Could see some really crazy consumption numbers pop up like 500-800Wh/mi+ versus the rated 250Wh/mi. Now it doesn't necessarily amount to much because it's on short single-digit mile trips, but it does happen. This stacks with the general cold weather efficiency losses of EVs..
The 272 Wh/kg is at cell level not pack level which the Tesla weight refers to. In my X has about 92 kWh usable energy when new and it uses around 225 Wh/km at 120 km/h and 170 at 90.
The 3 and Y is even more efficient, mostly due to size. But it has a smaller battery, I can get about 69 kWh out of my AWD 3 after losses and it hovers around 170-180 Wh/km at 120 km/h and 130-140 at 90.
How the hell a Chevy Cruze gets 31mpg with a diesel??? A VW Passat TDI will easily get 60+ imperial MPG, I've had it get close to 70 on long runs(that's 50 and 58 American MPG respectively).
Are American diesels this inefficient?? Looking at pictures online the Chevy cruze doesn't seem like a bigger/heavier car than a Passat, so what gives??
Here in the Netherlands, we'd translate 31mpg to "1 per 11". One can drive 11km on 1L of fuel. 1 per 11 is a joke. It's associated with heavy petrol cars from the 80s and 90s, before anybody even attempted efficiency.
Even my 15 year old diesel car had an efficiency of 1/22. Adjust you driving style and I'd get 1/25. Range: 1000km, with an ordinary sized tank.
It seems Americans haven't even started with efficiency, quite likely because there was no pressure to do so due to low fuel prices. Not in their homes, not in their cars, not anywhere.
What's with these weird, grandiose generalizations I've been seeing about America on this site, based on single data points?
Do you realize that other brands and models exist in the USA? Do you realize Tesla is and American company? Did you even check look into Chevy Cruze's mileage? Here's a guy getting 70mpg in a Chevy Cruze by driving 55mph on the highway. That's 30km/l.
I'm not even american, but it is getting so tiring. Especially when it comes from europeans, something about throwing stones from glass houses I guess? Self loathing americans aren't much better since they usually have a completely laughable view of the outside world ("America is a third world country!!").
It's not even the fact that most of those generalizations are factually false, it's mostly just that it leads to every. single. discussion circling back to be about the USA.
(It reminds me of the super patriotic american circlejerk on the internet a decade+ ago, that had tons of europe bashing/america exceptionalism. But with the sides reversed and the delusional misplaced self-praise mostly coming from Europeans.)
Meanwhile, fairly common cycling parameters lead to well under 10 Wh/km at comfortable cruising speeds, and with things like velomobiles you kinda start around 5 Wh/km, and 3 Wh/km is possible without significantly compromising the practicality of the vehicle.
But it’s still a useful comparison to contemplate, especially when considering the nascent category Lightweight Electric Vehicles, which in its most interesting form isn’t far off “ebike minus pedals”. Cars are still pretty power-inefficient as a general concept.
Not only that. The more important conclusion is that actually ICE cars are stupendously inefficient.
All that extra energy ICE cars carry isn't actually being put to use very well. They don't have more powerful engines. They don't have more torque. They don't have more acceleration. And even their range isn't that much better. You can of course get models that take something like 100+ liters of petrol. But the per liter performance only gets worse if you do that (heavier cars are less efficient).
The reality is that yes, fuel is very energy dense but sadly most of that isn't transformed into motion when you use it. You are instead making lots of noise (vibrations) and heat. Both are actually bad for your car. So, you use most of the energy to wear out your car faster. The more powerful the car, the less efficient they are. And the faster they break down.
For diesel, this is really really bad. Most gasoline cars will run more economic than this, let alone diesel.
If your diesel runs less then 17 to 18 km/l something is wrong.
(my opinion is based on how things are in .nl, other parts of the world can and will be different of course)
This is definitely not an apples-to-apples comparison. With an EV the ball is already at the top of the hill and merely needs to be rolled down, with an ICE car, the ball has to be pushed up the hill first. The power plant does all of the heavy lifting for the EV.
Not a mark against EVs of course - it kind of just makes sense. I'm sure future generations will laugh that every vehicle used to have its own on-board power generation facility. It's too bad the dumb power-plant-under-hood way is still so much cheaper than the EV approach of course.
Maybe I missed something, but seems very weird to compare kg of diesel fuel to kg of battery. The posted article's figure of 272Wh/kg is for battery capacity, not energy yield from source fuel.
225 Wh/km is even high for most routes and cars. Unless you drive fast on motorways or in cold climate, it's often easy to get to 150 Wh/km (15 kwh/100km as often displayed).
31mpg is not very efficient. Lots of current diesel engines in Europe are certified at 50+MPG. There's even a Car and Driver test where, with very efficient (and boring) driving you can get 70+MPG out of a Diesel Cruze...
@25% Viable for mining.................... 22,000,000,000 Kilograms [2], [3]
Tesla S battery weight.................... 540 Kilograms per car [4]
Lithium weight per Tesla S battery........ 63 Kilograms per battery [4]
Max Tesla S (global) production possible.. 349,206,349 units (See Edit below)
Number of automobiles running in the USA.. 102,000,000 units [1]
Number of automobiles running in the World 1,500,000,000 units [5]
So, even if we theoretically assume that the earth's entire known Li reserves are used for EV usage, we cannot replace more than 25% of the currently running cars in the world.
So, we have a bigger problem ahead of us (over the next decade) that will act as an opposing force against EV penetration and replacement of the IC engine.
Solutions possibly lie in exploring other battery chemistries while improving the efficiency of Li extraction.
Edit: As some of the comments below point out, the Li content in a Tesla Model S battery is approx. 63 Kg. That makes the Max Tesla S (production) possible to 349 million units. So, in theory, one could replace all IC engines in automobiles plying in the USA. That then leaves the rest of the world. So, the problem still remains.
You didn't cite sources for the critical pieces of that (the first three numbers). You also assumed that the battery is 100% lithium, which is obviously wrong. A random Googling says closer to 62kg. And now I'm tired of bothering to fact check you.
I'm also going to say that all the car companies, battery companies, and governments in the world probably took six seconds to do basic math before investing trillions of dollars in it.
It doesn't, because that 88,000,000,000 is a lower bound amount of lithium on the planet not an upper bound.
If I count all the apples on the apple tree in my yard, I haven't counted all the apples on the planet. Only the applies I know about. There's probably still more apple trees out there!
That 88,000,000,000 figure also doesn't count any lithium in the oceans. Taking even a small fraction from there would make that 88,000,000,000 seem tiny.
Sibling comment is a good point. Also there are lots of other battery chemistries available that use less, or no, lithium. Or approaches burning hydrogen, or ammonia, or methane.
More broadly, this is a class of complaint that you can't see every detail of path and the destination from the very beginning of the road. The solution to that isn't to stand around and complain about it, but _start moving towards the destination_.
> I have a fundamental question though. Will EVs (Li battery based) achieve the holy grail of IC engine replacement?
Even if they couldn't, why would you limit your analysis to Li-based batteries? It's basic economics that when a resource becomes rarer, it becomes more costly and alternatives spring up. EVs with Sodium batteries are already on the market in China. This whole Lithium fear mongering is such a red herring.
And in fact this number changed by large amounts in the last decade, even before the current boom of the 2020s.
Remember peak oil, which was a big panic of some in the 2000s? It turns out that peak production didn't happen overall, but if you look at the original set of "known resources", the peak oil predictions were spot on. Yet we didn't experience huge oil supply shortages because huge expenditures into new fracking tech enables far more resources to be accessed.
We have always loved in a complete abundance of lithium, so we never bothered to look for more resources. Now that we need more, we will find it. It's not a particularly rare element.
> Owing to continuing exploration, identified lithium resources have increased substantially...
Emphasis added from your [3].
Ever think maybe your 88,000,000,000 Kilograms number isn't actually all the lithium on the planet, and maybe there's more undiscovered under the ground? Or do you think all the lithium on the planet was discovered in 2023, and now there won't be any more reserves found?
Strange how this maximum amount of lithium reserves keeps magically growing year over year over year over year. I wonder how it magically appears.
Yes, exploration and discovery of new deposits continues. Everything else remaining constant, the 88M tonnes (99M tonnes in the latest USGS report in [3]) will need to go up by orders of magnitude to get the 25% to 100% (if that is ever the goal).
The US went from 700,000 to over 12,000,000 from the 90s to today. In places where we've actually really started to look, we've found orders of magnitude more. I wonder how much more we'll find when we actually go looking for it elsewhere.
There are many cars from 00-05 and with emission levels that are relatively low; if one is to make a somewhat absurd suggestion to prove a point, I'd suggest many smaller petrol and dieselbcars would be cleaner than an EV _if_ the EV was charged with 100% coal power.
Luckily, most people don't charge their teslas with coal power.
It would be slightly worse in colder climates. I wish car manufactures would allow for easy installation for range extenders in the front trunk. I'd be a great source of heat for the heat pump. Range anxiety would be gone. No carbon tax since it would be an aftermarket solution.
It seems Mazda MX-30 r-ev is the only thing you can buy.
Their point was that a number of people who have range anxiety are those who haven't actually looked at what the impact of changing to an EV would actually be. Which, for a lot of people, wouldn't be nearly as much as they would think.
A lot of people with range anxiety probably use an EV with little to no impact in their driving habits other than plugging in when they get home. But they're so concerned with "what if's" that rarely ever come up in their lives. "But what if I suddenly need to drive across the country taking only back country roads and avoiding all highways across the furthest north roads in the coldest of winter?? Can't do that in an EV!"
The most common reactions I get to people asking about my EV are along the lines of "But how do you charge it? Don't you have to wait at public chargers all the time? It must be so challenging driving an EV with so many broken chargers all the time! You must have to wait so long all the time for all that charging, its so slow!" Which is quite strange, because the vast majority of charging sessions most EVs would probably experience are plugging in at their home entirely negating these concerns.
For a lot of those people asking me those questions (often friends and family), I know they'd be able to replace a car with an EV and have only positive impacts other than the costs of buying a new car (something they do on some schedule regularly). But the talking heads on the TV tell them EVs == slow, unreliable, expensive charging so clearly all EV owners must be dealing with largely unavailable, unreliable, expensive, slow charging all the time. When in reality I spend more time pumping gas in my ICE than I do waiting on my EV to charge, I've encountered more broken gas pumps than charging dispensers in the last year, and it costs me almost 10x less in energy cost than my ICE per mile.
> which is ~27% of the energy required to run a normal car!
This is because you're not comparing the same things: going from thermal energy to mechanical energy has a much lower efficiency than going from electricity to mechanical energy. But that electricity has to come from somewhere, and most of the losses happen at the electricity generation place instead of in the car.
> It just wouldn't have been possible to run cars on batteries without this efficiency bump.
Electric motor have always been far more efficient than ICE ones, even in the 19th. In fact, the difference was even bigger, because combustion engine sucked hard back then, whereas electric engine didn't make as much progress as combustion engine ones (that doesn't mean that they didn't make progress, they did, but there's far less of a difference between an electric engine of 1920 and the one in a Tesla, than between an ICE engine then and now).
Sorry, but this is BS. Modern electric engines in Tesla Model 3 use high-speed power transistors to precisely modulate the magnetic field. Back in 1920 all you could do was a collector plate with brushes.
The difference is like the difference between carburetor engines and direct fuel injection.
During the introduction to a speech by J. B. Straubel, the presenter said his mentor’s motivations were that 1% of the energy in the gas tank was moving the passenger, 12% the car, and the rest was lost.
We should measure efficiency based on that number.
Something you left out here is that the full capacity of the battery can’t be used. Tesla uses more of the battery than other manufacturers, which gives them a higher range per rated watt hour.
On top of that, they have more efficient components. When you compare a model S to a lightweight Carbon Fiber BMW i3, with a much smaller pack, you’ll see that the modelS still squeezes out a higher mpgE rating.
For a normal, new car, anything above 6l/100km for that size of a car (and usually around 5) is something's wrong with the car. That's more than twice the efficiency of described one from 1976.
The problem is that at that point liquid hydrogen already spent 70% of the energy stored in it (80% efficiency of electrolysis * 40% liquefying efficiency) .
Its almost like electric cars are cleaner, more efficient and better for the environment. Telsa's are god tier level of engineering under the hood. (Maybe not so much fit and finish). The only reason the gov't isn't buying these for everyone is because Tesla disrupted deeply entrenched companies and people don't like Elon.
> The Aptera gets 1000 miles on a 100 kWh battery.
Gets, as in present tense. A theoretical car made sometime in the future shouldn't use present tense terminology. No consumer on the road today is getting 1,000mi on a 100kWh battery in an Aptera. If Aptera manages to actually ship cars, then the word "gets" is accurate.
> What makes you think it won't get to market?
See:
> Sure, they failed in the past
Building cars has extremely high barriers to entry. Getting things approved costs tons of money. Spinning up factories is no small challenge. Actually making more than one or two cars is incredibly challenging. Meanwhile, in order to spread those costs out you'll hopefully want to make a lot of them otherwise a good chunk of your value proposition goes away as the costs for the car would quickly get out of hand.
Then comes the challenges of actually selling them at any volume. I legally can't buy one in my state if they don't create a franchise dealer network. Its hard to get shoppers to compare your vehicles if you don't have a way for them to actually buy the cars. Tesla manages because they spent a ton on "galleries", they were the only real EV option for a while, and have massive brand presence. Ask any random average car buyer if they've thought of buying an Tesla, and they'll probably have an opinion. Ask anyone if they've thought of buying an Aptera, and they'll probably have no clue what you're talking about.
If Aptera manages to actually make some cars, that's great! Even better if they manage to sell them for profit. Its good to have more competition. But I'm not holding my breath.
model Y consistently do 150Wh/km which is just nuts...
one thing with petrol chemical too is it's not carrying all the energy with it, the oxygen came from atmosphere while EV is carrying the entire energy required to run with itself..
Gasoline internal combustion engines run at about 30% efficiency. Diesel does somewhat better at about 40% for car size engines, and about 50% for the really big ones. Electric motors easily exceed 90% efficiency. The EV wins even without regenerative breaking, even accounting for the losses in the batteries.
It's somewhat matched if the electricity is generated by combustion. Even then, if the power is generated using an efficient cycle (e.g. CCGT) the EV still tends to come out ahead.
40% diesel efficiency is for optimal conditions, like steady cruise on a motorway. For practical driving it is less than 25%.
What is also missing here is that it takes 20-30% of energy to refine diesel or gasoline plus there is oil extraction cost. Accounting for that electrical car produces less CO2 when electricity comes from a modern coal plant than a diesel car.
Regen braking is 60-70% efficient, and it also limits your ability to free roll (let go of the gas and let the car use its inertia) for example going downhill or on level highways. Polestar for example recommends to lower the OPD sensitivity on highways to increase efficiency.
There are theoretical maximum efficiencies for thermodynamic cycles in combustion engines. I believe the limit in the diesel cycle is around 40%. Petrol engines are lower still.
At a continuous 80km/h on a level road in the summer I can get down to 160Wh/km even in my 2015 S 70D. I have a friend with a Kia Eniro and he gets similar numbers to you most of the time.
DC is better then AC and both depends on how much the battery is already charged, temperature of the battery, the infrastructure (charging cables for example).
The range is somewhere from low 80's for low amperage AC charging on cold weather using a low quality granny charger cable to high 90's for a warm battery on a dedicated high power DC charger.
This of course doesn't include losses in transmission from the power station and in electricity production.
- AC converted to DC (with power factor correction, usually means AC stepped up 1st)
- DC converted back to AC (but higher voltage) and MUCH higher frequency
- AC transformed to lower AC voltage (still higher frequence)
- AC rectified to DC (filtered and stabilized), DC voltage lower
That's not true. Tesla works like this:
1. You have a high-voltage DC bus that is basically connected to all battery modules. Modules have individual BMS modules and can connect/disconnect to that bus.
2. If you're doing fast charging, the charger connects to that bus directly (you can hear contactors closing), matches the voltage and pushes the current.
3. If you're doing AC slow charging, the charging module on the Tesla simply boosts the voltage to the bus level via a PWM-based power supply.
31mpg is pretty low, even for us gallons. The most sold l car in the UK is (shockingly) the nissan qashqai. They get about 48mpg in imperial gallons which is about 40mpg for the US.
So, how about we apologize in public to the engineers who said no to radar, cause boy oh boy would that one have eaten battery, which would need additional batteries, which would have torrn into the car rocket equation ?
500 Wh/kg means Sulphur cathode, which also explains the solid electrolyte. Roughly speaking, it'll be 3x as energy dense but only a 1/2 as volumetrically efficient (so, a given capacity battery will weigh 1/3 less but take up twice as much space).
There are other approaches to Li-S (and Al-S and Mn-S) which will be less expensive. Grats to CATL for bringing this to market, but the race for sure isn't over yet.
Honestly it doesn't seem like that big a drawback. EVs for instance have reclaimed lots of space from under the hood, the gas tank, the exhaust system and more.
A lot of other comments are saying 2x as dense (that current norms are around 250Wh/kg for mass produced and widely available product)… can you square that with your 3x claim? Am I missing something?
> During the presentation, CATL said its working with partners on the development of electric passenger aircraft practicing aviation-level standards and testing in accordance with aviation-grade safety and quality requirements.
Get ready for passenger drones[0], delivery drones[1] and just drones in general, because this is what this breakthrough means really.
- cost?
- what new chemicals are involved and what is the environmental impact?
- how many cycles can the new battery take?
- volume? (density is always shown as weight/mass, it's not the only thing that matters)?
- how does it behave under environmental changes (temp / pressure / etc ...)
Yes, there are tradeoffs with all of these. We can easily get one or some good looking stats, but to get good results with all of these parameters is the real challenge.
The claims about new battery chemistry are rarely farfetched or inaccurate, but we as a society (and especially the reporters) don't do a good job of interpreting the claims, focusing on one promising sounding parameter and neglecting all others.
The manufacturers are also not helping by omitting this sort of critically important information that you have highlighted (lying by omission).
Let's consider Cessna-172S ([4]). Its characteristics:
- 130 kW engine, Lycoming_O-360 that weighs 117 kg. For comparison, an electric motor of this range would weigh 11-13 kg (at 10-12 kW/kg, [2]). That saves 100+ kg weight immediately and we can put 50+ kWh batteries instead.
- It carries up to 200 liters of kerosene ([3]), which weighs 164 kg. We can place 82 kWh of batteries instead.
- The engine consumes around 30 liters/hour ([1]), which gives us ~6.7 hours of flight time or the equivalent of 6.7*130=871 kWh for an electric-power plane.
- The fuel tank weighs about ~14 kg (source: an LLM, sorry) and gives us another 7 kWh.
So, we can put 50+82+7=139 kWh. By using modern materials, we can probably increase it to ~180 kWh, which will give us about 1.5 hours of flight time / 300 km range. This is much less than 6.7 hours, but quite practical for recreation and short flights. And it would be much cheaper to run too.
That said, still not practical for medium and long flights.
But the point that CATL makes with this announce is that before this capacity boost, electric planes were a complete joke. Now, they are only somewhat funny.
What I am more excited about is that electrically pumped rockets are now a lot more practical. As an example, Electron is such a rocket ([1]). It can now reduce the weight of the battery pack and increase payload.
I have an imagined invention where battery packs drop off an electric jet as it cruises and they glide to a landing somewhere when they are out of power.
Nuclear waste can be stored on the Moon. Just be careful that it doesn't overheat and turn into a giant rocket, propelling the Moon out of the solar system.
Harbour Air successfully tested electric plane based on De Havilland Beaver. This is still a super short distance but I think the longest route Harbour air has is Vancouver <-> Seattle and it's a 55 minute flight.
The point not considered is the Cessna 172 is an extraordinarily draggy airframe - it didn't need to be clean and laminar because fuel was (relatively) cheap.
Electric aircraft of the future will have half the drag or less. High aspect ratios, flush fairings, streamlined cockpits etc.
> quite practical for recreation and short flights
Perfectly agree with everything, but 1.5hr may be very short if you need to have 30 minutes of reserve at landing. On the saving side, you don’t have to have an alternator to transform ICE energy into energy for the dashboard instruments. On the downside, you now need to heat the cabin manually, rather than reusing the ICE heat.
The electric motor is not 100% efficient so some heat must be available for cabin. Large synchronous generators are 97% efficient not sure about 100 kw e vehicle
Motors
The power requirement at cruising speed would quite a lot less than max power would it not? If cruse consumed 60% of max you'd be using closer to 80kW which would give you over 2 hours flight time.
324 nmi range for the regular variant. Around 65 nmi for the electric version.
This is with older batteries, probably with very bad pack-level energy density. The battery pack can even be swapped. Great to avoid having to wait for charging, but probably terrible for weight.
If you design the aircraft for electric flight from the ground up (see Maxwell X-57 for how you could do that), with a structural battery pack, and with 300-500wh/kg batteries, I'm willing to bet a 2-5 times increase in range is viable.
A lot of people won't fully fuel up their 172 so they can bring more weight, either baggage or passengers. I don't think anyone would fly 6.5 hours in one either, but 2+ is normal for non-training flights.
Well, they were already possible and being sold. But with relatively short but usable ranges. Those now more than double with this battery. Which makes those planes usable in a lot more scenarios.
Consider the Eviation Alice, one of the 9 passenger prototype electrical planes that is currently undergoing test flights (i.e. it definitely works). The advertised range is 250nm. Not amazing. But far enough for a lot of regional flights.
What would happen if you double the battery capacity without increasing the weight? You more than double that range. This is counter intuitive until you realize that you are not going to need more energy for taking off, or reserves. All that extra energy goes into extending cruise range. So you get more than 250nm extra. Basically, it's probably getting closer to 600nm. That's still not amazing but there are a lot of flights every day that are much shorter than that. All of those are now doable with electrical planes. At a fraction of the fuel cost.
Most flights are short haul. And they are, well, short. Which means, all of those are in scope for electrical planes. Small planes work well for these too. You don't have to cram hundreds of people in a plane if you eliminate fuel cost as a major cost factor. That's the only reason we do that. It's not like it's pleasant or comfortable. 20 ten passenger planes can do the work of one passenger jet. But it can do it more flexible and cover more destinations too.
Electrical planes are not about doing exactly the same things that we do with traditional planes but about doing a lot more than that. Basically, less noise, less pollution, less cost, means that a whole lot of flights that would be considered decadent and obscene right now become perfectly feasible and reasonable. A ten minute hop across town. Why not? Live 70 miles from your office? Not a problem, you commute there in under 15 minutes. For the price of a few cups of coffee.
> Most flights are short haul. And they are, well, short. Which means, all of those are in scope for electrical planes.
Exactly. In the EU, Eurocontrol (European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation) says 30.6% of flights in 2020 were 0-500km, roughly within the range of the Eviation Alice currently. A further 43.6% of flights in the EU are between 500 and 1500km.
Source [1]
> You don't have to cram hundreds of people in a plane if you eliminate fuel cost as a major cost factor. That's the only reason we do that.
Not only. Gate capacity and runway capacity is an issue too. But that might also be easier to resolve with smaller electric planes. E.g. there's Liliums approach of vertical takeoff from little more than a helipad-sized platform, but even non VTOL planes capable of taking off from short runways would be helpful.
It's not just about runway length. Noise reduction would also make it easier to use smaller local airports. Electric aircraft are already more quiet, but there's probably room for even more reduction by using ducted fans or toroidal propellers.
We may also see a return to more of a hub-and-spoke model. Fly from a smaller, local airport close to you. Fly to some hub near the half-way point, switch to a plane that takes you to a small airport close to your destination. If planes are smaller maybe security can be relaxed too. Total time spent travelling could be comparable to taking a direct flight with a large international airport further from your origin and destination. Then the aircraft doesn't need to be very long range.
The thought of a return to more of a hub-and-spoke model sounds like a total nightmare. It'd take a huge price difference before I'd consider that, personally (EDIT: As in, I usually check "direct flights only" or equivalent and only relent if the cost is ridiculously much higher). Then again my perspective is being near multiple large international airports, so maybe that might appeal to some.
Hub and spoke is primarily used to fill large planes. If you have 10-20 passenger electric planes you'd land at some random county airport, eat a hamburger or a taco while the plane recharges, then get back on the same plane and finish the trip. So you'd have a layover like hub and spoke but all the concerns about missing connections go away.
ICE engines only manage to turn ~15% of the stored energy in gasoline into actual work. A bit of googling suggests that jet engines are about 35% efficient. Stored electricity is much more efficiently turned into mechanical work... Electric engines have 75-90% efficiency. So, you get a lot more work or unit of stored energy.
That factor 6 already seems to include the efficiency of the engine. Pure chemical energy density of kerosene is 12000 W/kg, 24x the new battery's energy densitiy.
Yes. 12kWh/kg chemical energy for kerosene, a little more for avgas. But with a 25% efficiency you are only getting 3kWh out of a kg of fuel. Electric motors tend to have higher efficiency -- maybe up to 75% so you might nearly get 500Wh from a kg of battery.
Yep. Also... kerosene gets spent. Pilots can also dump fuel in emergency when it's too heavy to land. Battery powered planes can't dump electricity, so I'd imagine some trade offs that have to be made.
That is a very good and often overlooked point. So in average on a flight one has to calculate maybe with 60% weight of kerosene, while the battery keeps 100% of its weight during the entire flight.
It gets worse with lithium air batteries that actually gain weight as they discharge because of the formation of solid oxides from the air. Argonne are reporting 1200Wh/kg in the lab though so still worth it.
This is more about day to day operations than emergencies. For an electric plane, your MTOW (max takeoff weight) is equal to your MLW (max landing weight). An ICE plane can take off with "bonus" fuel that it can't land with for structural reasons, while an electric plane can't.
Electric planes could recharge using solar or wind. As efficiency increases with these technologies, it would mean planes wouldn't require carrying the same watt-for-watt energy as fuel.
> Electric planes could recharge using solar or wind. As efficiency increases with these technologies, it would mean planes wouldn't require carrying the same watt-for-watt energy as fuel.
Those are pipe dreams :-)))
Solar recharging for electric cars is not realistic, let alone for electric planes.
Wind charger... maybe there's something there, but the fact that nobody has tried it probably means it's not good enough.
Planes have a much larger surface area to carry solar panels, and they fly above clouds, so have clearer access to sunlight than cars do.
Wind charging is more of a pipe dream, but there's no reason a plane couldn't glide for a period of time to get some energy back, similar to regenerative breaking.
There have been experiments in both areas, and while it's certainly unfeasible today for any large aircraft, the technology and efficiency will only improve. It would be wrong to discard these as an impossibility.
The concepts of potential energy and kinetic energy make the "wind charging" idea ... difficult.
The extra weight and structural challenges imposed by solar panels on aircraft don't seem worth it. The math on (174 sqft) * ideal theoretical power (250 W /m2) yields an optimistic ideal 4000 Watts. A conservative 75% power usage of a 172 engine is around 100kW. 4% under ideal circumstances.
Recharging would take a lot of energy but it's not unthinkable to have 1-3 GW supplied to an airport (which is what a reactor would likely supply), large metropolitan areas and large industrial factories already get to similar amounts. It's a couple of transmission lines and most large airports are close to population centers anyway.
The challenge would be getting the right amount at the right time, like now with quick charging. Like there, you'd probably have buffer storage at the airport so that it consumes electricity when available (e.g. during the day from solar) and dispenses it to aircrafts when needed. Luckily, most airports in the world have nearly all take offs and landings during the day, so there's a big overlap. Dubai would be an example where likely all would come from solar but a lot is needed over night (if we ever get electric long-haul flights).
So overall I don't think that this would be the limiting factor. But I guess larger airliners are more likely to run on synthetic fuels than electricity for a long time. And I guess that's fine, we have a lot of areas where cheap and/or dense batteries can help us much more in the short term (grid storage, cars, trucks).
Why does it have to be poison? Wouldn't having an airport nearby be a blessing for anyone with solar panels on their roof? Just like an industrial zone, it'd be a nonstop load ready to buy from anyone, anytime. (Yes I understand the infrastructure would need to change a lot.)
It's way cheaper and more efficient for electricity consumers to purchase power from the grid, and for the grid to figure out the most optimal way to produce and deliver the power.
Solar and wind are in many areas a) only available during certain hours b) expensive.
To ensure you have a stable power cost, and stable power availability, you as a large consumer (In the EU) make PPA agreements with power producers for specific KW rates, for specific KWh amounts, for specific times. These are complicated agreements.
A few panels on some warehouses and hangers close to an airport could keep the lights and the A/C on in the terminal, but that's about it. No one is putting up wind turbines anywhere close to an airport.
I feel that synthetic kerosene via electrolysis is a far more viable path to sustainable aviation than battery-electric engines. The energy-inefficiency doesn’t really matter as long as you can keep the total cost of the flight within consumer reach.
Carbon neutral synthetic fuels might make sense for airliners, because they're already pretty efficient, reliable and incomprehensibly powerful and there's tons of other stuff in them that'd require maintenance even if you took out the engines.
They don't make sense for general aviation planes that are usually a fifty year-old engine design that requires expensive overhauls and guzzles expensive fuel wrapped in a bit of aluminum.
But do we really need to focus on general aviation? I don't have numbers but believe it to be a pretty small part overall. In transportation, it's also fine if we keep some gasoline speciality vehicles for a long time, as long as we're able to convert the vast majority of cars and trucks.
Compated to jet fuel, avgas is more expensive today because there's almost no market for it. When synthesized, it's probably cheaper to produce than jet fuel.
The best application I've seen for the currently available electric airplanes are flight schools. One plane I looked into has a flight time of 1.5hrs, which is plenty for training. When I last priced out instructor time, 30% of the cost was the fuel. This means that flight schools could cut prices by up to 25% or so. That being said, the plane I looked into was $250k, while a student level ICE plane could be had for $20-50k.
I don’t think Musk has given a writeup of his reasons for thinking 400wh/kg is the magic number, but a lot of research has been done that says similar numbers. This paper https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666691X2... is a good review; it cites researchers saying 800wh/kg for an electric Airbus A320, NASA saying 400Wh/kg for general aviation and 750Wh/kg for regional aviation, and other researchers saying 600Wh/kg for commercial regional aircraft and 820Wh/kg for commercial narrow-body aircraft.
That paper also sketches out the argument for electric flight at close to current battery densities rather than close to kerosene energy densities. It goes:
Jet fuel gets roughly 28% final efficiency while electric gets roughly 90%, so divide jet fuel by 3 to get 4,000 effective Wh/kg.
That is getting close to current energy densities of batteries. You only need to find one more ~2x improvement that electric flight can obtain over jet fuel to bring it into the range of 500Wh/kg, which CATL is saying they have in production right now.
(Presumably Musk’s magic 400Wh/kg number involved another 2.5x improvement, though I don’t know where specifically he thought it would come from. The internet seems to think he said you can go higher because you don’t need oxidizer from the air to burn jet fuel, but that doesn’t sound right since you still need to push on the air with your fans and you’ll run out of that at high altitude before you run out of oxygen, so it must be coming from somewhere else. Regardless, the point is that jet fuel imposes design constraints that trap you in a local maximum of aircraft efficiency, and electric engines allow you to explore a wider space which may have much much higher maximums.)
I assume it's a limit motivated more by how far you can go rather than the cost of fueling/charging. Like, above a certain weight/energy store ratio, it's either too heavy to fly or would just have an incredibly limited range.
Soaring is currently making the switch, not only as sustainers, but also for starting. There are models from major manufacturers, like the Schleicher AS 33/34 me [1] or Antares [2].
The point isn't necessarily to equal or beat kerosene in terms of weight and range, but rather to be good enough that electric aircraft are usable for many or most use cases.
Planes tend to be very expensive to operate, due to maintenance and fuel costs. Some people would be happy to trade range for dramatically lower operating costs.
Nope, the variable is cost per passenger. Large jets only exist because fuel is really expensive. The cost per passenger gets astronomical with smaller planes. That's why only rich people can afford that. Big planes are more economical. Because of the fuel.
This is simply not true with electrical planes. A mega watt hour of power is about 60-100$. And much cheaper than that with renewables. Not at retail prices of course. But if you consume power by the mwh, you'd be investing in your own generation (solar + storage) pretty soon. A mwh is about what you need to move a small electrical plane a few hundred miles. The kerosene cost for a similar journey in a small jet is going to be hundreds of dollars, even for a small jet. The smallest jets burn 50-100 gallons of fuel per hour (in cruise). Depending where you get your fuel, that ranges from 3-5$ per gallon. That's why small jets are only for rich people. Even a very short flight sets you back hundreds of dollars. A simple propeller plane is cheaper. But we're still talking 5-10 gallons per hour. That's why people talk about 100$ hamburgers. Because that's what it costs to take your tiny plane out to grab a burger somewhere.
Big big jets are a bit more economical with fuel than small ones. But they only makes sense if you can distribute fuel cost among many passengers.
With electrical, you can use lots of smaller planes cost effectively rather than having to put lots of people in a few bigger ones. For the same reason, you don't need big airports either. Or worry about pollution. And even the noise of small electrical planes is not as much of a problem. And with autonomous flight, we won't even need pilots long term. Small electrical planes are good enough and much nicer for passengers, more flexible to operate, etc.
Airliners have already moved away from the hub-and-spoke model to a point-to-point model where smaller narrowbodies fly direct from small airport to small airport (E.g. Southwest in the US). They do this specifically because of the increased efficiencies of smaller aircraft.
If you can further lower the per passanger cost of small planes, you can make smaller airports more viable, and fly point-to-point from more odd routes. Think Oxford, UK (OXF), to Gothenburg, Sweden (GSE).
And more non trivial amounts of money on parts, maintenance and inspections. Lots of moving parts. Lots of complexity. Lots of engineering hours spent on keeping it all running smoothly. Electrical planes still need inspections but they are a lot more robust and the complexity of maintaining, inspecting, and operating them is at least an order of magnitude lower. And they break down in less and less expensive ways and probably less often too.
The third expensive component is staffing. Pilots are expensive and for complex aircraft they need lots of training. So, simple electrical airplanes lower the training cost and make it easier to train and find new pilots. And complexity is also a reason you often need two pilots. Smaller/simpler airplanes can be one pilot operations. And of course replacing pilots entirely when these things become autonomous brings further cost savings. The flip side is that lots of small planes require more pilots.
Finally, big airports are expensive. You have to pay landing fees in lots of places. And service fees. And missing your assigned slot because of delays is expensive. That too goes away if you start flying from less busy/cheaper airports.
So, there a few additional savings here beyond fuel. But that is the biggest one.
IMHO this is going to be a repeat of the EV revolution a decade ago. But minus a lot of the emotional bickering about range anxiety, etc. Most planes are operated by for profit businesses. The second something cheap becomes available, they'll be all over it. In the same way using electrical vans vs. ice vans is not a topic of debate in the industry. You get the electrical van if you can. They are cheaper to operate. There's zero uncertainty on that front so you see essentially all large fleets transitioning to electrical vans as soon as they can get it done.
With electrical flight, a lot of this stuff is bottle necked on product development (happening), certification (starting to happen), and volume production (not happening yet). Better batteries increase the demand further. But without volume production, demand is not the issue. Supply is. This is and will be supply constrained for a long time.
Not at this density. This is the minimum requirement for medium length large airplanes. Small aircraft are already viable with mass produced batteries.
As they scale production of these, hopefully they can get 20% additional improvements at the cell/pack level, reaching potential to replace the most common flights.
Video[0] isn't a direct answer, but I found it helpful for understanding the trade offs that come when considering using electric power for a plane vs regular fuel. They show the math in an easy to follow diagram.
tl;dr for their small kit aircraft the weight of batteries they would need to match the stored energy of equivalent fuel (even with a battery at 500wh/kg) would be 5-10x heavier, and also not get lighter during the flight. They said for long range it doesn't make sense, but that there are lots of companies iterating in the short range electric space.
Seems like marketing hype to me. An 8-hour transatlantic flight requires something like 600MWhr of energy. That's about 75MW, which is in small nuclear reactor territory.
Replacing transatlantic flights is out of the question (for batteries for now). But there exists shorter routes, and according to this list [1] on Wikipedia, the busiest route in the world is 449km long. That's probably also not doable now, but maybe in some years?
For the first years it will probably only be a few wierd, short routes in rich countries like Norway with 110% financial support from the state. But when they can safely fly 5-600km there is a actually quite a number of routes with a lot of passengers out there.
The US very nearly built a 60MW nuclear reactor for use in airplanes after their scaled down design at 2.5MW was successfully built, ran, and tested. This was done in the 1950s and, incidentally, required inventing molten salt reactors. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Reactor_Experiment
(They actually planned to go all the way to 350MW, which could theoretically run a transatlantic passenger jet with 2,000 passengers, assuming it’s even possible to build such an airframe.)
It’s interesting that battery stories generate so much opprobrium when battery performance has increased so dramatically over the last couple of decades.
Their main energy density boost is a silicone anode, which we've known "for ages" that it leads to higher energy density, but soaking it with lithium degrades the material very quickly, leading to cracks and thus damage after just a few charge cycles. The main innovation is some kind of nano-structuring of the anode, and that technique was published in the scientific literature in 2006.
I'm sure it was hyped as a battery break-through in 2006, and it has taken 17 years to get to market.
So, maybe we shouldn't go back 5 years, more like 20 years (OK, no HN back then :D).
Batteries do get better over time, fairly consistently so. The development lifecycle is just soooo much longer than in software.
I follow these announcements with a sense of dread, as battery limits are the main obstacle between our current situation and widespread adoption of drones and robotics for military use.
I do wonder sometimes if scraping the million plus of components, produced and assembled with great care into a ICE car and still relatively new, makes any sense. Re-powering seems no brainer to keep millions of new cars out of the scrapyard. And avoid the environmentally unsustainable production of slightly newer cars. Reusing them whole, engine included, is ideal. If battery re-powering, synthetic gasoline and hydrogen re-powering are not viable for multiple reasons I wonder what the best pool of options is.
I believe that current car racing trends will paint a picture of the future of automobiles.
The hybrid area is among us, and the technology used is so well thought out and advanced.
Hybrid as in “go incredibly fast”, and not “save gas” like as with a Prius.
Currently in F1 and the new prototype classes, they are using electrification in conjunction with the internal combustion engine to create more instantly available horsepower.
They are using twin turbo 6 cylinder engines, and anything that has large rotational mass has been electrified with motors. The turbos, crankshaft, and camshafts all have hybrid electric assist motors built into them to combat inertia. They then have incredibly engineered heat recovery systems built into the brakes and turbos. They collect the heat and convert it into electric to recharge the battery. Additionally, when the electric assist motors aren’t providing power to their components, their function is reversed and they become generators that also feed to the battery.
I don’t believe the streets have ever really even seen electric assist turbos and crankshafts lol. Ford only recently realized that you could make more fuel efficient and reliable power with less displacement using forced induction.
that seems very unlikely to be honest. Commercial cars are sold first on reliability and operating costs, which is why Americans are shying away from buying cars that have a basic turbo and prefer larger gas engines instead.
This is completely false lol.. Which Americans are shying away from turbo cars exactly?
Pretty sure Ford and GM have an entire lineup of fuel efficient turbo cars out right now. Ford has the ecoboost engine line, so I’m confused on what data you are looking at?
I think the age of Rube Goldberg dinosaur fumes fire machines is over and the age of Maxwells Equations is upon us. It’s sort of like college physics progression I just realized.
Do you believe that Saudi Aramco is just going throw their arms up and be like “well, the dinosaur fumes era is over everyone! Pack it up.”
The two technologies of electric and combustion are going to coexist with each other.
The rebirth of F1 into this new hybrid generation, as well as the new dPi hybrid prototype class will prove to you that Maxwells Equation is not close, and we breaking a new era of acceleration, braking, downforce, top speed, and fuel efficiency.
I don’t think F1 is going to save Saudi Aramco. People don’t generally need a super racing machine. Maxwells equations delivers a simpler machine that satisfies all needs of any user beyond the most exotic. The Rube Goldberg machine is the actual death of ICE - as a manufacturer, who have much more influence on cars, why do I want to build and design these incredibly complex machines when I could dramatically simplify the entire chain of design, production, distribution, and maintenance by hosting a sled with batteries and some inductive motors. Once the scale of production reaches ICE levels the efficiencies of market will just destroy the ICE market. Making a more complex ICE for some exotic benefit for race car drivers isn’t going to shift that economics. Oil producers are way too far down the chain to have much a voice.
F1 is like a test bed for new vehicle technology. It's not that you'll buy a race car, or a race car engine, but those discoveries will filter down into consumer products, like they have in the past: paddle shifters, KERS, hybrid engines, rear diffusers, traction control, drive by wire, the dual clutch, plus probably a ton of improvements in tires, fuel injection, safety, suspensions etc.
So if a hybrid engine that significantly increases ICE efficiency (already the case, F1 engines are 40% more efficient than normal cars) can become mainstream and be a better fit for particular use cases, it could extend the life of gasoline-powered vehicles for a while.
I can buy that. But I’ll bet you the marginal cost of all the added complexity will (as scales of economy in the EV manufacturing process) more than offset marginal engine efficiency gains, especially if electricity prices stay significantly cheaper than gasoline.
I think the reality is the ICE is a technology whose time has come. It’s overly complex and has to be close to optimal given the sheer time and energy spent perfecting it. The EV is far from optimality and it’s improvement rates will likely be staggering over the next 20 years. It’s ok. The ICE had its day, and it was cool. Now it’s time for flying drone cars.
F1 has gotten further and further away from production deployment vehicles in favor of more entertainment for the crowds. Tires all degrade to enable more strategy, and the ground effect cars are now designed for closer racing which production vehicles don't care about. Le Mans has more production relevance than F1 now.
The USA actually has more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia. Adding Canada, you have more than double. The production cost is higher, but technology adapts... SA can't really decide when this era is over.
Mass-producing IC engines, even complicated state-of-the-art ones, is exceedingly simple and cheap. Assembling an EV battery is actually pretty damned hard and energy-intensive. This is all reflected in the price. If it were easy to make an EV battery, they would cost less. If it was hard to make an IC engine, there would be no $4500 motorcycles.
The equivalent of your $4500 motorcycle is the $4000 - $6000 mini EVs sold in second-tier chinese cities[1], the best-known of which is probably the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV[2]. There are many reviews of them on Youtube, some in English by native english speakers. These EVs have the same number of airbags as motorcycles, but more seatbelts.
Edit: apparently they now have more airbags than motorcycles, as well as more roll cages and other safety features.
To what degree do you think this reflects learning over time? My impression is that high precision manufacturing is something that we've gotten very good at, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's easy.
I don't see what the difference is between being good at something and it being easy. I think the prices of these things are indicative. The fact that an ICE has a bazillion parts is superficial, aesthetic, and irrelevant. A bicycle chain has 400 moving parts, state-of-the-art metallurgy, and costs $10.
I guess it's a question of whether battery production will one day be easy as well. Certainly, 200 years ago modern ICE production wouldn't have been easy, so maybe we're just at a similar point in the history of battery production.
Chinese manufacturers will increasingly dominate innovation in their respective fields.
Manufacturing and innovation is inherently intervened and the West's decision to outsource manufacturing has stagnated our ability to innovate in many fields.
I think outsourcing is actually a symptom rather than a cause.
The real problem is that many countries don't want to do innovation because it's expensive and/or they don't want to invest in the education necessary.
China is able to do China things because they produce an absolutely staggering number of STEM grads and have jobs for them to fill. Everything from high energy particle physics to industrial chemistry, if you have a hard science degree in China your employment is pretty much gauranteed. This is a self perpetuating cycle too because as you provide more and more STEM labour more and more innovation occurs which spawns new industry which employs more STEM labour, etc.
Conversely China is struggling with the opposite end of the scale where most Western countries excel at which is finding jobs for people without hard skills. China youth unemployment rate is very high among those without STEM degrees.
>> The real problem is that many countries don't want to do innovation because it's expensive and/or they don't want to invest in the education necessary. <<
oah, what batst nonsense is this? CATL and BYD's battery production output/capacity, or whatever innovation you claim China has achieved, is a function of the CCP's protectionist policy to prevent foreign competition and nurture domestic battery industry since 2016 -- ie, China's refusal to grant license to operate battery business in China to South Korean and Japanese battery makers such as LG Chem, Samsung SDI, and Panasonic unless they gave up their core battery technology in exchange (forced tech transfer); or blatant discrimination in EV battery maker subsides or later outright no subsidy for EVs equipped with foreign companies' batteries (illegal subsidies). Ever heard of Make-In-China 2025? Wonder where Biden got inspiration for the IRA which excludes all things sourced or made in China? BYD and CATL are #1, #2 in China, but, outside China, they have to deal with the South Korean trio, LG Chem #1, SK Innovation #2, Samsung SDI + Panasonic (Japanese) -- and they are likewise leaders in their respective battery tech: for instance, LG Chem and SK Innovation in NCM, Panasonic and Samsung SDI in NCA.
>> China is able to do China things because they produce an absolutely staggering number of STEM grads ... <<
Stop, stop, stop. That's not how it works. If we assume your fallacious theory to be true, China would have won the World's most popular sport contest, the World Cup several times over. We all know how China poured billions into training millions of their youths and spent boatload of money recruiting the World's best soccer players only to see their national team getting beaten by small South East nations like Vietnam, and certainly no match for soccer powerhouses like Honduras with 1/150 of China's population or budget.
I don't know what you are smoking but it's some good shit.
NCM, NCMA, LFP, sure chemistries are cool to talk about but all that actually matters is batteries that are actually shipping.
LG Chem is claiming they can catch up, claiming they can start building LFP by 2026... only over a decade too late. CATL didn't develop LFP but they developed all the mass production techniques which is what counts in the market. No one cares how good you can theoretically produce cells if you never do.
Right now all I see is the Koreans claiming they can make up lost ground, not today mind you, by 2026+ and somehow then they will then become the dominant producers.
They do this based on projections of CATL not growing at all which makes no fucking sense given they are entirely supply constrained right now. People end up buying EVE and other second tier cells because of how hard it is to buy from CATL right now.
Sorry but it's fantasy.
If Korea/Japan/US want to beat CATL it's going to take more than hopes and dreams. It's going to take factories, lots of them. Not just the ~1-3 plants a piece that are currently on the roadmap.
Protectionism doesn't and can't explain the sheer capacity of CATL/BYD. Protectionism 101 is that by adopting protectionism you increase the local cost of the goods as a result by disallowing other competitors. That clearly isn't the case as CATL is the best price/performance cell anyone can buy for LFP friendly workloads anywhere in the world. It's not subsidy either as they are wildly profitable at the same time, even having enough margin to eat increases in lithium costs (partially because they are big enough to own their own mines) keeping themselves competitive as others are priced out.
Korea/Japan/US dropped the ball, it's simple as that. They had the lead but choose not to pursue it. Same with EVs until Tesla came long. GM should have been dominant but again they didn't have the balls.
When push came to shove they didn't want to put the money down and that is what counts in the end. China said they were going to build EVs and that was going to need batteries. That created the appropriate conditions for battery companies to invest heavily in China. LG Chem was late to the party, their first plant in Nanjing was nearly 10 years too late, that isn't protectionism that is just missing the boat. That and they were building NCM at a time that CATL was already producing LFP at good enough energy densities to displace NCM for EVs and storage applications. NCM is a "better" chemistry sure, but it's too damn expensive for cheap ass EVs that dominate the Chinese market.
This entire debacle is entirely one of mismanaged leads and it repeats across most modern tech that China is now doing well in.
Solar? Should have been won by US/Germany/Australia. Wind? US/Germany. Batteries? Korea/Japan. Nuclear? US/France/Germany/Japan. EVs? US. Telecom? Canada/Sweden. The pattern here is China invests and doesn't let new technology get fucked over by entrenched special interest groups. It's a political advantage at it's core, something the West might find very hard to replicate.
Also your soccer comparison is beyond dumb so I'm not even going to bother addressing that.
>>. I don't know what you are smoking but it's some good shit.<<
sounds like something I hear from very misguided wumaos all the time. It's fairly apparent that you know nothing about the industry or the "shipping" numbers, much less the chemistries. You've been drinking too much CCP Kool-aid.
>> NCM, NCMA, LFP, sure chemistries are cool to talk about but all that actually matters is batteries that are actually shipping. <<
Wrong, NCM/NCA, not LFP, are the most popular/manufactured/shipped with 70% of the global EV market share. The majority of EVs in China for instance are running on NCM -- only last year China achieved almost 50/50 between NCM and LFP on new EVs. Most LDVs outside China are also NCM/NCA. Even in ESS market, NCM still dominates today; though LFP will take over since LFP is suitable for stationary, low-density use cases. I also already commented earlier that the majority of CATL's output is still NCM, which is based on LG Chem tech, not LFP.
>> LG Chem is claiming they can catch up, claiming they can start building LFP by 2026. CATL didn't develop LFP but they deve... Right now all I see is the Koreans claiming they can make up lost ground, <<
Wrong. There is nothing to catch up -- LG Chem has no plan to use LFPs for EVs; nor did they ever have any "ground" in LFPs. They are not really interested in doing LFPs because of their low margin (and absurd LFP licensing fees; though they are now all, but expired). The Japanese/Koreans stayed away from LFP b/c of their low density and weight which in turn makes it unsuitable beyond stationary energy storage. LFP is far easier to manufacturer than NCM/A and subsequently cheaper, which is the main market driver for it, but the cost advantage of LFP isn't necessarily true anymore either: LFP is 20%-30% cheaper per Wh/kg compared to much older, least densest NCM532, but not against the recent high-nickel (811), most commonly used today on new EVs, or ultra-nickel (955) batteries, the emerging de facto industry standard; notwithstanding recent wild fluation in lithium/nickel price. LFP today is largely still limited to entry-level, non-performant, low-range EVs. Tesla uses NCMs from LG Chem for high-end models even in China and LFPs from CATL for lower, entry-level EVs.
>> ... by 2026+ and somehow then they will then become the dominant producers. ... <<
No worries, it's widely expected that the Korean trio would dominate 70% of the North American market. Biden's IRA and the EU's CRMA no longer promises exclusive subsidies or ban against Japanese or South Koreans competition. LG Chem also announced last month that they are going to start enforcing patent rights on high-nickle NCM batteriese against Chinese battery makers (which is one of the main reasons why China has been aggressively moving towards LFP in and outside China).
>> ... They do this based on projections of CATL not growing at all which makes no fucking sense given they are entirely supply constrained right now ...<<
Biden's IRA also takes a few steps further limits subsides on EVs made in China or EVs with batteries/material sourced from China. As of last week, even Tesla's entry-level EVs with Chinese LFP sold in the US are now partially excluded from receivign EV credits -- which explains why Tesla is now instead offering them in Canada. You should be familliar with this, since this is exactly China used to do to promote their own domestic makers CATL/BYD over foreign ones.
As for supply-constraint, it seems you are also quite slow to realize that battery constraints has easied substantially since the end of China's EV subsidies on Jan 1, 2023. The price of Lithium has more than halved since, for instance, and some Chinese processors are idling their factories to prevent further price drop (yes, they are still falling like a rock).
The only other bottleneck in EV battery supply-chain is the new "No China" constraints for battery and raw materials under Biden's new policies -- which in turns require severing ties with Chinese material suppliers, or pulling factories out of China -- will need at leat a year or two to build new domestic supply-chain in the US or its allies.
>> Protectionism doesn't and can't explain the sheer capacity of CATL/BYD. <<
Sure, it does. You combine that with blatant IP theft, forced tech transfer, and generous subsidies, it works out. The inefficiencies born by China's protectionism are ameliorated by huge subsides that accounts for as much as 40% of the purchase cost in some Chinese EV models. Ditto, watch the US EV supply-chain and market develop under Biden's IRA over next couple of years.
For me, this signals CATL is either actually on the verge of a breakthrough, or desperate and in big trouble. If the technology is brand new, how can it have been thoroughly life and cycle tested already?
I will believe the batteries are truly ready for prime-time after approx. 5 years of real world service. That's enough time to see the creeping, unforeseen issues that tend to crop up with batteries. Dendrite growth, structural failure, etc etc. They could be shipping millions of cars in 2025 with these and I would, rightly, still have my doubts.
A breakthrough based on solid state electrolyte sounds very plausible. But look at the presentation graphic. They get the translation of "energy density" wrong.
FWIW: lithium-ion was also expensive chemistry. If the promise matches the reality, supply chains will eventually realign to the point where consumer applications become feasible.
We are likely in the incremental phase of battery innovation.
You've got to balance so many factors to commercially release a battery: safety, durability, reliability, weight, energy density, cost. You can build cheap batteries, they just have some terrible characteristics.
That was CATL's other announcement, two years ago: sodium-ion batteries. Now being incorporated into a model of car by Chery, one of the second tier Chinese EV manufacturers, and another by BYD, the biggest.
That high density energy is going to need some good fire protection. Excited about the increased density coming out of energy storage - these breakthroughs take a lot of research work.
How was this achieved? It seemed like battery energy density improvements were very marginal. I'd expect that this type of jump could only be achieved with a new significant insight, but the article seems to say it's just traditional process done better and newer. That's very vague:
> the condensed battery integrates a range of innovative technologies, including the ultra-high energy density cathode materials, innovative anode materials, separators, and manufacturing processes
Are these all things that are common knowledge now, and they're just the first ones to slap them all together, and that it's a short matter of time before all battery manufacturers start providing much better density? Or is there something more to it?
IANAE but from what I've seen, there's been a lot of different potentially "game-changing" breakthroughs in energy storage, but the bottleneck lies in manufacturing capabilities. "Undecided with Matt Ferrell" on Youtube has great content on recent energy storage developments.
Key numbers: They doubled Wh/kg from about 280 to about 500.
I assume that thinking about battery capacity form first principles, the theoretical limit is reached when the charged battery consists of 50% matter and 50% antimatter, right?
Then during discharge, the reaction between the two would turn the matter/antimatter into energy.
How would that stack up against the 500Wh/kg stated here?
Update:
Did a bit of googling (Note to my future self: AI was still bad at math in 2023): Looks like 1kg of mass cointains about 25x10^9 Wh.
So if the above assumptions are right, we still have 8 orders of magnitude to go. An electric car with an optimal battery could go 100,000,000 times further on a single charge than the current ones.
Ridiculously higher. One gram of matter converted to energy (matter-antimatter annihilation assumed to be 100% efficient) yields, using E = mc^2 and 3.6x10^6 Joules per Kilowatt-hour, 25 million Kilowatt-hours
A unit containing matter and antimatter isn’t a battery, it’s a completely different thing altogether.
Maybe a slightly closer but still very different example would be a core of weapons grade plutonium. But what you’ve described would be far more powerful than that.
How combustible are these batteries compared to the standard lower density ones, and if one of them catches fire, how easy/hard is it for the fire department to get it under control?
Lithium-air and all other -air batteries have outsourced part of their mass to the atmosphere, which is also part of the reason why liquid motor fuel has such high apparent density. The joke with lithium-air batteries is they absorb oxygen when they discharge, so a dead battery is full of lithium peroxide and weighs significantly more than a charged one.
How do these batteries compare in terms of charge/discharge cycles? I suppose that if they can store twice the energy by mass, they'd only need 1/2 the cycles to be equivalent, yes?
If it's twice the density and the same number of cycles, a BEV will have a lifetime of 4 ICE vehicles.
You're right, and it's not just a minor pet peeve. It's a major error that recurs throughout the article and it destroys the credibility of the website and reporter.
They even refer to "energy intensity", which as far as I am concerned doesn't refer to anything.
1200wh/kg is when it will get really interesting to me. Half the weight and double the range would be great. Plus, electrified ultralight "aircraft" start to have numerous advantages over the traditional 2 stoke engines.
Why would it only be interesting at that point? At 500wh/kg, if the cost is low enough, you're already going to eliminate fossil fuels from basically everything except long range flights and shipping.
> Half the weight and double the range would be great
You don't need to quadruple energy density to achieve that. If you just half the weight (without increasing the total amount of energy in the battery), you're going to significantly increase range. The less weight you have, the less energy you need to move the vehicle.
> Plus, electrified ultralight "aircraft" start to have numerous advantages over the traditional 2 stoke engines.
I think you'll have plenty of benefits with ~300wh/kg (that's the target for many useful eVTOL aircraft).
The key challenge is you should redesign the whole aircraft around electric flight to get the full benefits. Look at NASAs Maxwell X-57 for an example of how that could look.
With 500wh/kg you can start taking over most regional flights. Yes, the range won't be as good as jet planes. But jet planes have FAR more range than they need because they don't design a special purpose aircraft for shorter range. They just put less fuel in.
But it'll probably take 10-20 years regardless of when we get good batteries because it'll take a long time to design and certify the aircrafts.
Ultralight have a very specific set of regulations. 500wh/kg is where you can really start to use it in that application. Currently there are models with electric, but it's about 1 hour flight time (advertised) and you don't have great margins. If you can reduce the weight and get a true 2 hours, then that would replicate the characteristics of today's 2 stroke.
Another point is that it won't take very long for ultralight since they aren't technically defined as an aircraft but as an air vehicle. You can home build them.
Yes, you might see a 10% increase in range with half the vehicle weight. If you tow or take long trips, you want double the range. At that density, you're choosing one or the other, or an "eh" compromise. I want 800 miles and less weight/size. This can especially be useful for retrofit kits for existing vehicles for people who hate all the tech in the EVs.
> But it'll probably take 10-20 years regardless of when we get good batteries because it'll take a long time to design and certify the aircrafts.
I'm wondering if large aircraft companies are actually already designing the next aircraft based on assumed battery densities? I know they put out press releases with nice looking renderings, but I am talking about serious development?
If you wait until you have the batteries on hand, and then spend 20 years to design a plane (and 20 years might be conservative, since arppovals will be harder to get for a brand new concept), you might be left behind. Instead, they could be already designing the plane and when 500Wh/Kg is available, boom, they are 15 years ahead.
I feel like this is a misunderstanding of HN's niche... For most of my time here the majority of articles have been about social media and other consumer web and mobile apps. Which makes sense because that's what Silicon Valley has been up to and this is an SV rag. It's nice that there are also lots of nerds here who are interested in other, frankly way more interesting, technologies so we get a good number of articles about those too. But your criticism just strikes me as odd. Generative AI is much more interesting and fundamentally new than the stuff I was reading about here a decade ago when Instagram filters were the new hotness...
so I worry a bit about energy density when it comes to accidents/battery breakage/fires/explosions/ect... anyone have any idea if these batteries are any safer than the currently used tech?
I like the headline, specifically aimed at aviation. This might definitely turn some heads. While this is still strong on the marketing with few details, it shows the intent to electrify air travel at some point, which is a good thing IMO. Also might put pressure on SAF, which themselves have a long way to go.
Also, this could be interesting already for existing small and/or short range airplanes like Pipistrel‘s training aircraft or Eviation‘s Alice. I don‘t know the energy density of their current batteries, but this could give them a boost very soon.
I’d take that. I charge every night anyway, 2 day battery life doesn’t mean much to me. I want my iPhone to be lighter, it’s too damned heavy right now.
Nice this would mean potentially cheaper electrical cars with same or longer range than today or more expensive cars with much longer range than today.
While it does use lithium it doesn't necessarily have to use the 'same chemistry' as existing technologies. Beyond that, they haven't (or maybe never will) release fully the technology so we can not know.
It uses a solid-state electrolyte which is probably big reason for capacity increase. It is the flammable liquid electrolyte that causes fires in lithium ion batteries. Solid-state electrolyte shouldn’t be flammable, that is main reason people have been researching solid-state electrolytes.
Like Amazon shopping, I come here for the 1-star reviews. Does it charge in cold? Will it catastrophically fail when punctured? Does it wear out over time? At this point only the negatives matter.
Would a bunch of economists and sustainability researchers have to redo their calculations for how sustainable the electric vehicle future just became?
They were battery kings well before that. CATL is the OG of the LiFePO4 chemistry and developed most of the mass production techniques to make the chemistry feasible. Tesla came along later and just bought lots of their stuff.
Yeah precisely. Tesla only adopted LFP when they started production in China and instead of producing their own batteries like they had to in US they just bought from CATL instead. CATL was already supplying SAIC, JAG, BYD, etc in China well before Tesla landed there.
That would of course be equivalent of deploying an air brake almost the size of the rotor/propeller disk. So descend rates would be pretty fast, and aerodynamic stability not necessarily guaranteed.
In the end you probably have to design the aircraft for it. Might be worth it for applications like sky-diving planes or heli-sking helicopters.
I believe car manufacturers are already big in battery production, for them it's as crucial as ICE production was before. It takes time to ramp up but I'd expect battery tech to be a key component that large manufacturers will want to have in house. But it could be one of the first key technologies where Chinese companies are a few years ahead of European and American companies.
This one seems pretty different to me, because it is "largest battery manufacturer to start mass producing these this year" rather than "promising startup has battery breakthrough that they need to convince someone to actually manufacture".
and then in Germany right wing/neoliberal politicians run around, make smug faces and tell people: ooooh, we need e-fuels because those combustion engines, they are sooooo good, the chinese are envious and will just copy (yes. for tanks...).
During their reign:
- solar industry: gone (in the 2000s germany had everything, domestically produced)
- wind energy: gone (well, Siemens did it themselves too)
- existing domestic electronics production: gone (Siemens had highly automated facilities producing state of the art mainboards...)
- in the pandemic masks were bought in China for billions. All the while the automation companies newly taken over by their Chinese joint venture partner were happy to show people how they built those in their chinese factories...
They call it responsible, I call it Seppuku...
Oh and of course they now want to build nuclear plants after they've shown for the last 30years that we have reached a state of more dysfunctional oligarchy than the Soviet Union ever was (they changed their system! Here the mantra is "There Is No Alternative"). I congratulate the chinese oligarchy for somehow keeping an interest in the physical world and fleecing two continents of 1200 million people for all they built and some more while their people are infighting on idiotic frontlines.
> Oh and of course they now want to build nuclear plants after they've shown for the last 30years that we have reached a state of more dysfunctional oligarchy than the Soviet Union ever was
I can't express how much I hate this. In terms of technology and engineering, nuclear is now so mature that it should be used everywhere solar doesn't make sense. Yet, in terms of politics, society and governance, we are still stuck in the state of 1970s. Putting nuclear in their hands is just irresponsible
China is.going to have the largest fleet of nuclear reactors in the world, all within a decade or two. We can bitch and moan all we want about their governance system but when it counts they are always the ones doing the right thing while Western governments hold their dicks and piss into the wind.
You seem to imply this is a sign of a failing of the west. I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion based on your data point, they produce everything for everyone and they have 1.5 billion inhabitants. It doesn't exactly come as a surprise that they require a lot of energy. China already has the largest coal, solar, wind, hydro energy production in the world.
We had a giant first mover advantage and didn't just squander it but fell behind the Chinese by a full generation.
We should be living in a post-scarcity era for energy. Instead we are contending with $80 crude prices and a future of trying to build a grid out of itermittent sources a lots of storage. None of that would have been necessary had we not dropped the ball.
It's ridiculous to dump these failures on the right wings/neoliberals. The actual government (and past governments) should take responsibility for the dumpster fires.
Do you not feel this is an unreasonable expectation? I wouldn’t think we would ever get to the point where phones are only charged once a year. This assumes that power consumption would not increase over time.
This is a lot more credible than most of the battery stories, because CATL is already producing a ton of batteries, lending them some credibility.
This is a little under 2x the density of current batteries.