Battery technology has been, and to a certain degree still is the limiting factor for electric cars...and the fact is that gasoline is still a denser form of energy storage than batteries by volume, weight etc..
I'm saying this as a someone who prefers electrics over ICE...
It's perhaps a more limiting factor now than then.
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...
> 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.,
Sure, but lead-acid and zinc-carbon, both 19th century technologies, were the main - essentially only - types of batteries until the age of the Walkman in the 80s. Then we got Duracell alkalines and cute adverts. Until then there wasn't a lot of pressure to get better, so they mostly didn't and they wouldn't have sold anyway. Around the same time rechargeables got some development pressure in the form of mobile phones, and there was effort to do better than rubbish NiCds or heavy lead-acid. Even cell sizes remained constant for nearly a century. If there'd been more pressure there'd have been a lot more chemists thinking about improvements than just Ever-Ready, Duracell and Motorola.
Maybe a global electric car industry working on the problem 4x longer than we have would have come up with something better, maybe not. Alternate time lines are never certain. :)
Batteries aren't all of it though - how would personal transportation have evolved if every city and road network had electric distribution points for vehicles - as was planned in the 1910s - instead of filling out with petrol stations? The fast charger networks could easily have been something of the 1940s rather than the 2000's. We'd undoubtedly have standardised on a generic one that worked with every make of car by now. We'd probably have designed cities a little differently too.
Be careful: For the improvements, are close against some quite fundamental chemistry and physics. E.g., for fast charging, the battery has internal resistance, that is, gets hot when charging. Likely the amount of internal resistance varies, but charging as fast as filling a 20 gallon tank of gasoline might encounter something impossible due to the chemistry/physics. Fast charging is one of the reasons for the pursuit of capacitors instead of batteries, e.g., the EEStore effort with barium and titanium. The capacitors also typically are able to discharge much faster than batteries. IIRC, battery charging is a chemical reaction where have to move atoms around. A capacitor, first cut, just moves electrons around. But for research time, EEStore has been at it for some years now.
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)
IIRC basic thermodynamics shows that ordinary steam engines can't be very efficient. So, don't get good MPG or miles per bucket of coal, or whatever fuel.
IIRC the main reason for diesel-electric locomotives for trains and large ships was that it was significantly more efficient than just steam, at least steam with just a boiler and pistons.
Of course, really large ships generate steam and then run it through a steam turbine -- no Diesel around.
Stream engines are no longer used on large ships (except for nuclear powered warships). Merchant ships now use large 2-stroke diesel engines for maximum fuel efficiency.
There used to be many large ships driven by oil-fired steam turbines but those have gradually disappeared over the past few decades. Compared to diesel engines, steam turbines are less efficient and require more maintenance.
The most common diesel-electric locomotive today has 6 drive axles. The big steam locomotives designed at their twilight sported 6-10 drive axles, and the most famous and successful of them (the 4-8-8-4 Big Boy) ran 8 drive axles. Mechanical linkage of drive axles isn't what killed the steam locomotive.
Mechanical linkage for multiple direct drive external combustion engines that can operate at 0 rpm is far simpler (the drive axles are basically the crankshaft) than for a single internal combustion engine that must maintain a minimum engine rpm and has to be geared down to axles that are riding on a bogie that pivots separate from the deck of the engine.
To take advantage of the increased efficient of an internal combustion engine you'd need a lot of mechanical complexity unless you go hydraulic (solidly defeating most efficiency improvements) or electric.
> basic thermodynamics shows that ordinary steam engines can't be very efficient
No this is not true, see other comments / Carnot cycle. Steam can be extremely efficient. But diesel engines are much simpler and more compact, it's a trade-off.
The acceleration is more of a function of the powertrain design in steam cars. If you replace the direct drive drive train with one similar to a ICE car (ie clutch+transmission) you can get the acceleration of a ICE car in a steam car. If you want to keep the direct drive though you would need to have a larger engine and use hook-up and variable cut-off to keep the efficiency of the smaller engine while cruising. Steam engines on the whole are pretty similar to electric motors though in having most or all of your torque from 0 rpm which is why many steam cars were direct drive (I think only the Whites and a few race cars had a conventional layout instead of direct drive).
> If you want to keep the direct drive though you would need to have a larger engine and use hook-up and variable cut-off to keep the efficiency of the smaller engine while cruising.
An alternative would be to make hybrids. Use an electric motor to get reasonable acceleration and a smaller steam engine for cruising distance.
Stirling engines have many of the advantages of steam, many of the disadvantages, but they lack the disadvantage of high pressure containment. It's likely that power density would have been too low, however.
A closed loop steam engine, the burners get the boiler hot enough to produce the power they need, then the engine extracts that heat from the boiler to mechanical energy.
I've had the same thought about rotary motors, they're interesting beasts and I wonder what we'd see if they had the same R&D investment like we saw in piston engines.
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).
We have seen a significant long-term R&D investment but all the nice rotary engines are in prop planes.
Edit: since you mention a ship, some use large opposed-pistol Diesel engines (two oppositely meeting pistons around the combustion chamber per cylinder which also allows the cylinder to be much wider)... don’t see these in either planes or cars... Hydrogen power?—- Hydrogen is difficult to keep contained because it escapes through anything over time unless we put heavy ceramic tanks in our cars.
Unless you're talking about turboprops (jet engines with a gearbox) there really aren't any wankel engines in aircraft. Just a few experimental/EAB conversions out there.
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.
1600 round mile trip, give or take. Georgia to Western Ohio then across to Eastern Pennsylvania, relatives in Eastern to North Eastern Ohio but that is an EV desert. I did this within weeks of buying a Model 3 LR. Added about ninety minutes to the 600 mile drive. Three stops. I did ignore the Navigation charge time so I could avoid the SC inside of Cincinnati.
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.
Where do you live where your favorite spots happen to have superchargers?
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.
I've done a roadtrip from Montreal to Atlanta in a Model S, back in 2015. I've found that by the time the battery runs low, you're due for a break anyway, so it doesn't really change the way you travel that much.
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.
Actually, no. Given the state of the tech at the time and our knowledge about pollution and the effects of various types of exhaust gases on the atmosphere it wasn't true 'all along'.
There were levels of vehicle use that were perfectly acceptable. But now that transportation is a world wide commodity instead of a luxury those effects are inescapable.
So there was some point in time where the balance shifted, and then it took a long time for the reality to set in (and some part of the world are still in denial). And it will take some time still to shift to electrical vehicles, but those too have their own waste and risks, some of which will only become apparent when their adoption rate crosses certain thresholds.
People usually think cars are the biggest sources of emissions but it's not even close. All transportation (car, planes, trains, etc) represent 14% of global emissions.
Globally the biggest source of emissions is energy production which represents about 35% (25% of direct emissions and 10% of processes like refining fuel).
Electricity required combustion to produce at the time, and still does today. Battery waste is also not negligible, and battery mining is as dirty as oil.
Electricity required combustion to produce at the time, and still does today. Battery waste is also not neglible, and battery mining is as dirty as oil.
Interesting that the concept is based on steam engine. Would there be a way to recondense the steam for reuse, or did they plan to just release all of them? Then they would need to run on water, much like the steam locomotives of the past.
given that the "fuel" was set to be replaced every 5,000 miles, i'm going to guess that it was going to be reused, but likely the need for weapons grade plutonium and the amount of shielding required made it not feasible to even think that far, so no idea what the end product would have entailed.
You’re right, otherwise we’d all be powering our cars with with zero point energy reactors.
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)
Terrorists currently utilize cars for destructive acts all the time - it hasn't caused us to abandon them.
I wouldn't be surprised if, had we gone down that path, automobiles had less fissile material in them than platinum. Currently fissile materials and high explosives are purchasable, we just keep an eye on purchases and follow up on suspicious buying patterns.
We still don't know the full extent of the environmental impact of the Fukushima disaster. Can we afford more incidents of that nature? I'm not certain.
That's nice, but we do know that burning fossil fuels kills a huge number of people [0]. Moving away from fossil fuels will require some form of nuclear power. Much of Europe has successfully transitioned most of their power to nuclear [1], so it's not like the concept is some experimental sci-fi dream. From an environmental standpoint, nuclear is by far our cleanest option based on all the information we have.
I'm saying this as a someone who prefers electrics over ICE...