It strikes me that you haven't considered the benefits and costs of the choices you want to make.
I do not disagree that apparently there are benefits. It's hard to even consider a world where they would have to be given up, but think on this:
Modern man has been on earth 200,000 years or so. Modern civilisation as we know it pretty much just 200 years. That's 0.001% of the total. I think that's simply far too early to say whether in fact there are net benefits. Perhaps there will be net costs, if we cannot fully adapt to the environment we've created. It may be the dysfunction we see today is just a temporary fall-out from this change, but it may not be. We can't tell. The short term benefits are so compelling that we dislike thinking long-term like this. And in that respect it's EXACTLY like a drug "hit". We're still feeling the initial rush, and cannot think straight.
Just think of oil and coal as solar power...... after all that's where all the stored energy originated.
For sure, except that the problem is the timescales over which the energy byproducts (the CO2) is released. Millions of years of solar energy sequestered as CO2, released in ~100 years. See the problem?
BTW what are YOU doing to reduce oil usage?
What I can. I have direct solar hot water heating, a wind turbine to offset my grid load and I'm working on a home-build EV, though admittedly the latter is a recreational vehicle rather than something to commute in. But I work from home anyway, so my IC car use is much lower than most people's. My house could be better insulated (trying to improve that whenever any reno work causes the gap between the walls to be exposed) but our main source of heating is a wood-fired stove which is totally sustainable.
You're assuming that "industrial civilisation" is all good, with no downsides. Human beings didn't evolve to live this way, and as a result many, many people are unable to cope, and are dysfunctional in all sorts of ways. Look at last week's events in Denver - would that have happened in a tribal colony? Doubtful. In many ways the world we have built on the fossil fuel glut proves my thesis.
Because on a geological timescale, what we're doing is releasing all the CO2 that has ever been sequestered on earth ALL AT ONCE. If you can't see there could be a problem with that you are in denial.
There are plenty of viable alternatives, they just need to be funded to the same extent as the fossil fuel industries.
Whether fracking is scientifically sound or not, we have just got to stop this desperate scrabbling to dig up any scrap of fossil fuel we can find.
The world is acting like an addict that will do anything to get their next fix, no matter how damaging it could be, or what the consequences could be that we just don't care to think about. I'm no treehugger but even I think this is like raiding grandma's handbag to give to "my man" and it's embarrassing, undignified and immoral.
The first step to recovery is to admit the problem. We're still in denial.
Your first port of call should be here: EV Power Calculator which will work out the baseline power you need from your motor for the weight and desired performance you want. What's immediately clear is that the biggest factor that affects your power requirements is air drag. If you persist with using a large brick as your body shape (SUV) you will constantly be battling the fact that you need a huge motor, with huge batteries and a huge generator. Then your overall weight is very high and that's a killer too.
That said, I think the a series hybrid based on a diesel-electric powertrain has a lot of merit. If the diesel part were a gas turbine highly optimised to run at a fixed speed you could get overall efficiencies up to 50% or so which would be very good. Gas turbines were tried for trucks in the 60s and failed, because they transmitted power mechanically, but using traction motors instead and modern power controls it should be revisited. A small APU from a business jet might provide a suitable turbine - your SUV/truck would sound pretty cool too:)
Traction motors can feasibly be mounted in the wheel these days, with 100kW motors down to ~20kg, which is not going to make your unsprung weight significantly poorer. A UK company was manufacturing these a while ago but they went into receivership so I'm not sure if you can still get them, but they looked very promising. Others seem to feel this is the way forward too, so there is some choice for motors available. In-wheel motors give you huge overall weight savings by getting rid of all the heavy drive-train components, and actually converting a vehicle to in-wheel motors might be less of a problem than mounting an in-board motor.
Well, in that case it's still old-think. Any mechanical connection between the IC part and the wheels is a cop-out - I had not realised the Volt still did this. Why have shafts and gears and clutches when you can replace them with far lighter wire and transistors?
No, the thing that killed steam is that the ICE is superior to the steam engine in every way but efficiency
Actually the ICE is a lot more efficient than steam. Max steam efficiency is around 10%, for an ICE, maybe 35%. The ICE is vastly superior to steam, especially in diesel form, which is why railways rapidly adopted diesel in the post-war period. In fact a diesel-electric locomotive is a very sensible type of series hybrid, using motors for traction with all their advantages, and a large single-speed diesel for power generation with all its advantages (being mainly the compact and cheap fuel storage).
It's a good solution that would apply to cars too, though so far hybrids like the Prius are parallel types which actually combine the disadvantages of the two technologies - it's still over-complicated and the electric motor isn't being used to its strengths. In fact the Prius only really irons out the peaks and troughs in the IC engine's operation in city driving, it is not a fundamental shift in drive-train design. Technologically it's sure to be a dead-end. Series designs like the Volt are on the right track, but it requires a much bigger shift in the thinking of the car industry to start designing cars along those lines, and the buying public needs to be educated about why the Volt makes sense but the Prius is a dead duck. So far it's not working, the Prius outsells the Volt by some margin, and that's a triumph of marketing and mindshare over actual engineering.
Anyway in terms of basic efficiency, steam: 10%, IC: 35%, electric motor: 95%.
I'm not arguing that your car isn't a highly practical and useful thing. I'm arguing that we're so used to the darn things being built the way they are we don't even recognise them for the horrible inefficient mess that they really are.
If the car hadn't ben invented yet, but other technology was at its present day level, and someone said he's invented the car, that would be fine. But if he then went on to describe how it worked and how it was fueled, he'd be laughed out of town and his patent would sink without trace. Cars are a throwback to the day they were invented in 1888, and only work due to the tireless efforts of engineers applying band-aids.
If you were to start today, you'd start with the electric motor as a given and then apply the century of research to the batteries.
That's odd, people seem to do quite a bit of traveling while being dragged around behind those ICs. I'm pretty sure they're capable for the task they are given. If you want to argue that the task they are given is stupid, you might have a point.
They work, because they have had trillions of dollars thrown at them for over a century. Nevertheless, they only seem suitable, but they're not.
Think how many components in the average car are dedicated to working around the IC engine's basic unsuitability. A car has to start at zero speed. No IC engine can run at zero speed, so you need a clutch of some sort. Then they have no power until they are revolving quite quickly, so you need to gear down the output. Then as soon as you're going at a few mph, they've run out of revs and you need a different gear. They are so inefficient that they get very hot indeed, so you need a large cooling system. The fuel/air mixture has to be just so, so you need a pretty complicated system to deliver that with any sort of control and frugality. The internal forces generated are enormous - really, think about how many g a piston pulls reversing direction - so they are big and heavy to contain those forces. And they are a one-way process, so there is no way to recover excess energy of the vehicle in any usable form - you have to throw it all away as waste heat. And when all is said and done, they turn in a measly 25% or so efficiency, which is crap.
An electric motor is perfect by comparison - efficiencies in the 90%+ range, reversible (i.e. it can recover energy back into electrical form), generates torque from zero speed and capable of delivering that torque over a usable range of speeds with no gearing. Sounds like a winner to me.
An IC car has been successful because of the convenience and density of its energy storage, not because of the Victorian engineering hack-job that converts that into motion. And it's only the lack of a suitable energy storage solution that holds back EVs, not motors.
The modern IC engine is a miracle of engineering, but that doesn't mean it's not a bunch of band-aids on top of hacks on top of an essentially unsuitable method for converting chemical energy into motion.
Assuming that's true, it means that a gas car is using the energy twice - once to refine the fuel, then again to use the fuel. At least the EV car is only using it once.
The problem with petrol is not this anyway, it's that a) it's a finite resource and becoming scarcer, b) it's releasing CO2 that was sequestered over million sof years in a short timeframe and that doesn't seem to be a good idea by any measure, and c) it's a very inefficient use of the energy it embodies.
If batteries could even get to half of the energy density of petrol, EVs would be a no-brainer. IC engines are really quite unsuitable for the task they are given.
I've been designing a home-build EV myself and in some respects it's similar: a 4-wheeled, single-seat space-framed vehicle with a lightweight non-structural aero body wrapping around it. But there the similarity ends. Mine weights 200kg, has a top speed of 130 km/hr, will do 0-100km/hr in 4 seconds, runs at its top speed for 1 hour which gives it a range of 130km at worst, much more if driven sensibly and legally. I only need 15kW motor power and 15kW/hr of LiFePo batteries. Then again it's primarily intended as a fun track car, not a commuter.
I just don't think they're trying very hard. And it's ugly too - they need a western stylist to fix that.
In fact it turns out to be cheaper to build a self-levitating and self propelling vehicle than to build a really long and terribly complicated track. I think I shall call my new invention the aeroplane.
Sounds like you're the one getting bent out of shape, e.g. using "fuck".
There is a time and place for correct grammar and spelling, and it's all the time. The point is not that you think "it's on/., so I'm going to misspell and get all my apostrophes wrong". You either know how to write correctly or you don't, and if you do, you do it automatically, like anything you practice. If you don't know, that's fine, but don't try and claim the moral high-ground. You're the one who looks ignorant, so maybe learn what you don't know?
This is why I am a programmer and not an English major.
That's my point. You wouldn't make a syntax error when programming (and you wouldn't be allowed to), so you learn it and get it right.
Incorrect apostrophes are just like having to deal with a compilation error when reading. It hurts! Or perhaps you feel computers are more important than people?
C is the manual transmission of cars, its a lot harder to operate, but you have a lot more control of how it drives.
Bad car analogy alert! The problem you're overlooking is that a manual (or auto) transmission is already a band-aid for a much more fundamental problem: the fact that an IC engine is an unsuitable powerplant for an automobile. All those gears and clutches are there to workaround all of its various deficiencies. Making them manually operable is a further admission that the workarounds themselves are only partial solutions - they need some hand-holding for them to get their job done reasonably well.
I'm not sure where that leaves C, but for efficiently programming a bare board with only 32K RAM it's hard to beat.
That's absurd. The shape of the blocks comes from the fact that those are all the possible 2D geometric arrangements of 4 connected blocks on a grid. If anyone is infringed here, it's basic geometry.
None of those reasons you give add up to people wanting to watch ads. They add up to people being too lazy or whatever to NOT watch ads. That's different.
If ads were creative and amusing, even occasionally, they might be worth watching, but I am sick of being shouted at for the ten millionth time to go to the perpetual sale at the nearest furniture and electronics good emporium. Give it a rest.
I would actually prefer to pay-per-view at a rate that reflected the true cost or value of the delivered content as long as it were ad free. I recognise that it costs money to make programming and that the companies involved in its production and delivery have a right to make a reasonable profit. I just despise the way they do it by being subsidised by advertising. It's intrusive and aggressive, and frankly, I do not want it force-fed into my own home where otherwise a little bit of relief from the relentless commercialism of our age can be found.
Once apps come to Apple TV and similar devices, channels will be just another app, and this whole model will come tumbling down.
Slashdot Mirror
It strikes me that you haven't considered the benefits and costs of the choices you want to make.
I do not disagree that apparently there are benefits. It's hard to even consider a world where they would have to be given up, but think on this:
Modern man has been on earth 200,000 years or so. Modern civilisation as we know it pretty much just 200 years. That's 0.001% of the total. I think that's simply far too early to say whether in fact there are net benefits. Perhaps there will be net costs, if we cannot fully adapt to the environment we've created. It may be the dysfunction we see today is just a temporary fall-out from this change, but it may not be. We can't tell. The short term benefits are so compelling that we dislike thinking long-term like this. And in that respect it's EXACTLY like a drug "hit". We're still feeling the initial rush, and cannot think straight.
Well at least I focus on the arguments, instead of resorting to ad-hominem attacks.
Just think of oil and coal as solar power...... after all that's where all the stored energy originated.
For sure, except that the problem is the timescales over which the energy byproducts (the CO2) is released. Millions of years of solar energy sequestered as CO2, released in ~100 years. See the problem?
BTW what are YOU doing to reduce oil usage?
What I can. I have direct solar hot water heating, a wind turbine to offset my grid load and I'm working on a home-build EV, though admittedly the latter is a recreational vehicle rather than something to commute in. But I work from home anyway, so my IC car use is much lower than most people's. My house could be better insulated (trying to improve that whenever any reno work causes the gap between the walls to be exposed) but our main source of heating is a wood-fired stove which is totally sustainable.
You're assuming that "industrial civilisation" is all good, with no downsides. Human beings didn't evolve to live this way, and as a result many, many people are unable to cope, and are dysfunctional in all sorts of ways. Look at last week's events in Denver - would that have happened in a tribal colony? Doubtful. In many ways the world we have built on the fossil fuel glut proves my thesis.
Because on a geological timescale, what we're doing is releasing all the CO2 that has ever been sequestered on earth ALL AT ONCE. If you can't see there could be a problem with that you are in denial.
There are plenty of viable alternatives, they just need to be funded to the same extent as the fossil fuel industries.
Whether fracking is scientifically sound or not, we have just got to stop this desperate scrabbling to dig up any scrap of fossil fuel we can find.
The world is acting like an addict that will do anything to get their next fix, no matter how damaging it could be, or what the consequences could be that we just don't care to think about. I'm no treehugger but even I think this is like raiding grandma's handbag to give to "my man" and it's embarrassing, undignified and immoral.
The first step to recovery is to admit the problem. We're still in denial.
Your first port of call should be here: EV Power Calculator which will work out the baseline power you need from your motor for the weight and desired performance you want. What's immediately clear is that the biggest factor that affects your power requirements is air drag. If you persist with using a large brick as your body shape (SUV) you will constantly be battling the fact that you need a huge motor, with huge batteries and a huge generator. Then your overall weight is very high and that's a killer too.
:)
That said, I think the a series hybrid based on a diesel-electric powertrain has a lot of merit. If the diesel part were a gas turbine highly optimised to run at a fixed speed you could get overall efficiencies up to 50% or so which would be very good. Gas turbines were tried for trucks in the 60s and failed, because they transmitted power mechanically, but using traction motors instead and modern power controls it should be revisited. A small APU from a business jet might provide a suitable turbine - your SUV/truck would sound pretty cool too
Traction motors can feasibly be mounted in the wheel these days, with 100kW motors down to ~20kg, which is not going to make your unsprung weight significantly poorer. A UK company was manufacturing these a while ago but they went into receivership so I'm not sure if you can still get them, but they looked very promising. Others seem to feel this is the way forward too, so there is some choice for motors available. In-wheel motors give you huge overall weight savings by getting rid of all the heavy drive-train components, and actually converting a vehicle to in-wheel motors might be less of a problem than mounting an in-board motor.
The Volt isn't a series hybrid
Well, in that case it's still old-think. Any mechanical connection between the IC part and the wheels is a cop-out - I had not realised the Volt still did this. Why have shafts and gears and clutches when you can replace them with far lighter wire and transistors?
No, the thing that killed steam is that the ICE is superior to the steam engine in every way but efficiency
Actually the ICE is a lot more efficient than steam. Max steam efficiency is around 10%, for an ICE, maybe 35%. The ICE is vastly superior to steam, especially in diesel form, which is why railways rapidly adopted diesel in the post-war period. In fact a diesel-electric locomotive is a very sensible type of series hybrid, using motors for traction with all their advantages, and a large single-speed diesel for power generation with all its advantages (being mainly the compact and cheap fuel storage).
It's a good solution that would apply to cars too, though so far hybrids like the Prius are parallel types which actually combine the disadvantages of the two technologies - it's still over-complicated and the electric motor isn't being used to its strengths. In fact the Prius only really irons out the peaks and troughs in the IC engine's operation in city driving, it is not a fundamental shift in drive-train design. Technologically it's sure to be a dead-end. Series designs like the Volt are on the right track, but it requires a much bigger shift in the thinking of the car industry to start designing cars along those lines, and the buying public needs to be educated about why the Volt makes sense but the Prius is a dead duck. So far it's not working, the Prius outsells the Volt by some margin, and that's a triumph of marketing and mindshare over actual engineering.
Anyway in terms of basic efficiency, steam: 10%, IC: 35%, electric motor: 95%.
I'm not arguing that your car isn't a highly practical and useful thing. I'm arguing that we're so used to the darn things being built the way they are we don't even recognise them for the horrible inefficient mess that they really are.
If the car hadn't ben invented yet, but other technology was at its present day level, and someone said he's invented the car, that would be fine. But if he then went on to describe how it worked and how it was fueled, he'd be laughed out of town and his patent would sink without trace. Cars are a throwback to the day they were invented in 1888, and only work due to the tireless efforts of engineers applying band-aids.
If you were to start today, you'd start with the electric motor as a given and then apply the century of research to the batteries.
That's odd, people seem to do quite a bit of traveling while being dragged around behind those ICs. I'm pretty sure they're capable for the task they are given. If you want to argue that the task they are given is stupid, you might have a point.
They work, because they have had trillions of dollars thrown at them for over a century. Nevertheless, they only seem suitable, but they're not.
Think how many components in the average car are dedicated to working around the IC engine's basic unsuitability. A car has to start at zero speed. No IC engine can run at zero speed, so you need a clutch of some sort. Then they have no power until they are revolving quite quickly, so you need to gear down the output. Then as soon as you're going at a few mph, they've run out of revs and you need a different gear. They are so inefficient that they get very hot indeed, so you need a large cooling system. The fuel/air mixture has to be just so, so you need a pretty complicated system to deliver that with any sort of control and frugality. The internal forces generated are enormous - really, think about how many g a piston pulls reversing direction - so they are big and heavy to contain those forces. And they are a one-way process, so there is no way to recover excess energy of the vehicle in any usable form - you have to throw it all away as waste heat. And when all is said and done, they turn in a measly 25% or so efficiency, which is crap.
An electric motor is perfect by comparison - efficiencies in the 90%+ range, reversible (i.e. it can recover energy back into electrical form), generates torque from zero speed and capable of delivering that torque over a usable range of speeds with no gearing. Sounds like a winner to me.
An IC car has been successful because of the convenience and density of its energy storage, not because of the Victorian engineering hack-job that converts that into motion. And it's only the lack of a suitable energy storage solution that holds back EVs, not motors.
The modern IC engine is a miracle of engineering, but that doesn't mean it's not a bunch of band-aids on top of hacks on top of an essentially unsuitable method for converting chemical energy into motion.
Assuming that's true, it means that a gas car is using the energy twice - once to refine the fuel, then again to use the fuel. At least the EV car is only using it once.
The problem with petrol is not this anyway, it's that a) it's a finite resource and becoming scarcer, b) it's releasing CO2 that was sequestered over million sof years in a short timeframe and that doesn't seem to be a good idea by any measure, and c) it's a very inefficient use of the energy it embodies.
If batteries could even get to half of the energy density of petrol, EVs would be a no-brainer. IC engines are really quite unsuitable for the task they are given.
I was amazed it's performance is that poor.
I've been designing a home-build EV myself and in some respects it's similar: a 4-wheeled, single-seat space-framed vehicle with a lightweight non-structural aero body wrapping around it. But there the similarity ends. Mine weights 200kg, has a top speed of 130 km/hr, will do 0-100km/hr in 4 seconds, runs at its top speed for 1 hour which gives it a range of 130km at worst, much more if driven sensibly and legally. I only need 15kW motor power and 15kW/hr of LiFePo batteries. Then again it's primarily intended as a fun track car, not a commuter.
I just don't think they're trying very hard. And it's ugly too - they need a western stylist to fix that.
Anything holds up surprisingly well if you run through it fast enough
You're right. I skim-read the Bible in about 2 minutes and it seemed fairly sound. Then I actually read it properly and realised it was all nonsense.
In fact it turns out to be cheaper to build a self-levitating and self propelling vehicle than to build a really long and terribly complicated track. I think I shall call my new invention the aeroplane.
Brilliant! Seriously, you should patent this.
British rednecks
I know what you're trying to say, but this is a contradiction in terms. There is no sun in Britain to give anyone a red neck.
Sounds like you're the one getting bent out of shape, e.g. using "fuck".
/., so I'm going to misspell and get all my apostrophes wrong". You either know how to write correctly or you don't, and if you do, you do it automatically, like anything you practice. If you don't know, that's fine, but don't try and claim the moral high-ground. You're the one who looks ignorant, so maybe learn what you don't know?
There is a time and place for correct grammar and spelling, and it's all the time. The point is not that you think "it's on
This is why I am a programmer and not an English major.
That's my point. You wouldn't make a syntax error when programming (and you wouldn't be allowed to), so you learn it and get it right.
Incorrect apostrophes are just like having to deal with a compilation error when reading. It hurts! Or perhaps you feel computers are more important than people?
C is the manual transmission of cars, its a lot harder to operate, but you have a lot more control of how it drives.
Bad car analogy alert! The problem you're overlooking is that a manual (or auto) transmission is already a band-aid for a much more fundamental problem: the fact that an IC engine is an unsuitable powerplant for an automobile. All those gears and clutches are there to workaround all of its various deficiencies. Making them manually operable is a further admission that the workarounds themselves are only partial solutions - they need some hand-holding for them to get their job done reasonably well.
I'm not sure where that leaves C, but for efficiently programming a bare board with only 32K RAM it's hard to beat.
1. it's design
2. it's implementation
Syntax error in line 1: unexpected character (grocer's apostrophe error)
Syntax error in line 2: unexpected character (grocer's apostrophe error)
Pasring aborted: too many errors.
I noticed that too. I guess they didn't have the technology back then to spin it the right way. Cut them some slack...
shape of the blocks constituted infringement
That's absurd. The shape of the blocks comes from the fact that those are all the possible 2D geometric arrangements of 4 connected blocks on a grid. If anyone is infringed here, it's basic geometry.
Sounds like the aversion therapy used in Clockwork Orange to me.
Yes. Thank god there's "prior art" so that they can't patent it.
None of those reasons you give add up to people wanting to watch ads. They add up to people being too lazy or whatever to NOT watch ads. That's different.
If ads were creative and amusing, even occasionally, they might be worth watching, but I am sick of being shouted at for the ten millionth time to go to the perpetual sale at the nearest furniture and electronics good emporium. Give it a rest.
I would actually prefer to pay-per-view at a rate that reflected the true cost or value of the delivered content as long as it were ad free. I recognise that it costs money to make programming and that the companies involved in its production and delivery have a right to make a reasonable profit. I just despise the way they do it by being subsidised by advertising. It's intrusive and aggressive, and frankly, I do not want it force-fed into my own home where otherwise a little bit of relief from the relentless commercialism of our age can be found.
Once apps come to Apple TV and similar devices, channels will be just another app, and this whole model will come tumbling down.
Next they'll be patenting eye clamps so you can't shut your eyes and a tongue strap so you can't go "la la la la la" during the commercials.
Peole.Do.Not.Want.To.Watch.Ads.
Find another way to make money, you morons.