
Why an F1 car is more energy efficient than an electric car - Osiris30
http://www.espn.in/f1/story/_/id/15152695/why-f1-car-more-energy-efficient-electric-car
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nnq
The article's reasoning only works if you assume you're extracting _gasoline_
already refined from the earth. You're not.

I'd bet the energetic cost of refining gasoline from crude oil is much larger
than that for the coal or "powerplant oil", thus seriously offsetting that 33%
vs 50%?

This is ignoring the more obvious fact that a powerplant can operate at nearly
constant efficiency, while a real car driving on a read road will have a
wildly varying efficiency, even with a hybrid engine...)

And even if electric is "less green" now, we are kind of sure that we can
drive down the price of electric power very low in the future (solar,
renewable, classic nuclear, fusion etc. ...only one breakthrough in only one
of these will have _huge_ price lowering consequences), while the price of oil
can only go up...

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Pxtl
Even extracting crude has ferocious energy costs for some sources. Alberta's
tarsands are a good example, with the Syncrude and Suncor projects being some
of the largest co2 emitters in Canada.

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reallydontask
I'm an avid F1 follower and not a fan of electric cars but this article is so
poor it's unbelievable.

Let's compare worst case scenario for what we don't like and ignore all
inconvenient facts for what we like.

Lazy

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Sephr
What a disingenuous title. It should say "Why an F1 car is more energy
efficient than an electric car running on coal and oil grid power".

I get all of my electricity from a nuclear power plant, so if I had an
electric car the title statement would at least be false for me. For people on
solar, the title doesn't make any practical sense, as less efficient solar
panels aren't causing any extra pollution (except during their initial
construction).

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jgalt212
> all my electricity from a nuclear power plant

Yeah, and there's no unaccounted for externalities with that strategy.

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Broken_Hippo
One of the biggest things I see with the article, outside of the poor
comparison, is this: Sure, gaining electricity from coal or oil isn't clean.
We know that. But we can make that better by switching the sources for
electricity. Wind, water, solar, and nuclear power are all cleaner ways to
produce electricity.

A hybrid car - or an outright gasoline car - always must rely on oil of some
sort to be able to run. We do not have a clean, reasonable alternative for
this as we do with electricity.

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ashitlerferad
Biodiesel exists, we can probably figure out similar processes for other fuel
types.

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Broken_Hippo
Some cars can run on a mix of ethanol and gasoline now, and I think more found
their cars would run (though with possible long-term damage). If I remember
correctly from when I lived in Indiana, they blamed rising food costs on
farmers switching out their food and feed crops for bio-fuels. In addition,
drought conditions or crop diseases would mean we are right back on oil-based
fuels and/or there would be a crisis because of lack of oil. I like the idea
that it is clean (at least cleaner than oil, anyway), but I think there are
better options than vegetable fuels.

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nopzor
I'm a huge fan of f1 but I think this article is a bit disingenuous. f1
engines are hundreds of times more expensive than normal engines, and they are
only designed to run for a few hours before needing to be replaced completely.

~~~
k-mcgrady
>> "they are only designed to run for a few hours before needing to be
replaced completely."

That's wrong. An F1 engine has to do about 800 miles/1200km based on current
rules. In testing over 4 days Mercedes completed about 2000 miles and I
believe that was without an engine change. Obviously these numbers are much
less than a person would drive in a year but significantly more than a couple
of hours. I'm sure they could be designed to go longer and be continue to be
efficient of necessary too as rules have forced this change over the years.

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tremon
Ooh, over a thousand kilometers you say? Yes, that's definitely much closer to
the 300,000km a regular car engine achieves than the GP was suggesting.

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w0utert
I really fail to see how the planned lifetime of F1 engines is related to its
potential fuel efficiency. If anything, I would expect the engines could be
made even more efficient if they were designed to last 300.000 miles, at the
expense of power output. I find it hard to believe that tuning an engine so
far it will wear down quickly will improve it's efficiency.

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nopzor
An F1 engine doesn't even have a starter. It's made out of exotic material. It
runs at 18,000+ rpm, and idles at what most car engines would redline at! The
entire car can weigh no less than ~1500lb, including the driver!

Making the engine last longer would likely require a huge increase in weight,
which would reduce efficiency.

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pmontra
The new combustion engines are limited to 15,000 rpm. They usually stay well
below the limit because of limitations on fuel amount (100 kg per race).
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_One_engines](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_One_engines)

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turbohedgehog
How much does it cost (in terms of money and carbon footprint) to prepare the
fuel and engine for a F1 car compared to that of a modern power plant?

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marklubi
How much (in terms of money and carbon footprint) is required to build a
modern power plant?

Your comparison is disingenuous.

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cromulent
This article doesn't explain it well, but converting fuel to energy with this
sort of thermal efficiency (40-50%) is indeed much better than both normal ICE
and coal power plants at around 30%.

Obviously racing engines are highly tuned and not suitable for general use,
but there's no reason I can see that TJI technology could not be adapted for
normal engines.

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Arnt
Doesn't sound as if it's really very efficient, though, when you measure the
entire chain (sunlight, plants, oil fields, crude, refined fuel, rolling
wheels) against the currently achievable chains from sunlight via electricity
to rolling wheels.

Which I realise isn't your point but IMO it's what an F1/FE comparison should
count.

~~~
cromulent
OK, but most electric cars don't get their electricity from sunlight. So
that's not a fair comparison either :)

Of course F1 cars are not an efficient means of transport. The point is that
the new rules introduced constraints that have produced real innovation in
efficiency, giving significant gains that could be utilized in passenger
vehicles. This is the real news, not silly headlines like "F1 cars are more
efficient than electric cars".

~~~
Arnt
Are you suggesting that most cars get their electricity from nuclear-powered
plants? Because gas, coal, oil and even most hydroelectric energy all are in
some form powered by sunlight.

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tremon
Apples and oranges. Dear author, please redo your argument with Formula One
versus these race cars:
[http://www.worldsolarchallenge.org/](http://www.worldsolarchallenge.org/)

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johnm1019
Can someone explain how they are getting near 50% thermal efficiency? All the
articles mention it, but I can't find a reasonable explanation.

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exDM69
It's a turbocharged hybrid engine with two electric motor-generator units. One
on the shaft between the turbine and the compressor and the other is on the
crankshaft.

Excess heat energy is captured from the turbo with the generator instead of
blowing the excess out of the waste gate. The turbo is pre-spooled by turning
it with the electric motor so the internal combustion engine runs at or near
stoichiometric optimal fuel-air mix at all times.

The other motor generator does regenerative braking and can drive the engine.

The Mercedes engine is rumored to develop around 950 horsepower from the 1.6l
V6 engine (of which about 160 are from the electric motors).

I'm hopeful that similar technology will find its way to road cars. City buses
in particular would benefit a lot due to frequent stops.

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barkbro
The comparison in the article is pretty odd, but it's still amazing to see how
much effort goes into engineering F1 cars. I wonder what they could produce if
they were allowed to run free and didn't have to deal with F1 regulations.

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nopzor
I think the sport would be destroyed if they were allowed to run free.

By now they would have removed the driver, and that would take most of the $$
out of F1 ;)

The Williams 1993 car was in many ways the high point of tech for F1. Since
then, I think FIA have been trying to balance the rules for (1) safety (2)
balancing the role of the constructor and the driver, and ensuring that driver
skill was a major part of the equation.

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pmontra
They would have to remove the driver. Check the famous Red Bull concept car
from 2010, only simulated, not built.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Bull_X2010](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Bull_X2010)
500 km/h and 8 g lateral acceleration with the final design. I don't think you
can drive a car like that for long.

The Williams car with active suspensions was the last technical improvement
that was not a rules loophole up to maybe the Mercedes f-duct and wing
stalling. F1 has become a spec formula with the only goal to keep lap times
more or less constant and some common ground with production cars (the current
hybrids, Le Mans too.)

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lumberjack
They also need an engine rebuild every how many miles?

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kybernetyk
What about an electric F1 car?

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leonsmith
Formula E? - [http://fiaformulae.com/](http://fiaformulae.com/)

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jcoffland
This is ridiculous. The energy consumed by an average road car to move 1 human
1 mile is far less than that of an F1 car, by a huge margin.

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pmontra
Formula 1 cars are designed to run fast, so they need a lot of energy, but
efficiency is about how much energy you extract from fuel, not about how much
energy you need.

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jcoffland
Efficiency can be defined in many different ways. For road cars the amount of
fuel used is far more important than the energy extraction efficiency, in
practice. Which was my whole point.

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simulate
Dupe:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11449314](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11449314)

