It’s hard not to look at this and think that battery technology would have progressed far more had the electric car been chosen rather than gas and how that would have meant all the investment into efficiency that the gasoline engine got, batteries and electric motors would have gotten all of that investment instead.
I was trying to find the range of gas cars vs electric in 1912, and it looks like gas cars at that period tended to be a little over 100 miles and the best electrics were 80, with most at 50. It’s too bad the Model T wasn’t electric.
“ While the prototypes seemed to work well enough, in Ford’s view they had a fatal flaw. His development crew had been unable to get the Edison batteries to perform as required. While nickel-iron batteries have a long service life, they are slow to charge, produce less voltage per cell, and as we’ve already seen, are considerably more expensive. To move the project along, the team substituted ordinary lead-acid batteries, and at that point Ford’s patience reached its limit. Without the Edison batteries, the electric flivver no longer had any reason to exist, in Ford’s mind anyway. After a reported expenditure of $1.5 million, mainly in Edison batteries, Henry pulled the plug.”
https://www.macsmotorcitygarage.com/henry-fords-electric-mod...
I recall reading somewhere that the ICE took off because there were quite a lot of low hanging fruits and a path with less resistance, thus it let faster progress towards the desirable properties of a car.
For example, it's way easier to move around a can of fuel rather than being limited to an electric grid in a time when electricity and proper roads were not ubiquitous yet. I imagine it would have been too limiting to need to bring the car somewhere specific to re-charge when you are still trying to figure out what this automobile thing is good for. Is it good at the farm for example? Can't tell with the electric car if you don't have electricity at the farm.
I've always felt like farms should be able to have another route to electrification, because you're dealing with the same set of fields in a constrained geography for years at a time.
Like, why go battery-heavy at all? Why not design some sort of EVA-like tether to a utility pole in each set of fields? Hook up your equipment when you enter the fields, spend 8-12 hours driving back and forth attached to the tether, unhook and use a small battery -- or even a battery-trailer -- to reach the next field or the barn at the end of the day.
Obviously there are problems with this scheme, but the point I'm getting at is that field work is such a radically different set of constraints to interstate, city or even rail networks that it feels like there should be a different set of solutions possible.
That sounds quite logical, and almost like there must be some equipment working that way.
Not a farm example, but trolley buses do this in cities
Apparently there was one in 1882: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:First_Trolleybuss_of_Siem...
In a part of Cambridge, MA, electric trolley buses with overhead lines ran for ~90 years, through 2022.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/03/09/metro/overhead-electr...
Instead of the usual ICE loud bus noises, the most noticeable sound was like (IIRC) maybe some springy metal brushing along some other metal.
It's a little sad that those went away, but if they can successfully do battery-electric busses, I guess it's ok. It's nice when a simple, hundred-year-old-plus technology can just continue to work though.
I don’t remember the analysis but I recall being effectively convinced that battery electric busses are a huge step down compared to electric trolleys.
If you have trolleys and you replace them by BES then that seems obvious, you need space for batteries & they impact handling and you replace daylong distributed electricity use by spot charge during which the bus is immobilised.
Something I’ve seen mentioned a few times but don’t know has been deployed is having trolley poles on a battery electric bus tho: you still have the battery space and weight issues but if you’re on trolley routes you don’t need to charge, and it allows more flexibility as the batteries mean you can go off-route (useful in case of blockage or roadworks), buses can now jump between sections, if the engagement procedure is good enough you can electrify bus stops with overhead hooks to spot-charge (just get the poles out and engaged), and you have the flexibility to explore bus route layouts and “upgrade” them to trolley routes without touching the rolling stock.
Yes San Francisco has electric trolley buses!
https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/muni/munis-electric-tro...
That's cool!
Apparently Lyon (with a continuously operated trolley network just 9 days younger than SF's) has also been deploying electric trolley buses since early 2021. Before that they got some autonomy with small ICE (just 88hp).
Seattle also has an extensive network of trolley buses, with projects under way to electrify additional routes.
There's a tethered electric ferry, anyway https://youtu.be/xhwZ-XFKJKk
I think it would be tricky and would create more purpose-specific equipment to buy. Fields are big, like sometimes really big, definitionally remote, and electrical transmission losses are real at "normal" voltages with fieldscale lengths. And crucially, the weight of batteries is actually a benefit for a tractor: the heavier you are, the more you can pull and cantilever. Without them, you'll still be dragging around 5000 pounds of steel ballast to hit a useful weight on your tethered tractor. Batteries can also serve as remote power banks (electric PTO) miles from any electrical supply, just as regular PTO driven tools use the mechanical energy from the engine to do other work besides toodling and pulling anywhere on the farm.
I mean, I'm open to it. Batteries are expensive-- most of the cost of a tractor conversion. Go build a prototype that competes on cost and I'll cheer from the sidelines and maybe buy one if I can afford it.
You have to watch out - past a certain weight you end up crushing the soil too much.
There are industrial machines that do just this. They move 100% of their lifetime in a specific spot so they're always tethered.
Also farms are the premium spot for electrification. Tractors need to run for long times (especially in the HUGE farms in the US that are bigger than some countries...), but there are other vehicles that can be electrified like ATVs, forklifts and other small tools.
The best thing is that many farms can produce their own electricity from biogas on-site. Or use the biogas directly in CBG converted engines.
The Soviet Union actually did that. They built some electric farm tractors that dragged long power cables behind them. It was a total failure.
https://jalopnik.com/when-the-soviets-built-an-electric-trac...
John Deere built one as an experiment. https://youtu.be/OJ9xKxAtDa8?feature=shared
deere employee, but not speaking for the company.
I’m working on this, but our approach is to make purely solar powered machines (no batteries even, just supercapacitors) and redesign the farming process to be less energy intensive. This won’t be a drop in replacement for current conventional farms which rely on a lot of energy intense tillage, but it does seem to me a viable path long term.
https://community.twistedfields.com/t/join-the-solar-farming...
Furthermore, it's a lot easier to carry an equivalent amount of energy in petrochemical form vs the primitive lead-acid batteries of the day, long before hyper-optimized computer controlled motors were available to wring every last milliwatthour of efficiency out of them. And now increase distances and therefore desirable speeds corresponding with the growth of population, and it becomes more and more impractical to use electricity for personal transport in the years after 1912.
I think viable electric cars landed about when they became practicable. Lead-acid absolutely shits the bed rapidly if discharged below FIFTY percent SoC, so take your kWh rating and cut it in half straight away. And remember that you're carrying around a ton of wet lead to achieve that. Not great. NiCd is crap, NiMH is better but not overwhelmingly so, and lead-acid can deliver a lot more current. Li-ion, then? Remember how rubbish laptop battery max charge cycle lifetimes were in 1999? The battery lasts maybe a year of regular use, and then it's shot and the laptop runs for 30 seconds and powers off. And it costs $300 to replace. Now make it 200x the size and put it in a car you use for your daily commute and get ready to spend BMW money annually on new Li-ion. The improvements in battery tech in just the last 15 years are really something to behold, and not coincidentally that's when Tesla was able to start shipping compelling vehicles.
Now somebody tell me why I'm wrong ;-)
If you insist: electric motors have always been far more efficient than their ICE counterparts. 80% is easy, 90% is doable. 95% and up requires more tricks and even regular EVs don't bother because they might as well use some of that waste heat to heat the pack or the interior of the vehicle.
The efficiency is undeniable, but it couldn't make up for the awful battery technology and absurd drag coefficient of a garden-shed-on-wheels car from the 1910s. Streamliners and aerodynamics matured a little later.
It's a pity we didn't go for Otto-electric hybrid drive cars like the EMD locomotives that have been running since before I was a going concern. The genset runs at its optimal RPM for power delivery and fuel consumption, with rapid refuelling and the massive range benefits of liquid fuel while the electric motors deliver a wall of torque and minimal driveline losses all the time. Dump it into a battery (or a flywheel KERS, whynot) to smooth out the peaks and valleys if you're feeling fancy. I am nearly certain that we had all that tech in 1912 - it's completely analog and self-regulating! - but it probably didn't pay for itself back in the days before they'd invented things like the environment and non-unlimited supplies of crude. Bummer.
I still want to build an EMD lawnmower.
Streamlined isn’t a concern below 30 mph or so.
And 30mph is fine if you're not going very far, but that's not what people wanted, and their wants dictated what technology succeeded at the time. Even a Model T could do about 50 MPH, not that you'd want to, and not that you'd be able to stop in time if anything bad happened, but it did it and delivered 20 MPG in the 1910s.
Yes, it's all in the batteries. But GP suggested it was in particular the last couple of mW advanced electronics squeezed from the batteries that made the difference and I really don't think that mattered at all.
Its a little overambitious to compare electrical efficiency and heat cycle efficiency. Electrical efficiency says nothing about how that energy was generated; if it was generated in coal, gas turbine, nuclear etc then you simply cant exceed carnot efficiency (solar is far less efficient than that for how much energy hits the panel); it also doesnt say anything about the extractable specific energy, which far favors ICE vehicles, efficiency be damned, ice will run longer on a fixed weight of fuel than an EV will on the same weight battery.
EVs in my experience have been a step change in car tech. Having a battery as a starting point rather than an alternator opens so many doors, from just having a stable grid to run devices on, the real time AI video processing, to the ability to play modern games on the cars hardware. The designs are far more simple than ICE, take the steering wheel off a tesla vs an ICE and you can get a peak at just how far behind ICE is in relying on complicated and expensive implementations of basic functions.
I just don't like these comparisons regarding efficiency, we arent really making a fair comparison; if we did EVs would probably lose considering the energy source and transmission losses, and it still would be a useless metric because thats not what anyone (sane minded) has ever bought a car for. All I care about is that the cost of ownership makes sense; the fact that the total efficiency of my own setup, where solar charges my car, is probably <25%, does not concern me.
This does not make him wrong. It's barely even relevant because even with that difference, even with todays batteries and motors, it still doesn't hold a candle to the utility of ice. Let alone then. I'm not saying I like it or hate the idea of evs, but the facts are the facts.
With a mature grid and better long distance (electric of course!) rail, electric cars and busses could have been the last mile instead of all the miles. During the War it was not uncommon for cars and busses to carry a little wagon for syngas generation. Imagine that, but with a system of battery wagons.
It's pretty trivial to range extend a gas vehicle within reasonable limits. Gas cans had a lot of development (the shape and features of a modern metal gas can came together in the 1930s), but any container sturdy enough and sealable will work. In a model T, fuel was fed by gravity, so tank capacity is strongly limited by where you can put the tank. On a vehicle with a fuel pump, there would be more flexibility (my first car had a 33 gallon tank... if you combined that with a fuel efficient powertrain, the range would be huge)
Yes. Those are the reasons why gas was chosen.
But it doesn't make the question "where would we be now, if the choice had been made different" less interesting.
Kind of depends on broad the answer is.
In isolation, sure, battery chemistry might've gone a little further. But I suspect it would've plateaued sooner without the sophisticated battery management systems that modern integrated circuits enabled.
When taken in scope of events of the 20th century like the World Wars? Countries that had adopted electric would've found themselves at a decisive disadvantage against countries that chose oil. The gas piston engine enabled advances in aviation and blue water ships. I have my doubts electric adopting countries would've survived against those advantages.
I doubt that electric armored vehicles will fare well against oil counterparts in the next century. Powering large batteries every day on a long frontline like Ukraine / Russia is not easy. Transporting and hiding oil is easier.
The US military is starting to adopt hybrid vehicles. This reduces the need to deliver fuel to combat zones and can also lower IR signatures.
https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2023/2/28/a...
They still get all of their power from oil tough.
About full electric vehicles, according to the article they are planned for 2050 and
Internal combustion piston engines weren't used much for blue water ships in the World Wars. Steam engines, both piston and turbine, were more common for power, cost, and efficiency reasons. ICEs were mostly used on smaller boats, as well as submarines.
ICEs were crucial for aviation during the World Wars. Even today we're barely able to build electric airplanes that can go anywhere.
gas cans!? the way we generally range extend a gas vehicle is to pull into a gas station and a couple minutes later you're on your way again.
For electrics, gas cans would be additional heavy batteries, while filling stations have the longer refill time, which can fit your schedule (recharge while at work) or not (stop to recharge every few hours on a long drive).
(please don't all start telling me about quick charging and a list of neat things to do while you wait and how the mindfulness is overall better. I'm just making a comment about available means to extend the range of a car)
in the transition phase (horse to car), a farmer with a model T could use a horse and buggy to bring a gas can to a stalled car. Would have to tow the battery car to where there is electricity and a rectifier. Look up "rural electrification program" to see how little electricity there was in the hinterlands at that time.
At the time rural domestic light was provided by kerosene lamps. The kerosene was sold in four-gallon(?) tins by general stores. Gasoline was initially sold in the same way, as another product just like kerosene at your local general store.
Familiarity is another thing that would have pushed people towards gasoline rather than electric. As well as the easy replication of the distribution network, by the same suppliers.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerosene_lamp
Electricity was not just unfamiliar to people. It was not understood. It was magic, possibly not just good magic.
That was a time before electrical engineering as mature field really existed. The situation parallels software today.
It didn't help that Edison was electrocuting animals across the country to frighten people about AC in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsy_(elephant)
The mysterious workings of electrical gadgets were also the inspiration for Rube Goldberg's cartoons.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/story-behind-rube-gol...
That was the electrical zeitgest a little over a century ago.
Did you even read the article you linked to?
what had a 33 gallon tank?
Scout II, factory option.
That's pretty awesome.
and at the time of the Model T you could just about run them on anything with hydrocarbons in them with some adjustments. A electric car required infrastructure that just didn't exist at the time until after the Rural Electrification Act in 1936
While not entirely critical I suppose, not getting stranded in an EV today also relies on much newer stuff as well, like the on board computer using cellular communications and GPS to help find a charging station within range of your destination. I imagine that in the absence of this assistance, the number of disabled EVs would be intolerably high, and delivering a can of gas is much simpler than delivering electricity or towing.
also if the amount of EV charging stations was the same as the amount of gas stations we wouldn't have that issue as well. Early gas was bought at stores in cans most of the time, bulk pumping was just not very common.
This seems unlikely. There were major industrial and military uses for rechargeable batteries throughout the 20th century. Things like submarines, portable electronics, stationary fallback for critical services (phone exchanges) etc., all added up to a substantial economic interest in battery technology.
The Nikel-Cadmium chemistry was known since 1899, but the materials and production process were considered too expensive to make them practical until mid 20th century. Advanced processing such as powder sintering to increase area were simply unknown at the time when the ICE vs EV competition was in play. By the 1920s, the ICE and petrol fueled cars were capable of ranges and fuel economies we can barely reach even today with Lithium batteries, a technology that became possible only in the 70s, taking advantage of substantial lateral progress in material and chemical science.
A hypothetical world of electric vehicles would have spurred battery sales and investment by an order of magnitude or so, but the actual effects in hastening productization of high density cells would have probably been marginal and below what was required to win against the ICE, disproving the hypothesis. You can see this diminishing return of research at work today where, despite the order of magnitude increase in the battery market, progress is very still sluggish, pitted against hard, physical limits.
Energy density is the issue. Gasoline has amazing energy density out of the box. Getting batteries anywhere near that may be impossible.
Battery applications are critical. Tons of money has been spent on research. If there was something revolutionary to discover it's likely it would have happened.
100 mile EV town cars would be great, they'd be much less money than the long range EVs and target air pollution in the places that need it most. Trying to make EVs take over for ICEs via policy mandate is just insanity.
The proplem with the 100 mile ev is most people have the 1% trips they don't work for. extra cars are expensive so you are better off with one that does it all instead of trying to figure out those exceptional trips.
i've tried to rent cars and been turned away because they were out. I've tried to rent but discoverd I wasn't allowed to do what I want (rocks are hard on trucks so I don't blame them, but it means I have to own for those weird things)
depending on how much cheaper a 100 mile range EV was, I might be willing to consider it and then rent an ICE vehicle for the few times a year I needed extra range. I am considering that option anyways since, while my current EV is fine for long (10+ hour) drives, it is potentially too small for when I have a second kid + dogs. While I'm hoping that a roof rack will make the vehicle still work (hopefully the range hit won't be too big), if it doesn't work, renting a car a few times a year is more than offset by my fuel savings the rest of the time.
Had a 100 mile range EV been available at a significant cost savings, I might have done that and started renting now for range reasons rather than space reasons.
Batteries are expensive though, so it is unlikely. Or to put it differently, how many people with a large SUV also have a tiny car? back in 2006 I did the math and concluded you would need to drive double the natioal average to make the numbers work, gas is cheaper now and cars cost much more. (but used cars should be cheaper)
I'm a little confused by your comment. Yes, batteries are expensive, therefore a shorter range EV should have a cheaper price than a longer range one, because you are removing expensive battery.
I think there might have bee some confusion. I meant "cheaper than an EV with the usual 250ish mile range", not cheaper than an ICE vehicle.
I bought an EV last year. It was more expensive up front than a comparable ICE vehicle, but the loan payments + charging costs were actually cheaper than the loan payments + fuel costs would have been. With my vehicle, I may, in the future, have to rent a larger ICE vehicle on rare occasions. This was a possibility I considered before I purchased the vehicle and decided I was fine with it, since my monthly fuel savings will more than offset this cost. I was suggesting that, for a sufficient discount, I would have bought an EV with less range and started renting a vehicle now, instead of potentially in the future.
while short range is cheaper, they are still expensive. Note too that li-ion batteries like to run between 20% and 80% charge (I don't recall the exact #, but close enough), so you want more battery to save life long term, so your 100 mile range becomes 60 - which suddenly isn't enough to handle the unexpected life events (it will get the average person to work, lunch and back home - but there is no reserve for anything else to come up - and it gets worse as the battery gets old. I'd say for a cheap car 150 miles is the lowest you really should go (I know the leaf only got 70, but it wasn't only practical if you had something else as a backup - according the everyone I know who bought one)
I've been looking at EVs, like you I expect that the savings in fuel will be significant - but the car it would replace is paid for so the loan is hard to stomach. (that car is 12 years, 215k miles, and otherwise showing age - I'm going to look hard at the id.buzz when it comes out this summer - but if I can buy a used minivan for half the price...)
I did the math (kinda).
I save so much on the 99% of drives when driving with electricity vs gasoline so I can just rent a car for the or fly/go by train and get a taxi in my destination.
Or the town cars can be designed to take an extra battery that you can easily rent (preferably from a charging station) when needed.
If gas wasn't there people would have settled for electric cars with the range they had and taken the train (maybe even a land ferry) if they needed to go further.
Energy density is one major fact the EV propagandists don't get. What they get is policies and mandates to work for their cause.
The fact that gasoline is significantly more energy dense than batteries is so easy to grasp that a monkey could probably understand it. Do you honestly believe that this is the missing piece that EV fans don’t get? That teaching them 6th grade physics will make the whole thing go away?
You need lithium chemistry to be competitive and that requires nano level understanding of the anode/cathode crystal structure. That essentially requires quantum mechanics which wasn't even a thing during the two decades when steam, electric, and gas/diesel were fighting for supremacy. Not to mention the manufacturing tolerances required to get reasonable diffusion rates which is the major limiting factor for charge/discharge rates (and a large component of temperature sensitivity).
You might make the case that steam power would have dominated until the 40s-60s if the Doble-style steam generator had been available in say 1890. By the time they figured out how to make useful steam cars gasoline had already won.
For the curious: the Doble-style system uses a steam tube that flashes water instantly to steam - not unlike instant hot water heaters but for steam. They also used condensers so the steam was cooled by a radiator, condensed, and the water re-used. Often paired with a double or triple expansion piston and an aux piston to run an electric generator for accessories. In these cars you turned the key and within 10-30 seconds you can drive away. No need to warm up a boiler and no large tank that might explode. And no water loss so no need to fill up on water either. They could essentially burn almost anything flammable. Steam also has instant full torque at any speed similar to an EV. But it was all developed far too late to matter.
On the quantum mechanics requirement - do you not think a dedicated team of experimenters could get quite a long way by systematic trial and error, without a deep theoretical understanding?
To take a simplified example - did Thomas Edison have a deep understanding of what was happening in a lightbulb filament? Or did he just try 10,000 different ways to make a lightbulb until he converged on a good one?
Good to know that steampunk could have been practical!
To put it in perspective, the inventor of the first lithium battery, John Goodenough, a work he later received the Nobel prize for, was a world renowned material scientist at the top of his game, who led some of the most advanced research labs at MIT and Oxford. This was not some scientific serendipity, a low hanging penicillin; practical lithium batteries had to be plucked from the bosom of physics using the best tools and knowledge available in the 70s.
How many electron microscopes, X-Ray crystallography machines, mass spectrometers, computer aided simulations and design systems and other contemporaneous tools, methods and theories had to be used by Goodenough's team and then the thousands of researchers in the subsequent decades to get to the point we are today with lithium batteries? It just doesn't sound like something that was possible pre-1940, the period where the bulk of the ICE improvement happened.
And you really need lithium chemistry for practical EVs; despite the enthusiast conspiracy theory, the General Motors EV1 was nothing more than an clunky, expensive curiosity that failed in the marketplace. The only way EVs could become practical reality (if barely) was that the ICE stop improving, hampered by emissions regulations, to the point where advances in lithium battery technology and economics could catch up. Such environmental concerns were pure fantasy more than a century ago.
Another issues to consider is that, even if not used for road transport, ICE were essential for aviation, the history of aviation being, to a fist degree approximation, a history of high power density propulsion methods that made mechanical flight possible. Major improvement of road engines (for example turbocharging, fuel injection, VVT) came from aviation. Since electric aviation remains still a dream, it follows that any counterfactual road transport history must account for the existence of a highly competitive aviation ICE.
When imagining these fun little scenarios, like what if the Roman Empire invented the steam engine or Victorians the microchip, we almost always tend to discount the highly contextual nature of scientific discovery and innovation. Previous scientific and technical progress alter the world in profound and subtle ways, transforming what was once considered a pipe dream - and not for lack of trying and visionaries - into reality.
But there are non-rechargable batteries. Zinc-air batteries have around 600 Wh/kg energy density (3 times more than Li-Ion) and they could have been manufactured with the technologies of the early 1910-s.
Zinc-air batteries can't be recharged in the usual sense, but zinc oxide can be reworked into the metal form easily.
True, but it’s easy to imagine (to me!) an alternative past with battery replacement chariots etc.
I've had similar thoughts with regards to the development of solar panels.
Imagine if America chose to respond to the 1973 oil embargo by investing tons of resources into the development of solar panels and made true energy independence a priority.
We would be in a totally different position right now with regards to the climate and geopolitics.
We would've spent a lot of time hanging around local maxima in both cases. The development of both modern batteries and solar cells required advanced material science. No one was going to build a Model Y in 1950, or a 25%-efficient solar cell in 1970.
EVs lost because gasoline is fucking awesome when considered solely as a means to transport energy and release it in a controlled manner. That's really all there is to it.
Yeah, this is a thought I just had a few days ago and I've been meaning to look into what the bottle neck with regards to solar panels was.
What sort of innovations in material science were needed to bring about the development of more efficient or affordable solar panels?
For solar cells, it was (according to Wikipedia) 1954 before the first practical PV cell was built. So that's already a late start. From there it seems that a lot of technologies had to develop in parallel, from larger silicon wafers to advances in understanding how to work with thin-film materials.
Meanwhile, in the 1950s and 1960s nuclear power was going to be the Next Big Thing, and it was understandable that low-efficiency PV tech was of interest only for things like satellites. IMHO, the top-down energy policy managers that couldn't fulfill the "too cheap to meter" promises of nuclear power wouldn't have been up to the task of accelerating PV technology either.
Solar cells are not like gas lasers, which could have been built in a neon-sign shop in the 1930s if the science needed to steer the technology had been in place. They are more like practical neural nets. Sure, they could have been built in the 1960s... if only GPUs weren't so darned hard to come by.
(And as someone else suggested, any nation that began the 20th century by pouring the resources into PV cells and EVs that we put into fossil fuels wouldn't have lived to see the 21st.)
Similar story for lithium batteries. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7215417/ seems to be a decent survey of their evolutionary timeline. They consist of multiple discrete technologies. R&D that goes into a good cathode has to be done separately from work on anodes. Same for electrolytes and separators. Looking at the bibliography in that article, batteries don't seem like the sort of field where progress could have been accelerated just by throwing money at it, and I think that's true for PV tech as well.
The alternate timeline I was suggesting didn't start in 1900, but 1973, with the oil embargo.
It seems to me that by the 1970s all the groundwork was there to start a solar panel revolution and that the major reasons it didn't happen were political and social, not technical.
Keep in mind that I haven't done any research on this subject yet, I just thought of it a few days ago and I'd love to hear input from anyone who is much more informed on the subject than I am.
My father in law sold solar in the 70s. His take is that it failed for the same reason it fails today. For most consumers in most environments, it makes no economic sense whatsoever, even with tax incentives. The short total lifespan, rapid aging of the cells, expensive maintenance, and risks of roof damage over time, altogether reveal costs that typically are not advertised but remain obvious to most consumers. That's aside from the unsightly appearance of the cells. In environments with more expensive power grids and higher temperatures they appear to be a suitable economic solution for the consumer. E.g. Phoenix, AZ.
If your dad thinks solar is failing today I'm not sure he's a very reliable source of information. Solar has been growing exponentially since the mid 2000s and shows no signs of slowing down - the average year over year growth rate in solar capacity since 2016 is about 26% (doubling every three years). The most common error in understanding and forecasting the growth in solar capacity is underestimating future growth - every IEA prediction for the growth of solar for the last 10 years has been significantly higher than the previous year's prediction, and also a dramatic underestimate of the actual installed solar capacity. Experts in this space have been predicting that the solar exponential will level off next year for a decade, and in all likelihood they will continue doing so for another decade.
I bought my first set of Solar Panels 33 years ago. Those panels are still on the roof, have had zero maintenance, and are still happily running my small fridge.
The Battery story is somewhat different. My first set of batteries finally died a few years ago. Likewise I've probably replaced three or four inverters in that time.
Whatever, my off-grid Solar power system has repayed itself many times over.
There were Schottky cells much earlier.
Imagine if America chose to respond to the 1973 oil embargo by investing tons of resources into the development of horizontal drilling and fracking. Because that is what has given us true energy independence right now.
I think when it comes to electric vehicles. The big issue was the batteries. It's a hard problem. Probably too hard for the science and technology 100 years ago. It's one hard problem after another. I worked with some lithium primary cells in the mid 80's. They were amazeballs and terrifying. They had an internal 4 amp fuse for safety.
But solar, I think we really under invested. My semi-trollish comment is if we invested as much in solar as we did for nuclear we'd be 30 years ahead. Trollish because it upsets people with an emotional attachment to nuclear. But it's also flat out true. The technology was rapidly developed in the 50's and 60's but no one spent the money to mass manufacture them until early 2000's.
The reason ICE cars won, is that electro motors got good enough to serve as starter motors for ICEs. Which is kind of ironic.
Also if you wanted to travel a longer distance, you just threw a couple cans of fuel in the back. Neither electricity nor fuel stations were abundant, but extending the range using gas was dead nuts simple.
It makes the assumption that in early 1900 people wanted or needed to travel far.
Did they? Even today, most travels are under 100km, often averaging around <60km a day for commutes and less for non commutes. Would that have been different then? I wouldn't be surprised to learn that back then, when the car was replacing horse drawn carriers, on a very rudimentary infrastructure (no tarmac, no paved roads outside of City centers) it was even less.
It's not only about traveling long distances. It's about traveling short distances many times without refueling.
And about recovering from using your fuel. It's easier to walk (or hitchhike) to a fueling station and carry a gallon or 5 of fuel back to your vehicle than it is to carry back a similar amount of electric charge. So you've got to move the vehicle somewhere it can charge --- not too hard today, electricity is near omnipresent and highly standardized in the developed world and mobile generators are common; but in the early 1900s, not so much.
I imagine few people were regularly using personal vehicles for commuting at the dawn of cars, but cars and trucks are immensely useful to move goods. Rapid point to point transport of goods for routes beyond navagable waters and the rail network opens up a lot of opportunity for trade and doing business in more of the country.
Note that cars can work with minimal infrastructure --- pavement is nice, but not required, although modern cars might not like it very much.
That seems more like post facto justification than an original design consideration.
Early cars were meant to be easily fixed, though. And that was likely a design consideration. Before cars were fuel-injected and full of computers there were "shade tree mechanics" everywhere. Of course "easy to fix" is maybe just a proxy for "unreliable." Kind of like software . . .
So are wagons pulled by draft animals. In fact, those wagons are much more reliable before roads were built to enable the automobile. Probably why there was a reliance on them for several generations after the country was crisscrossed with rail.
Pavement as we think of it was designed for cars, not vice-versa. The Appian way has lasted for thousands of years, but that's not much like how our streets and highways are built.
https://pavementinteractive.org/reference-desk/pavement-type...
define reliable? Of course there was reliance on them, rail doesn't go all the way to your back garden
General agreement, but I must say the difficulty of travel without roads using thin solid rubber wheels and rudimentary suspension was rather rough, regardless of engine tech.
Everyday commuters? Perhaps not. But a couple of years after this photo there was a major increase in demand for vehicles with extended range.
What drove that demand? Supply maybe?
At that time, fast long distance travel was there: trains. So why was personal, fast, long distance travel wanted. And was it really fast (faster than a horse?)
Ford sold a couple of million Model Ts (and gave up on his electric car project with Edison) before offering an electric starter motor as an option. The advantage of ICEs at the time was massive even if you had to hand crank the engine.
This raise an interesting question. Is improving the battery tech an inherently more difficult problem than the efficiency of a thermic motor?
I'd intuitively think so, as it's mostly chemical compared to mechanical work, and that would explain why thermic engine were favoured at the time. (On top of economic reasons)
If battery tech was easy and it only failed to progress faster due to lack of a well-funded use case, then submarine warfare should have brought us to Tesla-grade batteries in no time.
That did bring them nuclear reactors though. Hasn't helped my electricity come from nuclear.
That's the next step though. SMRs, Small Modular Reactors. Basically the same sort of thing that's in a submarine but dotted around our neighbourhoods and cities.
We are never, ever going to see SMRs dotted around our neighborhoods. I like the concept of nuclear power in general, but the security and terrorism concerns alone will kill any possibility of putting them in residential areas regardless of any potential economic benefits.
Fission batteries, baby!
Currently there are two land vehicles that drive with them :)
Panasonic-grade
I don’t think it so much that battery chemistry is so hard to improve, but rather the energy density of oil is so high, you don’t simply don’t need an efficient thermic motor to do useful work.
If you completely ignore the externalities of oil (which we did for a very long time). Then it’s very hard for an electric battery to compete with diesel or gasoline. Gasoline has an energy density of about 46MJ/Kg, compared to a lithium ion battery at just 0.9MJ/Kg and that’s a modern battery. A lead acid battery is just 0.15MJ/Kg.
So right out of the gate, your thermic motor can be two orders of magnitude less efficient than your electric motor, and still achieve the same range with an equivalent mass of stored energy. And that’s ignoring the fact the thermic engine burns its fuel, so does more useful work as the mass of stored energy drops.
To be quite honest, it’s astounding to me that electric traction was even remotely competitive with thermic traction back in Henry Fords era. The head start thermic engines get from such high density fuel is kind of obscene.
Yep, and then when you compare both of those options to nuclear they look like ~similarly puny options. If I remember correctly nuclear has roughly 100,000 times higher energy density.
From perspective of electric cars, the efficiency compared to ICE (combustion engine) cars is fantastic. 90%+ energy is used to move the car with electric motors, while only 30% is used in combustion engine, rest is losses in heat and friction.
Modern electric cars can now also use regenerative braking which means brakes last a long time.
The biggest downside of electric cars currently is the batteries. They 100x less gravimetric dense than gasoline/petrol.
Gasoline has volumetric density of 34.2 MJ/L and gravimetric density of 45 MJ/kg. Cost about ~$1/L. A 50L tank has same energy as ~450 kWh battery weighing only ~40kg.
Lithium ion batteries have volumetric density of ~1 MJ/L and gravimetric of 0.5 MJ/kg. A 450 kWh battery would weigh 3,240kg (3 tonnes!).
We are gonna be addicted to gasoline for a while until we solve for an equivalent clean energy dense fuel that can be efficiently converted to electricity.
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In similar perspective, solar panels are now quite cheap (<$1/watt). The big problem is energy storage. Lithium batteries are still quite expensive, bulky and not much energy dense.
Nature on the other hand has solved this problem millions of years ago. Natural solar panels (leaves) store energy in wood (mostly cellulose).
Dry wood is ~20 MJ/kg and ~10MJ/L. Still >10X more dense than Li-ion batteries.
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Long range electric cars use most of the energy to move the heavy battery instead of the payload inside the car.
Humans don't weigh much (~70kg). A tesla model Y has (~770kg) battery. That's 10X the weight of payload.
Not to mention refill time.
Not to mention safety.
According to this IEEE article, ICE fires are a greater danger than EV battery fires.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/lithium-ion-battery-fires
Recharge time is not the problem as much as recharge frequency. I can go on long trips with my Tesla. I don't mind the recharge time -- it's a good chance to get a cup of coffee or take a bio break -- but their frequency is a little irksome (if you're being cautious to protect the battery life). But then, generally I'm traveling with at least one person who needs bio breaks pretty frequently, so it works out fine.
Neither of these really invalidates the points.
A pail of gas is essentially inert and dead safe until you go out of your way to aerosolize it. Even though it will burn if lit, it doesn't light itself no matter how you abuse it, and, it even evaporates and dissipates itself completely away in a short while. IE, if you spill that pail, there is a short window of time where there is a risk of a fire, but after that the there is no more gas and no more risk.
A lithium (or any other battery for that matter) with the same amount of energy is essentially barely contained and always trying to get out and only held back by great care and no flaws in the materials and careful handling.
It's a totally different prospect or dynamic. It's not just the fires in the accidents.
"I don't mind the recharge time" is meaningless or valueless. It doesn't matter that you can afford to spend an hour getting a partial recharge, the world can not afford for all the bezillion refills to ballon to by such a crazy amount.
The system can absorb a handful of Teslas only because there are only a handful. And a lot of what makes an ev remotely practical is having an overnight charge at home. Many, maybe even most, vehicles do not have a matching garage where it's even possible to install a charger. Some day we might have street-side charging where every parking meter is also a charger, but that day is a far off fantasy. The power grid is not remotely ready for that either, especially when you add the removal of gas heating and cooking from new construction.
EVs are really completely impractical luxury toys that a few people in just the right hot-house environment can get away with, and only as long as it's not too many of them.
It will be a great future but it is the future.
As Tesla 3 owner with a $4000 bill for a scrape under the passenger door at 1MPH navigating a tight carpark I will tell you there are definitely a few more things they need to get right.
this has nothing to do with the drive train
Current Toyota models have engines with 40% efficiency: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/18919/toyota-develops-worlds-m...
But it's still under 50% of EV efficiency.
This is really divorced from reality. There was just no way at all that electric cars would've been viable in the 20th Century. No, we wouldn't magically have developed modern computer-controlled battery packs of lithium ion batteries in 1920 if we just wanted it hard enough.
I'm sure the performance wouldn't have been comparable to modern electric cars, but what if car companies in 1920 had focused on producing electric cars that had a shorter range with a lower top speed?
It's not like people were commuting 60 miles each way on highways in 1920, and I doubt model t's were actually normally hitting their theoretical top speed anyway.
They'd have been outcompeted by the cars with longer range and higher speed (and no reliance on lead acid batteries that must have horribly degraded with intensive use), just like they were in the 1910s. It's not like they weren't tried: the tech had a longer history than the ICE and they actually outsold the ICE in the US in the first decade of the twentieth century
That's not what the commenter said. Don't put your interpretation of the words into theirs.
It is very feasible that the investment of 100-some-odd years of battery research and a marked non-future invested as deeply into oil and gas as we have now would have rendered our entire world vastly different. This is not a claim that the future would have happened sooner, but rather the events that unfolded and the research would have been different.
But it's not something that happened at random. ICE was just an objectively superior option back then.
$1.5 million in 1912 is almost $50 million today, so he invested pretty heavily in electric before moving on. Without the benefit of hindsight, it's hard to imagine that going differently.
I wonder if anyone at the time had an inkling of the long-term downsides of gasoline powered engines?
Climate change predictions look to have “began” around 10 years after the first patent for gas vehicles, but predate mass production by a decade.
There probably wasn’t widespread knowledge at the time of mass production.
Then ~70 years ago, vehicle and oil giants absolutely knew what was happening and got the wheels spinning on a massive propaganda machine that continues to thrive today.
To be fair, I'm not sure choosing electric over gasoline cars at that time would have much effect on our current climate situation, assuming equal timelines for renewable tech.
All those cars would have needed electricity from somewhere, and at the time, gasoline and coal were pretty cheap ways to generate it.
It's not like they had solar, wind or nuclear back then. Power was produced by burning coal which isn't that much better than burning gasoline.
It might have resulted in a better world, less oil consumption and all that. But who knows? I wouldn’t be surprised if the solution they came up with was to just use some slow charging tech and swap them at the battery-station. Hand over your spent battery to the local attendant, he’ll either bring it in and pay some recycling fee or chuck it in a nearby creek for free.
This is the tech that most Asian motorcycle manufacturers have recently agreed upon for interchangeable batteries without charging wait times.
That’s interesting. Is there some plan in the agreement to prevent people from ending up with beat up old batteries?
Considering pretty much all power back then was produced by burning coal and that lead acid batteries are not exactly environmentally friendly it's not that obvious.
Replace gas/elecric with digital/analog. Is something I contemplated having studied neuroscience.
I think I somewhat disagree, having studied EE, although I did get out on purpose, so maybe I am biased. Analog circuits can be a real pain, though.
When the voltage means something, you actually have to get it right. With digital circuits, just smash it in the right direction as fast as possible. Get anywhere near Vdd and you have a 1, perfect!
Any nation pursuing this would have been dominated geopolitically, militarily, and economically by those that just took advantage of cheaper and more productive use of combustion engines.
Yep.. It's game theory, always has been.
No. Gasoline cars have the advantage of not having to carry their own oxidizer. Even today, EVs make no sense at all compared to hybrids from a CO2 emissions stand point.
Not only that, but the fundamentals of the thermo involved in ICEs were understood way before the electrochemistry thermo which lags thermal thermo by 50 to 100 years. Thats the theory; on the practical engineering side, by the time Goodenough was born in 1923, Sir Ricardo had figured everything we need to know about ICEs. Goodenough was working with late 20th (early 21st!!) century technology, Ricardo with turn of the 20th century tech.
If you like "what ifs" like this, you might enjoy For All Mankind which is a fictional show about an alternate history where the space race continued after Soviets beat the US to the moon.
It should be noted that the environmental impact wasn't really known and the energy potential of fuels still is unmatched.
From an engineering perspective with the information available at that time, the decision was probably "correct". Batteries were something like a necessary evil. For example to propel uboats because of the lack of oxygen. Otherwise the energy density and triviality of re-fuel-ing easily wins out.
The difference is that it is downright trivial to add range to a petrol vehicle. Making the tank larger by 10 liters will add less than 10 kg of weight, but will increase range significantly. The same is not true of battery electrics.
The crux of the issue is missing on this entire conversation. The role of women, or perceived womanly roles, as this post shows, needs to take into consideration the plight of women during those times. Women's suffrage and the result of which we see in our current times is probably more an influence on the entire chain of thought here, in regards to the incredible advancement we see in gender roles we see now. The range and effectiveness of these vehicles, so desperately described as 'consistently improving with technology', misses the point entirely.
So despite the current state of modern transportation/ technological advancement, we can now all see what apparently matters most to a (now) seemingly useless generation of educated 'opinionated specialists' pitifully beholden to their investors or large banks (this means you Tesla!), the reality of actual utility (such as farm use or manufacturing) can be seen on a grander scale, eg. A mass grid of indentured servants working a non-optimized routine for decades (might have overestimated their capabilities in that sense) vs customized electric tools (think handheld farming, perhaps each attached with it's own horn - not necessarily loud or aggressive but like those you see on clown cars), would they have eventually revolted against the machines/electric tools taking their place? Like the farm equipment of the past, obviously not the current capable tech we have to read about daily (for lack of better offerings), those indentured workers would likely be seen as no different to said farm equipment of the past.
Their only outlet to vent their frustrations at their inabilty to escape their milieu wouldnt amount to much more than dainty gossip, or to take a term from reddit 'circle jerks' (probably with not much to jerk about), but perpetually useless against effecting any actual change to their plight, espousing their views as best they could. So at least some technical know-how would give them a voice!
Workers rights have advanced leagues upon leagues in the past century.
We can only learn from the past and apply those competitive (capitalistic!) tendencies and methodology to building better tech and actively avoid the same pitifalls.
Given how central gasoline was to developments leading up to and during the Pacific War (like the role of the Dutch East Indies), history would change in all sorts of difficult-to-imagine ways.
90pc of NY taxi cabs in 1899 were electric.
ICE cars soon bettered them in sales because 1. range 2. speed 3. oil price - due to the discovery of large oil deposits in the USA. 4. initial cost - thanks to Henry Ford's innovations.
Most homes didn't have electricity at that time and wouldn't have it until the early 1930s.
$1.5 million in 1914 is about $48 million dollars today
I don't think it would have been popular. Oil is very cheap $/potential energy and not range-limited in the same way EVs are. And even if you dumped trillions of $s in battery tech 100 years ago it's not clear it would be enough to really improve the situation.
Seems unlikely. The core innovation behind lithium cells is polymer chemistry that didn't exist until the 80's. There might have been a market to drive adoption, but it still needs to wait for the science.
What about steam? Especially with Doble fast steam boilers?
I had heard that Edison‘s batteries were subpar compared to other contemporaries. Which makes me wonder if things would’ve been different if Ford and Edison weren’t friends.
But gasoline is so energy dense and at the time was so incredibly cheap I think it would’ve been a fight even if the batteries were better.