6 ms·

A review of the new-fangled "Petrol Powered" car

52 points by dabeeeenster 14y ago

smackfu 14y ago
Wow, a whole article full of analogies to argue about. Not to mention... >Exhaust systems need to be replaced every 20,000 miles. Wha? >And all this after 80 years of research and development. I thought this was supposed to a new-fangled petrol car.
- tvon 14y ago
  It is a "review" of a modern petrol car, hence 80 years of development. They aren't going to pretend to review a Model T, for example.
  - smackfu 14y ago
    Yeah, it's just highlighting the problems with contrived analogies. Either commit to the premise or write a proper article saying "yes, the electric car has downsides but it beats a internal-combustion car in these ways".
- dabeeeenster 14y ago
  My point, however poorly written (!), was that people are comparing 80 years and literally billions of dollars of R+D with something much, much younger. If you think about the two platforms objectively, IMHO, petrol powered cars are ridiculous.
  - crusso 14y ago
    ... as though batteries and electric motors were just invented last year
- madaxe 14y ago
  Exhaust systems need replacing, usually far more frequently than most people do. If you've got a rusty mess of an exhaust system, you're just blowing unburned fuel through your engine. I think 80 years of R&D is overly generous. There's been no fundamental change to the ICE since its invention apart from the addition of more and more compensatory systems being introduced to mitigate the shortcomings of the traditional four-stroke piston-driven engine. The Otto cycle sucks but we stuck with it because it was the best trade-off between implementation cost and mechanical performance. 120 years ago.
  - smackfu 14y ago
    20k miles is like 1-2 years of ownership. Maybe a Porsche needs that kind of crazy maintenance?
  - maxerickson 14y ago
    My car spent 15 salty winters in Michigan. 1 exhaust component has rusted through so far (too bad for me, one of the convertors). Quality control and goes a long way. I don't even wash it as much as I should. Just an anecdote, but I bet the data on modern vehicles is pretty ok. Also fuel injection is a huge innovation. A thousand carburetors in a chip and all that.
  - jack-r-abbit 14y ago
    > I think 80 years of R&D is overly generous. There's been no fundamental change to the ICE since its invention Fuel economy has been greatly improved. That same type of advancement in the electric world should translate directly into longer range (perhaps faster charging and/or easy battery swaps). So in 80 years... do you think we'll still be worried about getting 200 miles out of an electric car? Doubtful.
jerf 14y ago
No, it just doesn't work. Electric cars aren't facing challenges because they're just too darned new and people just can't deal with the change, they face issues because on all the metrics that people really care about, electric cars eke out a small win on a couple of them at the cost of major losses on quite a few more of them. They really are inferior solutions for many car use cases, perhaps even the majority of them. Hopefully that will change, and there's good reasons to believe that's a very plausible outcome (though not guaranteed), but you won't convince people by trying to essentially argue the problem is in the people and not the cars, because frankly, that's obviously not true, to the point of being insulting. Insulting your listeners is not a good argument technique.
- VLM 14y ago
  "on all the metrics that people really care about" Minor correction, but its really extremely important to the discussion: "on all the metrics that journalists really care about" Another important part is all the gas mfgrs ganging up on their advertising salesmen and telling them exactly how the review had better read if they want to continue to get highly profitable advertising.
  - smackfu 14y ago
    You don't think range is the single most important concern for regular buyers of an electric-only car? The article starting this was all about range.
    - madaxe 14y ago
      I just want to know who the hell all these people are that need to drive 600 miles a day every day, with no opportunity to stop and charge. Unless the only employment in the US is "taxi driver", I fail to see the issue...
      - potatolicious 14y ago
        The Tesla's range is between 160 miles and 300 miles on a charge, not 600. This is well beyond getting you to your office of course, but 160 miles is well within reach for many busy suburban people (read: kids). This and the fact that apparently there's substantial power loss if you leave it overnight without plugging it in (say, you're staying at a hotel on a trip), and the dramatic range loss in cold weather (which much of the US is subject to), and you've got a vehicle that doesn't give people the level of reliability/confidence they want. Not to mention, the car is more than just what gets you from home to work - much of the US lives in extremely large metro areas, particularly in the northeast where the NYT reporter was based. I have many coworkers here who drive hundreds of miles to see family on weekends, for holidays, etc. You have family scattered all the way across the northeast from Boston to NYC to DC to PA, and beyond. This level of social distribution is common in the region, and whatever car wants to succeed in this market needs to account for that. But no, let's just all pretend that everyone pointing out the range problem is corrupt and in the pocket of Big Oil.
rexreed 14y ago
I think the issue is about expectations of what has been hyped about electric cars (for better or worse) and the reality of their operation vs. what is already known and accepted about internal combustion engines (ICE). People already understand and accept the tradeoffs and costs of using ICE cars, and the "general joe" is hoping for something that provides a significantly better / different experience with their electric car experience. This has little to do with reality, but regardless, explains why the TNW article was written as it was and why the parody article analogy doesn't hold as well. Although I understand that at some point, people need to get more "real" about what electric cars can truly offer and their real advantages / disadvantages.
- notimetorelax 14y ago
  Off-topic for non native speakers. I feel stupid, for the last several days people were using "ICE" acronym in the posts and I was thinking that it was another brand of electric cars... Well no, it refers to "Internal Combustion Engine".
  - rexreed 14y ago
    Thanks for the tip - I added an acronym decode in the comment above.
- VLM 14y ago
  "what is already known and accepted" Electric vs gas car is much more like windows desktop pc vs iphone than its like gasoline engine vs diesel engine. Startup lesson: Phone computers failed miserably when they were designed and marketed as hand held desktop PCs. Tablet computers failed miserably when they were designed and marketed as PCs. If you're doing something fundamentally different, skinning it as something old isn't going to work. Back on topic the first large scale startup success in the automotive world did not involve sitting on a saddle, steering the car with reins, voice controlled brakes (whoa nellie, whoa), and did not involve removing the engine every night and placing it in a hay lined stable.
digitalengineer 14y ago
Too bad BMW couldn't make the bivalent (Hydrogen) engine very effective. One day I'd like to tank H2O and have my car's engine create the hydrogen using electrolysis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_Hydrogen_7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_Hydrogen_7
- VBprogrammer 14y ago
  Hydrogen cars always seemed like a solution waiting for a problem to me. The fact is if you can distribute and store hydrogen reasonably well then ordinary everyday cars could run it today, as easily as they do petrol except they only produce H20 as exhaust. If you have to create hydrogen from water and electricity you'd have been just as well using the electricity directly.
  - digitalengineer 14y ago
    Well, for electricity the world still burns coal, gas or destroys nature for things like dams. I imagined it takes a bit of electricity to transform the H2O to hydrogen at first, but than the hydrogen that is released takes over. It would be so great if the only thing cars produce is clean water and oxygen. Imagine entire city's with clean air. That is something to behold.
    - VLM 14y ago
      "I imagined it takes a bit of electricity to transform the H2O to hydrogen at first," No talk to a chemist or chemeng. Virtually all industrial H2 comes from steam reforming natgas. At red heat in the absence of air, natgas basically "burns" steam generating reformer gas or syngas or whatever which is carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Then at a much lower "cooking" heat you oxidize the toxic / poisonous carbon monoxide to CO2 with more steam. Separating out the CO2 is moderately annoying an energy intensive, too. In summary H2 comes from partial combustion of natgas, using water as an O2 source. Or another way to phrase it is you burn the carbon out of methane at great effort leaving you with just the hydrogen. As you'd imagine its terribly inefficient, even if you fed that H2 into a 100% eff fuel cell (LOL) you'd get more kilowatt-hours per BTU of natgas by simply burning the natgas in a turbine. Even a small turbine (hybrid car sized) would be a higher system efficiency than H2. In theory is not relevant WRT electrolysis, because in theory you could have a natgas hybrid turbine in a car, or in theory you could have a mr. fusion burning the H2. In practice H2 is just extremely highly processed natgas.
matte8000 14y ago
My issue with lekky cars at the moment is one of style. Unless you have a skwillion pounds to spend, you have to get a prius or leaf or something. There doesn't seem to be a stylish looking electric on the market yet. Something that might change once BMW release the i3.
- ben1040 14y ago
  I'm OK with the Prius, but the Leaf definitely looks like an "electric car" where "electric car" is said as though it were the punchline to a joke.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- mertd 14y ago
  Model S isn't that expensive, if you factor in the long term costs. Quoting from (http://teslarumors.com/USA-Residental-Energy-Cost-2011-by-State.html http://teslarumors.com/USA-Residental-Energy-Cost-2011-by-St...): Based on a price of $3.75 for gasoline, a 15 mpg vehicle will incur a cost of 25 cents per mile, while a 30mpg vehicle will incur a cost of 12 cents per mile. Model S gets 3-5c per mile in most states.
  - tbrownaw 14y ago
    The trouble is that that $3.75 includes taxes that are supposed to cover road maintenance. And sooner or later those taxes will have to be replaced by something else, likely paid when you renew your license plates and likely designed to be more expensive for cars that use less/no gas.
    - mertd 14y ago
      I think the portion of gasoline tax for road maintenance amounts to less than a cent per mile, while the frequently quoted cost for road maintenance is 5-6c per mile per car. Thus it is already being funded from other sources.
    - 14y ago
pkorzeniewski 14y ago
This article feels really forced.. No place for bags in front of the car? You have a huge trunk. Car heating in traffic jam? Maybe if there is 30'C outside. Huge amount of mechanical technology? Electric cars are full of far more complex technology, harder and more expensive to fix. And what about refueling, why didn't he mentioned "wow, refueling takes only 2 minutes! I don't have to wait an hour". I know what was the point of this article, electric cars are quite young and given some time many of the issues will be fixed, but it doesn't mean people can't complain about it right now, I think there is still a huge gap between electric and petrol cars.
- Terretta 14y ago
  > I know what was the point of this article, electric cars are quite young... No. This article is satire, but the best kind as it's grounded in truth. This article isn't making a point electrics are young, but rather about journalistic integrity. This article is responding to a couple of Tesla reviews that went way out of their way to complain about the Tesla and the idea of electric cars in general, by forcing situations to complain about. This article's "really forced" gripes mirror the "really forced" gripes of the journalists complaining about their electric test vehicles, e.g., "What, the battery gets lower just sitting in traffic?" And yet, as noted above, it's also truth. If we didn't grow up just accepting fumes killing fellow drivers behind us, we likely wouldn't jump at a technology that introduced those downsides out of the blue. PS. He specifically did mention refueling speed as a plus for the gas car, one he said wasn't worth it given the downsides.
  - Gravityloss 14y ago
    It seems you're almost the only one who understood this.
amalag 14y ago
Lets not forgot the millions of American's who cannot charge a car. I don't have a garage and my HOA does not allow fixed structures outside. There was a discussion about changing HOA rules, but it costs thousands of dollars for an attorney, plus residents have to actually vote on it. We can get 3 people out of 200 to attend an HOA meeting.
jack-r-abbit 14y ago
I think the point many are missing is that the electric car is not nearly as developed as today's petrol car. Great advances have been made over the decades to make today's cars safer, more reliable and more fuel efficient. The needs to be done with electric cars. It will come. But only if people believe it can happen. If too many nay-sayers poo-poo all over the advances that have already been made, confidence is going to be shot. The original review this was a parody of could have conveyed the same concerns without thumbing their nose at it. They did seem to have a lot of bias against the car that didn't need to be there.

52 points by dabeeeenster 14y ago

Wow, a whole article full of analogies to argue about. Not to mention... >Exhaust systems need to be replaced every 20,000 miles. Wha? >And all this after 80 years of research and development. I thought this was supposed to a new-fangled petrol car.

tvon 14y ago
It is a "review" of a modern petrol car, hence 80 years of development. They aren't going to pretend to review a Model T, for example.
- smackfu 14y ago
  Yeah, it's just highlighting the problems with contrived analogies. Either commit to the premise or write a proper article saying "yes, the electric car has downsides but it beats a internal-combustion car in these ways".
dabeeeenster 14y ago
My point, however poorly written (!), was that people are comparing 80 years and literally billions of dollars of R+D with something much, much younger. If you think about the two platforms objectively, IMHO, petrol powered cars are ridiculous.
- crusso 14y ago
  ... as though batteries and electric motors were just invented last year
madaxe 14y ago
Exhaust systems need replacing, usually far more frequently than most people do. If you've got a rusty mess of an exhaust system, you're just blowing unburned fuel through your engine. I think 80 years of R&D is overly generous. There's been no fundamental change to the ICE since its invention apart from the addition of more and more compensatory systems being introduced to mitigate the shortcomings of the traditional four-stroke piston-driven engine. The Otto cycle sucks but we stuck with it because it was the best trade-off between implementation cost and mechanical performance. 120 years ago.
- smackfu 14y ago
  20k miles is like 1-2 years of ownership. Maybe a Porsche needs that kind of crazy maintenance?
- maxerickson 14y ago
  My car spent 15 salty winters in Michigan. 1 exhaust component has rusted through so far (too bad for me, one of the convertors). Quality control and goes a long way. I don't even wash it as much as I should. Just an anecdote, but I bet the data on modern vehicles is pretty ok. Also fuel injection is a huge innovation. A thousand carburetors in a chip and all that.
- jack-r-abbit 14y ago
  > I think 80 years of R&D is overly generous. There's been no fundamental change to the ICE since its invention Fuel economy has been greatly improved. That same type of advancement in the electric world should translate directly into longer range (perhaps faster charging and/or easy battery swaps). So in 80 years... do you think we'll still be worried about getting 200 miles out of an electric car? Doubtful.

jerf 14y ago

No, it just doesn't work. Electric cars aren't facing challenges because they're just too darned new and people just can't deal with the change, they face issues because on all the metrics that people really care about, electric cars eke out a small win on a couple of them at the cost of major losses on quite a few more of them. They really are inferior solutions for many car use cases, perhaps even the majority of them. Hopefully that will change, and there's good reasons to believe that's a very plausible outcome (though not guaranteed), but you won't convince people by trying to essentially argue the problem is in the people and not the cars, because frankly, that's obviously not true, to the point of being insulting. Insulting your listeners is not a good argument technique.

VLM 14y ago
"on all the metrics that people really care about" Minor correction, but its really extremely important to the discussion: "on all the metrics that journalists really care about" Another important part is all the gas mfgrs ganging up on their advertising salesmen and telling them exactly how the review had better read if they want to continue to get highly profitable advertising.
- smackfu 14y ago
  You don't think range is the single most important concern for regular buyers of an electric-only car? The article starting this was all about range.
  - madaxe 14y ago
    I just want to know who the hell all these people are that need to drive 600 miles a day every day, with no opportunity to stop and charge. Unless the only employment in the US is "taxi driver", I fail to see the issue...
    - potatolicious 14y ago
      The Tesla's range is between 160 miles and 300 miles on a charge, not 600. This is well beyond getting you to your office of course, but 160 miles is well within reach for many busy suburban people (read: kids). This and the fact that apparently there's substantial power loss if you leave it overnight without plugging it in (say, you're staying at a hotel on a trip), and the dramatic range loss in cold weather (which much of the US is subject to), and you've got a vehicle that doesn't give people the level of reliability/confidence they want. Not to mention, the car is more than just what gets you from home to work - much of the US lives in extremely large metro areas, particularly in the northeast where the NYT reporter was based. I have many coworkers here who drive hundreds of miles to see family on weekends, for holidays, etc. You have family scattered all the way across the northeast from Boston to NYC to DC to PA, and beyond. This level of social distribution is common in the region, and whatever car wants to succeed in this market needs to account for that. But no, let's just all pretend that everyone pointing out the range problem is corrupt and in the pocket of Big Oil.

rexreed 14y ago

I think the issue is about expectations of what has been hyped about electric cars (for better or worse) and the reality of their operation vs. what is already known and accepted about internal combustion engines (ICE). People already understand and accept the tradeoffs and costs of using ICE cars, and the "general joe" is hoping for something that provides a significantly better / different experience with their electric car experience. This has little to do with reality, but regardless, explains why the TNW article was written as it was and why the parody article analogy doesn't hold as well. Although I understand that at some point, people need to get more "real" about what electric cars can truly offer and their real advantages / disadvantages.

notimetorelax 14y ago
Off-topic for non native speakers. I feel stupid, for the last several days people were using "ICE" acronym in the posts and I was thinking that it was another brand of electric cars... Well no, it refers to "Internal Combustion Engine".
- rexreed 14y ago
  Thanks for the tip - I added an acronym decode in the comment above.
VLM 14y ago
"what is already known and accepted" Electric vs gas car is much more like windows desktop pc vs iphone than its like gasoline engine vs diesel engine. Startup lesson: Phone computers failed miserably when they were designed and marketed as hand held desktop PCs. Tablet computers failed miserably when they were designed and marketed as PCs. If you're doing something fundamentally different, skinning it as something old isn't going to work. Back on topic the first large scale startup success in the automotive world did not involve sitting on a saddle, steering the car with reins, voice controlled brakes (whoa nellie, whoa), and did not involve removing the engine every night and placing it in a hay lined stable.

digitalengineer 14y ago

Too bad BMW couldn't make the bivalent (Hydrogen) engine very effective. One day I'd like to tank H2O and have my car's engine create the hydrogen using electrolysis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_Hydrogen_7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_Hydrogen_7

VBprogrammer 14y ago
Hydrogen cars always seemed like a solution waiting for a problem to me. The fact is if you can distribute and store hydrogen reasonably well then ordinary everyday cars could run it today, as easily as they do petrol except they only produce H20 as exhaust. If you have to create hydrogen from water and electricity you'd have been just as well using the electricity directly.
- digitalengineer 14y ago
  Well, for electricity the world still burns coal, gas or destroys nature for things like dams. I imagined it takes a bit of electricity to transform the H2O to hydrogen at first, but than the hydrogen that is released takes over. It would be so great if the only thing cars produce is clean water and oxygen. Imagine entire city's with clean air. That is something to behold.
  - VLM 14y ago
    "I imagined it takes a bit of electricity to transform the H2O to hydrogen at first," No talk to a chemist or chemeng. Virtually all industrial H2 comes from steam reforming natgas. At red heat in the absence of air, natgas basically "burns" steam generating reformer gas or syngas or whatever which is carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Then at a much lower "cooking" heat you oxidize the toxic / poisonous carbon monoxide to CO2 with more steam. Separating out the CO2 is moderately annoying an energy intensive, too. In summary H2 comes from partial combustion of natgas, using water as an O2 source. Or another way to phrase it is you burn the carbon out of methane at great effort leaving you with just the hydrogen. As you'd imagine its terribly inefficient, even if you fed that H2 into a 100% eff fuel cell (LOL) you'd get more kilowatt-hours per BTU of natgas by simply burning the natgas in a turbine. Even a small turbine (hybrid car sized) would be a higher system efficiency than H2. In theory is not relevant WRT electrolysis, because in theory you could have a natgas hybrid turbine in a car, or in theory you could have a mr. fusion burning the H2. In practice H2 is just extremely highly processed natgas.

matte8000 14y ago

My issue with lekky cars at the moment is one of style. Unless you have a skwillion pounds to spend, you have to get a prius or leaf or something. There doesn't seem to be a stylish looking electric on the market yet. Something that might change once BMW release the i3.

ben1040 14y ago
I'm OK with the Prius, but the Leaf definitely looks like an "electric car" where "electric car" is said as though it were the punchline to a joke.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
mertd 14y ago
Model S isn't that expensive, if you factor in the long term costs. Quoting from (http://teslarumors.com/USA-Residental-Energy-Cost-2011-by-State.html http://teslarumors.com/USA-Residental-Energy-Cost-2011-by-St...): Based on a price of $3.75 for gasoline, a 15 mpg vehicle will incur a cost of 25 cents per mile, while a 30mpg vehicle will incur a cost of 12 cents per mile. Model S gets 3-5c per mile in most states.
- tbrownaw 14y ago
  The trouble is that that $3.75 includes taxes that are supposed to cover road maintenance. And sooner or later those taxes will have to be replaced by something else, likely paid when you renew your license plates and likely designed to be more expensive for cars that use less/no gas.
  - mertd 14y ago
    I think the portion of gasoline tax for road maintenance amounts to less than a cent per mile, while the frequently quoted cost for road maintenance is 5-6c per mile per car. Thus it is already being funded from other sources.
  - 14y ago

pkorzeniewski 14y ago

This article feels really forced.. No place for bags in front of the car? You have a huge trunk. Car heating in traffic jam? Maybe if there is 30'C outside. Huge amount of mechanical technology? Electric cars are full of far more complex technology, harder and more expensive to fix. And what about refueling, why didn't he mentioned "wow, refueling takes only 2 minutes! I don't have to wait an hour". I know what was the point of this article, electric cars are quite young and given some time many of the issues will be fixed, but it doesn't mean people can't complain about it right now, I think there is still a huge gap between electric and petrol cars.

Terretta 14y ago
> I know what was the point of this article, electric cars are quite young... No. This article is satire, but the best kind as it's grounded in truth. This article isn't making a point electrics are young, but rather about journalistic integrity. This article is responding to a couple of Tesla reviews that went way out of their way to complain about the Tesla and the idea of electric cars in general, by forcing situations to complain about. This article's "really forced" gripes mirror the "really forced" gripes of the journalists complaining about their electric test vehicles, e.g., "What, the battery gets lower just sitting in traffic?" And yet, as noted above, it's also truth. If we didn't grow up just accepting fumes killing fellow drivers behind us, we likely wouldn't jump at a technology that introduced those downsides out of the blue. PS. He specifically did mention refueling speed as a plus for the gas car, one he said wasn't worth it given the downsides.
- Gravityloss 14y ago
  It seems you're almost the only one who understood this.

amalag 14y ago

Lets not forgot the millions of American's who cannot charge a car. I don't have a garage and my HOA does not allow fixed structures outside. There was a discussion about changing HOA rules, but it costs thousands of dollars for an attorney, plus residents have to actually vote on it. We can get 3 people out of 200 to attend an HOA meeting.

jack-r-abbit 14y ago

I think the point many are missing is that the electric car is not nearly as developed as today's petrol car. Great advances have been made over the decades to make today's cars safer, more reliable and more fuel efficient. The needs to be done with electric cars. It will come. But only if people believe it can happen. If too many nay-sayers poo-poo all over the advances that have already been made, confidence is going to be shot. The original review this was a parody of could have conveyed the same concerns without thumbing their nose at it. They did seem to have a lot of bias against the car that didn't need to be there.