Who killed the electric car?

[Apollo Gnomon]

Yes - liquid fuels pack a lot of energy into a small mass/volume combination and require very little on-board equipment to handle - fuel tank, pump, carburetor/injectors. Hydrogen fuel is possible, bun not simple, nor easy and safe for drivers to self-serve refuel. LPG and Propane exist as 4-stroke engine options, but they have limitations and drawbacks, including the weight of the high-pressure tank and the smaller range-of-drive per cubic foot of fuel tank.

As for why gasoline internal-combustion engines won out over steam, we can go back to that conspiracy Kruschev's Other Shoe mentioned - the conspiracy between the Manufacturers, Mechanics and Consumers. (Remember - it takes three to make a convictable conspiracy!) The Wikipedia article on Stanley mentions it somewhat.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Steamer

The electric starter and improved carbs really made the difference, and Ford was producing a car that sold for a few hundred dollars - Stanleys sold for several thousand. Consumers had a choice between sturdy, inexpensive vehicles with a growing fuel infrastructure and repair facilities, or gizmos that needed excessive fussing with.

The first automobile to cross the US had horsepower and drivetrain specifications that are still in production today - in the form of riding lawnmowers! That was the early competition. When cars were new, electric, gasoline and steam were all equal in fussyness, power, and range. Today, the electric golf-cart is the inheritor of the early electric cars. They still sell, to consumers who need that size/duty cycle combination.

The Fords created a market that had to be matched. The profits were plowed back into the engineering in feed-back loop amplification that small start-up sized companies like Stanley couldn't match. The market for "gourmet" cars was limited, compared to the market for the Model T.

I'll get back to this later and talk about the efficiency, and why I think steam should come back.

[lazarusty]

Do you really think that electricity is a limited resource though?

[Apollo Gnomon]

lazarusty said:

Do you really think that electricity is a limited resource though?

Depends on how you define the terms of your question. The energy available from the sun is, for all practical purposes, unlimited.

Manufacturing capacity and raw materials for collecting solar energy are limited.

Land is a limited resource, so the amount of acreage available for wind, photovoltaic or solar-thermal collection is limited. Not every spot that is available for, say, windfarms is an ideal location for windfarming. Maybe local residents dislike the shadows on their yards. Maybe migrating birds fly through that corridor. Maybe the land is cheap and uninhabited but the wind availability is poor, or the seasonal weather tears up the equipment.

On the other hand, we have almost no investment yet in those various ways of collecting solar for our total energy useage, so any amount of increase will be a good contribution.

One of the problems is attitude, too. Engineering things for economy-of-scale is frequently counterproductive. Roof-top solar-thermal collectors, for all their bad features, have the advantage of spreading a civilization's solar collection acreage over the users, rather than having massive solar-farms to give a city cheap heat.

[Apollo Gnomon]

Here's why I think we need to re-explore steam cars.

Internal combustion engines have poor efficiency, in terms of energy consumed converted to work. I'm sure we've all seen pictures of dragsters with flames coming out of the exhaust pipes - they're the least efficient, because they're taking the cream off the top of the expansion, and throwing away the explosion before it's even finished. Modern cars are better than this, but they still throw away huge amounts of pressurized exhaust, since the pistons are not allowed to decelerate.

Here's a piston that is allowed to decelerate at the end of the stroke, and it has really high combustion-to-work ratio:

wwwcf.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/tccc/tutorial/piles/pile03a.htm

The "open-ended diesel hammer", a type of pile-driver. Combustion throws the ram up, it decelerates to zero at the end of the stroke, then gravity drops the hammer back down, supplying the impact for the hammering action as well as the compression for the next stroke.

My house furnace is about 80% efficient - 100,000 BTU's heat my house, 20,000 btu's carry the CO₂ and H₂O up the pipe. There are modern high-efficiency furnaces that get as high as 94%. Instead of vertical exhaust pipes, they have pipes that are set to drain, at about ¹/₄" per foot, like rain gutters. Most of the heat is transferred to the heat exchanger, so the exhaust is quite cool and the H₂O condenses in the pipe.

You may have read over the last several years that natural gas is being used to generate electricity. Essentially, the gas is burned in a turbine, like a jet engine, that's coupled to the generator. In "combined cycle" plants, the hot exhaust is then used to generate steam to spin steam-turbines.

Fort St. Vrain, in Colorado, was originally built to be a nuclear power plant, but it basically was a piece of crap. Now it uses GE combustion turbines plus the original steam turbine to generate power.

What I'm trying to get at here is that efficiency comes from capturing as much of the heat as possible from the combustion of fuel. Modern cars are terrible at this - the exhaust is hot, and even in sub-zero weather enough waste heat is generated and dumped through the coolant to keep the cabin toasty warm.

Generating steam with gasoline combustion is potentially more efficient, if more of the heat is captured into the water and hot side of the equipment. Steam can be turned into motion with higher efficiency than Stanleys and locomotives used - "compound" steam engines

www.norwayheritage.com/gallery/gallery.asp?action=viewimage&categoryid=38&text=&imageid=685&box=&shownew=

take high pressure steam and pull motion off of it, then take the lower pressure steam that results and pull motion off of it again with another piston in tandem, on the same crank, or even on a separate piece of equipment.

One of the hassles with electric cars is that they lack waste heat for cabin comfort and windshield clearing. They have to use electric heaters to do this, drawing precious power from the batteries, reducing range/running time when vehicle reliability should be HIGHEST for safety and convenience.

[PeterB]

Jason asked:

So the question is, why did the gasoline engine win out over the steam car?

Lazarusty answered:

Because, by getting us to depend on a limited resource (oil) threy make more money and have more power over us.

Er, Lazarusty, the question Jason is asking is HOW did they get us to depend on a limited resource.

Can you answer that?

[lazarusty]

Mind control manipulation.

[Data Cable]

lazarusty said:

Mind control manipulation.

...In which case they don't need to spend billions of dollars to obtain and refine crude oil, they just use their mind control manipulation powers and make the public give them money outright.

[Apollo Gnomon]

lazarusty said:

Mind control manipulation.

Are you serious? Or are you referring to advertising with this quote?


Mind control was totally unnecessary - the use of gasoline-engines for transportation, machinery and traction sold itself. At my local county fair I've seen "maytag" engines, single cylinder hit-or-miss firing, with a big flywheel for running washing machines or other equipment. Have you ever washed clothes by hand? For a family? Of farmers? That's where they were selling the product of gasoline engines - anywhere they could.

For hundreds of years, people were experimenting with using machinery to save labor, using whatever power source and technology was available. There were even experiments with coal-dust as an internal-combustion fuel.

The only thing less convenient than animal traction technology is not having animals at all, or using humans as animals and having to whip them into submission, or doing it yourself. As soon as inventors put reliable machinery on the market, it sold. Even the overpriced Stanley Steamer sold well for a while, but then Ford came in and undercut everyone with a superior product.

The only mind control involved was each consumer, deciding between competing products or no products.

Next, we should talk about the history of liquid fuels. Gasoline was just a waste product leftover when refining kerosene out of crude oil, and kerosene was the replacement for whale oil (if you choose to belive in giant cetaceans) burned in lamps for residential lighting. Gasoline was considered waste, because it was poisonous to cook with, and dangerous to burn.

Putting the expansion of combustion into a cast iron barrel to drive a piston was a direct descendent of steam engine technology. Gasoline finally had a way it could be burned safely - let it explode in a bucket!

Mind control. Sheesh.

[PhantomWolf]

Well today GM unvieled their concept Hybrid car, the GM Volt. They'd love to release it on the market, but aren't going too because of one thing, they want to sell it for around US$25,000 but currently the battery alone costs US$10,000 to produce.

[gwen]

The only manipulative mind control is an exploitation of human nature by marketers and sales people (most of whom have their own families to feed, after all). This stuff is thoroughly described. Most introductory books about economics will tell you that free markets tend to support the cheapest, most widely available, minimally working standard. Like with personal computers. We have Microsoft, a highly skilled sales org which built a stroke of luck 25 years ago into a (by most accounts, one way or another) predatory monopoly by marketing a product which was demonstrably inferior except for two itsy bitsy details: It was cheap and easy to hack, allowing programmers to leverage limited computer resources, in an un-networked world, by using highly unsafe, depecrated and unstable but very effective calls directly on a machine's hardware. Who cared if the things crashed 5 times a day? Ctrl alt del is the first command I remember being taught when I was like, 10. I thought it was how things worked. F**k. It WAS how things worked!

A quarter century later we're finally pulling ourselves out of the mess our parents excitedly bought themselves into but meanwhile, folks had cheap and helpful computers, didn't they. So now, thanks to my job, our computers here at home run FreeBSD with graphical, networked multimedia desktops about as cool as OS X or Vista (no spinning 3D windows yet but I glark this'll be a port upgrade or whatever not too long from now) and they never ever crash. So is FreeBSD the best OS there is? Haha! Aye, spot on... for me, the most readily available one anyway, with what, 15,000 free and open proggies but I've heard of others. Plan9 maybe? Where does it end? Go back to that economics text then, I think.

Meanwhile batteries are still so heavy and expensive but I don't know anyone who thinks internal combustion engines are cool or will be around much in cars 25 years hence. Now, if the market can only find a way to remove fuzzy headed boys from the driving part, we may get somewhere