Going from 22 cylinders to none

"davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com" (davesaddiction) 12/12/2016 at 20:49 • Filed to: None

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Good for him, I guess...? Honestly, I can’t see myself ever giving up internal combustion voluntarily.

LongbowMkII > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 12/12/2016 at 20:55

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Sounds like a “Car guy” who looked at the HP output and said “that one”

TheTurbochargedSquirrel > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 12/12/2016 at 20:56

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Well he technically still has to provide fuel for the 2 cylinder in that i3 REX.

S65 > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 12/12/2016 at 20:58

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We’re gonna have to do it eventually..

Amoore100 > LongbowMkII 12/12/2016 at 20:59

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BEST CAR IN THE WORLD ADHWFHJAAAAAACCNH;FCGNUOCNSUO

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > S65 12/12/2016 at 21:01

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They can pry my clutch pedal from my cold, dead left foot.

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > TheTurbochargedSquirrel 12/12/2016 at 21:03

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So only down 20. Guess you don’t have to put gas in it... It’s just an on-board generator, right?

gin-san - shitpost specialist > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 12/12/2016 at 21:03

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At first I read that he got an i8 and thought that’s not too bad a tradeoff. The i3 is a different matter entirely - I think I’d like it if it didn’t look so odd and bulbous.

I’m ready to accept electric - it would meet 99% of my driving needs in a given year, but the upfront costs along with the fact that I don’t think I can get a personal high-voltage line in my condo for charging makes it impossible.

Still, I hope that I one day have the means to have a practical electric, autonomous commuter and a fun ICE car for when I actually want to drive. Commuting tends to be very frustrating except for fleeting moments of clear road.

S65 > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 12/12/2016 at 21:04

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very well..

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > Amoore100 12/12/2016 at 21:04

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He clearly could’ve afforded one, but went with the ugly duckling.

Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 12/12/2016 at 21:05

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No

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo 12/12/2016 at 21:09

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Most concisely-worded response thus far.

LongbowMkII > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 12/12/2016 at 21:13

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I dunno a viper and s600 gets you maybe 70k?

TheTurbochargedSquirrel > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 12/12/2016 at 21:14

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Generators kinda require gas to generate.

GTRZILLAR32-Now saving for Godzilla and a condo > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 12/12/2016 at 21:16

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“Car guy” riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

We get these “car guy” types at my dealership all of the time, most of them are so full of shit I do that Jackie Chan meme face.

V12 Jake- Hittin' Switches > LongbowMkII 12/12/2016 at 21:29

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Then he would have bought an S65. Just because someone drives a high power Luxobarge and not some English roadster with 17 peak horsepower at 9000 rpm doesn’t mean that they’re any less of an enthusiast.

Life and Times of Magoo: The People's Champ > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 12/12/2016 at 21:32

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That moment when you see a light go out.

But that light was someone’s soul.

#pouritout

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 12/12/2016 at 21:34

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I like the idea of electric cars....the next big level-up in the automotive world I think. BUT, they just aren’t there yet.Yes, the Tesla and a few others can get similar ranges to gas cars, but...

A. Not ALL charging stations can juice up your car as fast as a gas fill-up.

B. Range still heavily changes based on weather. I know gas cars lose mileage in cold climates, but electric cars MASSIVELY lose mileage in cold weather...

C. The electricity is still coming from burning dinosaurs in a power plant somewhere anyway most likely until we can switch to more environmentally friendly means, until then is there really a reason to switch when you’re not technically being that much more environmentally friendly?

I wish everybody would start to go the hydrogen-electric route...

LongbowMkII > V12 Jake- Hittin' Switches 12/12/2016 at 21:39

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No one said he had a blank check. I’m just not buying the “car guy” story with that evidence

V12 Jake- Hittin' Switches > LongbowMkII 12/12/2016 at 22:03

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Someone who can afford a $190,000 car can afford a $220,000 car. I’d call a viper pretty enthusiasty

sm70- why not Duesenberg? > LongbowMkII 12/12/2016 at 22:04

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...is that not how it’s supposed to be done?

deekster_caddy > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 12/12/2016 at 22:05

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I drive electric most days now. It’s different, after almost 4 years if DD electric driving, I get the appeal. It IS fun, in a different way. But I will be hanging on to my gas guzzlers for a long time as they are sentimental to me. Also, I’m not one for full BEV driving - 200+ miles is great and all but I need the freedom to do more some days so the Volt works out really, really well for me.

Nauraushaun > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 12/12/2016 at 22:09

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No fuel cost, no maintenance costs, no repair costs

Literally none of those are true. Can’t help but hate this guy a lot. My ‘84 Nissan had cruise control +power windows + mirrors + ac, features absent on cars 30 years newer BUT I BET SO MANY OWNERS ARE SHOCKED THAT HIS 6-YEAR-OLD TOP-OF-THE-LINE LUXURY SEDAN PULLS OFF THE SAME FEAT

hate this guy. hate

C62030 > V12 Jake- Hittin' Switches 12/12/2016 at 22:15

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Agreed. I’ve loved cars my entire life and my dream garage consists first and foremost of a Model S and a Phaeton.

Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 12/12/2016 at 22:20

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I’m old enough to remember when the enthusiast community was reacting this way to the introduction of EFI. “ You can pry my 48IDAs from my cold dead hands ” etc.

Now don’t get me wrong, give me a bank of Webers or a big fat Holley on my project car any day, but in terms of actually, y’know, WORKING, fuel injection kicks carburetion’s butt every which way,and nobody nowadays is going to say someone’s not a car guy because they can’t synch a pair of twin-chokes.

Same thing applies here. I hope to be turning dino juice into exhaust noise at least once every few weekends for the rest of my life, but electrons are already a better choice for my daily commute, and I’ll bet they become the better choice for fun driving within the next decade, too.

Wacko > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars 12/12/2016 at 22:52

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Why not propane?

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen 12/12/2016 at 23:16

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I guess I just don’t see the sound of an electric motor ever moving my soul like induction & exhaust currently are capable of doing.

Joe6pack > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 12/12/2016 at 23:16

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Come over to the dark err light side.

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > deekster_caddy 12/12/2016 at 23:21

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If my commute was mostly in traffic, all stop & go, I’d welcome an autonomous, electric personal transport vehicle into my garage.

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > GTRZILLAR32-Now saving for Godzilla and a condo 12/12/2016 at 23:27

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Well, he was a guy that had cars...

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > TheTurbochargedSquirrel 12/12/2016 at 23:30

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Right, but it doesn’t drive the wheels. Therefore, you could, theoretically, never use it and run purely off the battery.

Two cylinders-in-waiting.

TheTurbochargedSquirrel > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 12/12/2016 at 23:33

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I don’t know how the i3 works but in a Volt it will actually run the gas engine to cycle the tank so the ethanol doesn’t ruin the system.

Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 12/12/2016 at 23:33

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Actually, I agree with you on that. That and the smell and the vibration are why I expect to have an ancient smog-belcher in the back of my garage till the day I die.

But I also expect that in another decade or two the shitty torque characteristics, narrow rev range, unreliability, inconvenient warmup needs, demanding maintenance regime, and general hokeyness of an IC engine compared to an electric one will make us all think of gas-powered cars the way we think of 50s roadsters now: grin-inducing as a weekend toy, but you’d have to be nuts to DD one.

My bird IS the word > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 12/12/2016 at 23:56

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Correction: was a car guy. Now a self-righteous douche nozzle.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 12/13/2016 at 00:07

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Talking to my dad the other day, he mentioned that he’d probably buy something electric if something killed the Benz. It’s 16 years old, so even the smallest accident would probably total it. Since he’s retired he doesn’t need the range, and could use mom’s car if that was necessary. Since adding solar panels the energy cost would be essentially nothing. All this coming from a guy that has owned a GTO, MGC GT, Mustang and numerous BMWs.

Heck, if I had a garage I’d probably go electric as well, with my whopping 2.3 mile commute and all. Since changing jobs I’ve probably put less than 5K miles on the Mazda in the last 18 months, and this after years of 15K every year.

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > TheTurbochargedSquirrel 12/13/2016 at 00:30

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Interesting. Gotta love ethanol... /sarcasm Found this - “The range extender on the BMW i3 works differently than systems on plug-in hybrids (that to varying degrees sometimes power the wheels from the engine). The rear-wheel-drive i3 is the only pure series plug-in hybrid currently available. The i3’s two- cylinder range-extender engine never mechanically drives its wheels.”

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 12/13/2016 at 00:34

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For commuter duties, especially if short distances or in heavy stop & go traffic, I completely get it.

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen 12/13/2016 at 00:36

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The times, they are a-changin’...

bhtooefr > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars 12/13/2016 at 07:16

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Well, no charging station can fill up as fast as a gas fill-up - Tesla Superchargers can do 170 miles per half hour, whereas I can get 170 miles worth of gas in under a minute.

However, preconditioning helps the cold weather range problem (doesn’t solve it, but helps it), as will using heat pumps for HVAC. (Oddly, Tesla has not made that move.)

As far as the electricity coming from burning dinosaurs... as far as greenhouse gas emissions, here’s the impact of running an average EV as of 2015 (IIRC this is a mix of a Tesla Model S of some sort, and a Leaf):

Also consider that those are averages, and you can buy an EV today, and your transportation has lower and lower impact as the grid cleans up. An existing ICE vehicle won’t get better. And, in my case, if I had somewhere to plug an EV in... I’m on a green power plan where 100% of my usage is offset with wind power (which means my results would be far, far cleaner than the RFCW average, which I can beat with my Prius). A lot of EV owners install solar, too, which helps (although it’s obviously not inherent to an EV).

As far as hydrogen-electric... cost-effective hydrogen production is typically steam reforming of natural gas, and that’s just a moderately more efficient way of using the natural gas than burning it in an ICE. (California does require 33% renewable hydrogen at their filling stations, but electrolysis is horrifically expensive and inefficient, so some of it may well be biomethane, which means natural gas from renewable sources.)

67 miles per kg in the Honda Clarity, 142 MJ/kg of hydrogen, steam reforming is 65-75% efficient (per Wikipedia, though, so I might be wrong), so that’s 189-218 MJ worth of natural gas. 55.5 MJ/kg of natural gas, so you’re looking at about 3.41 to 3.93 kg of natural gas to get that hydrogen.

Now, the most efficient recent US-market NGV is the Honda Civic Natural Gas, at 31 MPGe. NIST uses 5.66 pounds of natural gas to equal a gallon of gasoline, or 2.57 kg. That means that the Civic NG is getting about 41 to 47 miles out of the natural gas used to make the Clarity’s hydrogen... yes, an improvement, but...

Let’s look at using that natural gas to generate electricity, too. We’ll ignore combined cycle plants, which means that the most efficient way to generate electricity with natural gas for 2015 was... internal combustion, at 9322 BTU (or 9.84 MJ) per kWh: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_02.html

So, that’s 19.2 to 22.2 kWh of electricity generated by an internal combustion power plant running off of natural gas. The EIA also says about 6% of this is lost in transmission and distribution, so that’s 18.1 to 20.9 kWh.

Now, how far can that 18.1 to 20.9 kWh get us in an EV? Note that charging losses are included in EV range estimates, too. The Hyundai Ioniq BEV is rated at 136 MPGe, 33.705 kWh per gallon equivalent, 4.04 mi/kWh, or 73.0 to 84.3 miles.

Upshot? You’re better off burning the natural gas in an ICE, generating electricity with it, sending it down power lines, and charging a battery with it, than you are turning it into hydrogen.

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > bhtooefr 12/13/2016 at 07:39

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Very well-written comment, I learned many things! :)

The range anxiety is still the thing for me though....I sometimes have to take long drives and knowing I can go between fill-ups is important without having to stop for quite awhile somewhere in the middle.

bhtooefr > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars 12/13/2016 at 08:26

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Oh, and I meant to say, yes, the Clarity is an improvement over the Civic NG.

And, yeah, range anxiety is about the only reason why hydrogen makes sense, although IIRC, it’s about $1 million per hydrogen filling station, making the infrastructure very hard to deploy, compared to EV charging infrastructure. Right now, you’d basically be confined to California, Hawaii, or being within about 300 miles of one filling station in Massachusetts - however, Nikola Motor is planning on deploying hydrogen fueling infrastructure for their semi, and has said that cars can use it as well (where’s the capital for this coming from?). If you do outdrive your range, though, you’re on a tow truck, whereas an EV can just be plugged into any ordinary 120 volt outlet and be slow charged.

I do suspect that the Nikola One is more efficient using a hydrogen fuel cell than using the natural gas microturbine that it was originally announced to have (and will still have in markets where there’s no hydrogen infrastructure), and the noise concerns they cited for the NG turbine are quite valid. And, that’s really an application where a battery-electric would not be practical. (At the same time, though, electric locomotives using a catenary would be more efficient for the long-haul duties that Nikola is targeting, and Europe uses that quite extensively...)

And, all of my numbers are based on a natural gas-based economy, it starts looking even worse once you start bringing solar, wind, hydroelectric, and nuclear in.

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > bhtooefr 12/13/2016 at 09:30

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Great, informative comments above.

I think the biggest limitation in the U.S. for wholesale acceptance of pure EVs comes down to our country’s general impatience and desire for convenience. Just look as how well fast-foot restaurants do, despite our knowledge of how bad it is for us, and how well Amazon does, despite us knowing we should support local businesses: Americans hate waiting.

For any one who regularly takes trips over the road for several hundred miles, I just don’t think most will have the patience to spend a half-hour plus waiting every time they run out of juice. I’m not saying we shouldn’t slow down and take a nice break in the middle of a road trip, but the 5 minute gas/piss/snack pit stop on the way to Grandma’s is something that’s so ingrained in many of our psyches that we probably wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves while getting your volts.

If and when EV range gets up to around 350-400 miles and the time it takes for a full recharge is 20 minutes, I think you’ll see much more widespread acceptance.

315 miles of range in the 100D is impressive. One does wonder, however, how that number holds up after a few years of ownership. We all own laptops and phones that use the same batteries, and we all know effective battery life gets significantly shorter with time.

bhtooefr > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com 12/13/2016 at 09:38

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Tesla battery degradation has so far been really good, it appears: https://electrek.co/2016/06/06/tesla-model-s-battery-pack-data-degradation/  Our laptops and phones tend to use all of the available capacity, where most EVs and hybrids are using a narrower range of that capacity - much of the damage is caused by deep discharge or charging all the way.

The other thing is heat, which Tesla seems to do a very good job of managing. That’s not as much of an issue for laptops and phones, but it is an issue for some other EVs with poor battery thermal management.

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > bhtooefr 12/13/2016 at 10:20

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That’s good to hear!

While I love my manual, high-reving V8, competition is great for consumers and anyone who loves cars. I just hope the mass-market “switch” from ICE to EV that’s coming doesn’t mean that there will be even fewer options for the driving enthusiast that values engagement more highly than outright performance.

DrScientist > bhtooefr 01/02/2017 at 20:57

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yeah, but...