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An idling gas engine may be annoyingly loud, but that’s the price you pay for having WAY less torque available at a standstill.
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.
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?
Hey mate I’m just here for some friendly discussion, I’m not here to argue until I’m blue in the face.
There is a difference between your above points and the original claim.
Fuel density doesn’t matter, what matters is how far you can drive on a charge.
Charge time doesn’t matter if you can swap a battery in 3 minutes instead of waiting to charge.
For your new point of rare earth materials, this isn’t related to the original energy density or charge time points, but high density batteries that don’t use rare earth metals already exist, the problem is cost. That will change over time.
Also you’re ignoring that fossil fuels are also dug out of the ground.
Fuel density doesn’t matter, what matters is how far you can drive on a charge.
Charge time doesn’t matter if you can swap a battery in 3 minutes instead of waiting to charge.
- they matter for the reason i explained. you are acting like we can simply build as much batteries as we want, which is not true
- and change them as conveniently as filling up the gas tank, which is also not true.
- and the whole “just swap the battery” concept leads to need of more batteries -> go to (1)
Also you’re ignoring that fossil fuels are also dug out of the ground
i am not, i am not defending fossil fuel, i am just pointing out that the ev concept has problems that are not widely talked about.
just because some other strategy has problems doesn’t mean your strategy is problem free.
It matters to people who drive more during the day than their range allows. They don’t want to wait 20 minutes for the car to charge every time they venture 300km out and back /s
Why /s? Road trips are a thing, and you’d be hard pressed to find a combo restaurant/charging station that’s along your path.
Road trips are a tiny fraction of all vehicle use, it’s fine to relegate them to specialty vehicles.
I’m so glad here in Germany they do that more often now. We have a quite a few large charging parks next to restaurants and bakeries. I just made a 9 hour trip to Denmark and it was a pretty nice experience overall. Only downside is you have to plan ahead if you want this convenience because the majority is still spots with 1-2 occupied chargers at some ugly, smelly Autobahn rest area.
restaurant/charging station combo
The people providing the charging infrastructure here haven’t figured out this important point yet. Gas stations are a terrible place to put chargers, no one wants to stop at a gas station for fifteen minutes to an hour at a time. Charging stations need to be in places people will be stopping anyway, or at the very least places that provide something to do while waiting. Restaurants, shopping centres, tourist traps, whatever.
Here it’s exacerbated by the fact that the fastest chargers we have only deliver about 60kW. Not even close to the 200+ some EVs need to get the fast charging times they advertise. But that 60kW would be perfectly fine if I could spend the time in a restaurant instead of standing around at a gas bar in the middle of nowhere.
Hell, even cheap (or free) “level 2” chargers outside restaurants and shopping malls would be a huge help.
Although own an electric car, I believe range is still an issue. I was specifically addressing fuel density and charging time. EVs have their issues, but I believe they will be solved over time even though they are unlikely to beat an ICE in fuel density or charge rate for a long time. But I don’t think those things are actually important, because the problem is solved in a different way.
Why do people still pretend it takes longer than 20 minutes to get a 50% charge increase?
Because it’s currently easier to find a gas station than a charger that will do that performance. Now I’m willing to wait 8 hrs for 10%, but others certainly aren’t.
Wait, I’m confused (out of date??) I thought it took hours to charge. Has that changed?
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
My point is that we should be focused on the outcomes we want. It isn’t really important that fossil fuels are a lot more energy dense if the electric cars can travel twice as far. They can’t, but I’d be willing to bet we will get to that point with fossil fuels still being more energy dense.
But also as I mentioned in the comment you relied to, Nio have a vast network of battery swap stations where you can get a full charge in a couple of minutes, the same as filling up at a gas station.
The price of EVs are a problem, and not the only problem, but my point was that the specific things mentioned don’t stop us having better EVs than ICEs, because we will get the same outcome in a different way.
I absolutely agree that we should work on improving EVs, charging network and whatever technologies makes it better and more suitable for more people. But every person in need of a car has unique hard requirements for the car that can’t be ignored as “inconvenience” - and many of those people have to drive with fossil fuels still.
Also, battery swap stations being available in X location doesn’t matter to people living in Y location, nor should people in Y location buy EV in hopes that it will be better in Z years
