New two-stroke engine design could help keep internal combustion around longer
roadandtrack.com
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Electric drivetrains open up an interesting potential for range-extenders which charge the batteries. The constraints are different than conventional engines - lower peak power, more-or-less continuous power output operation, no sudden torque changes. Different constraints generally mean a different optimal solution.
Li-metal batteries [edit: still an immature tech] are at around 14 MJ / kg, and gasoline is at 47.5 MJ / kg.
Moreover, suppose that you are really "off-grid". Meaning, you are off any fuel supply network!! In this case precisely, you would be saved by electric-related techs, such as photovoltaic.
If I want to burn dead leaves to run my car... well that sucks right now (moreover that isn't anymore 0 emission).
If I run off to start a farm, and I buy an existing OTS used tractor, it will have a tank that I can pour almost any flammable liquid into to make it run. If I want to plug the tractor in... well, that'll get the engine to turn over, but it won't get it moving anywhere.
If I build myself a cabin in the woods, I can burn wood or wood pellets to keep cook food, or keep warm during the winter. Alternatively, I could purchase batteries, PV panels, and the necessary charge control electronics, in order to run an electric heater.
Burning recently-alive biomass does release carbon, but it's carbon that was in the atmosphere as recently as a few months ago. It isn't zero emission, but it doesn't contribute a long-term increase to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
A forest is a carbon store. Burning trees puts carbon from this store to the atmosphere.
To count it as carbon neutral is an accounting mistake, that could be very costly...
Burn the dead leaves and you shrink humus (or annihilate it, depending on how much you do it), another huge carbon store. So that makes it yet another accounting mistake.
More generally, it is good practice to separate well atmospheric carbon (CO2) and captive carbone (anything in solid/liquid state). Just show that faithfully in the accounting method, and a lot of good will follow.
https://wood-energy.extension.org/is-burning-wood-carbon-neu...
But burning a preexisting forest is cancelling an existing carbon store and converting lots of solid carbon into atmospheric carbon.
The fact a forest is a carbon store is precisely why a startup such as Pachama exists: they help grow new forests to capture carbon.
Would you then just unnoticingly burn them for energy, and keep telling the customers that you just captured a net amount of carbon?
PS: oh you are jacquesm! :) didn't notice. How are you?
PPS: some critic about the link you sent me ("wood-energy.extension"): I disagree with what they say, in that fallen wood too is a carbon store, and in a forest at equilibrium the amount decomposed by fungi/bacteria is roughly compensated by the newly fallen wood. So that's just a carbon store, and if you begin to burn it you shrink this store.
Also, electric offers you the plethora of choices in methods to produce your energy. If it's not photovoltaic, you still have many solutions. Could as well be eolian, or a dam, or hundred of people riding generator-bikes (half-kidding), or etc.
I've wondered if it makes sense for gyms to be paying for electricity.
Free energy (but maybe only an epsilon), and no more deep vein thrombosis!!
---
Under the worst possible conditions (not considering temperature), on the shortest day of the year, with 100% clouds and a thick layer of snow, PV panels would produce 14% as much power per day as on the longest day of the year with 0 cloud cover.
> Li-metal batteries top at around 14 MJ / kg, and gasoline is at 47.5 MJ / kg.
Wouldn’t this gap actually be very close considering that the efficiency of an ICE on gasoline is what, 30-40% at best (IIRC)?
1kg * 14 MJ/kg * 95% = 13 MJ mechanical
1kg * 47 MJ/kg * 30% = 14 MJ mechanical
It comes out pretty close!
If you want mechanical power and also heat (for keeping people, animals, or equipment warm, decreasing the viscosity of fluids, etc), ICE is definitely the way to go.
-- edit --
/u/ash points out Tesla's energy density is is 0.576 MJ/kg
1kg * 0.58 MJ/kg * 95% = 0.55 MJ mechanical
...not even slightly close.
1 kg * 142 MJ / kg * 50% = 71 MJ mechanical
The dominant solution above all else.
Do you have a link to back this number? Are these batteries rechargeable? Does the measurement include wiring, cooling, cell connections and overall structure of the battery pack?
For comparison, Tesla's (Li-ion) battery pack energy density is 160 Wh/kg, which is 0.576 MJ/kg:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/02/11/energy-density-advanc...
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/ee/c9ee0...
Comparing just the gas tank to several subsystems of a battery electric vehicle is not really an interesting comparison. The closest comparison at that level is just gas vs just cells.
Overall electric is still lower energy density per weight, but is also far more efficient. The whole Tesla pack has the energy of just a couple gallons of gas but can go 400 miles.
They are also quite weight sensitive, requiring additional induced drag to be overcome at heavier weights.
Gas still wins with a short refuel time.
My own initial experiences have been mixed. Overall advantage still goes to gas. But I think we're very close to getting this battery thing figured out. Just a few years away. When we look back it will seem like it happened overnight.
By that logic, you could say that there is absolutely no difference, because if you can imagine a car where the battery can be swapped, you should be able to imagine a car where the entire fuel tank is swapped. A tractor arrives at a station, and instead of filling up 500 litres of diesel, the entire tank is simply replaced with a full one. It wins again since fuel tanks are cheap - they are just metal and plastic after all, you can have several just sitting there, full or empty.
The fact that no one has done it yet suggests that this really isn't an issue - commercial diesel filling stations usually run at much higher pressure than your regular pumps, a truck/tractor tank fills in minutes because of a much higher flow rate.
Swapping gas tanks provides no advantage and you conveniently ignore the whole point of the batteries which is that you don't need any fuel infrastructure to fill your tanks!
A fuel infrastructure costs magnitudes less than just one battery pack. You just need a large tank and pump.
Swapping batteries implies either having multiple batteries, which adds to you costs significantly, or it implies adding yet another proprietary service company putting the screws to you in your supply chain.
For instance, don't forget the fuel suppliers, tank inspectors, etc, in the supply chain on the other side.
I was just commenting on the point of refuel time.
Farmers have machines and equipment for almost everything. Swapping out a flat pack? POC
Also, it's possible to use extended swapable batteries for such cases.
Albeit in theory true, here in the outskirts of the Sahara, I have yet to find a village where I can get an electrician to fix my solar panels, though a few bottles of gasoline can be found everywhere.
All those require huge amounts of energy, and batteries are not yet nearly there (as others point out, your numbers for battery energy density are out by a factor of 30).
If there was a Nobel Prize for understatement, this comment would take it hands down.
New "breakthroughs" in battery energy density are a dime a dozen. They're proving incredibly difficult to bring to commercial viability, and there's no evidence that that's going to change.
It seems obvious that if you want the density of liquid fuels, hydrogen is the answer. Compromising yourself with a lower energy density substance stands as a very difficult problem to solve.
But I think the peak of that opportunity has passed. The market in Europe and China is going to flip to pure electric in 5-8 years, with the US 5 years later. The window for developing new models that fit into that transition is shrinking. There will be long term demand for range extended vehicles, still in 15 or 20 years, but it will be niche.
That's way too optimistic for Europe. Maybe with the exception of Norway and Europe's largest metros like London, most of Europe will stay on ICE for a long time.
The price of electric cars here is too high for most incomes and the cheaper ones have too little range compared to ICEs. Not to mention the charging infrastructure is still lacking.
Right now they're still toys for the rich man with a house and not tools for the average joe.
I'd rather we invest the money in public transport and cycling infrastructure to rid the cities of cars but unfortunately the auto industry lobbies too strong in Europe for that to happen.
Charge infrastructure is expanding rapidly due to current rates of adoption which further makes electric cars more appealing every year.
A lot of people can't drop $40k on a car, but they can spend $25k up front and another $15k over the life of the car.
I think the major changeover will be when I can buy the equivalent of a Honda Accord, but fully electric, and for the same price.
The Tesla Model 3 was supposed to be that, but in reality, it still costs more.
Unless you’re referring to the psychological sticker shock only and not the actual cash flow implications.
I think if Tesla had better leasing, you'd see way more of them
Fiat-Chrysler did it with the 500e, and back in the day the big 3 did it with subsidized Cavaliers and Escorts.
All of this is only happening because of the pressure from EU regulators.
To see how these norms are effectively impossible to meet with ICEs, note that these translate to fuel efficiency of 4, 3, and 2 liters/100 km, or for American folks, 58, 78, and 117 mpg respectively.
€23.000 ID.3 vs €20.000 ICE Golf in Germany, from what I understand the Golf is one of the best selling cars in Europe. Also I believe many European countries exempt or greatly reduce emissions taxes on EVs, so that difference could probably be made up quickly.
Might even be worse we're on the verge of the big global warming panic. At the same time the current pandemic has been showing that the world under a semi command economy is more resilient than neoliberals gaslighted everyone into believing. And thus governments have a lot more wiggle room than they thought. One might find that the resale value of your ICE car is zero.
EVs are better cars for the majority of people. Once drive out price unequivocally beats ICE, EV adoption will skyrocket.
Electric cars are vastly more than just a battery and electric motor. Regenerative breaking, power distribution, heat management, possibly a simple transmission etc etc. The amount of innovation in this space dwarfs what’s happening in the IC space because the problems are so new.
EV’s hit 2.5% of total sales in 2019. 2020 is likely going to be odd, but scaling production still seems to be the bottleneck.
So sure the Roadster can hold what, 6 gallons? Like an econo-box. And weighs 2 1/2 - 3 tons. Much of that in battery.
Yes, weight is still the big issue.
For the most extreme comparison, a Bugatti Chiron gets an EPA 11 MPG so the roadster is arguably the equivalent of a 56 gallon fuel tank where the Chiron is stuck with 26 gallons.
PS: A better comparison would be a similar ~200,000$ two seater but none of them are optimized for fuel efficiency.
A bit of a tangent but it'll be interesting to see what effect an all electric vehicle future has on the design of roadways, bridges, etc. I imagine that many things will need to be rebuilt to handle the additional load.
Raising the average vehicle weight from 1.5 to 3 tons will definitely have an effect.
I would guess electric cars are still negligible in that metric, though.
Actually, they're more likely to prefer a car free lifestyle unless of course they have a six figure job in finance or at FAANG but that's like 1% of Millennials and GenZ in Europe, the rest are broke AF.
Let's face it, pure EV adoption is a lot slower than we'd like to and lying to ourselves about it doesn't help.
Hybrids are easy to justify buying as you don't depend on charging infrastructure or lack thereof but once you switch to pure EV that becomes your bottleneck which rules out drivers who don't have chargers available at their home or at work or who want to drive long distances on vacations with family or who don't have too much money to spend on a car.
In other words, I can't prove with certainty that the market will flip, but I wouldn't bet on the contrary.
I don't know if it'll require upgrades to the power grid. You've already got 240v in Europe, so that's only ~10 hours to charge a Tesla. But could it handle thousands of EVs charging simultaneously?
If there's any place in the world that can do this it's Europe.
From top to bottom, it would fit about 40 cars - but there's only 6-8 street lamps? Ok, so maybe the council could fit a new charging post every 10 metres or so - but then the question is, with what money? There's hardly any cash to keep maintaining the roads at all, where would they find the money to dig up every single street in the city and put in charging posts? Even if they are paid, you'd wait a very long time to make your money back, and then there's another issue I have - at home, I can charge my car at about £0.12/kWh during the day and £0.05/kWh during the night. But public charging points I can see around at crazy expensive - like £0.30-£0.40 per kWh. At that point, it's literally cheaper to drive a good diesel.
Lots of European cities are broke at this point and have much bigger problems to fix right now than EV charging stations and if private companies would install them across the cities, the charging costs would be high enough to make EVs ownership unappealing.
Add the fact that EVs here are more expensive than in the US and you have the reason why most EVs right now are only owned by upper class people who can afford to have their own private charging station on their own property.
There's a reason diesel ICEs, as dirty as they are, are still so popular in Europe. They're cheap to run.
Ironically, as green as it may be, Europe will fall behind China and the US at mass EV adoption.
Unless they'd be given away for free, expecting EVs to take over the market here in 5 to 8 years is dreaming at best.
These European city planners should have listened to Strongtowns and other New Urbanists, and instead of encouraging suburban development style which makes prohibitively expensive for cities to maintain streets, instead followed the dense urban pattern of American cities.
"The number of battery charge-points will be tripled to 100,000 by the end of next year."
The wires aren't the problem; you've already got a power grid carrying kilovolts along the same streets to power the buildings. The cost is the charging ports. So start with one, reserve the space for EVs and make it expensive.
Then people won't want to use it. Most of the time they'll charge at work or some restaurant that installed a charging port to drive customers to its business. Which is why you only have to start with one -- the first one on the street is just for emergencies. You might have ten EVs in the area and one charging port because at any given time only one person is willing to pay that much to use it. Which also means that it's regularly in use and can recover its costs quickly. But then it's there if you really need it, so more people can feel comfortable buying EVs.
Then once there are more EVs, you can install more charging ports -- they're paying for themselves, after all, as long as you don't install so many they don't stay in use.
Then once you've paid off the capital cost you can lower the price, so more people use them, so you can build even more. When you have 10 charging ports but 9 are already paid off, you only have to charge 10% of the original premium to pay off the 10th. So in the long term you still end up with plenty of charging ports on the street at only a slightly higher price than they are in other places.
Rest assured it will, and not only on the power grid.
Back of the envelope calculation.
A modern lamp post (one every 30 mt or so) is (led based) 60-80-100W, if infrastructure (cables) are not so recent, previous generation of street lightning were 150-250W per post.
Cables are dimensioned accurately to carry that kind of current/power.
A charging every 30 mt needs to serve 6-7 cars, we are talking of 7-10KW, i.e. 7000-10000 W, something like 40 times the power the infrastructure was designed for.
And each 300 mt stretch of street will need something in the order of magnitude of 70-100KW, and since all cars will be charged at night, there are very little to be spared for non-contemporaneus power usage.
In areas where the street lights are set onto the property side of the sidewalk (or even into lawns) rather than on the sidewalk abutting the street (most NA residential areas I think) I don't see this idea gaining a lot of traction. Or at least not remaining for long past the sidewalk turning into an obstacle course for the elderly and others with limited movement.
Lots of essential infrastructure is cheap because of competition, like for example electricity generation. There is no reason to believe EV charging will be different.
Of course, it might also turn out that while electricity costs are low, other costs of running charging business are high. If that’s the case, that doesn’t bode well for EV adoption in among people who don’t live in houses.
This is exactly what I'm saying though - motorway petrol stations are insanely expensive, because they have no competition - a company wins a contract to run the only petrol station on a given stretch of the A1, so they can charge obscene prices for petrol. Same is already happening with electricity - some providers along motorways charge an insane £0.69 per kWh, it would be cheaper to fill up another car with premium unleaded and use it to charge the electric car at that point.
I've been reading HN for years and people from the USA keep writing that this didn't happen there for fiber and other telecommunication service. Is it going to happen for EV chargers?
The first customers are people who can install a charging port where they normally park their car. That's probably more than half of car owners, and gets you to at least a double digit percentage of cars as electric.
At that point there are enough electric cars that a charger starts getting installed anywhere there's a lot of parking. Then more people can buy EVs, and do, so more chargers get installed. By the time most cars are electric they'll be everywhere.
You can charge while you get groceries (or a haircut, or dinner, or whatever) and then go on with your day. Certainly not as convenient as charging at home, but not impossible.
There is zero elemental hydrogen on Earth. 99% of the one we use is a byproduct of fossil fuel industry. Yes, you can produce it from electrolysis, but not only the hydrogen produced this way will never "break even" it's actually much worse than "even" since you then need to spend a whole load of energy to compress it and bottle it. Why not...just put the electricity into the existing grid and charge automotive batteries directly? After all, fuel cell cars are electric cars, direct combustion of hydrogen was experimental and extremely inefficient.
That brings me to my next point - hydrogen has the smallest molecule of all, which means that it evaporates naturally through any container you put it in. 70kg lead bottle only holds 1L of hydrogen, and it naturally loses all of it in 2-3 weeks. So no underground carparks, garages etc because of the explosion risks.
But finally - there is no infrastructure for hydrogen. It's like trying to build a network of petrol stations....from scratch.
And batteries are definitely good enough to power larger trucks, it's just the cost that's prohibitive(enough cells for a large semi would cost many times more than the truck itself).
> There is zero elemental hydrogen on Earth.
Not actually true. As I understand it, reserves of natural hydrogen do exist underground, similar to how helium is sometimes trapped underground in certain formations. These could potentially be huge source of hydrogen, although right now it's just speculation.
> Yes, you can produce it from electrolysis, but not only the hydrogen produced this way will never "break even" it's actually much worse than "even" since you then need to spend a whole load of energy to compress it and bottle it.
Since we live in a world of zero priced, and sometimes negatively priced renewable electricity, this is a non-issue. In fact, it's irrelevant. The biggest motivation for green hydrogen right now is the fact that we have far more green energy that we can use for large stretches of time on the grid. We're currently "curtailing" that electricity, which is a fancy word meaning that we're throwing it away. Turning what is in effect a waste product into a valuable new fuel is a big gain.
> Why not...just put the electricity into the existing grid and charge automotive batteries directly? After all, fuel cell cars are electric cars, direct combustion of hydrogen was experimental and extremely inefficient.
Largely because we can't match production with demand. As I mentioned above, we have huge surpluses during parts of the day, but also we have huge shortages at other times. Using hydrogen as a load balancer is an excellent idea right now. We can do this to a certain extent using batteries or pumped water, but we quickly run into the limits of these technologies. Hydrogen can be stored in far larger quantities than any battery in the form of underground salt caverns.
> That brings me to my next point - hydrogen has the smallest molecule of all, which means that it evaporates naturally through any container you put it in. 70kg lead bottle only holds 1L of hydrogen, and it naturally loses all of it in 2-3 weeks. So no underground carparks, garages etc because of the explosion risks.
Carbon fiber tanks have long since solved this problem. We know this since you can buy FCEVs right now, and they are perfectly fine vehicle with none of the above issues. Indeed, I've seen quite a few hydrogen skeptics review these cars, and while they maintain their skepticism of the idea of hydrogen, they seem to be at a loss at describing any kind of real shortcoming in the technology itself.
> But finally - there is no infrastructure for hydrogen. It's like trying to build a network of petrol stations....from scratch.
This is changing. There are now hundreds of hydrogen refuel stations around the world, and many more being built. This is particularly true in Asia, where governments in that region have sponsored huge hydrogen infrastructure buildouts.
> And batteries are definitely good enough to power larger trucks, it's just the cost that's prohibitive(enough cells for a large semi would cost many times more than the truck itself).
There many problems with battery powered semi-trucks. Cost is one of them, and weight is another big one. Furthermore, recharging them in a few minutes is a huge selling point, and batteries cannot deliver on that need. FCEVs are a much better answer for long-haul trucking than BEVs.
Where is 'here'?
Here in Australia the price of pure electric cars is way too high - and not helped by federal government (lack of) subsidies, tariffs, policy preferences for fossil fuel, lack of charging infrastructure, etc.
I recently scoped out comparable ICE vs full electric new vehicles, and 'around the same' quality/comfort/range/size we were looking at roughly 3.5x the cost for electric. A 5y cost projection for an ICE that does 4.5 litres / 100 km, even with anticipated (higher) servicing costs, doesn't get us to a compelling proposition.
What you're looking for is a series hybrid, like the Chevy Volt. In a series hybrid the only thing the ICE powertrain does is run a generator to keep the battery topped up. This allows the ICE to run in its ideal power band range permanently, reducing its size and making gasoline only travel much more efficient while lowering vehicle cost.
Tow your own generator.
I suspect that would really mess with the load dynamics on most passenger type cars, as the generator would be pretty heavy. I don't think you'd be able to lift a big enough one into the trunk area, and attaching it to the back of the car would be a pain too. I think towing solves a lot of issues for the idea.
And it's normally at home, so if the power goes off for a week you can still run your house and charge your car.
Like other commentators have mentioned, if a u-haul like network of these were made, if you ran out of charge somewhere, they could drop one of these off to get you going again, as a depleted battery pack will charge slowly, making the van full of batteries potentially more expensive (you would have to pay for an extra 15-30m of their time).
If anyone did this, they probably would offer 15kW and 30kW versions, so both passenger cars and light trucks would be covered.
Both have a planetary gearset with engine on one gear, output on another, and an electric motor on the third. The difference lies on which gear the second electric motor is placed (motor shaft on the Volt, output shaft on the Prius), as well as some additional clutches and brakes in the Volt.
More info here: https://gm-volt.com/2015/02/20/gen-2-volt-transmission-opera...
When the Volt runs out of battery, it's almost not noticeable apart from engine noise. The performance characteristics in hybrid mode are almost identical to EV mode in terms of torque/acceleration.
It's an engineering marvel. I love mine. Shame GM killed it.
The Volt has basically the same engine as in the Chevy Sonic or Cruze, and the i3 range extender option uses the same engine as their C600 series scooters. Those engines are designed with a quick throttle response and a wide power band to operate over an RPM range sufficient to drive a vehicle through a regular transmission.
I don't doubt that for the same time and money, it was far better for GM and BMW to take advantage of the economies of scale around those products than to design an engine specifically to function as a range extender, but if they really took this as a core function or started from scratch I expect they might select a medium-speed industrial diesel engine instead: something optimized for a particular speed and power output that does that one thing optimally.
C'mon, can people research before opining?
"While it shares many parts with the new 1.5L I-4 used in other GM products, the Gen II engine’s combustion process and calibration are specific to the Volt. Its larger displacement not only improves fuel efficiency but also provides more torque, which contributes to the Gen II Volt’s surprising quietness."
https://www.wardsauto.com/engines/gen-ii-chevy-volt-propulsi...
So even though you're carrying around a huge amount of potential energy in the form of gasoline, your engine can only covert about 20% of that into motion.
The weight of combustible tank goes down as it become empty, while a battery weight remains constant.
This must have a huge decisional impact when manufacturing aircrafts.
Stationary generators and marine drivetrains come to mind. Those are less sensitive to the greater size and weight that this engine might have, and they benefit greatly from the ability to load fuel, store it, burn it as needed, and be refueled at any time, even while running.
As an example, my local university's datacenter has two rooms full of batteries for power backup. They instantly switch on, but can only power the datacenter for a short time. To protect against extended blackouts, there are two redundant diesel generators in the sub-basement, and enough fuel to run the datacenter for several months. Battery technology seems to have a ways to go before it'll be worthwhile to just have a basement full of batteries as long-term backup power.
People with those sorts of use cases are probably going to be relying on ICEs for a long time to come. In the meanwhile, efficiency improvements can make them less harmful to own and operate. And even after 150 years of developing ICEs, engineers are still coming up with ideas, maybe even practical ones, to gain those improvements.
In their basic function though I agree they are very similar.
Perhaps all of this is obvious to many others; it's interesting and novel to me, anyway.
Because they can't satisfy every need just yet. Imagine we still have horses even with engines being around for more than a century. And adapting to a newer IC tech might actually be cheaper and easier than redesigning for EV tech. Manufacturers already have the experience, logistics chains, much of the designs, etc.
Some transitions are never complete because sometimes there's no "one size fits all" option for the manufacturer or the consumer.
There are still hundreds of thousands to millions of work horses around the world. I'm still very much for improving old tech where it's possible and makes sense, even if it's niche.
But I really wish the main argument was our survival. We simply won't survive if we continue burning fossil fuels.
kwh/kg is a measure of density, not efficiency. Very different concepts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_turbine
(When I was a kid this thing was mythological and now it has a Wikipedia page. What a world!)
It's a bit like hard drives... As soon as the SSD arrived, everyone saw that hard drives would eventually die out, so manufacturers pretty much stopped new technology development. Sure, there have been a few small advances, but seek times and data read speeds haven't gone up for a decade, and capacities have only crept up.
IC engines are the same. It might take them 30 years to die out, but in those 30 years there won't be any significant tech advances, because every company that makes them is only optimizing for cost in a shrinking market.
While not many new things in HDD space have made it to market, there is still quite a few big things in development, the new HAMR technology (and friends from other vendors) are projected to be able to double/triple capacity.
SSDs sadly still cost a lot if you need 50TB of them. Comparatively, my 50TB NAS cost me about 15$/TB. Most SSDs still hover around 90$/TB and go up to 120$/TB depending on use case.
Similary ICEs have two big advantages over non-combustion alternatives: energy density and price. A modern ICE is complicated but not terribly hard to construct, in part because processes exist but also because the things that happen in an ICE can largely be achieved by using common materials like steel, titanium, ceramics, oil and rubber. Gasoline and Diesel are very energy dense (and bad for the environment and climate) and can be lit/triggered by a simple electric sparkplug.
Comparatively running a hydrogen (non-combustion) engine is very hard to achieve as hydrogen is an element that really wants to set itself on fire and if it does so, the result is not very conducive to safe operation (hydrogen flames tend to be invisible and it loves to explode or atleast deflagrate).
Electric engines are much more efficient than any ICE but suffer from energy density problems (solvable by using a hydrogen fuelcell but that has above mentioned issues). If not for that, it would be the next thing and people are working on that. I have no doubt that despite that, ICEs will continue to be used where alternatives aren't possible or expensive.
Flash storage is denser than HDD storage. For an easy example, think about stuffing. 3.5" enclosure with 1TB microSD cards.
As for SSDs, here's a four year old article on Samsung shipping 15TB SSDs in a 2.5" form factor.
HDDs are unlikely to reclaim the density crown from flash. That said, HDDs do still maintain quite a price advantage, which is typically more relevant than storage density for archival solutions.
The $/byte figures all remain in favor of HDDs.
And, as always, a relevant xkcd tells us that one of the highest bandwidth data transfer solutions remains overnighting a milk jug of microSD cards: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
If you are optimizing for volume, you will have all flash-based storage. If you are optimizing for price, you will have all HDD (I think. Not sure on tape pricing).
If we want to optimize for another measure, that's fine. But we can't redefine density just because there are price differences. It's like saying my Mazda is faster than a Ferrari, because the Ferrari is so expensive.
So, practicality is a different measure to optimize for, and a much more complex and situational one. We can observe that many bulk storage solutions use HDDs rather than flash storage. This provides evidence that HDDs are practical for bulk storage. It tells us very little about density.
You keep coming back to "practicality", and this is harder to define. I welcome a proposed definition, so we can talk about this more clearly.
As a first pass, I might consider "practical to access" as being a combination of available at retail, and able to be readily attached to consumer hardware through a combination of onboard motherboard IO connectivity and expansion cards.
Here's a list of hard drives available at retail[0] that shows the largest retail HDD at 16TB and 3.5" form factor, vs SSD at 15.36TB and 2.5" form factor. These are available at retail today, and in standard form factors, with standard physical interfaces (SAS and SATA).
Without even getting into volume, but just looking at a single dimension, width, we can see that the HDD is 40% larger, physically and only 4% larger in storage capacity. The story only gets worse if we move to volume, because the 2.5" form factor is smaller in every dimension than 3.5". An enclosure to hold equivalent storage based on these two drives would be smaller for the SSDs than for the HDDs.
Perhaps practicality just means something that you could find without needing specialty hardware? Datacenter stuff is huge:
If we move to things you might find in a datacenter, we can find some articles (both from 2018). One talks about an existing 100TB 3.5" SSD - still in a standard form factor and with a standard interface (SATA/SAS).[1] In another article from the same year, Seagate was introducing the largest HDD, a 16TB model, and discussing the potential to hit 60TB by 2030.[2] Again, this is at the same time that a 100TB SSD became available.
Price is also something that has come up a couple times. I do not know if price is synonymous with practicality to you? I would appreciate clarification on the matter.
SSDs are, as I have mentioned previously, more expensive per unit of storage than HDDs. This is not up for debate, but I feel almost as if you think I am debating it.
So, for a specific use case, it is very easy for one to make a judgment call that HDDs are a better investment. But I do not see any argument to be made that HDDs are denser than flash-based storage. Again, density is storage capacity per unit volume.
A specific example, archival storage, would likely not benefit from an all-flash storage solution, but would be better served with HDDs. The tradeoffs for archival typically favor cost and often don't need the read and write performance of an SSD. As we agree, HDDs have better capacity per unit price.
If practicality and price are synonymous, it becomes a bit of a weird measure. We'll be taking a double ratio, of price/bytes/volume. But lets do it:
HDD dimensions(mm):
26.11*101.85*146.99
390891.021465
HDD density (TB/mm^3):
16/390891.021465
.00004093212461118814
SSD dimensions (mm):
15*70.1*100.45
105623.175
SSD Density (TB/mm^3):
15.36/105623.175
.00014542263097090198
HDD $/density ($/TB/mm^3):
499.99 / .00004093212461118814
12215100.11389283589280755309
SSD $/density ($/TB/mm^3):
4295 / .00014542263097090198
29534605.24902343799726872620
On the point of density, though, it seems clear to me, and I hope to anyone else looking at the data, that flash-based storage is denser (bytes/volume) than HDDs.
Dimensions are from Newegg[3][4].
[0] https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#sort=...
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/worlds-largest-ssd-hits-100tb/
[2] https://www.alphr.com/storage/1010285/seagate-reveals-world-...
[3] https://www.newegg.com/seagate-nytro-3330-15-36tb/p/1Z4-002P...
[4] https://www.newegg.com/seagate-ironwolf-pro-st16000ne000-16t...
And not only that, 16 TB HDD is quite affordable. Just 500 dollars for a Seagate IronWolf. Meanwhile a 3.2 TB Seagate Nytro will set you back about $1800. SSD mass storage is an option for only those with deep pockets.
Hell, not even tape drives have gone away yet. Amazon Glacier is just one example.
More than that, a 5 year old nas drive can outperform a modern cheap ssd in throughput easily.
Physical memory cell dimensions decreased steadily until the arrival of 3D NAND, whereupon cell sizes jumped back up and have been relatively stable since. SSDs incorporate more advanced error correction with each generation of controllers, so today's drives can get more usable write endurance out of the same physical cell size.
Number of bits that can be stored per cell has been increasing. Each time we cram another bit into each memory cell, performance and write endurance drop. But in between those major shifts, successive generations of flash tend to get faster and more energy-efficient over time. Today's 3 bit per cell TLC NAND is much faster than the TLC from 5 years ago, and has better write endurance thanks to the transition to 3D NAND. Today's SLC NAND has comparable performance and write endurance to the planar SLC that disappeared from the market over 5 years ago, but now it's several times cheaper.
And most of the compromises that have been made with NAND flash over the past 10+ years are purely academic. The vast majority of use cases do not need flash rated for 100k P/E cycles, and excess endurance beyond your needs provides no tangible benefit. Most of the endurance that has theoretically been sacrificed was never needed in the first place. Most of the performance lost has been offset by using more flash in parallel and by eliminating bottlenecks elsewhere.
The only metric by which a 5 year old NAS hard drive—or any hard drive—will outperform a modern cheap SSD is in long-term sustained sequential write throughput. Even the slowest modern cheap SSD will offer at least twice the sequential read throughput, and orders of magnitude better random read or write throughput. And it's not like the write throughput of modern SSDs is abysmal: gigabit Ethernet is a more significant bottleneck when filling a 1TB or larger dirt-cheap consumer SSD. So unless you're trying to use cheap consumer SSDs in an expensive NAS with 10GbE, the poor write performance of low-end SSDs won't come into play.
Cheap SSDs can tank below 70MB/s after cache, which is less than a gigabit connection, so it can totally affect your performance even in the smallest local networks.
You don't have to sustain writes for long at all to start seeing the compromises hidden in cheap SSDs, especially if they're using their TLC as SLC cache, in which case you run out faster and faster.
Nearly all cloud providers have more storage bytes than they have IO (ie. each individual hard drive receives so many read/write requests per second that if they filled the drive all the way to full some read/write requests couldn't be handled and would be unacceptably delayed)
The “cloud” and all your data still primarily runs on mechanical drive and their density is now higher than ever.
And the development road map for mechanical drives is still expanding.
HAMR drives will be on the market in 2021-2022, then you have BPR, MAMR and even GMR drives on roadmaps and research papers.
The only reason you think development has stopped is because other than for home NAS mechanical drives have pretty much disappeared from the consumer market.
Perpendicular magnetic recording hit the market around the same time SSDs started to go mainstream. Since then, hard drives have advanced with the introduction of helium filled drives, multi-stage actuators and shingled magnetic recording. This has enabled an order of magnitude increase in drive capacity, and substantial increases in sequential transfer speed. Dual-actuator drives and HAMR/MAMR are in the process of moving from the lab to commercialization, and will respectively bring an increase in random and sequential IO throughput (but not latency) and more density increases (which always bring some sequential throughput improvement, too).
What's really been missing from the hard drive R&D scene is more Nobel-class discoveries like giant magnetoresistance to allow for big jumps forward.
However, advances in automotive are also driven by legislation. The three cylinder turbo charged engines you get in regular European cars are there because of the legislation and that cheating diesel doesn't sell any more.
With this continual ratcheting up of legislation there is an incentive for manufacturers to improve the ICE technology. Particularly when efficiency is across the fleet so those inefficient SUVs have to be offset by lean hatchbacks.
This means there is incentive for golden bullets, solutions that promise the earth and allow ICE to linger on for longer. Not many of the legacy auto makers can compete in EV sales. They could make the product but the Tesla is hard to beat. They all fall short except when in the subcompact segment where Tesla don't have a product offering.
Honda has a nicely sized sedan that gets 55 MPG city out of a drivetrain unit that is amply powerful.
Most of them produce small 4-cylinder engines that are as powerful as the V-6's that proceeded them, all while producing less emissions and offering greater fuel economy. Even Ford, Chevy, and RAM are putting gas 4-cylinder engines in their mid-size trucks are just as capable at 8-cylinder engines used to be just not very long ago.
Emissions and fuel economy standards will continue to tighten, which means that ICE development will continue for a long time.
Sure, turbochargers and hybrid tech aren't new in an of themselves, but that doesn't matter because there's still a lot of room for development left in them.
Even just 5 years ago, the idea of getting a roomy, nicely configured sedan that gets 55MPG city was a silly notion. Now, Honda sells them all day for $24k USD.
VW diesels from the 90s were doing 5 or 6 l/100km
I think this is somewhat exaggerated; it never really went above half the new car market, and is obviously down a lot now.
This monster of mechanical complexity is brand new as of a couple days ago. What company is going to commit the next half decade to developing it while watching gasoline engines fade into the background? Especially after watching Nissan's new engine totally flop.
My guess is virtually none.
I wonder how much more efficiency can we continue to squeeze out from ICE?
What prevents the burning from getting into the mixing chamber? It seems like the sliding valve is open while it’s burning. And there’s higher pressure in the cylinder.
What prevents the mixing chamber gas from getting into the compression reservoir?
I don’t understand how the heat differential between the injection and ignition phases is so great that ignition happens as the slide valve opens, but so little that ignition doesn’t happen within the fuel injection chamber. Perhaps the pressure differential regulates that as well?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_cycle_engine
"The Backus Water Motor Company of Newark, New Jersey was producing an early example of a split cycle engine as far back as 1891. The engine, of "a modified A form, with the crank-shaft at the top", was water-cooled and consisted of one working cylinder and one compressing cylinder of equal size and utilized a hot-tube ignitor system."
-some guy in 1980.
History is littered with inventions that didn't gain widespread use initially then some little advancement(s) came along that make the inventions workable when revisited and tweaked. Repeating firearms and electric lightbulbs are two good examples.
I don't pretend to know which bucket this "new" engine advancement will fit into but I think your judgement is premature.
I've worked on those systems, they were clearly a game changer, incremental improvements got us to where we are today. Almost no single technology hits the ground running, especially not in inherently conservative domains such as automotive. Interesting implementation details made the Citroen one much harder to work on.
Electronics aren't perfect either, they make it a lot harder to keep such older vehicles functioning whereas the purely mechanical ones from an earlier era will quite likely last practically for ever.
Note that Diesel has had mechanical fuel injection for much, much longer and that it wasn't exactly new technology to begin with. It's just that the conditions in a gasoline engine are a bit different which needed a re-thinking of the concept.
The jetronic is now 50 years old:
https://www.bosch.com/stories/50-years-of-bosch-gasoline-inj...
To suggest that fuel injection had to wait until the 80's before it was commercialized is a ridiculous attempt to rewrite history.
I have been surprised at how much 40V/80V electric systems are cutting into what was traditionally two-stroke light engines for string trimmers and mowers. The batteries are expensive though, and I don't know how many you'd need to have in rotation to be able to keep one fully charged and ready to go under continuous usage.
Theoretically, anyway; with our tiny yard this is seldom tested. Which why I'm annoyed by neighbors that buy a new gas-powered mower. There is not a yard within at least a 3 mile radius of me that can't be mowed by a modern, lithium-battery push mower.
My lawn mower 5Ah @56V (EGO power) is good for half an hour. It charges from empty to full in maybe 40 minutes. In a trimmer same battery seems to last forever, maybe at least 2 hours.
This engine has only one combustion chamber for every four cylinders, which means that it experiences one quarter of an ignition per revolution per cylinder.
It's not a 4-stroke, clearly, but I don't see how you can get away with calling it a 2-stroke either. The strokes kind of become beside the point, but if I had to I might want to call this an 8-stroke engine.
I see them pilfering ideas from this for 'simpler' engines. That valve design feels like it could be used for about anything. I've seen other engine designs that use a single intake chamber, so that part has in fact already been done before.
That recuperation chamber trick I think could be applied to a traditional 4-stroke engine, which you would need every other cycle and therefore could share with another cylinder (opposed by a full revolution, which I hear at least a few 4 cylinders do). And something similar could be applied on the intake side (although you might have to use the ignition cylinder for the second compression) and then fully half of your cylinders fire.
The video was released well before the article, and I believe the article was posted to spread the video more widely.
How long would I need to wait for these theoretical improvements to go from lab to reliable, mass market cars? Why aren't they here already, why would I wait a decade or two (for what, a 10%-20% improvement?) if I can buy a full electric car tomorrow?
I don't object to improvements, but it's a race, and it seems like ICEs are losing that race unless they can do something impressive on a very short timescale.
We're still improving on DSL and coax as long as they have to be around even if fiber is better.
If electrics take the mass market, as I think they will, then new ICEs will largely just vanish from the market, and anyone who needs a normal family car can and will buy electric. Improvements to ICE tech don't go into old used cars because we don't upgrade their engines. The only ICEs that would be sold new are ones built to meet special needs, but they're probably going to be uncommon enough that improvements in them don't benefit "us" in a meaningful way; instead they become something you can largely ignore.
Like, nobody is campaigning for fuel efficiency / pollution mandates for ATVs, tractors, supercars, or excavators, because they aren't a blimp on the radar. In these applications, fuel economy tends to be a very secondary concern anyway.
Over time, more areas will have fiber, and more people will be able to make the choice, or even have no choice but to buy fiber. Likewise, over time, charging access will grow and gasoline access will shrink, and more people will own electric cars. During the transition, there will be lots of people who might yearn to own an electric car (just as I currently yearn for fiber), but don't because the vehicles will be expensive, they won't be able to charge at home, and their routine places won't offer car charging. For those people, having access to less-dirty ICE cars will be a strict, if less-than-maximum, improvement over owning older, dirtier ICE cars.
[1] I can't charge at home because my neighborhood only has street parking, and the parking spots are on the other side of the street from my home.
EV charging infrastructure in many countries is rarer than hen's teeth. It's also much more expensive compared to fuel infrastructure that's already paid for and in place for decades.
> fuel economy tends to be a very secondary concern anyway
Fleets of vehicles always have fuel consumption as a prominent concern. But the pollution might also be since legislation could very well start covering construction or industrial equipment.
> If electrics take the mass market
"Mass" never meant 100%. We are surrounded by outdated tech that is still around because it fills a need even if just in a niche. Despite people insisting the fixed phone and snail mail have been superseded by mobiles and email, both of those legacy options are still there. Even selling 10% of the current volumes of ICEs still justifies improving them.
45 miles an hour seems like a reasonable compromise speed. At 65% the common highway speed limit of 70 mph, it's still fast enough to cross most states in a day, to travel between nearby cities in an hour or so, and to do errands in an afternoon. But a car at that speed has only 41% the kinetic energy as at 70 mph, making colisons less lethal, and has similarly less wind resistance, requiring smaller engines and less fuel.
Maybe I just think trains are romantic...
On the other hand, cars have been getting safer and faster and more efficient, roads have been getting wider and safer.. only speed limits haven't been lifted to match. A part of me wants to live the utopia where I can get where I want to be in less than half the time it takes today. That'd make the difference between going to my parents for a coffee after work vs having to reserve a full day (if not a full weekend) for the trip.
Trains are not really a solution around here.
I was glad I wasn't driving, because not only is that a greater posted-vs-actual speed difference than I've seen before, but I've never actually driven that fast in my life. I'd have been torn between driving 80 in the right lane and being constantly passed at 10-15mph, or being white-knuckled behind some other vehicle and setting a personal landspeed record.
In my case, rural Finland, it's been the same for as long as I remember. Maximum limit is 120 km/h on freeways (and there are practically none of them where I usually drive), elsewhere on bigger inter-city roads it's 100 km/h during summer and 80 km/h during winter. Lesser roads, never more than 80 km/h.
And traffic never flows significantly faster than the limit. A few km/h over the limit at most. There are some weirdos who drive much faster and are constantly overtaking others, but relatively few people drive like that. If anything, it seems to me that speeding has become less common over the years as the police have tightened the limit at which they'll fine you.
People are basically behaving like it's German autobahn everywhere. Even the informal rules have adjusted - in a major city, you not only respect the right hand rule, but also give right of way to all vehicles on the more major road. The conflict is resolved by blinking headlights.
Honda used to be the most popular brand here (90's and first few years of 00's).
Speed limits themselves only have a passing correlation to safe traffic speed. Almost nobody actually follows them intentionally at scale (traffic just moves at the maximum safe speed which just sometimes happens to be at or below the posted limit) which is why most municipalities are abandoning the "slap a sign with a low number on it" approach for "traffic calming" road features. Traffic moves at what it considered to be the highest safe speed for the conditions (a bunch of factors too long to list). You're seeing high differences because there's many roads that have speed limits that are unrealistically low for light traffic conditions (often below the designed speed of the road) and traffic density (as opposed to visibly or a sharp curve) was the road condition that was the bottleneck on speed on most busy roads. 'Rona has widened that bottleneck so of course you're seeing bigger differences between the posted limits and the traffic speed on those roads (which is probably all roads if you only ever drive during daytime hours in urban areas).
Edit: kind of got off on a tangent there but the point I should have made is that speed limits are fixed whereas traffic speed is variable based on conditions. As conditions change both slowly over time and day to day/hour to hour the max safe traffic speed changes. With 'Rona chopping congestion across the board it's no surprise that you see traffic speeds much farther from the speed limit on roads where traffic volume was a big factor in the traffic speed.
What do you mean by that? If you're covering long distances in the Western US, it's not at all uncommon to be driving 70+ for hours at a time.
That is solely determined by the energy required. And there is, where the electric car excels. A Tesla uses less than the equivalent of 2l of fuel for 100km or in other units achieves 120mpg. In situations you describe, it fares even better, as 60% of the kinetic energy built up is gained back when braking using the electric motors. So mass is much less a problem with electric cars than with combustion engines, which can't recuperate the kinetic energy.
And there are currently more fossil fuel cars on the road with regenerative braking than there are EVs ;-)
The article doesn't mention what kind of fuel this new engine uses, but if it can run on ethanol, or synthesized hydrocarbons like E-diesel then this could definitely be a good thing.
They are the ones that ought to go electric first. The easier ones.
Well, do you easily find a refueling station in the middle of the forest? If you brought spare fuel containers, why wouldn't you bring all-the-same spare batteries?
I have a chainsaw that runs on mains power. It's really nice (and quiet) for smaller tasks close to the house, but it doesn't help once you get outside extension cord-range.
But if you, like me, use 2-3l of bio-fuel a year during only 2-3 days on the chainsaw there are not many options and not much to save. Even added up all the fuel used on chainsaws is microscopic compared to for instance savings going from giant trucks to smaller trucks or cars, which is an easy fix by changing regulations in US to not favor giant trucks and subsiding fuel
Yes (as long as the engineers don't seriously mess up).
Nearly all of the energy released by burning gasoline is in the form of heat. ICE engines use that heat to expand gases, and capture the expansion as mechanical motion. Modern automotive ICE engines capture roughly 40% of their combustion output as mechanical work. The remaining 60% of the energy, still in the form of heat, is lost through the radiator and the tailpipe. Improving that ratio allows you to burn less fuel to get the same work done. Carbon is emitted by burning fuel, so burning 14% less fuel (yet accomplishing the same work) would result in approximately 14% less carbon being released for the same task.
Off the top of my head, here are some reasons that improving theoretical thermodynamic efficiency might not reduce carbon emissions:
* The extra parts to increase the efficiency (the fourth piston) could sap more energy in friction than they capture from the waste heat. (This would cause the engine to not actually have the claimed thermodynamic efficiency -- it's back to producing the same amount of waste heat as before, just in a more complicated way.)
* The combustion could be hard to control and inefficient, sending unburned fuel out the exhaust pipe. (This lowers the combustion efficiency, but doesn't actually change the thermodynamic efficiency -- it's still producing less heat per gram of burned fuel.)
* The higher compression ratio, and the different mixing pattern caused by the sliding valve, might cause more-potent greenhouse gases to be produced than CO2. (This doesn't change the efficiency at all, but it does affect the environmental impact similarly to burning more fuel in a less-efficient engine.)
Electric cars are well on their way to proving themselves. This new technology is too late to slow down the electric takeover. Its only use is to make those vehicles that are unable to switch to electric (probably because of fuel density or a need for rapid refueling) cleaner. Which is still useful, I guess. Though I'm hoping they won't be necessary at all.
It wasn't clear that the article author was aware of them either (and in fact I don't think I'd heard of them until the movie Sahara)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indirect_injection#Classificat...
Just scrap it all and go full electric. Coming out of COVID lockdown is a great time to invest and mandate.
He also intended the fuel for it to be peanut oil or canola oil a crop farmers could grow for their tractors.
Glow plugs are still here sort of although now a heating grid. My diesel truck has it to pre-heat the air to make starting easier.
Also, glow plugs are only used for starting.
Does two stroke mean it won’t need oil changes?
Some of the traditional ones did not because the oil was mixed with fuel to lubricate the seals that exist between the piston (part that moves up and down) and the cylinder (which houses the piston). In most engines that we refer to in cars, the lubrication happens from the bottom in the crankcase (where you see the rod beneath the piston).
This is not the same kind of two-stroke engine. The one you're thinking of pumps the fuel air mixture through the crankcase, which is why it cannot use the same oiling system that a typical four-stroke engine does. The oil would be diluted with fuel pretty quickly, and also carried into the combustion chamber and burned off. So adding the oil to the fuel is how you get around that, but then you're constantly burning oil.
https://www.thoughtco.com/does-oil-come-from-dinosaurs-10920...
- Uh, but, years ago, a P algorithm has been found...
- Yes, but if you want to stay in NP, I have a better one!!
This is the way I feel...
We have a 0 emission motor -- electric engine--
and people telling us that, if ever we would not like to use 0 emission, then they have a better IC engine...
Though if there really are use cases where electric cannot work and we are forced to accept fossil fuels, I guess a slightly more efficient engine is nice.
> ICEs have a lot of life left in them yet.
> [...]
> It will be a long time before every use case can be practically and economically covered by electric motors.
Let the near-future prove you wrong on both statements ;)
The maximum density of Li-metal batteries [edit: still an immature tech] is around 14 MJ / kg, whereas gasoline is the highest energy-density fossil fuel at 47.5 MJ / kg. This is not a huge gap at all.
And no, electricity isn't easily stored nor transmitted compared to hydrocarbons. Electricity, of course, does have a number of major advantages which is why we use it.
And no I'm not speaking of Li-ion. Sorry but I was speaking about Li-metal, a still immature technology.
So that weakens my argument. On the other hand, that shows that the path to improvement is huge, and could why not surprise us by becoming better density than fuel.
Lets do that. High voltage electricity transmission has losses about 4% per 1000 km (HVDC somewhat less, but is a point-to-point system so less flexible than the common AC transmission). By comparison the pumping power required for transporting liquid hydrocarbons is less than 1/10th of that. Also, a high voltage transmission line is an eyesore requiring about 50m wide right of way, whereas a pipeline of equivalent capacity needs a much narrower corridor.
I'm not saying we shouldn't go for electricity, but we need to be frank about the upsides and downsides. (Most experts seem to agree that in order to decarbonize our societies the basic recipe is to 1) Clean up electricity generation. 2) Electrify everything.)
I used Li-ion for the battery comparison, since that is the best rechargeable battery technology that actually exists. I'm highly skeptical that a new battery technology with two orders of magnitude better energy density is possible. It's very hard to get anywhere close to the energy density stored in the chemical bonds in fuels. Or, well, yes we do know of fuels with better energy density than chemical fuels, namely nuclear fuels.
Also, pipeline operations (leakage etc) seem a PITA.
That was my idea behind thinking electricity is easier.
However, the sheer ratio {transport energy} / {transported energy} is indeed in favor of pipeline, as you mentionned.
--
I found that you can bury HV lines: https://retasite.wordpress.com/burying-high-voltage-lines/
I found that it costs between $2.9 million and $13 million per mile to build a new pipeline, whereas it costs $285,000 per mile for a HV line and $1.5 million per mile if you build it underground.
P is a subset of NP, so no, you don't have even a better one in NP.
We must have a sustainable transport system, which ultimately means using non-fossil derived fuel. That means way way better batteries, fuel cells, or other up and coming solutions. Any iteration on ICE is just kicking the can down the road.
That statement is false. If an EV is run on electricity generated from coal only, the overall emissions output is close to that of a comparable ICE car [0]. Introduce some friendlier methods into the mix and your beating ICE by quite a margin.
The main source of emissions from an EV come from the manufacturing process. Even those can be significantly reduced when proper methods are applied.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/05/20/are-el...
But you're right that there are many other sources of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses. Those also definitely need to be addressed, but that does not mean car emissions don't need to be addressed as well.
Not true. Transport (road/sea/air) accounts for 29% of US emissions. That’s hardly “tiny”. Of that, 59% is from light duty road transport. Burning fossil fuels for transport is a major contributor to global warming.
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...
Cement and steel are serious problems as the chemical processes inherently emit CO2, but they are also centralised and therefore possible spots for carbon capture and storage.
(There is some work done on reducing iron with hydrogen, but you do need a bit of carbon for carbon steel)