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Comment by Cushman | Hacker News Reader

> It just has too work, there is no place for a list of "buts"

Of course there is! Here are some example buts for ICEs:

  Gasoline is a dense energy source, but...
  it stinks.
  it's toxic.
  it's too noisy.
  its price is too determined by foreign politics.
  it puts high stress and heat on the car, requiring constant maintenance.
  it's not shelf stable.
  its performance is dependent on altitude.

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All but two of these things have ceased to be a problem for many years. Gasoline cars of today are extremely reliable and generally very quiet. The primary source of wear is road abuse on the chassis, given you keep up on oil, and any engine requires lubrication. The primary source of noise on the freeway is wind and road noise.

Many of the other issues with gasoline- smell, toxicity, stability- have been largely addressed by the distribution infrastructure.

Oh, by the way, gasoline isn't all that toxic. It is more hazardous for its volatility rather than any poisonous properties for humans.

Last thought- one of the two things that are still an obstacle (performance at extreme altitude) is firstly always going to be an obstacle for any type of combustion engine and secondly addressable with a turbocharger if you care enough.

Just in case someone thinks drinking gasoline is OK to ingest after reading your comment:

"Inhaling or swallowing large amounts of gasoline can cause death." http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxfaqs/tf.asp?id=467&tid=83

Inhaling or swallowing large amounts of water can also cause death. :)

I challenge you to drink a glass of gasoline.

Anything for meaningless internet points! ;)

How long do I have to keep it down? ;)

1s should be long enough.

I find it amazing how when you throw out exploding millenia old dead plants in a box suddenly your motor and power train are about as complex as a RC matchbox car. Sure, replacing batteries is absurdly expensive, but that really is it. If you can just get the cost of the battery replacements down, you don't have to worry about belts or mufflers or the gear shift breaking due to complex machinery going on the fritz.

I'm sympathetic to electric vehicles, but they don't escape the problem of complexity. There's still power steering, brakes, gearboxes, differentials, a/c, and a million other things that can go wrong - little of which has the 100+ years of engineering development that ICE vehicles have.

I'm not saying don't buy one, but don't expect electric vehicles to be as reliable as ICE vehicles for at least another decade. Maybe two or three.

My Prius (which is almost guaranteed the worst of both worlds as it's both gas and electric) has had a stellar maintenance record - and I'm a very lazy oil changer and neglectful owner.

Electric vehicles using software "clutches" are to ICE-powered cars as SSD is to HDDs - at first, there will be downsides and only the adventurous will get to showboat, but in several generations the only reason you don't get an electric car (SSD) is if you really need the range (storage space using our analogy) or can't afford the upgrade.

I'm sorry, but your view on "extremely reliable and incredibly quiet" is idiotic. Gasoline cars are extremely reliable and incredibly quiet compared to OLDER GASOLINE CARS! Compared to Afghanistan, Iraq is an incredibly safe and quiet country to visit, but for some reason, I'm not planning a trip there anytime soon. Gasoline doesn't even come close to winning internal combusion category. Diesel blows it away in reliability.

Gasoline vehicles have gone from being absolute pains in the ass to maintain (I've worked on and rehabbed many an old vehicle, including mid 80's Oldsmobiles, 70's era air cooled VWs, and mid to late 90's GM vehicles) to significantly less pains in the ass, but still finicky creatures. 4 or 5 years in on modern ICE vehicles, you're going to start seeing problems that can often be expensive. If its not the electrical, it will be failed pump on the cooling system, or even a cracked impeller (now that they are made of plastic).

Can you prevent this all with regular maintenance? Of course, but let's not pretend like this isn't much more complicated than it needs to be. An electric vehicle isn't going to have tubes, pumps, fans, impellers, thermostats, spark plugs, valves,cylinders, ignition coils, injectors, oxygen sensors!!! ($10 part with several hours of labor to replace), catalytic converters... and my god how many other expensive, prone to breaking moving parts can I name.

And then you are sitting there talking about turbochargers? Really?? Do you have any idea what kind of maintenance is required, and oh wait, now we can up our octane to 93, pay out the ass for gasoline, and deal with all the extra wear an tear high compression turbo engines deal with......

but your view ... is idiotic

Thanks, glad to see we have a stage of mutual respect established.

Gasoline doesn't even come close to winning internal combusion category. Diesel blows it away in reliability

Ah, I see, only the most reliable thing can be considered reliable? More importantly, gasoline engines can be designed like diesels. We have direct injection for gas engines. We have low-rpm torquey gasoline engines (see the slant-6). A key reason diesel engines tend to be more reliable is because diesel engines are often used in applications that demand reliability, while gasoline engines are often used in applications that are willing to sacrifice some reliability for extra performance. Which, mind you, is not something electric vehicles will be immune from.

If its not the electrical, it will be failed pump on the cooling system

And I suppose you think electric vehicles don't have liquid cooling and heating systems? Cute.

Why exactly would an ELECTRIC VEHICLE be less prone to electrical failure, anyway?

talking about turbochargers ... do you have any idea what kind of maintenance is required...

No, I have no idea. In fact, I've never even heard of turbochargers before, I'm not sure why I said that word!

Turbochargers are a trade-off to handle a deficiency. Electric cars make trade-offs too, as they are not perfect either; their deficiencies are simply different.

high compression turbo engines

Who said anything about that?

From personal and anecdotal experience, ultra modern diesel engines are pretty sensitive little beasts.

I still prefer Diesels for my own transport.

Re turbochargers: For a sufficiently high fuel price, compression becomes a necessity. Atmospheric engines have more or less disappeared (100% for diesel since about 10 years) from the lineup of European manufacturers for example.

Spoken like an engineer: your points are technically quite correct, and yet, often irrelevant to the consumer!

For the average consumer of automobile technology, these are non-issues. Logistical and pricing issues are moderated and subsidized by governments and car manufacturers. From the consumer's point of view, you go to a gas station once a week, and the car "just works."

As superior as an electric system may be technically, economically, environmentally, etc, if you want it to take off, the UI and logistics need to be smoothed over until you get a similar level of "it just works" which matches the consumer's experience with gasoline.

Irrelevant to the consumer? Hardly:

> it stinks. > it's toxic. > it's too noisy.

These three points affect anyone who lives near heavy automobile traffic. Just because it's an externality doesn't mean it doesn't exist!

> its price is too determined by foreign politics.

When gasoline prices doubled from $2/gallon to $4/gallon, people certainly thought that was relevant. The price spike is partly responsible for the rise in hybrid vehicles.

> it puts high stress and heat on the car, requiring constant maintenance.

Oil changes every 5k miles and major services every 15k don't qualify as "just works" in my book.

> it's not shelf stable.

I'll grant you this one is irrelevant to consumers.

> this one is irrelevant to consumers.

Not if I want to put my car in long-term storage. Then this, too, becomes quite relevant.

Can we stop acting like this is a problem when $5 chemicals off the shelf at your local auto parts store fixes this problem?

Yes we can.

Well, the Tesla cars' batteries are permanently wrecked and have to be replaced - at a cost of about half the price of a new car! - if you put them into long-term storage without leaving them connected to a charger, or if the charger becomes unplugged or loses mains power. That's even worse!

> it stinks. > it's toxic. > it's too noisy. These three points affect anyone who lives near heavy automobile traffic. Just because it's an externality doesn't mean it doesn't exist!

I live near a heavily trafficked road. To be honest these aren't problems; the noise issue is far outweighed by a) people playing uber-loud music on their car stereo (not any different with electric cars) and the noise of the electric train (BART) that runs above the road.

Well, yes, if there's a train right by the road, of course it will be louder. A train is one of the noisiest things you can have around. That's hardly a point in favor of gas cars. This seems a bit like trying to demonstrate that eating a bucket of deep-fried twinkies isn't so bad for you by comparing it to a bottle of bleach.

As an example of the externalities of gasoline, living near a highway has been shown to have high correlation with the incidence of childhood asthma hospitalizations.

Fair enough about stink and noise, but personal experience really isn't good for judging toxicity. Automobile-related pollution is a pretty big deal, but it manifests as large-scale health changes, not immediate personal changes.

(too late to edit the parent) I didn't so much want to defend gasoline cars, as to observe that the externalities are much less of a burden nowadays than people might expect. I was surprised by this myself, but then vehicles in California are orders of magnitude cleaner than the cars I grew up with.

I don't know why people are writing off stinks/toxic/noisy. As someone who has at various times lived near large roadways, this is a huge concern. Car pollution is a really big problem

Because its a problem which affects the environment, not the consumer. You could buy an electric car and it wouldn't help one bit. You'd have to get everyone to buy one.

It's a problem of external effects. Now if we would make an effort to attribute the costs of these external effects to their originator, internal combustion engines would be wholly unavailable to anyone under 1M$ net worth almost instantly. We don't do so because a) it takes effort (and thereby generates costs all in itself) and b) we usually don't care about the plight of future generations and those around us and c) we want the economy not to crash.

And we don't even know about all the external effects that gasoline cars have; there was this article in Mother Jones [1] recently that correlated leaded gas to the crime rate, owing to the detrimental effects lead has on the human brain.

[1]: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...

Have you ever sat in traffic? I used to commute in Houston and even with a fairly decent filter on the A/C it stunk.

> Oil changes every 5k miles and major services every 15k don't qualify as "just works" in my book.

There are few items in this day and age that don't require owners to perform periodic maintenance. Tesla cars aren't immune from requiring annual inspections (http://www.teslamotors.com/service) either.

> These three points affect anyone who lives near heavy automobile traffic. Just because it's an externality doesn't mean it doesn't exist!

And the externalities of electric cars matter quite a bit to the people who live next to coal-fired power plants.

Good point, but it is a lot easier to get away from a power plant.

More concentrated, and more efficient, so it affects fewer people and creates less pollution overall. Additionally, we can power them with zero emissions power sources once we get there. People should really stop trotting out the coal power plant argument in trying to claim that this is somehow a relative weakness of EVs, because it's really not.

If you're changing your oil every 5,000 miles, you're wasting your money.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/your-money/11shortcuts.htm...

Unless you drive an older car. My 14 year old Saturn's oil was rough when I changed it at 3200. I can probably take it to 5000 now that it has synthetic blend in it, but I'm not going to take a chance with a 154,000 mile old engine.

"Oil changes every 5k miles and major services every 15k don't qualify as "just works" in my book."

Newer cars require oil change/service every 30000 km / 2 years. That would be ~20k miles.

>These three points affect anyone who lives near heavy automobile traffic. Just because it's an externality doesn't mean it doesn't exist!

However, it occurs over such a timespan that the immediate effects are a non-issue, just long-term. The average person does not take into serious consideration the 30+ year effect of a decision, but a more near-term one.

Obviously it has to match or surpass the experience with gasoline. This is what Tesla has done, surpassing that experience for some(rich) people.

The rest is mainly a cost issue. Conventional cars have 100 years of mass production advantage.

It will take some time until price goes down, and catch gasoline. Electronics, batteries and electric engines are way easier to mass produce than thermal engines.

I fail to see how tesla has surpassed the experience of an equivalently prices car.

Perhaps you should ask owners, many of whom I have heard state exactly that. It's big, comfortable, fast, quiet, clean, futuristic, high status, low maitenece and beautiful machine. Not hard to see its appeal.

Fast - most cars that cost that much are fast.

quiet - one of the selling points of expensive cars are how great their engines sound.

beautiful - I don't think it's look compare to an Aston Martin or Maserati. Maybe that's just me.

high status - mostly because they are so new and rare at this point.

I can't commen on the others because I honestly don't know.

It's much faster than other cars in its class. It has supercar worthy acceleration and handling (thanks to that low battery pack it hugs the ground like you have wings).

It's not a sports car, luxury cars pride themselves on what you can't hear.

"It's much faster than other cars in its class."

Well, the best performing option does have excellent acceleration (4.4s to 60) - but they aren't actually that fast in terms of top speed - 130mph. Of course, that is pretty irrelevant to most of us who don't have unrestricted Autobahns to drive on.

"It's not a sports car, luxury cars pride themselves on what you can't hear."

Are you saying people buy a maserati for what they can't hear?

I'm not arguing that it is a bad car. I just don't think we can say it blows away all cars on its luxury and performance.

In other words its not the end all be all of cars.

The original Tesla is a lotus with shed loads of batteries stuffed inside which destroys the handling.

And having to take extreme care to look after the battery is not low maintainance.

If you want a beautiful machine with US style handling buy a Shelby Mustang (though they have now seen sense and make them with a non live back Axel)

And the list goes on!

But from an engineering point of view, I just don't find ICEs elegant. Too many moving pieces, and all that for about 30% efficiency (the remaining 70% is lost as waste heat). Good thing gasoline is so energy-dense, because when you're wasting 70% of your energy, you need that.

30% is roughly the peak efficiency of an ICE. Average efficiency throughout a driving cycle is more like 17%.

It turns out, however that when you're talking about transportation, energy density is much more important than efficiency generally speaking.

ICEs are, at their core, plenty elegant. The trouble is efficiency and low emissions are not their strong points.

I would argue that efficiency and low emissions do not preclude something from being elegant. Steam plants can also be elegant, and they can be extremely efficient and low-emissions, but a steam plant cannot be bolted onto a motor car or a small aeroplane for which a turbine would be inappropriate. All forms of heat engines have their upsides and downsides.

Anyway, at the end of the day, consumers don't care one iota about engineering elegance.

The biggest ongoing problem is going to be CO2 emissions. Given few alternatives to ICEs (EVs and hybrid vehicles are available, but unsubsidized TCO remains higher, and even accounting for carbon costs may be higher, I'd have to research that), we're going to have liquid-fueled vehicles for a long time.

The real question is where that fuel will be sourced.

CO2 emissions is coupled to gasoline, not ICEs. Hydrogen ICEs do not give off CO2.

The emissions are going to come from wherever the energy is made.

I'd like to see efforts at using energy sources to manufacture gasoline from environmental sources of carbon, making the fuel carbon-neutral. How does that compare to electric vehicles?

Ok, fine, if you burn coal to produce hydrogen, yes. Hydrogen fuel then indirectly produces CO2.

There have been efforts to do this; basically any form of biodiesel that is produced by bacteria can probably be considered carbon-neutral.

No kidding, I wonder where the poster thinks power on the east coast comes from.

CO2 emissions is coupled to fossil fuels, not necessarily gasoline, if you're talking about renewably-generated gasoline (say from biofuels, though I suspect biodiesel is more likely). And if you're getting hydrogen (an energy storage medium, not an energy source, and an awfully low-density one to boot on a volumetric basis, with significant storage and transport issues) from fossil-fuel generated electricity, you've mostly just transported the CO2 emissions problem (modulo carbon sequestering, which is presently and likely forever highly uneconomic).

I address issues of alternate fuels in a prior post, and suspect we'll see liquid hydrocarbons, of some stripe, for quite some time.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5204104

Edit: speling

I sort of figure your first block of text is self-evident. Apparently a lot of people don't think so; perhaps I need to be much more verbose in the future.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. H.L. Menken.

A fair number of people can't put it together. The fact that we've extracted and re-released to the atmosphere a significant fraction of the hydrocarbons which have been sequestered via biological activity over a ~260 million year period, within a century, seems to escape a lot of folks.

As does the distinction between energy sources and energy media. And while technically fossil fuels are themselves a medium for sunlight, humans don't have to drive that particular conversion.

Besides, pedantism is one of the rare pleasures of old age.

But for all of that, liquid hydrocarbons offer among the best weight/volume energy storage capacity available to us. The alternatives: EVs, LNG, hydrogen, compressed air, flywheels, etc., just don't hack it. For an efficiency perspective, the next best bet is human-powered vehicles, but these aren't an option for all people. Transit and dense infrastructures are your next best bet.

While I see us moving from fossil fuel, I still see liquid fuels playing an important role in mechanized transit (ground, water, air) for as long as we're technologically capable of doing so.

I share your dislike of ICEs but you are being far too kind with that 30%. At best 20% is (high-end) typical. Which means that for every 5 gallons of fuel you feed it, it throws away 4. That is SUCH poor engineering that it's verging on insane that we've embraced these stinking, finicky beasts long enough to destroy most of the planet's (easy) fossil fuel reserves.

It sounded like the guy from the Times would have welcomed as much "waste heat" as he could get his hands on.

I do like the idea of Electric car as a fuel abstraction layer. Say a proper hybrid where it is fully electric motors but could be run completely on a fuel generator that could be any sorts of fuel.

Toxic? You should see how the batteries for electric cars are made, they are much more toxic than gas...

An (really?) "ICE" aka internal combustion engine isn't limited to gasoline it can also burn alcohol, natural gas, propane and I'm sure many other less smelly fuels.

Diesel is another but it's a bit smelly although I was behind a Mercedes diesel SUV and didn't realize it until I read the rear badge, no smell at all.

Although bio-diesel or even straight vegetable oil can be burned since Rudolph Diesel intended the diesel engine to run on peanut oil so farmers could afford the fuel.

None of which matters a bit if you just want to take the thing on a 200 mile road trip. People do care about the things on that list, but they care about being able to get where they're going more.

I agree with the gist, but a modern car's performance won't degrade with altitude: the ECU controls the engine's air intake pressure, so you might get a bit of extra wear on the forced induction system from the extra compression needed, but I don't think you'll see a perforamcne drop.

It is a source of energy that not every country has enough. Most countries in the world have different sources of energy(from coal to wood, going through nuclear).

The countries that do not have enough of it have to invent stupid excuses for invading the countries that do have, incurring in high costs while killing millions, because if not transportation halts and the economy nukes.

It is a highly pollutant for cities, specially diesel particles that are carcinogenic, while on electric generation plants you could use particle filters that are very efficient and cheap, and also far from where most people lives.

It is very complex and things breaks a lot. You need to change the oil frequently, drive belts and also the brakes while with regenerative braking they last forever.

The "buts" that come with the ICEs don't tend to directly contradict the baseline purpose of the car, though.

Some of us like the noise.

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