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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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Actually, piston engines are really bad a torque. It’s why they need a flywheel or a large amount of pistons.
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.
Gas engine makes good noises. Checkmate.
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
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.
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”
Vroom vroom is fun.
Shifting is fun.
Fun is good.
“Good” = “manly” to you? Wow. Sexist.
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.
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.
Between the fart can and the Lambo, which are you more likely to hear?
So total fucking silence? I swear to God it’s like the call to stroke each other off for you guys.
Huh?
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?
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
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.
On the other other hand, gas car makers have regulators by the ballsack. So we’ve got that going for us which is nice
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?
Cool but they sound like shit. No aesthetics in evs. You don’t feel connected to the car. Don’t feel the engagement. But hey, cars are all about stats, right, right??
The one thing stopping me is seeing how they fare long term with the overwhelming amount of electronics added to the cars.
Hopefully car manufacturers goes a different direction as electronic and appliances company went. Everyone I know that are into EVs went through 2 or 3 different one in the time I’ve owned my ICE car (~10 years). Most because of their lease ending and wanting the absolute newest but others due to battery issues making the car a total loss due to replacement cost.
I’m hoping that as EVs become more common, conversion kits become a thing. Both straight-electric and PHEV; I would love to pull the oversized engine from my truck (it’s a 4.0 in a Ranger, wtf, it doesn’t need that kind of power) and replace it with a diesel-electric motor-battery-generator combo. With a half decent battery, I would be running on electric 95% of the time; for the other 5% (which is camping on rough trails, no I’m not renting a truck for it), there’d be the diesel generator backup
I mean that’s not really a problem specific to EVs. But yeah I also drive an aging car because I don’t want one with 10x more failure points.
Most because of their lease ending and wanting the absolute newest
Technology is moving so fast that this seems like a reasonable approach to me.
Which is also the reason why I wish to wait for the technology to stabilize a little.
I’m not optimistic about this. The finance “geniuses” have seen how much money software and electronics companies are making from subscription models and trying to put them into even combustion powered cars. I think it’s BMW that’s already started trying to put heated seats on a subscription model. The equipment’s already in the car but it’s disabled unless you pay them a monthly fee.
It’s about the battery, nerd. 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
We’ll just do what trains do.
Replace the battery with a massive diesel generator. Run that to get power to the electric motors.
Best of both worlds!
The way of Toyota hybrids! Though those can power wheels somewhat-directly too.
Some trains. In most of Europe, trains are electric and get their power from overhead lines (same for trams and even some buses).
On the other hand, many large ships are diesel-electric. And those gigantic mining haulers as well.
Electric vehicles a bad product for 95% of people right now. When is America just going to invest in public transportation.
Pouring billions of dollars widening highway widening projects and giving automotive companies a tax break to charge a premium on electric cars has always been idiotic.
What do you mean by bad for 95% of people? 95% of people drive less than 60 miles in a day. Which is something that can easily be recovered overnight with a standard 15 amp outlet not even a special dedicated charger they would have been fine with early electric vehicles much less what we have today
Your Lemmy instance is running under Estonian domain and yet you still imagine the world as just USA
Do you really believe that 95% of people live in the USA? Guess what, you’re wrong. And for 95% of population electric cars are amazing.
I think there was a Renault that worked like this. I think the main issue is that you need a decently sized battery that can supply enough power or else the ICE needs to start every time you hit the gas pedal like was the case with the older Prius models and then you might as well connect it to the wheels and you can have a smaller electric motor.
But batteries keep improving and you can pull more power per kWh now. Maybe with solid state batteries this power train could become the more affordable option.
Best of both worlds!
This is a joke, right? Efficiency is atrocious.
Hybrid cars were a topic in germany a few years ago. Laws provided funding for them too (grouped as EVs), despite their huge weight and low efficiency. I think it was solved since then?
He is not wrong, but he is not adressing the actual criticism of electric vehicles, so it is kind of pointless.
What interests me is the terror threshold. People are just so much more, including me, afraid of electric motors vs ICE per kw.
I would absolutely love to have an EV. But they are very expensive, especially compared to the gas-powered car I already own.
If you read comments on Instagram and the like, people hate electric cars because…
…they don’t do the vroom-vroom noise.
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.
Gas engines smell good 🥰
Eventually that’ll be one of the quaint old timey smells at the county fair.
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.
