Quote:
Originally Posted by Efthreeoh
Back on page 361 I was chastised for stating I get my science information from science textbooks (written before the internet). The criticism was that the books are outdated and the science has advanced (meaning scientific understanding I guess Dan B was saying). My reply was not the fundamentals of science (which is what textbooks teach). That is relevant to your last sentence regarding progress. Some of the best engineering practice is to accept a level of advancement, meaning understanding what is "good enough".
Scale your battery charging observations (concerns) to the next level of automotive products, heavy trucks, construction, and mining equipment. These vehicles are single-purposed to perform heavy work. EV batteries do not scale well here. They can't be recharged while the operator sleeps at home all comfy in his bed. These vehicles are run constantly in some cases and operators are changed out. These vehicles use the same fuels as light-duty cars and pickup trucks. Taking away the gasoline fuel market for light-duty vehicles (where EV sort of works) effects the heavy-duty vehicle market because gasoline and diesel (and jet fuel) are refined at fixed ratios. That means diesel can't be produced without gasoline as an adjacent product of refining oil. These ratios are fixed by trillions of dollars of refinery hard infrastructure. So when you want to advance the state of the art of light-duty EV you are inadvertently creating a downstream effect on other parts of the economy that will raise the price of everyday items and limit the availability of products and services.
This is why I advocate to advance the more efficient combustion of gasoline and diesel. Batteries are limited and antiquated thinking.
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This is the kind of conversation the world needs to be having; I've never actually thought about this. I'll admit I don't know much about crude oil refining; just that certain temps generate certain products but without a full top to bottom flow, a lot of the crude is wasted. We can't just make Jet Fuel and Diesel and not make Gasoline and all the other lubricatives.
In your example, the thing that scares me most is the downstream, like you mentioned. I don't see a single negative to every delivery truck being an EV; mail, packages, shelf-stocking, logistics. However, reserving oil-products/diesel for exclusively-heavy lifters would be horrendous: I'm trying to imagine how much it'd cost to excavate and prep land for a residential build if the larger machines were the main and only consumers of fuel. As if housing prices aren't high enough now!
I think I disagree with the refinery/infrastructure POV, though. Plenty of previously-booming infrastructure and business has dried up; when's the last time you went into a vacuum repair store? (Obviously a low-brow example, but a just one.) How much longer will the car dealership model continue to be a smart real estate investment as more and more manufacturers move to partial online sale offerings? Growing pains are growing pains but the world's still spinning.
I think we all know how it's going to go. Promised, "hard" deadlines that get pushed further and further to the right every 5 years; but it's these looming, truthfully soft deadlines that drive innovation toward better battery technology, range improvements, EV tire technology, etc; one might argue that without a deadline (even a fake one), no one would push the envelope without huge financial benefits, which EVs are not, currently.