Quote:
Originally Posted by pikcachu
Well not quite. Ice will never be very efficient about 40% is lost due to heat.
And over the 100 years or so, they did get quite more efficient.
But the point is electric cars are in their infancy and battery technology, capacity, discharge rate etc should increase much faster than improvements of ices
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In the 1970's Ford was investigating building engines out of ceramic materials. Ceramic engine blocks, pistons, cylinderheads. Prototypes worked. The idea was high-silica ceramics could be formulated to withstand higher operating temperatures than iron and aluminim, which extracted more power from the higher cylinder temperatures and pressures. Simply put, there was less energy lost to waste heat.
The problem was the ceramic engines would have been expensive to produce and there was little market acceptance for an engine made from the same base materials as dishes, which easily break as everyone knows. Today, with the market willing to accept more complex (read as expensive) technologies to solve fuel consumption and emissions challenges (less waste heat means lower emssions) perhaps a ceramic engine makes marketable sense. Yet the new marketing issue is people are now convinced buring carbon fuel is bad for the planet. Shifting the emssions from the tail pipe to smokestack is an easy sell.
But the point is electric cars are not all that new. The electric drivetrain is more efficient than ICE because there is less heat loss and virtiually no idle time, coupled with the different torque charateristics of electric motors. Engineers and scientists have been at the battery development business for 40 years, the gains have been slow and expensive. But as I've stated there is a technological-cost wall somewhere out in front of them.