Featured Will Piston Engines Get Clobbered by Electrics?

Battery pack manufacturers, even with their un-accessable tops & bottoms, said not to charge above 80% & below 20%.....except in emergencies. Many people define emergencies as any break from their regular schedules, & really want to treat their EVs as ICE vehicles. Three year old EVs have resale values ~ 20%-25% of their original price..... & the govt reduction of the sale value of new EVs only has a smaller percentage drop in the used EV price market collapse. Many people know that people drove their EVs to abuse the battery pack, & the market reflects that punctured price loss.

 

i thought used ev prices were climbing?

 

Again, source?

 

But without the piston engine legacy in this hypothetical world. Yes, you can build the engine in the new Camry, but there isn't the well established supply chains that make its production as cheap as it is today, nor the hundreds of thousands of gas stations around to fuel it.

Think every potential propulsion choice is starting out like hydrogen is today.

The section quoted from me was in relation to a small company that does PHEV conversions of commercial trucks. It is a series hybrid system, so torque output is not a problem, and the turbines can be adapted to other fuels far easier; required changes will be in the fuel delivery and exhaust treatment systems. That simply can't be done with a piston engine. Change the fuel, and more modifications are needed to the engine, if maintaining the highest peak efficiency.

A fleet operator getting this conversion currently has 3 choices for fuel, gasoline, diesel, and CNG. Natural gas has an effective octane rating of 130. An engine designed for gasoline won't have the compression ratio to fully take advantage of CNG. Variable valve control can only go so far in allowing the engine to handle fuels with different octane ratings efficiently. Besides advanced VVT is an unneeded expense on an engine that will run mostly at one set speed, and use one fuel once put into service. Then the reinforcing requirement to handle the compression ration of the CNG and diesel, would be unnecessary weight on a gasoline engine. So this company would need to stock different engine blocks instead of one turbine.
Technology | Wrightspeed Powertrains

As for my answer to the question, it would be PHEV along the idea of the i3 REx; a series hybrid with at least 50 miles of EV range. This means the majority of miles will be grid electric. The lower use of range extender fuel will make the higher cost of renewables tolerable. Highest possible hybrid efficiency becomes less important, making the size and weight of the range extender a more primary concern.

Except the only BEVs available in which the user might be able charge above 80% is Tesla, and the car defaults to a lower percent. It simply isn't possible to charge another plug in over 80%.

At least Tesla's and maybe GM's will be with the credit going away.

 

i just don't read it that way. knowing everything we know about about current technology. i'm reading it as 'we're not emotionally tied to piston engines.' but i don't read, 'the technology is a hundred years old.'

however, if all technology was still the same as 1919, i'd still design with pistons.

now, if all technology had been developed the way piston engines have for the last hundred years, how would i know what would be worthwhile? no idea where the others would be at.

and also, piston engines were pretty darn good 90 years ago, if not as efficient.

 

Where? Is that a car that has been in a wreck or with far more than average miles?
What is the average for a car with typical miles?

Mike

 

so i can get a model3 for 20k soon

 

Sign me up too!

 

Yeah, 1% to 2%. Do NOT under-estimate american drivers' ability to abuse battery packs to the extent they treat them like ICE. As stated, americans have to keep up with their...... schedules.

 

it's a secret source (hint ...... sphincter)
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i agree about driving habits. i don't disagree about battery abuse possibility, but i don't have any data to support it.
it seems to me, (and i could be wrong) that a range test would tell you everything you need to know when purchasing a used ev.

 

you can always pull the data out of the same crack that he does

Why Tesla holds resale value better than comparable gasoline and electric cars - 1redDrop
maybe he just doesn't know people can read.
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Part of our attachment to piston engines is because they are cheap, and they are cheap in part because of the decades spent making their production cheap and really leveraging the economies of scale.

Look at EV batteries. In 2010, a traction pack for a plug in was $600 to over $1000 a kWh depending on who you talked too. Today, they are $200 or less, and still dropping.

Give micro turbines, motors, linear generators, etc. the same level of production experience and capacity as the piston engine now enjoys, and they will be far cheaper than they are now. Because of the copper, an EV motor may still cost more than the piston engine for a car, but the piston engine will need an infrastructure for refueling to be built out to allow its adoption, while the EV can be charged at home.

If there were no gas stations, you would choose to build them, or a DC fast charging network?

To be fair, used LEafs had such levels of depreciation, but the combination of federal, state, and factory incentives meant new ones were selling for almost half of MSRP.

 

Would add to this that it has been common for years to get thousands off MSRP. For example, I could do this where I live:
Mid-trim Leaf SV for $32.5k MRSP - $5k incentives - $7.5k Fed credit -$2.5k CA rebate -$500 utility rebate = $17k brand new.

Someone with an agenda would assume the reader would be fooled thinking the vehicle was bought at MSRP. If the car sells for $12,000 in 3 years, he could incorrectly claim it sold at 37% of its purchase price. In reality, it sold for 71% of the purchase price.

 

Exactly! Frankly, I have never purchased a vehicle anywhere near MSRP. However, I have also never tried to purchase a new Prius or other Hybrid either. I have seen some very good deals on Hybrids though ( but not necessarily Prius ).

It is kind of amusing to see all these Tesla folks falling over backwards to pay MSRP. I'm assuming it is rationalized by the fact they get the tax credit?

 

Teslas may be the only plug-in vehicles to require MRSP. That said, they hold their resale value quite well (compared to other plug-ins).

Telsa's are still a bit too rich for my blood, but they are well regarded by their drivers.

 

Wrightspeed seems very interesting, but we can learn from their experience and Jaguars. Wrightspeed seems to be concentrating on garbage trucks and here the system makes some sense

From Tesla to Trash: Wrightspeed’s Electric Garbage Truck Journey
From their site and this we can find that for a garbage truck they are replacing a big diesel engine and transmission with a 80 kw microturbine, 60 kwh battery pack, electric motors, simple transmission, and electronics for around $150K. They are also working with mack to produce new phev garbage trucks.

They were using a capstone 65 kw microturbine that capstone says is 29% efficient. They claim that their own designed 80 kw microturbine weighs 250 lbs and is 30% more efficient which if true would make it just under 39% efficient. This would be slightly more efficient and lower weight than a camery engine with generator. It seems a good match for a garbage truck but piston engine phevs are going to be better for most other applications. They claim 7 mpg for said garbage truck (versus today's average of around 2.5 mpg), which is believable as most fuel is burned in short start stop cycles while a phev can be more efficient on this with battery/mg for torque to start, and regen brakes to recoup energy on the stop. They claim pollution control and maintenance is much less expensive than diesel, which makes a lot of sense too.

Jaguar's parent tata bought 20% of microturbine maker bladen thinking that this was a perfect way to have a light weight high powered generator for a phev. After they started looking at things they switched to a turbo charged engine instead.

For diesel sure, if it needs to be diesel, having maintenance costs and probably lower pollution after pollution control devices may make sense to take the efficiency hit in a phev.

Natural gas engines appear to operate well with an effective compression of 12:1 around where a direct injected gasoline operates. Since the camry hybrid engine is 14:1, simple intake valve changes should allow a 12:1 compression stroke on port injected natural gas/air mix, and 14:1 expansion stroke. It also should work well for M85 which world wide is a much more promising fuel than compressed natural gas.

Piston engines have had a lot of time for R&D. Microturbines needed some material issues solved but R&D has been high for the last 20 years especially on chp and back up generator applications. A flex fuel version of a pi/di engine would likely be good to burn gasoline, methanol, ethanol, cng, and lng efficiently but not diesel. Mazda's spark initiated HCCI design looks like it would be even more efficient with an electric turbo charger and could be quite small.

 

Both ice cars AND ev/battery/thermal management systems have had their epic failures. As a past memory, both the EV nissan Leaf (no matter how seriously you baby did it in warm weather) on the electric side, and the Chevy Vega on the internal combustion side. Regardless, you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
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We are very early, especially in Model 3 land

Low volume cars with high demand and good financing do tend to hold value but higher volume cars like the 3?

Let’s wait a few years and see.

 

Uncle