I also wonder if the maintainability of these engines will be the same as with diesel. That would be another big benefit.
Washington DC, for whatever reason, gets its electricity from a gasoline power plant. In Washington, the Model S gets 28 MPG.
This happened a while ago so I could be misremembering, but regardless I don't believe that the environmental value of electric vehicles has been realized. In a lot of places, your Tesla is still coal powered. Efficient internal combustion engines are still a worthy cause, and this will continue until more electricity is being produced than is normally consumed.
So it doesn't matter about any of the arguments about whether an electric car is more efficient or not when the electricity comes from coal.
What matters is that having electric cars enables us to move to a future of solar and wind and not notice the difference.
Plus having electric cars that don't pollute in cities where there are lots of people and generating the electricity with coal fired powerstations outside of cities where there are less people has immediate benefits.
While this is true, much as the rest of your comment, this sentence has made me think that pushing pollution away from the eyes of people is a really negative effect of electric cars. If pollution is not in my backyard, I'll certainly be less aware of it, and hence I'll certainly pressure less for reduction.
Also once people have electric cars the incentive to have solar panels on your roof becomes bigger. Then once enough electricity is generated through that the coal power stations just get turned off because they're not needed.
Plus there will still be the issue of CO2 generation, just that drivers won't be responsible any so like ex-smokers (who in my experience seem to be more anti-smoking than most) they'll probably be even more offended by the polluting power stations.
EVs pollute less, but they pollute too, and in cities as well. They emit dust (including the most harmful particles: PM10 and PM2.5) from break discs and tires. Difference between CO2 in power plants and in city centers matters, but not that much. Once it's in the atmosphere the damage is done. As for NOx, the biggest offender in the dieselgate, Mazda's engines should not emit these.
Add a fact that in the current grid setup most of the energy is coming from coal, and that it's very unlikely it is going to change in a near future (mainly due to political reasons). Also, the waste from batteries is really ugly.
Given all that factors a 30% less polluting combustion engine is almost too good to be true. From a macro perspective the gain for environment is on par, if not better, than from electric cars.
My biggest problem is to believe in the numbers Mazda provides. Have to wait and see.
I shouldn't have made the point about city pollution as it just diluted the main point.
Nevertheless, the brake discs won't be any worse in electric cars, so it is an absolute reduction in pollution in cities. I've also only heard such things getting raise ever since we started talking about electric cars. When everyone is worring about NOx we forget about all the other polluting steps.
Coal power stations are the worst case scenario for electric cars and even with this things are on a par. But back on my main point with electric cars we can switch to Gas fired power stations and then to our own solar powered roof. With a Mazda ICE you're stuck on petrol.
Plus petrol in the long term can only get more expensive and solar can only get cheaper. Petrol is eventually going to run out and before that happens it's going to get very expensive. Solar panels and batteries will only get more efficient and cheaper to produce.
Battery recycling is definitely an issue and Elon Musk has quoted at the gigafactory opening that they can take all Tesla batteries back an recycle them fairly efficiently as their robots can strip the batteries apart as they have the schemas. Whether other car manufacturers follow suit is open to question.
As far as political reasons go, if everyone is driving electric cars I'm sure there will be much more political pressure to remove the polluting power stations because now CO2 is primarily the fault of the power stations rather than people driving around in their cars.
Citation needed. It seems obvious to me that a huge power plant is going to be less polluting per kWh than a tiny little engine in a car. Otherwise, we'd use tiny little car engines to power everything - which only happens at the moment in places where they cannot get electricity by other means (building sites etc).
However, I have to agree that my previous comment _wrongly_ implied that burning coal at the plants to power the electric cars is the main issue we have to deal with.
I don't think it follows that just because we have historically centralized power generation, this was obviously due to efficiency. For example, centralization of management, investment, pollution control, logistical (fuel delivery), safety (nuclear) and reliability concerns seem far more obvious to me, although I don't doubt there could be an efficiency benefit to large-scale generation, I've just never heard of it.
Simple rectification has not so much loss, I think you are thinking about low voltage DC power supplies, and I think that chargers for large, high voltage battery piles are likely to be happy with rectified (maybe doubled) mains supply.
The low voltage supply is first rectifying the input, then using an inverter to generate high frequency AC, then rectifying and filtering this to give a DC output.
The simple "diode" rectification is no longer acceptable due to harmonics put on the AC side causing grid stability problems and emitted radio interference.
Coal represents less than a third of North American power generation, and less than a quarter of generation in Europe. In Brazil (another major car owning country) coal only represents ~1% of their generation sources.
Really the only place your statement is true is mainland Asia, and even there the market share of coal is falling (and the number of cars there is dwarfed by the number in NA/Europe/Brazil).
The biggest nail in the coffin of the long tailpipe fallacy is that you can drive an EV farther on the power needed to refine a gallon of gas than you can drive a ICE car on that same gallon. So, even if you built a gasoline engine that had absolutely no emissions, and oil bubbled up into crude lakes right next to every refinery, EVs would still be more efficient.
Energy density of gasoline is 34.2 MJ/L: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
This means there was 4.8 MJ of energy spent to create 1L of gasoline. The 70kWh(250MJ) tesla is reported to have 390KM range. 4.8 MJ would be 1.92% of the range, or about 7.5km. The Mazda 3 has a combined fuel economy rating of 33 MPG, which is about 14KPL.
As far s I can tell, your statement that an EV can go further on the power needed to refine a gallon of gas, than an ICE car can drive is off by a factor of almost two.
That said, arguing an electric car can go a certain distance based on inefficiencies of another unrelated process is not a very meaningful argument. You need to look at the efficiencies and CO2 produced for drilling/transporting/refining/burning gas vs producing/transmitting/storing/using electric power, and probably the costs of dealing with peak loads vs non-peak loads, and even then the argument is heavily weighted on where your power comes from.
Indeed.
However, look at it this way: which is easier to replace, the entire fleet, or centralized power plants?
Every time a new windmill or solar panel is added, your Tesla gets that much cleaner. And that's something you can do yourself if you want to. Electricity is fungible and your car could not care less where it came from.
Oil changes have a non-negligible impact for the environment as well. And then there are all those components that have to be replaced from time to time and end up in landfills (spark plugs/cables, timing belts, etc).
So I believe electric cars today are already a net gain. And, even if they polluted more, the pollution is centralized in the power plants, which is easier to do something about. There are problem health benefits from moving pollution away from population centers.
I make a point of going to parks with my EV. I know it's a token gesture, but I like to think I'm not blowing dirty fumes next to animal habitats. It helps that California is reasonably clean.
The entire fleet I'd think. It's certainly much more likely to happen first.
(Cars have a much shorter average lifespan than power plants; the natural gas power plants we're building right now have a designed lifespan of up to 50 years. Very few cars coming of the production line today will be on the road in 50 years.)
The reality is that anyone in the US, east of the rockies and not in texas will have the same 'mpg equivalent' for their Tesla.
Now in winter gasoline/diesel cars have the issue of nearly always running rich on very short commutes as they strive to get to an optimal operating temperature. The EV just loses a serious chunk of range. Both of course can be preconditioned but the EV is more efficient there.
As for Mazda. None of the electrification upcoming laws exclude fuel powered vehicles, range extenders and hybrids all seem to meet many requirements.
older article about range/ev/winter http://www.teslarati.com/effects-winter-tesla-battery-range/ I hope they have corrected how regenerative braking works since then
People don't hold up BMW passenger diesels as the hallmark of maintainability. Heck, even the diesel offerings in American trucks are pretty bad from a reliability standpoint. Both Cummins and Navistar faced multiple CALs over reliability and warranty-related issues.
They also include traditional spark plugs and the engine automatically switches between modes. So, I fear that maintenance wise, it may be the worst of both worlds -- but with less wear and tear on the spark side, perhaps it will be better.
Backstory: Ford came out the gate with a new spark plug design for the 2004 F-150 3V Triton 5.4L V8 engine (after their previous spark plug design failure in the 2V Triton where the plugs would shoot out) and told everyone that the spark plugs would last 100k miles. Turns out if you let them go that long, they would get stuck in the cylinder head and break off when you tried to remove them, leaving stuck broken pieces of spark plug behind. Conveniently, 100k miles happens to be when most people's warranty expires, leaving people with a best case a few-hundred-dollars-extra tune-up bill, if not thousands of dollars if the heads had to be removed. Ford faced a class-action lawsuit over this debacle, and there are still companies selling special broken spark plug removal kits designed solely for this engine to this day. Of course the root cause of the problem is faulty design, but it would have been mostly avoided had they not claimed a 100k mile service interval for the plugs. So yes, Ford went from an engine where the spark plugs would shoot out of the cylinder head, to one where they would get stuck so hard they would break.
I know all of this not because I am an engine geek, but because it happened to me. Two spark plugs broke off while being removed and I came this close to needing to have the heads removed and machined. Fortunately those special removal kits I mentioned earlier really do work. Given how relatively cheap spark plugs are, you can bet it will be a while before I trust that 100k mile number :-)
This is the one with a "permanent air filter" so they were thinking about eliminating maintenance. Boy this is going to suck when it is clogged.
"Promises only bind those who believe them."
Wow, was that ever effective.
The Toyota/Mazda collaboration is a pure compliance play, just like what Honda has done in California for years (read: Honda Fit EV.) The official announcement had a subtle hint:
From 2019, start introducing electric vehicles and other electric drive
technologies in regions that use a high ratio of clean energy for power
generation or restrict certain vehicles to reduce air pollution
Also the new Toyota/Mazda auto plant is not going to manufacture only EVs but also other ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) cars.
And yes, without their own EV or the resolve to electrify their model lineups, Mazda might not even survive after 2025 when they plan to use SKYACTIV-X on all of their cars.
For EV, the old saying is true: driving is believing.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/8/16099536/mazda-compression...
Some people enjoy the mechanics of the thing. So they buy a nice mechanical watch. These watches went from being simple utility pieces to works of art.
Similarly I expect that car companies will continue to sell a set of "enthusiasts" models for a long time. They might revert back to manual gearboxes, and become more and more outrageous works of art - turned polished engine bays (Think Perlée, etc).
When all your actual needs can be met by a self driving electric car, why do you own a physical mechanical car? For the enjoyment of it.
"The Model 3 is so unexpected scalpel-like, I’m sputtering for adjectives. The steering ratio is quick, the effort is light (for me), but there’s enough light tremble against your fingers to hear the cornering negotiations between Stunt Road and these 235/40R19 tires (Continental ProContact RX m+s’s). And to mention body roll is to have already said too much about it."
http://www.motortrend.com/cars/tesla/model-3/2018/exclusive-...
Winters are pretty mild throughout more populated parts of Norway and Sweden.
- Fuel efficiency gains over 17%
- over 40% thermal efficiency
- over 99% reduction in NOx
- significant reduction in CO2
http://www.mahle-powertrain.com/en/experience/mahle-jet-igni...
- significant reduction in CO2
CO2 production is directly inverse-linearly related to thermal eficiency. It is silly to list both.
(To be more specific, the terms are often used interchangeably. Thermal efficiency has an exact definition in an ideal heat engine and even ways of calculating the theoretical maximum for given conditions – but CO2 or chemical reactions have nothing to do with an ideal heat engine to start with. I'd personally perhaps prefer to talk about just the efficiency in an actual ICE – even if just to be clear none of the losses are conveniently left outside the calculation.)
NOx is not peculiar to diesel engines. Gasoline engines also generate NOx. All internal engines make NOx. As long as you burn fuel + atmospheric air you get NOx. The atmosphere is 78% nitrogen. Some of it gets oxidized.
My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that off-the-shelf oxygen concentrators aren't efficient enough to make this practical, but I don't know whether there are fundamental thermodynamic limits that would prevent the efficiency from being improved.
The same condensation process would also trap all the carbon particulates.
The irony being that most don't. For example, hybrid synergy drive is basically an alternate transmission design that replaces the complex clutch packs used to control Ravigneaux planetary gears with electric motors. The result is a more simple overall design.
Other systems are literally just beefed up starters.
I think it's more of a political thing -- if you've made the argument that "ICE = pollution = bad" then it's hard to turn around and say "but a little bit of ICE to extend range is good."
The battery + electric motor adds so much good -- regenerative braking, electric torque, good city driving experience, it really feels like every car that is now an ICE should be a hybrid, even if just a "soft" hybrid with no plug, like a Prius.
I would imagine most the complaints are for when the ICE actually powers a drivetrain. If it's essentially a generator to keep the batteries from depleting too far, that's not much extra complexity it all. Have a problem with the generator? Just swap it out with a new or rebuilt one from some vendor (if designed well such that you can do so). I'm seeing that a Tesla uses about 300 Watts a mile @ 55 Mph.[1] Honda seems to have generators much more than capable of supplying that need for under $1000.[2] I'm not familiar enough with electric systems to know how accurate that assessment is (whether the voltage requirements complicate it, for example), but that seems promising. Then again, I imagine if it was really that easy, Tesla would have put a generator charge hookup and exhaust ventilation capabilities in the trunk already.
Edit: Hmm, I'm definitely missing something, since the $1000 generator says it can go 8.1 hours on a gallon of gas, and it doesn't seem likely for that to translate into powering a Tesla for 8 hours of travel.
1: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/average-wattage-for-...
2: https://powerequipment.honda.com/generators/selecting-a-gene...
This is nonsense. The dimensions are wrong. Watts are instantaneous power. To be meaningful, you would have to give either kWh/h or kWh per mile or km.
Besides that 300 W is only 0.4 hp. Sorry, but that is just not credible.
The time component being on the mph allows the conversion.
On the other hand, using the correct units (300Wh/mile):
300 Watt * hour / mile * 55 mile / hour = 16500 Watts [a sensible unit] (or about 22 horsepower which is reasonable for a steady 55mph cruise).
Do that for an hour, and you get 16.5kWh of energy consumption and cover 55 miles, for an energy efficiency of 3.33 miles/kWh, which is in the ballpark (albeit low) for what my LEAF delivers (averaging a bit over 4 miles/kWh at average speeds somewhat lower than 55 mph)
The most powerful generator I see on Honda's site is 10 kW for $5400.
We're already seeing companies being interested in making battery-only buses, tractors, semis, and even airplanes. Not all models of those types of vehicles may work with batteries, but it's a sign of what the future could bring.
Someone once told me battery technology has 2-3 more doubling left and then we hit chemical limits and cannot get more out of them. If this is correct batteries can never do the longer distances, but I don't know if it is correct.
We still have energy cells which are essentially bateries that you charge by pouring in some fluids just like in a regular car. However the tech is not mature enough yet.
A have Toyota Auris with hybrid synergy drive and even though it has really small battery (so it costs less than $25000 including tax), I am able to ride through small town using EV mode only and then use ICE between towns. My mileage is 4.4 l/100 km which is ~53.5 miles per gallon and I'm driving in city most of the time.
I'd like to have it with a larger lithium-ion that can remote start only my AC for a few minutes while I walk to the car in the summer.
- In line with this policy, continue efforts to perfect the internal combustion engine, which will help power the majority of cars worldwide for many years to come and can therefore make the greatest contribution to reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and combine the results with effective electrification technologies
- From 2019, start introducing electric vehicles and other electric drive technologies in regions that use a high ratio of clean energy for power generation or restrict certain vehicles to reduce air pollution
[1] http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1111876_mazda-exec-engin...
http://bioage.typepad.com/greencarcongress/docs/greenfreedom...
Its authors badly underestimated how much new American nuclear reactors would cost.
We performed economic analyses on a partially optimized baseline concept based on a single Gen III PWR to provide power for the process. The analyses estimated a capital cost of $5.0 billion for an 18,400 bbl/day synthetic-gasoline plant and $4.6 billion for a 5,000 tonne/day methanol plant. Nuclear power accounts for more than 50% of the total plant capital investment.
If just over 50% of that cost is supposed to be nuclear plant, it would be $2.5 billion for a Gen III pressurized water reactor. ($2.9 billion now, accounting for a decade of inflation.) The just-abandoned VC Summer project was supposed to build two new Gen III PWRs in South Carolina. They pulled the plug because estimated cost of completion had spiraled up to $25 billion ($12.5 billion per reactor).
https://neutronbytes.com/2017/07/31/utilities-pull-the-plug-...
So this is 'gasoline' diesel. Or diesel without the NOx. Which, in theory, would give better fuel economy and possibly better torque. And it will ship in cars in the 2019 model year (so possibly as early as late next year).
To me, it sounds like a "Don't pass"[1] bet on electric cars. Which they also are working with Toyota on electric cars so perhaps it is a fall back plan. It will be interesting to see how it fares. There are a lot of products that are built as the other side of an industry change bet. Sun created a workstation on the 68040 in case the SPARCStation didn't meet expectations as an example.
[1] In the dice game Craps, the "Don't Pass" bet is against the current player 'winning.'