Re:The electric car as a talisman of false hope
by yellowapple on Friday August 16, 2019 @05:55PM
(#20720092)
> For instance, you'll likely not ever see - barring some extremely major advance in battery technology - something like a Bobcat Skid-steer loader using an all-electric drive system.
These do exist, though, albeit in smaller form factors: http://www.sherpaminiloaders.com/eng/models/sherpa-100-eco/
Industrial applications like this tend to be more amenable to electric-only vehicles (even if those vehicles ultimately get their power from ICE generators on the job site) thanks to there being far less of a need to drive long distances on a single charge (and thus never having to be very far from a charger). Electric forklifts are pretty common, on that note.
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But yes, I fully expect ICE vehicles will continue to exist for various specialized applications (and also because there are a lot of them driving around right now). They just don't need to be anywhere near the majority of vehicles in operation.
It basically comes down to energy density. Right now, fossil fuels are the most energy dense for their weight. They are portable enough, along with the engine, to make for machines which are very powerful, yet still small enough for practical purposes.
For instance, you'll likely not ever see - barring some extremely major advance in battery technology - something like a Bobcat Skid-steer loader using an all-electric drive system. The problem isn't the motors - it's the battery; you can't make one small enough with the same energy density as the diesel or gasoline those machines currently use.
That's merely one example, I can think of more, but I won't. The only way around any of this would be to change (fairly radically) how certain tasks are accomplished; For instance, if instead of such a machine with a single operator, you instead had a ton of smaller robotic machines digging or whatnot, all in some kind of conga line or bucket-brigade type system - and let it work overnight or be slower in some other manner - the same amount of work could potentially be done and stay all-electric. But - somebody will be losing a job in such a scenario...