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My $0.02: ICE vehicles require extremely tight tolerances in their engine bits, while EVs generally don't (and have a lot fewer parts to boot). The complication
by aperson_hello 4y ago
My $0.02: ICE vehicles require extremely tight tolerances in their engine bits, while EVs generally don't (and have a lot fewer parts to boot). The complication (as you alluded to) in EVs is chemical, rather than mechanical. And the supply chains therefore, are just about as complicated, just in different ways.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y agoI'll agree there are few high tolerance moving parts in an electric motor vs an ICE engine. But otherwise they do infact have equally precise tolerances, probably more so given they've tend to operate at much higher RPM. We know that the Tesla Plaid motor is an extreme example of tight tolerances.
- _hypx 4y agoBecause we have no way of machining extremely precise parts with modern technology at a low cost...
- aperson_hello 4y agoThat low cost part is the challenge. There are a pile of precision parts that are expensive because of this exact issue. It's just a different problem than EVs.
- blagie 4y agoWe have ways to manufacture cars at the price point we do due to a century of optimization. It's fundamentally a very, very hard thing: we're containing a gasoline explosion many times per second. Electric vehicles are expensive, in my opinion, mostly because they're new. It's like CRTs versus LCDs. My first LCD cost $2500. A the time, CRTs were cheap. However, making a slab of silicon with liquid crystals is a lot cheaper, fundamentally, than a vacuum-filled glass cavity with an electron gun and all the other stuff that goes into a CRT. If I were to estimate the cost of making a gas car, or a CRT, without that century of optimization, it'd be astronomical almost to the point of being impractical.
- _hypx 4y agoThe problem is that batteries are bigger and heavier than engines.
- Ferrotin 4y agoI’d say the difficulty with ICE in cars today is the precision of design, not precision of machining.