DC Servo motors have been with us for I have no idea how many decades. They can be easily controlled and deliver power with delicacy or force as required. The idea of four huge DC Servos controlled by computers to deliver power and to adapt to any road conditions makes me all warm and fuzzy. I do believe people will pass out at the generated G-Forces that those cars could develop unchecked. I also believe they will be very efficient and will have 10 times the range of the leanest gas-powered in the market.
But what we have right now is the equivalent of a Ferrari F8 Tributo running with steam engine circa 19th Century.
Till electrical vehicles can generate their power as they need without batteries, they will be pretty toys.
And EXPENSIVE! They will never be as efficient as internal combustion cars. Battery technology is just not there. Electric cars are a city toy so woke asshats can commute to thier cubical and be all smug.
We bought our first hybrid early in the game. Not to save the world or to stop climate change, but to save our wallets.
Because of the commute distances and the cost of gas, that car paid for itself in fuel savings and then when we replaced it, we got a very good retention of value.
After 15 years the second one died. Not the electrics, the actual motor. Given the cost of repair, we are going to replace it instead of fix. And because our commutes are near 10 miles per week, it won’t be a hybrid.
I looked at electric and could not justify the costs. At a time when I would have been commuting 160 miles per day and 600 on the weekend, it would not have had the range. Electrics are not working cars so much as short commute and local shopping.
Agreed, a great idea limited by the vision and practicalities of our current companies and tech.
15 years ago you’d have been laughed off a job sight for having a cordless drill on your tool kit. Now one of the first things that gets unboxed at the start of the day is the hot swap charging base for said tools.
I can not wait to see high end performance racing done with motorcycles and someday sports aircraft with this. Heck first person view drone racing could be amazingly popular in it’s current form with some more attention paid to making courses look cool and a good video editor.
“Till electrical vehicles can generate their power as they need without batteries, they will be pretty toys.”
A agree that electric cars are basically pretty toys, but I’m not sure how you think they’ll ever work without batteries. Electricity doesn’t come from unicorn farts and magic. It has to be generated by something or stored by something.
I suppose after they perfect the cold fusion reactor and everyone as a Mr. FusionTM in their car*. That would work. Someday. If it’s even possible. Until then it’s batteries or nothing.
And even if they get battery technology refined to the point that a charge will last through a full day of travel (say, 600 miles) and/or can be recharged as fast as you can fill your gas tank, you’ll never convince me that the strip mines needed to produce the rare earth minerals used in modern batteries and the toxic waste generated both when the batteries are made and when trillions of batteries reach their end of life is more ecologically friendly than burning gasoline in a modern, low emission vehicle.
*100 internet points if you get where that reference comes from
There are no rare earth metals in lithium batteries as far as I know. They do show up in the motors, if you use permanent magnet motors. Tesla, at least in the model S, uses induction motors which avoid that cost and hazard, and somehow manage to do regenerative braking with these motors.
As for “expensive toys”, that’s an overstatement. I agree with Therefore. Bought a Honda Insight (original version) because I like how the technology worked. 10 years later, traded it in for a Tesla A, same reasoning. I don’t care about tree huggers, but the performance and handling of the S is outstanding and that I enjoy a great deal.
“Good only in the city”? Not true. Even my 2013 model gets around 230 mile range very comfortably, and the newer models do better than that. I don’t travel long distances, but as of a couple of years ago I could easily have taken my car to my college reunion (NH to WI) and today it’s easier still. No, I can’t drive a full day without recharging. Some have pointed out that stopping to recharge every 200 miles or so isn’t so bad, it’s a 20-30 minute rest break every 4 hours or so, which gets you to your destination less tired out than when driving long stretches. It’s no surprise that charging stations are often located next to places where you can grab a bite to eat or a cup of coffee.
Something else: battery swapping has been demonstrated and works well technically; the barriers to deploying it widely are more in customer perception. (People aren’t used to treating a big chunk of their car that way, and the accounting and warranty and all that would need to be worked out.) Tesla had that demonstrated and operating in a few location on a trial basis; it worked and did the job faster than filling a gas tank.
Would I like a car like the S that can drive across the continent without stopping? Sure. But for most purposes, what I have today does the job for me. If I need to haul a big load of cargo or tow a big trailer I’ll dust off the pickup truck, but only then.
Ferdinand Porsche presented diesel-electric drive trains for every large tank design he pitched — the torque and elimination of the transmission would solve half the problems the Nazis’ biggest tanks faced.
BUT they needed large amounts of copper, which Germany doesn’t have, so the Wehrmacht turned down his suggestions every time.
Both Tesla (Elon Musk personally) and Toyota Motors have said in public announcements that electric cars are a niche market at best because we don’t have enough electrical generation capacity in the world to charge them all if we replaced all the Internal Combustion Engine cars with electrics. Yes, they’re very useful in some situations; that’s the definition of niche market.
I believe in physics. There’s a fundamental, difficult barrier that electric vehicles have to fight. Battery makers are desperately working out how to someday reach a specific energy of 1000 Wh/kg (Watt-hours per kilogram), gasoline already offers 12,000 Wh/kg. The best EV batteries now are pushing 500 Wh/kg.
Niche market because there is just not enough lithium mined to support all the demand. (Among other reasons)
If every passenger car (not truck/suv/van, only sedans and coupes) were to go electric, it would use up all of the world’s lithium production, plus some. It is the batteries that are limiting the usefulness of electric vehicles, not the performance or cost. (Well, the batteries are driving the cost).
Give me an easy way to generate the 88GWs* of electricity needed, without requiring regular recharges, and we are good.
*100pts.
The concept behind mass adoption of electric cars requires two simultaneous technological breakthroughs, in both photovoltaic solar collectors and batteries. Both are currently very inefficient. And people have spent a lot of time and money to make the incremental improvements that we’ve seen in the last 20 years. Just because we want something to be possible doesn’t mean that it is possible. The fastest air-breathing plane (SR71) was built in the 1960s, and we can’t go faster in a practical design because of the limits of physics and the materials that are available on our planet. Achieving one technological breakthrough would be a miracle, expecting two to happen at the same time is wishful thinking.
Without both breakthroughs, the whole concept will still have to rely on natural gas and coal fired power plants, or…gasp…nuclear power.
And electric cars are seriously handicapped in colder climates, because the use of electric resistance heat for cabin temperature control seriously reduces its range.
Expecting two breakthroughs at once? No biggy, non believers swear two genders evolved out of primordial slime, at the same time to allow procreation. Too different DNA strands at once, so two(hell, a dozen) technologies should be a piece of cake.
Most of the newest electric cars are AC motors. Less maintenance.
And one should have an emergency generator in every electric vehicle.
I did some calculations when the Green New Deal first came out (tried to get WSJ to publish it, they did not).
On electric vehicles: switching all cars and trucks to electric would raise the US electricity consumption only about 20 percent. However, the batteries needed would consume 21 times the current annual world-wide lithium production.
Of course, even a 20% demand increase would wreck the California electric grid… 🙁