this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
87 points (93.1% liked)
Technology
59123 readers
3863 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Never knew about this metric before.
I’m looking forward to the instant benefits for e-bikes!
The thing is when gasoline is used to power a car about 80% of the energy is loss to heat and only about 20% is used to actually move the car on average. It’s worse when you are doing acceleration and better when cruising at a steady speed on a level surface.
Yeah, so you have to divide it by a factor of 5. Which still makes gasoline roughly 5 times as energy dense than this prototype battery, instead of 25 times.
Another problem is the increased complexity of fossil fuel vehicles, specifically in stuff like the engine, gears, pollution filters, etc. A fossil fuel vehicle is just intrinsically more complicated. Which doesn't directly relate to the density, but it gives electric vehicles an advantage.
Also no regenerative braking
Which is where hybrids have a huge advantage, getting the best of both worlds
The weight itself is an engineering challenge.
With passenger vehicles, the problems have largely been solved. With motorcycles, there are still some tradeoffs on range (especially highway). With large cargo trucks, the weight causes issues with range, weight capacity, and charging times. With aircraft, there's not really competition on the horizon.
And electrification of heat production itself for climate control, cooking, hot water, industrial processes, etc. is coming along, too, on an application by application basis. (But note that the energy "lost" to heat is less of a factor for these uses.)
In general efficiency, modern cars are a lot closer to 40% than 20. E.g. a Prius engine is at 38,5%.
It was interesting to see F1 engines go past the 50% mark, a few years back.
Not sure how much it'd improve ebikes. Maybe if you want to take a bike trip longer than 100 miles.
If anything, sodium batteries are more exciting for ebikes. They're more than enough for getting around town, and they're cheap.