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Mazda Says Its Next-Gen Gasoline Engine Will Run Cleaner Than An Electric Car (popularmechanics.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Popular Mechanics: Mazda is staking much of its future on the continued existence of the internal-combustion engine, with clever tech like spark-controlled compression ignition set to debut in Mazda's next-generation production-car engine, Skyactiv-X. But the automaker is already thinking even further into the internal-combustion future. Automotive News reports that Mazda is working on a new gas engine, Skyactiv-3, which the automaker says will be as clean as an electric vehicle. Speaking at a tech forum in Tokyo, Mazda powertrain chief Mitsuo Hitomi said that the main goal with Skyactiv-3 is to increase the engine's thermal efficiency to roughly 56 percent. If achieved, that would make the Skyactiv engine the first internal-combustion piston engine to turn the majority of its fuel's energy into power, rather than waste due to friction or heat loss.
To date, the most thermally efficient automotive internal combustion engine belongs to Mercedes-AMG's Formula 1 team, with an efficiency of 50 percent; AMG hopes the F1-derived engine in the Project One street-legal supercar will achieve 41-percent thermal efficiency, which would make it the most thermally efficient production-car engine in history. Automotive News says Mazda's 56-percent goal would represent a 27-percent improvement over current Mazda engines. Hitomi didn't provide a timeline for when Skyactiv-3 would reach production, nor did he specify how Mazda hopes to achieve such an improvement. Mazda's claim, that Skyactiv-3 would be cleaner to run than an all-electric vehicle, is a bold one, and requires some unpacking. Mazda bases the assertion on its estimates of "well-to-wheel" emissions, tallying the pollution generated by both fossil fuel production and utility electricity generation to compare Skyactiv-3 and EV emissions. Such analysis reflects the reality that, currently, much electricity is generated through fossil fuels. In regions where electricity comes from wind, solar, or hydroelectric, the EV would clearly win the argument, but that's not the case for many customers today. If Mazda can make a mass-production internal-combustion engine that achieves more than 50 percent thermal efficiency, it will be an incredible feat -- and would likely help guarantee the piston engine's continued survival.
To date, the most thermally efficient automotive internal combustion engine belongs to Mercedes-AMG's Formula 1 team, with an efficiency of 50 percent; AMG hopes the F1-derived engine in the Project One street-legal supercar will achieve 41-percent thermal efficiency, which would make it the most thermally efficient production-car engine in history. Automotive News says Mazda's 56-percent goal would represent a 27-percent improvement over current Mazda engines. Hitomi didn't provide a timeline for when Skyactiv-3 would reach production, nor did he specify how Mazda hopes to achieve such an improvement. Mazda's claim, that Skyactiv-3 would be cleaner to run than an all-electric vehicle, is a bold one, and requires some unpacking. Mazda bases the assertion on its estimates of "well-to-wheel" emissions, tallying the pollution generated by both fossil fuel production and utility electricity generation to compare Skyactiv-3 and EV emissions. Such analysis reflects the reality that, currently, much electricity is generated through fossil fuels. In regions where electricity comes from wind, solar, or hydroelectric, the EV would clearly win the argument, but that's not the case for many customers today. If Mazda can make a mass-production internal-combustion engine that achieves more than 50 percent thermal efficiency, it will be an incredible feat -- and would likely help guarantee the piston engine's continued survival.
but not for long. even IF they achieve this.
They are defining the scope of "clean" pretty narrowly here to get this win. One admittedly important metric only -- CO2e, and the comparator is an EV running off a grid that looks like today.
Obviously,
1. there are many other important metrics: particulates, particulates at street level, NOx, NOx at street level, noise, vibration damage, etc.
2. EVs get less carbon intensive over time without doing anything as the mix of power sources shifts more and more towards low-carbon.
On whether the germans or the japanese get there first - at least to a production vehicle, the article states that Merc-AMG have already made it with F1, but the japanese are persistent.
This will be an interesting contest to watch.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
He is right in one thing, and that is the scandal that isn't - how we still burn coal to generate electricity. Thanks to green party opposition to nuclear power, we are still burning coal (which creates more residual radioactivity than nuclear, but that's another story).
Had we embraced nuclear energy, we would not have coal, oil or gas power plants anymore. They would simply be too expensive. But nuclear has this atomic bomb associations, while coal gives us mental pictures of hard-working people.
By the time their super-efficient cars hit the roads, we will hopefully be more advanced and the "cleaner than EV" claim is ancient history.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Not like you think, of course.
But burn it cleanly in a fuel cell, capture (and perhaps compress) its exhaust gases, and convert them back into gasoline in a plant, using nothing but electricity from sunlight, and you got a perfectly clean, infinitely recyclable process, and a fuel that has *much* higher energy density than batteries.
You can even take the CO2 from the air and turn it back into gasoline. Although that is very inefficient.
But efficiency is not really relevant, as you can store both the CO2 and gasoline for a very long time, and hence do the conversion whenever and wherever you please. Like only in the summer during the day. Or in the desert. (Although of course carrying it via ships and pipelines is a bad idea due to how much mess even a little error can cause..)
It needs no rare earths, no poisonous chemicals (OK, except that gasoline itself isn't the healthiest. But hey, it literally comes out of the ground. :), and also doesn’t explode, unlike batteries (and movie gasoline).
I know this goes very much against popular opinion (as in belief, as opposed to knowledge, or understanding), and might even get me downmodded on this site,
but I find it crazy that we run after batteries, even though they are even worse, just because we are willfully (and militantly) ignorant regarding the above solution.
Why is this desirable? A heavy noisy motor with lots of moving parts - decreasing reliability - requiring harmful chemicals and kicking out pollution at street level.
Not criticising the concept. It's good to see improvements, and the internal combustion engine was an impressive invention, but I think after a century and a half, we should expect it to be replaced with better technology.
The elephant in the room is: regardless of whether EV from green sources or super-efficient ICE, we have too many cars, and they are too big.
I watched in horror at Dieselgate, where folks were quibbling about a minor cheat in small automobiles while they were buying SUVs to go buy their groceries or bring their prole to the school.
I mean: VW (and many others!) cheated on the emission values of their cars and desserve a serious spanking on that (much more than they actually got!), but are making a killing selling SUVs to people that don't really need them: the real problem are we, the customers!
Mazda is due some credit here for making an HCCI engine, However, the headline is a lie. It's not Mazda's fault, though. Mazda didn't write this farce of a headline. All blame here should be placed on BeauHD for signing off on this article without changing the sleazy and dishonest headline. I recommend that BeauHD be subjected to disciplinary action.
On a long term forecast, electric vehicles will be very very cheap to produce, not just the components are way less, the supply chain and quality control will be way more reduced. There is no way any fossil fuel will ever be more efficient from an energy prepective than a eletric engine. We are at infant stage of tech, and cars are getting has low as 12 kwh per 100 km, I can't even imagine anything better than this. This Mazda engine relies on extreme compression, don't expect the engines to last long
but let's try to charge them off wind/solar please?
Which is already happening in several countries (e.g.: hydro is popular in the Alpine regions of Europe).
You know, not every nations produces it's electricity by burning coal.
Otherwise you're shifting the efficiency problem from your engine bay to the grid. I hate smug EV drivers boasting about "clean" driving. They get all flustered when I point out that grid-charging has all sorts of issues from coal-fired electricity.
According to research (damn, I have to keep the link under hand), except in a few countries that have a horrible mix of sources of electricity and burn too much fossils (out of my head, I think it's : China, Inda, Australia. Not 100% sure, should google) where there's basically no difference between an EV charging from the grid and a ICE, in every other country including those that still burn fossil in electrical power plant (that's including the US), there's some improvement of efficiency simply by shifting the burning from a small compact ICE that has to do compromises on lots of other parameters (weight, size, quick reaction, etc.) to a huge power plant that is more or less exclusively optimized for efficiency.
And then you have European nations where you can find a mix of power source that relies a lot on renewable sources (solar, wind, alpine hydro) or sources with a much smaller mass of pollution output (nuclear).
Also the way power is produced isn't the only advantage :
EV use regenerative breaking, being able to use significant fraction of the kinetic energy to charge back their battery pack.
(Slight tangeant, Swiss example : two high speed train going down from the Lötschberg tunnel can power one train going up "for free").
That is extremely usefull in stop-and-go situations (in city driving, commuting on busy highway with traffic jams, etc.) whereas these situations are killer for ICE efficiency.
Also, going out for a spin on the weekend? I prefer my motorbike, thanks. Perhaps I'll have to have it modified to run on bio-fuels.
Depends on how the biofuels are produced.
- As a way to make something useful out of argigulture's waste ? (We're doing so in several European countries) Yup, that's definitely an improvement.
- But some countries (US among other, I've read) do cultivate plants for the sole purpose of producing ethanol. That's cultures which are requiring additional soil exploitation, and a competing with food production.
It's a bit more problematic in the long term regarding bio-diversity, etc.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
This is just an attempt to stretch the sunk investment in gasoline technology a little bit more into the future and to cover the gap till the long overdo electric models can be developed. Because when doing the math directly comparing an electric to a gasoline car there is no way a gasoline engine can beat an electric car. A gasoline engine is a heat engine and as such is limited to Carnot efficiency.
I did the math for relative CO2 (energy) cost comparing a Volvo diesel car to a Tesla Model S. It was a few months ago so I don't have the exact figures anymore but here are the factors i discarded or took into account:
* I assumed an average European energy mix
* I ignored possible positive factors in favor of the Tesla. For instance it very much looks like electric cars will last a lot longer than gasoline cars.
* I ignored all the parts of both vehicles (except the battery)
* I took into account the "Fuel" in case of the Tesla this is both the battery and the Power to charge it
* The fuel of the Volvo (Diesel) includes cost for prospecting, transportation and refining
* I took into account the energy cost of prospecting and mining the resources for the batteries as well as production
Anyway the Result was that around 26000-ish km the electric car would have recovered any possible energy dept its production could have had over a gasoline car. This figure gets massively better when say the batteries are produced with renewable energy (say in Sweden). I also suspect I massively underestimated the energy cost of refining given some statistics i recently saw.
Mazda's engine achieves a compression ratio of 14 to 1 which I think is spectacular for a road going car. It's the same as their diesel which has evolved in the other direction.
Racecars can get higher compression but their idle is very high, which avoids low rev knocking and they use higher octane.
Come on guys, is nobody interested in the mechanics of this thing?
>> Mazda powertrain chief Mitsuo Hitomi said that the main goal with Skyactiv-3 is to increase the engine's thermal efficiency to roughly 56 percent.
Yeah. Not really.
A typical gasoline engine may have an efficiency of 20-30% at best.
The maximum efficency of an otto cycle gasoline engine is 40-47%, which is limited by physics.
More would mean a different cycle needs to be used. You can't beat entropy.
https://physics.stackexchange....
Moreover all these efficiencies are totally misleading and completely wrong for an automobile.
The real efficiency of a gasoline engine may be 30%. But the real average efficiency of a gas engine in a car is no more than 12% !!!!
Why ? because this top efficiency is only achieved at a single point in the motor torque/rpm graph.
At all other regimes, the efficiency drops like a rock into the Marianna trench.
The real world gas powered engine efficiency is 12% at best. Diesel achieves 15-17% at best.
aaaaaaa
They are fudging some number to tout this efficiency.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
One is the continuous use of spark plugs. These ignite the mixture conventionally when the engine is cold or operating at high revs but, in lean burn mode (about 80% of the time), the spark ignites a pulse of richer fuel. The resultant fireball lights the ultra-lean mixture as it’s compressed.
According to the test drive it's characteristics sound good (low end torque and high revving) but they were unable to verify fuel economy claims.
comparing the engine with an EV which is powered by fossils fuel electricity..... Marketing at work again.. No their new engine (which is only still in theoretical stage) is not cleaner than any EV. when it comes to the car itself, it's still much MUCH more polluting than an EV by itself. And we want to get rid of those localized polluters.. It's easier to clean/reduce pollution from one big giant plant, than a gazillion small ones (cars).. And since most countries are already setting in motion laws that prohibit sale of new ICE cars by 2025-2040, these new engines don't have a chance, as they are still ICE's and we should really get away from those and only resort to ICE in the most extreme situations where EV might not be possible (so that certainly rules out ownership by private citizens).
Also, just because an EV is fun to drive, doesn't mean that IC cars *aren't* fun to drive.
No argument from me.
Hop in a Ford Focus Sport or a Golf GTi and tell me it isn't fun.
We'll I've owned a GTi and it wasn't exactly mind blowing. I didn't hate it but it was just a hopped up econobox with the various compromises that entails. Hot hatchbacks try to be all things to all people and to my mind they fail in that for the most part. The Mercedes SLK I had was MUCH more fun (albeit less practical) to drive. It was faster, cornered way better, looked better, and did the one thing it was designed to do rather well. If you can only afford one car and need something small and practical with a bit of a kick then a hot hatch isn't a bad choice but as fun cars go they aren't the best option out there.
Even better, jump in an Audi Quattro and tell me what you think.
I've owned one of those too a while back. Performed well enough but fun to drive? It was ok in some conditions. Better than a hot hatch but worse than a proper sports car in the dry. Fairly fun on gravel and in sloppy weather.
Or find yourself a Group B rally car and take it for a spin on a dirt track.
Seriously? You're comparing a purpose built race car to a street legal EV? I'm sure it's amazing to drive an F1 car too but let's keep it realistic.
EVs aren't an evolution of fun, they're not the next generation of fun, they're more of a new branch of the family tree. They're going to replace whole classes of IC cars, e.g commuting, but they're not going to replace them all.
Yes there will probably be IC cars for the foreseeable future as long as those who use fossil fuels aren't required to pay for the full cost of the pollution they generate. My guess is that EVs will eventually account for the majority of cars with gas/diesel cars becoming specialty vehicles for tasks EVs aren't well suited for. (remote locations, extreme climates, etc) The advantages of EVs just make too much sense for most people if they can get the fueling infrastructure issues sorted out. How long this will take is anybody's guess but I'm thinking at least 30 years.
In rural areas where power distribution is more complex and transmission losses are higher, it doesn't always make sense to use electric vehicles. In an urban center where millions of people share the same air in close proximity, it helps to have a very clean burning gasoline engine, it helps more to run electric vehicles.
50 years from now, I can imagine regularly seeing vehicles still burning hydrocarbons in a piston engine. Such as off-road vehicles, farm equipment, etc. But I seriously doubt we'll see a lot of that in a big city. If the price ever comes down on electric motorcycles I think we'll barely recognize places like Hanoi.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
So basically it's only cleaner if people continue to use dirty power generation techniques. Generate green energy and this car will not be 'cleaner'
With the exception of the grossly mismanaged Chernobyl, none of the other "disasters" actually killed many people. For Fukushima, the Tsunami killed thousands, but zero direct deaths from the plant.
Forgetting that it rendered the area several miles around the plant uninhabitable? The fact that 150,000 people had to be evacuated many of which still cannot return to their homes? That the cleanup has so far required 9 million cubic meters of contaminated soil to be scooped up and that the cleanup is expected to take decades? The fact that no one was directly killed doesn't begin to mean that it is safe or without extremely serious and expensive problems.
Fission power is great until it isn't. I think it's a better option than coal in most cases but that's damning with faint praise. Being against fission currently is effectively an endorsement of using fossil fuels. But it's very much a lesser of two evils sort of situation.
It is all hype. But the result of that hype is that Nuclear is artificially very expensive.
There is nothing artificial about its cost. Nuclear fission has failure modes that while rare, are extremely dangerous and expensive to mitigate. It is dangerous enough that it requires nation states to provide insurance guarantees and severe regulatory oversight to ensure safe operation. It's expensive because when things go wrong it can render large areas unfit for habitation. Most of the time it is fine but that's not what insurance cares about.
UCS has been evaluating & tracking how much mpg is needed to match an EV on a grid-level basis
http://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-re...
Thank you for the useful link.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Put the CEO in a air-sealed room with one of his cleanest cars.
Start the engine.
If the gas tank runs out before he dies, I'll believe his claim and buy one of his cars.
But most people can't afford a new car anyway, and most of the cars on the road are 5-10 years old minimum.
The average age of a car on the road today is around 11.5 years in the US.
To make a dent in the existing market is going to take a decade minimum, and even then most people will still be driving a fuelled car instead of electric.
I think you'll see a dent within a decade but the tipping point is undoubtedly further out. My guess is somewhere around 30 years from now. I figure it will take about 10 years for credible EVs in the major market segments at reasonable prices to become available and sell in meaningful numbers and a bit longer for the electric grid to reconfigure to deal with it. Then it will take a few decades for the old cars to wear out and be replaced with new ones. So probably we see a tipping point in 20-35 years with substantial numbers of EVs taking market share in 10-15 years. To your point, though it's going to take decades under the best of circumstances to get most of the petrol powered cars off the road.
Whether it pays for itself or not, it really doesn't matter if you can't afford it, people aren't buying it, production isn't there, and there'll be a glut of cheap petrol cars even when they do start taking over.
Well the interesting thing is that while there will be cheap petrol powered cars, as EVs become more popular the cost of petrol itself will have to increase and thus they become less affordable. People aren't going to care if they can get a car for $5000 used if gasoline costs $10/gallon because there is less demand for it. Oil benefits in part from economies of scale and if EVs start capturing meaningful market share (and it seems likely they will) then oil based fuels will HAVE to increase in cost to offset the lower demand.
There is only one way to achieve that efficiency with a combustion engine, or any thermal engine: Increase the operating temperature and the expansion ratio.
So they will need:
- a material that withstands the higher temperatures
- a fuel that does not ignite on its own. Are you sure they are using gasoline and not diesel?
- a way to manage the nitric oxides that form at these high temperatures - the same problem that efficient diesel engines run in
I don't care how gutless this thing is, I'll prefer it to a battery until the day batteries can stay charged for 24 full hours of driving.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The whole "EVs can't handle extreme climates or places with low population density" thing is just plain silly.
It's not a population density thing. The question is whether there is refueling infrastructure available. Go to remote parts of Alaska or Antarctica and an EV would rapidly become useless because there is simply no way to practically charge it. It doesn't have to be a big town but you do need access to some means of charging it. There also are climates where EVs will struggle. Heat is actually a bigger problem than cold for them. In the cold they don't work as well but extreme heat can kill an EV. I think these are technical issues that can be worked out in time but they are real issues.
So they say they'll match the tailpipe emissions of an electric vehicle using a combustion engine? Man, those batteries sure output a lot of CO2 and particulates, don't they?
I do expect somebody to bring up some stats that show that the manufacturing of said electric car and for the production of electricity for it produce loads of emissions, and more damaging than what the combustion engines output, but there's one crucial difference to people (even if not for the planet): cleaner air in the cities. Then we can focus on making those processes better on site. Can upgrade them more quickly than renewing the whole electric vehicle inventory.
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
Another method of proof: have the CEO spend a day in a sealed garage with the engine running. Do not use monkeys. If it's clean enough that that does not cause health problems, then the claim may have some merit.
Hmm... That is an interesting question, so I went to Google "gasoline fuel cell".
This is what I found:
Gasoline Fuel Cell Would Boost Electric Car Range
WSU researchers develop fuel cells for increased airplane efficiency
It looks like there are serious people working on it, but there's still a way to go.
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
It's all fine and good to make an efficient IC engine car, but that in no way staves off its demise. Because no one wants even the most efficient ICE car if the infrastructure isn't around to support it. There is a currently huge network of gas stations, oil change shops, and engine repair shops. As EVs hit critical mass, those businesses are going to start shutting down, further accelerating the shift to EVs. At some point, the few people who have held on to ICE cars will be traveling far out of their way to find a "boutique" gasoline and oil change supplier.
They know that they're lying, and they are trying to justify it.
They say that its engine runs cleaner than electric, but then disclaim that to say that their claim is based on the notion that many places still produce electricity through the burning of fossil fuels, and that in regions where electricity comes from non-fossil fuels that isn't the case. Ignoring the fact that clean electricity production is getting more and more widely used, this claim would also seem to suggest that they are saying that a region's entire electricity production system is part of their own car's engine. Comparing apples to apples here, that's a lie, plain and simple. Their car still burns gasoline, and it emits pollution. Fully electric cars do neither, full stop.
If they had integrity, they would instead be saying that it is the cleanest running engine they have ever produced, and instead of making the generalization (falsely) that it is cleaner than an electric car, state that it's overall environmental impact works out to be less than that of an electric car in regions using current most common methods of fossil fuel-based energy production.
Since of course, fossil fuel power generation isn't exactly a static comparison point, and cleaner technologies for such power generation can always be developed.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
That's all well and good, but I doubt it will compete in long-term reliability against an EV. If you take a look at the myriad of sensors that they added just to make Skyactive-X's sparked HCCI happen, there was *a lot* of complexity and computer monitoring and control to make that happen. Each of those added sensors and connection points is now a new failure point. That can't be good for long-term reliability.
I love this headline. "Mazda Says Its Next-Gen Gasoline Engine Will Run Cleaner Than An Electric Car"
-An Electric Car has zero emissions.
-That means the next generation ICE Mazda will have negative emissions.
-That means the next generation Mazda engine will run on atmospheric carbon instead of gasoline.
-That means we can effectively replace lost rainforests with fleets of mazda vehicles!
I'm happy to hear someone's pushing this, especially Mazda, since they have an excellent track record of putting innovative drivetrains into production vehicles (Wankel, Miller cycle). The claim of "cleaner than EV" is disingenuous, however. Every time it's said, it must be qualified with "using today's average mix of electric power generation", because tomorrow isn't today and things are absolutely moving to more and more renewable sources, so by the time they have this in production, it very likely won't be even close to being as "clean" as EVs. The other problem is the source of the fuel. If it's still gasoline refined primarily from crude oil, it's not going to help much if it doesn't show up within five to ten years. If it works well with, say, butanol produced from renewable sources, it might just help push the adoption of a convenient liquid fuel. Hydrogen is still a PITA. Methanol is highly toxic.
I'm seriously sick and tired of the bullshit definition of thermal efficiency cycles, casuals and even many undergrads get the wrong impression. You need to have your cold side sink at absolute zero, this limits any practical process to a low efficiency, and is technically correct but horribly misleading. Moreover it's bullshit because after your exaust dips below ambient temperature you are actually throwing away useful energy, no one pays for the base thermal energy in the atmosphere so the dollar cost is zero and most textbooks argue this energy is unavailable (ironically). More emphasis needs to be put on the upper bound of possible efficiency using the actual thermal resivoirs at hand and rating efficiency (utilization efficiency) as a percentage of the theoretical maximum given those constraints. It's like when they teach you in 1st year mechanical engineering where the isothermal expansion of a cylinder is efficient. Great! But seriously emphasize the fact it's efficient because you are taking thermal energy you didn't pay for from the atmosphere (most new students leave it off the energy balance lol). Car engine is 18% efficient? Great! But a better way to say it is 50% utilization of available thermal energy. In this case it's the emphasis on how well the engine does compared to what's really possible and gives a cleaner impression of the bigger picture on how well the engine does it's job. I guess it's not as sexy to say 50% thermal utilization efficiency, but it's what gives a clearer impression to the general public.
Mazda is to be applauded for making a more efficient internal combustion engine. But the only way it's "cleaner" than an electric vehicle is by making the assumption that the EV was charged from fuel produced by fossil fuel. That's a bogus assumption.
The places where electric cars are actually bought in large numbers, also are aggressively updating their electric grid with renewables. I have 2 electric cars, and solar on my house that generates enough that I have no electric bill. Beyond whatever bill, between my solar and the local grid being 43% (and improving) renewables, and 0% coal, this claim from Mazda is utter BS here. So in places like Texas where coal is still very heavily used for energy, then yeah...a myopic view may hold to this. But then you just have to decide if you want to be part of the problem, or part of the solution :P
You can back out ICE efficiency from the EVs on the road. Let's use the Nissan Leaf (you'll see why later). EPA rating of 30 kWh per 100 miles. 112 MPGe combined, 101 MPGe.highway. Top speed of 93 MPH.
30 kWh per 100 miles = 108 Megajoules per 100 miles. Since we're trying to do a comparison and ICE cars don't have regenerative braking, we need to compare the highway mileage. Since the Leaf gets 101 MPGe on the highway vs 112 MPGe combined, this works out to (112/101)*(108 MJ) = 119.8 MJ per 100 miles on the highway. Note that this is energy stored in the battery. To do the comparison, we need energy at wheels to the ground.
Electric motor + inverter efficiency is typically about 85%-93% (page 35). That's for a Prius' motor (the only one I could find detailed stats for), but they're all pretty similar at these levels of power output. Since there's no gearing, if you align the Leaf's top speed of 93 MPH with 6000 RPM, then the highway speed of 55 MPH corresponds to (55/93)*(6000 RPM) = 3550 RPM. Which puts us right around 90% efficiency.
I couldn't find any numbers for battery discharge efficiency. Battery charging efficiency for a Tesla with the home charger is about 85%. Battery discharge efficiency is typically a bit worse (even more so at higher loads, which is why jackrabbit or ludicrous mode starts kill your rnage). so go with 80%. (For those of you complaining this is too unfavorable to EVs, a lower discharge efficiency here corresponds to lower ICE efficiency later on.)
So 119.8 MJ from the battery becomes (119.8 MJ)*(90%)*(80%) = 86.3 MJ per 100 miles wheels-to-ground. The extra energy is lost as heat to the battery, wiring, inverter, and motor.
Gasoline has an energy density of 34.2 MJ/L = 129.5 MJ/gallon. To figure out how many gallons were used in 100 miles, we need the MPG of a gas-powered Leaf. Fortunately we have one - the Leaf's aerodynamic and rolling resistance is almost identical to the Versa since it shares the same body and frame (I had to go back to 2014 to get the hatchback version with a regular transmission). Highway mileage is 35 MPG. Meaning (129.5 MJ/gal)*(100 miles)/(35 miles/gal) = 370 MJ worth of gasoline consumed per 100 miles.
Overall highway efficiency of the ICE and drivetrain is then energy wheels-to-ground vs energy in the gasoline. (86.3 MJ)/(370 MJ) = 23.3%. It's rated at 26 MPG city, so overall efficiency in city driving is (26/35)*(23.3%) = 17.3%. A far cry from the 12% you came up with.
We can also calculate overall efficiency for the EV, from energy source to wheels-to-ground, just like we calculated it for the ICE vehicle from energy source (gasoline) to wheels-to-ground. The average efficiency of a coal plant is about 33%. The average efficiency of a natural gas plant is about 43%. Power line transmission losses are about 5%. As mentioned before, charging efficiency (for a home charger) is around 85%, discharge efficiency around 80%, motor efficiency around 90%. To get an overall efficiency of (33% or 43%)*(95%)*(85%)*(80%)*(90%) = 19.2% or 25%. If you use a fast charger like a Supercharger station, it's even worse, since the charging efficiency is even lower (more of the electricity is lost as heat) the more quickly you charge the battery.
So an EV powered by electricity generated from fossil fuels isn't any more energy efficient than an ICE vehicle. The reason it's cheaper to charge an EV is almost entirely because gasoline is damn expensive for an energy source. Coal costs about $50/ton and contains ab
The problem with this argument of course, is that if there is no petrofuel, the IC engines don't work either.
I can fly or ship and store an arbitrary volume of gasoline or diesel literally anywhere in the world. Explain to me how you do the same with electricity. Especially given that battery packs are highly non-standardized not to mention very heavy/bulky in the case of an EV. I either have to fly in a generator and fuel for it (which then ironically could have been used to power an ICE without the middle step) or I have to be near a grid. Some places don't have access to a grid and those places aren't good places for EVs for the foreseeable future. I'm as big a fan of EVs as you'll find but the ability to transport and store fuel in a relatively compact physical volume is a decided advantage of ICEs.
Taking these fringe cases of a cabin in the remote woods like the Alaskan reality shows is where we start going off the rails.
Not at all. It's just an example of cases where an internal combustion engine will continue to make sense for some time to come. Don't get to wrapped up in it. Point is that there will likely always be internal combustion powered vehicles even if EVs dominate someday.
Except of course that the supercharger network extends almost all the way up to Nordkapp (Norway's equivalent of Alaska's Point Barrow). The country is covered.
I guarantee there are places in Norway where you cannot drive an EV without refueling becoming a problem. It might be covered for the vast majority of use cases but not all of them. In the much larger US it would be rather easy to do in parts of the Western US or Alaska.
Are there really that many parts of the world that don't have electricity? I mean apart from large very low population areas.
There are a LOT of places with very low population density and limited to no grid. Look at a photograph of the world at night. The dark areas are where there is limited electrical grid access. I wouldn't even have to leave the lower 48 states of the US to drive to a place where refueling an EV would be a problem. Furthermore there are a LOT of countries where the grid does not cover all the citizens and/or is highly unreliable. Even some highly populated places have undependable grids.
That's practically an IQ test in a bottle.
The smallest value of "region" sufficiently decoupled in economic decision making for this to be obviously true is no less than the size of a planet—in any solar system where any moon has been visited by any number of feet.
Even the isolationist Hermit Kingdom here on earth is hanging off a warm Chinese tit in energy balance.
Isn't this where molten salt reactors come in? No material left over, no meltdowns, small.
There are serious problems and dangers with every fission reactor design. Molten salt and thorium reactors are no exception. They might be better but they aren't without risk.
new clean engine with some batteries and electric motors and you can make a great pluggable hybrid car.
Are they factoring in how much carbon footprint is produced by having to maintain an ICE vehicle compared to electric? I'm talking about everything that produces all the parts and supplies necessary to do required maintenance of an internal-combustion engine vehicle compared to all-electric, which requires a fraction of the maintenance.
Face it, ICEs are going to go away sooner or later. If practical, I'd rather it was sooner. I've been repairing and maintaining ICE vehicles of all kinds since I was 15, and it's no picnic. An electric vehicle would be so much easier to deal with, so much cleaner.
Because they don't seem to have ever experienced the fun of keeping IC engines running in the extremes - usually cold
One could say the same about people experiencing the fun of keeping an EV running in the extremes (hot and cold). Most of those doing the discussing haven't done that either. There are problems with both and there are some extreme conditions which ICEs deal with better than EVs and vice-versa. EVs start better in cold but their range is significantly diminished which is not true of ICEs. Heat is a major issue too and can substantially reduce the life of a battery pack or electronics.
Most modern (ULEV / PZEV / whatever) gasoline vehicles already do run more cleanly than electric cars when you take generation into account.
So this is a pointless claim.
If instead he's claiming that their gasoline car will run more cleanly than an electric car does, ignoring generation, then nah, that's bullshit.
"What we need is a gasoline fuel cell"
We had a story about this on /. years ago where 90+% efficiency was claimed. IIRC, it was either Honda or Mazda that announced the technology in conjunction with some University.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Neither. That animosity is not how the real world works. Americans aren't that much different than anyone else in the world. Just like the majority of the world's population, they just do not have the time nor luxury to think about the big picture you describe. They just go about their day-to-day trying to make ends meet, being good, and thinking it is normal just like anyone else.
Can we do more? Of course! But that takes a concerted effort of the few to rally the many for a cause. Outside that, it is difficult to blame the masses, let alone assign a perceived sense of animosity to them.
The problem is still that we have to extract oil from the ground which is an energy intensive process and can end up damaging the environment. The answer is to use renewable resources and there is only a finite amount of oil and the large deposits of oil exist in politically unstable areas. Moving away from ICEs isn't just about air pollution, it's about the destruction of ecology and there are significant social and political ramifications. Furthermore, let's look at the caustic chemicals needed to run an ICE. You need coolant or propylene glycol. This stuff is a poison. ICEs that are not maintained properly can leak coolant. I wonder if Mazda is being influenced by world-wide oil interests. Does Mazdas open CEO actually believe that there won't be any critical thinkers to refute his claim?
"Captain, I canna change the laws of thermodynamics!" In other words, I'll believe it when I see it.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Great, let's use this technology to make power plants more efficient and then drive EVs.
35 years ago in college, I did a report explaining why we wouldn't be switching to electric cars in the near future: because gasoline has an order of magnitude greater energy density than batteries. 35 years later, that situation hasn't changed much. I am hopeful that eventually someone will produce a cheap, easily manufacturable battery with greater energy density than gasoline, but that day may still be decades away. If electric cars are such a great idea, why do we see so few electric airplanes?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
If the electricity is produced by solar, wind, or hydro, yes. If the electricity is produced by burning coal or natural gas, then gasoline can be cleaner. That seems like a no-brainer to most people, there are huge inefficiencies in the power distribution system.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It will be interesting to see which country becomes the first to mandate all electric cars and make internal combustion cars illegal. It certainly won't be Trump's America! I suspect in might be China that does it; they have an authoritarian government and serious pollution problems.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It certainly won't be Trump's America!
It won't be in anyone's America. There was no need to invoke partisan politics here.
America is too large geographically for short-range EVs to be forced upon the populace. In addition, each state has the ability to write it's own laws (per the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution), so the likelyhood falls even farther considering that geographically large states with sparse populations (Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, etc) wouldn't be able to function if vehicles capable of 500+ mile drives were banned.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
And yet, we can run power to the same places.
We can but we won't because there is no economic case for running a power line to everywhere we could theoretically drive a vehicle including places where there are no roads like Antarctica or vast swaths of Alaska, Siberia, or northern Canada or the Sahara, etc.
Power lines and substations are nothing difficult to install.
Running power lines AND maintaining them out in the middle of nowhere is hardly a trivial endeavor even if we ignore the economic cost of doing so. It is FAR more expensive and environmentally damaging than shipping a occasional container of petrol to a random spot once in a blue moon.
Seriously, you are completely and utterly missing the point. The point is that it simply that there will remain corner cases where EVs are not viable. That is ok. It will not be practical within your lifetime or mine to extend our electric grid everywhere just in case someone wants to recharge an EV in the middle of some remote wilderness. It's totally OK that for corner cases like that we use an internal combustion engine. EVs will eventually be able to cover most destinations and for those that they cannot get to we use something else. EVs don't have to be able to cover 100% of possible destinations. 99% will do just fine.
.We can find a lot of specific cases where one or the other doesn't work, but that doesn't mean that we abandon EVs because they aren't universally applicable to every situation.
Who said anything about abandoning EVs? Certainly not me. How about actually responding to what I wrote instead of some imaginary argument in your head. We need all the EVs we can get in my opinion. I'm just stating the plain-as-day fact that EVs will not completely eliminate ICEs even under the rosiest of possible outcomes. But if we get to 95%+ I think we should all be very pleased with that.
So, would you care to explain how I can go 400 miles between refueling in the summer, and less than 350 in the winter with my ICE car? I call that significant.
Because they change the fuel blend between summer and winter. Plus you lose a bit of mileage to traction slippage on snow if you live in an area where that is a thing. The winter blends are well understood to get worse MPG. Run the same fuel blend and you'd see fairly similar MPG, conditions allowing.
You say you are all about Els, but I'm beginning to think you are trolling me.
Sigh... Yes I'm a huge fan of EVs. I'm just not a brainless fanboi who presumes they are superior in all circumstances and at all times.
If you think that reduced range is a show stopper, ever wonder why you seem to get less miles per in the winter?
I'm well aware of winter versus summer fuel blends and their effects. I'm also aware that the effect of the changing blends is generally less dramatic than the effect of the range of EVs under the same cold conditions. Never argued that the reduced range was a showstopper but it is a consideration. That it's a consideration that each car buyer will have to determine for themselves. As EVs get longer ranges and bigger battery packs this concern will get mitigated. It also will become less of an issue as fast charging technology advances.
So your beloved internal combustion engines also get less driving range in the winter. Everywhere, not just the far north that some think dictates how the rest us us must bend the knee .
I don't know where you are getting the idea that I somehow love ICEs but that's an imaginary argument you are having with yourself. Pointing out that ICEs do in actual point of fact have some advantages under some conditions does not equal an argument against EVs nor does it equate to a love of ICEs. I'm simply soberly looking at the facts. All I pointed out was that ICEs are going to be with us for the foreseeable future and that they are more practical in some use cases both of which are undeniably true. It would be true even if oil wasn't hugely subsidized both directly and indirectly to the tune of trillions of dollars annually across the globe.
In 1988, Mazda produced a 4 cylinder engine for the Ford Probe and Mazda MX-6 that felt like driving a 6 cylinder while getting 45 MPG. There are current hybrids on the market today that still can't match that. If anyone can do something like this, it is probably Mazda.
I am neither you're strawman fanboi, and not brainless in any event.
And yet that's what you tried and failed to label me as. "your beloved internal combustion engines"? Seriously?
Calm down. If you actually read what I wrote I never accused YOU of being a fanboi. I simply said *I* am not one. I said *I* do not think they are superior in all circumstances. It was a rhetorical device which you failed to understand.
As an internet troll, you just failed by using the same strawman on me twice, when it is obvious to anyone reading the posts that I am not claiming anything of the sort.
You really cannot be bothered to actually read and take a moment to comprehend the posts you reply to can you?
"Cleaner" is good, but this engine does nothing for climate change beyond reducing the amount of fossil feul burned. That's a good thing, but an EV takes it to zero. First choice for any task from today forward should be the best EV for the job.
Only boring people are ever bored.
There isn't much commenting about Mazda's engine. Just a lot of penis measuring concerning which is bigger, EV or Gas.
Personally, I'm looking forward to the new Mazda, and I'll probably buy one.
35 years ago in college, I did a report explaining why we wouldn't be switching to electric cars in the near future: because gasoline has an order of magnitude greater energy density than batteries. 35 years later, that situation hasn't changed much. I am hopeful that eventually someone will produce a cheap, easily manufacturable battery with greater energy density than gasoline, but that day may still be decades away. If electric cars are such a great idea, why do we see so few electric airplanes?
The illuminati, obviously.
Plus, authoritarian boot preventing something in the guise of environmentalism....say, we have that outside china as well!
Hmm, anonymous coward or Mazda engineer....who is right?
You know, I've actually met some Mazda Engineers, so I'm going to have to go with them.