TBK-Light.com

They said the same about automatics in the 80's and diesels in the late 90's, yet 95% of cars still have manual boxes and your grandkids childrens children are still going to be clearing up diesel particals from this expert 'predictions' when they hit retirement age.

I don't mind electric engines, but let's not kid ourselves 'batteries' are the future of clean energy, far from it in fact.

Not in the USA. It's actually incredibly rare to see manual transmission cars here. Most people don't even know how to drive a manual transmission car. (I've never actually done it even!)

Batteries will *never* be as energy-dense as petrol (and yes, the word "never" does exist in science. It's physically/chemically impossible to obtain the same energy as petrol from the same weight of batteries, even using the best atom combinations available in the periodic table). And to fly a plane, or accelerate a car as fast as possible, or to have vehicle autonomy in general, you need a high energy density.

As for gearboxes and type of oil, those are just minor design variations and lifestyle choices mostly, but there's no going around the depletion of oil. It will happen, and we'll have to get used to it, and we will never be able to move around as easily and as far/fast as we're used to now that the oil is still flowing. Past science feats should not fool someone into thinking that progress is guaranteed and will save us from this one: that very progress was only made easy by oil giving us basically free, easy, light energy to do all the rest, and feeding the economy that allows these developments.

Isn't the massively superior energy density of petrol balanced out a little by how inefficient the process of unlocking it is? I might be wrong, but that's how I understood it.

But electric cars will be mandatory on a few years in countries like Germany. That's why....

Most people don't even know where their electricity even comes from.

We still have coal, oil and gas power plants here that make up 53%. Then there are the ageing nuclear plants making up a further 21%.

Clean, my arse.

Electric, yes. Battery-powered, not necessarily. I am still reasonably sure that battery-electric cars are only a stopgap until hydrogen fuel cells mature and a better infrastructure for them is developed.

At the moment the world seems convinced that batteries will be the future saviour of all our power needs, and as others have said, hardly anybody understands what goes into making one of these cells, so yeah, at the moment the majority of people continue to fool themselves into thinking batteries are the future clean energy solution.

Anyway once people begin to realise the thing powering their shiny new environment saving car is the same thing that was randomly exploding in hoverboards and Samsung's and burning people's houses down a few years ago, they may think twice about buying one.

Yes, yes I know petrol catches fire just as easily (in fact more easily) than a lithium cell, it's actually quiet hard to force a lithium cell to combust, but once it does, unlike a petrol fire you don't put it out, you just wait and put out what else it sets on fire.

As GK said, the solution will come from another power source, that may well call itself a battery, but won't share anything in common with the present battery technology used in electric cars other than the name.

Re: Autos, it's funny how buying habits are different in each country, you see hardly any automatics for sale in the UK, we had to order ours specially as the model did not come (in the UK at the time) with an automatic gearbox as standard.

The environmental issue that gives EVs the "clean" tag among those who desire "environmentally friendly" is "greenhouse gas". Of course lithium mining has a carbon footprint, but so do oil sands. Yeah, lithium mining isn't exactly "clean" either in other ways. Neither is petroleum extraction and refinement. Of course generating electricity contributes to greenhouse gas, but unless you are generating electricity with say dirty coal, chances are your generation method is a bit cleaner greenhouse gas wise (something like LNG sure is, and nuclear for all its faults and warts is quite low CO2). There's no such thing as a free lunch, so "clean" isn't 100% "clean". Still, the "clean" tag isn't completely wrong.

Battery issues and "green" claims aside, what should be nice about EVs for certain markets is reduced maintenance and operating costs. Electric engines are a simpler design that are far more efficient overall at converting energy to motion, even if battery physics means there's less energy to work with. Not everyone needs lots of energy reserve, so this might appeal to some of the urban commute market just for this reason (especially if EV cars equalize more with ICE cars, the reduced maintenance costs will become quite an advantage for anyone who keeps their vehicles for the long haul). I could also see fleet vehicles for things like urban deliveries or taxis or whatnot using them for that reason. Of course, Tesla's showing the other side of this with their fast acceleration in their high-end sports cars (high torque), but that's for good show.

Because gasoline is more energy dense, I seriously doubt EVs are going to work in anything that requires lots of extended power for a while (eg lorries / semis, planes, big cargo ships) -- even if the carbons run out (which they won't for a seriously long time), probably more "renewable" carbons (such as the methanol / ethanol that has powered Indycar for the last half century) could basically take their place due to similar enough energy density. All those countries that said "we're going to ban gasoline cars blah blah" haven't actually passed laws to do so, from what I understand, so my best guess is by 2040 or whenever they think they are thinking of that "ban", they'll probably have to amend their statements.

You're confusing the power with the source. The big difference between electricity and oil is that electricity can be generated in a variety of ways ranging from environmentally sustainable to environmentally harmful, whereas oil extraction will only ever be an environmentally harmful process with a supply limit.

_________________

Welllll, the name of the series is Formula E, not Formula Battery. They can very well change the rules, or make a sub-series with other means of assists.

You're right, but in a petrol engine you're also burning massive volumes of oxygen which you're chugging for free from the atmosphere, and only injecting a little fuel. Batteries have to contain all the energy needed to power the car/plane from the start, so in terms of weight unfortunately it doesn't balance out.

Only better alternative to keep a similar power and autonomy ratio to petrol engines would be nuclear energy like uranium or thorium, but I'd rather ride a horse to work
Well, maybe hydrogen cells, but that idea has been around for a while and doesn't seem to pick-up as fast as electric, does it?

In all cases, I'm convinced that the weight-obsessed, performance-obsessed, motorsport world is the ideal platform to develop petrol-less cars. What works for a fast race-car on a short race will work for road cars for longer, less aggressive stints, provided the regulations let them go in that direction.

Hydrogen would be great but like the present crop of batteries, it's almost entirely dependent for it's manufacturing and "recharging" on fossil fuels, I'm not sure why it's never taken off, maybe it's because people are generally more scared of having a gas tank in their boot rather than sitting on a hundred lipo cells, although anybody who has ever witnessed a lipo cell failing would plumb for the gas tank every time.

I understand the issue with fuel cells is that hydrogen is a relatively difficult material to work with and transport (it has this nasty tendency to combine with things and leak and whatnot). Consequently, you'd have to build up infrastructure to deal with hydrogen.

In the urban markets where EVs will focus on in particular, there is an existing infrastructure for electricity, which adds some attraction to the battery solution. So people have kind of stopped looking in the fuel cell direction for the moment.

I'm not convived. Then again I'm not convinced motorsport has been really a laboratory for road cars at all since the 60/70s, except of course in manufacturrers' marketing material and press releases. Even if you had the most open regs ever, it is still more efficient to do R&D in actual test facilities compared to motorsport where a lot of money goes into extracting performance from areas that have no relevance to road cars at all (but at least FE is trying to avoid that with spec cars, but that also makes it boring as a motorsport).

And current Formula E certainly isn't a great laboratory either. There are already way powerful and advanced EV cars, including Teslas and other road and not road legal cars by smaller makers. The most important area (battery) is spec part to keep costs down, and might not be even opened for development until 2025 if even then. Current standard FE budget is 20M eur. That's nothing compared to overall R&D budgets of car manufacturers which are counted in billions.

the mayor of Montreal has canceled next year's Formula E season finale.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/sports/montreal- ... sc=wifnDCK

Starting to see a trend here...

I'm not surprised by it at all, after reading Kligerman's article about his spectator experience at Brooklyn this summer.

My experience in Paris the first year was awful. The year after, they added grandstands, tidied up the area, and offered all of us early access to front row seats on the S/F line and the overall experience was better for all spectators.

How many cities still know how to host a motor race ? Monaco and Macao did it for decades, and newcomers that didn't run in a park (so, Singapore) had millions and the Bernie-machine behind.
I also think this only really works in cities where population is in favor of electric cars in the first place. Either way, I'd give this some more time to pick up and find its core audience and core venues.

You mean this: http://nascar.nbcsports.com/2017/07/27/ ... ience/amp/

I've read it and I recommend reading it. "Formula E is an Instagram hit, but attending a race is an out-of-focus experience."

The things mentiopned in this might explain the bad attendance but there were other reasons for the cancellation, and the recently elected new mayor was the final nail in the coffin.