car service station I find this curious. If you insist on using hydrogen in the first place, why use it in a internal combustion engine instead of a fuel cell? Isnt 2.5 to 3 times the energy consumption already enough? Why add even more inefficiences? You pay for that energy use at the end of the day and I find it hard to imagine a vehicle with arround 3 times the cost per 100 km ever being competive in the mainstream market. You cant even argue with legacy support..... to my knowledge, an ICE designed for petrol or diesel wont run on hydrogen so you will need a new engine which realistically in most cases means, a new car. The concept of smaller vehicles for most daily driving needs imho as a lot of potential... which might explain why the existing vehicle industry fights it with everything they can muster. God forbid anyone get the groceries with anything below 1500 kg and 200 HP. People who have to park on the street are indeed at a disadvantage at the moment. Yet, a vehicle ultimately needing nothing but electricity for its operation has an inherent infrastructure advantage, because when you look arround you... we are surrounded by electricity. Unlike you know hydrogen stations that first need to be build, are expensive as hell and also waste energy even when idle because hydrogen has to be compressed and cooled for it to be capable of offering a refill to an vehicle. Some hydrogen stations need a 7 minute pause between vehicles because they need to recompress enough hydrogen first. Electric grid to electric vehicle battery is mostly a problem of local infrastructure. The electricity is already there, we just need to make sure that the cable is thick enough and that the supply line can handle it. Which will sometimes require an beef up of the local infrastructure without a doubt, but that is just a financial issue, not a technical one. After all, power companies want to sell power and if there is sufficient demand, you will see infrastructure being put in place to deliver that power. Keep in mind that charging "at home" does not have to be particularly fast. Even charging from a regular wall outlet (limited to 2400 Watt here in Germany) from 19:00 - 06:00 (like a commuter with long hours would) is 11 hours = 11 x 2,4 kWH = 26,4 which it at least 100 km of recovered range.... yet most commuter distances are way below 100:2 = 50 km. Even if you end up loosing a bit of battery charge every day from Monday to Friday... that is still not particularly problematic because at the weekend you almost certainly will have more than enough parking hours to fully recharge the vehicle. An increasing amount of companies also offers charging at the workplace.... at the moment it often is even free. Regarding safety concerns: I am not an electrical engineer, but seing that most charging stations today are without a roof, including the fast chargers on highways that really push some serious power, your concerns while not unfounded seem exaggerated. The country in europe with the most EVs is Norway... a country both known for being pretty cold and having pretty wet weather... it didnt stop them from becoming a huge EV market. Improving battery technology and capacity makes it possible to use more secure battery technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery#Advantages_and_disadvantages for vehicles. Historically, the lower capacity per kg made them unviable when even the best but more dangerous batteries where fighting for every km of range, but with range ever improving, they are becoming a competive choice, especially considering that they are cheaper and last longer. Finally, all current research indicates that on average, EVs burn less than ICEs in the first place and while it is going to be more expensive to extinguish for good, the total cost of firefighting may in fact go down as a result. ICEs have over a 100 years of safety development behind them and yet you can hear one catching fire every other week in the traffic news. Which is unsurprising, because no amount of safety development can fully eliminate the inherent need of any ICE powered vehicle to have highly volatile fuel rather closer to some very hot... one might even say burning hot parts. Even today, total cost of ownership of an EV are significantly lower than total cost of ownership of an ICE vehicle. Most places also dont ban ICEs, they ban the registration of new ones. That is something very different because it means that people can keep their old fuel burning vehicles as long as they want/can bear the increasing repair and energy cost. People who can afford new cars, can afford an EV. Mostly today, certainly in 5 years. Those poor people will likely favour a cheaper to run vehicle over one that makes vrooooom vroooom. Charging infrastructure is a secondary issue that will be fixed within one decade. Because it is not so much a technical issue, as a issue of will. Electricity is usually much cheaper than any fuel for the same driving distance and this difference will likely only ever increase. Very few things humans do are without influence on the envionment. Does that mean we should not at least try to reduce the impact? Fuel is gone... gone forever... my petrol car so far has consumed arround 1400 L of petrol and turned those into toxic fumes, CO2 and a lot of hot air. By mass, one might say, it has pretty much done consuming its third "battery pack" because that it what it does... turn fluid into dirty air, 50 L at a time. A battery does degrade and one day will be out of operation... but most of the material inside is still there and can be recycled. Which BTW makes it also much harder to blackmail you..... things dont stop driving just because your raw material supplier decides to hate your guts. Cut off our oil/gas supply and see most cars becoming stationary within 2 weeks. Ohh and homes getting cold because a bunch of morons decided that trusting russia is a good idea. Idiots! The distribution of the technical failures is pretty interesting and not very evenly distributed. Indicating that he sometimes get lemon parts and sometimes pretty good ones. One should also compare an ICE vehicle with the same mileage and then count the repair costs of all the replaced parts to make an fair comparsion. Yet at least in the developed world, most cars dont even see 250000 miles / 400000 km. They end up being scrapped long before that. The thing is, that in countries with a relative high wage level, repairs while technically being possible, are not economical anymore. Especially not on an ICE engine that could die next week on you without pre warning, because to get a really good idea of its remaining lifetime, you have to disassemble it, which alone costs 4 digits in work hours. The technical reality is, that for a given build quality, an electric motor will outlast an ICE by a significant margin. You can always have bad luck and get a lemon but statistically the ICE dies much sooner while consuming much more maintainance costs before that. You can even see that when looking at city buses and electric trams. Both have engines designed to last because they are both expected to get to a very high mileage under harsh driving conditions. Yet the tram is still there long after the bus has been scrapped. Electric buses cost arround twice as much as diesel ones... but they are cheaper longterm because you end up saving on all those oil changes and other ICE maintainance. The more complex a machine, the less likely the average person is qualified enough to properly repair it. Fact of modern life, we live in a world of ever increasing differentiation of labour. The average driver will go to the car service station for pretty much anything. Which will also kill the car once past a certain age, because repair is going to be more expensive than a newer used one. Most people consider their lifes to be busy enough and have little desire to lie below their car in an - often unsuccessful - attempt at reparing it. Just aks a friend of mine, who spent weeks at repairing his petrol engine on his own and ended up spending more than having it done because mistakes are very expensive. "Ohh sorry, you didnt knew how to properly install the new crankshaft... to bad.... have a new one and a new block at your expense because it didnt quite survive the test run. Let me get this straight.. I am not a fan of the throw away culture. But as long as work hours are expensive and mass production is cheap, there isnt much one can do besides making things easier to repair. One could still argue that the electric motor and the battery pack being somewhat modular units will decrease the repair cost because the amount of work hours is lower compared to replacing an ICE. But then again, it is a moot point. A major repair in a 15 year old car will usually result in the car being scrapped anyway. In time, the market will move away from ICE in cars. It has already begun and it will only accelerate. The thing is, we are a bit short on time https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/global-warming and there is also an annoying amount of people who are completely immune to any kind of rational reasoning. Just read a few posts in this topic Biofuel is even less efficient... you are better off having photovoltaic on the same amount of farmland. Biofuel can be a small niche for the bio waste that is there anway... but for mainstream usage.... it just doesnt make sense. Power to X is sensible, but you will want that X to be something that doesnt pollute much when you turn it back into power. So hydrogen is probably the solution, especially as we are going to need at least some of it anyway for heavy industry and some mobility needs that for the foreseeable future are not suited for batteries. (Agriculture, Long range flights and ships) This is indeed a worrisome trend and should be banned. Yet it is somewhat unrelated to the choice of what moves the car and more related to the fact that cars build in the last 20 years are all basically an computer on wheels. Interesting discussion.
Fuel cell is more efficient than internal combustion engine. On average, that's the thing. Most ICEV fires are from classic cars or even rustbuckets. Modern ICEVs catch fire much less frequent. I see you didn't fully understand what whataboutism is, so I'm going to explain it. The original post is Concerned citizen: Materials used in batteries come from questionable sources UK gov: wHaT aBoUT sMaRT dEVIcEs? That's whataboutism. Part of those "idiots" are environmentalists who advocate the ban of nuclear power plant, which in turn, increased the energy demand from Russia. The thing is, we don't need a complex engine. KISS principle. The complexity of car is mostly the result of consumerism. This EV lasts more than 25 years. It's not hard to make durable EVs, remove all internet connection and use as little computer as possible. Making the battery pack maintain-able is also recommended. That was intended to be a separate post, hence the "post updated" above that. That's the problem, again, we don't need "computer on wheels" in the first place, the simplest way is to eliminate said computer or at least remove all internet connection modules from cars. Interesting discussion. Pay attention to the phrase of "rational reasoning" in this quote. Consumers who practice rational reasoning prioritize practicality over appearance or ideology. ICEV is more pratical for the average consumer as explained by @redrobin . Not only they refuel faster, but ICEVs are more consistent in terms of driving. ICEV's MPG varies less in driving at highway or in city, also using AC in ICEV affect less MPG compared to EV. In most if not all EVs, driving at highway yields significantly less MPG, compared to much less variation in ICEVs. In addition, using AC affects more range in EV compared to ICEV. This means EV's range is much less consistant compared to ICEV. Thus, how to make people buy your EV? The hard way is to make them more consistent and charge faster. However there's a shortcut: use fear-mongering techniques(the world is going to end, we are going to die, etc etc) to suppress their rational reasoning, so more people will likely to pursue the environmentalist's glorious ideology. The clever use of fear-mongering is a key component to the efficacy of advertising. Making people think rationally can only do the opposite.
Yes, which is why I find it curios why he appearantly wants to burn hydrogen in an ICE instead of using it in a fuel cell. I agree to an extent at least. It however is unfortunatly pretty difficult to sell people stuff like that compared to "Ohh, new and shiny". That used to be the case but imho is increasingly the other way arround or at least equal: Refuelling faster is correct but the lifetime spent refuelling an ICE can actually be longer than an EV that in a decade or so, you will almost certainly charge at home most of the times, unless you drive long range. Yes, you lose time on long range distance driving, but not that much anymore, so if you like most people mostly drive short to medium distances, you will actually spend less time refuelling the car. Also probably visiting the repair shop less often. Consistent in driving? MPG varies less for ICEs because ICEs have piss poor efficiency and waste generous amounts of energy all the time but especially in city driving. The very high efficiency of electric motors mean that unlike an ICEV, your energy consumption is pretty accuratly based on load. An petrol engine in stop and go traffic will hardly reach more than 15 HP output power but will drink fuel worth 50 HP output power. Modern EV also are pretty transparent about energy consumption, so you can see the consumption of the things that are not used to drive the car. The reason why EV consume so much "more" at highway speeds compared to city speeds is that for an EV 40 HP output power is prettty much 4 times the energy consumption of 10 HP output power. while an ICE may consume almost as much due to being horrible inefficient at low load. AC always affects ranges, my Focus consumes arround 1 L of petrol more with AC on in summer... which btw is enough energy to drive arround 40 km with an average EV. It is just that in an ICE, you dont care about range as much because it is pretty good in the first place due to the very high energy density of petrol per litre. So we are again back to the battery topic.... which has always been the limiting factor of EV market uptake. (Better power electronics help as well, but alone that is not enough to make an EV competive. Having a more powerful battery is what allows EVs to have comparable comfort to an ICE vehicle because some things just consume a lot of energy.. like heating and cooling even if you use a heat pump (which you should) Speaking of comfort, there are some comfort features that are only possible in an EV... like pre heating the car and pre cooling it. While theoretically possible with an ICE, the issue is that there are justified safety concerns about an ICE engine running unattended. Some idiot will park it in his garage and die from carbon monoxide poisoning, possible even killing others. Using electric heating also means a much faster warm up of the car compared to using the waste heat of an ICE... it takes me over half the way back home from work in winter before my petrol car (diesels are even worse) achieves anything like comfortable temperature inside. Because batteries are still somewhat limited, you have indeed to be more thoughtfully about wasting energy... which could at least for some time steer the market toward more efficient vehicles in general... which imho would not be bad, because I fail to see why we should subsidise people driving a 2 ton AWD SUV to get the groceries. You shall have the freedom to waste energy... but you really shouldnt complain when things get expensive for you. EV have improved enormously in the last few years... just go back to 2018 and compare the market. Consistent is neither realistic nor desireable, because again, an EV consumes much more based on power output than an ICE, so it would have to waste energy like mad in the city to have comparable city range to highway range. It also doesnt suffer from cold start drawbacks.... the difference between my focus cold and warm engine operation is arround 2 L per 100 km..... that is insane. Regarding climate change.... it is a serious issue and we will all come to regret very dearly not doing enough against it in time. Heatwaves, drought, storms and flooding. That little Ahrtal disaster in germany costed more than 30 billion €.... and that is just the beginning.
Electric cars don't have regen in cold starts, the difference is about 30% efficiency, similar to 2L per 100km(assume city driving is about 6~8L/100km) Do you know how shady it is in terms of li-ion BMS(battery management system)? A pro-user BMS forbids charging when overcharged(can be discharged normally) forbids discharging when overdischarged(can be charged normally). An anti-user BMS bricks the battery pack when overdischarged(does not even allow charging), it's like amputating your legs when you only break your bone. Unfortunately most BMSs are anti-user, I know that over discharge can damage battery, causing performance degradation, but bricking it is destruction i.e. 100% degradation. This it even true on laptop batteries, if you don't use the laptop for an extended period of time(most self-discharge is done by residual current on the computer circuit, not the battery itself, as li-ion has low self discharge compared to NiMH), you'll have to hack the BMS via an EV2400 module to take back your right to use the battery. I won't even be surprised if the BMS on an electric car decides to brick the battery pack when the capacity drops to 70%, as manufactures can claim the battery "dead", just like anti-user inkjets that bricks the cartridge after certain pages, even there's still plenty of ink left. Please don't confuse power with consumption. Power is energy per time, while consumption is energy per distance. It's true that going faster needs more power, however, it's also true that going faster means higher distance per time. Yet a German company, BMW, still does this Use mechanical switch to control that friggin' seat heater to reduce(actually means not increase) e-waste. Again, consumerism. Heatwaves are not gonna stop that. Even cancer is not going to stop the manufacture of computer on wheels. That's one of the reasons I'm going to live car-free if I can't buy a car that is not computer on wheels.
Infotainment computer does not make cars "computer on wheels". The implement of computer on safety-critical component, where the car can't drive if the computer fails. For example: The anti-user Passat where a unplugged wheel speed sensor cripples unrelated engine power. The fragile Model 3 that a laggy computer caused laggy throttle response.
Just realised I never posted this here, I bought this 94' Bluebird back in April. Only 150,000km on it, in near perfect condition. My very own Pessima
Unfortunately the blame is always put on the driver of the car, not the pedestrian that was not paying attention and randomly steps out in front of traffic, I saw happen right in front of me the other day, a guy just walked across the road with even looking, not one bit of even a glance and stepped in front of a car, the car just barely stopped short of them. And the audacity of the pedestrian to flip the driver the bird, i called them out, saying some less than pleasant things to them, they walked off look hurt Did i not say this:
I finished my interior swap. Back in high school 16 year old me wanted leather so I installed some junkyard seats. Since they've fallen apart I decided to put the cloth ones back in. I also added bolsters, lumbar, and padding to the driver's seat for extra comfort and to hold me in, and it turned out great. Also vacuumed the interior while I was there. Really pleased with the results, the seats makes it feel like a whole different car.
Cool car. There arent many nice examples of those left. They're solid. ps I remember when your screen name was mrheyfuckoff
Can't say I've seen a single one for years (Aside from mine), Its pretty well built. I've heard a few people say its one of the last good cars Nissan built. And yes lol, that's a 2013-2014 throwback
Yes it is. 1997 Infiniti Q45. Drives great besides needing front shocks and the starter is failing I fear.
