Electric car update: The good 'ole boys are not too happy

[Pat Conlon]

Everyone realizes that electric's are the future, right? Really, there's no debate.

Day by day, if you're paying attention, you're seeing into the future.

Enjoy: http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1110669_souths-good-ol-boy-drag-racers-whupped-by-tesla-not-happy-about-it

Small but steady advancements in battery technology:
http://newatlas.com/lithium-battery-graphene-nanotube-anode/49621/?li_source=LI&li_medium=default-widget

[ZOA NOM]

Not MY future...

[Country Joe]

Yeah, that future looks like a lot of sitting around starring at your smart phone. Hey, maybe the future is now!!!

https://www.cars.com/articles/2013/11/how-quickly-does-the-tesla-model-s-battery-charge/

A Tesla will make a really nice commuter car, I will admit that.

[Bill_Rockoff]

Not MY future...

Ever been to Norco? Cool weird little town down near Riverside, where horses are still a thing. If you love horses and want to have them in your everyday life, riding to work and to the store, Norco is your place.

And if we were serious about developing internal combustion engines, man there is a lot of progress we could still make. We have come a long way already in the last 100-ish years, with better metallurgy giving us better strength and lighter, more-powerful, more-efficient engines. We have gone beyond cast-iron blocks and side-valve engines and the wild-ass-guess that is a carburetor. The current Corvette engine, with its direct-injection and aluminum block and variable valve actuation, making 460 hp from a package you can fit under a kitchen sink, that can also power a 180+ mph car to better highway fuel economy than a Miata? Man, these are the good ol' days. New Korean appliance cars will whip the ass of anything the Beach Boys ever sang about, and go 100,000 miles without much more than ten oil changes.

But think what we could do with better materials, maybe ceramic or carbon or some composite, for engine blocks and pistons and crankshafts. Because as Smokey Yunick pointed out decades ago, ideally we would want ambient-temp air and fuel coming into the engine, and nothing but ambient-temp water and CO2 coming out of the engine. The fact that we have to have "cooling" at all means we are throwing away an awful lot of the energy we get from the combustion, just to keep our metal engine components from getting too hot. And the sound? I know we all associate it with "fun" but everything we hear is just power that *didn't* get turned into going faster.

And the ability to turn the stored power directly into force, to recover your energy during deceleration by using the motor as a generator to recharge your battery and letting *that* slow you down, instead of throwing it all away as heat? All of these are great, from a performance point of view. And electric gives us that, all at once, as soon as you stomp the throttle, because DC motors make full power at nearly zero RPM (limited by electric current capability of the battery, the motor wiring, and the conductor between them.) My wife's Leaf doesn't have "fun" anywhere in its mission statement, but it launches with authority. And driving it is its own kind of fun.

I appreciate the quirky air-cooled old-tech stuff as much as the next guy. A friend is selling his dad's '88 Targa and MAN do I need that thing in my life. (If it was for sale next year instead of this year, I could do it.)  As far as I'm concerned, it became a different car with power steering and more-different still with liquid cooling, and I don't think the better a/c was worth the trade-off against the steering feel, and this may be the last 911 I have a chance to buy and use like a normal car that is priced where I could buy it and use it like a normal car. I just plain love the FJ, even though my son's FZ1 is "better" in just about every way a bike can be better other than "I have 30,000 miles of FJ memories from before you were even born, 80,000 before there even was an FZ1."

I love vintage racing. I like the way that stuff looks and sounds and smells.

But I also love Formula E. (What can I say? I like any kind of racing; if two neighbors are cutting their grass, I'll sit down to watch and pick one of them to root for, hoping he gets finished first. "Come on, Wayne! Mark has finished his lawn first every Saturday this spring, you need to get it together!")

And for just getting around? Man, the FJ (or Todd's dad's 911) does itself no favors sitting there at idle in traffic, and for that matter neither do any of my normal liquid-cooled things, they just take twice as long to ruin parts that are way easier to replace. I know, I know, we should be using other things to sit in traffic, keeping an FJ or a 911 for the kind of commute that is at least fun. 

But with all the R&D going toward making electric stuff work as transportation, there will be a lot of effort into making those things more fun, too.

As Ferdinand Porsche said, "The *last* car ever built will be a sports car."

[ZOA NOM]

Not MY future...

Ever been to Norco? Cool weird little town down near Riverside, where horses are still a thing. If you love horses and want to have them in your everyday life, riding to work and to the store, Norco is your place.

And if we were serious about developing internal combustion engines, man there is a lot of progress we could still make. We have come a long way already in the last 100-ish years, with better metallurgy giving us better strength and lighter, more-powerful, more-efficient engines. We have gone beyond cast-iron blocks and side-valve engines and the wild-ass-guess that is a carburetor. The current Corvette engine, with its direct-injection and aluminum block and variable valve actuation, making 460 hp from a package you can fit under a kitchen sink, that can also power a 180+ mph car to better highway fuel economy than a Miata? Man, these are the good ol' days. New Korean appliance cars will whip the ass of anything the Beach Boys ever sang about, and go 100,000 miles without much more than ten oil changes.

But think what we could do with better materials, maybe ceramic or carbon or some composite, for engine blocks and pistons and crankshafts. Because as Smokey Yunick pointed out decades ago, ideally we would want ambient-temp air and fuel coming into the engine, and nothing but ambient-temp water and CO2 coming out of the engine. The fact that we have to have "cooling" at all means we are throwing away an awful lot of the energy we get from the combustion, just to keep our metal engine components from getting too hot. And the sound? I know we all associate it with "fun" but everything we hear is just power that *didn't* get turned into going faster.

And the ability to turn the stored power directly into force, to recover your energy during deceleration by using the motor as a generator to recharge your battery and letting *that* slow you down, instead of throwing it all away as heat? All of these are great, from a performance point of view. And electric gives us that, all at once, as soon as you stomp the throttle, because DC motors make full power at nearly zero RPM (limited by electric current capability of the battery, the motor wiring, and the conductor between them.) My wife's Leaf doesn't have "fun" anywhere in its mission statement, but it launches with authority. And driving it is its own kind of fun.

I appreciate the quirky air-cooled old-tech stuff as much as the next guy. A friend is selling his dad's '88 Targa and MAN do I need that thing in my life. (If it was for sale next year instead of this year, I could do it.)  As far as I'm concerned, it became a different car with power steering and more-different still with liquid cooling, and I don't think the better a/c was worth the trade-off against the steering feel, and this may be the last 911 I have a chance to buy and use like a normal car that is priced where I could buy it and use it like a normal car. I just plain love the FJ, even though my son's FZ1 is "better" in just about every way a bike can be better other than "I have 30,000 miles of FJ memories from before you were even born, 80,000 before there even was an FZ1."

I love vintage racing. I like the way that stuff looks and sounds and smells.

But I also love Formula E. (What can I say? I like any kind of racing; if two neighbors are cutting their grass, I'll sit down to watch and pick one of them to root for, hoping he gets finished first. "Come on, Wayne! Mark has finished his lawn first every Saturday this spring, you need to get it together!")

And for just getting around? Man, the FJ (or Todd's dad's 911) does itself no favors sitting there at idle in traffic, and for that matter neither do any of my normal liquid-cooled things, they just take twice as long to ruin parts that are way easier to replace. I know, I know, we should be using other things to sit in traffic, keeping an FJ or a 911 for the kind of commute that is at least fun. 

But with all the R&D going toward making electric stuff work as transportation, there will be a lot of effort into making those things more fun, too.

As Ferdinand Porsche said, "The *last* car ever built will be a sports car."

Lots of good reasons to appreciate "progress" in the automotive world, none of which interest me in the least. I have been unable to exhaust the adrenaline levels provided me in my flat six 911 race car. I have no interest in gee-whiz gadgetry.