I'm big into motorcycles and all the electric motorcycles are like 100 lbs more and go through tires like twice a year compared to my gas powered motorcycle changing tires once everyother year and can go fraction of the distance. Idk I want to think electric is the future but with these limits I'm still not too interested. If hydrogen ever comes to motorcycles like Kawasaki, Honda, Yamaha and Suzuki want, I'll definitely get one of those but I can't recommend any electric motorcycles right now and before you say anything I would recommend a Surron if you check your welds before you buy those are great commuters but probably not a motorcycle.
Sorry for not being clear, I change tires on my gas powered commuter motorcycle about once every two years. Electric motorcycles seem to go through tires much faster it was explained to me that the bikes are heavier and most tires aren't designed for electric motorcycles.
that just sounds like too much throttle because you're not familiar with the extra torque from take off.
nothing to do with a little extra weight.
my last two bikes were over 1L, with a curb weight of something like 280kg, maybe. 45kg extra in batteries is like a child or a big dog. it's not much.
The torque off the start is so much higher in EVs vs. ICE. I'm not sure from u/blindbunny 's post if they've ridden an EV motorcyle. I'm pretty sure they haven't owned one. They sound like an ICE shill. My bicycle's torque off the start is pretty low, and dependent on this old school "neuro-musculo-skeletal" system. It's kinda jankety, but I'm too cheap to upgrade.
I wish I was a shill I'd probably have more money to buy more motorcycles. I've rode a Surron bee? and a Stark VARG and I kinda like how quite they are especially dual sporting. But it takes almost half a day to charge the Stark VARG and the longest I've rode a Surron was about ~20 miles before it needed to charge.
Many motorcycles (not bicycles, those are irrelevant to the comparison) already have more torque off the line than the available traction can handle, so that benefit from electric motors is less critical. The wear is a concern because motorcycles are already more sensitive to tire wear than cars, and simply switching to a harder compound to account for the extra weight has other ramifications that are far less severe in electric cars.
Fair. I've been comparing ICE vs EV cars wrt tire wear. And some folks, depending on driving style, find that the tires wear faster on EVs. Slow off the line should moderate that.
Yeah, a general "electric vs. gas" comparison which elides the two big disadvantages of electric in familiar applications (which aren't to be found in the motor) seems slightly subpar for xkcd. It's valid from a certain narrow engineering perspective but not too helpful if what you're thinking about is motorcycles.
If fossil fuels were so easy to give up we'd have done it by now.
Uh, maintenance is one thing where ICE wins (until very recently, thanks fucktards in car industry). Cars have been generally very easy to work on, with anyone with a toolbox being able to do most their repairs in a shed
This isn't a function of the engine though right? Electric engines are inherently simpler and should therefore be easier to maintain (putting aside company fuckery)
High voltage is scary as fuck, but also the fact that absolutely everything from doors to gas pedal and chairs are controlled by a computer you need specialized proprietary equipment to investigate.
This is an issue with new ice cars too to be honest
EVs have a High voltage disconnect. I repaired my EV(inverter) with normal hand tools in my garage. I did have to buy a license and tool for flashing the firmware, but this is a problem in nearly every new vehicle, gas or electric.
That's a user-hostile feature, not a property of electric engines. An electric car has far simpler mechanical parts, and the circuitry isn't very complicated either. It could be made incredibly easy to repair, modify, and upgrade, mostly at home even, if they designed them that way
Not really. Its trees from a time before micro organisms evolved the ability to eat dead trees. These days, the solar energy collected by trees will get used to power the metabolisms of fungi before those trees can get buried and eventually become new coal & petroleum.
I suppose an impact from a sufficiently large asteroid could turn the entire crust of the planet into magma, sterilizing it and therefore opening the possibility that new oil might be created some day.
I think I read somewhere that oil will not be produced anymore because now bacteria can break down that biomass that it previously didn't. Hence, non-renewable even on long timescales.
If you're making your diesel from CO2 pulled from the air, pollution aspects don't really apply (at least, CO2 emission issues don't, there's still NOx, but that's what cat piss is for).
Problem is, converting atmospheric CO2 back into fuel makes the efficiency issue drastically worse. Maybe with enough solar panels and windmills, and use the Fischer–Tropsch process with the excess energy that the grid isn't consuming.
Of course, that would be for mobile fuel, if solar plants were going to do anything like that for later use generating electricity during peaks, making diesel is dumb; you'd want to use hydrogen or ammonia for in-place energy storage.
Ah. I'm generally skeptical of any plant-based 'green fuel' because they generally take up agricultural capacity that would otherwise be producing food
Energy density is a huge advantage which most people find hard to give up especially when the biggest problem that we face is invisible to most people. We can't fix a problem if we ignore the cause.
oops you posted irrelevant pedantics that verge on misinformation 😧
sure it’s distilled solar energy that cannot be renewed. relevant language highligted. no one “forgets,” this. literally no one. it’s just not relevant to a timespan less than millions of years. cheers! ☀️
Biofuels are carbon-neutral. They release CO2 when burned, but it doesn't matter because that same CO2 had recently been sucked out of the atmosphere by the plant they came from.
While U.S. biofuel use rose from 0.37 to 1.34 EJ/yr over this period, additional carbon uptake on cropland was enough to offset only 37 % of the biofuel-related biogenic CO2emissions. This result falsifies the assumption of a full offset made by LCA and other GHG accounting methods that assume biofuel carbon neutrality. Once estimates from the literature for process emissions and displacement effects including land-use change are considered, the conclusion is that U.S. biofuel use to date is associated with a net increase rather than a net decrease in CO2emissions. study
Not passing judgement on anything, just putting the facts out there that I happen to know :) Biofuel may or may not be a good tool to move toward more sustainability, and it’s certainly better than petrol.
My biofuel of choice is biodiesel produced from byproducts of chicken rendering that would otherwise become waste/pollution anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The way I see it, we should electrify all the things that can be (urban driving, both freight and passenger trains, etc.), maximize the use of those things (e.g. by shifting long-haul freight away from trucking and back towards rail, and shifting airline travel to high-speed rail), and then use biofuels for the relatively-niche stuff that's left instead of spending excessive effort trying to get electric to cover 100% of cases.
Um piss off. It is not irrelevant or misinformation. That is exactly what petroleum is.
You clearly can't understand a factual statement from an opinion I never said it was good I never said it was bad I just said it was. If you'd bother to take a moment to think about it. You would realize that I was referring to the fact that petroleum is extremely energy dense. For the very reason I stated. That is fundamentally why petroleum has become a successful energy source and why it's been so difficult to replace.
You're welcome to point out where I said it was renewable. I think you're going to have a difficult time finding that statement.
As for being a pedantic ass that's clearly your territory. A pedantic ass that it likes to put words in other people's mouths.
Your post was bordering on irrelevant to the original comment. In light of that the information you provided can really only be interpreted is as pro-fossil fuel.
Exactly this. Imagine if gas powered motor could recharge in mere 12 hours and run for up to half the distance. Ah, that would be the dream.
And if you and 5 of your neighbors decide to refuel at the same time during peak hours you have a real chance of overloading your neighborhood grid. And your fuel tank is dead in 5 years, replacing which is more than half of your used cars cost.
Everything non-portable uses electric motors from the time the first wire was invented.
I can. Electric car batteries last 10+ years, often longer than the body work of the car. Lookup Lithium Iron Phosphate, this has around 5-10x the cycle life of conventional lithium batteries. Combine this with the complex heating and cooling systems, battery and charging management in modern EVs and you have something that lasts as long or longer than even a diesel engine.
Cell phone batteries die quickly because both their construction and the way they are managed favour capacity, cost, and charging speed over longevity. Car battery design is much more focused on longevity by comparison. They are also cycled more often and more completely than most EVs.
Grid issues are a real problem. Cars can be used to make this worse or better depending on how they are deployed. If they are charged during peak energy production from solar they can actually help rather than hurt the grid.
You can also rapid charge a car in like 30 minutes. You don't need 12 hours.
I suspect people just assumed you were the same person who wrote the sarcastic comment before the one you replied to and that you were just being combative
My up! can get about 260 miles out of its 30ish liter tank. That is about 1/3rd more than a new leaf. Hardly half the distance.
The electric grid will be fine. This is not the first time it's expanded because of new technological demand. And I've never heard of 5 EVs overloading the grid.
And if the person above could read they'd see that all of these are battery problems, something the original comment said we should have put our focus improving on long ago.
Edit: I'll just add that I love my ICE cars as much as the next petrol head, but the future is electric cars for at least daily driving. We've pretty much perfected combustion engines at this point. F1 engines sit around 50% thermal efficiency, and we're not gonna get any meaningful amount above that (but I will be happy if it turns out I'll have to eat my hat in the future). I just hope petrol engines don't become banned in the future for the enthusiasts.
No, you see, that's not how it works. The battery needs to be filled to 100%, just like a gas tank. And you should only ever charge once you're under 10-20%, just like a gas tank (it's silly to top up every day, that's just a waste of time). We must be able to exactly replicate the current paradigm for people to be able to adjust.
I drive about 150 miles a week and get gas every couple of weeks. It takes 5 minutes. If I have to go to a charger I'll be there for hours. It's absurd.
When you look at fueleconomy.gov you will see that the furthest a compact ev can go is 149 miles while the furthest a ice compact car can go is 594 miles
According to motor trend DC charging is the fastest way to charge your EV and it still takes just under two hours
Couldn't find a source that studied how long a ice takes to recharge but considering how ices are currently extremely common you can easily test that yourself and probably already know it's so quick you don't even think about it
According to car and driver those lithium ion batteries you mentioned while yes they can last a decade most cars typically stay on the road for give or take 30-35 years and lithium ion batteries are inherently expensive and prone to thermal cascading ie catching fire also full charge and depletion wears the battery down over time
You have all kinds of nonsense in your post. Like you limit it to just compact cars for no reason. When you don't limit it to just compact cars then you get EVs with 516 mile range
There are use cases for battery trains. In remote, mountainous locations where the cost for electrifying a track is very high it is not uncommon to use electric trains with batteries. Here in Germany we have several regions where diesel trains have been replaced by them.
Not really. Battery tech has always been advancing. Even today electric vehicles have barely come up with anything new, battery wise. Everyone wants something better than lithium base. No one can get anything to market.
It advanced at a glacier pace because there was no massive driving force. It only kicked off a bit with cell phones and then in any substantial way with laptops. (Yes, batteries existed before that for different things, but there was no massive driving force.) Now imagine what would have happened if we funded it starting in the 1970s.
Yes, but no one's even glancing at it for use in vehicles. The one that's finally getting into production is 70wh/Kg. Not nearly energy dense enough yet for ev's. Lithium batteries are closer to 300wh/Kg. In other words, they take up 1/4th the space and weight. EV's are already a thousand pounds heavier than non ev's and that's already causing extra tire pollution issues and having to overbuild suspension parts and bearings. Making them another 3,000 pounds heavier than that is just out of the question. Let alone making the space to fit the battery.
Sodium is going to change the world with its power storage capabilities connected to solar.
Anyone on like 75% of the planet could 100% live off the electric grid problem free with enough solar panels and a big sodium storage battery.
Yep. A size of vehicle wise comparison would be that a tesla model s sedan weighs around 4,600 pounds. A toyota Corolla weighs around 1,600 pounds less at around 3,000 pounds.
Even the newest and most powerful mass produced American made car ever, the "C8 Corvette Z06" with its big V8 gas engine with 670 horsepower weighs in at around 3,650 pounds.
Oil is honestly an amazing product, chemistry wise there is so much we can do with it and energy wise it's a extremely concentrated and easily transported form of energy.
Energy wise one liter of oil is equivalent to 10 person working for a day !
I repeat, using one liter of oil is like having 10 "slaves" working for us for a day.
Its easy to see why oil became the base of our modern civilization, and easy to see why we don't manage to stop using it even though it's destroying us.
pretty sure most trains are powered by either overhead wires or third rails? considering that urban rail systems are always electrified and those have A LOT of trains.
The point is about utilization of electric motors, if it happens anywhere on earth it's possible. You're trying to insinuate that it isn't true. And it is. Being American has nothing to do with you dunce
Brilliant! This is one of those things that when you see it, it seems so obvious that you wonder how nobody thought of it until now. But it takes someone like Randall to pluck it out of the space of unexplored ideas and present it perfectly.
I always took pascals wager as just being about some nebulous creator type of thing with no real specifics because the argument can't really handle specifics.
Pascal's triangle. This describes how to expand expresions of the form (a+b)^n as well as to compute how many ways there are to pick k objects out of a set of n (ignoring order.
This triangle is computed by starting with 1 at the tip, then having each element be the some of its 2 parents (except the diagonal edges with only one parent, which remains as 1)
Pascal's wager. This is a theological argument for a belief in god that goes "if you believe and god doesn't exist, nothing happens. If you don't believe and he does exist, you suffer for eternity. The logical choice is therefore to believe"
The natural conclusion is therefore to believe in all gods. If procelatizing happens in just the right way, and no one realizes people are talking about the same god, you end up with a triangle of polytheists, where the number of gods they believe in is given by Pascal's triangle.
Pascal was a famous thinker of their time, particularly in mathematics.
Two of the ideas they're remembered for are Pascals Triangle and Pascals Wager.
Their triangle is a helpful tool for combinations of things. Their wager is a (kinda bad in my opinion) argument for why you should believe in the Christian God.
Isaac Asimov's Bible guide convinced me that abrahamic religions are mostly made out from stuff either from Mesopotamia (Sabbath, Eden, the floods) or myths coming from later cults (e.g. Greece).
I don't know about the shrooms, my reading of the old testament made me think it started with some old guy trying to stop his nomadic desert tribe dying of anything too stupid by telling camp fire stories with some sort of message. The whole 'god will make the ground open up to swallow you and your family if you screw up' is a desperate attempt to scare them into not doing stupid things like slaughtering too many of their livestock at once, or eating shellfish whilst wandering around in a desert.
The stories get retold, changed and embellished over generations before being written down, and you end up with the weird mess of basic survival tips, animal husbandry, heroic stories and mystic fluff that is the OT.
The new testament is just the story of a fairly chill guy, with a slight messianic complex, wandering around with his mates and suggesting people be nice to each other, put through a similar transformation.
All Religion has its origin in shamanism. That then led to polytheism which then led to monotheism. What all those have in common is that people made it up as they went along.
Afaik, christians don't see the devil as a god, but as one of god's minions takes with temping the flock or having them prove their faith or some shit.
Catholics also have patron saints for nearly everything from infants to ice skaters that they pray to but that are totally not gods because there is only one god. I mean, yeah, their second most important prayer is directed at the Virgin Mary, but that doesn't mean they worship her or anything.
This presumes some type of "pure" original religion — which indeed some people believe — as opposed to an evolving understanding that is relevant in each generation.
You seem to be confusing religion with a bible, which is probably a reflection of the dominant religion near you, but not every religion has a book, and not every religion with a book understands it in the same way.
xkcd
Hot