ICE Forever!

    Internal combustion engines (ICE's) aren't going away. Not in your lifetime, and likely not in your grandchildren's lifetime either.

    This basically comes down to energy density. Gasoline has more than 25 times the energy density of the best Lithium ion battery technology by volume. This is why electric cars with giant battery packs still can't go more than about 300 miles in the best case scenario. Gasoline also has a tremendous advantage over Li-ion batteries by weight. A Tesla battery pack weighs 1200 lbs (540 kg), compare that to nine gallons of gas which weigh 54 lbs (24 kg) - both will get you about 300 miles down the road. There is also charging times vs time to fill a tank. For those who advocate battery pack swapping, consider the mechanics of swapping out 1200 lb, 10 ft long battery packs vs pumping 10 gallons of gas.


    This video from Engineering Explained does it better - well worth watching.

    The smarter you get, the funnier I am.

    I'm telling you guys. Warp core!

    Never saw any of the Enterprise's filling up for a recharge including the one William Shatter owned back in the 70's, plus when you need to make that last minute escape/getaway you can always eject the warp core to eliminate the threat.


    Image result for warp core gif

    But you forgot about Galaxy Quest, they had to go find Beryllium for their engine core :)


    All good points. I have another example though, look at the early 1900's. Gasoline was hard to come by, the engines didn't provide very much HP/Torque for the gas used and was really inefficient.


    Look at the batteries we have today compared to 30 years ago, they have come a long way. They are still getting better, and in another 20 years, we may see something really good improvements that will allow longer distances on electricity and much faster charging, along the lines of a fuel fill-up of today.


    ICE isn't going anywhere soon, but it will eventually, just probably not in our life time.

    Depends so much on your individual needs. Run around all day as a traveling salesperson? ICE. Going 3-4 hours each way on a skiing trip? ICE. Getting 10 or 20 miles to public transportation? EV. Making a trip local shopping trip? EV.

    I got this in an email today. How much is going to happen and will never happen (remember, by now we are supposed to have flying cars)?

    Fun to read and speculate.


    While some of these predictions seem plausible, some are almost mind boggling unfathomable!
     
     
    SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT! ALL OF THE FOLLOWING WILL BECOME REALITY IN THE NEXT 10-20 YEARS. MANY OF US WON’T SEE THE CHANGES, BUT OUR KIDS AND GRANDKIDS PROBABLY WILL. WELCOME TO TOMORROW!!
     
    1 - The basic auto repair shops will disappear. Read on to know why.
     
    2 - A petrol/diesel engine has 20,000 individual parts. An electrical motor has 20. Electric cars are sold with lifetime guarantees and are repaired only by dealers. It takes only 10 minutes to remove and replace an electric motor.
     
    3 - Faulty electric motors are not repaired in the dealership but are sent to a regional repair shop that repairs them with robots.
     
    4 - Your electric motor malfunction light goes on, so you drive up to what looks like a car wash, and your car is towed through while you have a cup of coffee and out comes your car with a new electric motor.
     
    5 - Petrol pumps will go away.
     
    6 - Street corners will have meters that dispense electricity. Companies will install electrical recharging stations; in fact, they’ve already started in the developed world.
     
    7 - Smart major auto manufacturers have already designated money to start building new plants that build only electric cars.
     
    8 - Coal industries will go away. Gasoline/oil companies will go away. Drilling for oil will stop.
     
    So say goodbye to OPEC! The Middle-East is in trouble.
     
    9 - Homes will produce and store more electrical energy during the day than they use and will sell it back to the grid. The grid stores it and dispenses it to industries that are high electricity users. Has anybody seen the Tesla roof?
     
    10 - A baby of today will see personal cars only in museums. The FUTURE is approaching faster than most of us can handle.
     
    11 - In 1998, Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper worldwide.
     
    Within just a few years, their business model disappeared and they went bankrupt. Who would have thought of that ever happening?
     
    12 - What happened to Kodak and Polaroid will happen in a lot of industries in the next 5-10 years…and most people don’t see it coming.
     
    13 - Did you think in 1998 that 3 years later, you would never take pictures on film again?
     
    With today’s Smartphones, who even has a camera these days?
     
    14 - Yet digital cameras were invented in 1975. The first ones only had 10,000 pixels but followed Moore’s Law. So as with all exponential technologies, it was a disappointment for a time, before it became way superior and became mainstream in only a few short years.
     
    15 - It will now happen again (but much faster) with Artificial Intelligence, health, autonomous and electric cars, education, 3D printing, agriculture and jobs.
     
    16 - Forget the book, “Future Shock,” welcome to the 4th Industrial Revolution.
     
    17 - Software has disrupted and will continue to disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5-10 years.
     
    18 - UBER is just a software tool, they don’t own any cars, and are now the biggest taxi company in the world. Ask any taxi driver if they saw that coming.
     
    19 - Airbnb is now the biggest hotel company in the world, although they don’t own any properties. Ask Hilton Hotels if they saw the coming.
     
     
    20 - Artificial Intelligence: Computers become exponentially better in understanding the world. This year, a computer beat the best Go player in the world, 10 years earlier than expected.
     
    21 - In the USA, young lawyers already don’t get jobs. Because of IBM’s, you can get legal advice (so far for right now, the basic stuff) within seconds, with 90% accuracy compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans. So, if you study law, stop immediately. There will be 90% fewer lawyers in the future, (what a thought!) only omniscient specialists will remain.
     
    22 - Watson already helps nurses diagnosis cancer, it’s 4 times more accurate than human nurses.
     
    23 - Facebook now has a pattern recognition software that can recognize faces better than humans. In 2030, computers will become more intelligent than humans.
     
    24 - Autonomous cars: In 2018 the first self-driving cars are already here. In the next 2 years, the entire industry will start to be disrupted. You won’t want to own a car anymore as you will call a car with your phone, it will show up at your location and drive you to your destination.
     
    25 - You will not need to park it, you will pay only for the driven distance and you can be productive while driving. The very young children of today will never get a driver’s license and will never own a car.
     
    26 - This will change our cities because we will need 90-95% fewer cars. We can transform former parking spaces into green parks.
     
    27 - About 1.2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide including distracted or drunk driving. We now have one accident every 60,000 miles; with autonomous driving that will drop to 1 accident in 6-million miles. That will save a million lives plus worldwide each year.
     
    28 - Most traditional car companies will doubtless become bankrupt. They will try the evolutionary approach and just build a better car, while tech companies (Tesla, Apple, Google) will do the revolutionary approach and build a computer on wheels.
     
    29 - Look at what Volvo is doing right now; no more internal combustion engines in their vehicles starting this year with the 2019 models, using all-electric or hybrid only, with the intent of phasing out hybrid models.
     
    30 - Many engineers from Volkswagen and Audi are completely terrified of Tesla and they should be. Look at all the companies offering all-electric vehicles. That was unheard of, only a few years ago.
     
    31- Insurance companies will have massive trouble because, without accidents, the costs will become cheaper. Their car insurance business model will disappear.
     
    32 - Real estate will change. Because if you can work while you commute, people will abandon their towers to move far away to more beautiful affordable locations.
     
    33 - Electric cars will become mainstream about 2030. Cities will be less noisy because all new cars will run on electricity.
     
    34 - Cities will have much cleaner air as well.
     
    35 - Electricity will become incredibly cheap and clean.
     
    36 - Solar production has been on an exponential curve for 30 years, but you can now see the burgeoning impact. And it’s just getting ramped up.
     
    37 - Fossil energy companies are desperately trying to limit access to the grid to prevent competition from home solar installations, but that simply cannot continue - technology will take care of that strategy.
     
    38 - Health: The Tricorder X price will be announced this year. There are companies who will build a medical device (called the “Tricorder” from Star Trek) that works with your phone, which takes your retina scan, your blood sample, and you breathe into it.
     
    It then analyses 54 bio-markers that will identify nearly any disease. There are dozens of phone apps out there right now for health.
     
    WELCOME TO TOMORROW - some of it actually arrived a few years ago.
     
     
    Note: How much does it cost to replace the batteries in a Tesla?
     
    Tesla puts a price on Model 3 Battery Model Replacement around $5000-$7000. If you’ve ever owned anything that requires batteries, from TV remotes to laptop, you know that the battery - no matter how good - will require replacement.

    Quote from openair

    Whoever wrote that must be working on much more complex engines then most cars have, I have never seen an engine with 20,000 parts in it, nor have I seen an electric car sold with a lifetime guarantee on the motor yet. I have also not seen a workshop manual for any of the electric car manufacturers out there, but 10 minutes for removing and installing a motor in a vehicle seems very optimistic.

    Quote from openair

    I got this in an email today. How much is going to happen and will never happen (remember, by now we are supposed to have flying cars)?

    Fun to read and speculate.

    A lot of goofy talking points here - and this really ignores the problems of an electric infrastructure and energy density problems of batteries. Batteries are metalic systems - and they're heavy! Fuel cells are a possibility, but hydrogen infrastructure has massive problems (hello Hindenburg!). Hydrogen is one of the most difficult elements to store, it's tiny molecular size means that for hydrogen, most metals are ultimately porous.


    Batteries based on Lithium are an environmental disaster. Extremely toxic, difficult to mine, and in very short supply world wide, the lithium economy is self limiting - today's 2% electric / 98% petroleum auto fleet is pushing the lithium economy to its very limits - expanding beyond this to meet world demand is really unrealistic. Disposing of lithium is comparable to disposing of liquid radioisotopes - the stuff is corrosive, toxic, and contaminates the environment for decades or centuries. Lithium is nightmare fuel.


    Providing 'street corner electric charging' has insurmountable problems as well. This means that you have to have either a very large nuclear energy generation, or your transportation sector must run largely on coal and oil fired plants. You haven't changed the energy economy at all - you've just moved the exhaust pipe and made the system less efficient - electricity is ALWAYS lost in transmission, petroleum products lose no energy content when transported. Charging also takes TIME, lots of it. You aren't fueling up a vehicle - you are changing the molecular structure of the battery system. That generates HEAT (pollution), charging (or discharging) too fast means a fire risk. You cannot "fuel" any electric vehicle as quickly as a petrol based vehicle - you need 10x the time at the very minimum. Energy density means that no vehicle larger than a personal car can run on batteries anyway - if you get a cargo load larger than the battery mass, the system becomes unworkable. Battery powered trains, tractor trailers, or planes are flat out impossible. Hydrogen would make a workable heavy transportation fuel, but that has its own problems.


    This vision of the future would require rationing, eliminating personal mobility, destroying industries (and the jobs they create) in the process. You're talking about a socialist utopia - ask any Venezuelan how they feel about it. Ask the Chinese why they abandoned a pure communist, centrally controlled economy for an essentially capitalist economy supporting their unworkable communist political ideology. You're not talking about 'the best is yet to come', you're talking about going back to the bad old days.


    The only way your vision of an electric economy could work is to have fusion power generating the electricity. Want that? Then we need to go back to the moon and mine He3 (helium 3, a pre-fusion product) and research fusion energy big time. One Space shuttle full of He3 in fusion reactors would supply the energy needs of the world for a year. Fusion is REALLY efficient - and the only exhaust product is helium (currently in short supply world wide) and radioactive steel shielding (easy to store safely compared to liquid radioactive products from fusion reactors.) Of course - if most of the economy were run with clean nuclear electricity, we could save the petroleum for personal vehicles, keep the infrastructure we've got, and fuel trucks with batteries.


    Sure, we'll change over to hydrogen fueled vehicles over petroleum eventually, but we will not sacrifice the free market or a freely mobile populace to do it.

    ICE forever!

    The smarter you get, the funnier I am.

    I disagree. In my opinion we are 20-25 years max before going full blown electric. It’s a matter of technology advancing and enough companies jumping on board. To those Talking about SUVs and pick up trucks, there are already a small handful of them with a wide acceptance in the market. As sad as it might be for some of us to accept it is already happening. Noone thought the internet would tale over our lives 25 years ago and now everything is done through a computer. We are also seeing the huge, rapid rise in drone technology and robotics. In 15 years dont expect to see humans at your local supermarket scanning your items. The intro of 5G networks this year are going to accelerate things even more.

    Quote from OrangeSlingFL

    I disagree. In my opinion we are 20-25 years max before going full blown electric. It’s a matter of technology advancing and enough companies jumping on board. To those Talking about SUVs and pick up trucks, there are already a small handful of them with a wide acceptance in the market. As sad as it might be for some of us to accept it is already happening. Noone thought the internet would tale over our lives 25 years ago and now everything is done through a computer. We are also seeing the huge, rapid rise in drone technology and robotics. In 15 years dont expect to see humans at your local supermarket scanning your items. The intro of 5G networks this year are going to accelerate things even more.

    Very much agree with you that fast data processing and information transfer technology will continue to transform the labor market and retail sector.


    Your insistence about battery powered transportation simply ignores the physics with a "science will solve that" statement. I don't think so. Computer technology moves nothing bigger than electrons, and primarily at low voltages which eliminates the transmission loss problem.


    Battery technology has to move real mass, and it involves transferring large amperages at high voltages. These two technologies are not congruent, and the limitations of one are nothing like the limitations of the other.

    The smarter you get, the funnier I am.

    Our current structure might handle 10% of cars being electric and even that's a difficult number to manage. The numbers from the current 2% will continue to slowly increase as better technologies and logistics develop. Strange part was the best type car to tackle this was the 2nd gen Chevy Volt. 60+ miles on juice and then seamlessly switch over to a 40+ mpg engine. Most drivers averaged better than 90% on electric. It was the best car I ever owned. Low profit margin vehicle so GM put no marketing behind it and they stopped making it in favor of new pure electrics with aforementioned inherent problems.

    I would love to own a Chevy Volt style SUV. Much of the driving I do is in the "less than 50 miles round trip" category. On the other hand, I live on a small hilltop ranch, some days I really need an SUV and some days 4WD is a life and death necessity for us - it's Arkansas, not Wisconsin, but being 500 ft higher than the rest of the town, we can be snowed in when the rest of the town is just wet. If I had a hybrid that would do the job I needed, I'd be all in.

    Right now though, it's a gasoline engine fleet for me.

    The smarter you get, the funnier I am.