Comment by seanp2k2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanp2k2 | Hacker News Reader

Imagine how far an EV with a similar amount of weight of batteries to vehicle weight could go. I'm not an EV hater, just pointing out here that even lithium-ion batteries are in the range of 100-265 Wh per kg while gasoline is around 12,200 Wh/kg (roughly 50x the energy density). This is a big part of why there are no commercially-viable EV aircraft, and probably won't be for some time -- namely until battery energy density improves by an order of magnitude or so.

As for this mini motorcycle, it's impressive that it still looks pretty decent and someone unfamiliar with this model might even mistake it for stock. I never quite understood why it's so hard to find even aftermarket tanks for bikes that get the range up to car range...I just want to go 500 miles on my bike without refueling. Put the gas in the frame AND into a 5+ gallon tank up top. Put gas into a portion of the seat. Put it up behind the headlight or in a big fender. Carrying jerry cans or even the bag style ones is just so bulky and inconvenient for overlanding on two wheels without a support vehicle carrying extra fuel.

Yes unfortunately EV's will not be able to be heavily modified by engineering teams for impractically long cargoless scooter trips at 40mph. Such a shame they will only be useful for virtually all practical trips.

Indeed, if you want an impressively impractical trip in an impressively impractical custom built EV, you'll have to make due with the world solar challenge. 3000+ kilometers at highway speed, carrying more than 1 person, and entirely on solar power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Solar_Challenge

What a useless comment.

Why are you on Hacker News when you clearly are not a Hacker and don't have the IQ to understand such a simple, interesting point OP is making.

Is it jealousy because OP travels and they want to hack it out even further than the normal model gives them? Why put them down otherwise?

What EV cars do is exactly what is happening here, they are highly aerodynamic and weight reduced, at the cost of practical things. They have to, to get distance.

Is this satire?

- dubious IQ (dIQ) measuring

- incorrect accusation of “putting them down” immediately following an ad hominem attack

- unspecific “insight” that EVs sacrifice practical things to get distance, when the parent and OP were both basically saying the opposite: EVs sacrifice distance for practicality

Yeah, I am really confused too, given that the grandparent comment was making a pretty sane and relevant point. Sure it was a bit snarky and tongue in cheek, but it definitely wasn't something even remotely close to intellectually deserve a low-IQ attack (not even mentioning that those attacks aren't appropriate on HN regardless of the intellectual merit of the point).

It's true that energy density of batteries is a lot lower than gasoline, but electric motors are a lot more efficient. It doesn't make up the whole difference, but it does make up some of it. Also, battery technology is improving pretty rapidly.

Electric aviation is not yet viable commercially, but it will be soon. I'm working at a company building electric aircraft, and one of our prototypes has done a flight of more than 380 miles. Note that this is a prototype, in ideal conditions, with a tailwind, last few miles were circling the airport within the glide cone, etc. The actual production vehicle range, with all of the safety margins, seats for passengers, passenger weight, etc, will be a lot less; but still, 150 miles is enough for many commercially viable trips, especially in dense areas like the BosWash corridor, or getting from suburbs to a long haul airport, or many others.

Electrification can also make viable new architectures, like VTOL, and the extra efficiency and longer maintenance intervals can drastically drive down operating costs; so there will be many trips that are economically viable in an eVTOL that wouldn't be in conventional airplanes (due to needing an airport) or helicopter (due to high fuel and maintenance costs).

Which company/aircraft?

Beta ALIA-250, an eVTOL, and CX300, a conventional takeoff and landing aircraft that's basically the ALIA 250 with the lift motors and supporting structure deleted to get through certification sooner, and serve a few markets that don't need VTOL.

We're a little bit quieter than some of the other players, as we're still a private company and are focusing more on engineering than marketing right now.

edit: Oh, hey, just checked your profile and I guess your firm is one of our investors, so I guess you already know about us.

Yup! I saw the plane in Bentonville!

Remember plutonium is 23,222,915,000 wh/kg, and antimatter is 24,965,421,631,578 wh/kg :)

Antimatter has some storage problems.

Scotty normally manages to fix things when the antimater containment fails.

I completely agree with your first paragraph. But the 2nd, with gas storages encircling the rider like that, sounds very dangerous in the event of a crash.

It's not quite as a dramatic a difference as it appears - most petrol engines are going to be in the region of 30% efficiency, vs an electric motor at ~80-90% (or perhaps more?). Still, talking 5000Wh equivalent to 250, or a 20x difference (which is about in line with most real vehicles, I think? 1 tonne battery packs vs 50L fuel tanks)

Combustible fuel also leads to reductions in weight over time as fuel is burned. The same does not occur with EVs.

I mean it could… Just not a great idea.

Make for some expensive litter.

You could use a metal-air (such as Al-air) battery for this. You'd get _much_ better range than any lithium battery will give you, except it's not rechargeable.

In that case, it would increase in mass though.

Could always burn the lithium to heat a boiler and turn the tires.

That's not really a problem for cars, unlike planes.

You sound like you haven’t enjoyed the thrill of owning an old British car. Fuel sloshing out or mangling the handling on cornering was a feature of British Leyland. I miss my cursed ‘68 Triumph 2000.

> most petrol engines are going to be in the region of 30% efficiency

It’s worse than that. A recent Yale study found that—for an average car on the road—from $5 of gas you’re really only getting $1 of that energy to propulsion.

It’s 20%.

We are really not far off commercially viable short-haul EV flights. Harbour Air in Vancouver is converting their fleet of Beavers to EV and a company in Scotland is working on converted Cessnas. And purpose built aircraft will likely do better than these.

They won't replace the 737 any time soon of course, but progress is progress.

https://harbourair.com/harbour-airs-all-electric-aircraft-op...

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetl...

Imagine where we could have been if the Ford Nucleon had been produced and developed. A similar range and radioactive too.

High speed head-on collisions could have been quite spectacular.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon

The same way this is a prototype heavily optimized for this record, if the point was to reproduce it with an EV we'd probably heavily optimize for regenerative energy, possibly lower speeds and solar panels.

I was wondering how Guinness Record would deal with such a category, and the answer seems to be that they just don't. Most of their electric vehicle records have either a time limit, or no refueling/single charge limitation

e.g. https://guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/115107-greate...

There are now completely "normal" hydrogen fuel cell buses in service that only exhaust water dripping.

But the more amazing thing about a 4000km motorcycle ride is they weren't injured or killed by someone using their smartphone.

Yeah range frustrates me too. The reason they don't generally do this is that having unsprung weight dramatically affects the cornering performance of the bike. So while it would be great to crank out miles in a straight line on a long journey it would suck going around corners on a shorter trip. Like everything else in biking it's a tradeoff.

I was going to recommend my former ride, the Suzuki V-Strom 650, which easily covers >200 miles, and can push close to 250 miles, on a tank of gas. Then I googled it and found the V-Strom isn't even in the top 10. The best are hitting 300 - 400 miles on a tank, some by being thrifty, some by having big tanks.

Given that the farthest I've ever ridden in a day was about 800 miles, being able to go all day on two, maybe even just one fill-up(s) seems reasonable.

https://www.bennetts.co.uk/bikesocial/news-and-views/feature...

https://www.visordown.com/features/top-10s/top-10-longest-ra...

Can also swap for bigger tanks... I put a larger tank on my DRZ-400sm cause the stock one is tiny.

Those articles are good but from 2016 and 2020 -- I'm personally going with the (2022+) Ducati Desert X with optional rear fuel tank for this.

https://www.ducati.com/ww/en/accessories/ACC012304

Something like 350 mile range (lot of variables) once that's added on. Enough to get from Coldfoot to Prudhoe Bay (one of the harder routes to clear on a bike, historically).

Why would you go with something like that rather than a 20L jerrycan?

Because as far as I can see, it is integrated with the default gas tank, so you don't need to stop to refill the built-in tank manually or worry about managing the two tanks separately.

So this extension functionally works as if your single tank just got larger. Might not be something that everyone cares about, but the value proposition over a jerrycan is clear.

Sure, I got that aspect. For me the argument going the other way is:

1. Generally you don't need the excess range, and this thing seems like a relatively permanent modification, so you're dealing with the excess weight/bulk all the time, and getting the added benefit only when you actually need to do the long haul.

2. This Ducati thing is only 8 liters, and adds 40% to your range.

So a jerrycan would (more) easily be added/removed as needed, and holds 20 liters, doubling your range. You could even add two, to triple your range.

Also, there's the fact that a jerrycan costs about $40, while the Ducati tank costs... $1900!? Yikes -- yeah, I'm sticking with the jerrycan :-)

Well the weight is distributed lower and it would survive being dropped offroad and so on...

But I get it -- I've ridden with Gatorade bottles full of spare gasoline too (yes it'll eventually eat through the plastic, but not fast enough to matter in my experience.)

> I've ridden with Gatorade bottles full of gasoline

Samesies! I once ran out of gas on a GS-550, walked to a Circle-K, bought and drank a quart of milk (I'm not much for gatorade) then bought enough gas to lightly rinse out the paper carton and then fill it to take back to my bike. This was a long time ago, please don't judge me :-)

It's a bit more complicated than that, as an EV motorcycle drivetrain tends to be lighter than a petrol one (excluding battery/fuel tank), but that isn't going to make a big difference for aircraft

Major problems are arising because of politicians silly proclamations and attempts to buy votes that are not backed by engineering reality.

Reducing certain emissions is commendable... But not when you realize that the environmental damage from strip mining rare earth metals in developing countries is far worse.

Just talking energy density is a little misleading if internal combustion engines can't capture most of it

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