Electric Cars are not ready to replace gas-powered cars.
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Believe it or not this is the real solution. You make the generator where it is as efficient as possible and much smaller so its less weight. If you KNOW you are going very far then you have a switch that just turns it on and lets it run instead of an automatic mode that only runs when the battery is low.
I know you're making a joke but their is a balance there that would make electric cars useful, and practical.
This is stupid. Instead of taking fuel and turning it directly into motion for the vehicle, you would have them turn fuel into motion, motion into electricity, electricity into battery and battery back into motion. The only thing it beats is having to make the energy somewhere else and ship it miles thru power lines to get to your car
Maybe in an attempt not to over explain I wasn't clear enough. I'm talking about an electric car that has a SMALL motor(less than 50 hp maybe even only 10-20 hp) that can trickle charge the batteries or just add to the power being used.
There is a lot of inefficiency in cars because they need a wide power band to deal with various problems like hills and starting from a dead stop. If you have a generator that runs at the most efficient RPMs with no clutch etc it solves a lot of problems and removes a lot of weight. Its not just as simple as motion to electricity to motion. Although I admit that part of it is less than ideal.
What I'm saying is if the goal is an electric car... as flawed as they are... then a setup of large battery with a small motor and modest fuel supply is best to achieve endurance and usability. Especially given that in most places gas is easy to find but a charging port isn't.
My personal preference is hydrogen fuel cell cars. By weight and volume liquid hydrogen has more energy than anything else and its actually quit easy to make. There are storage and handling issues but still we should be putting all our efforts into improving that technology not toying around with gas engines. Electric cars run on batteries should only be a jumping off point to ditch the batteries for a fuel cell IMHO.
I see what you mean. To use them as backup. But you will still no matter what always have some loss no matter what with every step you take away from the origional power source. Hybrid cars to me seem like the best option for pure efficiency. Using some electric and some gas allows for regenerative braking or I've heard some places are even toying with electronic generating suspension. There is a similar problem with hydrogen as with EV tho. In order to make hydrogen out of water. You need to run an electric current thru it. The problem here lies in that you need more electricity power to split the H2O than you will get energy from burning it. That's why when you try to make the perpetual motion machine where you burn hydrogen to power the generator to make the electricity to split the water and try to run the loop, it doesn't work for long. Eventually it sputters itself out. Crazy enough the most efficient way to make hydrogen comes from oil. It's a by product of making things like acetylene although I'm not sure how it works
Yeah, but the question becomes what wastes more energy... running that electricity through a power line that heats up or moving hydrogen through a pipe or via a truck.
Also from a standpoint of storing energy long term hydrogen has them all beat by so much its not even funny. Plus its crazy clean overall. And all this can be improved on. Which was my point... why aren't they working on improving that tech? You know what I think... I think they already have and they don't want us to have access to it because they know it will mean we can use nuclear power to make hydrogen and POOF they lose control. Energy will be cheap. No more wars etc etc.
Its just like medicine. Healthy patients don't pay. Cheap, portable, easily stored energy doesn't get massive profits for big oil. They know batteries are a boondoggle they can launder taxpayer dollars from. Hydrogen would actually solve the problem and not just strip them of their profits/tax money but it would also strip them of their power over us.
Imagine a house run by a fuel cell. You have a big low pressure hydrogen tank in your back yard that holds two or three days worth of power. A backhoe tears up the gas line. Guess what... you still have power. No UPS on your computer. No resetting clocks. Owe and when you need to fuel up your car you have a nozzle in your garage that allows you to just pump hydrogen right into your car.
Your house fuel cell goes tits up. You plug the hydrogen nozzle into your car, plug the house circuit box into the car, and flip a few switches. POOF! The whole house has power, but not as strong as the main cell so maybe you can't run a few things. Call the repair guy. No hurry. Easy simple portable power that's easily stored. Its like freaking Star Trek or something.
The cabal will never let that happen if its within their power to stop it.
On the plus side you can get regenerative braking which might give you a net gain for a stop and go all day vehicle.
Regenerative braking has also been done with flywheels and hydraulics.
That's not how physics works. If your driving the car in motion 50% of the time and regenerative breaking is 50% of the time but the power you get back is less than the cost of putting the car in motion because you don't gain energy in a transfer, only loss occurs. This is because of material inefficiency. Gold wires would get you closer (not exactly 1:1) but then no one could afford to buy it. you are in energy debt and analogous to any democrat run administration.
The Laws of Thermodynamics are finite - and MUST be obeyed!
Here is a regenerative braking bicycle using a flywheel.
https://www.wired.com/2011/08/regenerative-flywheel-powered-bicycle/
The design I saw years ago (1970s) used high pressure air over hydraulic reservoirs and variable displacement pumps and motors. They were getting 40 mpg on a VW sized car. It had good acceleration with regenerative braking. They used a 20 hp gas motor but had about 100 hp impulse air/hydraulic power.
Think of it this way.
Take a fuel efficient gas car and put a 1200 lb slab on top of it.
If that 1200 lb slab you're talking about is the battery, keep in mind that electric engines are extremely efficient at using the energy in there. It's a lot different than putting a 1200 lb slab of concrete that doesn't aid in moving the car forward. Electric engines are way more efficient than gas engines, and I fully expect that we will be getting 1000+ miles out of them off a single charge within 10 years.
Don't get me wrong: I've had many opportunities to buy electric cars and haven't. I thoroughly enjoy driving stick, and they just don't have anything like it for electric vehicles. All the hate for electric cars seems a bit unwarranted though. The idea of being able to charge my car using solar panels appeals to me. If the government tries to limit movement by cutting access to gasoline, I can still move around, provided my car's electronics do not brick the car.
I got my coal powered car because it’s super fast, always has a full tank in the morning, no maintenance except for tires (brakes last forever because of regen) and stick to the road (good in snow) because of the weight. I love it. I didn’t get it to “save the planet”, it doesn’t do that.
Not only is it super fast, the throttle response is next to nothing. That's the one aspect of EVs that I can't wait to try out, because it might feel so good that it's an acceptable tradeoff for the stick shift. I'm so close to pulling the trigger.
Electric car engines have ZERO efficiency at creating energy.
They do not create energy.
Someone else has to do that ---- then you have an additional ~5 to 10% loss (Tesla batteries have to have a cooling system for the waste heat energy).
.... and you have to drag around a 1200 lb weight.
Engine efficiency refers to the percentage of energy lost when converting stored energy into kinetic energy. No engine creates energy (it's one of the basic laws in physics: energy cannot be created or destroyed), so discussing how much energy an engine creates doesn't really serve to validate or invalidate any engine, gas or electric.
Comparing today's typical efficiency of consumer gas engines and consumer electric engines puts electric vehicles significantly ahead: gas car engines operate at 20% efficiency, whereas electric car engines operate at 60% efficiency. And the electric vehicle industry is still young, so we will likely see significant improvements in both energy storage and thermal efficiency.
I suspect improving battery weight is at the top of every EV manufacturer's list of desired improvements. Right now the energy density of a lithium ion battery is around 0.7 MJ/kg, whereas gasoline stores around 44 MJ/kg. There's quite a bit of research going on around increasing efficiency of electricity storage, so I suspect that will improve significantly within the next 5 to 10 years. Increasing the energy density of EV batteries from 0.7 MJ/kg to 2.8 MJ/kg will effectively make electric batteries lighter than most car engines (and would also increase the single charge range into thousands of miles).The future looks pretty exciting.