There was no electric grid to speak of - even now there is concern the grid can't support all EV's, once you were outside the cities (and there weren't many back then) the grid was spotty. The miracle of being able to pour some cheap liquid in an engine and drive for miles is a considerable achievement.
Lead acid batteries weren't very good and were expensive (and still are) and don't last long compared to petrol engines.
Electric motors were big then - it was only rare earth magnets that made them small enough to consider using in cars at high speed/ranges.
Its always been possible to make a small electric commuter car to drive round at 30mph for short distances but even today there are none like this, because people want to take their cars on the road on the weekend without having to worry. In the 1900's it was the call of the open road and cheap travel (petrol was very cheap then) that made petrol win.
Another reason: Even today the energy density of batteries is SUBSTANTIALLY smaller than that of fossil fuels. [0] We frequently see this graph [1] showing how far batteries have come (they have! and we need to keep going) but not understanding this is part of the issue too. [0] is why we need to keep researching, but [0] is why electric was never going to win in the beginning. It is taking very advanced materials to get to pretty decent energy densities and also advanced materials to use electricity more efficiently. Advanced materials that would likely^ not have been invented that far back even if there was a demand.
This is an incredibly myopic take masquerading as "first principles". First, you're flat wrong on the differences between gas and batteries, especially for cars. Second, you need an actual reason energy density is the fundamental metric- cars aren't rockets and weight isn't the end-all.
It's impossible to neglect the efficiency here. Car-scale combustion engines have a real world efficiency of around ten percent compared to electric. A gallon of E10 contains 34.9 kWh and randomly picking a Toyota Avalon you'll get a real world 17 mpg with that[1], which works out to 16.4 mpge.
Compare that to real world measurements of a Tesla Model 3, a car that is MUCH more powerful and heavier, but gets 147.4 mpge[2]. The Avalon gets 11% as many miles per unit of energy stored. E10 is equivalent to 1.32 kWh/kg (4.8 MJ/kg).
Not to mention that graph of battery energy density is significantly out of date. Normal li-ion, is at 300 Wh/kg (1.1 MJ/kg) and li-sulfur is commercially available at 500 Wh/kg[3] (1.8 MJ/kg). Even Tesla's batteries are above 250 Wh/kg.
So the bottom line is the difference is ~5x right now. Is that enough to matter? 15.5 gallons of gas (standard fuel tank) weighs 44 kg, or 2.7% the total weight of the Avalon. The full capacity in batteries at 250 Wh/kg would weigh 232.32 kg, or 11.4% more. As much as 2 people + luggage. That's a totally irrelevant increase in weight; luxury or performance cars in a given class can weigh DOUBLE the lightest cars in the same class.
The energy density of batteries is a red herring for all vehicles except cargo/tanker ships and long-distance airplanes. It's completely irrelevant for vehicles. The charging speed is arguably minorly important but by FAR the most important things are the upfront and lifetime cost. That is related to energy density... the energy density of the power plant's fuel, not the battery. And again, it's incredibly naive to assume the weight is the major factor in cost.
It seems like you responded only to the gravimetric density part of the chart and not the volumetric part of the chart.
For performance cars, weight is absolutely a factor. (I'm not aware of any performance cars that weigh twice as much as their competition.)
(I do think it is fair to ignore the financial energy density and assume that a century of progress would have addressed substantial fraction of that gap.)
> It seems like you responded only to the gravimetric density part of the chart and not the volumetric part of the chart.
Gravimetric (specific energy, Wh/kg or MJ/kg) energy is generally more relevant than volumetric (energy density, Wh/l or MJ/l), because batteries are about twice the density of gasoline. Weight is also more valuable than volume in most vehicles, and a battery system already takes up hardly any more than a full combustion system. For example most electric vehicles now have a front trunk just to use up the newly available space.
> For performance cars, weight is absolutely a factor. (I'm not aware of any performance cars that weigh twice as much as their competition.)
Sure, but again this is an 11% weight difference, and range matters least on a performance car. A 918 weighs 25% more than an Agera RS. If you want to talk about power density, an electric battery will beat a gas engine to absolute shreds.
> If you want to talk about power density, an electric battery will beat a gas engine to absolute shreds.
Most (all?) production electric cars struggle to do a full power complete lap of Nürburgring Nordschleife without heat-related issues. They're amazing at the Stoplight Grand Prix (and I enjoy my cheap LEAF daily), but struggle as racecars.
>> I'm not aware of any performance cars that weigh twice as much as their competition.
> Sure, but again this is an 11% weight difference
I was just responding to a previous post claiming that "performance cars in a given class can weigh DOUBLE the lightest cars in the same class", nothing more. If you claim the span is much less than double, then I agree.
> Most (all?) production electric cars struggle to do a full power complete lap of Nürburgring Nordschleife without heat-related issues. They're amazing at the Stoplight Grand Prix (and I enjoy my cheap LEAF daily), but struggle as racecars.
No, they just don't make electric race cars. There is not yet sufficient demand. Properly cooled electric batteries make as much power as f1 engines without breaking a sweat.
Sony VTC5a cells[1] are 85% efficient at their full rated power, and can sustain that continuously for their full capacity. They do 2.4 kW/kg without a gas tank, exhaust, turbos, or intake. Their ten second burst current is double that, 4.8 kW/kg. That puts it at the same level or higher than current f1 engines, which run less than 2000 km.
If you count the weight of ancillaries as you should, electric batteries come out way ahead, particularly the most powerful ones.
> I was just responding to a previous post claiming that "performance cars in a given class can weigh DOUBLE the lightest cars in the same class", nothing more. If you claim the span is much less than double, then I agree.
I was referring to the A-F market segments when I said class, not saying that performance have a weight range that large. Performance or luxury cars can weigh twice as much as a lightweight car of the same rough size.
It would also be nice if they responded to my actual point. Which was the state of technology over a hundred years ago. Using bad lead acid batteries vs poor efficiency petrol engines. The petrol was just way ahead at the time.
The tl;dr is that market forces led to early electric cars being slow and expensive- they were luxury vehicles primarily targeted at women, because they didn't have to be manually started. The cost was about equal before the model T, and speed could have been equal without any design compromises. The cost of fuel was also about equal.
The main reasons they weren't adopted was the lack of charging at home and secondarily the lack of good speed control. Not a big issue at low power, but once you can hit 40+ mph it's cumbersome and dangerous to be throwing switches to accelerate.
First off, your comment is mainly about current technologies. That misses the entire point of my comment. They were working in the lead-acid regime. Calling my graphs out of date is moot (even when you consider that 500Wh/kg is only a slight bump in my [0] link). I do think EV will win in the end, but that that statement has nothing to do with what my original comment was about. Also current gasoline engines are more than 25% efficient, not 10. But that's beside the point.
So if you're going to attack me, attack me on my points. Don't create a false comparison. Petrol had more than 10% efficiency from the get go. 10% of 50MJ/kg is much larger than 100% of 0.18MJ/kg (upper end of Lead-acid). You'd have to have an engine under 0.1% efficiency for EV to be able to compete in the beginning. (You'd have to have that upper end of lead-acid) This is all my comment was about. The state of technology and manufacturing (both!) over a hundred years ago. I was responding to "We could have had electric cards from the beginning" not "We can have electric cars now". If I said the latter then I understand your visceral, but I didn't.
Yeah, things are different now. Those 1.8MJ/kg engines at 100% (we'll round up) are able to start competing with 25% of 50MJ/kg(12.5MJ/kg), but there's still a way to go. That's why a Camry and Model 3 have similar weights and the Camry gets twice the range. But yeah, things are looking much better for the EV's now because there are other factors that matter like torque, space, and we don't need to often go more than 200 mi. But most of these factors are, for the average user, less important and so don't matter as much. Especially in the beginning where electric vehicles were struggling to drive between cities.
I look forward to the future of EV, but that doesn't discredit the history. And that doesn't make lack of technology a myopic take. Reality is just that a petrol vehicle getting 100 miles range is easier than an electric and requires less advanced technology and manufacturing techniques. But technology and manufacturing has progressed A LOT in the last hundred years.
Will charging speed really only be of minor importance? How do you charge your vehicle if you live in an apartment building? And if you can't do that and charging at a station takes more than 3-5 minutes then you cut out a huge part of the populace.
> Will charging speed really only be of minor importance? How do you charge your vehicle if you live in an apartment building? And if you can't do that and charging at a station takes more than 3-5 minutes then you cut out a huge part of the populace.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. If you have to leave your home to charge, the time is relatively unimportant. Sub 3-5 minutes is a big deal because you can do it on the way home from work, but you could also accomplish that with a battery swap or even a small top-off block you keep indoors. I could have phrased it better by saying that charge speed is arguably a major issue, but only if there is no way to solve the distribution problem.
Until then it's pretty low value- 10 minutes doesn't have much benefit over 30 minutes since you have to plan around it. If you're stopping for ten minutes, you may as well eat or run errands, and then it might as well be 30 minutes.
If it's 30+ minutes you need to do it while you run errands or something, so it may as well be an hour. You'll only ever notice on the few days you drive for hundreds of miles at once. If it's over an hour, it might as well be 6+ hours, because you'll only ever do it overnight.
For mass adoption you need chargers at most parking spots. Since cars spend almost all their time parked, charging time really is not all that important.
adding mass increase the costs of tires (ongoing) wheels, shocks and other suspension bits that have to be stronger and bigger to support the mass, and it increases wear on roads too. so energy density does affect upfront costs and lifetime costs.
Again, an 11% increase. It's tiny. My point is that it's vastly outweighed by other effects, not that it literally does not exist.
I'm making the case that treating the specific energy/energy density of batteries as the end-all, be-all is foolish. I am not arguing that it is nonexistant, just not relevant.
Sure, but if you're going to go that direction with your argument you need to account for the environmental damage caused by burning fossil fuels inefficiently in motor vehicles.
I still think there is a limit in chemical density that cannot be overcome without significantly changing technological principles of current batteries. Maybe hydrogen fuel cells would be a better solution after all if we can find an efficient way to contain it. Easier said than done...
Energy density of hydrogen per litre is few orders of magnitude lower than that of petrol. Really the only saving grace of hydrogen
vs batteries is the speed of refueling.
I think molten salt (latent heat) batteries could push the boundaries further as researchers continue to design salt mixtures with lower melting points and higher and higher delta_k's (economic considerations of compounds included).
Though for usage in cars would imply some kind of small/portable vacuum storage tanks and a way to put the heat to work (most likely initially through a steam engine and eventually directly to electricity via advanced thermocouples[0])
> Really the only saving grace of hydrogen vs batteries is the speed of refueling.
And range, weight, and (eventually) price. Batteries need to improve in all these areas.
Fuel cell cars are expensive at the moment because they're produced in such low volumes. But Toyota thinks that if they produced FCEVs at scale they could build them cheap:
Toyota is the only company pushing hydrogen as a fuel for cars, and it's puzzling why, because they really don't have many advantages, and a ton of disadvantages compared to BEVs.
Everyone else is working on BEVs, including the Chinese.
Am I misreading the gp's cited chart? According to that, it seems like hydrogen is only a factor of around 4x worse in terms of volumetric energy density, and is better than petrol in weight density.
Weight density doesn't help you in a car; these aren't rockets where most of the weight of the vehicle is fuel. In a car, the weight of the fuel is barely noticeable. What's much more important is the size of the tank, and a hydrogen tank takes up a lot of room (to get decent range), and is also quite heavy to contain a pressurized gas that literally leaks out constantly because its molecules are so small.
Still better than current batteries. You could pump that up if you store it in a liquid state to a level above common fossil fuels. Not saying you don't open a can of worms for implementing it...
Hydrogen in liquid state leaks out of any container that you put it in. 70kg lead bottle stores only 1L of hydrogen and all of it evaporates naturally in 1-2 months through the metal. So no, storage of liquid hydrogen is a terrible idea.
It does diffuse through everything, but there are several research projects in that direction. It is the smallest element and it helps if that bottle is solid, but I still see potential.
Besides in-vehicle storage being completely infeasible for many reasons, how exactly do you propose to safely allow consumers to refill a tank with liquid hydrogen? They use it for rockets sometimes, but it's handled very carefully by highly trained technicians under very controlled conditions and the fueling procedure is nothing like a stop at your local gas station.
Dont you forget something- hydrogen if hydrolizes takes place in situa - aka directly below a windpower or solar-plant, has the lowest conversion loss right there.. Also storage can be improved by now chemically - meaning you bind it to a
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Liquid_organi...
and reduce that to a nearly solid material with extremly high energy density. Its okay to be a tesla fanboi, its not okay to propagate ancient technological "insights".
To me, there's not so much difference between batteries and fuel cells - one stores the redox reaction components outside the electrode/electrolyte setup, that's all. The advantage of hydrogen in this setup is the ability to pull oxygen from the air and then dump the reaction product.
Depending on the process of extracting hydrogen, it could also be more environmental friendly overall. I don't know much about the battery life cycle, but I image there to be "casualties".
I know there are many, many problems to solve for fuel cells and if you are scared of some burning batteries, this solution probably doesn't provide much consolation.
>Another reason: Even today the energy density of batteries is SUBSTANTIALLY smaller than that of fossil fuels.
That's irrelevant. The thing people keep forgetting with fossil fuels is that most of that energy is being wasted to just produce heat. With an EV, 95-98% of the battery's energy is being used for propulsion (unless you turn on a heater of course).
It's not irrelevant. The high water mark for Li-Ion efficiency is 0.875 MJ/kg[1] (in practice e.g. a Tesla seems to be 0.7 MJ/kg). For petrol that's 46.4.
Now, let's adjust that for the efficiency of the power train. Let's give the electric car 100% (in practice it's 95-97%). Production ICE engines are around 20%. That gives us 46.4 x 0.20 = 9.28 MJ/kg.
That's a 10.6x difference in favor of petrol if we take the optimistic 0.875 number. The most fuel-efficient cars sold today consume around 5L/100km. A liter of petrol is 0.78 kg. A 1000 km of range is the probably holy grail for an electric car.
A a car powered by petrol needs to carry 39 kg of fuel at the start of a trip for that range. That'll be at best ~390 kg for the Tesla at its theoretical limits, which isn't counting overhead weight associated with the battery pack, and unlike a petrol-powered car the weight doesn't reduce as you go through the trip (a significant hurdle for e.g. electrically powered airplanes).
Of course the power train of an electric car is lighter than on the ICE-power vehicle, but the ICE still wins, and all of this is before we get to the battery needing much more volume than petrol, although as the Tesla shows you can win back some space by placing it in the floor, which isn't a realistic option for ICE.
None of this means electric cars aren't viable, but the weight and volume differences for the same MJ are inherent, and aren't going to go away.
You're comparing solely based on the weight of the energy storage medium (fuel/batteries). Two problems here: 1) ICE cars have big, heavy engines to burn that fuel and produce mechanical power, whereas BEVs have much smaller motors, so there's a big weight advantage for the BEV. (I see you addressed this, but you're also missing the volume savings with electric motors; gas engines take up a ton of space with all the associated plumbing and systems). 2) In gas cars, the fuel isn't really a big component of the vehicle's weight, which is why Tesla is able to add another 500-1000 lbs of batteries and not have too much trouble with that. That's basically like adding 3-4 adult Americans. Gas cars do not get significantly better fuel economy with empty fuel tanks.
As for airplanes, this discussion is about cars, not airplanes, where things are really different. Power-to-weight-ratio is far more important with aircraft since they have to fight gravity constantly. Aircraft will surely be the last bastion of fossil fuel usage because of this.
But electric vehicles weigh more than gas equivalents. A Model 3 (standard) is 3552lbs. I found that a Camry is similar in weight (3572lbs; similar weights for the Leaf and Volt). But if we compare the range the Model 3 has 220 mi while the Camry has 352/512 (city/highway). We can pretty conservatively say that Camry is going to get approximately twice the range for the same weight. And extra 500lbs on the Tesla only gets you another 100 miles.
So while the gp to this comment and my original comment focus on the weight and density of the storage media this is one of the largest factors. What the graphs I linked to show is that basically the weight for gasoline is not a major part of the vehicle weight. But on the other hand, for electric vehicles it is a significant weight.
The point I was making with my original comment wasn't that electric vehicles won't win (I think they will) but rather that it is a ridiculous notion that they would have won from the beginning. These new batteries take extremely complex engineering to achieve. And only because of these new batteries are they starting to win. If we go back to when everything was made from steel then your electric car is also going to gain more weight. Even from the get go petrol vehicles had longer ranges. My comment (and a lot of people are missing this) was not about NOW it was about the past. I want to stress that it has nothing to do with current tech. It has to do with what technologies they had available to them. Also how impressive the work is that has been done to create these new generations of batteries (and is still being put in). Petrol won because it was the easiest route. But EV is winning because it is superior (with the advancements and the path that it is on).
1) Guilty as charged. It's far from an apples to apples comparison, but if you compare like-to-like models of EVs and similar ICE vehicles you get the same story everywhere. Around 1/2 to 1/3 the range of the ICE vehicle, and 20-25% heavier.
E.g. the Chevy Sonic[1] & Bolt[2] are equivalent EV/ICE vehicles. They weigh 1300 & 1600 kg respectively, have the same cargo volume, but ranges of ~750 km (most pessimistic) & ~380 km (most optimistic).
So that's the like-to-like comparison. We can see that all things added up these vehicles are heavier and have much less range.
2) These volume savings are overstated and if anything work in the favor of ICEs, not EVs.
Look at a cutaway of the Chevy Bolt[3] or other reasonably priced EV like the Hyundai Ioniq or BMW i3[4]. Yes you get relatively more cargo volume in a Tesla Model S compared to other Sedans, but at that point you're paying tens of thousands for a luxury vehicle whose gimmick is things like the frunk. If you drop the same money on an ICE that optimizes for cargo space you'll come out way ahead.
3) A Tesla Model S's 85 kWh battery pack is 540 kg. If that's 3-4 adult Americans they've gotten a bit fatter on average since I last checked :)
In any case, that gets you a 420 km range, which tells you something about how heavy the car would be and how little space would be left for anything else if they were aiming for ICE-like range.
4) "Gas cars do not get significantly better fuel economy with empty fuel tanks": Yeah exactly. The point is that EVs inherently do not share this benefit.
5) Yeah we're talking about cars, but the point of bringing electric airplanes into it is to show how electric vehicles are weight and volume limited in an area where everything is done to bright the weight down, whereas someone might (wrongly) argue that for cars the weight doesn't matter that much.
And then there's the cost of the fuel. Electric car fuel is currently about 1/5 of the cost of gasoline and dropping. In addition, the cost of maintaining and electric is also much less than an ICE car so in terms of dollars per mile driven electrics are way cheaper. And that's where ICE really takes the head shot.
That heat is not wasted if you live in a place that has seasons. I’d like to see EVs with a petrol burning heating system that could provide cabin and battery heat during winter. Many gas stations sell untaxed kerosene that I think could be used because it’s for heating, not motor fuel.
Even with heat being wasted, the energy density is so high that it still outpaces batteries by a significant margin. For example... try making a battery powered 747 airliner... you can't because the weight is too high.
I'm surprised many people missed this. That 10% of 50MJ/kg is still more than 100% of 1.8MJ/kg (current advanced batteries) and substantially more than 100% of 0.18MJ/kg (lead acid). Which my comment was about manufacturing and technology over a hundred years ago. My comment was focused on the latter comparison and not the former (which was just a side note). I guess everyone latched onto my side comment.
> Its always been possible to make a small electric commuter car to drive round at 30mph for short distances
Early models of the Nissan leaf weren't too much more than that (though there have been some advances since the invention of electricity). However, golf carts are the modern version of the small electric car - and is street legal in service jurisdictions!
(Okay,
technically what's street legal isn't literally a golf cart, and is called a low speed vehicle (LSV) and will only do 25mph, and aren't always electric, but close enough!)
bicycles / scooters have a limited application though - families with young kids, long trips, older people, people with injuries, its raining, are just some of the groups / times these are excluded. Cars still are superior general purpose solution for travel.
You'd be surprised how much a simple bicycle or scooter cab can accomplish in solving this objection. These are very popular in Asia.
The main limit is carrying capacity - maximum power - and you really do not need that much stuff. This works long range too, and could work even longer range should there be proper cargo trains for bikes.
But there aren't.
The trip time is typically needed to be less than 10h or you need alternative driver or a long break anyway. A car can go let's say 1000 km on average in that time. A plane maybe 5kkm and a train matches a car. A human powered bicycle goes perhaps 250-300 km. Man on foot goes 40 km.
In a city a car is on average 30% faster than a bike and even less vs a scooter or motorbike.
Except in the bigger mode of transport there is space to put in amenities and a spare driver or secondary crew.
That's a good point, I suppose the problem with many cities is they are designed for cars, not for more people centric solutions. I'd like to see a city designed for smaller vehicles bikes / scooters / small EV's, its difficult to get rid of cars once they're there though.
They are popular in Asia because relatively speaking Asia is poor.
Just like the flying pigeon bike was massively popular in china back in the 70's, I even saw one being ridden at Cranfield university by a Chinese masters/doctoral student in the late 70's early eighties.
No, Japan is one of the richer countries on the planet per-capita, and bicycles are very popular there. They're popular because they're cheap and simple and they have excellent public transit for longer distances and they don't have to worry much about thieves like in crappier countries. And as a result of people biking and walking more, almost no one there is fat, unlike America where the majority of the population is obese (not just overweight).
The overall point was that bikes can be made to work, Asia is a large scale example, although as you say, not necessarily by choice. The Netherlands, and increasingly other parts of north west Europe are another example.
I've been to Japan, and I saw lots of people riding bicycles there. However, they were all relatively fit. Disabled people don't ride bicycles, nor do elderly people. And almost no one rides a bicycle in a downpour. Of course, in a city like Tokyo, if the weather is bad, people can just walk their bike, or take the subway, because things are relatively close together and the public transit infrastructure is excellent. It also helps that they can just leave their bike parked somewhere if they need to, and not worry about it being stolen, unlike America where you can't leave a decent bike in a city like DC for long without someone stealing it unless you have it U-locked to a post (no one locks bikes to solid objects in Japan; they just have simple locks on the back wheel so no one can easily ride away on it).
In many cities bikes are faster than cars. In central London for example average speeds are around eight miles per hour (and falling). During rushhour it's even worse. Rushhour traffic in Berlin averages around five miles per hour. Even untrained cyclists are faster than that.
In many ways, it's actually better cycling in dense urban traffic moving at a snail's pace than say, a 5 lane road (2 in each direction, shared center turn) of the sort that are arterials in suburbs or might find near your local mall when traffic is moving at 35mph.
Source: I've put about 14,000 miles on a bicycle, half touring, half commuting in Cleveland and Boston. for context, that'll seem absurdly large to non-cyclists, and quite small to serious cyclists.
Young kids: Cargo bike.
Long trips: Car or public transit is better for most people.
Older people: Tricycle/electrical assist bike
People with injuries: Tricycle, recumbent bike, hand pedals, electric assist etc
Rain: rain coat.
You're seriously out of reality. I'm writing this from a subway car where at least 30 people out of the ~50 here would not be able to do anything you suggested since they have trouble with simple slow walking and even stepping into the bus is problem. Rain coat? Some elder people could downright die from a cold. And it's not just rain, it snows here and for several months it's around 0 degrees Celsius and the road is covered in ice.
And even if not, what would you gain with these weird single purpose vehicles that can't be used while remaining in comfort and need to be replaced every winter over a multi-purpose super-comfortable shared microcar? It's not even economical or ecological, ordinary bikes/scooters + microcars + public transport is the ecological/economical solution.
I would guess that in a society where everyone cycles, those that would usually be unable to cycle would gain the most from the exercise etc. I believe cycling in your 70s and 80s is relatively common in the Netherlands.
Isn't a wheelchair a weird single purpose vehicle, isn't a bike, or a car? There's nothing inherently wrong with being weird or single purpose, as long as it gets used.
'Around' 0c isn't that cold, gritting the road and putting on a coat would sort that. You're right there is weather that isn't great for cycling, just as there's terrain that isn't great for it either. I'm sure any global scale transportation solution is going to have its problems, no ones suggesting a one size fits all solution.
Where I live, people tend to ride motorbikes on a weather permitting basis. Which means the bulk of days are in late May, June, July, August, and early September. Assuming they can afford to have a second vehicle.
> [...]a small electric commuter car to drive round at 30mph for short distances but even today there are none like this[...]
These are called microcars[1] and a lot of models exist. E.g. the Canta[2] (both petrol and electric models) and Biro[3] are quite popular in The Netherlands. There they're given preferential regulatory treatment, e.g. you can park them on sidewalks and drive them down bicycle paths.
The problem with a small car that can go at max 30 mph is that a moped is a much better fit for most use cases for such a car. An advantage of a car like the Canta or Biro is that they're fully covered, so you won't get wet in the rain. But you can also get good moped rain covers, and mopeds are a lot cheaper.
Power control is also a massive consideration - doing more than on-off basically requires semiconductors or wasting a lot of energy in variable resistors. Some old systems had two-speed control by swapping batteries between series and parallel.
I think the poster was more thinking of the "neighborhood electric vehicle" type. I don't know all the cars on the list, but the Fiat 500 and smart electric are both normal cars that can hit 65+mph on highways with ease and have ranges over 100km.
> There was no electric grid to speak of - even now there is concern the grid can't support all EV's, once you were outside the cities (and there weren't many back then) the grid was spotty. The miracle of being able to pour some cheap liquid in an engine and drive for miles is a considerable achievement.
Not true- Pearl street switched on in 1882, the first overhead wires went up in 1883, and by 1899 there were hundreds of generating stations. Until around 1905-1910 there was no real standardization, leading to a mix of DC, polyphase, and split-phase systems since light bulbs don't care what they run on. Roughly standard split-phase pretty quickly won out and the first electrical washing machine was sold in 1907, before the first model T.
The problem is much more fundamental: you can't charge a battery on AC. Getting DC power at home was NOT easy. You needed a phase converter (an AC motor connected to a DC motor) or a mercury rectifier[1], both FAR from affordable.
> Lead acid batteries weren't very good and were expensive (and still are) and don't last long compared to petrol engines.
That's just goofy. Research doesn't just happen, there has to be real interest and funding. There was no significant interest in batteries for half a century.
> Electric motors were big then - it was only rare earth magnets that made them small enough to consider using in cars at high speed/ranges.
Totally wrong. Electric motors have always and will always be far more compact than combustion motors. In fact induction motors -the kind used in the Tesla Model S- have been essentially unchanged since 1889, when the first squirrel-cage motor was invented.
> Its always been possible to make a small electric commuter car to drive round at 30mph for short distances but even today there are none like this, because people want to take their cars on the road on the weekend without having to worry. In the 1900's it was the call of the open road and cheap travel (petrol was very cheap then) that made petrol win.
No it wasn't. The Model T had a maximum range of 250-300 miles, and as the article says the Detroit Electric could do 240 miles. The Model T did over double the top speed and cost a fourth as much, but the speed wasn't due to technical limitations and the cost was because electric vehicles were a luxury item (the battery was a low-ish premium). Electricity and gas cost roughly the same at the time. It was all about the charging.
Efficient electricity transmission requires high voltage. High voltage requires transformers. Transformers require AC. Batteries require DC. Until it was cheap to convert AC to DC, electric cars had no chance.
I think steam engines prototyped a lot of the needed technology like lubrication, manufacturing of precision shafts and heat resistance which then could be applied to the gas engine.
There's an interesting example of technological synergy at the dawn of the steam engine industry.
To build an effective steam engine, you need a precisely ground piston and a precisely bored cylinder, otherwise you can't get useful working pressures. Grinding the piston is laborious but straightforward - you just need two centers and a cutting tool to achieve a rotationally symmetrical part. Boring the cylinder is much more challenging, because you need to cut a very wide, very deep, very straight hole into a huge lump of iron. Cutting that hole requires a very rigid, very powerful machine.
John Wilkinson developed an effective boring machine in 1774 for making cannons, but it was limited in speed and capacity by the water wheel that powered it. The next year, the Boulton & Watt company was founded, building stationary steam engines with cylinders made by Wilkinson. Wilkinson received the second steam engine built by Boulton & Watt, which he used to power a bigger and faster cylinder boring machine, which he used to build more and bigger steam engine cylinders for Boulton & Watt.
This also shows the curious paradox (if it’s a paradox) that we can’t easily re-create many of the industries from scratch. We’ve had many intermediate steps that we discarded along the way.
In other words, modern industry is the product of modern industry.
There are points in mechanical history where you have a real problem taking the next step. The classic is "who made the first tongs?" You need a handling tool that will survive fire to do blacksmithing. How was the first one made? It's ascribed to God in some Jewish text and to Thor in some Viking legend. Probably someone used chipped rocks as handling tools.
Another bootstrapping problem is making a precise screw thread without another screw, as in a lathe, to use as a reference. This was solved by Maudsley, who invented the "screw originating machine".[1]
The sequence for bootstrapping machine tools from a very low level is well known, because hobbyists sometimes build their own machine tools and need to take upward steps. Hammer, anvil, forge, lathe, better lathe, better lathe, good lathe, planer, bigger planer, drill press, better drill press, milling machine, better milling machine, good milling machine. There's a set of books on this intended for a post nuclear disaster. (It assumes you have aluminum scrap around.) Electronics is tougher to cold start.
The plans and steps all require a computer (cept for the simplest of chips which would'be been originally hand-designed). This means that if there's some planetwide disaster that wiped all electronics, we'd have to restart from scratch as even viewing the blueprints of a chip requires a chip!
Lubrication is, I think, and under-appreciated aspect here.
Trains got substantially more efficient circa 1850-1950, more miles-per-ton, and I believe the reason was essentially that they made hotter steam, because efficiency is bounded by the temperature difference (thanks to Carnot). And the limitation on how hot you could make steam, in any given decade, was that you needed the cylinder to still be lubricated at that temperature, and this technology slowly advanced.
I think this is one of the reasons internal combustion engines didn't appear sooner. They are necessarily quite hot, even more so for diesel, which is later (and more efficient).
We didn't have "good" machine tooling for mass production of metal parts until the 1880/1890s. The technology existed but it was all exotic and high priced because we just weren't good at making metal stuff.
Depedns on your definitions of "good" and "mass". UK railways crossed 500 million people a year sometime before 1880, and as many journeys as the population sometime in the 1840s. That's sounds like a lot of metal wheels & rails to me, certainly not space-ship exotic. Although of course things continued to grow from there.
That's a funny comment. The colonies had a smattering of railways, most colonial subjects probably never saw any railways or trains. Heck, for an example, look at how the African railway networks look in 2019 (!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Union_of_Railways#/med...
This is an odd tangent, though, if you are interested in humanity's ability to do fine metalworking etc. and how this influenced what transport technologies were viable in what year. This isn't about rural backwaters, anywhere. It's reasonable to define mass adoption to mean that millions are using the thing, although obviously the first million will be in advanced bits of the world.
Related article (by Alexis Madrigal), "The Electric Taxi Company You Could Have Called in 1900" about an attempt to roll out an electric cab company in NYC and the rest of New England.
"At a time when many people were stuck inside new urban confines, unable to get outside to private spaces, having a car that could tour, a car with a lot of range, was quite appealing.... And it was just sexy to go fast. People like to go fast."
You can visit Thomas Edison's house with his lab near Newark NJ. There are two electric cars on display. Interestingly here it says in 1914 38% of all the cars on the road were electric; 22% gasoline, 40% steam powered.
"In 1914: 38% of all the cars on the road were electric; 22% gasoline, 40% steam powered."[0] "by 1917, only 50,000 electrics were registered compared to 3.5 million IC cars. Steamers were all but gone"[1]
Assuming both sets of stats are correct, it sounds like something happened between 1914 and 1917 that led to the switch from electric (or steam) cars to ones powered by internal combustion engines. Perhaps the First World War?
Jay Leno has a YouTube channel with several episodes on his steam-powered vehicles, if anyone is interested. He goes through the enormously complicated startup procedure, which takes about 45 minutes. His comment was that most people who could afford a car could afford "a man" who would take care of all of this every morning.
I imagine the democratization of automobiles in the teens and 20s lead to the cheapest solution winning.
Of all the pre-war cars I have been in or around... only steam had the power to throw you back in the seat. It would be interesting to see a modern multifuel interpretation of one. Might be well suited to long runtimes and alternate fuels.
The problem with steam is that external combustion tends to be very fuel inefficient compared to internal combustion. This is true in general, but becomes even more true when you constrain the size and weight of the engine.
> external combustion tends to be very fuel inefficient compared to internal combustion. This is true in general
No, that's not true at all. Big power plants stayed with steam for efficiency reasons, and they are pretty close to theoretical limits.
Cars and aeroplanes, and later ships and trains, went to internal combustion because size and weight are very real concerns for them, and this trade-off against pure efficiency (heat-to-torque) was worth making. In the name of overall efficiency, if you like -- smaller engines meant more cargo room, so in oil-to-cargo terms you could come out ahead.
More electrical now is gas-turbine, but again this is about trading efficiency for other things -- peak-hour electricity is worth much more than 3am electricity, etc.
Doble got pretty close to solving that problem actually. His water-tube boilers were extremely efficient at the time (probably surpassing the contemporary ICEs). He also did some work on a “wet heater” which is a boiler that
mixed the fuel with the water, burned the mix, and used the exhaust gas+steam mix for the engine. Doble really pushed the boundaries for steam cars.
I am not sure it's less efficient by default or simply because of lack of R&D into making steam engines better.
I read about a government program in maybe the 70s (oil crisis?) where steam engines were reviewed to replace gas engines. The reason being is that burning fuel at atmospheric pressure means you burn it more cleanly and fully. This sounds like an efficiency balance at some level, certainly a pollution advantage.
You run into Carnot cycle [1] physical limits. The efficiency of any heat engine is bounded by 1 - Tc/Th, i.e. the ratio of the absolute temperatures of the cold reservoir (usually the exhaust gases) to the hot reservoir (combustion temperature). To make an engine more efficient, it needs to run as hot as possible. Non-superheated steam engines are bounded by the boiling point of water (373 C); assuming 21 C outside air, you get a max theoretical efficiency of about 22%. ICEs are typically bounded by the thermal limit of the cylinder material; for iron engines, this gives about 37% efficiency.
Superheated steam or closed-cycle (eg. Stirling) engines can do a lot better than this - Stirling engines can reach 50% efficiency, and this is nearly matched by superheated steam engines as used in power plants. But then you run into weight & safety problems. Superheated steam is great in a nuclear reactor or battleship, but in a car where a crash could easily break the engine piping? You're turning survivable crashes into death traps.
It seems something is not possible until someone figures a way to do it. I could see steam/sterling engines combined with electric could do amazing things. Primarily because of low pollution (from what I read, almost none in some cases) of burning almost any combustible fuel.
Even if there are some efficiency limitations, a small steam generator (range extender) combined with an electric vehicle could be ideal.
I really don't think efficiency is the primary problem with steam/heat tech, I think it's politics and society and possibly greed.
Edit: a quick search, it seems the Carnot limit applies to ICE engines as well. So your argument seems to be contradictory. Can you clarify how ICE engine efficiency is different from steam, related to the Carnot limit?
The Carnot limit is a simple statement about temperatures: the thermodynamic efficiency of a heat engine is 1 - the ratio of cold/hot temperatures in Kelvin. In practice that means that efficiency goes up the hotter you can make the engine's working fluid, and that (because you start at 294K) you have to go pretty high to get really good efficiencies.
The relevance to ICE vs. steam is largely about material science. You're limited first of all by mechanism by which the working fluid is heated and second by the materials used to contain it. Regular non-superheated steam never gets past 100C (373K), because once it does it boils off and the steam transmits the heat away from the heat source into the engine.
Superheated steam (as in a nuclear reactor or military-grade steam turbine) can get significantly higher than that, and reach corresponding efficiencies, but you have to figure out how to continue applying the heat source to the steam after it has boiled, and that steam will be under correspondingly high pressure (because of the ideal gas law: PV = nRT), so you need materials that can both contain the high pressure and don't degrade under heat. The working fluid within an ICE is entirely contained within the engine; thus, the primary constraint is that the material used to construct the cylinders can't melt or deform under the heat of combustion. The big advantage of ICEs is that you don't need any piping, though, so you can machine the engine out of a solid block of iron or similar material and get all the strength that results.
Electric or solar-thermal Stirling engines actually do have very good efficiency ratings. But the key here is for stationary uses. They are big, bulky things, because they have to be to provide sufficient heating to the working fluid and then move it to and through the engine without any pipes bursting.
Moving vehicles have a large constraint: any engine adds to the weight of the vehicle, and has to be accelerated along with the payload. So power-to-weight is crucial: an engine that has equal efficiency but weighs as much as a car has effectively half the efficiency, because you need to move twice as much weight around. That's why most of the interest is in either smaller (and hence lighter) ICE cars or in electric drive: electric motors have very good power-to-weight ratios if you can make the battery storage light enough.
Ha, I remember reading about that in university. One of the options my group considered for a culminating project in our engineering degree was a 6-stroke rotary (Wankel) engine that would have a water injection phase after the exhaust was pressed out.
I don't think manufacturing a working model of such a thing would have been within reach for a couple of undergrads, although the project we went with was almost as ambitious— we ended up building a mostly functional laundry washer from scratch.
We also could have had steam powered cars. Jay Leno once said that he got pulled over on the freeway for breaking the speed limit in his Stanley Steamer from 1906-ish. Darn thing has a top speed of 127mph.
My 2018 motorcycle tops out at 110mph, to give you a comparison.
Why don't we have steam cars?
Because in the early 1900's steam cars they couldn't compete with the elegance of ICE vehicles. The engines were big and heavy, the fuel was hard to manage, they took a long time to warm up, etc etc. The internal combustion engine was just a way better tool for the job.
Same reason electric cars didn't win: The ICE was just a way better tool for the job at the time. This is now changing, but very slowly.
Tesla, for example, still doesn't have an official Nurburgring lap time because it simply isn't able to drive at racing speeds for long enough without the battery overheating and reducing power output to avoid damage. Yes racing electric cars exist and they're awesome, but even Formula E swaps cars in the middle of the race because a single car can't last long enough.[1]
It does look like VW's electric supercar currently attacking the Nurburgring lap record. Already holds the absolute record for Pikes Peak. Exciting times we live in :)[2]
This is a silly point of fact. Motorcycles have been capable of achieving far greater than 110 mph for a long time; a top speed of 110mph puts your 2018 vehicle on the low end of the speed range for "motorcycle" class vehicles (as opposed to scooters, mopeds, ebikes, etc). My random 1997 low-end 600cc sportbike could exceed 130 mph when it was 15 years old.
Exactly. ICE is/was more size- and weight- efficient than electric. We had motorcycles with the performance of normal person modern motorcycles many decades ago.
Electric power only became practical enough for motorcycles in the last few years.
Just a small correction-- Formula E doesn't swap cars anymore, they go the full race distance now, although the distance is much shorter than Formula 1, for example.
I wonder if any electric cars are going to get swappable battery packs? That way you could get an instant recharge, and for racing, it would make battery pack heat manageable by just swapping out the hot pack. It might even provide an advantage over ICE race cars, as fueling is often the lengthiest operation in pit stops.
They have given up on that, and there are certainly some problems with the model (for example, what if you own the battery, and they replace it with one in poorer condition?), but other companies are still pursuing it: https://electrek.co/2018/11/01/nio-battery-swap-station-next...
> Tesla, for example, still doesn't have an official Nurburgring lap time because it simply isn't able to drive at racing speeds for long enough without the battery overheating and reducing power output to avoid damage
Now I'm really curious: with a limit on the Tesla's performance to keep the battery from overheating, what's the fastest time it could do?
That they don't have an official lap time for this reason strikes me as almost dishonest, since they marketed the Roadster entirely and the Model S significantly on performance. But you can't actually drive either to its limit for more than a couple minutes? Lame.
> But you can't actually drive either to its limit for more than a couple minutes? Lame.
Notice all of Tesla's marketing is about acceleration, not lap times. They beat any other car hands down on the drag strip. But cornering is just not their forte (too heavy) and driving fast for a long time is hard (too much power draw).
You saw that when top gear compared the original tesla vs its donor car - the Tesla had amazing acceleration but wallowed going round corners when compare to the ICE Lotus it was based on.
A Tesla is way too heavy and soft to produce a decent lap time. They accelerate really well but fast cornering is not their forte. The Nurburgring has some very fast sections where you go top speed or near top speed for a long time. I also would have my doubts about the brakes holding up.
It should be mentioned, too, that Tesla doesn't have an official Nurburgring lap time because they don't want one. They've made several official statements that they aren't interested in such competitions.
There are unofficial times [1], but Nürburgring apparently takes manufacturer wishes into respect on declaring official times.
Multiple EVs have official times at this point. Tesla doesn't seem to care right now.
(VW, on the hand, with Nürburgring in their backyard has to care, and it is fascinating to hear what's going on with their EV race teams.)
Nurburgring has a notoriously long lap. Fast times are measured in handfuls of minutes. It's an interesting fact that Teslas aren't race cars capable of going full out for minutes on end, but I'm not sure that's relevant to most potential customers.
And more importantly, the Model T was a factor of 6 cheaper than the competing steam cars.
External combustion just sucks. Heat exchangers, or indeed anything that transmits heat through solid/fluid interfaces, are not something you want if you can avoid it. The ICE has the advantage that the working fluid carries most of the waste heat away from the vehicle.
Interestingly, we're seeing the same thing play out in stationary power plants today. Gas turbines are beating steam-based power plants (coal, nuclear), because they have much lower capital cost.
What do you mean steam powered cars? When I think of an X powered car I think of putting X into the car to power it. You put petrol in a petrol car and electric power in an electric car. You don't put steam in a steam train, aren't they actually coal powered? According to Wikipedia, steam cars just ran on petrol, but the combustion engine was external, and the car was less efficient overall. Steam engines don't seem to make sense for cars.
Ransomes, famous maker of traction engines and inventor of the powered lawnmower had a couple of patents for steam motorcycles, but I've never seen details of what they envisaged.
I have strong doubts about both those claims. Depends on what you want your car for, of course, but how do batteries of the time stack up to ICE cars in terms of range and durability?
If memory serves, until very recently, most consumer rechargable batteries would basically stop holding charge after 2 or 3 years. Was that better for bigger batteries? I don't know ... but it would suck to have to buy a new car battery every 3 years since the lifespan of most [modern] cars is much longer than that.
As for racing being a harmful distraction: maybe. Depends on the type of racing. I like racing as a driver of what-can-this-technology-possibly-do. Bleeding edge engineering that trickles down to consumer devices. Racing is great for that.
As for the article's claim that electric cars even back then were better than ICE for city driving ... in the city nothing beats a bicycle, a brisk walk, or public transit. Cars were never a good fit for cities.
Battery durability has to do with the battery management system itself as much as it is about the chemistry. Consumer devices did and still do stop holding a usable charge because they batteries on portable devices are deep cycled 100%-0% (Or near zero) on a regular basis. This greatly reduces a battery's lifespan.
A properly managed car battery won't be kept at 100% charge level, and will definitely not be discharged down to 0%.
Car HV batteries are kept at 80-40% (Varies by chemistry) state of charge to prolong battery life. A Prius can go hundreds of thousands of miles on their original battery, and have been around for over 20 years.
Racing has led the development of more economical, lighter weight, and more powerful cars that handle better and stop faster. No other development method has made such rapid progress in automotive technology.
I'd have to agree with that. I'll add that "customized" cars, mostly built in small shops and home garages, have also had a huge influence in the evolution of automobiles.
For example, in the `50s custom car builders were "sectioning" the bodies and "Z-ing" the frames to make cars thinner and lower to the ground. By the `60s all the big manufactures were building cars styled like that.
But racers have had a huge influence on mass production cars and still do. One simple example of that is the coolant overflow tank. As I recall it was small circle track racer that made that mod to his race car and encouraged other car owners at the track to install them because when cars overheated and blew coolant on the track it caused delays in the races. If I recall the story right he had to sue the car companies to enforce his patent and collect a royalty.
the claim is dubious. article focus on the range, which is ok-ish as long as the claim is "see! only 20 miles less" but it's like two third of ICEs, and ICE at that time had shit fuel economy.
plus we focus on range because recharging is slow, not because range is a core value of the vehicles per se. and that point stands. sure you can commute, once, but then how long is the recharge? having two vehicles because you need to leave one at the office recharging for the next day commute is going to be inefficient.
and then there's all the stuff about battery self discharge, capacity depletion and burning everything down if shaken. it's not like battery tech then was that great.
I don't think you can discount the military applications as a factor. It is not as extreme as in aviation in terms of raw innovation, but without the demand for millions of engines for trucks, tanks, jeeps, and all the other machinery of war sparked by the warfare of the first part of the 20th century, the internal combustion engine would not be as ubiquitous as it is today. In thirty years armies went from marching on oats and horseshoes to petrol and Goodyears.
Maneuver warfare would have been impossible on electric. And then when the war was over, all that surplus machinery was around, and so were the factories that built it.
We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Beginning
All true. If we ignore the massive increase in infrastructure needed to make them viable outside of cities. And also ignore, as the article does, the time it would take to charge along with the short lifetime of batteries in that era. It doesn't matter if their range equaled that of an IC, the IC could be ready for the next leg of a trip almost instantly compared to an EV. Effectively this halved the range of an EV. If you could only drive 60 miles and there was no guaranteed prospect of charging at the end, you had to be able to return home to charge, meaning 30 miles out and 30 miles back.
All issues that still represent bottlenecks to EV adoption today, albeit much less so, and which are gradually being overcome.
The range isn't really a problem: all you have to do is have "battery stations" where you swap out the batteries in a few minutes. This has its issues (related to ownership of the batteries, and also standardization), but technically it's completely doable. They've had lead-acid batteries for over a century now, so if society had wanted to make EVs the norm, this could have been done.
It's still an issue, requiring large infrastructure investments to build battery stations and the charging equipment. Compare this to gasoline and it's precursor mixtures which could be derived from coal, for which there already existed massive distribution infrastructure.
I think the author reads entirely too much into the supposed psychology of an IC powered vehicle instead of the much more simple explanation: path dependency.
Battery technology has been, and to a certain degree still is the limiting factor for electric cars...and the fact is that gasoline is still a denser form of energy storage than batteries by volume, weight etc..
I'm saying this as a someone who prefers electrics over ICE...
It's perhaps a more limiting factor now than then.
As the article notes most EVs at the turn of the century had a range of 40-70 miles. The model T of around 1910, ten years later, had a range of about 90. Earlier ICE cars were down nearer EVs.
A century ago battery and ICE technology were not that far apart. i.e. both fairly primitive. If electrics had been chosen and had 100 years of continual minor incremental improvements...
> If electrics had been chosen and had 100 years of continual minor incremental improvements...
Battery technology is still basically just ordinary chemistry and, thus, hasn't made much progress in 100 years. E.g., we use a lead acid battery in cars now, and they had lead acid batteries back then.
Just look at the periodic table, pick some elements, and make a battery. They did that 100 years ago also.
If we do something special with graphene, high temperature superconductivity, maybe still with a capacitor of "doped barium-calcium-zirconium-titanate", etc., technology not known 100 years ago, fine, but these are all long shots, both as in risky and how long it will take to be successful or give up.
Gas-electric hybrid involves essentially two engines instead of one but can do some amazing things, e.g.,
Sure, but lead-acid and zinc-carbon, both 19th century technologies, were the main - essentially only - types of batteries until the age of the Walkman in the 80s. Then we got Duracell alkalines and cute adverts. Until then there wasn't a lot of pressure to get better, so they mostly didn't and they wouldn't have sold anyway. Around the same time rechargeables got some development pressure in the form of mobile phones, and there was effort to do better than rubbish NiCds or heavy lead-acid. Even cell sizes remained constant for nearly a century. If there'd been more pressure there'd have been a lot more chemists thinking about improvements than just Ever-Ready, Duracell and Motorola.
Maybe a global electric car industry working on the problem 4x longer than we have would have come up with something better, maybe not. Alternate time lines are never certain. :)
Batteries aren't all of it though - how would personal transportation have evolved if every city and road network had electric distribution points for vehicles - as was planned in the 1910s - instead of filling out with petrol stations? The fast charger networks could easily have been something of the 1940s rather than the 2000's. We'd undoubtedly have standardised on a generic one that worked with every make of car by now. We'd probably have designed cities a little differently too.
Be careful: For the improvements, are close against some quite fundamental chemistry and physics. E.g., for fast charging, the battery has internal resistance, that is, gets hot when charging. Likely the amount of internal resistance varies, but charging as fast as filling a 20 gallon tank of gasoline might encounter something impossible due to the chemistry/physics. Fast charging is one of the reasons for the pursuit of capacitors instead of batteries, e.g., the EEStore effort with barium and titanium. The capacitors also typically are able to discharge much faster than batteries. IIRC, battery charging is a chemical reaction where have to move atoms around. A capacitor, first cut, just moves electrons around. But for research time, EEStore has been at it for some years now.
Where the maintenance and dirtiness were their major detractors, refined fuels and new burners solve these.
Steam engines can and could have been refilled at any gas station, could run on any multi fuel including biodiesel. They theoretically require less maintenance, no oil changes, no cooling system.
They'd also have had greater range and greater top speed (though less acceleration without a hybrid design)
IIRC basic thermodynamics shows that ordinary steam engines can't be very efficient. So, don't get good MPG or miles per bucket of coal, or whatever fuel.
IIRC the main reason for diesel-electric locomotives for trains and large ships was that it was significantly more efficient than just steam, at least steam with just a boiler and pistons.
Of course, really large ships generate steam and then run it through a steam turbine -- no Diesel around.
Stream engines are no longer used on large ships (except for nuclear powered warships). Merchant ships now use large 2-stroke diesel engines for maximum fuel efficiency.
There used to be many large ships driven by oil-fired steam turbines but those have gradually disappeared over the past few decades. Compared to diesel engines, steam turbines are less efficient and require more maintenance.
The most common diesel-electric locomotive today has 6 drive axles. The big steam locomotives designed at their twilight sported 6-10 drive axles, and the most famous and successful of them (the 4-8-8-4 Big Boy) ran 8 drive axles. Mechanical linkage of drive axles isn't what killed the steam locomotive.
Mechanical linkage for multiple direct drive external combustion engines that can operate at 0 rpm is far simpler (the drive axles are basically the crankshaft) than for a single internal combustion engine that must maintain a minimum engine rpm and has to be geared down to axles that are riding on a bogie that pivots separate from the deck of the engine.
To take advantage of the increased efficient of an internal combustion engine you'd need a lot of mechanical complexity unless you go hydraulic (solidly defeating most efficiency improvements) or electric.
> basic thermodynamics shows that ordinary steam engines can't be very efficient
No this is not true, see other comments / Carnot cycle. Steam can be extremely efficient. But diesel engines are much simpler and more compact, it's a trade-off.
The acceleration is more of a function of the powertrain design in steam cars. If you replace the direct drive drive train with one similar to a ICE car (ie clutch+transmission) you can get the acceleration of a ICE car in a steam car. If you want to keep the direct drive though you would need to have a larger engine and use hook-up and variable cut-off to keep the efficiency of the smaller engine while cruising. Steam engines on the whole are pretty similar to electric motors though in having most or all of your torque from 0 rpm which is why many steam cars were direct drive (I think only the Whites and a few race cars had a conventional layout instead of direct drive).
> If you want to keep the direct drive though you would need to have a larger engine and use hook-up and variable cut-off to keep the efficiency of the smaller engine while cruising.
An alternative would be to make hybrids. Use an electric motor to get reasonable acceleration and a smaller steam engine for cruising distance.
Stirling engines have many of the advantages of steam, many of the disadvantages, but they lack the disadvantage of high pressure containment. It's likely that power density would have been too low, however.
A closed loop steam engine, the burners get the boiler hot enough to produce the power they need, then the engine extracts that heat from the boiler to mechanical energy.
I've had the same thought about rotary motors, they're interesting beasts and I wonder what we'd see if they had the same R&D investment like we saw in piston engines.
Alas I think that ship has sailed, aside from energy density the modern electric VFD wins along a whole range of design constraints(torque, size, latency/traction response, efficiency, etc).
We have seen a significant long-term R&D investment but all the nice rotary engines are in prop planes.
Edit: since you mention a ship, some use large opposed-pistol Diesel engines (two oppositely meeting pistons around the combustion chamber per cylinder which also allows the cylinder to be much wider)... don’t see these in either planes or cars... Hydrogen power?—- Hydrogen is difficult to keep contained because it escapes through anything over time unless we put heavy ceramic tanks in our cars.
Unless you're talking about turboprops (jet engines with a gearbox) there really aren't any wankel engines in aircraft. Just a few experimental/EAB conversions out there.
Every quarter or so I do a 1500km(935 mile) trip and back. Nowadays it takes me two days, because I realized that spending around 20h behind the wheel without rest is simply dangerous.
My car's highway range is about 440 miles - but I rarely drive that far without refueling because the longest distance between my usual stops is 350 miles. And once stopped I don't just fill up an move along - I stretch my legs, grab something to eat etc.
My point being: given that the newest Model S achieves 370 miles and my favourite spots all happen to have superchargers I could probably pull this off in a Tesla adding maybe one stop and one hour to my trip.
We're there in terms of range. Now all that is needed is a reduction in cost.
1600 round mile trip, give or take. Georgia to Western Ohio then across to Eastern Pennsylvania, relatives in Eastern to North Eastern Ohio but that is an EV desert. I did this within weeks of buying a Model 3 LR. Added about ninety minutes to the 600 mile drive. Three stops. I did ignore the Navigation charge time so I could avoid the SC inside of Cincinnati.
If you follow the suggestions of the car and are willing to stop more the charge times are lower. However as I was hoping 190 to 210 at a time and driving the standard speed of I75 at the time I tended to push the charge to 80% or more.
Now the reason there is ninety minutes is you need to factor in charging at your destination. Seeing that my relatives had nothing more than standard 120 I was in effect anchored to my closest SC which was thirty six miles away. So at that point I charged to 95% which took longer. They don't live in a small Ohio town but there were only two good chargers, one at Nissan and one at the Ford dealer. Neither is good for a true long range car.
After that trip I realized there really is no point in carrying the mobile charge cable. I simply found hotels with nearby SC setups. Do not rely on destination charging as you are just as likely to find "guests" who act as if they own it and hotels are not keen on stepping in. There are times I swear fellow EV drivers are the most entitled pricks I have ever met.
The posters talking about 500 mile journeys without a single stop strike me as being frankly bonkers.
Yeah, you can do it. Unless your concentration is fundamentally different to most human beings, you shouldn't sit in a car for 8 hours straight without a break.
On the Model S, on an infinite distance journey, supercharging increases journey time by about 20-30% maximum over driving all the way without a break (takes about 20 mins to charge 120 miles or 20-60%).
Spending 12-13 hours to do a 10 hour drive is fairly normal for me even in an ICE car unless you want to like, eat sandwiches at the wheel and piss into a bottle whilst driving.
Where do you live where your favorite spots happen to have superchargers?
I've looked into buying a Tesla and part of the reason I dismissed it is because here in Western Europe the supercharger stations are all in some bleak industrial estate by the highway usually next to a McDonalds or 1-2 restaurants.
I recently did a 1200 km drive between the Netherlands and Denmark & back. Looking at a map there's a supercharger every 100 km or so around that route, but having looked at some road trip videos on YouTube from Tesla owners their long distance trip becomes all about planning around the charging times.
I.e. I might drive for 6 hours with brief 3-4 brief 5-10 minute stops along the way, and maybe have lunch at some nice restaurant in a forest by the highway. Also, if you have young kids you really appreciate being able to loosely plan stops. I.e. "kids are asleep, let's keep driving" and "they just woke up, let's stop in the next 5 minutes for lunch".
Changing that sort of trip to introduce the variable that we must stop for 40 or so minutes (for 80% charging) in specific charging stations along the way might work for some, but I can't see how to plan around it without a lot of hassle. I'm not going to seriously consider an electric car unless there's something like Tesla's proposed battery swap where "refueling" takes less than 5 minutes.
I've done a roadtrip from Montreal to Atlanta in a Model S, back in 2015. I've found that by the time the battery runs low, you're due for a break anyway, so it doesn't really change the way you travel that much.
Like I said before. I am a big fan of electrics. Currently drive a Volt and plan on getting a Tesla eventually, but am not blind to it's faults.
If we were talking about what lead to using leaded gasoline there is a different argument because that could have been avoided.
Given the lower population density and the fact that in the early 1900's a large percentage of the population did not have electricity to charge the batteries.. when you factor that in with the other issues of electric cars vs ICE I can see why electric cars did not take hold at that time.
Actually, no. Given the state of the tech at the time and our knowledge about pollution and the effects of various types of exhaust gases on the atmosphere it wasn't true 'all along'.
There were levels of vehicle use that were perfectly acceptable. But now that transportation is a world wide commodity instead of a luxury those effects are inescapable.
So there was some point in time where the balance shifted, and then it took a long time for the reality to set in (and some part of the world are still in denial). And it will take some time still to shift to electrical vehicles, but those too have their own waste and risks, some of which will only become apparent when their adoption rate crosses certain thresholds.
People usually think cars are the biggest sources of emissions but it's not even close. All transportation (car, planes, trains, etc) represent 14% of global emissions.
Globally the biggest source of emissions is energy production which represents about 35% (25% of direct emissions and 10% of processes like refining fuel).
Electricity required combustion to produce at the time, and still does today. Battery waste is also not negligible, and battery mining is as dirty as oil.
Electricity required combustion to produce at the time, and still does today. Battery waste is also not neglible, and battery mining is as dirty as oil.
Interesting that the concept is based on steam engine. Would there be a way to recondense the steam for reuse, or did they plan to just release all of them? Then they would need to run on water, much like the steam locomotives of the past.
given that the "fuel" was set to be replaced every 5,000 miles, i'm going to guess that it was going to be reused, but likely the need for weapons grade plutonium and the amount of shielding required made it not feasible to even think that far, so no idea what the end product would have entailed.
You’re right, otherwise we’d all be powering our cars with with zero point energy reactors.
Clearly feasibility has a big part to play as well and everyone driving around little fission reactors would be ridiculously impractical from both an engineering standpoint, as well as a safety one too. Not to mention it becoming a terrorists wet dream because of all the waste material. (Not that I’m normally one to play the “terrorist” card)
Terrorists currently utilize cars for destructive acts all the time - it hasn't caused us to abandon them.
I wouldn't be surprised if, had we gone down that path, automobiles had less fissile material in them than platinum. Currently fissile materials and high explosives are purchasable, we just keep an eye on purchases and follow up on suspicious buying patterns.
We still don't know the full extent of the environmental impact of the Fukushima disaster. Can we afford more incidents of that nature? I'm not certain.
That's nice, but we do know that burning fossil fuels kills a huge number of people [0]. Moving away from fossil fuels will require some form of nuclear power. Much of Europe has successfully transitioned most of their power to nuclear [1], so it's not like the concept is some experimental sci-fi dream. From an environmental standpoint, nuclear is by far our cleanest option based on all the information we have.
Early electric cars performed better in cities than internal combustion vehicles, but didn’t give riders the same illusion of freedom and masculine derring-do
Isn't that the same reason we still don't all drive electric cars?
I was always disappointed that NEV's didn't take off, seems like a perfect solution for cities and even suburbs -- lanes could be striped much narrower and parking could be much more dense.
But few people want to drive a glorified golf cart to the office, even if they only drive 10 miles and are stuck in stop and go traffic anyway, so the 25mph NEV cap wouldn't really change their commute time.
So working well in rural areas was probably a more important concern. A product that works OK for all your potential customers is better (from a business's point of view) than one that works a bit better for some customers and not at all for others.
Valid point. I couldn't easily find data on that, though I do think that at a certain point cars became one of those things you find a way to afford (even if you don't have a lot of money) because of how useful they are if you live in a rural area.
If we replaced all cars with EV's how much greenhouse gas would we actually curb? I know we're shifting the strain of the car producing greenhouse gases tp the power plant. Anybody know the numbers?
Intuitively I always thought the only way of actually making a dent in emissions is to change the way we live by shifting to public transportation. Suburbia is what makes the US the leading greenhouse gas producers and only changing the way we live to be more like cities such as NYC or Tokyo do we actually stand to make a change. We need to reduce the usage of cars to make a meaningful dent in greenhouse gas emissions.
They could've worked in cities. Lead-acid batteries, though, have never had the energy/weight ratio necessary for the type of long-range driving necessary outside of highly urbanized areas.
Two of my great grandfathers bought cars around 1915. One owned a plantation outside of Memphis. And the other a ranch in California. They didn't have electricity.
Not developed by my comment is in 1920 you didn't 'need' a car in cities. Since you had street cars. In rural/small town America cars were really useful but electric cars were a non starter.
I would say that fossil fuels are very important for a lot of our battery technology. I believe that a large number of important chemicals and materials like plastics are derived from oil.
They are important, but not as important as they are to transportation. The quantities of oil required for fuel production dwarf the quantities required for plastics and other important chemicals. It's still a sizeable amount but not even close to what gets burned every day.
It's just that fossil oil is - relatively speaking - very cheap compared to other sources.
Unpopular opinion, but I truly feel battery powered cars are a dead end. Gas won out over earlier models because of its unique properties, most of which is its easy availability and high energy density. Batteries are heavy, and range limited. A true successor to the ICE must offer the same freedoms afforded. Whether it's super fast charging, nuclear, or a greener fuel, though, I'm not sure.
The 2019 Tesla model S has a range of 370 miles, and I assume that as time passes, more EVs will have a range approaching that figure.
That range is considerably longer than the range of my bladder, so once charging increases in speed, this "problem" simply vanishes. We're already on our way there, the first 250kW charger opened this week, and will add 180 miles of range in 15 minutes.
In fact, it's better than an ICE car, because I can charge at home, and start every single journey with 100% charge.
How long does it take to charge? Granted 350 miles is a long trip, but some 9f us drive from Seattle to San Francisco and we can't do that in 350 burst waiting overnight for the car to charge.
Personally I think a hybrid that plugs into 120, with a commuting range 50 miles and a back up gas engine will be the sweet spot
Lithium-ion batteries can be fully charged safely in about an hour, give or take, regardless of their capacity. 80% charge is about half that, IIRC.
The reason it takes a while to recharge EVs is because of the enormous size of their batteries. Tesla Superchargers inject more power into the car than what comes into a regular home.
Quick math: A 100KWh is going to take a bit more than 100KW of power to charge in an hour. For comparison, an oven uses about 3KW...
It's amusing to see people "Monday morning quarterbacking" on one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century. "We could have done it ANOTHER way!" ignores the fact that it might not have happened at all.
So I started reading popular mechanics 1905-2005 last weekend, in the first issue of 1905 they actually show a little blurb about electric mail trucks, I knew EVs went way back but found it pretty neat.
I think methanol makes far more sense then ethanol. But basically you can cheaply build cars that can run on pretty much anything. It would be easy to require all cars to support everything from M10,E10 to M80,E80 without much issue.
I think 20-30 years ago cars should have started requiring cars to support all that stuff and allow competition between the different fuels and different methods of fuel production. Meaning most likely methanol from gas, ethnaol from food or gas from saudi arabia.
Methanol from natural gas could have been incredibly successful specially because natural gas export is not an easy problem. Meaning that gas prices in the US were incredibly cheap and a huge fleet of car hungry for methanol would have made it reasonable to do the conversion process. Far less methane could have been wasted into the air.
Now I feel like time has passed and EV make more sense.
That's only an issue if you assume that farm land is a limited resource but that not really the problem in practice.
There are no fuel shortages just because you have cars that use ethanol.
I'm not a huge fan of ethanol specially not how it was handled in the political process (farm subsides) but using it in general is not a bad idea if it can compete.
Perhaps we could have had electric vehicles sooner, but we would have needed clean sources of electricity, not coal powered generation, to make a difference.
Many of the largest early sources of electricity were, in fact, hydro power. We could've just kept building more of those until the mid 20th century when we would've pretty much maxed out the rivers (in the US).
And don't forget wind power. Could do that, too. The intermittentness handled in areas by hydro as well. Then nuclear in the mid 20th century.
If we talk about world, not just USA, then many places just don't have the luxury of hydro, or even wind. And often gas needs to be imported making it expensive. Coal was just cheap and effective to begin with.
No, it would not have been needed because even with coal-generated electricity, EV are cleaner than ICE (because small engine are far less efficient than big power plants).
Besides, if all the car were powered by electricity, we probably would have made the electric grid cleaner and switch to renewables far sooner. Because switching from coal to gas and gas to solar/wind would have had a positive impact on almost all types of energy consumption: train, cars, heating, lightning, etc. Instead we had to invest in both the electric grid and ICE to try to make them clean, instead of just the grid.
According to the information found on page 7 of Cleaner Cars from Cradle to Grave, a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists [1], an electric vehicle that is charged by electricity from oil or coal generation has overall equivalent emissions to a gasoline vehicle that obtains 29 miles/gallon. Roughly on par with fuel-efficient contemporary gasoline powered vehicles. So I stand by my claim that electric cars don't solve the problem without addressing the emissions due to coal/oil based grid power.
In an alternative history, perhaps we could avoid petrochemical power, but it's not clear to me how we would have done that. Ford began production of the Model T in 1908. Solar and wind production would not have been feasible in the early 20th century, and even today hydroelectric power provides only a fraction of our energy consumption. See [2].
With regard to the original article, I find its analysis flawed. As I've already stated, power production for electric vehicles wouldn't have been clean in the early 1900's, but modern clean electric cars depend on more than a power grid based on renewable energy sources. They depend on lithium-ion batteries, invented in 1980. What would the country's electric cars have utilized before the 1980s? (Lead-acid and NiCad have serious environmental impacts, Lead-acid has poor energy vs weight, and NiMH batteries were not invented until 1989. All three of these battery types have charging rate limits that prevent them from being used in practical cars.[3])
Perhaps we could have done much better in the past with our decisions, but "masculine daring-do"[4] isn't the reason that we ended up with the levels of CO2 that we have in the atmosphere today.
Why would we have had electric car from the beginning? Producing an E-car consumes more energy than a car with an internal combustion engine, the milage is a joke. And if electricity is coming from coal power plants it is all but green.
> Producing an E-car consumes more energy than a car with an internal combustion engine,
That's true! These differences change as soon as the cars are driven. EVs are powered by electricity, which is generally a cleaner energy source than gasoline. Battery electric cars make up for their higher manufacturing emissions within eighteen months of driving — shorter range models can offset the extra emissions within 6 months. Source: https://youtu.be/K9m9WDxmSN8
Of course, most EV owners rarely use any charger other than their home one, since you can start every journey with 100% charge.
This might be "a joke" to you, I cannot say.
> And if electricity is coming from coal power plants it is all but green.
That's also true! Lucky then that all electricity does not come from coal power plants. In the US, that's only 17.8%. Source: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/
Those with solar panels on their homes don't get their power from any kind of power plant at all, just the sun.
There was no electric grid to speak of - even now there is concern the grid can't support all EV's, once you were outside the cities (and there weren't many back then) the grid was spotty. The miracle of being able to pour some cheap liquid in an engine and drive for miles is a considerable achievement.
Lead acid batteries weren't very good and were expensive (and still are) and don't last long compared to petrol engines.
Electric motors were big then - it was only rare earth magnets that made them small enough to consider using in cars at high speed/ranges.
Its always been possible to make a small electric commuter car to drive round at 30mph for short distances but even today there are none like this, because people want to take their cars on the road on the weekend without having to worry. In the 1900's it was the call of the open road and cheap travel (petrol was very cheap then) that made petrol win.