Replies (109)
Darn. She bought the wrong version of the 500. Always gotta look for that _elektro_ label.
You aren't energy-independent with gasoline-powered vehicles. You have to fill up the tank. Or do you have an oil well in the backyard, or something.
And all cars are electronically-controlled. That isn't the differentiator between fossil or electro. They already were, back when I worked in powertrain, decades ago. They're just computers on wheels.
That's what Merkel told us. So, we became dependent upon Russia gas and they saved up the income from the sale to finance invading Urkaine.
Hard pass.
I can fill up the tank on my own. That's the point. It's not even hard, it just takes some time.
Electronic engine controls are not what I'm referring to. Specifically, the fact that by law in many countries, remote kill switches are required to be supported and then actively mandated. I'm very, very uncool with that. I'll never own a vehicle with an internet connection.
Okay, you do that. I have cheap electricity and will be getting a wall box in the garage. 🤙
If you value independence then you should be looking into plug-in hybrids.
Why? Adding complexity to a vehicular system is a bad thing, especially when many (most?) Hybrids will not function if the electric part goes dead.
That’s a funny thing to say, as traditional transmissions are more complex than the planetary gearset driven transmissions hybrids use.
New ICE cars have just as much, if not more, enshitification.
Actually a good thing about EV is that you can replace the computer with aftermarket, some are open source even. These are mostly used in EV conversions of classic cars but there’s nothing preventing you from using elsewhere.
EVs are just that simple.
> I can run nearly any ICE with self-brewed hooch, biodiesel, or even wood gas.
You can’t switch fuels with different characteristics without modifying the engine, fuel injection system and/or causing long term damage.
It is much more efficient to run a generator and charge an EV instead, which doesn’t care about the source of the electrons.
Good thought but... who is going to supply the batteries? 🤨
Well, duh. But I can run a diesel engine on biodiesel. And I can run any petrol engine on alcohol.
And sure, you can run a generator to charge an EV but it actually isn't easy to do that properly and to be useful the generator needs to be significantly large.
Plus, I can fix most vehicles with junkyard parts. That's much harder to do with generators.
So, long term, running a generator will get harder and harder to maintain at a faster rate than maintaining a vehicle of any sort.
Not to mention, diagnosis and repair of high voltage DC systems is deadly, and requires tools and skills that are still uncommon.
I could be biased, being born in a family of electricians, but any monkey can do work in an EV (just like ICE you need some training of course).
And sure a gas car can run on ethanol without mods, but not for long and not without expensive consequences.
Lastly you don’t need a beefy generator to charge an EV, that’s the whole point. You can combine electric coming from your solar farm, generators, wind or even hydro depending on your property layout.
My point is: don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
There's multiple kinds of complexity. Mechanically, an ICE is more complex. But materially, its arguably less complex, since it doesn't rely on rare earths or lithium, and the knowledge base for construction and maintenance of ICE is already established.
There's another important thing to consider - the energy density of the fuel or battery. Petrol is nothing short of miraculous. We can literally poor energy into a tank. We can transport it with zero energy loss, over any distance and any time. Conversely, any use of batteries faces massive losses in efficiency due to conversion losses.
Nope. Playing with 500+V DC controls is not something a monkey mechanic can do.
Plus, unless you can de-pot motor controllers and handle SMD soldering, you can't fix control components.
Don't need batteries. Just raise the regular consumption to a third higher, with stuff like Bitcoin mining and e-cars, and then pay some people a fee to agree to lower their consumption when there is increased demand. Like Texas does.
Gasoline can be made from non-dinojuice sources. You can make it from plants - hemp is supposedly quite good for this. There's also GMO algae that excrete gasoline.
I'm pretty sure Merkel was a Russian agent
On the topic of losses, internal combustion is less efficient than burning the same fuel on a generator, charging a battery and discharging through an electric motor.
This is even true not only for big generators but also for series hybrids because the engine can be optimized to work in a narrow RPM range.
I usually take the train, long-distance.
Next ones are definitely e-cars. 💯
We don't actually drive much, but when we do, we hate to get in the car and see the empty tank or face a dead battery. I _cannot_ get Hubby to fill up before driving home, but he could manage to plug it into the wall. 😂
Nearest gas station is 20 minutes away.
meanwhile, in rural croatia, the primary heating fuel is wood because of EU no russia energy policy. what about the people who can't put fireplaces in their houses in the city?
> I _cannot_ get Hubby to fill up before driving home
Can I roast him a little bit here? This is usually a stereotype of woman drivers XD
They make the "truck" they have no pride.
German gasoline and diesel already come with biofuels mixed in. That's the standard, here. Natural gas is also often biogas.
That's probably also stabilizing the price. Forgot about that.
Eeeeeh.
That's very debatable. If you have a direct DC genset, then, yes, it is arguable more efficient and in many ways more useful than running a vehicle.
But... Once you factor in conversion losses and maintenance schedules, generators are a huge hassle and that's why anyone that can sets them aside as backup and not primary systems.
Also, efficiency isn't what I'm after. I need robust, diverse sources of useful energy to do work. Just being efficient set point of use isn't a very large part of my system. Sure, it's good, but no one has yet been able to convince me that for my uses in my area that EVs are a better solution for most people.
Now... Electric bikes and scooters? That's where things tip waaaay in favor of all electric. (As long as you keep your battery packs
I'm the car guy, in our house, but he'd show more interest if it were fully electric.
Out of your domicile...
The HV system is not rocket science, anyone willing to learn can deal with it. I have seen dudes wiring up the phases of an ev motor incorrectly and nobody got hurt, not even the electronics.
And regarding fixing individual components in a controller, same could be said of the EFI, ECU and every other computer in an ICE car. Good thing is they’re just as unlikely to need repairs as the electronics in an ICE car.
Probably, at least a little. But its probably coming from US corn. Our gasoline has I think 10% biofuel but its made from corn, and making the corn is entirely dependent on fossil fuels. I've seen claims that its actually increasing our use of fossil fuels, though I can't say for sure if that's right. One thing I know for sure is that agricultural exports are the main thing in our diplomacy, so if your country is an ally, its guaranteed that you're bring forced to buy our agricultural exports, which is mostly GMO corn and soy.
it's not dinojuice either. where in the hell does anyone think the carbon came from in the first place?
the bigger problem is wen tesla papers declassified?
wen do we stop with this provably false claim you can make radioactive metals explode like hydrogen and tritium?
wen do we get nuclear reactors small enough to fit in a car?
what about biologically sourced hydrogen? this isn't even slightly speculative, it's just not been funded.
and you may not realise this but the biggest reason for all the methane being important and being a major component of what's being carted through the suez, that's where the nitrogen for the fertilizerr comes from. methane plus atmospheric nitrogen. this is arguably more important than the rest because you can't go driving on an empty stomach either.
You cannot do that in anything that has to pass inspection these days.
Classic cars (and old trucks) don't need to worry about those regulations for the most part. (Which is, itself, another issue.)
All new cars are awful.
I don't buy newer than about 2008.
Naw. I've been fixing 35 year old ECUs for a while now. Through hole stuff is cake.
Potted SMD stuff? That's not something 99.99% of DIYers can do correctly.
Eventually, every electronic thing will die. And when you can't even get new components, you'll have to go without or buy a new vehicle.
Eventually, I'll be getting an old Deisel truck with no electronics at all. That will outlast us all. 😁
> Sure, it's good, but no one has yet been able to convince me that for my uses in my area that EVs are a better solution for most people.
Fair point, I don’t know the specifics of your location.
In my area the sun shines even overnight (hyperbole), never seen snow in my life and have seen good gas vehicles getting rekt with backfires as the government pushes to increase the percentage of doping gas with ethanol, among other things.
It is.
Corn is stupid to turn into vehicle fuel.
Hmm... it's from German corn, I think, and field scraps. But mostly rapeseed oil (we have a lot of that, here) and waste oil from restaurants and stuff.
Or you can just slap an aftermarket generic computer like resolve-ev or megasquirt for ICE.
I did realize it 🎯. Its actually part of why I've started studying biology.
Yeah, there's good reasons to believe the so-called fossil fuels are abiogenic. Titan is one - the biggest gas station in the solar system is just waiting for us.
We're gonna get those small reactors. Idk if people will want them in cars, but houses for sure. The future comes when 3d printers that use metal are cheap and widespread. We'll print whole cars, too.
A lot of "fossil fuels" were once plants, tho. I don't know why old plants you have to dig out of the ground are better than new plants you have grown.
How the taxman going to know you changed the computer in your car?
Home batteries using nickle and zinc, for instance. You just need the lighter batteries for cars and things you carry around, like cell phones. But the batteries we could use now are just big boxes you keep in the basement, or whatnot.
Its better to make it from plants, if the economics around it aren't predatory.
From plants, its carbon neutral - I don't think we're at a problem point with carbon dioxide, but it will surely come eventually. Plants get their carbon from the air, so if you burn a plant as fuel and it goes into the air, the net effect is nothing.
But the economics around it matter a lot. I mean, who grows it, or is allowed to grow it, and what their inputs are. Fertilizer based agriculture is the thing destroying the planet. It has to stop. Petrol is not the main problem, not even close.
I can't stand megasquirt.
$20 in components to get a vehicle running vs. Hundreds (our thousands) to get another computer and build a wiring harness properly...
Most people will have the first done.
Plug in inspections. Can't pass with aftermarket ECUs without explicitly illegal stuff spoofing the OEM canbus.
I've heard a lot more arguments on the practical side of this though from farmers I know in the midwest. Corn grown for fuel isn't food, and the fields use to grow it aren't useful for growing much else, so the land would just got back to nature i suppose. Drilling maybe? dunno what you use it for.
We have a lot of wood heat, around here. Big ovens, where they burn entire trees at a time, and heat the whole neighborhood. Sustainable forestry is a major industry, in Bavaria. Trees literally grow like weeds, here. You have to constantly fight, to keep the entire state from turning into a gigantic forest.
You mean for cars and vehicles in general?
“Illegal”, no, bypassing unjust laws is self defense.
We had the same issue here, where they complained that we use so many fields from grazing. But they can't be used for anything else, so now they mow them for hay, which is the same as grazing, but stupider.
The biodiesel plants are entirely different plants and they grow like weeds. Human food is more particular and more expensive to buy.
Bavaria is building a fusion plant. Sort of exciting.
It actually looks surprisingly promising and I think that's been making the nuclear option less attractive. Nobody wants to spend a fortune on fusion and nuclear, and then fusion pans out and we're stuck sitting on the nuclear nobody wants, anymore.
It's all used for hot water. The heating is water in the floors.
There was a fusion experiment a few years ago that returned net positive energy. But I haven't heard anything about it since...
Yeah I saw some funny videos about that a little while ago. Like farm animals are natures lawn care service... Fuck off XD
With bio there is also the practical use case as well. Right now, for pump diesel, we used to have high sulfur which help reduce wear in engine components, now we don't have that and have to put our own consumer additives into the fuel if you want to extend engine life. Bio around here doesn't have that, it's dirty and messy (for many different reasons) and destroys emissions equipment fast, which cost more then the vehicle is worth to replace.
There is also, like ethanol, lower energy vs quantity which makes for worse consumption, and higher particulate quanity. I suppose proper refining these days probably is able to produce a "cleaner" product but that's what we've been dealing with for a while.
I doubt corn ethanol drives up food prices. Edible corn is so abundant and grotesquely-subsidized in the USA that they add corn syrup to everything, just to get rid of it. America is drowning in excess edible corn. It's basically a waste product.
And biodiesel stabilizes diesel prices by reducing the amount of the fuel that is affected by mineral oil market prices.
The fact they haven't devised an apparatus to capture cow flatulence yet tells me it was never about the methane XD
They made that jab to reduce their emissions tho right
Oh they started playing with genetics to fix that? Wonderful.
Yes. And feed. Which is literally killing animals.
Yah. 🙄
Sick. Dope. Awesome.
So bad
Great times we live in
That's why we mix it into _all_ of the diesel. We don't use it alone. It's like 7%-10%, or something.
That's still enough to cause issues unless highly refined. Around here bio is not refined mainstream enough yet to be a net cost benefit. For the same reasons I mentioned. Existing ICE diesel engines were designed when #2 included the essential additives for component wear and exhaust emissions, not as poor and reduced as it is now. Yes even diesel engines being produced now have reduced life and encourage you to treat your fuel compared to #2 pump diesel from 10 years ago, let alone 25. Besides sulfur, it's already missing lots of essential additives existing ICE diesels need, not even including breakdown of emissions equipment. We can't afford to run engines on reduced pump #2 any more than we already are.
We need better refining and reduced regulation to get there.
*For consumers* I have no idea if there is a reason it's not more mainstream yet. There probably is.
Ah, okay. Yeah, it's a national strategy here, so I guess they take care of that. We put it in our normal gasoline cars. 🤷♀
I think there are some pumps (or there were) by some fuel companies that had a label "x% bio diesel" on the pump but I haven't seen that in a while, but I also have been avoiding driving my pickup the cost of fuel has had some bad spikes over the past few years. I'm not in the automotive world much since 2023 so things might be changing I just don't know it.
The reason is probably just that the idea came from Germany and US politics is obsessed with how stupid we are.
Full size electric bikes are scary fast. The issue is energy density. If you don't need to go far, they are totally cool, even if they don't sound as cool.
XD fuel is fuel man. If we can make it in stable supply and get it to consumers without trashing their already absurdly expensive equipment I'm here for it. Running a performance oriented business less than half of my customers used their diesel pickups to work, but those that did, really did and they shared a lot of hardship with me between 2020 and 2024. Guys have already gone through a lot due to the collapse of equipment, supply chains, and manufacturing. I lost my career due to regulation, so I personally have a different agenda, but I don't want to see any more asinine politics BS shovel more crap onto the blue collar working Americans.
I like fast :)
Reminds me of a dude who slapped an AC generator + wallcharger on an ebike and it worked while traveling 🤣
Found it
Found it
Да пошла ты нахуй
bunch of crabs in a pot with the gas turned up to max. let's drag everyone down because we can't have them risking our perceived something or other.
meanwhile, the useful eaters sit at the table waiting for the cooks to finish boiling the crabs.
Still have to pay to transport petrol. And all cars require large batteries. Some just have even larger ones.
that's awesome!
Also, you have to constantly have wars for petrol. It's arguably the main cause of war, for decades. If you add the cost of the wars required to attain or protect the petrol, to the liter price, it's by far the most expensive.
Also, you know, all of the dead people. I guess their corpses are the "fossil" part of fossil fuels. 💀 _How many dismembered schoolgirls does it take to screw in a headlight?_
That was something you don’t see everyday… but, for bikes, I think it makes more sense to start with ICE and then add a hub motor like this dude did
"It doesn't rely on rare earths"
It relies on petrochemicals of which there are limited amounts, and certainly the amount you can burn is very limited if you don't want big environmental problems later.
There are solutions. Hydrogen fuel cells have great energy density, although operating needs care. Better for buses, trucks and taxis where the driver can be properly trained to deal with the dangers of leaks.
You can use sodium batteries which are extremely cheap, extremely safe, operate in environments you can't use petrol in let alone lithium. The only drawback is they have about half the energy density of lithium batteries. But for something so cheap who cares if you can only get half the range? Plenty of people will buy that
They will function if the petrol part goes dead though 😁
Reduce reliance and suddenly you get to choose your values.
Sodium batteries are not cheap yet.
There's so much untapped hydrocarbons that we aren't going to run out if we're smart and use them to make cheap electricitybuipd build next gen nuclear.
Buuuuut... That doesn't match up with the commie green agenda.
No thanks.
I will keep my 1980’s transport, with no ECU, and no software built into it that ‘lets’ me lease a feature the car already has, and I can fix myself without having to take it back to the dealership for servicing and repairs.
Our company car is a hybrid. it sucks balls. For short journeys EV is cool, but long distance ( at least here ) it costs more per mile to charge on public charging stations than it does to run on petrol 😂
I like it!
I don’t have strong opinions on hydrogen but I heard it’s hard to contain leaks and that’s bad news because it’s a greenhouse gas.
Perhaps it makes more sense on big ass haulers and not inside drunken driving teenagers’ cars.
Agreed.
And yes that's precisely the problem. Preventing leaks is essentially impossible, and it's highly explosive so unregulated vehicles that could park in underground car parks for a couple of days + spark = no more apartment block
Need some economies of scale for sure.
And I'm definitely a fan of nuclear, especially 4th generation
I agree. Current stuff uses rare earths, and it shouldn't.
Mmm, also, funnily enough, I just bought an electric scooter 5 minutes ago. Paid less than the parking fee for a place, and can use it for more. I feel like I just won
Politics certainly makes the problem much worse, in both your country and mine.
But "getting off" fossil fuels is simply not possible with current technologies.
Vaclav Smil's book is well worth reading, here's a summary:
How the World Really Works
by Vaclav Smil
"Half the range" is simply untrue. You need to expend energy to transport your energy, range has a negative exponent.
Too bad you need Russia and iran to get anywhere 😔
small hydrogen gas engines properly made are quite safe. the flashback arrestor is critical. hydrogen produces 5-7 times as much impulse in the detonation and so the engine has to be designed better for thermal dissipation and higher RPMs but unlike carbon fuels it's output is water.
fuel cells are nice in theory but hydrogen modified gasoline engines are ready to be built right now, and make a lot of sense for small engines.
the problem is the hydrogen. for all the talk about decarbonisation where is the research going with biological hydrogen generation? plenty of known methods already exist. problem is that many of them don't work on massive scale.
I don’t think the problem is hydrogen engines, more like the fuel cell.
hydrogen engines don't require rare earth minerals. given the current active trajectory to "suppress china" in play right now in the red sea anything involving expensive, china-dominated source materials and the fact that fuel cells have been on the table since 1988 and still have made no progress. the real move is biohydrogen and modified gasoline engines, in my humble opinion. neither are difficult to retool for from this point, it's just a matter of research focus. fusion is still off in the distance. nuclear could go somewhere but it's got the CND psyop around it that despite 3 mile island and chernobyl turning out to be relative nothingburgers relative to the actual toxicity to humans should have changed that trajectory but that doesn't sell tabloids.
Petrol cars are fine. They can co-exist with electronic vehicles. I just don't like the way governments are forcing us to choose one basically for fraudulent "environmental" reasons.
This was what nuclear was all about and we (Germany) sadly dropped the ball.
The fuel cell is the engine.
The problem is the fuel itself. Hydrogen atoms are the smallest atoms therefore they will leak out of any container made of a material made of larger atoms. To really make it safe you'd need to keep it in a box with lead walls 30cm or more thick, which massively increases the weight of the vehicle you're trying to propel.
In open air or for a short period of time (like a day) it's not a very serious problem. But in an enclosed space, left for a week, dangerous concentrations of hydrogen are going to build up around the vehicle which can explode.
There's also the issue that if you leave your car in a car park for 2 weeks to go on holiday all the hydrogen will leak out while you're away so you can't start it when you get back (as many people used to have problems with dead lead-acid batteries)
This is wrong and I will show you why.
Range = total energy / total consumption
Total consumption is a constant for both vehicles (lithium and sodium) - same mass
Total energy = mass of battery x gravimetric energy density
Sodium ion battery has half the energy density of the lithium-ion battery
Energy of the sodium battery = mass of battery x (half of lithium battery gravimetric energy density)
Energy of the sodium battery = 0.5 x energy of the lithium battery
therefore
Range of the sodium vehicle = (0.5 x energy of the lithium battery) / total consumption (which is constant as we said) = 0.5 x range of lithium vehicle
There is something else you have not considered which is that in order to keep a large lithium battery operational it need to expend energy to heat itself and cool itself to the correct temperature, which a sodium battery doesn't need to. This is a major loss factor in current lithium based EVs. So in fact the sodium vehicle will have more than half the range of the lithium for the same weight, with the difference being more marked the further the ambient temperature is away from the optimal temperature for the lithium battery.
see what the real problem is? people don't care to learn how they get that convenience.
i'd be more than happy to maintain my hydrogen tank and benefit from bio hydrogen production. i'd have my own furnace to regenerate the CO2 capture that requires (lime) and spend the money to make double sure the flashback arrestor works.
but your average person doesn't have "diligence" in their vocabulary.
so, you get what you deserve.
All that is really required is proper oversight - you have to have a special license and certification with training that is up to date to balance the risks. Easily feasible for professional operators, and motivated private individuals can choose to do it if they want. The danger is the general public thinking they can just treat it like they do any other car.
Normies can’t be arsed to fill a water tank to reap the benefits of water injection, somehow I don’t think they would maintain a hydrogen fuel cell properly.
Remember the time when EVs were nothing more than road legal golfcarts sporting lead acid batteries and brushed DC motors? They may not like it but that’s what they deserve.
That's all most people need honestly
