My 2018 motorcycle tops out at 110mph, to give you a comparison.
Why don't we have steam cars?
Because in the early 1900's steam cars they couldn't compete with the elegance of ICE vehicles. The engines were big and heavy, the fuel was hard to manage, they took a long time to warm up, etc etc. The internal combustion engine was just a way better tool for the job.
Same reason electric cars didn't win: The ICE was just a way better tool for the job at the time. This is now changing, but very slowly.
Tesla, for example, still doesn't have an official Nurburgring lap time because it simply isn't able to drive at racing speeds for long enough without the battery overheating and reducing power output to avoid damage. Yes racing electric cars exist and they're awesome, but even Formula E swaps cars in the middle of the race because a single car can't last long enough.[1]
It does look like VW's electric supercar currently attacking the Nurburgring lap record. Already holds the absolute record for Pikes Peak. Exciting times we live in :)[2]
[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-time-clocked-in-by-Tesla-M...
[2]https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/vws-record-breaking-ele...
This is a silly point of fact. Motorcycles have been capable of achieving far greater than 110 mph for a long time; a top speed of 110mph puts your 2018 vehicle on the low end of the speed range for "motorcycle" class vehicles (as opposed to scooters, mopeds, ebikes, etc). My random 1997 low-end 600cc sportbike could exceed 130 mph when it was 15 years old.
Electric power only became practical enough for motorcycles in the last few years.
Now I'm really curious: with a limit on the Tesla's performance to keep the battery from overheating, what's the fastest time it could do?
That they don't have an official lap time for this reason strikes me as almost dishonest, since they marketed the Roadster entirely and the Model S significantly on performance. But you can't actually drive either to its limit for more than a couple minutes? Lame.
Notice all of Tesla's marketing is about acceleration, not lap times. They beat any other car hands down on the drag strip. But cornering is just not their forte (too heavy) and driving fast for a long time is hard (too much power draw).
There are unofficial times [1], but Nürburgring apparently takes manufacturer wishes into respect on declaring official times.
Multiple EVs have official times at this point. Tesla doesn't seem to care right now.
(VW, on the hand, with Nürburgring in their backyard has to care, and it is fascinating to hear what's going on with their EV race teams.)
[1] An example: https://jalopnik.com/heres-what-a-tesla-model-s-can-do-aroun...
The 3 is better on the track than the S. Still heavy, of course.
External combustion just sucks. Heat exchangers, or indeed anything that transmits heat through solid/fluid interfaces, are not something you want if you can avoid it. The ICE has the advantage that the working fluid carries most of the waste heat away from the vehicle.
Interestingly, we're seeing the same thing play out in stationary power plants today. Gas turbines are beating steam-based power plants (coal, nuclear), because they have much lower capital cost.
The earliest ones were coal or wood burning, we're also talking 1880s
Here's one from 1860: https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/motorcycles/a26052/186...
Ransomes, famous maker of traction engines and inventor of the powered lawnmower had a couple of patents for steam motorcycles, but I've never seen details of what they envisaged.
If memory serves, until very recently, most consumer rechargable batteries would basically stop holding charge after 2 or 3 years. Was that better for bigger batteries? I don't know ... but it would suck to have to buy a new car battery every 3 years since the lifespan of most [modern] cars is much longer than that.
As for racing being a harmful distraction: maybe. Depends on the type of racing. I like racing as a driver of what-can-this-technology-possibly-do. Bleeding edge engineering that trickles down to consumer devices. Racing is great for that.
As for the article's claim that electric cars even back then were better than ICE for city driving ... in the city nothing beats a bicycle, a brisk walk, or public transit. Cars were never a good fit for cities.
plus we focus on range because recharging is slow, not because range is a core value of the vehicles per se. and that point stands. sure you can commute, once, but then how long is the recharge? having two vehicles because you need to leave one at the office recharging for the next day commute is going to be inefficient.
and then there's all the stuff about battery self discharge, capacity depletion and burning everything down if shaken. it's not like battery tech then was that great.
I'm saying this as a someone who prefers electrics over ICE...
As the article notes most EVs at the turn of the century had a range of 40-70 miles. The model T of around 1910, ten years later, had a range of about 90. Earlier ICE cars were down nearer EVs.
A century ago battery and ICE technology were not that far apart. i.e. both fairly primitive. If electrics had been chosen and had 100 years of continual minor incremental improvements...
Battery technology is still basically just ordinary chemistry and, thus, hasn't made much progress in 100 years. E.g., we use a lead acid battery in cars now, and they had lead acid batteries back then.
Just look at the periodic table, pick some elements, and make a battery. They did that 100 years ago also.
If we do something special with graphene, high temperature superconductivity, maybe still with a capacitor of "doped barium-calcium-zirconium-titanate", etc., technology not known 100 years ago, fine, but these are all long shots, both as in risky and how long it will take to be successful or give up.
Gas-electric hybrid involves essentially two engines instead of one but can do some amazing things, e.g.,
Where the maintenance and dirtiness were their major detractors, refined fuels and new burners solve these.
Steam engines can and could have been refilled at any gas station, could run on any multi fuel including biodiesel. They theoretically require less maintenance, no oil changes, no cooling system.
They'd also have had greater range and greater top speed (though less acceleration without a hybrid design)
Alas I think that ship has sailed, aside from energy density the modern electric VFD wins along a whole range of design constraints(torque, size, latency/traction response, efficiency, etc).
Every quarter or so I do a 1500km(935 mile) trip and back. Nowadays it takes me two days, because I realized that spending around 20h behind the wheel without rest is simply dangerous.
My car's highway range is about 440 miles - but I rarely drive that far without refueling because the longest distance between my usual stops is 350 miles. And once stopped I don't just fill up an move along - I stretch my legs, grab something to eat etc.
My point being: given that the newest Model S achieves 370 miles and my favourite spots all happen to have superchargers I could probably pull this off in a Tesla adding maybe one stop and one hour to my trip.
We're there in terms of range. Now all that is needed is a reduction in cost.
If you follow the suggestions of the car and are willing to stop more the charge times are lower. However as I was hoping 190 to 210 at a time and driving the standard speed of I75 at the time I tended to push the charge to 80% or more.
Now the reason there is ninety minutes is you need to factor in charging at your destination. Seeing that my relatives had nothing more than standard 120 I was in effect anchored to my closest SC which was thirty six miles away. So at that point I charged to 95% which took longer. They don't live in a small Ohio town but there were only two good chargers, one at Nissan and one at the Ford dealer. Neither is good for a true long range car.
After that trip I realized there really is no point in carrying the mobile charge cable. I simply found hotels with nearby SC setups. Do not rely on destination charging as you are just as likely to find "guests" who act as if they own it and hotels are not keen on stepping in. There are times I swear fellow EV drivers are the most entitled pricks I have ever met.
The posters talking about 500 mile journeys without a single stop strike me as being frankly bonkers.
Yeah, you can do it. Unless your concentration is fundamentally different to most human beings, you shouldn't sit in a car for 8 hours straight without a break.
On the Model S, on an infinite distance journey, supercharging increases journey time by about 20-30% maximum over driving all the way without a break (takes about 20 mins to charge 120 miles or 20-60%).
Spending 12-13 hours to do a 10 hour drive is fairly normal for me even in an ICE car unless you want to like, eat sandwiches at the wheel and piss into a bottle whilst driving.
I've looked into buying a Tesla and part of the reason I dismissed it is because here in Western Europe the supercharger stations are all in some bleak industrial estate by the highway usually next to a McDonalds or 1-2 restaurants.
I recently did a 1200 km drive between the Netherlands and Denmark & back. Looking at a map there's a supercharger every 100 km or so around that route, but having looked at some road trip videos on YouTube from Tesla owners their long distance trip becomes all about planning around the charging times.
I.e. I might drive for 6 hours with brief 3-4 brief 5-10 minute stops along the way, and maybe have lunch at some nice restaurant in a forest by the highway. Also, if you have young kids you really appreciate being able to loosely plan stops. I.e. "kids are asleep, let's keep driving" and "they just woke up, let's stop in the next 5 minutes for lunch".
Changing that sort of trip to introduce the variable that we must stop for 40 or so minutes (for 80% charging) in specific charging stations along the way might work for some, but I can't see how to plan around it without a lot of hassle. I'm not going to seriously consider an electric car unless there's something like Tesla's proposed battery swap where "refueling" takes less than 5 minutes.
Like I said before. I am a big fan of electrics. Currently drive a Volt and plan on getting a Tesla eventually, but am not blind to it's faults.
If we were talking about what lead to using leaded gasoline there is a different argument because that could have been avoided.
Given the lower population density and the fact that in the early 1900's a large percentage of the population did not have electricity to charge the batteries.. when you factor that in with the other issues of electric cars vs ICE I can see why electric cars did not take hold at that time.
A nuclear vehicle would be impractical due to waste and risk.
but there are a lot of reasons why it never made it into production.
'Practicality of a thorium-powered, superheated-steam car?' https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69576/prac...
Clearly feasibility has a big part to play as well and everyone driving around little fission reactors would be ridiculously impractical from both an engineering standpoint, as well as a safety one too. Not to mention it becoming a terrorists wet dream because of all the waste material. (Not that I’m normally one to play the “terrorist” card)
cue the anti-nuclear power comments
There was no electric grid to speak of - even now there is concern the grid can't support all EV's, once you were outside the cities (and there weren't many back then) the grid was spotty. The miracle of being able to pour some cheap liquid in an engine and drive for miles is a considerable achievement.
Lead acid batteries weren't very good and were expensive (and still are) and don't last long compared to petrol engines.
Electric motors were big then - it was only rare earth magnets that made them small enough to consider using in cars at high speed/ranges.
Its always been possible to make a small electric commuter car to drive round at 30mph for short distances but even today there are none like this, because people want to take their cars on the road on the weekend without having to worry. In the 1900's it was the call of the open road and cheap travel (petrol was very cheap then) that made petrol win.
[0] https://static.financialsense.com/historical/users/u242/imag...
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gp_Pandey/publication/2...
^ For you hopefuls, I say likely not impossible. The machining to create these state of the art batteries requires a lot of other technologies.
It's impossible to neglect the efficiency here. Car-scale combustion engines have a real world efficiency of around ten percent compared to electric. A gallon of E10 contains 34.9 kWh and randomly picking a Toyota Avalon you'll get a real world 17 mpg with that[1], which works out to 16.4 mpge.
Compare that to real world measurements of a Tesla Model 3, a car that is MUCH more powerful and heavier, but gets 147.4 mpge[2]. The Avalon gets 11% as many miles per unit of energy stored. E10 is equivalent to 1.32 kWh/kg (4.8 MJ/kg).
Not to mention that graph of battery energy density is significantly out of date. Normal li-ion, is at 300 Wh/kg (1.1 MJ/kg) and li-sulfur is commercially available at 500 Wh/kg[3] (1.8 MJ/kg). Even Tesla's batteries are above 250 Wh/kg.
So the bottom line is the difference is ~5x right now. Is that enough to matter? 15.5 gallons of gas (standard fuel tank) weighs 44 kg, or 2.7% the total weight of the Avalon. The full capacity in batteries at 250 Wh/kg would weigh 232.32 kg, or 11.4% more. As much as 2 people + luggage. That's a totally irrelevant increase in weight; luxury or performance cars in a given class can weigh DOUBLE the lightest cars in the same class.
The energy density of batteries is a red herring for all vehicles except cargo/tanker ships and long-distance airplanes. It's completely irrelevant for vehicles. The charging speed is arguably minorly important but by FAR the most important things are the upfront and lifetime cost. That is related to energy density... the energy density of the power plant's fuel, not the battery. And again, it's incredibly naive to assume the weight is the major factor in cost.
[1]: https://www.fueleconomy.gov/mpg/MPG.do?action=mpgData&vehicl...
[2]: https://www.fueleconomy.gov/mpg/MPG.do?action=mpgData&vehicl...
That's irrelevant. The thing people keep forgetting with fossil fuels is that most of that energy is being wasted to just produce heat. With an EV, 95-98% of the battery's energy is being used for propulsion (unless you turn on a heater of course).
In short, you're comparing apples to oranges.
Early models of the Nissan leaf weren't too much more than that (though there have been some advances since the invention of electricity). However, golf carts are the modern version of the small electric car - and is street legal in service jurisdictions!
(Okay, technically what's street legal isn't literally a golf cart, and is called a low speed vehicle (LSV) and will only do 25mph, and aren't always electric, but close enough!)
Cars are mostly useful for larger distances, i.e. on highways, where slow vehicles are not allowed.
These are called microcars[1] and a lot of models exist. E.g. the Canta[2] (both petrol and electric models) and Biro[3] are quite popular in The Netherlands. There they're given preferential regulatory treatment, e.g. you can park them on sidewalks and drive them down bicycle paths.
The problem with a small car that can go at max 30 mph is that a moped is a much better fit for most use cases for such a car. An advantage of a car like the Canta or Biro is that they're fully covered, so you won't get wet in the rain. But you can also get good moped rain covers, and mopeds are a lot cheaper.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Microcars
Here's one. The Renault Twizy: https://www.renault.co.uk/vehicles/new-vehicles/twizy.html
The e.Go Life only has 100km range in the base model (the e.Go Kart looks pretty fun): https://e-go-mobile.com/en/models/e.go-life/
The Sono Sion has a small battery but plenty of solar panels: https://sonomotors.com/en/sion/
The Honda e is a nice looking city car with only 200km range: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfD67KCFxqI
The electric city car certainly exists. I wouldn't buy one but you can if you want.
One of Tesla's less obvious innovations is going beyond silicon to silicon carbide for high-power control: https://www.systemplus.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/SP18413...
Milk floats lasted a long time as ubiquitous home delivery EVs. Maybe we'll see their return.
Energy density (MegaJoule/Kilogram):
Lithium-ion battery: 0.36–0.875 MK/kg
Gasoline: 46 MJ/kg
for reference, Uranium: 80,620,000 MJ/kg
We might get parity between gasoline and electric by 2045 [0].
[0]: https://cleantechnica.com/2016/05/13/ev-battery-energy-densi...
Hmmm? There are quite a few like that, off the top of my head:
- Peugeot Ion
- Smart electric
- Renault Zoe
- Mitsubishi imiev
- Fiat 500 had an EV version
- Don't remember the name but some citroen too
Not true- Pearl street switched on in 1882, the first overhead wires went up in 1883, and by 1899 there were hundreds of generating stations. Until around 1905-1910 there was no real standardization, leading to a mix of DC, polyphase, and split-phase systems since light bulbs don't care what they run on. Roughly standard split-phase pretty quickly won out and the first electrical washing machine was sold in 1907, before the first model T.
The problem is much more fundamental: you can't charge a battery on AC. Getting DC power at home was NOT easy. You needed a phase converter (an AC motor connected to a DC motor) or a mercury rectifier[1], both FAR from affordable.
> Lead acid batteries weren't very good and were expensive (and still are) and don't last long compared to petrol engines.
That's just goofy. Research doesn't just happen, there has to be real interest and funding. There was no significant interest in batteries for half a century.
> Electric motors were big then - it was only rare earth magnets that made them small enough to consider using in cars at high speed/ranges.
Totally wrong. Electric motors have always and will always be far more compact than combustion motors. In fact induction motors -the kind used in the Tesla Model S- have been essentially unchanged since 1889, when the first squirrel-cage motor was invented.
> Its always been possible to make a small electric commuter car to drive round at 30mph for short distances but even today there are none like this, because people want to take their cars on the road on the weekend without having to worry. In the 1900's it was the call of the open road and cheap travel (petrol was very cheap then) that made petrol win.
No it wasn't. The Model T had a maximum range of 250-300 miles, and as the article says the Detroit Electric could do 240 miles. The Model T did over double the top speed and cost a fourth as much, but the speed wasn't due to technical limitations and the cost was because electric vehicles were a luxury item (the battery was a low-ish premium). Electricity and gas cost roughly the same at the time. It was all about the charging.
Efficient electricity transmission requires high voltage. High voltage requires transformers. Transformers require AC. Batteries require DC. Until it was cheap to convert AC to DC, electric cars had no chance.
I don't think you can really make any sort of meaningful conclusion from this - rural areas tend to lag in this sort of innovation.
Assuming both sets of stats are correct, it sounds like something happened between 1914 and 1917 that led to the switch from electric (or steam) cars to ones powered by internal combustion engines. Perhaps the First World War?
[0] Parent comment reference, i.e. http://www.edisonmuckers.org/edisons-cars/
[1] Main story link, i.e. https://longreads.com/2019/06/13/we-could-have-had-electric-...
I imagine the democratization of automobiles in the teens and 20s lead to the cheapest solution winning.
Er, steel? Steel was about as exotic as titanium is now until the 1860s when the Bessemer process went into volume production.
To build an effective steam engine, you need a precisely ground piston and a precisely bored cylinder, otherwise you can't get useful working pressures. Grinding the piston is laborious but straightforward - you just need two centers and a cutting tool to achieve a rotationally symmetrical part. Boring the cylinder is much more challenging, because you need to cut a very wide, very deep, very straight hole into a huge lump of iron. Cutting that hole requires a very rigid, very powerful machine.
John Wilkinson developed an effective boring machine in 1774 for making cannons, but it was limited in speed and capacity by the water wheel that powered it. The next year, the Boulton & Watt company was founded, building stationary steam engines with cylinders made by Wilkinson. Wilkinson received the second steam engine built by Boulton & Watt, which he used to power a bigger and faster cylinder boring machine, which he used to build more and bigger steam engine cylinders for Boulton & Watt.
Trains got substantially more efficient circa 1850-1950, more miles-per-ton, and I believe the reason was essentially that they made hotter steam, because efficiency is bounded by the temperature difference (thanks to Carnot). And the limitation on how hot you could make steam, in any given decade, was that you needed the cylinder to still be lubricated at that temperature, and this technology slowly advanced.
I think this is one of the reasons internal combustion engines didn't appear sooner. They are necessarily quite hot, even more so for diesel, which is later (and more efficient).
Literally so until 1824.
Not electric, but renewable, sustainable, and I'd assume (maybe wrongly) mostly carbon neutral.
I think 20-30 years ago cars should have started requiring cars to support all that stuff and allow competition between the different fuels and different methods of fuel production. Meaning most likely methanol from gas, ethnaol from food or gas from saudi arabia.
Methanol from natural gas could have been incredibly successful specially because natural gas export is not an easy problem. Meaning that gas prices in the US were incredibly cheap and a huge fleet of car hungry for methanol would have made it reasonable to do the conversion process. Far less methane could have been wasted into the air.
Now I feel like time has passed and EV make more sense.
There are no fuel shortages just because you have cars that use ethanol.
I'm not a huge fan of ethanol specially not how it was handled in the political process (farm subsides) but using it in general is not a bad idea if it can compete.
That range is considerably longer than the range of my bladder, so once charging increases in speed, this "problem" simply vanishes. We're already on our way there, the first 250kW charger opened this week, and will add 180 miles of range in 15 minutes.
In fact, it's better than an ICE car, because I can charge at home, and start every single journey with 100% charge.
Personally I think a hybrid that plugs into 120, with a commuting range 50 miles and a back up gas engine will be the sweet spot
And don't forget wind power. Could do that, too. The intermittentness handled in areas by hydro as well. Then nuclear in the mid 20th century.
Besides, if all the car were powered by electricity, we probably would have made the electric grid cleaner and switch to renewables far sooner. Because switching from coal to gas and gas to solar/wind would have had a positive impact on almost all types of energy consumption: train, cars, heating, lightning, etc. Instead we had to invest in both the electric grid and ICE to try to make them clean, instead of just the grid.
According to the information found on page 7 of Cleaner Cars from Cradle to Grave, a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists [1], an electric vehicle that is charged by electricity from oil or coal generation has overall equivalent emissions to a gasoline vehicle that obtains 29 miles/gallon. Roughly on par with fuel-efficient contemporary gasoline powered vehicles. So I stand by my claim that electric cars don't solve the problem without addressing the emissions due to coal/oil based grid power.
In an alternative history, perhaps we could avoid petrochemical power, but it's not clear to me how we would have done that. Ford began production of the Model T in 1908. Solar and wind production would not have been feasible in the early 20th century, and even today hydroelectric power provides only a fraction of our energy consumption. See [2].
With regard to the original article, I find its analysis flawed. As I've already stated, power production for electric vehicles wouldn't have been clean in the early 1900's, but modern clean electric cars depend on more than a power grid based on renewable energy sources. They depend on lithium-ion batteries, invented in 1980. What would the country's electric cars have utilized before the 1980s? (Lead-acid and NiCad have serious environmental impacts, Lead-acid has poor energy vs weight, and NiMH batteries were not invented until 1989. All three of these battery types have charging rate limits that prevent them from being used in practical cars.[3])
Perhaps we could have done much better in the past with our decisions, but "masculine daring-do"[4] isn't the reason that we ended up with the levels of CO2 that we have in the atmosphere today.
[1] https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/11/Cl...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#/m...
[3] https://phys.org/news/2015-04-history-batteries.html
[4] From the original articles sub-title.
All true. If we ignore the massive increase in infrastructure needed to make them viable outside of cities. And also ignore, as the article does, the time it would take to charge along with the short lifetime of batteries in that era. It doesn't matter if their range equaled that of an IC, the IC could be ready for the next leg of a trip almost instantly compared to an EV. Effectively this halved the range of an EV. If you could only drive 60 miles and there was no guaranteed prospect of charging at the end, you had to be able to return home to charge, meaning 30 miles out and 30 miles back.
All issues that still represent bottlenecks to EV adoption today, albeit much less so, and which are gradually being overcome.
I think the author reads entirely too much into the supposed psychology of an IC powered vehicle instead of the much more simple explanation: path dependency.
This article talks a lot about cars around 1900.
In the US in 1900, 60% of the population lived in rural areas and only 40% lived in cities. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...)
So working well in rural areas was probably a more important concern. A product that works OK for all your potential customers is better (from a business's point of view) than one that works a bit better for some customers and not at all for others.
Maneuver warfare would have been impossible on electric. And then when the war was over, all that surplus machinery was around, and so were the factories that built it.
"The Lohner-Porsche's design was studied by Boeing and NASA to create the Apollo program's Lunar Roving Vehicle."
That's true! These differences change as soon as the cars are driven. EVs are powered by electricity, which is generally a cleaner energy source than gasoline. Battery electric cars make up for their higher manufacturing emissions within eighteen months of driving — shorter range models can offset the extra emissions within 6 months. Source: https://youtu.be/K9m9WDxmSN8
> the milage is a joke.
The 2019 Tesla model S has a range of 370 miles, and on new superchargers will add 180 miles of range in 15 minutes. Source: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/24/new-tesla-model-s-370-m...
Of course, most EV owners rarely use any charger other than their home one, since you can start every journey with 100% charge.
This might be "a joke" to you, I cannot say.
> And if electricity is coming from coal power plants it is all but green.
That's also true! Lucky then that all electricity does not come from coal power plants. In the US, that's only 17.8%. Source: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/
Those with solar panels on their homes don't get their power from any kind of power plant at all, just the sun.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/the-e...
Another article which touches on the subject: https://grist.org/article/2011-03-28-alexis-madrigal-crazy-g...
"At a time when many people were stuck inside new urban confines, unable to get outside to private spaces, having a car that could tour, a car with a lot of range, was quite appealing.... And it was just sexy to go fast. People like to go fast."
Isn't that the same reason we still don't all drive electric cars?
I was always disappointed that NEV's didn't take off, seems like a perfect solution for cities and even suburbs -- lanes could be striped much narrower and parking could be much more dense.
But few people want to drive a glorified golf cart to the office, even if they only drive 10 miles and are stuck in stop and go traffic anyway, so the 25mph NEV cap wouldn't really change their commute time.
Intuitively I always thought the only way of actually making a dent in emissions is to change the way we live by shifting to public transportation. Suburbia is what makes the US the leading greenhouse gas producers and only changing the way we live to be more like cities such as NYC or Tokyo do we actually stand to make a change. We need to reduce the usage of cars to make a meaningful dent in greenhouse gas emissions.
