Audi abandons combustion engine development
electrive.com
electrive.com
It’s depressing to read about engineers having to go to the Smithsonian to study the lunar lander to relearn some of the innovations and improvisations made at the time.
I’m happy that might change in the world of software, since so much collaboration is done online, and future historians will have troves of JIRA tickets to dig through.
> I’m happy that might change in the world of software, since so much collaboration is done online, and future historians will have troves of JIRA tickets to dig through.
I doubt it. In my experience, JIRA tickets don't capture much information like that. Also, my employer at least has trouble maintaining actual design documents over the long term [1] that stuff that everyone views as transient has pretty much no chance.
Also, a lot of collaboration tools, while technically being more archiveable (e.g. slack, typical meeting recordings), are in practice so disorganized that they are rarely even useful as a long term reference for the teams that use them. Unless the team's software is truly world changing, I don't think any historians would bother.
Personally, I think the kinds of very formal processes that are unfashionable in the world of software are the ones that are most capable of capturing the reasoning behind design choices for future generations.
[1] stuff is spread across so many places, and a lot gets when we migrate from one enterprise collaboration system to another, or as teams reorganize.
Think of all the papers this will produce for future historians!
It's unlikely ICE cars will be banned from being driven in the next 30 years, if ever. Once electric is proliferated the effects of car enthusiasts will be negligible. Even if there are some bans, motorsport will hopefully continue.
Many car manufacturers run heritage parts programs and there is already a well established industry for maintaining the collector and enthusiast car fleet that has nothing to do with the new car cycle. People are engineering entirely new parts for old cars all the time, we won't be forgetting how ICE works for a while yet. Although the goal of all that engineering effort may shift from efficiency to efficacy in the form of motorsports parts.
I fully expect to have to keep barrels of E85 at my house so I can take my soon to be heritage vehicle to the track every now and then, but I don't see us forgetting how to engineer for combustion engines.
There’s been little need for a liquid fuelled engine that large though due to advances in solid rockets in the US and Europe, and a focus away from super-heavy launch vehicles elsewhere.
Duplicating the F1 would involve technology and knowledge of individual engineers who are dead and corporations that no longer exist. The TACIT knowledge and technologies required to go with the blueprints died with them.
https://www.space.com/nasa-saturn-v-and-sls-compared.html
https://ourplnt.com/remake-rocketdyne-f-1-engine-humans-moon...
Technology knowledge is extremely ephemeral and easily lost once you stop using it because so much of it is "tacit knowledge" that is only preserved by active use and passed by mentorship/apprenticeship.
We've lost many technologies this way. In some cases like FOGBANK and the recent B2 bomber heat exchange system, there was enough incentive to reconstruct it from scratch at great cost. For most lost technologies, that incentive will never exist. If you are very, very lucky, some other country will maintain it by continuing to manufacture it.
This is a major reason why "bringing manufacturing back to the US" is so hard. We literally lack the technology/knowledge context as a society to do that most of the time. It's like pondering a semiconductor fab project in Chad or Sudan!
Otherwise it becomes like pyramids and monoliths that some "moderns" can't imagine came from anything other than space aliens! "They couldn't have made anything like that back then because we can't do it today."
This is essentially what China did to a lot of US manufacturing, as well as SpaceX to old line aerospace giants.
If you want to run a current F1 car in 40 years time then you will need to RE it however because the Powertrain is complicated and totally custom
Never mind 40 years, F1 cars of even a couple years ago become impossible to run because just getting the engine started requires custom equipment and knowledge that often doesn't seem to be preserved year to year.
Or have you recently looked through a book on vacuum tube circuit design? Even more modern transistor-based analog circuit design is going to fade somewhat, as more and more parts of devices are moved to digital circuits.
It is a little terrifying and sad to see how many incredible ideas, that took a lot of smart people to develop, are basically thrown away over time.
If you want to preserve it for survivors of civilisational collapse, then it has to be codified and simplified first. Well done, a civilization could jump tech levels much quicker than if they had had to bootstrap everything first.
If we stop making ICE cars then a lot of the tech around them will be lost, but chances are we won’t care a whole lot because electric cars will be better for most people in most ways, and ICE cars will live on as a historical curiosity.
What about books on skillsets necessary?
They will mostly disappear from cars, and (more slowly) even trucks, but they are still going to be around for a lot longer in other applications – backup generators, heavy construction and mining equipment, the military, locomotives, smaller aircraft, ships and boats, etc.
We may well start to lose some knowledge about how to design ICEs optimised for specific use cases, we aren't anywhere near forgetting how to design ICEs in the general case.
I'd read recently something similar about Colt. Not only did they 'lose' their bluing formula, but apparently never documented much about their smithing process, as they had trouble hand fitting revolvers due to a knowledge gap.
Seeing as mass scale ICE development is probably a deadend, hopefully the current state of engines will hold over until battery energy densities become viable for light aircraft (an extremely selfish desire, i admit).
That is at most 17 years once new vehicle sales are effectively 100% electric which will probably happen around 2030. The value of used gas cars will deteriorate rapidly as the spare parts and repair networks disappear and electric vehicle costs become much cheaper pulling forward demand for the transition to electric.
> You making a lot of assumptions that arent born out by current experience
current experience assume easy access to gasoline and motor oil that has been true for 100 years - that will pass in time
I suspect once we reach a certain thresholds it will create other push factors toward EV's and accelerate their adoption.
I expect we will hit a wall that will inhibit adoption.
It's somewhat more complicated because many also function as convenience stores, but most convenience stores near me have already died so I doubt that would save them.
I think that the main issue will be maintenance of ICEs in the future. Like try to find a garage that is able to tube carburators these days. It will be a while until we reach that point so.
You dont need top of the line $1700 Haltech elite 2500 or Link G4X FuryX if you arent seriously racing.
~$350 full standalone ecu http://ottomotive.pl/sklep/komputery-standalone/easyecu-2-pl... or http://ecu-shop.eu/produkt/ottomotive-easyecu-micro/
~$150 simple piggyback able to work in standalone mode http://ottomotive.pl/sklep/komputery-piggyback/digital-ecu-c...
The thought that civilization is going complete displace and lose hydrocarbon based engines and logistics in 17 years... Its optimistic I guess?
Heck, we haven't even transitioned 100.000% away from horses yet.
If the Euro 7 standard has little benefit for the environment, it should be stricter, because the cities are full of toxic gases.
They will be told that their great great grandparents' generation dug holes thousands of feet deep in the desert and under the sea to extract the liquid fossilised remains of plants that lived on Earth hundreds of megaannums prior. They took these liquid fossils, refined them in factories, transported them all over the surface of the earth, and poured them one gallon at a time into machines that squirted precise amounts of the precious liquid into metal cylinders where the liquid was set alight to explode thousands of times per minute, in precise amounts calculated to release power to a series of mechanical levers, pulleys, and spinning rods which did for 4 wheels what horses had done in the even more distant past.
EVs are not going to eliminate the oil&gas industry. We still need it for aerospace, military, maritime, mining, construction, plastics, chemical feedstocks. Some of those use cases we may find alternatives for over the coming decades, but I reckon in 100 years the oil&gas industry will be still around. Very likely it will be smaller than it is now, but I very much doubt it will be gone completely.
“If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.
Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It's a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
This whole electric car hype exists in wealthy urban bubbles only and only because they are heavily subsidized.
These cars are still not competitive in the market after all these years and they are completely useless in cold or rural regions.
I mean, you're right - electric vehicles are heavily subsidized. But it's not like it's a one way street where ICE cars have no (indirect, in this case) subsidies. The petro industry has its own share of funding and tax breaks, ranging from greenwashing and public imaging [0] to regular old tax breaks [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Energy_Centre#Funding
[1] https://kimsiever.ca/2020/10/20/alberta-oil-gas-firms-get-3-...
Cars just last a hell of a lot longer than they used to. Even if every Western manufacturer stopped making petrol cars, you could still buy them from Russia or China.
And everyone stopped making cars, well, it's not impossible to have a domestic auto industry. After all, Detroit started from nothing. If you didn't care at all about emissions or fuel economy, a large-displacement 2-stroke engine wouldn't be hard to make. Heck, in the future, it might be harder to get hydrocarbon fuels (either synthetic or ultradeep drilling, which really does require exotic technologies) than it would be to make engines.
i think there's still cool developments e.g. https://www.freevalve.com
Audi saying they will not be doing further development, basically doesn't say much in light of this change. Could be more of a marketing thing in the end, or maybe to put some pressure on EU regulations... Generally VW is doing a poor job at transitioning to EV and "connected" vehicles (just take a look at some reviews of ID.4, or issues latest Golf model has) and they do need to put a bigger focus there.
1. They cover markets that will not be ready for EV in the near future.
2. They will need combution engines for trucks for the forseeable future. I do not think that the Diesel engine has really reached the full potential, yet.
3. While the share of combustion engines will go down significantly, it will not become zero. Having one centralized engine development division may be sufficient for the future.
This is generally true whether or not ICE vehicles go anywhere.[0]
[0]: https://www.hagerty.com/media/market-trends/most-expensive-c...