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Why an F1 car is more energy efficient than an electric car
- Sephr 10y agoWhat a disingenuous title. It should say "Why an F1 car is more energy efficient than an electric car running on coal and oil grid power". I get all of my electricity from a nuclear power plant, so if I had an electric car the title statement would at least be false for me. For people on solar, the title doesn't make any practical sense, as less efficient solar panels aren't causing any extra pollution (except during their initial construction).
- jgalt212 10y ago> all my electricity from a nuclear power plant Yeah, and there's no unaccounted for externalities with that strategy.
- cbr 10y ago> I get all of my electricity from a nuclear power plant If you use more power, that doesn't come from running the nuke plant more (we run them at 100% all the time) or building more nuke plants (politically impossible). Instead it comes from coal/oil/wind/sun: something else.
- turbohedgehog 10y agoHow much does it cost (in terms of money and carbon footprint) to prepare the fuel and engine for a F1 car compared to that of a modern power plant?
- marklubi 10y agoHow much (in terms of money and carbon footprint) is required to build a modern power plant? Your comparison is disingenuous.
- nopzor 10y agoI'm a huge fan of f1 but I think this article is a bit disingenuous. f1 engines are hundreds of times more expensive than normal engines, and they are only designed to run for a few hours before needing to be replaced completely.
- k-mcgrady 10y ago>> "they are only designed to run for a few hours before needing to be replaced completely." That's wrong. An F1 engine has to do about 800 miles/1200km based on current rules. In testing over 4 days Mercedes completed about 2000 miles and I believe that was without an engine change. Obviously these numbers are much less than a person would drive in a year but significantly more than a couple of hours. I'm sure they could be designed to go longer and be continue to be efficient of necessary too as rules have forced this change over the years.
- tremon 10y agoOoh, over a thousand kilometers you say? Yes, that's definitely much closer to the 300,000km a regular car engine achieves than the GP was suggesting.
- w0utert 10y agoI really fail to see how the planned lifetime of F1 engines is related to its potential fuel efficiency. If anything, I would expect the engines could be made even more efficient if they were designed to last 300.000 miles, at the expense of power output. I find it hard to believe that tuning an engine so far it will wear down quickly will improve it's efficiency.
- Ensorceled 10y agoThis is genius! You should go to Ford, GM, etc. and explain how they can just take the techniques from the F1 engine and tune it to really improve their cars mileage. Clearly their engineers have thought that yet!
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- jcoffland 10y agoThis is ridiculous. The energy consumed by an average road car to move 1 human 1 mile is far less than that of an F1 car, by a huge margin.
- pmontra 10y agoFormula 1 cars are designed to run fast, so they need a lot of energy, but efficiency is about how much energy you extract from fuel, not about how much energy you need.
- jcoffland 10y agoEfficiency can be defined in many different ways. For road cars the amount of fuel used is far more important than the energy extraction efficiency, in practice. Which was my whole point.
- reallydontask 10y agoI'm an avid F1 follower and not a fan of electric cars but this article is so poor it's unbelievable. Let's compare worst case scenario for what we don't like and ignore all inconvenient facts for what we like. Lazy
- simulate 10y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11449314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11449314
- cromulent 10y agoThis article doesn't explain it well, but converting fuel to energy with this sort of thermal efficiency (40-50%) is indeed much better than both normal ICE and coal power plants at around 30%. Obviously racing engines are highly tuned and not suitable for general use, but there's no reason I can see that TJI technology could not be adapted for normal engines.
- Arnt 10y agoDoesn't sound as if it's really very efficient, though, when you measure the entire chain (sunlight, plants, oil fields, crude, refined fuel, rolling wheels) against the currently achievable chains from sunlight via electricity to rolling wheels. Which I realise isn't your point but IMO it's what an F1/FE comparison should count.
- cromulent 10y agoOK, but most electric cars don't get their electricity from sunlight. So that's not a fair comparison either :) Of course F1 cars are not an efficient means of transport. The point is that the new rules introduced constraints that have produced real innovation in efficiency, giving significant gains that could be utilized in passenger vehicles. This is the real news, not silly headlines like "F1 cars are more efficient than electric cars".
- Arnt 10y agoAre you suggesting that most cars get their electricity from nuclear-powered plants? Because gas, coal, oil and even most hydroelectric energy all are in some form powered by sunlight.
- 7952 10y agoAlso, with large thermal power stations you have other problems: * It is difficult to utilise heat that is a byproduct. * Energy is lost during transmission. If you need to burn fuel it can be more efficient to do so at the point of use. Small domestic gas boilers (Micro CHP)[0] are being designed to generate electricity, and can use the heat within the household. They have excellent thermal efficiency and can use existing pipeline networks. For the foreseeable future we need to burn fossil fuels to balance out renewable generation. Being able to do that efficiently is important. It also leaves the door open to green fuels, however far fetched that might be. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_combined_heat_and_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_combined_heat_and_power
- kybernetyk 10y agoWhat about an electric F1 car?
- leonsmith 10y agoFormula E? - http://fiaformulae.com/ http://fiaformulae.com/
- nnq 10y agoThe article's reasoning only works if you assume you're extracting gasoline already refined from the earth. You're not. I'd bet the energetic cost of refining gasoline from crude oil is much larger than that for the coal or "powerplant oil", thus seriously offsetting that 33% vs 50%? This is ignoring the more obvious fact that a powerplant can operate at nearly constant efficiency, while a real car driving on a read road will have a wildly varying efficiency, even with a hybrid engine...) And even if electric is "less green" now, we are kind of sure that we can drive down the price of electric power very low in the future (solar, renewable, classic nuclear, fusion etc. ...only one breakthrough in only one of these will have huge price lowering consequences), while the price of oil can only go up...
- Pxtl 10y agoEven extracting crude has ferocious energy costs for some sources. Alberta's tarsands are a good example, with the Syncrude and Suncor projects being some of the largest co2 emitters in Canada.
- johnm1019 10y agoCan someone explain how they are getting near 50% thermal efficiency? All the articles mention it, but I can't find a reasonable explanation.
- cromulent 10y agoThis is a much better article: http://www.motorsportmagazine.com/opinion/f1/ferraris-formula-1-jet-ignition http://www.motorsportmagazine.com/opinion/f1/ferraris-formul... My understanding is that they pre-ignite a tiny amount of fuel in a special chamber, which forces the main fuel-air charge into the cylinder through targeted nozzles, making a very effective and targeted fuel air mixture, which can be leaner as the mix is so good.
- exDM69 10y agoThis new jet igniter you mention is a fairly new development (not all teams have it yet) and is no doubt beneficial but it's probably not a huge increase in the efficiency on top of the clever hybrid technology. But it does provide a fair bit of power, and I'm looking forward to seeing Honda race it tomorrow for the first time (Mercedes and Ferrari have it already, Honda bringing it to Canada this weekend, not sure about Renault). This might improve McLaren's lackluster performance and even up the racing a little.
- cromulent 10y agoIt is actually quite a huge increase in the ICE. Ferrari's been using it for a year. "Furthermore, this process allows ... peak indicated thermal efficiencies up to 45% - not to be confused with the reported > 48% thermal efficiency that Mercedes is achieving for its entire F1 power unit." http://www.f1technical.net/news/20316 http://www.f1technical.net/news/20316
- exDM69 10y agoThanks for the good link. TJI seems to give quite nice increase in efficiency, up from the already impressive 40% or so they had in 2014. I don't remember anyone struggling with fuel loads in a long time like they did early on with the new engines.
- lumberjack 10y agoThey also need an engine rebuild every how many miles?
- tremon 10y agoApples and oranges. Dear author, please redo your argument with Formula One versus these race cars: http://www.worldsolarchallenge.org/ http://www.worldsolarchallenge.org/
- barkbro 10y agoThe comparison in the article is pretty odd, but it's still amazing to see how much effort goes into engineering F1 cars. I wonder what they could produce if they were allowed to run free and didn't have to deal with F1 regulations.
- LoSboccacc 10y agoThey'd be as wide as the track and so frail people'd be killed for getting on a kerb at a bad angle :X
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nopzor 10y agoI think the sport would be destroyed if they were allowed to run free. By now they would have removed the driver, and that would take most of the $$ out of F1 ;) The Williams 1993 car was in many ways the high point of tech for F1. Since then, I think FIA have been trying to balance the rules for (1) safety (2) balancing the role of the constructor and the driver, and ensuring that driver skill was a major part of the equation.
- pmontra 10y agoThey would have to remove the driver. Check the famous Red Bull concept car from 2010, only simulated, not built. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Bull_X2010 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Bull_X2010 500 km/h and 8 g lateral acceleration with the final design. I don't think you can drive a car like that for long. The Williams car with active suspensions was the last technical improvement that was not a rules loophole up to maybe the Mercedes f-duct and wing stalling. F1 has become a spec formula with the only goal to keep lap times more or less constant and some common ground with production cars (the current hybrids, Le Mans too.)
- Broken_Hippo 10y agoOne of the biggest things I see with the article, outside of the poor comparison, is this: Sure, gaining electricity from coal or oil isn't clean. We know that. But we can make that better by switching the sources for electricity. Wind, water, solar, and nuclear power are all cleaner ways to produce electricity. A hybrid car - or an outright gasoline car - always must rely on oil of some sort to be able to run. We do not have a clean, reasonable alternative for this as we do with electricity.
- ashitlerferad 10y agoBiodiesel exists, we can probably figure out similar processes for other fuel types.
- Broken_Hippo 10y agoSome cars can run on a mix of ethanol and gasoline now, and I think more found their cars would run (though with possible long-term damage). If I remember correctly from when I lived in Indiana, they blamed rising food costs on farmers switching out their food and feed crops for bio-fuels. In addition, drought conditions or crop diseases would mean we are right back on oil-based fuels and/or there would be a crisis because of lack of oil. I like the idea that it is clean (at least cleaner than oil, anyway), but I think there are better options than vegetable fuels.
- manigandham 10y agoInternal combustion engines can just run on hydrogen which will deliver more power and only water vapor for exhaust - however the hard part is containing this hydrogen.