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Alt text:
An idling gas engine may be annoyingly loud, but that’s the price you pay for having WAY less torque available at a standstill.
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The reason I’m pretty much undecided about EVs is the rare metals in the batteries. The pollution by gathering and the inhumane treatment of the workers who extract these resources. I’m still hoping for better alternatives in the energy storage medium
Extremely rare XKCD L
Just gonna say the motors have never been the problem, it’s always been the battery. See train engines, they are diesel generator with electric motors.
This is where history pisses me off. We should have been headlong into battery research after the oil embargoes.
I think people forget that petroleum is consented and distilled solar energy. One gallon of gasoline is the results of years of solar energy.
Non renewable solar energy unfortunately.
Renewable fuels exist and are used today, but the efficiency and pollution aspects still apply.
If you’re making your diesel from CO2 pulled from the air, pollution aspects don’t really apply (at least, CO2 emission issues don’t, there’s still NOx, but that’s what cat piss is for).
Problem is, converting atmospheric CO2 back into fuel makes the efficiency issue drastically worse. Maybe with enough solar panels and windmills, and use the Fischer–Tropsch process with the excess energy that the grid isn’t consuming.
Of course, that would be for mobile fuel, if solar plants were going to do anything like that for later use generating electricity during peaks, making diesel is dumb; you’d want to use hydrogen or ammonia for in-place energy storage.
I was thinking about fuels like HVO. They work well, but have their own ecological implications.
Ah. I’m generally skeptical of any plant-based ‘green fuel’ because they generally take up agricultural capacity that would otherwise be producing food
Happy cake day!
A lot of people have been having their cake days recently. Guess it’s the first anniversary of the Reddit exodus.
Energy density is a huge advantage which most people find hard to give up especially when the biggest problem that we face is invisible to most people. We can’t fix a problem if we ignore the cause.
No, it’s renewable. But… not in any practical timeframe.
Not really. Its trees from a time before micro organisms evolved the ability to eat dead trees. These days, the solar energy collected by trees will get used to power the metabolisms of fungi before those trees can get buried and eventually become new coal & petroleum.
I suppose an impact from a sufficiently large asteroid could turn the entire crust of the planet into magma, sterilizing it and therefore opening the possibility that new oil might be created some day.
IIEC it is actually mostly from algea. A small amount from some fern-like plants. By the time trees existed, they were being broken down by bacteria.
I think I read somewhere that oil will not be produced anymore because now bacteria can break down that biomass that it previously didn’t. Hence, non-renewable even on long timescales.
That’s not the definition of renewable.
It is iv we use it sustainably.
Only if we bring back the dinosaurs. There are six movies (and counting!) explaining why this is not a good idea.
Technically no. Only if we erase bacteria capable of breaking down trees.
oops you posted irrelevant pedantics that verge on misinformation 😧
sure it’s distilled solar energy that cannot be renewed. relevant language highligted. no one “forgets,” this. literally no one. it’s just not relevant to a timespan less than millions of years. cheers! ☀️
Petroleum can’t be renewed, but biofuels can be.
v true but i also dislike how biofuels get smorked into yet more CO2 which is kind of a problem rn
Biofuels are carbon-neutral. They release CO2 when burned, but it doesn’t matter because that same CO2 had recently been sucked out of the atmosphere by the plant they came from.
In theory true. In reality not true.
While U.S. biofuel use rose from 0.37 to 1.34 EJ/yr over this period, additional carbon uptake on cropland was enough to offset only 37 % of the biofuel-related biogenic CO2emissions. This result falsifies the assumption of a full offset made by LCA and other GHG accounting methods that assume biofuel carbon neutrality. Once estimates from the literature for process emissions and displacement effects including land-use change are considered, the conclusion is that U.S. biofuel use to date is associated with a net increase rather than a net decrease in CO2emissions. study
Not passing judgement on anything, just putting the facts out there that I happen to know :) Biofuel may or may not be a good tool to move toward more sustainability, and it’s certainly better than petrol.
My biofuel of choice is biodiesel produced from byproducts of chicken rendering that would otherwise become waste/pollution anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The way I see it, we should electrify all the things that can be (urban driving, both freight and passenger trains, etc.), maximize the use of those things (e.g. by shifting long-haul freight away from trucking and back towards rail, and shifting airline travel to high-speed rail), and then use biofuels for the relatively-niche stuff that’s left instead of spending excessive effort trying to get electric to cover 100% of cases.
Um piss off. It is not irrelevant or misinformation. That is exactly what petroleum is.
You clearly can’t understand a factual statement from an opinion I never said it was good I never said it was bad I just said it was. If you’d bother to take a moment to think about it. You would realize that I was referring to the fact that petroleum is extremely energy dense. For the very reason I stated. That is fundamentally why petroleum has become a successful energy source and why it’s been so difficult to replace.
You’re welcome to point out where I said it was renewable. I think you’re going to have a difficult time finding that statement.
As for being a pedantic ass that’s clearly your territory. A pedantic ass that it likes to put words in other people’s mouths.
Your post was bordering on irrelevant to the original comment. In light of that the information you provided can really only be interpreted is as pro-fossil fuel.
Just because you can only interpret it that way doesn’t mean it is true.
Exactly this. Imagine if gas powered motor could recharge in mere 12 hours and run for up to half the distance. Ah, that would be the dream.
And if you and 5 of your neighbors decide to refuel at the same time during peak hours you have a real chance of overloading your neighborhood grid. And your fuel tank is dead in 5 years, replacing which is more than half of your used cars cost.
Everything non-portable uses electric motors from the time the first wire was invented.
Boy it sure is easy to win a debate when you use fictional information
When you look at fueleconomy.gov you will see that the furthest a compact ev can go is 149 miles while the furthest a ice compact car can go is 594 miles
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/01/why-the-ev-boom-could-put-a-major-strain-on-our-power-grid.html You can read cnbcs article on how the grid is already pretty spread thinn with us already increasing our power demand by almost 3,000% in the last decade without even considering ev charging
https://www.motortrend.com/features/how-long-does-it-take-to-charge-an-ev/
According to motor trend DC charging is the fastest way to charge your EV and it still takes just under two hours Couldn’t find a source that studied how long a ice takes to recharge but considering how ices are currently extremely common you can easily test that yourself and probably already know it’s so quick you don’t even think about it
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a31875141/electric-car-battery-life/
According to car and driver those lithium ion batteries you mentioned while yes they can last a decade most cars typically stay on the road for give or take 30-35 years and lithium ion batteries are inherently expensive and prone to thermal cascading ie catching fire also full charge and depletion wears the battery down over time
https://www.edmunds.com/electric-car/articles/electric-car-battery-replacement-costs.html According to Edmunds.com the average cost of ev battery replacement costs anywhere from 5,000$ to 15,000$ So what point was made up
You have all kinds of nonsense in your post. Like you limit it to just compact cars for no reason. When you don’t limit it to just compact cars then you get EVs with 516 mile range
And charging a car for 15 minutes gives you hundreds of miles of range
https://www.tesla.com/supercharger
Etc.
I am being serious - can you factually counter those points? I’d like to know the truth of the matter.
Batteries don’t fail after 5 years, for starters. Source: literally any used car site
Well.
To fully charge a leaf at a public fast charging station takes an hour. https://www.nissanusa.com/experience-nissan/news-and-events/nissan-leaf-charging-101.html
My up! can get about 260 miles out of its 30ish liter tank. That is about 1/3rd more than a new leaf. Hardly half the distance.
The electric grid will be fine. This is not the first time it’s expanded because of new technological demand. And I’ve never heard of 5 EVs overloading the grid.
And if the person above could read they’d see that all of these are battery problems, something the original comment said we should have put our focus improving on long ago.
I can. Electric car batteries last 10+ years, often longer than the body work of the car. Lookup Lithium Iron Phosphate, this has around 5-10x the cycle life of conventional lithium batteries. Combine this with the complex heating and cooling systems, battery and charging management in modern EVs and you have something that lasts as long or longer than even a diesel engine.
Cell phone batteries die quickly because both their construction and the way they are managed favour capacity, cost, and charging speed over longevity. Car battery design is much more focused on longevity by comparison. They are also cycled more often and more completely than most EVs.
Grid issues are a real problem. Cars can be used to make this worse or better depending on how they are deployed. If they are charged during peak energy production from solar they can actually help rather than hurt the grid.
You can also rapid charge a car in like 30 minutes. You don’t need 12 hours.
Thanks, I’m not sure why I was downvoted for asking a legitimate question.
I suspect people just assumed you were the same person who wrote the sarcastic comment before the one you replied to and that you were just being combative
15 minute recharge adds hundreds of miles of range
No, you see, that’s not how it works. The battery needs to be filled to 100%, just like a gas tank. And you should only ever charge once you’re under 10-20%, just like a gas tank (it’s silly to top up every day, that’s just a waste of time). We must be able to exactly replicate the current paradigm for people to be able to adjust.
I drive about 150 miles a week and get gas every couple of weeks. It takes 5 minutes. If I have to go to a charger I’ll be there for hours. It’s absurd.
Tap for /s
/s
I hope you are not talking about battery locomotives.
With overhead wires the train has a practically unlimited battery capacity.
There are use cases for battery trains. In remote, mountainous locations where the cost for electrifying a track is very high it is not uncommon to use electric trains with batteries. Here in Germany we have several regions where diesel trains have been replaced by them.
Oil is honestly an amazing product, chemistry wise there is so much we can do with it and energy wise it’s a extremely concentrated and easily transported form of energy.
Energy wise one liter of oil is equivalent to 10 person working for a day !
I repeat, using one liter of oil is like having 10 “slaves” working for us for a day.
Its easy to see why oil became the base of our modern civilization, and easy to see why we don’t manage to stop using it even though it’s destroying us.
pretty sure most trains are powered by either overhead wires or third rails? considering that urban rail systems are always electrified and those have A LOT of trains.
Freight trains are diesel electric.
Not in America
okay? i’m talking about the world though, so typical for people to just assume america is all that matters lmao
The point is about utilization of electric motors, if it happens anywhere on earth it’s possible. You’re trying to insinuate that it isn’t true. And it is. Being American has nothing to do with it you dunce
Not really. Battery tech has always been advancing. Even today electric vehicles have barely come up with anything new, battery wise. Everyone wants something better than lithium base. No one can get anything to market.
Didn’t sodium batteries start getting marketed recently?
Yes, but no one’s even glancing at it for use in vehicles. The one that’s finally getting into production is 70wh/Kg. Not nearly energy dense enough yet for ev’s. Lithium batteries are closer to 300wh/Kg. In other words, they take up 1/4th the space and weight. EV’s are already a thousand pounds heavier than non ev’s and that’s already causing extra tire pollution issues and having to overbuild suspension parts and bearings. Making them another 3,000 pounds heavier than that is just out of the question. Let alone making the space to fit the battery.
Sodium is going to change the world with its power storage capabilities connected to solar. Anyone on like 75% of the planet could 100% live off the electric grid problem free with enough solar panels and a big sodium storage battery.
Wasn’t aware that EVs were already that heavy. Then yeah, I guess that’s definitely not feasible, at least not at the moment.
Yep. A size of vehicle wise comparison would be that a tesla model s sedan weighs around 4,600 pounds. A toyota Corolla weighs around 1,600 pounds less at around 3,000 pounds.
Even the newest and most powerful mass produced American made car ever, the “C8 Corvette Z06” with its big V8 gas engine with 670 horsepower weighs in at around 3,650 pounds.
It advanced at a glacier pace because there was no massive driving force. It only kicked off a bit with cell phones and then in any substantial way with laptops. (Yes in case you try to suggest I’m saying otherwise, batteries existed before that aha for different things, but there was no massive driving force.) Now imagine what would have happened if we funded it starting in the 1970s.
I would absolutely love to have an EV. But they are very expensive, especially compared to the gas-powered car I already own.
Real answer: power density. Pound for pound, gas still contains more energy than our best batteries. The weight of energy storage is still a massive deal for anything that cannot be tethered to a grid or be in close practical proximity for frequent recharging, from rockets, planes and cars (sometimes) to chainsaws and lawnmowers (sometimes).
Thing is that pound of gas is gone, that pound of battery is still there and ready for recharge.
A dead battery is far worse than an empty jerry can, atleast the jerry can is light. Hell there are even some real nice collapsible ones and thats not even accounting for fuel bladders. Electric is useful but it is also rather rigid as well.
A pound of dead battery doesn’t help me when I’m camping 10km from the nearest access to the power grid. (There are actually powerlines not even a kilometre from my favourite campsite, but those are going to be measured in kV, and so aren’t really useful to me.)
Now, if I had enough solar panels in a mobile setup, probably folding out of a trailer, I could make it work, but solar panels are expensive.
But solar panel costs are falling way faster than battery costs.
Sure, but even then there are plenty of cases where a solar panel doesn’t make much sense either. If you’re cutting down a tree in the woods, would you rather grab your gas-powered chainsaw out of your truck and cut down the tree, or grab your solar-powered chainsaw out of your truck, spend minutes setting up solar panels to pick up the small amount of sunlight which makes it to the forest floor, and then cut down the tree?
The point is there will always be a market for ICEs until there are batteries with competitive energy density to gasoline. You don’t see solar- or battery-powered trains or construction/mining equipment because these things need huge amounts of energy to work, energy which can be easily stored in a fairly small fuel tank (which can be quickly topped off when necessary).
Absolutely, just like there’s some things a horse can do that a car just can’t.
I don’t plan on buying a horse or needing to do those things, and I don’t think the vast majority do either.
The end result is that there will still be ICEs in niche applications, but those who know how to operate them and the supply chains that currently make them cheap and dominant will slowly die off.
Density is relative to efficiency, and electric wins
What i cannot understand is people trying to defend something that is clearly worse,
Googling tells me that:
- Electric cars have 77% efficiency
- Gas cars have 30% efficiency
- Electric car batteries have 270 Wh/kg (converts to 0.97 MJ/kg)
- Gasoline has 46 MJ/kg
So the math here says electric gives you (0.97 * 77%) 0.75 MJ/kg output and gas gives you (46 * 30%) 13.8 MJ/kg output. Plus, as someone else said, spent gasoline no longer weighs you down.
I like the idea of electric, and I want to see it replace gas as soon as possible, but fair is fair.
How do you think about hydrogen cars? They have better fuel density, and hydrogen is renewable.
Technically empty batteries weigh less than charged batteries.
Not that the difference is significant enough to tip the scale though.
And let’s not forget that fueling your car requires a tank, a decently sized pump and 2 minutes of your time. A quick charge will hopefully charge your battery to 80% in 30 minutes, while giving you less km and running 300kW of power through hefty cables and big transformers, consuming the amount of energy that a family house consumes in a few days.
(And yes, battery manufacturing and disposal consume enormous amount of resources)
Electric and gas have different situations in which they shine. Gas/diesel engines are just a bunch of steel and some control chips, optimized in more thana century of technological development if we couls develop carbon neutral fuel, electric cars would not be needed. Unfortunately, it woulf be difficult to do at scale of current fuel consumption. More (electric, battery-less) public transport, less road goods transportation, more nuclear, electric for vehicles that move 100% of the time (delivery and logistic vehicles) and carbon-free fuel for other kinds of vehicles (personal transportation) is a good balance, in my personal, ignorant, armchair opinion.
The argument that I’ve heard is that electric cars aren’t actually cleaner because of the pollution caused by mining the minerals required for the batteries.
I’m sorry but I’m too lazy to dig up links to back up my claim. But you are correct in that electric vehicles pollute far more being produced than combustion engine cars, however the electric vehicles gain that back over it’s lifetime if your charge from mostly non-fossil sources. The figures I have read says that over the lifetime of a car, electrics output 70% less CO2 than combustion cars, and that includes the production of each of the cars.
Gas engine makes good noises. Checkmate.
I don’t see how making noise is good. I live in a street that doesn’t get much traffic, but even one car is loud enough to be bothering.
I don’t want to pause my music and conversations just because someone decided that vroom vroom sounds were more important than me hearing literally anything else.
Even more that noise pollution is definitely a thing, and affect both mental health and physical one.
The majority of sound for cars are not the motor but the wheels compressing air, after I think 50kph, the sound of an ev or a ic is basically the same.
Vehicles making noise actually is good, for pedestrians’ sake, but yeah ICE vehicles make far more than they need to. Some (? many? I’m not sure how standard it is) electric vehicles make a sort of beeping sound for that reason.
If you’re in an area where pedestrians may be crossing the road, traffic should be slow enough to use permeable brick pavers, which increase road noise, help with rainwater drainage, and add a little green to the road if find right.
Well that sounds cool; what about those of us who live in conservative hellscapes? I’m pretty sure ‘road maintenance’ is a sin here
I dunno, maybe take their conservative advice and violently overthrow your government?
Real talk, you’ll have a hell of a time arguing for the upgrades, but even so, I only suggest switching to bricks when the road needs to be resurfaced anyway. The road works well enough as-is, this is just an improvement.
Oh, the road needs resurfacing, most of them here do. Decades of conservative government will do that
When you’ve inevitably barricaded yourself in city hall, just remember: we never met, this conversation didn’t happen. Revan? Never heard of 'em.
It’s incredible how certain people are conditioned to think the sound of a gas motor and shifting because your puny motor is out of optimal torque and rpm range are manly.
Vroom vroom is fun.
Shifting is fun.
Fun is good.
Never said anything about it being manly, but it can sound good.
Yeah, I guess all those professional female race car drivers are doing it to feel “manly”
I’m a car guy and far from manly. I drive a loud annoying stick shift because it’s fun and life is too short to be bored while driving.
Life is too short to have to fucking drive everywhere.
Yeh, but unless I uproot my life and move to a different country, I’m stuck doing it, so I can either bitch and moan about how much I hate it, or have the best time I can doing it 🤷🏾♂️
For sure, I used to drive stick when I drove, but I also argued for town planning that would make driving optional. Personal choices to deal with the reality you’re given, public policy activism for the reality you want.
“Good” = “manly” to you? Wow. Sexist.
There you go pointlessly gendering again!
Think of the most annoying sound you know. Whether it’s country music, rap, lawnmower before 8am on sat, etc that is your “good noises” sound like.
Think of the nicest sound you know. A well-tuned instrument performing a delicate melody, a passionate singer performing their heart out, a cacophony of songbirds. That’s what my good noises sound like when done right.
Obviously nobody wants to hear a fart can Honda Civic at 4am, but a fantastically engineered Italian V10 has its own melody that can’t really be replicated otherwise. These examples will be missed, and the survivors will be sought after like a vintage violin.
So total fucking silence? I swear to God it’s like the call to stroke each other off for you guys.
Huh?
Between the fart can and the Lambo, which are you more likely to hear?
There is a huge difference between a finely tuned V8 with an appropriate muffler versus a gas lawnmower, but to each there own.
Great username btw
Mr. Monkey subjectively your finely tuned v8 sounds like a 400lb basement dwelling gorilla someone has fed laxatives and recorded from the bottom of a well used coachella porta potty.
I dunno, I’m “team electric is objectively better in every way” but I gotta agree, a fancy tuned racecar engine sounds like angry beast and that’s pretty sexy.
The jolt of max acceleration of an electric motor in complete silence is also extremely sexy, though.
Lol ok I get it you’re all Car-o-sexuals. It’s cool but can you guys just keep it to your bedrooms and rest stops?
I don’t care much about cars overall but I do like angry beasts…
In today’s edition of lemmy: poetry.
You just gonna sit there and yuck the mainstream yum like your opinions are better than everyone else’s?
When accelerating my Leaf makes a “woooooooooooOOOOOOOOP” noise I’ve seen described as the “UFO sound”
Tbh I like it a lot more than the vroom of even my motorcycle cuz it’s funny
I do love the whine of the drive units when going full throttle on EVs, it reminds me how much current is surging through those wires
The ioniq 5 N has that covered, evidently: https://youtu.be/DSIguemKIbQ?si=Do2diTJm8-_Hb9Ro
Or playing cards in the wheels
Lol i would definitely buy that. And i don’t own a car…but if i would
Someone has to build quite a few more power stations though. Assuming you’re talking about swapping a large fraction of the car fleet to EV, not just a few here and there. That’s a substantial increase in total electricity demand. Enough to radically impact the load on the grid.
And if you end up burning natual gas / coal to meet the marginal increase in demand - as would seem fairly likely - then much of the thermal conversion losses you’re saving in the higehr efficieny motor just get shifted to the furnace in the power station and transmission/distribution system; so that can erode some of the efficiency benefits.
I guess you could require for every new EV that they also install roftop solar PV and basically buy a spare battery of near same capacity as the car. that might push the up front and periodic replacement cost a bit though - quite nice for the running costs i guess.
Another good alternative is to try to convince people to get together and share their electric motors in things callled trains and do as many trips in those as possible - that’s not too popular with most people unless the road congestion is really bad. Something to do with sharing being communism i think,
And if you end up burning natual gas / coal to meet the marginal increase in demand - as would seem fairly likely - then much of the thermal conversion losses you’re saving in the higehr efficieny motor just get shifted to the furnace in the power station and transmission/distribution system; so that can erode some of the efficiency benefits.
- liquid fuels still have to get from the ground -> refinery -> distribution -> gas station -> vehicle so there is transmission cost and loss there
- “we can’t immediately solve all of the problems so let’s not do it” is a pretty bad take. Incremental progress is better than waiting for perfect which basically means never doing it.
Another good alternative is to try to convince people to get together and share their electric motors in things callled trains and do as many trips in those as possible - that’s not too popular with most people unless the road congestion is really bad. Something to do with sharing being communism i think,
I 100% agree everywhere it’s practical. Still, people are going to have to get to train stations somehow. Multi-modal transit could somewhat cover that, but some people would still practically have to drive. Convincing those people to only drive to the nearest station and not all the way to their destination is another challenge to solve.
From personal experience, you also need a garage to keep an electric car in if you’re in an extreme cold climate, those batteries can fail if in the deep cold for long enough and those car companies do NOT have the replacement parts in stock to fix it quickly.
I live in an area with the exact opposite issue (my battery MELTED) so I’m probably wrong, but isn’t that what the battery blankets they try to sell you on when you buy an EV is for?
I live in Canada and own a Bolt. Its a pretty unremarkable EV from a tech standpoint. It keeps the batteries at the right temp by heating and cooling them. It really doesnt require any extra effort or special equipment.
This is why modern EVs need heating and cooling systems for their batteries. Did you have a Nissan Leaf by any chance?
Nah, Chevy Volt
First Gen?
I’ll keep my ICE and ride a bike. I’ll still do less environmental damage than you because I am human powered for all but the trips to the mountains, and then I don’t have to worry about being stranded without a plug.
And I have yet to hear a convincing argument that taking my perfectly working vehicle off the road to buy another manufactured product is still more environmentally friendly than… not buying anything at all.
I don’t give a fuck about initial torque. I’m going to be laughing in my wheetabix when there’s not a single EV older than a decade on their original batteries.
This comic is clearly about lawn mowers people. Who discusses cars when wearing a hat like that?
He is not wrong, but he is not adressing the actual criticism of electric vehicles, so it is kind of pointless.
On one hand, electric motors […]
On the other hand, electric motors […]Typo?
That’s the joke
Reading the alt-text makes it more obvious.
you found the joke, now the next step is to get it.
Yeah they’re great. Just gotta pull out a diesel generator to charge them when it’s minus 40
The price. The price is the problem for all us poors.
But remember, electric motors also require next to no maintenance and can last for many years of runtime. Pros and cons.
Uh, maintenance is one thing where ICE wins (until very recently, thanks fucktards in car industry). Cars have been generally very easy to work on, with anyone with a toolbox being able to do most their repairs in a shed
That’s true. But since now it’s all messed up shit that you can’t fix yourself they’re on fairly equal line there.
This isn’t a function of the engine though right? Electric engines are inherently simpler and should therefore be easier to maintain (putting aside company fuckery)
High voltage is scary as fuck, but also the fact that absolutely everything from doors to gas pedal and chairs are controlled by a computer you need specialized proprietary equipment to investigate.
This is an issue with new ice cars too to be honest
That’s a user-hostile feature, not a property of electric engines. An electric car has far simpler mechanical parts, and the circuitry isn’t very complicated either. It could be made incredibly easy to repair, modify, and upgrade, mostly at home even, if they designed them that way
And no gearing, so no complex moving part assemblies…
Unfortunately, brushless motors are also trivial to waterproof.
