xkcd #2948: Electric vs Gas
xkcd #2948: Electric vs Gas
Alt text:
An idling gas engine may be annoyingly loud, but that's the price you pay for having WAY less torque available at a standstill.
733 comments
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The motors have never been the problem, it's always been the battery. See train engines, they are a diesel generator with electric motors.
This is where history pisses me off. We should have been headlong into battery research after the oil embargoes. Could have been 40 years faster.
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I think people forget that petroleum is condensed and distilled solar energy. One gallon of gasoline is the results of years of solar energy.
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I hope you are not talking about battery locomotives.
With overhead wires the train has a practically unlimited battery capacity.
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There are use cases for battery trains. In remote, mountainous locations where the cost for electrifying a track is very high it is not uncommon to use electric trains with batteries. Here in Germany we have several regions where diesel trains have been replaced by them.
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Oil is honestly an amazing product, chemistry wise there is so much we can do with it and energy wise it's a extremely concentrated and easily transported form of energy.
Energy wise one liter of oil is equivalent to 10 person working for a day !
I repeat, using one liter of oil is like having 10 "slaves" working for us for a day.
Its easy to see why oil became the base of our modern civilization, and easy to see why we don't manage to stop using it even though it's destroying us.
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Not really. Battery tech has always been advancing. Even today electric vehicles have barely come up with anything new, battery wise. Everyone wants something better than lithium base. No one can get anything to market.
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It advanced at a glacier pace because there was no massive driving force. It only kicked off a bit with cell phones and then in any substantial way with laptops. (Yes, batteries existed before that for different things, but there was no massive driving force.) Now imagine what would have happened if we funded it starting in the 1970s.
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Didn’t sodium batteries start getting marketed recently?
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Exactly this. Imagine if gas powered motor could recharge in mere 12 hours and run for up to half the distance. Ah, that would be the dream.
And if you and 5 of your neighbors decide to refuel at the same time during peak hours you have a real chance of overloading your neighborhood grid. And your fuel tank is dead in 5 years, replacing which is more than half of your used cars cost.
Everything non-portable uses electric motors from the time the first wire was invented.
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"On the other hand gas has a much higher energy density than batteries and a much faster refuel rate."
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It's exactly this. Convenience. We've become accustomed to how convenient it is and don't want to be put out.
On the other hand, it's super convenient to never go to a gas station again, and to wake up to a full tank. So if you drive less than 60 miles a day, and have acess to another car for long trips, an electric is even more convenient.
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That's basically 90% of every car owner.
It's one of those things where people feel like they're going to take a road trip every weekend, but most people are just using their car to commute to and from work and maybe take one or two longer trips per year. The time saved by not having to stop at a gas station throughout the the year is less than the additional time taken at a fast charging station for the rare road trip.
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Are those two things actually important?
Electric motors are a lot more efficient, and battery technology is quickly approaching the place where you can get the same range with an electric motor as with an ICE.
As for refuel rate, I spend no time waiting for my car to charge because it charges at home while I'm sleeping, so the refuel rate doesn't matter.
Plus the technology to battery swap is well in use for electric vehicles (see Nio, who have thousands of battery swap stations in China and some in Europe too). 3 mins and you have a full battery.
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Yes, for people who can't charge at home. I'd love to swap to electric, but 1 hour trip to go charge the car at the nearest charging station is not realistic - especially since I'd need to do it twice as often as 10min trip to refuel.
Also there's the EV prices, starting at 2-3 times more than my current whip lol
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Are those two things actually important?
For some people? Absolutely.
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Yes, somewhat.
Not as much, to most people, as most people think though.
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Are those two things actually important?
yes, they are. they make difference between actually usable technology and engineer's dream.
Electric motors are a lot more efficient, and battery technology is quickly approaching the place where you can get the same range with an electric motor as with an ICE.
i doubt we even have enough rare metals for 8 or 16 billion batteries. most of them are being mined in politically unstable or to western civilization unfriendly countries, with terrible effect on the environment.
efficiency matters, it is not a question of how good single battery is.
As for refuel rate, I spend no time waiting for my car to charge because it charges at home while I’m sleeping, so the refuel rate doesn’t matter.
oh good. YOU have it solved, so the rest of the world does not matter, i assume...? fuck all these people, right?
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On the one hand the Nokia 3310's battery lasts a week. On the other hand the iPhone 15....
Just plug your car in when you're not using it like you'd charge your phone overnight. It's only a problem if you can't charge at home (due to on street parking and no charging facilities on that street) and you can't charge somewhere you usually take your car (eg a workplace).
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Nope,it's a problem in many other scenarios
If i ride to vacation to a country with no charging infrastucture, if I want to ride to the mountains where it is subzero and my range drops dramatically, if I go to a place where it's 38 deree celsius and I need AC my range is pretty much fucked up... (not to mention that close to remote places like cool beaches there is no charging station)
If I want to have a road trip... i suddenly becomes a planning issue
There are still so many things that are complicated by having a EV, and I don't need the extra complications
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I wonder if looking at the system as a whole for both systems would reveal a different difference. (infra needed to transport and fill those gas station tanks vs infra needed for level 3 charging stations)
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If you don't drive for work--and I mean get paid to drive hundreds of miles every day, not just a long commute--or take a road trip every month, and have a place to charge at night (most people do, at least in North America), then an EV is just better.
Otherwise, a plug-in hybrid or a "gasoline boosted EV" like a Volt is sufficient. ICE cars for regular people shouldn't have even existed once the Volt proof of concept was proven!
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PHEVs for the win.
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But remember, electric motors also require next to no maintenance and can last for many years of runtime. Pros and cons.
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And no gearing, so no complex moving part assemblies..
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Unfortunately, brushless motors are also trivial to waterproof.
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Uh, maintenance is one thing where ICE wins (until very recently, thanks fucktards in car industry). Cars have been generally very easy to work on, with anyone with a toolbox being able to do most their repairs in a shed
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That's a user-hostile feature, not a property of electric engines. An electric car has far simpler mechanical parts, and the circuitry isn't very complicated either. It could be made incredibly easy to repair, modify, and upgrade, mostly at home even, if they designed them that way
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That's true. But since now it's all messed up shit that you can't fix yourself they're on fairly equal line there.
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Real answer: power density. Pound for pound, gas still contains more energy than our best batteries. The weight of energy storage is still a massive deal for anything that cannot be tethered to a grid or be in close practical proximity for frequent recharging, from rockets, planes and cars (sometimes) to chainsaws and lawnmowers (sometimes).
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Thing is that pound of gas is gone, that pound of battery is still there and ready for recharge.
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A pound of dead battery doesn't help me when I'm camping 10km from the nearest access to the power grid. (There are actually powerlines not even a kilometre from my favourite campsite, but those are going to be measured in kV, and so aren't really useful to me.)
Now, if I had enough solar panels in a mobile setup, probably folding out of a trailer, I could make it work, but solar panels are expensive.
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A dead battery is far worse than an empty jerry can, atleast the jerry can is light. Hell there are even some real nice collapsible ones and thats not even accounting for fuel bladders. Electric is useful but it is also rather rigid as well.
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Do we ignore fuel distribution costs? How much fuel is required to distribute fuel to the stations? Shipping oil from high-conflict areas?
Electric is stipl very much problematic, with the coal burning. But at least it has a lot of headroom to improve, and can be produced locally.
Oh, and my fucking lungs mate.
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Density is relative to efficiency, and electric wins
What i cannot understand is people trying to defend something that is clearly worse,
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Googling tells me that:
- Electric cars have 77% efficiency
- Gas cars have 30% efficiency
- Electric car batteries have 270 Wh/kg (converts to 0.97 MJ/kg)
- Gasoline has 46 MJ/kg
So the math here says electric gives you (0.97 * 77%) 0.75 MJ/kg output and gas gives you (46 * 30%) 13.8 MJ/kg output. Plus, as someone else said, spent gasoline no longer weighs you down.
I like the idea of electric, and I want to see it replace gas as soon as possible, but fair is fair.
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The price. The price is the problem for all us poors.
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It wouldn't be so bad if they paired small batteries with backup generators.
But nooo, its 7000lb all electrics or overly complicated ICE-hybrids, nothing in between.
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7000lb all electrics
This idea overlaps the big truck mentality: most EVs are much lighter. The weight penalty averages only about 20% over an equivalent ICE, so the type of vehicle you get can be a much bigger impact. My EV is a mid sized SUV that may be the biggest car I’ve ever owned and it weighs 4,000 lbs. I’m not claiming it’s light, but it’s much better than you seem to think
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the price gap is slowly closing, esp if you take into account total cost of ownership. It agree that the upfront cost makes it out of reach for many people.
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Really the biggest part of the price gap now seems to be volume. Not enough new cars to offset the R&D and bring prices down. Not enough new cars for there to be a healthy used car market. And especially not enough non-premium cars
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Hybrids are more affordable than full electrics, and have some of the benefits.... I have a Kia Sorento and its torque was enough to climb out of a pretty deep rut that would have required shifting into low4 on my dad's 4x4... Plus it gets about 600 miles on a tank.
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Purchase price, higher maintenance costs (EVs eat tires due to the increased weight and higher torque), installation of charging infrastructure (some us need expense electrical service upgrades and added wiring; we don’t all have 200 amp panels and garages with 30 amp 240v service already wired in)
I’d love an EV, but I won’t be afforded Int one for a bit. And used ones, even if cheaper, will have massive battery degradation cutting range way down.
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I always heard the concern about electrical service but wonder at the reality. A level 2 charger is the same as a stove circuit: do none of you have electric stoves? You don’t even need that: some people are fine with just an extension cord, some people need a “dryer outlet”, I have never come close to needing the level 2 charger: is it really important that my EV charges in a couple hours vs by morning?
Also, hasn’t 200a service been standard for new homes for a couple decades? If someone can afford an EV, they are much more likely to have a newer home so already have 200a service
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Only thing stopping me having one is cost.
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For me it's cost and having a place to charge since I rent.
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Unless you take road trips often having a place to charge is literally any random Outlet. You don't need a fancy dedicated fast charger if you drive less than 100 miles in a day. Think about how many hours your car is just sitting at home, it has that many hours to charge it doesn't matter if it charges in 1 and 1/2 hours or 9 hours as long as it gets charged
So even as a renter as long as you have any kind of outdoor outlet or garage you've got somewhere to charge
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The cost, the fact that I don't have a parking space at my apartment, and the fact that insurance is expensive.
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A 2 year old Polestar 2 with 12,000 miles just cost my buddy slightly less than $25k. You can't even get an Accord with that age and mileage that cheap these days! Hertz dumped a bunch of them on the market recently, they were too much fun to be a profitable rental so they're absurdly cheap right now
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Sadly, battery companies are quite greedy.
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Will go down in the next years.
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Gas engines have decent range. Gas engines are cheaper (as the electric engine prices are artificially inflated, just look at Chinese prices), with gas engines you can listen to the sound of the engine to diagnose problems before they occur, batteries don't degrade (you still have car batteries, but when they degrade, you can still drive a car for as long as with the new battery. You can refuel it in a couple of seconds. Anyone can make one sided arguments. There isn't a best thing for everything.
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The reason why you may be able to diagnose an ICE by sound is because they're complex. That's not a positive. An electric motor has just a few moving parts. If it goes bad you don't really need to work to figure it out and fix it.
The rest of the arguments can be made, but as you imply they're disingenuous. The sound one is just not a benefit at all.
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I was apprehensive about EVs but the first time I rode in one I immediately fell in love with it. I get carsick easily, and the super-smooth ride without the chug-chug-chug of an internal combustion engine made the experience surprisingly much more pleasant for me. I do not use a car, but if I had to buy one, I don't think I could ever stomach an ICE again knowing that this alternative is available.
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At a stretch, I guess you could say that a battery that's going bad doesn't make a sound.
But yes, electric motors are way more reliable than internal combustion engines and objectively superior. You would never use an ICE over an EE for any application where you have a reliable supply of electricity.
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Range anxiety is largely a perception thing. The vast majority of car journeys are well within the range of an EV, you just need to get in the habit of plugging in like you would your phone. For journey's long enough for it to be more than a single charge you really should be stopping for more than a few seconds anyway as you need recharging.
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you just need to get in the habit of plugging in like you would your phone
Yeah but not everyone lives in suburbia with ample plug-in options available to them. Where I live the street-side charging spots are usually occupied, and the parking spot that I rent has no charging.
For journey’s long enough for it to be more than a single charge you really should be stopping for more than a few seconds anyway as you need recharging.
True to some extent, I have to check my travel logs but I do feel like stopping for an hour every 300km or so is longer and much more often than I would normally stop on long road trips. My (diesel) car has a range of well over 1000km so often I stop for only 15 minutes for a coffee and to stretch my legs, or just for a restroom stop and a driver swap. We usually plan just one big stop (1h) for dinner. Most destinations I've been to I could reach without refueling at all.
There's also the issue of contention for charging spots. On gas stations near the big highways towards popular destinations you often already have to queue to get gas. This will become worse when EVs become common place and people occupy a charging spot for an hour instead of a fuel pump for 30 seconds to top up.
Little anecdote: every year around the holiday season, there are several company wide e-mails from EV driving co-workers requesting to swap cars (with a co-worker who has a CE car) to go on holiday. So I think the practical experience may not be as rosy as you paint it.
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the vast majority of the cost of an electric car is in the battery, every phone I've had really degrades in battery after a couple years, and my dad still drives an ICE car about the same age as me
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just look at Chinese prices
The prices of chinese EVs are artificially deflated! They heavily subsidize their EV manufacturing sector.
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What about the european electric car prices in china?
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Your argument is with electric cars vs ice cars. xkcd likely specifically was talking about engines just so all the range arguments don't work. It's just engine vs engine and there electric is far superior.
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That's like saying a sword is a better weapon than a gun because the sword can bei used for cutting, hitting und thrusting and also as a tool while the gun can only hit and shoot while needing additional components to function that quickly run out while being more complex to build. You cant just ignore the context to make your argument. He's clearly talking about cars here.
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Oh well, I just assumed it was about cars for some reason.
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electric cars are expensive, the engines are pretty cheap.
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As a US citizen I am painfully aware that I could dip down to mexico and buy a competent EV at 35~40k USD value in MXN. Alternatives in the states, even produced here, are upwards of 50k for the poverty model. Maybe the engine itself is cheaper, but the vehicles absolutely are not (unless you are being denied options by your government as part of an ongoing slap fight).
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Wow, you can actually get normally priced cars outside of EU.
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Gas engine makes good noises. Checkmate.
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It's incredible how certain people are conditioned to think the sound of a gas motor and shifting because your puny motor is out of optimal torque and rpm range are manly.
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Vroom vroom is fun.
Shifting is fun.
Fun is good.
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Never said anything about it being manly, but it can sound good.
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There you go pointlessly gendering again!
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Yeah, I guess all those professional female race car drivers are doing it to feel "manly"
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"Good" = "manly" to you? Wow. Sexist.
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The ioniq 5 N has that covered, evidently: https://youtu.be/DSIguemKIbQ?si=Do2diTJm8-_Hb9Ro
Or playing cards in the wheels
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Lol i would definitely buy that. And i don't own a car..but if i would
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I don't see how making noise is good. I live in a street that doesn't get much traffic, but even one car is loud enough to be bothering.
I don't want to pause my music and conversations just because someone decided that vroom vroom sounds were more important than me hearing literally anything else.
Even more that noise pollution is definitely a thing, and affect both mental health and physical one.
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When accelerating my Leaf makes a "woooooooooooOOOOOOOOP" noise I've seen described as the "UFO sound"
Tbh I like it a lot more than the vroom of even my motorcycle cuz it's funny
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I do love the whine of the drive units when going full throttle on EVs, it reminds me how much current is surging through those wires
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Think of the most annoying sound you know. Whether it's country music, rap, lawnmower before 8am on sat, etc that is your "good noises" sound like.
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Think of the nicest sound you know. A well-tuned instrument performing a delicate melody, a passionate singer performing their heart out, a cacophony of songbirds. That's what my good noises sound like when done right.
Obviously nobody wants to hear a fart can Honda Civic at 4am, but a fantastically engineered Italian V10 has its own melody that can't really be replicated otherwise. These examples will be missed, and the survivors will be sought after like a vintage violin.
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You just gonna sit there and yuck the mainstream yum like your opinions are better than everyone else's?
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Yeah, but does it make Oscar Winner Hans Zimmer kind of noises? https://www.bmw.com/en/magazine/innovation/hans-zimmer-individual-drive-sounds-as-identity-for-electric-vehicles.html
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This comic is clearly about lawn mowers people. Who discusses cars when wearing a hat like that?
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Definitely stovetops
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I do love how much torque my electric stove can put out while stopped
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He is not wrong, but he is not adressing the actual criticism of electric vehicles, so it is kind of pointless.
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And what exactly is the criticism of electric vehicles according to you?
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Different for many people. For us it is that we live in an urban area parking on the street and charging it, even with the faster chargers nowadays, just doesn't fit into our schedule. We'd have to cut working hours if we'd want to get an EV. But other people have other problems with them
Luckily me and the children can completly get around by public transportation, scooters and bicycles. My wife cannot (for now at least). So, at least we only have one car for the 4 ouf us.
But I already know that you'll belittle out problems and come up with half assed solution (yes I know we can charge while shopping, but we walk to the supermarket). I had this discussion often with EV fanatics. Please spare me.
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As the owner of a Bolt, the only significant criticism is range (mine's a 2020, gets ~180mi comfortably on the interstate) and charging rate (2020 bolts are limited to 50 kW, so kinda specific). Not great for road trips, but otherwise fantastic. As for electric fires... yeah I wasn't gonna be able to put that out anyway so the firefolk have it either way.
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It's about the battery, nerd. 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
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We'll just do what trains do.
Replace the battery with a massive diesel generator. Run that to get power to the electric motors.
Best of both worlds!
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I think there was a Renault that worked like this. I think the main issue is that you need a decently sized battery that can supply enough power or else the ICE needs to start every time you hit the gas pedal like was the case with the older Prius models and then you might as well connect it to the wheels and you can have a smaller electric motor.
But batteries keep improving and you can pull more power per kWh now. Maybe with solid state batteries this power train could become the more affordable option.
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Electric vehicles a bad product for 95% of people right now. When is America just going to invest in public transportation.
Pouring billions of dollars widening highway widening projects and giving automotive companies a tax break to charge a premium on electric cars has always been idiotic.
Edit: I was never criticizing electric car owners nor do I care if it works for the specific use case of a small group of individuals. I'm glad some people are adopting a new technology for the sake of helping the environment(I don't care about individuals doing it for clout).
Most people can't even reasonably afford new cars and have an outlet to park next to at the end of the day so you're doing good so long as you plan to keep the car for at least 20,000 miles give or take to offset the carbon emissions of manufacturing the battery. Food and shelter is just more important.
Hybrids are a good stop gap until they dramatically improve battery technology and standardize parts. Plus there are plenty of used hybrids around and are just getting cheaper as more get released onto the market. Hybrids often get released at lower prices due to the cost of manufacturing battery packs.
The ability to reliably get to work and the super market shouldn't be restricted to the ones able to afford and maintain transportation but a basic right of all citizens.
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Yeah but petrol cars go brum brum
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There is that! I've been thinking of marketing exterior sound systems, that go Brum BRum, for EVs. Do you think it would help?
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Absolutely fucking not. Wanna fake some orgasms with AI while you're at it?
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Check out Texas’ Slab culture for some heady exterior audio hahaha
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brum brum
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Funny, that's why I picked EV as a family car. I could turn on the AC and let my daughter and my dog sleep without any brum brum.
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I have a proposed solution to this ....
Straight cut gears
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Gasoline motors can be recharged in a couple of minutes.
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My EV sits in the driveway and soaks up excess production from my PV setup.
My main problem is it's never really empty enough.If I'm on the road, a high voltage DC charger gets me from 10% to 50% in about 10 minutes. Barely enough time for a coffee and a leak, then it's another 2 hours of driving. Rinse, repeat.
Sure, you can't barrel down the Autobahn for 10 hours straight without stopping but who wants that?
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I make a 9-10 hour drive to see my family multiple times a year. I normally stop twice to get gas and use the bathroom, and that's it. Sounds like you'd be adding most of an hour to my travel time each way. I've tried stopping longer and grabbing food, it's not worth it for me.
With that said, I drive 25-40 miles a day the other 360+ days of the year, so it'd really make much more sense for me to have a short range EV and rent something for travel when I have too much luggage to fly.
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I’m not wealthy enough for a PV setup.
And I love road trips. Some of the most beautiful areas of my country are 3000+ km from me.
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My EV sits in the driveway and soaks up excess production from my PV setup.
Yeah EVs are a great solution for homeowners.
Sure, you can't barrel down the Autobahn for 10 hours straight without stopping but who wants that?
As an Uber driver, I want that. I want to be able to gas my car back up and go back on he road and keep earning money.
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I plug my car in in seconds
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Driving to work 110 miles a day meant I had to get gas once per week, driving out of my way, stopping to get gas cost me 500 minutes per year as opposed to the two seconds to plug in at home. Totally a no brainer. I HATED stopping for gas on the way home from work at 11 in the evening, or whatever hour really. I think of people tied to ICE engines the way people were tied to outhouses a hundred years ago.
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Wow. Awesome. Only takes a few seconds to plug it in. Good on ya bud
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If you're driving more than 300miles a day you're just admitting your a much larger slice of the shitty pie.
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If it’s not a concern for my phone, why should it be for my vehicle? It is so nice never having to go to a local gas station, when all I need to do is plug in at night
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Why on earth do you get down votes? This is the truth. Downvoters just straw man argue pointing out that 'just charge your car at home', which isn't the matter of discussion. There isn't even a discussion to be had - it is faster to refuel a car than recharge. Might this matter to you? Maybe, maybe not.
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So what? Doesn't matter for most people
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Electric cars is not the solution. Sure, it's an improvement, but for a real solution you need to get people out of personal vehicles on onto public transportation. Trains, trams, busses, whatever. Build it in a way that doesn't suck. Assuming american, the US had (past tense) amazing train/tram networks decades ago. Every warehouse had a rail spur, and since walking was considered ok people weren't obese fatasses.
I drive a scooter. It is possible to live without a car, although it does have some difficulties sometimes. If your job is within 10 miles of your home or less, then you don't need a car for your commute. If I can do it so can you. I'd still rather take a bus, if it existed.
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Just came back from Tokyo. Tokyo's public transportation is awesome. You do also need to walk a lot at times and the first few days our legs were quite sore. But towards the end of the trip I can feel my leg strength again, felt healthier, and did not miss my car at all. To go to certain places, you do have to plan a little bit ahead, for example, a day trip out to Mt. Fuji area requires booking tickets because right now there's a ton of tourists. But within the city, the subways are so convenient.
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I want an EV. I think its 98% the right choice for me. I also 100% with you. Cars are a terrible solution at a certain density, which is what most industry and thus where people live makes sense.
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My job is within 10mi of my home. If I walk there, I get there in 2 hours. If I take public transportation, it takes me 1h45m to 2h20m depending on the day.
I also live in a community where our electricity is from 90% renewable resources, 10% nuclear. Switching to an electric car is a 100% reduction in carbon usage for my commute. Using the bus isn't.
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Why not get an electric bike then? Reasonable price tag, will get you to work within a reasonable timeframe, significantly less congestion on roads, and charges with that renewable energy without using a lot of it.
Also, their point was that adding infrastructure for public transport (aka improving the public transport you're complaining about) will have a huge effect on reducing greenhouse gas emissions across a population and is more easily electrified. Your focus on an individual case is irrelevant to their argument.
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The issue with this stance is that it's one of those all-or-nothing points of view. Sure it's better to have good public transportation, but in a lot of places there won't be for the foreseeable future. Sure it's better to use bicycles, but sometimes it's just not an option.
Electric cars won't fix traffic, but for the planet they're still a vast improvement. It's like a viable 95% solution that is dismissed because there might a 100% one somewhere in the next 200 years.
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I've lived in a city with really good transit, and even then, I'd prefer a car if it were affordable here.
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TINY ELECTRIC GO CARTS
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I drive a scooter.
Friend and coworker of mine was recently in a deadly accident on her way to work on a scooter. Those vehicles are great but on a road that is still primarily built for cars (and is now inhabited by ever more massive giant pickups) it can be a serious safety risk.
you need to get people out of personal vehicles on onto public transportation
This is really the heart of it. It's an infrastructure problem. Frustratingly, this is the most difficult and time consuming problem to solve.
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Idk why ppl are down voting this, bro is literally just advocating for public transportation
Ig it's all the insecure pickup truck bros
Edit: typos
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I think people (not me, I agree with glitchdx, overall) are probably down voting because it's a classic example of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, with a healthy dose of smug mixed in. Smugness is a great dialectical tactic if you hope to entrench people deeper into their views, rather than convince them to consider alternatives through reasoned discussion.
Do I agree that ideally we'd have robust public transit and increased usage of smaller, greener personal transport solutions? Of course I do.
But, incrementalism is progress. Valuable progress. We could argue whether it's more likely to get us to the aforementioned vision of robust public transit or not, but history has proven time and time again that progress takes time and is resisted tooth and nail by monied interests. I don't like it either. I want to wave a wand and have everything change. OP is right. Electric cars are not the solution. But treating symptoms while you work on curing the disease is best practice.
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bro is literally just advocating for public transportation
Seems to me that bro is arguing against EVs when that may be the best choice in an individuals control. Even if we’re all for public transportation, that takes years and millions to improve, so EVs may be the best choice available for the time being
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From personal experience, you also need a garage to keep an electric car in if you're in an extreme cold climate, those batteries can fail if in the deep cold for long enough and those car companies do NOT have the replacement parts in stock to fix it quickly.
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I think in certain areas for your EV you want a gas powered heater for the battery and cabin. That's how I think EV transit buses should do it too.
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I live in an area with the exact opposite issue (my battery MELTED) so I'm probably wrong, but isn't that what the battery blankets they try to sell you on when you buy an EV is for?
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I live in Canada and own a Bolt. Its a pretty unremarkable EV from a tech standpoint. It keeps the batteries at the right temp by heating and cooling them. It really doesnt require any extra effort or special equipment.
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I would absolutely love to have an EV. But they are very expensive, especially compared to the gas-powered car I already own.
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Well everything's more expensive than the thing you already own. It's true, most are available in the higher end markets right now, but the Bolt and Leaf are pretty cheap. In the long run, almost all EVs are cheaper than their gas counterparts.
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Maybe in your country. Chinese electric cars are plenty cheap, many of them are cheaper than most ICE cars
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Here in middle eu they are twice as expensive. Maybe it got a little better to like 1.75 now? Still I would have to be crazy to spend more than necessary on a car and watch it’s value plummet and repair cost suck my entertainment money. But also no way to charge them without living countryside or arrive comfortably at the far destination without long stops.
A car is a necessary tool to get from a to b. Whatever does its job the best at the moment. I despise car owners treating them as status symbols.
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If you read comments on Instagram and the like, people hate electric cars because...
...they don't do the vroom-vroom noise.
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And I don’t get this. I mean I also love the feel of power you get from a large engine turning over, but really? You over there in that mustang making all that noise and effort, really straining to accelerate, while my Tesla effortlessly leaves you in the dust? Do people not understand how much more powerful it feel to be the fastest car with seemingly no effort?
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That's a very real issue that car enthusiasts have a hard time with. There's just something about a great sounding engine that is the cherry on top of a car you like. My weak spot is a 4 rotor screaming like a banshee from Mazda's Le Mans car.
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Car enthusiasts are weird.
The whole notion of loud = fast falls apart with electric engines.
Not many people buy cars just because they sound good. It's usually the engine that makes it sound good.(+exhaust, etc). Which means tha there's still the need for speed.
But if you want speed, you need to go electric.
The whole macho V8 rumble and manually shifting gears is now less effective than a one-pedal, one-gear, quiet electeic setup.
This must such a huge disconnect in their heads, that they go about posting "electric = gay" on car videos.
Just like listening to loud music with windows down, the loud fart cans are just for seeking attention.
A loud engine is now an equivalent of a dog that barks, but doesn't bite.
I agree that there are many cars that sound incredible (four rotor Mazdas, Porche Carerra GTs, Black or Brabus Mercs, you name it), but disliking electric cars because they make a silly quiet noise just makes one a poser, IMO.
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It's true. But a v-twin motorcycle like a Ducati or Moto Guzzi ignites your balls like no electric motor can.
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I have been looking for new exciting and safe ways to ignite my balls
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This is the true valid complaint against electric. Electric vehicles are super boring to drive, even when they have insanely good performance.
It is not just the lack of noise and vibration. Too consistent maybe? It is like going fast in a video game. Something is just missing in an EV.
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I always found it interesting that Rolls-Royce had to let vibrations and noise in the back of their cars. Moving in a car without identifiers really trips with the brain.
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Welcome to downvote city, where every comment that brings forth negative aspects of EVs are downvoted!
I agree btw.
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The one thing stopping me is seeing how they fare long term with the overwhelming amount of electronics added to the cars.
Hopefully car manufacturers goes a different direction as electronic and appliances company went. Everyone I know that are into EVs went through 2 or 3 different one in the time I've owned my ICE car (~10 years). Most because of their lease ending and wanting the absolute newest but others due to battery issues making the car a total loss due to replacement cost.
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I’m not optimistic about this. The finance “geniuses” have seen how much money software and electronics companies are making from subscription models and trying to put them into even combustion powered cars. I think it’s BMW that’s already started trying to put heated seats on a subscription model. The equipment’s already in the car but it’s disabled unless you pay them a monthly fee.
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I mean that’s not really a problem specific to EVs. But yeah I also drive an aging car because I don’t want one with 10x more failure points.
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I'm hoping that as EVs become more common, conversion kits become a thing. Both straight-electric and PHEV; I would love to pull the oversized engine from my truck (it's a 4.0 in a Ranger, wtf, it doesn't need that kind of power) and replace it with a diesel-electric motor-battery-generator combo. With a half decent battery, I would be running on electric 95% of the time; for the other 5% (which is camping on rough trails, no I'm not renting a truck for it), there'd be the diesel generator backup
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Most because of their lease ending and wanting the absolute newest
Technology is moving so fast that this seems like a reasonable approach to me.
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Which is also the reason why I wish to wait for the technology to stabilize a little.
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I feel like this is directed towards ICE vs EV cars. If that's the case, it's sort of frustrating.
EVs have some very real drawbacks. Even if those drawbacks are solvable problems, they are still problems right now. Pushing this narrative that EVs are universally better or that the biggest hurdle to adoption is irrational consumer sentiment will just make people feel gaslit. It'll also make people more hesitant to adopt later on, because they'll be skeptical of positive reviews that are honest.
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ok, what are those drawbacks?
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Battery cost pushing up vehicle cost, battery replacement cost, battery weight, low battery energy density, batteries that only last half of a car lifespan of 20 years.
We need much better batteries.
For now, plug in Hybrids are a good way to avoid many of these problems.
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I agree. ICE vehicles usually have more range, fuel is basically available everywhere, they take minutes to fill, and generally have a cheaper initial cost.
In addition to that, ICE cars, though needing more maintenance, have repair shops in just about every village, town, city.... often several of them.
I feel like EVs are a bit of a glass cannon when it comes to anything that might go wrong with them. Whatever goes wrong is very likely to cause the vehicle to stop operation entirely. Most ICE cars will either just keep working when something is wrong, or at worst go into a limp mode, allowing you to get to a repair shop to have the vehicle repaired.
I understand why EVs are the way they are, high voltage electricity is no joke, but then you need a tow truck to get to the service center that's likely much further away.
EVs are great, don't get me wrong, but if you're planning for the worst case and/or failure cases, ICE vehicles just fail more gradually, frequently giving you some leeway to take care of the problem well before the vehicle completely stops working.
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EVs are also a major issue for firefighters. Lithium ion battery fires following an accident are ridiculously hard to put out and present a significant safety hazard in confined spaces, like tunnels or narrow streets. It takes close to 6 times the water to control EV vehicle fires.
And while it's a more minor issue, EVs are heavier than ICE vehicles in the same class, which causes more road wear and more tire wear (and more micro plastics to enter the environment).
And, I guess, finally, there's no established break-even point for carbon emissions over ICE vehicles. The estimates provided in the literature vary wildly--from 13,000 miles to 94,000.
I love the technology, but I hope solid state batteries become a viable option for EVs.
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Those drawbacks are endlessly discussed online, to a ridiculous degree. Nothing is universally better, but EVs are almost as close as it gets. If there weren't several whole industries dead set on preventing adoption they would have been adopted much quicker.
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Trying to convince people not to burn gas will make them feel gaslit lmao
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Actually, piston engines are really bad a torque. It's why they need a flywheel or a large amount of pistons.
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Steam engines are 'piston engines' and they are pretty torquey, even at low rpm.
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Is this a joke I'm not getting, or just a statement?
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Read it closely. It's making fun of petrol heads who try to justify keeping gas engines. Electric power plants are way more efficient, generates more torque and horsepower in a smaller package.
Then scroll this thread and you see all the same people doing the same thing.
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Read it again, slowly.
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Oh yeah, that did it. Thanks !
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On the other other hand, gas car makers have regulators by the ballsack. So we've got that going for us which is nice
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Well maybe in your 3-rd world they do.
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I'll get an electric when I can get a used one for around $5k and not have to worry about the battery going out and costing $20k.
I'd love to have one, but I don't see it happening any time soon unfortunately.
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I'm big into motorcycles and all the electric motorcycles are like 100 lbs more and go through tires like twice a year compared to my gas powered motorcycle changing tires once everyother year and can go fraction of the distance. Idk I want to think electric is the future but with these limits I'm still not too interested. If hydrogen ever comes to motorcycles like Kawasaki, Honda, Yamaha and Suzuki want, I'll definitely get one of those but I can't recommend any electric motorcycles right now and before you say anything I would recommend a Surron if you check your welds before you buy those are great commuters but probably not a motorcycle.
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Yeah, a general "electric vs. gas" comparison which elides the two big disadvantages of electric in familiar applications (which aren't to be found in the motor) seems slightly subpar for xkcd. It's valid from a certain narrow engineering perspective but not too helpful if what you're thinking about is motorcycles.
If fossil fuels were so easy to give up we'd have done it by now.
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I'm genuinely confused - why are you going through tires so quickly?
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The torque off the start is so much higher in EVs vs. ICE. I'm not sure from u/blindbunny 's post if they've ridden an EV motorcyle. I'm pretty sure they haven't owned one. They sound like an ICE shill. My bicycle's torque off the start is pretty low, and dependent on this old school "neuro-musculo-skeletal" system. It's kinda jankety, but I'm too cheap to upgrade.
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all the electric motorcycles are like 100 lbs more and go through tires like once a year
compared to my gas powered motorcycle changing tires twice a year
...so, you're changing tires less on an electric motorcycle? I don't see the issue
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Sorry I edited the post poorly 😞
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I'll keep my ICE and ride a bike. I'll still do less environmental damage than you because I am human powered for all but the trips to the mountains, and then I don't have to worry about being stranded without a plug.
And I have yet to hear a convincing argument that taking my perfectly working vehicle off the road to buy another manufactured product is still more environmentally friendly than... not buying anything at all.
I don't give a fuck about initial torque. I'm going to be laughing in my wheetabix when there's not a single EV older than a decade on their original batteries.
Downvotes don't make me wrong, chuds.
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And I have yet to hear a convincing argument that taking my perfectly working vehicle off the road to buy another manufactured product is still more environmentally friendly than... not buying anything at all.
That’s because nobody is making that argument. The only statement I’ve ever heard from environmentalists/scientists is that the most beneficial thing to do is keep your old ICE car and maintain it well.
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Approximately nobody is saying you should sell your 2020 compensator for scrap, in fact the general consensus is that the best thing you can do is keep your current ride in good repair as long as you can.
You don't have to invent boogeyman just because you have a weird parasocial relationship with big oil.
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I'm going to be laughing in my wheetabix when there's not a single EV older than a decade on their original batteries.
You lost this one the instant you posted the comment.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/how-long-do-ev-batteries-last-study-says-longer-than-you-think
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How do you know how much environmental damage I do?
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Pretty easy to make a comparison to the average American. It's like BMI -- it's bigger than the individual and not a metric useful for individual comparison.
Drivers reported making an average of 2.44 driving trips, spending 60.2 minutes behind the wheel, and driving 30.1 miles each day in 2022. Projecting these results to all drivers nationwide, 255 million drivers made a total of 227 billion driving trips, spent 93 billion hours driving, and drove 2.8 trillion miles in 2022, all of which represented small but not statistically significant decreases relative to 2021.
I average 0 miles a day driving.
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Downvotes don’t make me wrong, chuds.
Oh look, a child is on Lemmy!
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Someone has to build quite a few more power stations though. Assuming you're talking about swapping a large fraction of the car fleet to EV, not just a few here and there. That's a substantial increase in total electricity demand. Enough to radically impact the load on the grid.
And if you end up burning natual gas / coal to meet the marginal increase in demand - as would seem fairly likely - then much of the thermal conversion losses you're saving in the higehr efficieny motor just get shifted to the furnace in the power station and transmission/distribution system; so that can erode some of the efficiency benefits.
I guess you could require for every new EV that they also install roftop solar PV and basically buy a spare battery of near same capacity as the car. that might push the up front and periodic replacement cost a bit though - quite nice for the running costs i guess.
Another good alternative is to try to convince people to get together and share their electric motors in things callled trains and do as many trips in those as possible - that's not too popular with most people unless the road congestion is really bad. Something to do with sharing being communism i think,
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And if you end up burning natual gas / coal to meet the marginal increase in demand - as would seem fairly likely - then much of the thermal conversion losses you're saving in the higehr efficieny motor just get shifted to the furnace in the power station and transmission/distribution system; so that can erode some of the efficiency benefits.
- liquid fuels still have to get from the ground -> refinery -> distribution -> gas station -> vehicle so there is transmission cost and loss there
- "we can't immediately solve all of the problems so let's not do it" is a pretty bad take. Incremental progress is better than waiting for perfect which basically means never doing it.
Another good alternative is to try to convince people to get together and share their electric motors in things callled trains and do as many trips in those as possible - that's not too popular with most people unless the road congestion is really bad. Something to do with sharing being communism i think,
I 100% agree everywhere it's practical. Still, people are going to have to get to train stations somehow. Multi-modal transit could somewhat cover that, but some people would still practically have to drive. Convincing those people to only drive to the nearest station and not all the way to their destination is another challenge to solve.
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Gas engines smell good 🥰
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Eventually that'll be one of the quaint old timey smells at the county fair.
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An interesting article about the Muskmelon, Tesla, and fuel cells. []https://energynews.biz/will-tesla-release-hydrogen-car/ (take the article with a spoonful of salt I think) It's perhaps another attempt at a pump and dump stock fraud as he does need money for twitter. But, I've seen a couple of these blurbs lately and I can't find where they originate from.
Even the ketamine wonder wants to sound like he thinks Tesla is going to abandon pure EVs and build and sell something with a hydrogen fuel cell evidently. If so,and you can't rule out it out completely yet, the ICE engine might not be done yet - just swapping a fuel source.
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ICE with hydrogen has some racing applications, but that's about it. It's taking something that already has efficiency issues compared to batteries and making it even worse.
Fuel cells use hydrogen to generate electricity to spin a motor. There are issues with that, as well, but there's no future in ICE either way.
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Personally, outside of some niche applications, I don't think fuel cells are going to replace EVs. The losses in efficiency are just to great in the conversion from water to hydrogen/oxygen gasses to electricity - unless someone figures out how to harness the energy released in a hydrogen bomb. But I wouldn't hold my breath for that. I do think that Tesla isn't as long for this world as Musk would have hoped for though. I personally hope he ends up broke and mocked as soon as possible. The world will be just a tiny bit better place IMO.
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A fuel cell does not mean it's an ICE. It will still use an electric motor and probably even a small battery.
Hydrogen ICE exist, but are more complex and less efficient.
You could use Hydrogen to produce so-called e-fuels (we had a huge debate about them in Germany), but those can typically be used in normal ICE vehicels.
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so my sisters Mazda MX-30 has more HP than my uncles Peterbilt 389? cool, I'll use it to haul my horse trailer. define "more powerful". Makes the point but XKCD usually does better.
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Thats not very accurate, ICE motors aren't quite out dated just yet. Electric has a long way to go with the storage and refuel cycle
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That's really the only thing holding EV's back. If we can get away from lithium batteries and get something like graphene batteries (one can dream), range, recharge, etc. everything immediately get's better.
But electric engines are far superior. -
What's wrong with storage and refuelling? We got two electric cars, they charge well.
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Because "better overall" is a silly concept to use here, and is bring deliberately done to "both sides" the debate.
For driving really fast: petrol
For not killing our planets ability to sustain himan life: electric
Its not that hard
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Driving really fast is electric, still. Driving fast and quite far is not.
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The current pikes peak speed record is done with an electric car. Electric cars are quite good at speed as well.
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On one hand, electric motors [...]
On the other hand, electric motors [...]Typo?
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That's the joke
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Reading the alt-text makes it more obvious.
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you found the joke, now the next step is to get it.
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Yeah they're great. Just gotta pull out a diesel generator to charge them when it's minus 40
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Probably easier than thawing the gasoline in the ice engine, which freezes at -40. And your diesel generator won't run either unless you kept it plugged in to keep the fuel from turning to gel (that process starts at -10).
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As a person who got trapped because our family's diesel car got gelled in cold weather, I'm not sure your generator is going to help.
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To be fair the comic said nothing of batteries. Case in point: there are "gas engines" that are basically a generator connected to an electric motor because it's more efficient than just using an ICE. The generator is optimized for small constant torque and the electric motor delivers as much torque as the system demands.
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Don't forget to plug in your block warmer so you can start up your diesel generator in the cold.
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Cool but they sound like shit. No aesthetics in evs. You don't feel connected to the car. Don't feel the engagement. But hey, cars are all about stats, right, right??
Edit: ok so I get downvoted for having a differing opinion from the majority of Lemmy users here. I'm wrong in saying that EV engines sound like shit?PLEASE one downvoter, explain to me how such a statement deserves a downvote?
Majority of you probably just use your car as a means of transportation. I don't. I also drive to have fun. That's also why I never drive automatic as it is (to me) more engaging and challenging with a manual gear box. Let me give you another example: weight. EVs are heavy, always. I don't like heavily cars because I don't find them enjoyable to drive on small roads.
Please understand that there is more to the world of cars than numbers.
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being on a track and being able to hear what my tires are doing, individually, in the absence of engine and exhaust (and intake) noises, is a pretty cool level of connectedness and engagement.
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Fair enough. Do you do track days yourself? I would love to learn more about what I can from listening to my tires.
Still, no engine noise.
I'm not a EV hater, just saying that there are more to cars than 0-100km/h stats and range. And to me, most of these aesthetic qualities are lost with EVs. The only EV that looks interesting from a aesthetics point of view is the inonic 5 n, imho.
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PLEASE one downvoter, explain to me how such a statement deserves a downvote?
Down voting because this sort of complaint is cringe. Wear down votes with pride and don't comment on them.
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"But if my car doesn't massively contribute to noise pollution and wake up half the neighborhood when I touch the gas pedal, how will I know I have a penis?"
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Lemmy user base will not understand your comment but yes, I will miss the roar of an engine in the future, and the ability to feel the road through the steering wheel. EVs are simply not fun nor interesting even though I can't deny they are 'better'
At least you can get rwd EVs I guess
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Nope. Hoped Lemmy would be better but it's just like reddit: disagree -> downvote....apparently. I thought up/down voting was supposed to help filter out bad contributions, not silence people with opinions that are different from your own.
We agree. True but 'better' in what ways? EVs are, as you know, extremely heavy. Is this better or worse? If you don't have a car that you like to drive for the sake of driving, then it might not matter. If you are like me and like to fun on small roads then you might hate heavy cars because of the handling. Most EV lovers don't understand such things because they have a car for the purpose of transportation, not for the purpose of "the drive". Maybe bad generalization but I have yet to meet a person who have had as much fun in an EV as in a more traditional sport oriented car.... Except for the ionic 5 n, but I think there's a novelty factor involved here.
If I only needed my car for transportation, the I would buy an EV, but only because of the reduced fuel costs.
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Extremely rare XKCD L
Edit: downvote me all you want, it won't make electric cars charge any faster, have any more range, be any more affordable, work any better in the cold, or be any more fixable by their owners.
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The price of electric cars are rapidly falling down to ICE levels in many parts of the world tho
I live in Malaysia a third world country and recently there is a noticeable growth in EV sales over here
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Just did a quick eBay check. The cheapest 350hp ICE I could find was a rebuilt $3,000 Chevy engine. A new one is more like $6-8k. An equally powerful, brand new Siemens motor was $1,500.
This makes sense when you think about it though. An electric motor is basically just steel with a bunch of coiled wire with some control electronics. An ICE is hundreds of pounds of precision cast and machined metal. The cost driver in electric vehicles is not the motor, it's the batteries.
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