Why Gas Engines Are Far From Dead - Biggest EV Problems

hello everyone and welcome according to the industry that has made a ton of money selling combustion

engines

the combustion engine is going nowhere and of course they would say that but this is what they are right so in In this video I want to discuss why the combustion engine still has a long life ahead of it and some of the challenges electric cars face and I want to be clear about my goal 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 plenty of good reasons to continue to improve combustion

engines

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

So much of this video is for selfish reasons, so next time someone in the comments is bashing combustion engines. I can say that hey, there are still good reasons why they exist. Here's the link because I'm certainly going to continue to make videos on cool and interesting combustion technology as well as technology involving electric cars, so we're going to divide the video into four categories: the science, the environment, the cost, and the consumer. In each category we will discuss the associated challenges, well let's start with the science from a physics standpoint, the

biggest

challenge electric cars currently face is energy density.

In other words, how much energy can you put into a given space? So here I have a gallon of water now, according to the EPA. If it were a gallon of gasoline, it would have the equivalent of 33.7 kilowatt hours of energy, so just on this. a gallon of gas is more power than the entire battery in the first generation nissan leaf now times have changed batteries have gotten better since the first generation nissan leaf so i found a study in 2018 that was looking at eight different battery manufacturers lithium ion and from them I 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 give a visual demonstration of what that means so here we have a gallon of gas and now what i want to see is how much space do we need to have the same amount of power but in the form of lithium ion batteries. let's do that using lecroy cans not because i'm sponsored this isn't sponsored i'm just basic so if you do the math of course i did the energy equivalent per volume of a gallon of gas it would take 139 cans of lacroix to represent our lithium ion batteries now this is more than just an elaborate plan to make my purchases tax deductible this is crazy to see by volume gasoline is 13 times more energy dense than the best of lithium ion batteries in 2018. and you might be saying to yourself, this isn't such a fair comparison visually because all the gasoline is tucked away in one convenient little place, while the lithium ion is spread across all these individual cells but that's the point because gasoline just goes in a tank and just sits in one place Batteries are made up of thousands of individual cells which are not that space efficient so keep in mind that what What we're looking at here is the volume required just for the cells this doesn't take into any consideration, cell connections, wiring, cooling routing q It runs through these batteries and the overall structure that holds them together, so the space will actually be much larger than what you see here, and also, remember that we're looking for the best. example from a study in 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 one. gallon of gas by volume so far we've only talked about volume and of course volume is important for packing inside a car so if you previously only needed this much space but now you need this much space then obviously you have a bit of a problem because you have to take away existing space inside the vehicle or your vehicle has to be bigger to accommodate all that power but we haven't mentioned 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 now, based on that same study that I looked at earlier, the best battery energy density was about 240 watt hours per kilogram, what does that mean?

Well, if this was gasoline represented. Here for Pamplemousie, the best flavor of Lacroix, then it would weigh 50 times less than the equivalent amount of power in the form of lithium ions and remember this only refers to the battery cells, the battery pack itself. it would be even heavier so if you look at a gallon of gas that weighs six pounds it has more power than the original leaf battery pack which was over 600 pounds over a hundred times heavier for less power then why is this a problem well it depends on what you are 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 its not really a problem , it doesn't matter how much space it takes up, it doesn't matter how heavy it is, it's just sitting somewhere and it may help you if you then put it in a car, however it means the car is significantly heavier and the bigger the item you it becomes more detrimental it becomes to that object so think airplane or train or you know big cargo trucks or when you are towing so these are scenarios where it becomes challenging because of how much a package of batteries of lithium ion so if you were to think of a plane for example i know it's trying to fly it needs to be as light and compact as possible so if you had enough batteries on board the thing could fly somewhere it would take up all the space inside it and you wouldn't if there was any extra weight allowed for the passengers, the thing would be full of batteries, it would be very heavy and it would fly somewhere for sure, but it wouldn't take anyone with it and it wouldn't go very far. far, so now we're really in the sweet spot where passenger cars make sense, but things bigger than that still don't.

The good news is that battery technology continues to improve, so as battery technology continues to improve, the battery itself will take up less space and weigh less. and eventually we'll get closer and closer to what we have with gasoline. We are not going to get there, but we can reduce it and it can improve significantly. We're just not there yet, so what does that mean? Well, if there are applications. today that actuall and require combustion engines we might as well make those combustion engines as clean and good and efficient as possible while we still need them ok so now let's talk about cost and there are two issues here so, first of all electric cars are expensive according to this automotive engineering magazine from sae electric cars they are around 12 000 more for the initial purchase price so yeah maintenance cost and operating costs will end up lower , but the initial purchase price is significantly higher and so a lot of people avoid buying them now, part of this is a chicken and egg scenario because because not many people are buying electric cars not many are being produced electric cars and because not many electric cars are produced it's very expensive economies of scale the more you do. cheaper they get so in this scenario if more people bought electric cars they would be cheaper but more people can't buy electric cars because they are too expensive no I want to be very clear and I don't think the initial purchase price is the big deterrent for the electric cars.

I don't think that's the big reason why we don't see mass adoption and the reason is if the only thing people were worried about when buying a new car was total cost of ownership we would all be driving old 90's honda civics and not we are buying new toys buying cars its a very emotional experience its not a logical experience and thats why all luxury brands exist if all of us just thought about total cost of ownership there would be no luxury brand period there would be no fun cars just we have all the boring simple machines that could get us from point a to point b that cost us the least amount, but people buy things they enjoy and for that reason I don't think it's such a strong argument that cost is just what It keeps people out of electric cars, however where does the cost get involved and where do I think this? playing a role is in terms of profit for manufacturers according to a study by alex partners for an electric car to be profitable today it has to cost forty eight thousand dollars quite a lot and the cost of the powertrain of that electric car is about sixteen thousand dollars for long range ev 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 make a significantly higher profit if you sell that car out of 30,000 like 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 talk about why what should we improve internal combustion engines according to According to this reading, between two and three billion internal combustion engines will be sold between re now and 2045.

That alone sounds like a good reason to buff and improve them if we're going to sell that many anyway they might as well be as clean as possible but let's look at it from a manufacturer standpoint you knew it 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 and so you're a small company you don't have a ton of money and you have to make a decision of what do you want to do with that research and development money, do you want to put it into an electric car or do you want to improve your combustion cars, so let's say you choose to create an electric car and that ends up accounting for about 10 of their sales which is actually an optimistic number based on today's sales data and that 10 percent thankfully these electric cars have twice the life cycle emissions friendly compared to the combustion course. s are only reduced by 5 because you still have 90 of your cars unchanged, then you might as well choose to, instead of spending that money developing an electric car, develop a better internal combustion engine and create new technology that reduces emissions , let's say 10 percent 10 is not a crazy number to improve emissions now because all of your vehicles are combustion engines that 10 applies across the board and that means you have a total emissions savings of 10 so it actually was cleaner and probably much more profitable for your business to develop a new internal combustion engine technology than to go the eevee route and part of this is down to consumer choice which brings us to our last point finally let's talk about consumers so a big part of selling a car is knowing that there is a market out there to buy that car in 2018 and in 2019 the global market share al for electric cars was about two percent so if you owned a car dealership and a hundred people came to your car dealership and bought cars only two of them came out with an electric car now marketing is the business of teaching you what you want to buy and part of it is we've marketed 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 big part .

Lots of people still want combustion cars. It's easy to think why not everyone has an electric car if you have a garage. i have a way to fast charge that vehicle however one thing i have always said and will continue to say is that people are lazy so 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, electric cars will often be more convenient than a combustion car; However, if you live in an apartment or park your vehicle on the street, which many people do, then a combustion car is easy. g to be more convenient, so many people will choose to have thepeople also buy cars that they rarely need for their intended purpose say five percent of the time that's why you see a ton of trucks because one day they might need to buy mulch but with that five percent mindset people buy gasoline cars because they know they can travel on the road anywhere and everywhere.

I've experienced this with my tesla, there are trips on it that I intentionally took my crosstrek because the charging infrastructure doesn't exist where I want to go, so if you only have one car, it's often very logical that it's a combustion car. If you're a family with multiple cars in a garage, it makes perfect sense to own at least one of those vehicles. electric for everything in the city but that's not the case for everyone and then if we go back to take into account that currently two percent of buyers are buying electric cars and let's say again you're mazda you're trying to clean your your fleet so you invest all in an electric car that only two percent of the people who buy your cars are buying then you're not really cleaning 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 electric cars are dumb or you shouldn't buy one i love them but there are still plenty of good reasons why combustion engines still exist and why they should keep getting better so I'll ultimately keep making videos on pre-chamber ignition engines or gasoline compression ignition or whatever else car manufacturers think. 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.