Munich Students Smashed the World Record For EV Distance On a Single Charge (arstechnica.com) 111
At 103 miles/kWh (or 0.6 kWh/100 km), the new "muc22" car built by students from the Technical University of Munich "is 25 times more efficient than any EV on sale..." writes Ars Technica. "For those who think in terms of miles per gallon, it's the equivalent of traveling 3,815 miles on a single gallon of gas.
The car has a top speed of just 26 mph (42 km/h) — and without a driver it weighs just 374 lbs (170 kg): In a six-day test at Munich airport, it set a new distance record on a single charge (for a non-solar EV): 1,599 miles (2,574 km), with less battery capacity than many plug-in hybrids — just 15.5 kWh...
The airflow-optimized shape has faired-in rear wheels and a drag coefficient of just 0.159; more importantly, though, it has a pretty tiny frontal area (it's only 39.4 inches/1,000 mm tall and 47.2 inches/1,200 mm wide)... [F]or this record run, muc22 made do with just 400 W — that's 268 times less powerful than the least-powerful EV on sale today, the Mazda MX-30... The record run took place in an empty hangar at Munich Airport, obviating any interference from the weather. The previous record stood at 999 miles (1,609 km), but the team of seven drivers reached that distance after just four days, and since the battery wasn't empty yet, the car kept going.
Thanks to Slashdot reader FrankOVD for sharing the article.
The car has a top speed of just 26 mph (42 km/h) — and without a driver it weighs just 374 lbs (170 kg): In a six-day test at Munich airport, it set a new distance record on a single charge (for a non-solar EV): 1,599 miles (2,574 km), with less battery capacity than many plug-in hybrids — just 15.5 kWh...
The airflow-optimized shape has faired-in rear wheels and a drag coefficient of just 0.159; more importantly, though, it has a pretty tiny frontal area (it's only 39.4 inches/1,000 mm tall and 47.2 inches/1,200 mm wide)... [F]or this record run, muc22 made do with just 400 W — that's 268 times less powerful than the least-powerful EV on sale today, the Mazda MX-30... The record run took place in an empty hangar at Munich Airport, obviating any interference from the weather. The previous record stood at 999 miles (1,609 km), but the team of seven drivers reached that distance after just four days, and since the battery wasn't empty yet, the car kept going.
Thanks to Slashdot reader FrankOVD for sharing the article.
Race cars (Score:5, Informative)
So if think this is a waste of time, then you obviously must also think that race-cars in general are also a futile pursuit (ignoring the fun of the race itself). I'm honestly shocked to find out that so many Slashdot Pundits are vehemently opposed to pushing technology to it's limits. Maybe you don't belong here in the first place. (Read my sig before you blow your top...)
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This is a waste of time, but only because the design is completely impractical.
Doing the same kind of thing but targeting designs that you could actually build and legally sell would be entirely useful, but they're not doing that.
You're not seeing slashdotters reject useful research. They're rejecting useless research. No shit you can make a vehicle get better mileage by making it totally infeasible as a product. The lessons learned from this project will be valuable to the students, but less valuable than
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There are practical applications for this kind of technology, mostly with drones. Land going and sea going drones can perform useful tasks, like surveying roads automatically and collecting samples.
Other developments like super efficient drivetrains do often feed back into production vehicle technology eventually.
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If they had done this via an improved battery chemistry or something like that it would be incredibly useful. Getting better range by making the vehicle tiny and slippery isn't all that interesting other than as a technical exercise. Car makers already know how to do that if they wanted to. I doubt there's anything to be learned from this that can be applied to a commercial vehicle.
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Without heartlessly belittling the effort his took: this is a publicity project.
Huh? It's not a publicity project, it's a student project. Universities all over the world have student teams that compete to push some engineering challenge or other to its limit, or even just to give students an opportunity to design, build and test something even if it doesn't push any boundaries. A similar one is the Zurich ETH team that recently set a new record for fastest 0-60 time (0.9s) with a tiny, custom-built EV. Sure, they do publicize their results, because it is good publicity for the univers
Units (Score:5, Insightful)
At 103 miles/kWh
Argh, please don't mix freedom units with metric. That is 1/32 miles per BTU.
Alternatively, 3000 miles per US therm, for our West Atlantic cousins.
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Argh, please don't mix freedom units with metric.
Why would you call something "freedom units" when it actually was forced on people by the British Empire? That Imperial System should long have been extinguished, given the fact that it is inconsistent when crossing different scientific disciplines, which was the very reason for SI in the first place.
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You are asking for logic from something rooted in an appeal to patriotism. Also, you're complaining about a term that is being used sarcastically to mock the reason Americans cling to Imperial units.
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"Freedom units" is a term that mocks those who consider everything associated with America to be "freedom" related. As in "freedom fries".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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It's about 6Wh/km.
Most cars measure in kWh/100km as the old standard was litres/100km. So this would be about 0.6kWh/100km.
For reference a decently efficient car is around 200Wh/km.
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It's about 6Wh/km.... So this would be about 0.6kWh/100km.
(comparing EV to e-bike to human-powered bike :)
Coincidentally, that is exactly what I get from my e-bike (with pedalling though).
In SI units, get 21.6 joules per metre. Which is 21.6 kj/km or 5 k calories per km. 3.2 k-calories per mile.
Which makes me think of food. I burn around 100kj/km on a recreational bike ride. (40"cal"/mile), so 5x as much as the above EV.
OTOH, the fossil fuel use to make bread or pasta is much less than the energy content of that food. So no clear winner between human-powered
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At 103 miles/kWh
Argh, please don't mix freedom units with metric.
You're joking, but in case you weren't aware this measure and its inverse are the common ways to measure EV efficiency in the US and UK. I thing the inverse (e.g. 250 Wh/mile) is becoming more common. The EPA also provides gas mileage equivalent numbers, but that's really dumb.
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Solar EVs still trounce them (Score:2)
Weirdest article ever (Score:2, Informative)
"| that's 268 times less powerful than the least-powerful EV on sale today, the Mazda MX-30."
LOL, the Mazda MX-30 is by far the least powerful EV on sale today, it got 143 HP, and achieve 14.9 KWh per 100 KM with regular driving 30-120 KM/h (100 KM to my job every day).
Mazda MX-30 was introduced in late 2020. And had 143 HP. Weights 1.7t and was classed as the safest EV of that time.
Volkswagen latest E-up was introduced in 2022 and had 83 HP. Weights 1.25t and got a poor 3 star safety rating.
Skoda Citigo iV
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City range is where the EVs shine, so the highway range of the MX-30 is maybe half of that unless you limit to 80 kph.
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For sure, if I drive it just within the city, it could probably easily do 400 km range in total without a charge, but that's because our city limits are 30-40 KM/h max, but to work I have 100 KM total back and forth. (and the speedway is 100 km/h) and sometimes I (uhm. admittedly) surpas that to go past big trucks and exceptionally slow drivers with U-hauls and such, and I've got typically half the power left when I'm home again so it's not that bad.
I frequently drive the entire highway to a city nearby (ab
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My Peugeot e208 lasts maybe 200 km when i drive 120-130 kph.
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The Renault Twizy has 5.4 HP, and weighs less than 0.45 tonnes. Stretching the idea of a "car", but it has four wheels, seats, and a roof, and it's road legal.
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Least powerful EV sold in the USA
Echos of the GM Sunraycer? (Score:2)
In antediluvian times, GM made a vehicle called the Sunraycer for concept car races. It had a permanent magnet motor the size of a coffee can and a small battery bank, but could get 1500 watts from the panels on it in a good day, which, coupled with the car's light frame, could get it going and keep it going.
If you focus on weight, you can make an EV go a pretty good distance. Unlike IC engines where engine efficiency scales up with size, if there isn't much mass, one can scale down the motor and battery
And now for the price of the contraption (Score:2)
And I don't even factor in manufacturing, just tell us what the materials alone would cost.
We've had spaceships and probes that ran on batteries and solar panels that were (and partially still are) essentially made of unobtanium for the normal user that are heaps ahead of anything you can (or ever will be able to) buy. These things are not really useful until you find a way to make them available. Until then, these projects prove what's technically possible, but then again, what's technically possible can b
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Until then, these projects prove what's technically possible, but then again, what's technically possible can be established with sufficient accuracy by now without actually having to build it.
We don't know what is possible until something is actually built.
I recall reading about protests over announcements of possible resumption of nuclear weapons testing, the claim being that the weapons tests were not necessary given that we have computers that can simulate the weapons now. The response to this was that it is because we have data from real world tests that we can run the simulations, and without new data to update the simulators then at some point the simulations become worthless. Another re
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What if we launched all our nuclear missiles, and they didn't work?
"Munich students smashed" (Score:2)
Oh yeah, it's Oktoberfest again...
Turtle (Score:2)
Huh? (Score:2)
No comparison (Score:2)
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I mentioned the Renault Twizy further up. Top speed 28mph (moped limit is 30mph), 2-star NCAP rating. Yet it's a commercial product that people buy and use for "normal use".
Scales that don't mean anything (Score:1)
so what? (Score:2)
A gossamer car made out of spider webs?
Retrofit (Score:2)
Rich Rebuilds, one of the best channels on Youtube, retrofit a City EV three-wheel electric city car from the 1980's with a modern EV motor and controller, powered by a dozen Ryobi drill motor batteries. He drove it all day, including burnouts and high-speed drifting, and barely used a single LED segment from the batteries.
Probably not as efficient as the Munich team's vehicle, but it took them half a week to design and build it. Also, if you need a quick charge, you just return the Ryobi batteries to Home
Well that's not useful (Score:2)
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Kind of useless actually.
It's a university research project. It isn't supposed to be useful.
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Ok, so what did they find? What's the conclusion? What were they trying to find? (the answer "how far can something go on a single charge" is not very useful - that's a "Guinness record book" goal).
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Kind of useless actually.
It's a university research project. It isn't supposed to be useful.
They why is it a "World Record for EV distance"? With self selected parameters like 170 kg and extremely low drag and no driver it's not an EV, it's a test platform at best. Comparing it to any actual EV is ridiculous. The real story is the motor and components. The drag confident is meaningless at this scale. I'd rather see standardization on using a 1 x 2 meter box with 4 wheels as the test bed for the motor and controller tech.
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World records are the currently known upper limits. Nothing more, but also nothing less.
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It's a university engineering project. It's supposed to give baby engineers practical experience at engineering things, which it did.
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that's 268 times less powerful than the least-powerful EV on sale today
There is actually a good reason why EVs are apparently so ridiculously overpowered. They need that power for regenerative braking, not acceleration. Though the latter does help in the sales brochure.
Without strong regenerative braking, the urban range would be much less. E-bikes and track cars don't need it.
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Without strong regenerative braking, the urban range would be much less. E-bikes and track cars don't need it.
Just how much range does regenerative braking add? I found the following article as one possible answer.
https://electrek.co/2018/04/24... [electrek.co]
A summary is that some people will claim as high as 33% of their range back on a hilly commute in a Tesla, the author of the piece saw more like 5%, with a number of reports suggesting the average is somewhere in the middle with something more like 15%. That's not nothing but also not near the benefit often claimed from having the feature.
I believe regenerative braking t
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Interesting, I'd heard 30% in city commutes, ie lots of stop/start, which would equate to 42% more range. But hearsay, not solid data, I guess.
Certainly I was aware that regen braking on e-bikes is next to useless.
However in an EV, given the cost and weight if the battery, even a 5-10% recovery may be a good ROI on the cost of a bigger motor, inverter & gearbox, and some software?
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Which is it? Make up your mind!
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Not nothing... 15%... no real difference...
Which is it? Make up your mind!
Your confusion likely comes from not reading the entire sentence. "In actual practice though there may be no real difference seen by the driver." That is the driver is not likely to change their routine over a 15% difference in miles per charge.
My current vehicle gets about 300 miles on a tank of fuel while my previous vehicle got more like 400 miles. That didn't make much difference to my driving habits because with either vehicle I could drive all week without filling up assuming I did little more than
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Range anxiety and regen braking (Score:2)
My current (2022 VW Jetta) gets about 500 to 600 miles per tank (varies based on manner and type of driving) vs. the 300-400 my old (2012 Honda Civic) pulled. It very definitely has changed my fueling habits.
That kind of change in range is nearly 100%, certainly at least 50%, not the 5% to 30% under debate here. I can see how that can change your fueling habits, especially if your daily commute is about the USA average of 29 miles per day, or even my average which is about twice that.
Re: So what's the accomplishment? (Score:2)
It depends on your drive. Stop-and-go traffic - it will matter. We live 600 meters up the side of a valley - any trip begins with a descent - regenerative braking is *very* useful.
Add to that the reduced brake servicing - reduced basically to zero for the life of the car.
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Add to that the reduced brake servicing - reduced basically to zero for the life of the car.
Unfortunately that's not really accurate. Caliper seals will go bad just from thermal cycling and age, if the system is hydraulic then the fluid needs to be changed periodically, if you use the system little enough the rotors will rust and even the pads might do so if they are metallic. Germans aside (they use metallic pads that are designed to wear the rotors away in exchange for better grip) the amount you use your brakes has a smaller effect on how fast they go bad than you think. And I might as well add
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The article you cite actually reinforces the point made in GP post.
The Tesla, with its powerful motors, regenerates up to 33%. The EVs with lower regeneration figures are e-bikes, with relatively smaller motors (no e-bike accelerates remotely as fast as any Tesla).
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I'd say that the sample size is too small to say for sure. Tesla might be doing better on recovering energy in braking because they put more effort into optimizing the system, not because of the larger motor involved. I have little doubt that the relative and absolute size of the motor in an EV contributes to the regen braking efficiency, but I have doubts on how much that contributes. I'd have to see more evidence that it is the motor size, and not the terrain or driving tactics or something else, that
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Evidentially you can scrap regenerative breaking and get a significant mileage boost.
Yeah I know you can't but in the context of TFA your post is non-sequitur.
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It doesn't carry ANY people, it's a land-based drone. Drop a 150 pound college kid on it and then tell me how far it goes...
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Once you meet all the design requirements for a vehicle that has to share the road with existing dino-powered cars, you end up needing a whole lot more energy to make it go. There's no escaping that.
However, if you were thinking of an electric vehicle that's stripped down to just the bare essentials and isn't intended to be traveling anywhere near 70 MPH highway traffic, those things already exist and are called e-bikes. The downsides though are that sometimes the weather doesn't cooperate, slow top speed
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It actually is a car for humans, or at least a human. And with a maximum speed of 26 MPH, assuming it met minimum safety specs, it could actually be a street-legal car, at least on roads marked under 25 to 35 MPH in the U.S., depending on the state, in much the same way that some golf carts are. Whether it has all the required features (turn signals, horn, three-point seat belts, safety glass windshield, etc.) or not, I have no idea, but it sounds like it might be at least in the ballpark for being a viab
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Re:Ok, now how about a car fir Humans? (Score:4, Insightful)
An ant can jump off the Empire State building
Jump? It was pushed!
Joke aside, this is the consistent level of commentary now on /. Ignorant, myopic, presumptuous judgement. Yeah, sure - developments in F1 racing, space flight, warfare have no other potential applications. I do come for the few, excellent comments by experts in the topic but it is a slog.
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Much easier to take a shit on someone else's work than produce anything yourself. See if I was going to make something it would be way better...
Anyway holy shit, my drill battery has 90Wh of charge, that would push this thing a quite astounding distance, nearly 10 miles.
Re: Ok, now how about a car fir Humans? (Score:3)
I think some confuse critical thinking (which is not negative or positive by itself) with channeling their nastiness.
I find these optimization exercises very interesting. The extreme methods can trickle down to production vehicles eventually. Viewing and building things from outside of some manufacturers paradigm can produce valuable innovations.
Not everything needs to be instantly mass produced, and perfecting the art forces toolset evolution as well.
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The things they did to get this record are simply impossible outside a lab environment. You can't have a road-safe vehicle with that low a mass, the shape is totally impractical for comfort or carrying any payload other than a single driver, the speed limit is slower than a fit person can peddle a bike, and I'd bet it can't climb a hill while carrying a driver and even with its extreme streamlining, I'd bet it has trouble with a headwind.
The engineering challenge should be "carry a standard human plus a s
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The things they did to get this record are simply impossible outside a lab environment. You can't have a road-safe vehicle with that low a mass, the shape is totally impractical for comfort or carrying any payload other than a single driver, the speed limit is slower than a fit person can peddle a bike, and I'd bet it can't climb a hill while carrying a driver and even with its extreme streamlining, I'd bet it has trouble with a headwind.
The engineering challenge should be "carry a standard human plus a standard cargo load over a standard road surface (including transitions from road to driveway), while carrying standard safety equipment, with stops, starts, and hills at varying speed limits matching an average suburban environment". Of course, just setting the standards for the test could be a fairly big challenge.
If it can't do 60km/h, handle a hill, handle loss of momentum due to stop signs and traffic lights, or cart along my groceries, and do all that while meeting road safety standards, it's pretty much useless.
Chasing records for records can be fun and produce real-world improvements, but I questing whether that is possible here.
Precisely.
One of my old bosses had a Term for a Design that could Demonstrate amazing things, but only under the perfect, or at least largely predictable, environment of an R&D workbench:
A Lab Queen.
This car is exactly that.
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Also it's less than 40 inches tall, which means the driver has to more or less recline. A practical vehicle must allow the driver to sit upright.
PHEV advantages (Re:Apples, oranges) (Score:3)
Or build a completely stripped not-street legal ICE and see how far it can go on a gallon of regular when it weighs about the same.
Precisely.
Or, since I imagine the use of an electric motor was vital to keeping weight down while achieving some minimum required torque to get it to move, replace the battery with an ICE-generator pack like those used on trains, ships, and other vehicles where energy efficiency grants more room for greater upfront costs and that might prove that the battery was holding it back.
Rising fuel costs are making hybrid electric cars more economically viable, as are the falling costs of the electrical components.
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Renting a car or truck is rarely a pleasant experience, rarely is the desired vehicle available since when people are likely to be renting a vehicle then it is likely for many others to do as well, which means if people see a need for an ICE to take their annual summer road trip, and another annual road trip around Christmas, then they will want to simply own an ICE or hybrid than try renting one twice every year.
I usually take one or two trips per year by car and for that I hire a car, not being a car owne
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Car hire doesn't need to suck.
True, but will this improve if there's more people renting cars than buying them?
If there's a trend for people to only rent cars for summer vacations and trips around major holidays then expect the prices to go up. This practice of renting only on special occasions will mean those renting the cars will have to store them while they are unused for longer, and that costs money. If people buy a car for their summer vacations and such, something a bit older and beat up perhaps, then they can avoid the overhea
Re: PHEV advantages (Re:Apples, oranges) (Score:2)
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You outlines the advantages if a hybrid. However, they have two disadvantages.
It appears you missed the point I was making, but I'll see what you got.
First, they can never reach the energy efficiency of pure electric - ICEs top out around 40% efficiency.
What if the driver gives no shits over efficiency? I'm pretty sure most drivers do not think at all about the thermal efficiency of an internal combustion engine. What they care about are things like total cost of ownership, convenience, comfort, and performance.
If the electricity for charging a BEV comes from coal or natural gas then that still sees a top out of 40% of efficiency. Well, maybe a combined cycle gas turbine gets more l
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Second, you have all the complexity and all the maintenance requirements of *both* power trains.
For someone used to owning an ICEV the maintenance requirements of an oil change isn't likely to deter them much. Convincing them to give up having even the option to fill up quickly at a common filling station isn't likely to be an easy sell.
Until their friends change over and tell them how much time they save by charging their car at home and never needing to go to a filling station. I mean I guess with PHEV, that's still true for the ones who don't drive very far, but....
Also the cost savings can be a huge win. It's not just oil changes and brake pads (and besides, the extra cost of changing tires twice as often cancels out a lot of that). The big win is the fuel cost.
What if the driver gives no shits over efficiency?
Then the driver will pay for that efficiency. Handsomely. The fact of
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Then the driver will pay for that efficiency. Handsomely. The fact of the matter is that at current rates of usage, the total known oil reserves (including the ones that are hard to deplete without causing ecological disasters, like underneath the Gulf of Mexico or in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) will last us about 50 years. As we get closer, the cost of oil is going to skyrocket. Ethanol is so close to break-even in terms of fossil fuel input to fossil fuel output that it won't help much at all, and synthetic fuel is also going to cost a fortune.
We're already over $5 at the pumps in many states, and approaching $6. What if I told you that in ten years, it could be $30, but your electricity prices will still probably be about one or two dollars per gallon-equivalent kWH quantity on average. Now do they care about efficiency? Because that's the way you frame efficiency.
I mean, if they plan to trade the car after three years, they still may not care, but otherwise, they really should.
You can keep up that fight to pry the ICE from people's fingers but expect to lose. With something trivial like what to eat for supper on a given night the fight on that is likely easy to win, but with a large purchase like what someone might be driving for the next 3, 5, 10, or 15 years that's not so trivial. If you tell people that there's 50 years of petroleum in ANWR then they'll be buying another big block SUV.
When I was deciding on what to buy the last time I needed a new-to-me vehicle I made a spre
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Then the driver will pay for that efficiency. Handsomely. The fact of the matter is that at current rates of usage, the total known oil reserves (including the ones that are hard to deplete without causing ecological disasters, like underneath the Gulf of Mexico or in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) will last us about 50 years. As we get closer, the cost of oil is going to skyrocket. Ethanol is so close to break-even in terms of fossil fuel input to fossil fuel output that it won't help much at all, and synthetic fuel is also going to cost a fortune.
We're already over $5 at the pumps in many states, and approaching $6. What if I told you that in ten years, it could be $30, but your electricity prices will still probably be about one or two dollars per gallon-equivalent kWH quantity on average. Now do they care about efficiency? Because that's the way you frame efficiency.
I mean, if they plan to trade the car after three years, they still may not care, but otherwise, they really should.
You can keep up that fight to pry the ICE from people's fingers but expect to lose. With something trivial like what to eat for supper on a given night the fight on that is likely easy to win, but with a large purchase like what someone might be driving for the next 3, 5, 10, or 15 years that's not so trivial. If you tell people that there's 50 years of petroleum in ANWR then they'll be buying another big block SUV.
That's the thing, when you get down to a twenty-year supply, the major oil-producing countries are going to be trying to stretch that supply over a thousand years so their countries don't go bankrupt. Synthetic fuels probably still won't be able to be mass-produced in the quantities required at a reasonable price, so I'd expect gas prices to peak somewhere between $100 and $300 per gallon, and the only thing keeping it that low will be synthetic fuel production, which will produce just enough for vintage c
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so I'd expect gas prices to peak somewhere between $100 and $300 per gallon
Would you please share whatever it is you are smoking?
and the only thing keeping it that low will be synthetic fuel production, which will produce just enough for vintage car fans to take their cars to car shows a couple of times per year. That's what we're looking at in a couple of decades or so.
Porshe is already producing "e-fuels" (their name for synthesized hydrocarbons) for about $10 per liter according to their press people, so about $40/gal. The US Navy claims to be producing e-fuels for about $6/gal to $8/gal, an estimate they admit doesn't exactly translate to civilian costs today because of various differences on how the Navy operates versus the civilian nuclear and petroleum industries. In either case the estimate is we can get e-fue
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so I'd expect gas prices to peak somewhere between $100 and $300 per gallon
Would you please share whatever it is you are smoking?
and the only thing keeping it that low will be synthetic fuel production, which will produce just enough for vintage car fans to take their cars to car shows a couple of times per year. That's what we're looking at in a couple of decades or so.
Porshe is already producing "e-fuels" (their name for synthesized hydrocarbons) for about $10 per liter according to their press people, so about $40/gal.
News to me. The most recent price I could find was $50 a liter. Still, at ~$45 per gallon for manufacturing, that means transportation of the fuel will cost ~15x as much, which is going to add on probably at least ten bucks to that number. But you're failing to account for A. profit, and B. demand. If you're worried about mining not scaling up to meet demand, think how much harder it will be to scale up electricity production and manufacturing simultaneously enough to meet the demand for synthetic fuel.
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What if the driver gives no shits over efficiency?
With these fuel prices, most drivers do in fact give at least one shit about efficiency, and most likely several.
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With these fuel prices, most drivers do in fact give at least one shit about efficiency, and most likely several.
I'm making the distinction between thermal efficiency and fuel efficiency, costs per mile, and any of a number of other metrics for performance that people are far more likely to care about.
I am willing to wager that with with enough work I could make a car that gets 45% thermal efficiency, which would be a considerable boost from what is on the road today. I believe that is possible given we have trains with greater thermal efficiency, and power plants with greater thermal efficiency, so I'd make somethin
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I'm making the distinction between thermal efficiency and fuel efficiency, costs per mile, and any of a number of other metrics for performance that people are far more likely to care about.
Those are all about efficiency, only different kinds of it. And they still all boil down to thermal efficiency, because you're trying to get the maximum output out for your input. If you're throwing away unnecessary energy as heat then you're not getting the maximum power output or the maximum mileage output.
I am willing to wager that with with enough work I could make a car that gets 45% thermal efficiency, which would be a considerable boost from what is on the road today. I believe that is possible given we have trains with greater thermal efficiency, and power plants with greater thermal efficiency, so I'd make something with features of a locomotive and/or power plant. This could be a car that has a steam engine instead of a typical automotive radiator, meaning it is boiling off the water coolant instead of recirculating it. I could use rock hard steel wheels to reduce rolling resistance, meaning it would have a very rough ride and be impossible to drive on any roads but the hardest of concrete. The water tank alone is likely to add a near impossible to manage weight if we are to maintain anything close to the range of the vehicle where I took that engine from to start with on my demonstration. But with all that added mass and aerodynamic drag from the water tank the fuel efficiency would likely be horrible if taken up to highway speeds.
Yeah, you just described a train. Efficiency is why we should use more trains. I'm surprised you're not pro-steam-train given that they could be nuclear-powered and you would love that.
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Those are all about efficiency, only different kinds of it. And they still all boil down to thermal efficiency, because you're trying to get the maximum output out for your input. If you're throwing away unnecessary energy as heat then you're not getting the maximum power output or the maximum mileage output.
Thermal efficiency would correlate to fuel efficiency, and fuel efficiency would correlate to total cost of ownership, if all else were equal. The problem is that given how we've spent so much effort on maximizing efficiency of all kinds it is unlikely to improve thermal efficiency any more without taking a large hit on the size, mass, cost, or so much else that could make improvements to thermal efficiency undesirable. If it were so easy then I'd expect it would have been done by now. All else would lik
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The point is to develop a zero emission vehicle.
PHEVs are the worst of both worlds. Small battery, complex drivetrain, high maintenance. For some people they are useful, but for most people the only real reason they want one is because they can't charge at home - which makes the P part of the PHEV fairly pointless.
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The point is to develop a zero emission vehicle.
The point is to make a zero emission vehicle that people would actually want to buy.
A PHEV that is plugged in for the daily commute is as much a zero emissions vehicle as a BEV, the distinction is that the PHEV drivers aren't renting an ICEV for the extra range it buys them about three times per year that they drive beyond where a BEV an reasonably go. People have had the option to get a BEV for more than 100 years but it is only in the last 20 years or so that we had the battery technology that we have
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They are students, they aren't selling this thing.
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If the students aren't taught to be looking for economical and practical applications for the technologies they are working on then they should get a refund on their tuition.
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Universities are more about basic research than commercialisation.
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Is there any new science being discovered here? Maybe a novel way of designing low friction aerodynamic shapes?
If it's cool but not useful, then it's an art piece.
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I see you are failing to see the picture. Perhaps I can try again in painting a new picture by painting with more vivid colors.
Take these power outages from 2020 as examples to start with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Assume a near future USA where BEV adoption has been highly successful, perhaps 90% of households in the given area have only BEVs with the rest PHEVs and ICEVs. Assume a widespread power outage. How widespread? Pick a number, something like 1 million to 10 million people. How long?
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The fundamental difference between EVs and ICEs is their energy source, and yes, in an emergency, it's easier to bring vast quantities of the latter's fuel. The energy that would've been moved by the Keystone Pipeline takes 50 ultra-high voltage powerlines to replace.
However, electricity is extremely flexible and can be generated pretty much anywhere. You can have a single backup generator for your house and that takes care of everything. It's not any harder to bring in fuel for the generator than to bring
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However, electricity is extremely flexible and can be generated pretty much anywhere.
True, but also missing some important details. One important detail is keeping generators around, and maintaining them so they are functional when needed. A hybrid vehicle is often a generator on wheels, and a generator that people will often keep fueled up and well maintained as a daily routine.
You can have a single backup generator for your house and that takes care of everything.
Everything except charging up your BEV.
It's not any harder to bring in fuel for the generator than to bring it in for your ICE car.
My truck has it's own wheels and a large fuel tank inside. I don't have to bring fuel to it, I drive it to the fuel.
If I'm sheltering in place because the roads are blocked
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One important detail is keeping generators around, and maintaining them so they are functional when needed. A hybrid vehicle is often a generator on wheels, and a generator that people will often keep fueled up and well maintained as a daily routine.
That's a good point. A generator is a separate thing that needs to be purchased and run occasionally to ensure it's working. However, I don't actually see any hybrid vehicles that support bidirectional charging, so your best bet right now is still a generator.
You can have a single backup generator for your house and that takes care of everything.
Everything except charging up your BEV.
Why not? A 4 kW unit (~$400) would fully charge a Tesla's 100 kWh battery in 25 hours, give or take. If you had enough fuel to drive your car 400 miles, then you have enough fuel to run your generator for that long (approximately, depending on your car
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That's a good point. A generator is a separate thing that needs to be purchased and run occasionally to ensure it's working. However, I don't actually see any hybrid vehicles that support bidirectional charging, so your best bet right now is still a generator.
You don't need vehicle-to-home (which is what I believe you mean by "bidirectional charging", V2H is likely defined as providing 120/240 VAC split phase power at something like 20, 30, or 40 amps) kind of power to make a PHEV useful for sheltering in place or to replace a portable generator. What would be immensely useful is just having vehicle-to-load (or V2L), a couple 120 VAC 15 amp outlets for running extension cords into the house or "camping out" in the garage with the car. After the 2020 derecho I
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That's quite the wall of text my friend. You could have just summarized it as "What happens if there's an extended power outage?"
Apparently that would not have been a sufficient summary because it appears you are still missing the magnitude of the problem.
Fun fact, take it from someone who used to live in Hurricane Alley, you can't fucking pump gas without electricity either. The few stations that didn't lose power quickly run out of gas.
We learned that lesson the hard way. All kinds of fuel sitting in underground tanks at filling stations but without electricity to run the pumps that fuel wasn't going anywhere. The solution was that the local fire departments now have hand pumps to get fuel out of the tanks. Why the fire department? I guess because it had to be someone and the fire department is trained in mana
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" Add a/c, heated seats,"
If you need one, you don't need the other.
"entertainment system"
How much does a cellphone and earbuds weigh?
"anti lock breaks"
Why can't people spell brakes properly?
" a top speed of 155 mph"
I don't know anywhere that is legal to be doing that on public roads - unless its the German autobahn.
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" Add a/c, heated seats,"
If you need one, you don't need the other.
You must not get out much.
Where I live the temperatures range from something like -30F to over 100F every year, and if I expand that to places I've driven to then the temperature extremes get wider. On an odd day I can wake up to a vehicle that's been soaking in sub-freezing temperatures all night then find myself needing air conditioning later that day because I've been driving all day under a cloudless sky with the sun beating down. Granted I'd likely do better on this with a lighter color paint job but
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" Add a/c, heated seats,"
If you need one, you don't need the other.
Most people don't have separate cars for each season.
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Whoosh!
The cars this extreme experiment are being directly compared to in this article have all those things.
Apples. Oranges.
It doesn't matter if _you_ don't see a point in those things. The compared vehicles have them. They add weight.