Hard Limits and Electric Cars
Beauty and the Electric Car
Matthew Inman, the well-known cartoonist behind The Oatmeal, loves his Tesla Model-S, and I’m happy for him. It sounds like those guys at Tesla Motors are doing some innovative stuff, while the rest of the automotive industry is “Mac-ifying” their entire fleet – churning out boring, style-over-substance vehicles, which you aren’t allowed to fix on your own, and despite having hundreds of horses under each hood, they somehow accelerate slower than an old MX-6 with only half the power.
As you can tell, I’m not exactly a fan of the modern automotive industry. The Form is reduced to practicality, while the Function is utterly impractical
Now I’ll confess, I like a bit of ostentation in my life; I’ve got a weakness for Forms that are slightly over-the-top, even to the point of absurdity (suits with pocket-squares and a patriot pins, for example) which is why I love the RX-7’s Wankel Rotary Engine. A piston blows off energy each time it changes direction,1 while the Wankel just spins faster and faster, a tightly-knit reaction on the verge of breaking the Third Law of Thermodynamics; it’s as beautiful as a fractal.
But is it sensible? Not in the least. The thing’s got no torque at the low-end, and the engine has a bad habit of exploding without warning somewhere around 250,000 k. On a Functional level the RX-7’s a bit of a failure, but Good Lord isn’t she gorgeous!
Same thing goes for the DeLorean – an under-powered, overpriced “sports” car, with incoherent model-numbers, whose Form reaches for the stars, while its Function lies broken upon the earth like a Fallen Caryatid.
And the same thing goes for the Tesla Model-S.
You cannot deny that the machine is beautiful, fully deserving of his title “Magical Space Car”; it runs silently, has no need of a transmission, automatically senses your presence, and has secret door-handles which appear when they’re needed, and disappear when they aren’t; and yet all of these wonderful elements are simultaneously its greatest flaws; each a potential fault which threatens to brick the vehicle. Heroism and tragedy, death and vanity – they’re two sides of the same coin. In this world, we are often at our greatest when we are at our most foolish.
Where Inman goes wrong is in mistaking this overweening beauty for practical virtue (paragons are seldom practical). He mistakes the Model-S for being the Car of the Future, when it is merely the car of his dreams. It really is the Magical Space Car – the actual Car of the Future is but a Mazda 3… or perhaps a mule with a cart.
Electric cars are a step backwards, not a step forwards; a failed experiment from a century ago. Tesla himself was a genius, but he was also quite mad, and gloriously absurd. Functionally, we live in a universe of hard limits, of stall speeds, of finite spans, and of death; the only eternity is in our souls, and the only perfection is to be found in mathematics.
All art eventually crumbles to dust, and there are certain limits which our technology will never overcome.
Hard Limits and Technology
As a young man over-schooled in Science Fiction, I mistook the space shuttle for primitive ugliness. The vast flame and clouds of the hydrogen tanks, the wasted heat-panels, burned off during re-entry – as gloriously elegant as the shuttle looked in space, the process of getting it there seemed vulgar and wasteful. Perhaps with a better education system I wouldn’t have been so misled…
Acceleration due to gravity is one of the Hard Limits.
All objects upon the surface of the Earth are constantly being pulled down at 9.81 m/s2. The only way to escape this gravity well is to accelerate faster than that, at a gradually diminishing rate as the force of gravity wears off, but you must keep accelerating forever – the gravity well never disappears, after all, it extends to the boundaries of reality. Alternatively, you can accelerate until you are above the atmosphere, and then attain enough horizontal velocity to enter into a stable orbit.
The International Space Station may look peaceful, but it’s travelling at a rate of 7.8 kilometres per second.
The energy required to rise 400 kilometres above the earth’s surface, and to then achieve a horizontal velocity of 7.8 km/s, is a hard limit of the universe, which no technology can overcome. The method of achieving this state doesn’t have to be hydrogen rockets – it could be lasers, a catapult, or a water cannon – but the energy requirements will always be the same. It doesn’t matter how many dillithium crystals you have, you won’t be able to rise off the surface with a thrust of 5 m/s2.
Imagine two cars, chained together by their rear bumpers, accelerating away from each other. The one on the right – gravity – is accelerating rightward at a constant rate, pulling the other car snug against a metal gate. For the car on the left to break contact with that gate, it will have to burn-rubber at a rate higher than the car on the right. Two vehicles, red-lining and spewing exhaust (or… burning through electric batteries fast), gradually creeping leftward…
This is what is happening when the Starship Voyager lifts off from the planet’s surface. It doesn’t matter that Voyager is using gravitons instead of rockets – the amount of energy being expended is the same, and at least 50% of it will be turned into heat (Newton’s Third Law of Motion)
In other words, the entire spaceship should be glowing white-hot.
Whether it’s gasoline or batteries, it’s measured in Watts, and there’s a finite distance those Watts will get you.
Elevators and Magic
There is one exception to the Hard Limit of gravitational acceleration; and that is the magical device known as the elevator. Something that doesn’t break the laws of physics, but nonetheless manages to exploit a loophole; something that never would have existed all on its own, but which human ingenuity can summon forth (and if that isn’t magical, please tell me what is).
The energy costs of a “perfect” elevator (one without friction, and with a perfect counter-balance) are no higher than your rate of travel. Put a hamster on a generator wheel, and the 0.45 Watts he puts out will get you to the top of the shaft… eventually. Build it higher than a geosynchronous orbit, and you now have a sling-shot to launch you into space for “free”… once the bloody thing’s been constructed.
Cold Entropy laughs once again; the construction costs of an elevator are incredible. Cheap to use once you have it – but expensive to acquire in the first place. This is a similar principle to the “stall speeds” that AfOR wrote about recently:
*All* engineers *get* this point, to others, it needs to be pointed out, to everyone else, it doesn’t exist, wishful thinking and magic pink unicorns rule the day.
If you have less than 10 hp, then you are not in the car, not even at 4 mph with a top speed of 5 mph, it won’t go up any hills, not even in 1st, yeah you can add another gearbox and make it a sixteen speed two shift job, and all the weight of that kit, and at that point it will be overtaken uphill by tortoises and frogs.
It’s like stall speed in an aircraft, drop even 0.0001 mph below it and you are no longer flying, you are falling, then you crash and die…. you can’t make a jumbo fly at 90 mph.
All things in engineering have an equivalent, not a stall speed per se, but the same concept, like a step, you are either on this high step, or that low step, there is no slope anywhere in between, one or the other, those are the only options possible.
Inman posits that he could run his electric car on 80% solar energy by using solar panels on his house. This might be true form the perspective of his bank account, but it fundamentally misunderstands the greater civilizational context in which he and his car exist. Your energy consumption as an individual is a drop in the bucket; it’s the motive force behind the elevator. The real energy cost of an industrialized economy are outside of your apartment, they’re embedded in the infrastructure, they’re the construction cost behind the elevator.
Going Green is a fatal conceit. It doesn’t matter if you:
- Run all of your personal devices off of intermittent solar and wind,
- grow your own crops and compost the left-overs,
- reduce your consumption of unnecesary consumerist garbage,
- and learn to fix your own car/plumbing/electrical wires…
…you still haven’t changed the system.
Living off the grid is a wonderfully foolish and tragically heroic thing to do – it certainly increases your anti-fragility – but “Going Green”, if it means anything at all, involves a return to pre-Industrial levels of energy consumption. Grass huts and a pointy stick. The real cost of civilization isn’t the energy you consume, it’s the energy that the mining company consumes – and a mining company cannot afford to have work-stoppages due to the intermittency of solar power, not and remain profitable, the banking/communication industry cannot afford interruptions to their data-transfer, and we can’t afford to feed everybody on home-grown plots of land.
Civilization is like a car going up a steep hill; you can argue that 140 km/h is needlessly wasteful, but if you try and climb the hill at 60 your engine is going to stall. True, you can shift to a lower gear, but in the case of civilization that lower gear is a return to 1700.
Let’s hope the road doesn’t get really steep any time soon; we might have to go back to the old-ways of doing things.
A Price for Everything, and Everything Has its Price
What matters is Energy Price and Energy Density: we once again turn to AfOR, who has run the numbers.
On energy price, he’s repeatedly found the same thing – that energy, regardless of its form, is roughly the same price when you measure it in kilowatt-hours:
Petrol / gasoline / benzine is currently, as I type £1.37 a litre.
There is approximately 9.7 kWh of energy in a litre of petrol (10.7 for diesel)
£1.37 / 9.7 = 14.1 p per kWh
The average price for electricity is currently 16.6 p per kWh
In other words, the type of energy is an engineering question – not an economics question. It doesn’t matter where you get it, so long as it’s in its most useful form for the purpose at hand (a gasoline-powered cell phone would be a terrible idea). Next, we have Energy Density:
Fossil fuel is 46 megajoules per kilogramme, and 36 megajoules per litre.
li-on batteries are 0.4 megajoules per kilogramme, and 1.2 megajoules per litre
Fossil fuel has 100 times the energy per kilo, and 30 times the energy per litre.
Talking about “science” one day closing this fucking gap is like talking about “science” one day making a jumbo jet fly at 5 mph
Maybe – maybe – some sort of modern Manhattan Project could close this gap; it could give us high-capacity capacitors, and develop a form of Cold Fusion that’s cheap and portable, safe to store in every home. Maybe. The problems is I don’t know where we’d find the scientists, let alone the political will to do anything this ambitious. This generation solves its problems through subsidies and discussion groups, not through hard work and innovation.
And even if we did manage to do all of this… by the time we figured out how, we probably would have also figured out how to cheaply turn bio-matter into gasoline. As Freeman Dyson said about his theoretical construct the Dyson Shell, “Any species which could build such a thing, would be so advanced it wouldn’t need to.”
Eden’s Lost to Us
Or to put it more prosaically,”You can’t go home again.”
Technology, magic, and the force of the human spirit can do amazing things, but ultimately we’re living in a universe with hard-and-fast physical limits. The overweening Pride of our civilization seeks to declare otherwise – that we can talk our way out of fossil-fuel dependence, that we can sleep with whomever we want without consequence, that we can redefine ourselves on a daily basis and demand that reality conform to our ego, and that we can endlessly stimulate the economy without the bill coming due – these are the vanities which lead us into the fall.
Vanity itself is normal, it’s fine, it’s one of the wonderful things about being alive; so long as we know that it’s just vanity. Cake is fine, too, so long as we remember that it’s dessert. The problem comes when we mistake what we want magic to be, for what it actually is. The magic we write about in our stories is an excuse for the plot to move forward, to serve the narrative structure, to serve the egoistic god who created the fictional universe; it always and inevitably follows the dictates of the Human Ego. The real universe, however, has a God who’s utterly bereft of ego; He’s got one heck of a sense of humour, but if He had an ego, could you really call Him a God?
Ego is a child’s toy, and for children like us it’s a fun toy to play with. Humans are at their best when they embrace their absurdity, and actually pretend to be the sort of Virtuous Paragons which can only exist in our own fiction.
So long as we remember how ridiculous it all is.
The Electric Car is a beautiful, childish concept, but it’s not going to bring us back to the days when we lived in harmony with nature; and there’s nothing wrong with that. Enjoy it for what it is; not what for you want it to be, and remember that we all have to pay the piper eventually.
1. Not technically true.
Don’t mistake any of this for hostility towards Tesla Motors, or Inman; quite frankly, if we had more people like him in the world, and more companies like Tesla Motors, I’d be able to dedicate myself to full-time science fiction writing, instead of this philosophy nonsense which does nothing but dirty my soul. Make sure to read Part II of his Tesla-series.
… and that’s why I put the pedal down on the Ford V8 whenever possible.
I get the guy wanting the Tesla ’cause, well, it’s way sexy but to get it because it’s allegedly Greener? Why do hybrid/electric car guys always forget that, at some point in the not too distant future, those batteries need to be changed and battery waste ain’t real pretty.
Tesla was a genius. Still have a copy of a biography on my shelves somewhere.
The design for the 3-phase, 3-wire generator he developed was an absolute breakthrough, and that and recognizable offspring of his three-phase motors were still in use in modern electrical and conversion systems into the 90’s before solid state controllers/etc. became common.
I’ve had the wonderful bit of dissonance involved in standing in front of a general electric (nee general Edison) controller with a Westinghouse motor-controlled valve behind me, close enough to touch.
Exactly why I found that surreal requires a bit of digging into history, but suffice it to say that Westinghouse co-opted Tesla for generating AC to distribute electricity, and Edison championed DC power. The FUD, the propaganda, etc. , were outrageous, and resulted in Edison effectively creating the electric chair to “prove’ AC power was more dangerous (turns out DC was…..).
Also – saw the review of your book at Castalia House – need to bump it up my reading queue.
The ‘laws’ of philosophy, or natural laws put into philosophical terms that can be applied to human decision making, is of course extremely important. I think the crux of Aurini’s post, that I think deserves explicit statement, is:
Don’t think like a woman.
Our culture, the norms of behavior and thought foisted upon us in the name of feminism, multiculturalism, humanism, &tc, is not culture at all. Culture is functional. It is either on a step above the animals and allows systemic improvements, or it does not and has a ‘socio-ecological gravity’ on the bottom step with the animals. What we have for ‘culture’ are female social norms. Hence, don’t think like a girl. It’s really that philosophically simple to identify but hard to do and be. ‘Magic pink unicorns’ was used by AfOR for a reason.
Does civilization always have to necessarily involve environmental destruction?
Why not environmental enhancement and renewal?
The author is incorrect on a number of levels and keeps referring back to some “AoFR” and quoting someone who “has the facts/numbers”. He correctly posits that there are hard science numbers – facts, laws of physics – that cannot be broken. But then asserts that a fictional spaceship couldn’t lift off a planet’s surface without glowing white-hot due to the amount of energy it would have to expend. Spaceships work just fine with current technology; they just expel that excess heat along with the reaction mass (read: big rocket exhaust plume). Electric cars were very successful until a convenient and reliable electric starter was invented for gasoline-powered cars. Gas-powered cars are the norm only because they carry hundreds of miles worth of fuel and so can drive a very long way before needing to refuel. Electric cars are range limited, but so incredible more efficient, reliable, and clean running! Gas-powered cars, by comparison, are inefficient (in terms of mpg and thermodynamic efficiency), have more parts that can break down, and generate pollutants. It’s almost laughable – and I’m a huge car nut! Besides, most people very rarely actually require the unrefueled range that gas offers.
Here are the challenges with moving toward “green” vehicles: 1) develop batteries that hold more power and therefore enable further travel before needing to refuel. 2) develop other electric storage technologies (such as super-capacitors) that can recharge as quickly as a gas tank can be refueled. 3) develop methods to efficiently convert electric power (or solar, etc) into a compact and easily stored fuel that can be efficiently used in an engine (biofuel, gas from CO2 in seawater, etc). (Please note that burning fuel for energy is inherently very inefficient. Making methanol for fuel to store then running it through a fuel cell would be much better!). None of these new technologies are anywhere near a hard physics limit. One might even suggest that green technologies help us move away from technologies that run/ruin our lives/livelihood and into a future where we are more free to do whatever we want without worrying so much about the future of human existence on this little green planet. :-)
This article was long winded and illogical…
“Electric” cars per se are not more complicated to work on than ordinary cars… Modern combustion-engine cars hybridized with complex electronics are the ones that are impossible to work on. Retrofitted electric cars are exceedingly simple to work on, and incredibly practical in warm climates, where no heating is required. Without power-steering, battery life can be extended even further. For a bachelor, this is incredibly economical, say if an old Beetle was converted into electric… the cost of operation would only be a new battery bank after 10 years.
In Canada this is not feasible. Lots of snow and heating is required by law to render a car roadworthy IIRC. In the cold climates, the ever-persecuted family man will always be condemned to drive these vomit-inducing, Korean-designed combustion automobiles, each “Newer” model containing more “rice” and less actual quality.
Kind of makes you wonder then why Canada, of all places, is so eager to send their oil to anyone who is willing to take it, the exception being Canadians. I’m tired of Levant’esque attacks on anything non fossil-fuel. I get you now Aurini, you don’t dislike Jewels because of the degeneracy you perceive in them, YOU wish you could be that degenerate.
If your force field or anti gravity device could repel the Earth in a similar manner that two electromagnets can repel each over then you could hover and ascend with the same energy efficiency as you can climbing a ladder, and recover energy from regenerative breaking when descending, like a space elevator without the cable, now I will just go out to my shed and invent it, cant be that hard.
LOL, Risen Ghoul did an immitation of you, I see you took it like a sport.
One hard limit on Battery Electiric Vehicles is charging times, which are limited by circuit and grid capacities.
The fundamental rule of electric current that controls charging is: watts = volts * amps. That is arithmetic and it can’t be changed or fiddled.
A regular US household circuit is fused at a maximum of 120 volts and 15 amps. Its maximum power level is 1800 watts. It can deliver a maximum of 1.8 KW. Remember that this is a maximum. Regular circuits rarely run that hot. Much will depend on your local wiring and household uses. The BEV people call this level 1 charging.
Lines used for major household appliances such as ovens and dryers are fused at 240 Volts and 30 Amps. This is Level 2 charging. A level 2 charger in your garage will set you back a couple of thousand dollars. It can deliver a maximum of 7.2 KW.
If your BEV holds a full charge of 24 KWh, it will not take less than 13 hrs 20 min to charge on a level 1 or less than 3hrs 20 min on a level 2. If you buy a Tesla Model S with the optional 85 KWh battery pack, level 1 will take almost 2 full days at level 1 or half a day at level 2
One way of looking at this is to think of charging as a speed figure for the vehicle. I have seen claims of electricity use by BEVs of between 3 and 5 miles per KWh of charge. A level one charge fills the car up at between 5.4 mph and 9 mph. It’s faster than walking, but not a whole lot.
A level 2 charge can be between 21 and 36 mph. Car like speeds to be sure, but satisfactory only for in town driving.
Of course that is optimistic, line voltage and amperage are usually lower than 240/30, and charging is less than 100% efficient. Your top charging speed would realistically be about 30 mph. This is a core problem with BEVs that cannot be finessed.
It takes less than 15 min to put 15 gal of regular in to my Honda Accord which will take me 400 miles easily. That would be 1600 mph — supersonic. This is why BEVs are inferior and always will be.