SimplyMe
Senior Veteran
- Jul 19, 2003
- 10,611
- 10,357
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Christian
- Marital Status
- Married
I'm running off the assumption that the battery capacity wears down faster based on the weight it's moving. You're correct that mpg in ICE cars is similarly affected.....but capacity isn't.
There is no reason to believe that the weight in the vehicle has any noticeable effect on degradation. The biggest issue for battery degradation is heat -- things like charging the last few percentage of the pack creates heat, removing charge from the battery at the low end creates heat, fast charging the car creates heat. Normal driving of the car does not create much heat, even if the car is fully loaded. In fact, on some cars where the BMS does not have a way to "pre-condition" the battery before charging, there are cases where drivers accelerate rather quickly, then brake hard, then repeat; so that the battery is warm enough (maybe 70 degrees) so that it will fast charge at the maximum speed. The constant yo-you (accelerating and then hard regenerative braking) does help to heat up the battery; driving normally does not warm up the battery all that much.
And, again, that is why the BMS is designed to keep the battery at a "safe" temperature; and why manufactures build packs with a 5 or 10% "buffer" at the top that "can't be charged" (in quotes because that is oversimplified), so that the car won't ever actually be charged to 100% of the full battery, just 100% of the usable battery space, and why when you hit 0% in the battery it is actually maybe at 5%. I suppose the way to look at it, even if your battery takes an hour to charge to 100%, that is still twice as fast (and likely exponentially more heat) than driving your car where the battery will last over two hours at high speed -- even with the car loaded to the top rated weight.
Well let's put it this way....
Your advancements in EVs have largely been made because they're competing with a superior product.
Perhaps Toyota's entry level EV car is better than Chevy's entry level EV and Chevy will need to support advancements that allow it to compete with the Toyota.....but that's likely a much smaller gap than between either of them and an ICE car.
Consider the points we basically agreed on earlier....
1. EVs and similar sized ICEs are comparable in short range drives (with the main difference between the two being price, which is considerably higher).
2. ICEs outperform EVs on long range drives (a point repeatedly reinforced by posters here who have both bought an EV for short drives and bought or kept an ICE for long range drives).
If we want EVs to be adopted by the market they should outperform ICEs in every way....including range and price. By keeping them in competition with ICEs they'll make advancements much faster. On the flip side of that, a lot of advancements have been made in reducing emissions from ICEs and if we want to continue that advancement....we need to keep them in competition with EVs.
That last point is arguably the most important since any scenario wherein ICEs are banned in 1st world nations will result in a reduction in demand and new markets in poorer nations will be pursued with more and more people from places like Brazil and Angola buying their first cars which will inevitably be ICEs.
No offense but I don't think we need to complicate this discussion anymore by adding hydrogen power.
The issue is, there have been no major breakthroughs on ICE cars, it is a "mature" technology. Most of the current "advancements" are using older technology, such as making the engines smaller but adding turbochargers to add more power and reduce emissions (because of the smaller engine while the turbocharger is not needed to provide that extra boost) -- that is a technology from 1905. It is "new" in passenger cars (though it's been used in sports cars for decades) because they are an extra cost to add and they require extra maintenance; but with the push to increase fuel economy and smaller engines, at that point it became worth adding.
To some degree you could claim that auto-start/stop is a new technology, then again it is based around the push button start on cars and that technology was first used in 1912. You just needed the computers, that are now used in all engines/motors, to determine when the car is stopped and turn off the engine, and then a switch -- when the foot hits the gas pedal -- to restart the engine.
The engine "technology" used to help improve efficiency in ICE engines, and mostly used in hybrids, is based on the Atkinson cycle engine, from 1882. Despite being efficient, it produces very little torque which makes cars accelerate slowly. The lack of torque on a hybrid wasn't an issue, since you could add the electric motor to add torque, so that the hybrid would perform decently (thought that is arguable on the Prius until the last few years). I suppose you can claim some modern invention here, as the engineers started realizing they didn't need to use an actual Atkinson cycle engine but use a computer to use a more normal type of engine (most car engines are based on the Otto cycle) and then using the computer to adjust the engine timings when cruising to replicate the Atkinson cycle, so the car could have more power (torque) when accelerating but become more efficient when not needing much torque. Of course, much of the technology was converting fuel injection, which was invented in 1891, and then computerized in the 1980s for use on passenger cars to replace the carburetor, and applying that technology.
Obviously there is some advancement going on -- largely in figuring how to use technologies and computers to increase efficiency of gasoline in an engine; but the base technology is often over 100 years old. The issue is that gasoline engines rely on combustion -- and when you combust gasoline (or other oil based products) most of the power generated is from heat -- and until you can find a way to efficiently gain power from that heat, the engine will always be inefficient.
With EVs, I think it could be argued that there are similar issues with the motors -- EV motors are already highly efficient, so little can be done to improve them. OTOH, as we have talked about on this thread, that is not true of batteries; while batteries have existed as long as the ICE engine (some of the original cars were EVs, until they were beaten out by gas engines). The difference is, since the batteries were beaten out by ICE cars, there was no work done on improving a large battery in a car.
So, now there is a lot of money being spent to improve battery chemistry, both to make the battery more robust, energy dense, and to remove the more problematic metals (such as lithium and nickel). Whether ICE cars are here or not, there is too much money to be gained by a company that figures out how to make a battery that is lighter, more energy dense, and faster charging; even after EVs are the only cars sold (particularly, as other threads have pointed out, you'll still have long-haul trucking and even jets that will retain combustion style engines). And that isn't even counting how a solid-state battery could revolutionize the entire EV industry; which is why there is such a large push to solve the issues.
If we use your logic, Lithium batteries would not have been invented in the 60s, as they weren't even thinking about EVs then, it was simply to improve the current battery technology. They wouldn't have bothered with electronic fuel injection in the 80s, as carburated cars had worked fine for decades. The research will not stop if there aren't ICE cars, there is too much money to be made.
And forgive me for pointing out this fun little fact, since I was talking about carburetors, but one advantage of an EV is in the mountains. Essentially, an ICE car loses 3% of its power for every 1,000 feet it goes above sea level -- so at 5,000 feet (for people living in Denver or Albuquerque) a gas car that is rated at 200 hp only has about 170 hp. By contrast, the EV still has its full power regardless of elevation. Also interesting, because of the increased altitude and less air pressure, the fuel sold at gas stations in the Rocky Mountains is 85 octane for Regular (down from 87) and 91 for Premium (down from 93).
Upvote
0