

Electric Car Runs 170 Miles On Single Charge--And It's 98 Years Old - bishvili
http://www.allcarselectric.com/blog/1049744_thomas-edisons-1912-electric-car-gets-a-chance-to-shine

======
ck2
My electric bicycle also goes 25mph like that old electric car.

I can tell you it takes exponentially more power to go faster than that
because of wind resistance, so that's why it could go that far at that slower
speed. There's some nonsense in their numbers though, because my battery is
state-of-the-art and it can "only" go for 2 hours, so that's 50 miles max.

Also, the batteries they used a century ago were very dangerous because of
their liquid (acid) chemicals and had to be replaced constantly. The lifepo4
battery my bike uses is good for over 5 years and can survive being crushed
without any explosion/fire.

~~~
cma
Polynomially, not exponentially:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_(physics)#Power>

~~~
wlievens
People often (in a non-formal context) use exponential as meaning "more than
linear". Any idea why this happens?

(don't mean to offend the poster here)

~~~
ck2
No offense taken. I am not familiar with the term "polynomially" but I assume
it means it grows at a rate that is a more complex calculation than a simple
exponential curve.

(useless to me: <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/polynomial> )

~~~
wlievens
A polynomial is the sum of terms with powers in them.

For instance:

    
    
      y = 3*x
      y = x*x
      y = 3*x*x*x + 5*x - 7*x
    

Any polynomial you can think of will always, at some point, grow slower than
an exponential curve. So it's not necessarily "more complex", but it's
somewhere in between linear and exponential (informally speaking).

There's a whole theory behind linear/polynomial/exponential growth that is at
the basis of algorithms in computing. If this interests you, you should read
up on _complexity theory_ \- though learn the basics and stop when it gets too
abstract :-)

------
jjcm
A few issues with this article:

Edison did not "come up" with the lightbulb - he improved upon the existing
design.

Range isn't the only important thing in a car. Efficiency, speed, torque, and
hundreds of other factors have to be taken into account. If you want range on
a single charge, a camel might be your best bet.

It's an entertaining read, sure. But I wouldn't consider it hacker related
news by any means.

------
bugsy
Lots of companies made electric cars at the turn of last century, Edison was
not the only one nor the first.

Electric cars were marketed to women as they had far less maintenance required
and were not as noisy or as dirty.

At the same time a century ago that electric cars were available, you could
also buy a number of gasoline cars that got 40-60 miles per gallon.

~~~
S_A_P
I think that is the big oversight in a lot of green tech. Sure we could make
items that have super impressive green specifications, but making them to
achieve the same/similar performance to the not so green counterparts is the
tricky part.

~~~
bugsy
Yes, this is a good point. There do exist normal cars now that have good
performance and get good mileage, around 60mpg. Most of these are not
available in the US due to "safety regulations" unique to the US, proposed and
written by oil company lobbyists, which effectively require that cars sold in
the US be very heavy.

On the electric car side, the electricity is coming from things like burning
coal and oil, or natural gas which we will run out of in a few years. The cars
use batteries that contain highly toxic chemicals that are somewhat difficult
to extract from the earth, and are done using strip mining. And the batteries
lose their capacity after a few years of use and have to be replaced with a
new set costing $30-$50,000 at least every five years. But bring up any of
this and there is a lot of handwaving and claims that battery technology is
getting better. Sure it's getting a tiny bit better, but it's not in the
direction of batteries made of air or water or harmless inexpensive materials,
and the charge capacity and lifespan are not so dramatically changing that it
changes any of the basic dynamics of this technology.

In short, even the super green techs don't seem so green when you start really
looking at the details.

In addition, we have a fetishization of things like electric cars, when the
issue of efficient public transport, or getting rid of suburbs so people don't
have to commute, are completely ignored even though the gains from this would
be massively higher by several orders of magnitude. No, we must have electric
cars for each person to drive alone by himself 30 miles to and fro work each
morning. That is the only option.

I have preferred to live close enough to walk to work and have often managed
this. I am often told this is an unrealistic expectation and I need to get
real or get with the program. Including by people claiming to be
environmentalists, many of whom drive giant gas guzzlers because of some
perceived need.

Someone walking to work each day is getting infinite miles to the gallon and
is going to live longer and have fewer health problems and costs as they age.

This is universally considered a non-solution compared to toxic batteries and
recharging them using non-renewable resources.

------
InclinedPlane
It's easy to make an electric car with a useful range, it's a centuries old
technology. The hard part is making an electric car that is quickly re-
chargeable, reliable, affordable, safe, and has good enough performance to be
suitable for routine driving. You can manage a few of those, but all of them
together is as yet an unsolved problem.

~~~
InclinedPlane
To be more specific: lead-acid batteries are dead simple technology. Reliable,
provide tons of power, etc. However, they take forever to recharge (about 5x
as long as they take to discharge) and they are _heavy_. You can build an EV
by just attaching a motor to an axle and adding enough lead-acid batteries
until the thing has a decent range, but you'll create a horrible vehicle by
the standards of today's commuter automobiles.

And then you've got a vehicle that's mostly batteries and little else and has
horrible acceleration and top speed. If you use more modern batteries (NiMH,
LiIon) you improve the situation greatly but it's still a troublesome
equation. Batteries are heavy, putting enough in a vehicle to give it decent
range and performance is a struggle to avoid compromising vehicle comfort and
safety. And then if you use advanced materials to make the vehicle lighter
then you end up raising the cost significantly.

The good news is that technology is catching up. Hybrid technology is maturing
and with it plug-in hybrids, fuel-cell vehicles, and entirely battery powered
vehicles are becoming feasible, even if a bit on the expensive side. But the
even better news is that as more money gets spent on R&D the technology will
get better and cheaper, until it's a legitimate competitor to gasoline.

The bad news is that currently the concentration of hybrid / electric vehicle
development is mis-targeted at small, commuter vehicles (making the small
slice smaller, basically) when they really need to target bigger vehicles
(long-haul freight, etc, although fortunately there are inroads being made
there). The far worse news is that at best all of this is just step 1. Even if
suddenly overnight every automobile was replaced with s shiny new electric
vehicle all that would mean is that we'd transferred the problem to the base
power generation infrastructure, which today is dominated by coal and oil in
much of the world.

~~~
anamax
> target bigger vehicles (long-haul freight

Trains excel at freight.

In some cases, you want to use "gravity hybrids", where a train going down a
hill sends power to a train going up the hill at the same time.

------
lelele
What's all the fuss with electric cars? Isn't methane green and cheap enough?

