[GutsyGibbon]

Originally Posted by romeomidhun

2. A set of electric generators attached to a long shaft connected to the engine. No battery in between.
6. Since no battery is needed. So, the cost will be something similar to IC engines.
In my idea, no battery to be used other than the normal small battery. Power from the generator to be directly given to the motors.

Nothing has surplus capacity in a modern car. Every thing is purpose built keeping weight and cost in mind. A normal battery has enough juice to start the car a handful of times (when new), which is why it is advised to idle the car at least 5 minutes after starting, so that the alternator replenishes the charge in the battery. Also, this battery cant do anything more than running the starter motor, it certainly cant move a 5000lb car an inch.

Your point #2, is not really practical if you dont store that energy. Always generating the Max electric energy needed without a way to store, would be very very inefficient. What is very practical is the hybrid transmission on a Toyota Prius. I had posted a link to How stuff works earlier, and that explains it very well.

[Gansan]

Originally Posted by romeomidhun

Can we have a car like this:

1. An engine, that keeps running in its optimal RPM always, and not connected directly to the wheels.
2. A set of electric generators attached to a long shaft connected to the engine. No battery in between.
3. Power from these generators to be used by motors to move the car, controlled by the accelerator.
4. This way, since the engine is always in its optimal RPM, we can expect the best FE.
5. Also, since the electric power is available on tap of the accelerator, it can give the electric-car-like acceleration.
6. Since no battery is needed. So, the cost will be something similar to IC engines.

This is more or less how a diesel electric locomotive works. Diesel is used to run an onboard generator which produces electricity to power the electric drive motors. But acceleration is gradual, not very quick. Also, once the cruising speed is reached, the train coasts along for many kilometers by momentum, the diesel engine just idles and kicks in only when acceleration is needed. Not practical for a road vehicle which will have constant acceleration-deceleration-acceleration again. The road ressistance of an automobile with tyres on road is a lot more than a train with steel wheels on steel tracks..

If a car can run exclusively on a battery which can constantly be charged by a small displacement ic engine such as those used in Honda gensets, that will be the most ideal vehicle. It will give Splendor like FE. But if a small displacement engine can do that, some company would already have made such a car.

[GutsyGibbon]

Originally Posted by Gansan

If a car can run exclusively on a battery which can constantly be charged by a small displacement ic engine such as those used in Honda gensets, that will be the most ideal vehicle. It will give Splendor like FE. But if a small displacement engine can do that, some company would already have made such a car.

A small one cant do much, while it generates 1kw. A regular 110V socket can drive 2kw and it can barely add a mile per hour of charge (for my Model 3).
https://powerequipment.honda.com/gen...models/eu1000i
Even an industrial size genset that generates 5kw, would take forever, then you start getting penalized for the weight of the genes and the fuel.

[maktags]

Hi Folks, ET has interesting news about the formalization of Diesel/Petrol cars into Electric Vehicles

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com...w/89420480.cms

Any takers for it?

[Arjun Bharadwaj]

Not sure if this is the right thread to post the below. Request moderators to move this if inappropriate or delete this if already posted elsewhere. I received the below as a WhatsApp forward but it strongly echoes with my doubts about whether sufficient research has been done before promoting widespread EV policies. Would love to hear from experts on this team.

Batteries...

What is a battery?' I think Tesla said it best when they called it an Energy Storage System.

That's important. They do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. So, to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid. Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, do you see?" Einstein's formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.

There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals.

Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.

All batteries are self-discharging. That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery's metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.

In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly.

But that is not half of it. For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive embedded costs."

Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. I will explain embedded costs using a can of baked beans as my subject.

In this scenario, baked beans are on sale, so you jump in your car and head for the grocery store. Sure enough, there they are on the shelf for $1.75 a can. As you head to the checkout, you begin to think about the embedded costs in the can of beans.

The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plow the field, till the ground, harvest the beans, and transport them to the food processor. Not only is his diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. In addition, the farmer might use a nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas.

Next is the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building, transporting the workers, and paying for the vast amounts of electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining taconite, shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it's back on another truck to take the beans to the grocery store. Finally, add in the cost of the gasoline for your car.

A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.

It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust for just - one - battery."

Sixty-eight percent of the world's cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car?"

I'd like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being 'green,' but it is not! This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.

The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.

Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.

There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. I predict EVs and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become apparent. "Going Green" may sound like the Utopian ideal and are easily espoused, catchy buzz words, but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth's environment than meets the eye, for sure.

If I had entitled this essay "The Embedded Costs of Going Green," who would have read it?
But thank you for your attention, and good luck.

[GutsyGibbon]

Can we please not let threads denigrate to discussing WhatsApp forwards without quoting any sources? From, battery does not make electricity, to Einstein's formula, to a battery plant in SFO that is a disaster. It has all the salient points that I do not like on WhatsApp university.

[Arjun Bharadwaj]

Originally Posted by GutsyGibbon

Can we please not let threads denigrate to discussing WhatsApp forwards without quoting any sources? From, battery does not make electricity, to Einstein's formula, to a battery plant in SFO that is a disaster. It has all the salient points that I do not like on WhatsApp university.

Fair point sir. I am neither a graduate of Whatsapp University nor considering it as a holy grail for information. The very reason for posting it here was trusting that experts here might have read better/ real studies and I will get a chance to be better educated against the points mentioned in the article. I am looking for conclusive sources of information if someone has already studied this topic. I can obviously sit and google and spend a few 10s of hours and verify every bit of information but looking for a short cut to start with This is quite a concerning topic for me.

[Shresth_EV]

The article does indeed have some element of truth to it, though it makes some very blatantly incorrect point as well — in addition to some glaring generalisations.

Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, do you see?" Einstein's formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one.

Except that it doesn’t. An electric powertrain of battery and motor is as much as 95% efficient, while even the best engines are only 1/3rd as efficient at 30%. The petrol tank of a BMW330i stores equivalent of 250kWh energy and by EPA estimates of mpg, has a “range” of 480mi.
A model 3 SR RWD stores 55kWh and goes 260mi.

On a strict “energy vs energy” basis, which doesn’t directly correspond to same ratio in emissions, the Model 3 gets 4.7mi/kWh while the 330i gets 1.9mi/kWh.

Also, E = MC^2 is not correctly valid here. A 1kg block of aluminium cannot give you same amount of energy as a 1kg coal because, you guessed it, you can’t burn it. 1kg uranium can power a city for weeks or even months.

The essay author has already made such a blunder that I’d toss this essay into the bin if I were a science teacher and this, his project, but I digress and will give the person who took pains to write this WhatsApp forward, a benefit of doubt.

Might I clarify that I have directed this for the person who wrote the message/essay, not our T-BHP member who simply shared it here’s

Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.

That’s true, but just because one type of battery is going that way, doesn’t mean all types will. Case in point, there is copious amounts of gold, copper, and other valuable metals up for grabs in e waste. However, people don’t bother with it because it’s

1. Not “worth” their effort to go that extra mile to not pollute the planet
2. For scrappers, there’s just not enough “concentrated” source to justify working on it — just like a 30g D type cell vs a 300kg battery pack.

There have been enough EV sales for enough time that people have, instead of just dumping their old EV in a landfill, sold the parts to Hobbyists, mod shops and the like. Tesla swaps can be popularly found on YT. You’d not find a tesla battery in a landfill just like you’d not find a gold or copper ingot in a scrapyard.

In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly.

Whether this is deliberate use of ambiguous language for FUD or a coincident, I neither know, nor want to, but what I do know, is that this is exactly what is lead acid business. They are
1. Big in size and capacity to justify recycling
2. Numerous and concentrated amounts of material

That’s why they get recycled. Rechargeable batteries are useful, and a good business to recycle. Not so with single use cells. And EV batteries certainly aren’t single use.

A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.

It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust for just - one - battery."

In a vacuum, even the activity of human respiration would appear to be blasphemously polluting.

The question should be, are these numbers better or worse than the status quo that was oil extraction, the catalysts for fractional distillation? Add to that, 25% of global shipping is based around oil and assorted products.

It’s a common tactic to hide the complete information by giving such big numbers that one would feel guilt from mere thought of these numbers.

The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.

That’s absolutely true. Indeed, semiconductor industry uses some very nasty chemicals. I wonder why haven’t there been spills of acids from TSMC in Taiwan. I’ve heard there was a Dino juice spill in Gulf of Mexico though. Again, overwhelming readers by writing names of chemicals in detail to blow it out of the water.

The same chemicals treat every single chip, including the one which powers the device I wrote this on, and which you used to post it, and probably the OP of the said essay too.

"Going Green" may sound like the Utopian ideal and are easily espoused, catchy buzz words, but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth's environment than meets the eye, for sure.

If I had entitled this essay "The Embedded Costs of Going Green," who would have read it?
But thank you for your attention, and good luck.

Ironically the essay used more buzz words than I could find in any single Pro-EV article. I have obviously omitted parts which I do agree with, such as the windmills being harmful to aves and child labour issues in DRC. On the whole, these are probably the only two sensibly out points of the whole “essay” imho.

[locusjag]

So, I've been hunting for a rental home for 3 months now. We've shot down multiple homes by now; today I rejected a home purely based on the Ola electric scooter that would place my vehicles in peril nearby, if I were to reside there.

That's a first for me - reject a rental based on the presence of a parked EV!

[Mortis]

On the latest Car Trek, Ed Bolian of VinWiki fame said something very poignant about electric cars, the Tesla in particular.
Cars that have an enthusiast version and sports cars are made by and for people who love to drive. The Tesla while it's fast and handles well, etc. is made by and for people who see driving as a chore and want to make it into a transport appliance basically.
Not his exact words but this was the gist of it out of context

[ajayc123]

Originally Posted by Shresth_EV

Also, E = MC^2 is not correctly valid here. A 1kg block of aluminium cannot give you same amount of energy as a 1kg coal because, you guessed it, you can’t burn it. 1kg uranium can power a city for weeks or even months.

Wow! Not sure how Einstein would have reacted after reading this. For sure, I can’t make any sense out of this.

[akhilesh]

Originally Posted by Mortis

]The Tesla while it's fast and handles well, etc. is made by and for people who see driving as a chore and want to make it into a transport appliance basically.
Not his exact words but this was the gist of it out of context

Sweeping generalisation if you will. I wonder if the author even though that Tesla's might just be the best EV's available in the market. I know plenty of people who own a Tesla and came from a combustion engine car, some really fast one's. No one buying Tesla or for that matter any other brand is going to use the full self driving on a track however I would love if a car can drive me within the city or do the boring highway runs without much interaction. Even in that case, its not that I cant switch of full self driving if i wanted to drive myself.

[Shresth_EV]

Originally Posted by ajayc123

Wow! Not sure how Einstein would have reacted after reading this. For sure, I can’t make any sense out of this.

The statement mentioned in the forward basically says that it takes equal amounts of energy (see calorific value of fuel and kWh of battery energy) to move a vehicle equal distance, however firstly, E=MC^2 is purely for nuclear reactions, where M is mass defect. And secondly, two cars of same weight may not necessarily need same amount of energy to go same distance.

The correct statement instead would’ve been : “two moving vehicles of same mass and velocity possess equal kinetic energy” (which is instead given by 0.5MV^2 where M is mass of vehicle)

But the energy used by those two vehicles (calorific value of fuel and energy capacity of batteries) to reach that velocity will not necessarily be equal — just like mileage — two cars of same weight might have different mileage due to the difference in engines. Mileage at its core is just the energy that two engines are successfully able to convert to kinetic energy.
Mileage units : km/L
Calorific value : kJ/L

Same way, an being 90% efficient is using 3x less energy than a normal vehicle which is only 30% efficient.

That does not mean the normal car pollutes 3x more, it’s between 1.2x-1.7x more pollution than an EV using worst to best case for an EV (See ICCT report on EVs July 2021)

But the statement makes it appear that they :

1. Consume same amounts of energy to go same distance (false, as I mentioned, 330i fuel tank when full, is storing 250kWh in calorific value of fuel, which ends up equivalent to having a 83kWh battery due to 30% efficient engine.
It’s possible that a theoretical EV which weighs as much as a 330i and has a 83kWh battery despite lower mass, will go 480mi unlike the model 3 (which weighs more than 330i and only gets a 55kWh battery) and goes 260mi.

2. Bases this “fact” on E=MC^2 which is only for nuclear reactions’ energy output, not normal fuel/batteries which are both chemical reactions at core, and even then, they’d not require the same energy because one is 3x efficient at the other. So it is fundamentally a wrong reason, and a wrong backing for it.

[ajayc123]

Originally Posted by Shresth_EV

2. Bases this “fact” on E=MC^2 which is only for nuclear reactions’ energy output, not normal fuel/batteries which are both chemical reactions at core, and even then, they’d not require the same energy because one is 3x efficient at the other. So it is fundamentally a wrong reason, and a wrong backing for it.

I don't want to pursue this discussion any further, but I will leave you with a quote from a source. Please feel free to reach your own conclusions.

My interpretation is that this formula is universally applicable and not limited to nuclear reactions alone, as being called out by you.

In physics, mass–energy equivalence is the relationship between mass and energy in a system's rest frame, where the two values differ only by a constant and the units of measurement.[1][2] The principle is described by the physicist Albert Einstein's famous formula: {\displaystyle E=mc^{2}}E = mc^2.
..

The equivalence principle implies that when energy is lost in chemical reactions, nuclear reactions, and other energy transformations, the system will also lose a corresponding amount of mass. The energy, and mass, can be released to the environment as radiant energy, such as light, or as thermal energy. The principle is fundamental to many fields of physics, including nuclear and particle physics.

Source:

Link

[Shresth_EV]

Originally Posted by ajayc123

My interpretation is that this formula is universally applicable and not limited to nuclear reactions alone, as being called out by you.

Source:

Link

I am sorry I was unable to get the point across, all I’d like to say is, it is universally applicable, true, but not practically used in cases where there is very little mass defect (chemical reactions) compared to nuclear reactions (large mass defect viz a viz Chemical reactions)

Energy release during combustion comes from breaking and formation of chemical bonds. Energy release in nuclear is from splitting of nucleus into smaller nuclei (fission).

https://chem.libretexts.org/Courses/...Nuclear_Energy

E=MC^2 is not applicable here not because it doesn’t hold, but because combustion reaction has more to do with bonds than mass defect.

I am sorry that the discussion totally went to a tangent to EVs due to a worthless WA forward