Death of Diesel

[PapaJoe]

... and exactly where is all of this electricity coming from that charges all of these batteries?

 

[H3LZSN1P3R]

... and exactly where is all of this electricity coming from that charges all of these batteries?

Reviving all the older threads today?

 

[kobra]

... and exactly where is all of this electricity coming from that charges all of these batteries?

So... look at some of the earlier posts, and search the information out there... first there does not need to be "all these batteries", in fact there doesn't need to be batteries at all. Second, there is a lot of development for energy generation; some will use existing fossil fuels, some will likely be alternatives like hydrogen fuel cells or batteries charged by solar, wind or modular nuclear power. The Aussies are developing some interesting batteries using aluminum ion tech; if it's as good as they say, it will be a big leap forward.

I'm not saying that I believe this is the best route in the short term, but I am saying to educate yourself on this. Why? To me it's simple - follow the money and the gov regulations.
There is a lot of money that governments all around the world want to spend on alternative energy. And in most areas, it is becoming increasingly popular to support alternative energy, so where the votes go so do the politicians.
On the other side of the coin; isn't it interesting how a year ago there were a lot of "green" folks who wanted to kill off the oil and gas industry, while now governments are begging for more oil and gas and the prices are rising quickly! Oil and gas is not dead, but alternatives will make headway.

I believe electric vehicles are coming whether we agree with the idea or not. I actually think the electric motor itself is far superior to any ICE, but I also think we have a long way to go to get the energy storage density onboard vehicles that we have with gasoline or diesel. Interesting times!

Brad

 

[Great White North Eh]

Electric motors/ batteries are all good good until the mercury drops. Try using a drill at -30 or -40 ….it ain’t worth $#!T. Heck they even fly around with helicopters to try to thaw out wind turbines where I live. That’s some green tech right there!

 

[H3LZSN1P3R]

Electric motors/ batteries are all good good until the mercury drops. Try using a drill at -30 or -40 ….it ain’t worth $#!T. Heck they even fly around with helicopters to try to thaw out wind turbines where I live. That’s some green tech right there!

Yea all the deicing spray must be great for the environment too lol

 

[jetrinka]

Or the effects of DEF fluid fumes on vegetation that then affects honeybee populations....

 

[freeram]

Ford and Chevy will go all electric. Ram will find a way to stuff a nuclear reactor in our trucks.

 

[OuterUB]

Ford and Chevy will go all electric. Ram will find a way to stuff a nuclear reactor in our trucks.

Haaaaaaaaaahahahahahahaha .....

 

[Brewbud]

We were approached by Texas Instruments 6 or 7 years ago. At the time we were putting a cellular module in a heart monitor. They wanted us to do a side project using the same module. The module was going to interface to EV chargers so they could talk to each other. The transformer boxes in most neighborhoods across the country cannot support more than 3 EVs charging at once. The idea was the module would help negotiate/coordinate the duty cycles of the EV chargers. I was a little bummed we decided not to move forward on the project.

There are definitely infrastructure hurdles to cross to bring any new widespread technology. If not EVs maybe hydrogen fuel cells will be the future. I have had a deposit down on the Rivian R1T for 2 1/2 years now. I ordered it for the performance (0-60 in 3sec) and the camping usability of the truck. Not for any Eco reasons as I don't believe EVs are really that green. They are starting to get delivered now. Mine will likely come up in early 22. Not sure if I will move forward on it. It may depend on what Ram decides to do about the CP4 in my truck.

Ram has said their EV 1500 will be out in 2024.

 

[MikeXM]

Ford and Chevy will go all electric. Ram will find a way to stuff a nuclear reactor in our trucks.

Better hope there isn't a pump problem with your nuclear RAM... They don't seem to know how to fix them.

 

[Brutal_HO]

Better hope there isn't a pump problem with your nuclear RAM... They don't seem to know how to fix them.

They'll release with a GenIV plant then have to revert back to GenIII.

 

[BAT3500]

And use a cp4.n pump...

 

[H3LZSN1P3R]

And use a cp4.n pump...

You CP4 complainers just sound like you have a one track mind…..

 

[Grayson]

It will be more than 10 years before Diesel engines begin to be threatened. Technology hasn't advanced enough to produce in numbers, the capacity & capability of HD trucks.

Until humanity can either defeat the the laws of thermodynamics or come up with a insanely quick type of non-toxic renewable energy source the goals set to eliminate ICE vehicles aren't possible. I know companies are "displaying" prototypes but again a prototype and mass production are a massive task.

 

[H3LZSN1P3R]

It will be more than 10 years before Diesel engines begin to be threatened. Technology hasn't advanced enough to produce in numbers, the capacity & capability of HD trucks.

Until humanity can either defeat the the laws of thermodynamics or come up with a insanely quick type of non-toxic renewable energy source the goals set to eliminate ICE vehicles aren't possible. I know companies are "displaying" prototypes but again a prototype and mass production are a massive task.

Toyota has a production vehicle that is hydrogen i believe production starts soon, California already has some hydrogen pumps…

 

[MikeXM]

You CP4 complainers just sound like you have a one track mind…..

Yep. Ticking time bombs. Only in this case, it is just nuclear fuel. Bah.

But who would cares, really? Certainly not RAMCares in any cases.

 

[freeram]

Yep. Ticking time bombs. Only in this case, it is just nuclear fuel. Bah.

But who would cares, really? Certainly not RAMCares in any cases.

HAL @ RAMCares: We are sorry but we have NOT come out with a fix to the radiation leak in the Nuclear Ram HD yet. We have made the cabs more spacious incase you sprout extra body appendages.

 

[Dirtbiker70X]

I found this article very interesting. Sorry it is long but it is a good read!

Toyota Warns (Again) About Electrifying All Autos. Is Anyone Listening?
BY BRYAN PRESTON MAR 19, 2021 12:50 PM ET

Depending on how and when you count, Japan’s Toyota is the world’s largest automaker. According to Wheels, Toyota and Volkswagen vie for the title of the world’s largest, with each taking the crown from the other as the market moves. That’s including Volkswagen’s inherent advantage of sporting 12 brands versus Toyota’s four. Audi, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bugatti, and Bentley are included in the Volkswagen brand family.

GM, America’s largest automaker, is about half Toyota’s size thanks to its 2009 bankruptcy and restructuring. Toyota is actually a major car manufacturer in the United States; in 2016 it made about 81% of the cars it sold in the U.S. right here in its nearly half a dozen American plants. If you’re driving a Tundra, RAV4, Camry, or Corolla it was probably American-made in a red state. Toyota was among the first to introduce gas-electric hybrid cars into the market, with the Prius twenty years ago. It hasn’t been afraid to change the car game.

All of this is to point out that Toyota understands both the car market and the infrastructure that supports it perhaps better than any other manufacturer on the planet. It hasn’t grown its footprint through acquisitions, as Volkswagen has, and it hasn’t undergone bankruptcy and bailout as GM has. Toyota has grown by building reliable cars for decades.

When Toyota offers an opinion on the car market, it’s probably worth listening to. This week, Toyota reiterated an opinion it has offered before. That opinion is straightforward: The world is not yet ready to support a fully electric auto fleet.

Toyota’s head of energy and environmental research Robert Wimmer testified before the Senate this week, and said: “If we are to make dramatic progress in electrification, it will require overcoming tremendous challenges, including refueling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability.”

Wimmer’s remarks come on the heels of GM’s announcement that it will phase out all gas internal combustion engines (ICE) by 2035. Other manufacturers, including Mini, have followed suit with similar announcements.

Tellingly, both Toyota and Honda have so far declined to make any such promises. Honda is the world’s largest engine manufacturer when you take its boat, motorcycle, lawnmower, and other engines it makes outside the auto market into account. Honda competes in those markets with Briggs & Stratton and the increased electrification of lawnmowers, weed trimmers, and the like.

Wimmer noted that while manufactures have announced ambitious goals, just 2% of the world’s cars are electric at this point. For price, range, infrastructure, affordability, and other reasons, buyers continue to choose ICE over electric, and that’s even when electric engines are often subsidized with tax breaks to bring pricetags down.

The scale of the switch hasn’t even been introduced into the conversation in any systematic way yet. According to FinancesOnline, there are 289.5 million cars just on U.S. roads as of 2021. About 98 percent of them are gas-powered. Toyota’s RAV4 took the top spot for purchases in the U.S. market in 2019, with Honda’s CR-V in second. GM’s top seller, the Chevy Equinox, comes in at #4 behind the Nissan Rogue. This is in the U.S. market, mind. GM only has one entry in the top 15 in the U.S. Toyota and Honda dominate, with a handful each in the top 15.

Toyota warns that the grid and infrastructure simply aren’t there to support the electrification of the private car fleet. A 2017 U.S. government study found that we would need about 8,500 strategically-placed charge stations to support a fleet of just 7 million electric cars. That’s about six times the current number of electric cars but no one is talking about supporting just 7 million cars. We should be talking about powering about 300 million within the next 20 years, if all manufacturers follow GM and stop making ICE cars.

Simply put, we’re gonna need a bigger energy boat to deal with connecting all those cars to the power grids. A LOT bigger.

But instead of building a bigger boat, we may be shrinking the boat we have now. The power outages in California and Texas — the largest U.S. states by population and by car ownership — exposed issues with powering needs even at current usage levels. Increasing usage of wind and solar, neither of which can be throttled to meet demand, and both of which prove unreliable in crisis, has driven some coal and natural gas generators offline. Wind simply runs counter to needs — it generates too much power when we tend not to need it, and generates too little when we need more. The storage capacity to account for this doesn’t exist yet.

We will need much more generation capacity to power about 300 million cars if we’re all going to be forced to drive electric cars. Whether we’re charging them at home or charging them on the road, we will be charging them frequently. Every gas station you see on the roadside today will have to be wired to charge electric cars, and charge speeds will have to be greatly increased. Current technology enables charges in “as little as 30 minutes,” according to Kelly Blue Book. That best-case-scenario fast charging cannot be done on home power. It uses direct current and specialized systems. Charging at home on alternating current can take a few hours to overnight to fill the battery, and will increase the home power bill. That power, like all electricity in the United States, comes from generators using natural gas, petroleum, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, or hydroelectric power according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. I left out biomass because, despite Austin, Texas’ experiment with purchasing a biomass plant to help power the city, biomass is proving to be irrelevant in the grand energy scheme thus far. Austin didn’t even turn on its biomass plant during the recent freeze.

Half an hour is an unacceptably long time to spend at an electron pump. It’s about 5 to 10 times longer than a current trip to the gas pump tends to take when pumps can push 4 to 5 gallons into your tank per minute. That’s for consumer cars, not big rigs that have much larger tanks. Imagine the lines that would form at the pump, every day, all the time, if a single charge time isn’t reduced by 70 to 80 percent. We can expect improvements, but those won’t come without cost. Nothing does. There is no free lunch. Electrifying the auto fleet will require a massive overhaul of the power grid and an enormous increase in power generation. Elon Musk recently said we might need double the amount of power we’re currently generating if we go electric. He’s not saying this from a position of opposing electric cars. His Tesla dominates that market and he presumably wants to sell even more of them.

Toyota has publicly warned about this twice, while its smaller rival GM is pushing to go electric. GM may be virtue signaling to win favor with those in power in California and Washington and in the media. Toyota’s addressing reality and its record is evidence that it deserves to be heard.

Toyota isn’t saying none of this can be done, by the way. It’s just saying that so far, the conversation isn’t anywhere near serious enough to get things done.

YOU CAN IGNORE REALITY, BUT YOU CANNOT IGNORE THE CONSEQUENCES OF IGNORING REALITY!

 

[JohnandDonna]

I found this article very interesting. Sorry it is long but it is a good read!

Battery technology and infrustructure need to come a long way. Currently electric is only practical in an urban setting. However there is IMHO a better choice, hydrogen. It can actually be burned in an internal combustion engine, and of course power a fuel cell. Either way you get water out of the tail pipe. Plus it is almost as quick to fill up as gasoline. Unfortunately this most plentiful of elements is locked up in other things. I would love to see an huge investment in coming up with an efficient and inexpensive manner to separate hydrogen from sea water. This just seems to be the most practical alternative to gasoline.

 

[Brutal_HO]

Battery technology and infrustructure need to come a long way. Currently electric is only practical in an urban setting. However there is IMHO a better choice, hydrogen. It can actually be burned in an internal combustion engine, and of course power a fuel cell. Either way you get water out of the tail pipe. Plus it is almost as quick to fill up as gasoline. Unfortunately this most plentiful of elements is locked up in other things. I would love to see an huge investment in coming up with an efficient and inexpensive manner to separate hydrogen from sea water. This just seems to be the most practical alternative to gasoline.

Lots of Tesla owners would disagree with you.

That said, everyone has a different perspective of "practical."