6 ms·

Electric Car Runs 170 Miles On Single Charge--And It's 98 Years Old

22 points by bishvili 16y ago

bugsy 16y ago
Lots of companies made electric cars at the turn of last century, Edison was not the only one nor the first. Electric cars were marketed to women as they had far less maintenance required and were not as noisy or as dirty. At the same time a century ago that electric cars were available, you could also buy a number of gasoline cars that got 40-60 miles per gallon.
- S_A_P 16y ago
  I think that is the big oversight in a lot of green tech. Sure we could make items that have super impressive green specifications, but making them to achieve the same/similar performance to the not so green counterparts is the tricky part.
  - bugsy 16y ago
    Yes, this is a good point. There do exist normal cars now that have good performance and get good mileage, around 60mpg. Most of these are not available in the US due to "safety regulations" unique to the US, proposed and written by oil company lobbyists, which effectively require that cars sold in the US be very heavy. On the electric car side, the electricity is coming from things like burning coal and oil, or natural gas which we will run out of in a few years. The cars use batteries that contain highly toxic chemicals that are somewhat difficult to extract from the earth, and are done using strip mining. And the batteries lose their capacity after a few years of use and have to be replaced with a new set costing $30-$50,000 at least every five years. But bring up any of this and there is a lot of handwaving and claims that battery technology is getting better. Sure it's getting a tiny bit better, but it's not in the direction of batteries made of air or water or harmless inexpensive materials, and the charge capacity and lifespan are not so dramatically changing that it changes any of the basic dynamics of this technology. In short, even the super green techs don't seem so green when you start really looking at the details. In addition, we have a fetishization of things like electric cars, when the issue of efficient public transport, or getting rid of suburbs so people don't have to commute, are completely ignored even though the gains from this would be massively higher by several orders of magnitude. No, we must have electric cars for each person to drive alone by himself 30 miles to and fro work each morning. That is the only option. I have preferred to live close enough to walk to work and have often managed this. I am often told this is an unrealistic expectation and I need to get real or get with the program. Including by people claiming to be environmentalists, many of whom drive giant gas guzzlers because of some perceived need. Someone walking to work each day is getting infinite miles to the gallon and is going to live longer and have fewer health problems and costs as they age. This is universally considered a non-solution compared to toxic batteries and recharging them using non-renewable resources.
- ck2 16y ago
  They got 40-60 miles per gallon because they were going half of today's highway speed limit. See my note above about wind resistance at higher speeds. If you drove 30mph on the highway with today's cars you'd also get 40mpg+ (and a $100 ticket!)
InclinedPlane 16y ago
It's easy to make an electric car with a useful range, it's a centuries old technology. The hard part is making an electric car that is quickly re-chargeable, reliable, affordable, safe, and has good enough performance to be suitable for routine driving. You can manage a few of those, but all of them together is as yet an unsolved problem.
- InclinedPlane 16y ago
  To be more specific: lead-acid batteries are dead simple technology. Reliable, provide tons of power, etc. However, they take forever to recharge (about 5x as long as they take to discharge) and they are heavy. You can build an EV by just attaching a motor to an axle and adding enough lead-acid batteries until the thing has a decent range, but you'll create a horrible vehicle by the standards of today's commuter automobiles. And then you've got a vehicle that's mostly batteries and little else and has horrible acceleration and top speed. If you use more modern batteries (NiMH, LiIon) you improve the situation greatly but it's still a troublesome equation. Batteries are heavy, putting enough in a vehicle to give it decent range and performance is a struggle to avoid compromising vehicle comfort and safety. And then if you use advanced materials to make the vehicle lighter then you end up raising the cost significantly. The good news is that technology is catching up. Hybrid technology is maturing and with it plug-in hybrids, fuel-cell vehicles, and entirely battery powered vehicles are becoming feasible, even if a bit on the expensive side. But the even better news is that as more money gets spent on R&D the technology will get better and cheaper, until it's a legitimate competitor to gasoline. The bad news is that currently the concentration of hybrid / electric vehicle development is mis-targeted at small, commuter vehicles (making the small slice smaller, basically) when they really need to target bigger vehicles (long-haul freight, etc, although fortunately there are inroads being made there). The far worse news is that at best all of this is just step 1. Even if suddenly overnight every automobile was replaced with s shiny new electric vehicle all that would mean is that we'd transferred the problem to the base power generation infrastructure, which today is dominated by coal and oil in much of the world.
  - anamax 16y ago
    > target bigger vehicles (long-haul freight Trains excel at freight. In some cases, you want to use "gravity hybrids", where a train going down a hill sends power to a train going up the hill at the same time.
jjcm 16y ago
A few issues with this article: Edison did not "come up" with the lightbulb - he improved upon the existing design. Range isn't the only important thing in a car. Efficiency, speed, torque, and hundreds of other factors have to be taken into account. If you want range on a single charge, a camel might be your best bet. It's an entertaining read, sure. But I wouldn't consider it hacker related news by any means.
ck2 16y ago
My electric bicycle also goes 25mph like that old electric car. I can tell you it takes exponentially more power to go faster than that because of wind resistance, so that's why it could go that far at that slower speed. There's some nonsense in their numbers though, because my battery is state-of-the-art and it can "only" go for 2 hours, so that's 50 miles max. Also, the batteries they used a century ago were very dangerous because of their liquid (acid) chemicals and had to be replaced constantly. The lifepo4 battery my bike uses is good for over 5 years and can survive being crushed without any explosion/fire.
- cma 16y ago
  Polynomially, not exponentially: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_(physics)#Power http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_(physics)#Power
  - wlievens 16y ago
    People often (in a non-formal context) use exponential as meaning "more than linear". Any idea why this happens? (don't mean to offend the poster here)
    - ck2 16y ago
      No offense taken. I am not familiar with the term "polynomially" but I assume it means it grows at a rate that is a more complex calculation than a simple exponential curve. (useless to me: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/polynomial http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/polynomial )
      - wlievens 16y ago
        A polynomial is the sum of terms with powers in them. For instance: y = 3*x y = x*x y = 3*x*x*x + 5*x - 7*x Any polynomial you can think of will always, at some point, grow slower than an exponential curve. So it's not necessarily "more complex", but it's somewhere in between linear and exponential (informally speaking). There's a whole theory behind linear/polynomial/exponential growth that is at the basis of algorithms in computing. If this interests you, you should read up on complexity theory - though learn the basics and stop when it gets too abstract :-)
lelele 16y ago
What's all the fuss with electric cars? Isn't methane green and cheap enough?

22 points by bishvili 16y ago

bugsy 16y ago

Lots of companies made electric cars at the turn of last century, Edison was not the only one nor the first. Electric cars were marketed to women as they had far less maintenance required and were not as noisy or as dirty. At the same time a century ago that electric cars were available, you could also buy a number of gasoline cars that got 40-60 miles per gallon.

S_A_P 16y ago
I think that is the big oversight in a lot of green tech. Sure we could make items that have super impressive green specifications, but making them to achieve the same/similar performance to the not so green counterparts is the tricky part.
- bugsy 16y ago
  Yes, this is a good point. There do exist normal cars now that have good performance and get good mileage, around 60mpg. Most of these are not available in the US due to "safety regulations" unique to the US, proposed and written by oil company lobbyists, which effectively require that cars sold in the US be very heavy. On the electric car side, the electricity is coming from things like burning coal and oil, or natural gas which we will run out of in a few years. The cars use batteries that contain highly toxic chemicals that are somewhat difficult to extract from the earth, and are done using strip mining. And the batteries lose their capacity after a few years of use and have to be replaced with a new set costing $30-$50,000 at least every five years. But bring up any of this and there is a lot of handwaving and claims that battery technology is getting better. Sure it's getting a tiny bit better, but it's not in the direction of batteries made of air or water or harmless inexpensive materials, and the charge capacity and lifespan are not so dramatically changing that it changes any of the basic dynamics of this technology. In short, even the super green techs don't seem so green when you start really looking at the details. In addition, we have a fetishization of things like electric cars, when the issue of efficient public transport, or getting rid of suburbs so people don't have to commute, are completely ignored even though the gains from this would be massively higher by several orders of magnitude. No, we must have electric cars for each person to drive alone by himself 30 miles to and fro work each morning. That is the only option. I have preferred to live close enough to walk to work and have often managed this. I am often told this is an unrealistic expectation and I need to get real or get with the program. Including by people claiming to be environmentalists, many of whom drive giant gas guzzlers because of some perceived need. Someone walking to work each day is getting infinite miles to the gallon and is going to live longer and have fewer health problems and costs as they age. This is universally considered a non-solution compared to toxic batteries and recharging them using non-renewable resources.
ck2 16y ago
They got 40-60 miles per gallon because they were going half of today's highway speed limit. See my note above about wind resistance at higher speeds. If you drove 30mph on the highway with today's cars you'd also get 40mpg+ (and a $100 ticket!)

InclinedPlane 16y ago

It's easy to make an electric car with a useful range, it's a centuries old technology. The hard part is making an electric car that is quickly re-chargeable, reliable, affordable, safe, and has good enough performance to be suitable for routine driving. You can manage a few of those, but all of them together is as yet an unsolved problem.

InclinedPlane 16y ago
To be more specific: lead-acid batteries are dead simple technology. Reliable, provide tons of power, etc. However, they take forever to recharge (about 5x as long as they take to discharge) and they are heavy. You can build an EV by just attaching a motor to an axle and adding enough lead-acid batteries until the thing has a decent range, but you'll create a horrible vehicle by the standards of today's commuter automobiles. And then you've got a vehicle that's mostly batteries and little else and has horrible acceleration and top speed. If you use more modern batteries (NiMH, LiIon) you improve the situation greatly but it's still a troublesome equation. Batteries are heavy, putting enough in a vehicle to give it decent range and performance is a struggle to avoid compromising vehicle comfort and safety. And then if you use advanced materials to make the vehicle lighter then you end up raising the cost significantly. The good news is that technology is catching up. Hybrid technology is maturing and with it plug-in hybrids, fuel-cell vehicles, and entirely battery powered vehicles are becoming feasible, even if a bit on the expensive side. But the even better news is that as more money gets spent on R&D the technology will get better and cheaper, until it's a legitimate competitor to gasoline. The bad news is that currently the concentration of hybrid / electric vehicle development is mis-targeted at small, commuter vehicles (making the small slice smaller, basically) when they really need to target bigger vehicles (long-haul freight, etc, although fortunately there are inroads being made there). The far worse news is that at best all of this is just step 1. Even if suddenly overnight every automobile was replaced with s shiny new electric vehicle all that would mean is that we'd transferred the problem to the base power generation infrastructure, which today is dominated by coal and oil in much of the world.
- anamax 16y ago
  > target bigger vehicles (long-haul freight Trains excel at freight. In some cases, you want to use "gravity hybrids", where a train going down a hill sends power to a train going up the hill at the same time.

jjcm 16y ago

A few issues with this article: Edison did not "come up" with the lightbulb - he improved upon the existing design. Range isn't the only important thing in a car. Efficiency, speed, torque, and hundreds of other factors have to be taken into account. If you want range on a single charge, a camel might be your best bet. It's an entertaining read, sure. But I wouldn't consider it hacker related news by any means.

ck2 16y ago

My electric bicycle also goes 25mph like that old electric car. I can tell you it takes exponentially more power to go faster than that because of wind resistance, so that's why it could go that far at that slower speed. There's some nonsense in their numbers though, because my battery is state-of-the-art and it can "only" go for 2 hours, so that's 50 miles max. Also, the batteries they used a century ago were very dangerous because of their liquid (acid) chemicals and had to be replaced constantly. The lifepo4 battery my bike uses is good for over 5 years and can survive being crushed without any explosion/fire.

cma 16y ago
Polynomially, not exponentially: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_(physics)#Power http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_(physics)#Power
- wlievens 16y ago
  People often (in a non-formal context) use exponential as meaning "more than linear". Any idea why this happens? (don't mean to offend the poster here)
  - ck2 16y ago
    No offense taken. I am not familiar with the term "polynomially" but I assume it means it grows at a rate that is a more complex calculation than a simple exponential curve. (useless to me: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/polynomial http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/polynomial )
    - wlievens 16y ago
      A polynomial is the sum of terms with powers in them. For instance: y = 3*x y = x*x y = 3*x*x*x + 5*x - 7*x Any polynomial you can think of will always, at some point, grow slower than an exponential curve. So it's not necessarily "more complex", but it's somewhere in between linear and exponential (informally speaking). There's a whole theory behind linear/polynomial/exponential growth that is at the basis of algorithms in computing. If this interests you, you should read up on complexity theory - though learn the basics and stop when it gets too abstract :-)

lelele 16y ago

What's all the fuss with electric cars? Isn't methane green and cheap enough?