Objectivity

The Electric Car Battery Battle

Bare-J

Conservation and efficiency go hand in hand.

Back in '89, I was driving another engineer to a meeting. I drove a VW 5 speed, and though gas wasn't very expensive, I coasted down hills on the highway... he asked me why. I told him that in hilly regions like where we were it increased my FE by about 5 mpg.

When he commented that why bother, as it must only save me all the cost of a lunch once a month, I had to reply... "I'm not really saving anything for myself. I'm trying to save oil for our kid's generation..." He thought about it for a minute, then told me he'd be doing the same from then on... if only he drove a stick.

And before some clown starts on about clutch wear or the societal cost of using up a car prematurely or something, I drove that Scirocco nearly 300,000 miles before giving it away to charity... and it still ran good.

The Electric Car Battery Battle

JohnTC...

If you'd seen all of the alpha24-7 posts (I can't say dialogue, that woud imply more from his side than existed), not just here, but other pages, you would have understood.

As for suffering fools, been there, done that, and if they are just misguided souls, it still happens. Freakingly obtuse moronic donkeys with bad attitudes, like alph here... now that's a horse of a different color.

To "schmicknick"... there's a better chance that Ghostbuster's equipment is a plausible scenario than solving harnessed lightning. Or... in the immortal words of Winston Zedimore... "That's a big twinkie!"

The Electric Car Battery Battle

JohnTC...

Here's some objectivity on the subject of autos, fuels, fuel economy, pneumatic storage, and design of the same subjects ... and before you get too excited, this is something a even a 2008 first year engineering student should be able to comprehend...

The problem with any particular motive system isn't whether it is feasible, but whether it is sensible, overall, in the context of it's production and use. Design analysis provides the answer...

Start with this... Good Design is a function of intelligent compromise. Good engineers and designers understand this.

Try also this... in the system we live in (earth) there are clearly limitations in our ability to overly satisfy all of our whims and wants, and sometimes even our needs. Efficiency is the key factor, in many cases, in deciding between success and failure.

Transportation needs (transporting goods, economically necessary travel, etc.) and wants (trips by car to WallyWorld) are both possible when good designs results in efficiencies that enable TOTAL (the integral of the function) Transportation Demand to be met.

When we downsized cars and doubled fuel economy in the 70's, it was a fairly easy exercise. How do I know? Because I was there, and doing it. Why did it happen? BECAUSE we could not, as a nation, meet our fuel demand with the inefficient fleet of 13 mpg autos.

Congress (the People) mandated higher mileage, and The Big Three ordered weight taken from components, and we re-designed and re-tooled to make it happen.

If you had been there at the time, you would have heard plenty of people smart enough to argue why we really needed the bean-counters out of top management then... as they only responded because it was mandated. We were plenty pissed off that once we reached the 27 mpg targets for CAFE, it would all stop, and be effectively rolled back.

Unfortunately, 30 years have effectively rolled by, and we are in far worse a predicament now than we were then.

Crude oil derived gasoline and diesel are "fuels". They exist, are energy rich (high specific btu) can be extracted at extremely high EROEI, are relatively safe, cheap enough (at least in the past) that burning it at 30% efficiency was still fairly economical, etc...

Unfortunately, cheap oil is over.

What REPLACES cheap oil, and how we do it (for transportation need) is the critical problem we face today.

We should have all been driving cars like Audi A2 turbodiesels at 75 mpg long ago. But the beancounters wanted really big profits, and our women wanted SUV's. And the bulk of the human brain-mass of the USA wasn't quite smart enough to see that $1 a gallon gas wasn't a God given right. The bean counters blew the profits, the SUV's sit in garages, but the brain mass that went along with it all seems not to have learned a thing, but to bitch in all the wrong directions.

Idiots who do not understand any of this are all around. Smart loses to stupid in a democracy every time, however, if smart fails to educate stupid first. If you doubt any of this, at this point it's obvious where you stand.

Back to intelligent design... so what is the real problem?

THE PROBLEM IS LACK OF SUFFICIENT, and CHEAP ENOUGH... fuels.

And... their efficient use.

Not alternate energy transfers, or methods... I said FUELS.

Hydrogen isn't a fuel. Why? Because it's an energy SINK, not a SOURCE. If you don't grasp this then go learn, come back, and start again. We will all wait.

Compressed air is also not a fuel. It is like a spring, a pneumatic one. The losses from compressing the air means also, that it is subject to all the iron rules of efficiency that bind us to this struggle. TANSFTAAFL. No perpetual motion machines either. simple right?

Electricity also isn't a fuel. Unless you can harness lightning, that is.

Wind? Actually, yes, in the context of us humans... it's a fuel. But a transient one. WASTED if not captured. Sunlight? Same thing. The issue for both is the capital cost and EROEI of capture, including all inputs and infrastructure. Again... efficiency. Makes sense if it's efficient, but there we go again, design decides. Not idiots with opinions.

Why does any of this matter here?

Because... The PROBLEM is, idiotic nonsense like ... "we can all just have solar powered cars! I saw it on TV!" or "wouldn't it be great if cars could run on water! They can, I heard all about it!" or "chicken waste will be our next oil, I read it in Pop-Mech!" ... abounds whenever those unfit-to-design attempt to force a "solution" onto a problem they cannot even fathom.

Just like bean-counters running car companies.

So... those that understand better start helping the rest learn this quick, otherwise it will be a repeat, and add in more resource wars to boot.

And we don't have time to blow this chance, like we did the last thirty years.