Why Gas Engines Are Far From Dead - Biggest EV Problems

Hello everyone and welcome, according to the industry that has made a lot of money selling combustion

engines

, the combustion engine is not going anywhere and of course they would say that, but in this they are right, so in this video I want discuss why the combustion engine still has a long life ahead of it and some of the challenges that electric cars face and I want to make my goal clear. I'm not saying you shouldn't buy an electric car. I bought an electric car and I think You're great, my goal with this video is to give you evidence that there are still many good reasons to continue improving combustion

engines

, so a common comment I get on this channel every time I talk about an new piece of internal combustion engine technology is Why would the manufacturer continue to develop the combustion engine when we know the future is electric and when could they be investing that money in electric cars?

A big part of this video is for selfish reasons, so next time someone in the comments is attacking. combustion engines I can say, hey, you know there are still good reasons why they exist, here's the link because I'm certainly going to continue making videos about cool and interesting combustion technologies as well as technology that involves electric cars, so let's go to divide the video into four categories science the environment the cost and the consumer in each category we will discuss the challenges associated well, so let's start with the science from the point of view of physics, the

biggest

challenge that electric cars currently face is the energy density, in other words, how much energy can you put in a given space?

Here I have a gallon of water according to the EPA. If it were a gallon of gasoline, it would have the equivalent of 33.7 kilowatt hours of energy, so there is just this one gallon of gasoline. more power than in the entire first generation nissan leaf battery now times have changed batteries have improved since the first generation nissan leaf so i found a study in 2018 that looked at eight different lithium ion battery manufacturers and They looked at what was the best energy density they found in a lithium-ion battery cell; that number was 684 watt hours per liter, so I want to provide a visual demonstration of what that means, so here we have a gallon of gasoline and now what I want to see is how much space do we need to have the same amount of energy?

But in the form of lithium ion batteries, we will do it using Lecroy cans. Not because I'm sponsored, this isn't sponsored, I'm just basic. So if you do the math, which of course I did the equivalent energy per volume of a gallon of gasoline, you would need 139 cans of Lacroix which represents our lithium ion batteries. Now this is more than just a plan put together to make my purchases tax deductible. It's crazy to look at it by volume, gasoline has 13 times the energy density of the best lithium-ion batteries in 2018. And you might be telling yourself that this isn't such a fair comparison visually because all gasoline is hidden in a nice little convenient place, while the lithium ion is distributed in all these individual cells, but that's the point because the gasoline just goes into a tank and it just stays in one place.

Batteries are made up of thousands of individual cells that aren't that space efficient? So keep in mind that what we're looking at here is the volume required just for the cells. This doesn't take into account the cell connections, the wiring, the cooling routing that runs through these batteries, and the overall structure that holds them. all together, so the space will actually be much larger than what you see here and also remember that we are looking at the best example from a study from 2018. If we were to look at the worst example, the energy density was less than half and that would mean we would double what you see here just to have the same amount of energy as a gallon of gasoline by volume.

So far we have only talked about volume and of course volume is important for packaging inside a car. So if before you only needed so much space but now you need so much space, then obviously you have a little problem because you have to take away existing space inside the vehicle or your vehicle has to be bigger to fit everything. that energy, but we haven't touched on weight yet and this is where gasoline has an even bigger advantage, so a gallon of gasoline weighs about six pounds and has the energy equivalent of 33.7 kilowatt hours according to that same study that I looked previously.

The energy density of the best battery was about 240 watt hours per kilogram, what does that mean? If this can were gasoline represented here by Lacroix's best tasting pamplemousie, then it would weigh 50 times less than the equivalent amount of energy in the form of lithium ions and remember. This is just talking about the battery cells, the battery pack itself would be even heavier, so if you look at a gallon of gasoline that weighs six pounds, it has more energy than the original leaf battery pack, which He weighed more than 600 pounds. a hundred times heavier for less energy, so why is this a problem?

It depends on what you're trying to do with that battery, if you have a lithium ion battery in your house as a backup power source for when the power goes out. It's not really a problem, you don't care how much space it takes up, you don't care how heavy it is, it's just somewhere and it can help you if you then put it in a car, however it does mean that the car is significantly heavier and The larger the object becomes, the more damaging it becomes to that object, so think about an airplane or a train or large cargo trucks or when you're towing, these are scenarios where it becomes challenging because of how how much a lithium ion battery pack weighs, so if you think about an airplane, for example, you know it's trying to fly, it needs to be as light and compact as possible, so if you had enough batteries on board, that thing could actually fly somewhere, it would take up all the space inside it and no extra weight would be allowed for the passengers, the thing would just be full of batteries, it would be very heavy and would surely fly somewhere, but don't take Anyone with it and you wouldn't get very far, so right now we're really in the sweet spot where passenger cars make sense, but bigger things don't yet.

The good news is that battery technology continues to improve so that battery technology continues to improve the battery itself will take up less space and weigh less and over time we will get closer and closer to what we have with gasoline, we are not going to get here, but we can reduce it and it can improve. significantly we are not there yet, so what does that mean? If there are applications today that require combustion engines, we might as well make those combustion engines as clean, good and efficient as possible while we still need them, okay? Let's talk about costs and there are two

problems

here, so first of all, electric cars are expensive according to this sae automotive engineering magazine.

Electric cars cost about 12,000 more than the initial purchase price, so yes, maintenance cost and operating costs are going to increase. They end up being lower, but the initial purchase price is significantly higher and that's why many people avoid buying them now. Part of this is a chicken and egg scenario because because not many people buy electric cars, not many electric cars are produced and Because not many electric cars are produced, they are very expensive economies of scale, the more they are made, the more cheap they become. In this scenario, if more people bought electric cars, they would be cheaper, but more people can't buy electric cars because they are now too expensive.

I want to be very clear and I don't think the initial purchase price is the big deterrent to electric cars. I don't think that's the main reason we're not seeing mass adoption and the reason is that If the only thing people worried about when buying a new car was the total cost of ownership, we'd all be driving old 90's Honda Civics. and no, we buy new toys. Buying a car is a very emotional experience, it is not a logical experience. and because of that, all luxury brands exist, if we all thought only about the total cost of ownership, there would be no luxury brand period, there would be no fun cars, we just have all the simple boring machines that could take us from the point a to point b. that costs us the least amount, but people buy things they like and for that reason I don't think it's such a strong argument that cost alone is what keeps people out of electric cars, however, where cost comes into play and where I think this plays an important role in terms of profits for manufacturers, according to a study by Alex Partners.

For an electric car to be profitable today, it has to cost well over forty-eight thousand dollars and the cost of the powertrain for that. An electric car costs about sixteen thousand dollars for a long range electric vehicle, versus about sixty five hundred dollars for a combustion car, so think about this, if you are a manufacturer and you want to sell a car to a customer for thirty thousand dollars, you can earn much more. you will make a profit if you sell that 30k car as a combustion car versus an electric car and for better or worse manufacturers will follow what makes them profitable and in this case it is combustion engines so let's move on to the environment and let's talk about why.

We should improve internal combustion engines, so according to this reading, between two and three billion internal combustion engines will be sold between now and 2045. That alone sounds like a very good reason to improve them and make them better if We're going to sell that many anyway, they better be as clean as possible, but let's look at it from the manufacturer's point of view. You knew I was going to include a whiteboard in this video, so let's say you're a small automaker with a hypothetical name. like mazda and your goal for your company is to improve your overall emissions, so you are a small company, you don't have a lot of money and you have to make a decision on what you want to do with that research and development money, do you want to invest it in a car electric or do you want to improve your combustion cars?

So let's say you choose to create an electric car and that ends up making up about 10 of your sales, which is actually an optimistic number based on today's sales data and that 10 percent, fortunately, these electric cars have a cycle of twice as emissions-friendly life compared to the combustion course. Great, you've upgraded them, but they're only 10 of your sales, so your total emissions are only reduced by 5 because you still have 90 of your cars unchanged, so you might as well opt for, instead of spending that money, develop an electric car to develop a better internal combustion engine and create new technology that reduces emissions by, say, 10 percent. 10 is not an unreasonable number to improve emissions.

At this point, because all your vehicles are combustion engines, 10 applies across the board and that means you have an overall emissions savings of 10, so it was actually cleaner and probably a lot more profitable for your company develop a new internal combustion engine technology that will follow Eevee's route and part of this is due to consumer choice, which brings us to our last point, let's finally talk about consumers, so a large part of selling a car is knowing that there is a market to buy that car in 2018 and in 2019, the global market share of electric cars was about two percent, so if you owned a car dealership and a hundred people went to your dealership and bought cars, only two of them walked out with an electric car, now marketing is the business of teaching you.

What you want to buy and part of it is that we've been marketing combustion engine cars more often, unless you've been watching recent Super Bowl commercials, but it also comes down to consumer choice and that plays a huge role for Many people. I still want combustion cars, it's easy to think why not everyone has an electric car if you have a garage and have a way to charge that vehicle quickly, however, something I have always said and will continue to say is that people are lazy. If you want to convince people to buy something, it has to be more convenient than what they already have now.

If you have a garage and, again, a way to charge it. Often, electric cars will be more convenient than combustion cars. However, if you live in an apartment or if you park your vehicle on the street, which many people do, then a combustion car will easily be more convenient, which is why many people will choose that peopleAlso buy cars that are rarely needed for their intended purpose. Let's say five percent of the time that's why you see a lot of pickup trucks because one day they might need to buy mulch, but with that five percent mentality people buy gas cars because they know they can road trip anywhere. and everywhere.

I have experienced this with On my tesla there are trips on it that I have intentionally taken on my crosstrek because the charging infrastructure does not exist where I want to go so if you only have one car it is often very logical that it is a combustion car if you are For a family with several cars in a garage it makes a lot of sense to have at least one of those vehicles as electric for everything in the city, but that is not the case for everyone and if we take into account again that currently two percent percent of buyers buy electric cars and Let's say again you're Mazda, you're trying to clean up your fleet and so you invest everything in an electric car that only two percent of the people who buy your cars buy. then you're not really cleaning up. your fleet because there aren't enough people buying that car for it to really make a difference, so again, none of this is to say that electric cars are dumb or that you shouldn't buy one that I love.

I love mine, but there are still many good reasons why combustion engines still exist and why they should continue to be improved, so ultimately I will continue to make videos on pre-chamber ignition engines or gasoline engines with pre-chamber ignition. compression or whatever else automakers come up with. mainly because I think it's cool, but also because it actually makes sense under the current circumstances, so thank you all so much for watching, and if you have any questions or comments, of course, feel free to leave them below.