Lexus in development of a manual transmission for electric cars
evo.co.uk
evo.co.uk
I don't know why journalists think it's okay to engage in such blatant dishonesty. It's not just evo.co.uk:
https://insideevs.com/news/625264/lexus-confirms-manual-tran...
Jalopnik at least puts 'manual transmission' in single quotes:
https://jalopnik.com/lexus-is-developing-a-manual-transmissi...
These are headlines are better:
https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/9/23501585/lexus-manual-tra...
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42180807/lexus-built-an-e...
Oh, BTW as an EV owner (seeing the crappiness level of modern connected crapware inside the vehicle perhaps user is a better term, since the OEM is the real owner) I found MANY issues in such vehicles, one I do not found is the pleasure of driving without "engine regime steps" with constant torque and so on.
jeeps Ev wrangler prototypes have been manual so far.
Electric motors are very inefficient at low revs. Most cars don't spend much time at low revs with a lot of torque output so this doesn't matter. But a car like a jeep that may haul a high load at low revs up a hill may be more efficient with a transmission.
Of course you have to account for the weight of the transmission and its inefficiency as well to see if it makes sense overall.
(It's not unusually for ICE vehicles converted to EV to retain a manual transmission, but conversions aren't being done in large numbers.)
The motor isn’t just connected to the drive train in 1:1 that won’t end up well for neither the drive train or the motor.
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-co2-emitted-manufac....
https://caniuse.com/url-scroll-to-text-fragment
Too bad it doesn't work on Firefox.
Estimates seem to vary, but this is claiming that there's about 12 kg of lithium in a 70 kwh Tesla battery: https://www.quora.com/How-much-lithium-in-kg-is-used-in-an-e...
So, that's 180 kg of CO2 for enough lithium to make a large car battery. If your first quote is actually referring to 15 tons of CO2 per ton of lithium carbonate mined, then there's 63 kg of that, the mining of which causes about 945 kg of CO2 emissions.
Burning a gallon of gas emits about 9 kg of CO2. A car that gets 30 miles to the gallon will burn about 6700 gallons of gas over a 200,000 mile lifetime, resulting in 60,000 kg of CO2 emissions.
There are other environmental issues with mining lithium and cobalt and other energy costs involved in making the batteries, but CO2 emissions from mining is way down there on the list of things to be worried about.
The efficiency of an IC car can be in the low 20%s. And cars burn a fuel with a higher C:H ratio than natural gas.
EVs are way more energy-efficient than ICE vehicles. Something like 80% of the energy from the gas you put in your car is wasted.
Why? And if not, why can't we apply your argument to other things, eg, coal power plants?
>Even if you could get rid of most cars, that wouldn't be enough, and it wouldn't be able to happen quickly enough to avoid electrification.
Estimates for the lifetime CO2 savings of EVs vary from 40% to 70%. Assuming the be best case (70%), the CO2 impact would only be the same as "getting rid of most cars", which you say isn't enough.
Comfort, convenience, speed, separation from other people, etc, etc. Changing the balance there requires significant investment in alternatives which doesn't seem to be forthcoming (at least in my country).
We can't apply the same arguments to power plants because we don't have to go to / see / interact with the power plant in order to use electricity. It just appears at the wall socket like magic. Where it comes from is functionally irrelevant to the consumer.
Didn't realise these were valid arguments in the face of the Climate Catastrophe!
>It just appears at the wall socket like magic.
It's by far the most convenient and quickest to burn coal.
If you are observing that electricity is currently being produced with some fossil fuels, I will respond that we should get rid of fossil generating capacity. This does not require getting rid of electric cars.
In the ultimate zero fossil fuel economy, we can still build and operate electric cars. This will not involve any release of CO2 whatsoever; do you imagine this would create carbon atoms out of nothing?
It just appears, fully-made and with no CO2 spent on its manufacture?
The anti-EV argument is deliberate confusion of the former with the latter.
There is no inherent CO2 emission required in construction and operation of an electric car. This is unlike gasoline powered cars, where petroleum has to be involved in their fueling.
From a policy point of view, an EV that replaces a gasoline car is a good thing, even if there is at the moment some CO2 emission in the construction and operation of the EV. It reduces CO2 emission in the near term, while also pushing EVs down their experience curves to enable total replacement (and abolition of CO2 emission) in the far term.
By your same argument, I could say that there's no inherent CO2 emission required to manufacture petrol (as in, there theoretically is a way to do it).
>The anti-EV argument is deliberate confusion of the former with the latter.
I'm not confused about the distinction between the two. The pro-EV crowd seem happy to ignore the former, as long as it's far away, or could be solved by some as yet unimplemented technology.
The pro-EV people are not ignoring the distinction here. Stop putting your lies in other peoples' mouths.
They're not even arguments.
I'm not saying that people should keep driving.
I'm answering the question "why aren't cars going away".
Unless you think that people just aren't aware that public transport / riding / walking is more environmentally friendly than driving, the only conclusion I can come up with is that people care more about the factors I mentioned than environmental impact (or at least, that time-discounting of delayed negative externalities is significant).
> It's by far the most convenient and quickest to burn coal.
For who? I'm talking about the factors that influence consumer choice, not producers.
The person I replied to said (paraphrasing) "Why aren't cars going away? If they aren't, why can't you make the same arguments about coal power plants".
I'm saying:
- Cars aren't going away because they are much better than any available alternative for a large number of people from a short term perspective
- The same can't be said of coal power because electricity is electricity is electricity, there is no immediate difference, so the longer term differences have a greater impact on decision making
My reading was that you were comparing physical presence of cars + coal plants and also the negative externalities of coal plants but not accounting for the negative externalities of cars.
But I may have misread and I apologize if I did :)
Figure out how to convince people to do it worldwide, figure out how to replace all auto transport with other modes, then build those alternate modes. I'll bet that will take longer and result in more CO2 emissions than electrifying cars.
We don't solve global warming by fantasizing about deleting cars, we solve it with good engineering and passable policy.
lol (sorry for not being funny to you)
Combining it with an explosion engine is more interesting though. The 2023 McLaren Artura uses an axial flux motor fused with the engine to maximize total power production even through low acceleration parts of a track, by running the engine while decelerating to charge the battery then the electric motor kicks in to boost acceleration on the flip side. See Engineering Explained's video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICTi2Z_X5Kw
EDIT: Except, I guess in this case when it breaks the car will still function fine because it's not really connected to anything.
More power to you! EVs are great and I'm thrilled to see them catching on. But every time I have to drive an automatic I just want to slide into an early grave. No rev matching, no heel-toe downshifting, no holding on to a gear a little too long on an onramp, no deciding whether to downshift up a hill or coast down a hill in higher gear. Autos leave you with only the most mindless parts of driving. Zzzzz. No wonder they're building TVs into the dashboard now.
To be clear before I continue: I think all cars should go the way of the dodo and we can and should redesign our societies to not be dependent on them because we have the technology and resources to accomplish such a thing, we just waste them. Manufacturing electric cars IS NOT GOING TO REDUCE OUR FOSSIL FUEL EMISSIONS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have never understood how anyone could think that. You have to mine for the batteries, the metal, you have to smelt it, is all that green? What about the energy to smelt it? To charge it? What about the environmental impacts of Lithium refining? What about the oil needed for all the plastic pieces inside? We absolutely need to abandon cars and start thinking realistically about how to accomplish it _yesterday_.
But while we live on this highway to a mad max hell scape, there is an argument to be made for standard transmissions and their ability to keep the driver engaged and aware. There really is no time to text and drive, or a scenario where you can entirely check out while moving, as you will have to be aware of what your engine and transmission are doing. In an activity that breeds dissociation and distraction, while also demanding your full attention, a standard transmission is the fidget spinner that keeps you present. At least it does me.
I think you misspelled "eliminate". Some of the sources of total lifetime emissions from electric cars are different from sources of total lifetime emissions for ICE cars. It's reasonable to believe the sums won't be equal. Power plants don't have size/weight constraints of ICEs, so it's rather easy to get significantly higher efficiency out of them (plus economies of scale). It's not idiotic to think total lifetime emissions will be reduced by producing new EVs instead of new ICE vehicles. (Though, keeping an already manufactured ICE car on the road may likely be better than recycling the car and producing a new EV.)
Lack of transmission is the main reason so many ev's have stupid 600+ hp ratings, it's required to brute force those times when what you really need is a low gear.
Especially hideous to think about is suv's and trucks crawling slowly up steep hills. That is just pouring unholy tonnes of current through the windings just to hold the vehicle almost still, and inch it forward against a totally inappropriate gearing.
And more every day, just every random acceleration like from a stop, with any load or tow load. Those are brief so I don't worry about cooking motors, but they are frequent and still need ridiculous overkill in the motor to emulate the normal functionality of any other vehicle when it comes to getting going from a stop.
That all is just to say that a transmission of any sort would be useful, and then the choice between manual and traditional hydralic auto and cvt is still the same choice as with an ice. The autos are more convenient and potentially more efficient through superior scavenging/shifting keeping the engine always in it's optimum, but the manual is more efficient through less loss in the train which robs overhead every second of operation, and fewer simpler parts cheaper to make and requiring less maintenance over time (even with needing a clutch once in a great while)
Except maybe not the same question as ice. An EV might actually be the one application where a cvt might not be terrible, because an ev can be programmed to strictly never exceed whatever threshhold will wear the band and pulleys too fast, and then you can actually get the value from the magic cvt infinite gears.