Why Gas Engines Are Far From Dead - Biggest EV Problems

hello everyone and welcome according to the industry that has made a ton of money selling combustion engines the combustion engine is going nowhere and of course they'd say that but here's the thing they're right so in this video i want to discuss why the combustion engine still has a long life ahead of it and some of the challenges facing electric cars and i want to be clear about my goal i'm not saying that you shouldn't buy an electric car i bought an electric car and i think they're great my goal with this video is to provide you with evidence that there are still many good reasons to continue improving combustion engines so a common comment i get on this channel whenever i'm talking about a new piece of internal combustion engine technology is why would the manufacturer continue to develop the combustion engine when we know the future is electric and when they could be investing that money in electric cars so a big part of this video is for selfish reasons so the next time that someone in the comments is bashing combustion engines i can say hey you know there still are good reasons why they exist here's the link because i'm certainly going to continue making videos about cool and interesting combustion technology as well as technology involving electric cars so we're going to divide the video into four categories the science the environment the cost and the consumer in each category we'll discuss the associated challenges okay so let's start off with science from a physics standpoint the biggest challenge currently facing electric cars is energy density in other words how much energy can you put into a certain space so here i have a gallon of water now according to the epa if this was a gallon of gasoline it would have the equivalent of 33.7 kilowatt hours of energy in it so in just this one gallon of gasoline there is more energy than in the entire battery of the first generation nissan leaf now times have changed batteries have improved since the first generation nissan leaf so i found a study in 2018 that was looking at eight different lithium ion battery manufacturers and of them i looked at what was the best energy density they found in a lithium-ion battery cell that number was 684 watt hours per liter so i want to provide a visual demonstration of what that means so here we have a gallon of gas and now what i want to see is how much space do we need in order to have that same amount of energy but in the form of lithium ion batteries we're going to do that using cans of lecroy not because i'm sponsored this isn't sponsored i'm just basic and so if you do the math which of course i did the equivalent energy by volume of one gallon of gasoline you would need 139 cans of lacroix representing our lithium ion batteries now this is more than just an elaborate plan to make my groceries tax deductible this is wild to look at by volume gasoline is 13 times more energy dense than the best of lithium-ion batteries in 2018. and you might be saying to yourself well this isn't really that fair of a comparison visually because all of the gasoline is tucked away in one nice little convenient spot whereas the lithium ion is spread out in all these individual cells but that's kind of the point because gasoline just goes into a tank and it just sits in one spot batteries are made up of thousands of individual cells which aren't that space efficient so keep in mind what we're looking at here is the volume required for just the cells this doesn't take into any consideration cell connections wiring cooling routing that's going through these batteries and the overall structure that's holding these all together so the space is actually going to be much larger than what you see here and on top of that remember we're looking at the best example from a study in 2018. if we were to look at the worst example the energy density was less than half and that would mean we would double what you see here just to have the same amount of energy as one gallon of gasoline by volume now so far we've just talked about volume and of course volume is important for packaging within a car so if previously you only needed this much space but now you need this much space well then obviously you have a bit of a problem because you either have to take away from existing space within the vehicle or your vehicle has to be larger to fit all of that energy but we haven't yet touched on weight and this is where gasoline has an even larger advantage so one gallon of gasoline weighs about six pounds and it has the equivalent energy of 33.7 kilowatt hours now from that same study i looked at previously the best battery's energy density was about 240 watt hours per kilogram what does that mean well if this can were to be gasoline represented here by lacroix's best flavor pamplemousie then it would weigh 50 times less than the equivalent amount of energy in lithium-ion form and remember this is just talking about the battery cells the battery pack itself would be even heavier so if you're to look at a gallon of gasoline that weighs six pounds this has more energy in it than the original leaf's battery pack which weighed over 600 pounds over a hundred times heavier for less energy so why is this a problem well it depends on what you're trying to do with that battery if you have a lithium ion battery pack at your house as a backup energy source for when the power goes out it's not really a problem you don't care how much space it takes up you don't care how heavy it is it's just sitting somewhere and it's able to help you out if you then stick it in a car however it means that car is significantly heavier and the larger the item that gets kind of the more detrimental it becomes to that object so think about a plane or a train or you know big freight trucks or when you're towing so these are scenarios where it becomes challenging to because of how much a lithium ion battery pack weighs so if you were to think about a plane for example you know it's trying to fly it needs to be as light and as compact as possible so if you were to have enough batteries on board the thing that the thing could actually fly somewhere it would take up all the space within it and you wouldn't have any additional weight allowed for passengers the thing would just be full of batteries it'd be really heavy and sure it would fly somewhere but it wouldn't take anybody with it and it wouldn't go very far so right now we're really in the sweet spot where passenger cars make sense but things larger than that don't quite yet the good news is battery technology continues to improve so as that battery technology continues to improve the battery itself will take up less space and it will weigh less and eventually we'll get closer and closer towards what we have with gasoline we're not going to get here but we can reduce it and it can improve significantly we're just not there yet so what does that mean well if there are applications today that currently require combustion engines we might as well make those combustion engines as clean and as good and as efficient as possible while we still need them okay so now let's talk about cost and there are two issues here so first of all electric cars are expensive according to this automotive engineering magazine from sae electric cars are about 12 000 more for the initial purchase price so yes the maintenance cost and the operating costs are going to end up being lower but that initial purchase price is significantly higher and so because of that a lot of people avoid buying them now part of this is a chicken and egg scenario because because not many people are buying electric cars not many electric cars are produced and because not many electric cars are produced they're very expensive economies of scale the more you make the cheaper they become so in this scenario if more people bought electric cars they'd be cheaper but more people can't buy electric cars because they're too expensive now i want to be very clear and that i don't think the initial purchase price is the big deterrent from electric cars i don't think that's the big reason why we don't see mass adoption and reason being is that if the only thing people were concerned about when buying a new car was total cost of ownership we'd all just be driving old 90s honda civics and we're not we buy new toys car buying is a very emotional experience it's not a logical experience and because of that all of the luxury brands exist if all of us only thought about total cost of ownership no luxury brand period would exist no fun cars would exist we just have all the boring simple machines that could get us from point a to point b that cost us the least amount but people buy things that they enjoy and so because of that reason i don't think it's that strong of an argument that cost alone is what is keeping people out of electric cars however where cost does get involved and where i think this does play a role is in terms of profit for the manufacturers according to a study by alex partners in order for an electric car to be profitable today it needs to cost forty eight thousand dollars quite a bit and the power train cost for that electric car is about sixteen thousand dollars for a long range ev versus about sixty five hundred dollars for a combustion car so think about this if you're a manufacturer and you wanna sell a car to a customer for thirty thousand dollars you can make significantly more profit if you sell that 30 000 car as a combustion car versus an electric car and for better or worse manufacturers are going to follow what makes them profitable and in this case it's combustion engines all right so let's move on to the environment and talk about why we should be improving internal combustion engines so according to this reading there's going to be about two to three billion internal combustion engines sold between now and 2045. that alone sounds like a pretty good reason to improve them and make them better if we're gonna sell that many anyways they might as well be as clean as possible but let's look at it from a manufacturer's point of view you knew i was gonna work a whiteboard into this video so let's say you're a small car manufacturer with a hypothetical name something like mazda and your goal for your company is to improve your overall emissions and so you're a small company you don't have a ton of money and so you have to make a decision of what do you want to do with that research and development money do you want to put it into an electric car or do you want to improve your combustion cars so let's say you choose to create an electric car and that ends up accounting for about 10 of your sales which is actually an optimistic number based on today's sales data and those 10 percent thankfully these electric cars are twice as emissions friendly life cycle versus the combustion course great you've improved them but it's only 10 of your sales so your overall emissions are only reduced by 5 because you still have 90 of your cars unchanged well then you could also choose to instead of spending that money on developing an electric car to develop a better internal combustion engine and create a new technology that reduces emissions by let's say 10 percent 10 isn't a crazy number to improve emissions by now because all of your vehicles are combustion engines that 10 applies across the board and that means you have an overall emission savings of 10 so it was actually cleaner and likely much more profitable for your business to develop a new internal combustion engine technology than to go the eevee route and part of this yes is due to consumer choice which brings us to our last point finally let's talk about consumers so a large part of selling a car is knowing that there exists a market out there to purchase that car in 2018 and in 2019 the global market share for electric cars was about two percent so if you owned a car dealership and a hundred people came to your car dealership and bought cars only two of them walked out with an electric car now marketing is the business of teaching you what you want to buy and so part of this is that we've been marketed combustion engine cars more often unless you've been watching recent super bowl commercials but it also does come down to consumer choice and that plays a massive role lots of people still want combustion cars it's easy to think why doesn't everyone have an electric car if you have a garage and you have a way to fast charge that vehicle however something i've always said and will continue to say is that people are lazy so if you want to convince people to buy something it needs to be more convenient than what they already have now if you have a garage and again a way to charge it often electric cars will be more convenient than a combustion car however if you live in an apartment or if you street park your vehicle which hello a lot of people do then a combustion car is easily going to be more convenient and so a lot of people are going to choose that people also often buy cars that they rarely need for their intended purpose say five percent of the time that's why you see a ton of pickup trucks because one day they might need to buy mulch but along that five percent mentality people buy gasoline cars because they know they can road trip anywhere and everywhere i've experienced this with my tesla there are trips in it that i have intentionally taken my crosstrek instead because the charging infrastructure doesn't exist where i want to go so if you only have one car it's often very logical for it to be a combustion car if you're a family with multiple cars in a garage it makes complete sense to have at least one of those vehicles as electric for everything around town but that's not everyone's case and then if we take back into consideration that currently two percent of buyers are buying electric cars and let's say again you're mazda you're trying to clean up your fleet and so you invest everything into an electric car that only two percent of the people buying your cars are buying then you're not really cleaning up your fleet because not enough people are buying that car in order for it to actually make a difference so again none of this is to say that electric cars are dumb or that you shouldn't buy one i love them i love mine but there are still many good reasons why combustion engines still exist and why they should continue to be improved so ultimately i'm going to keep making videos about pre-chamber ignition or gasoline compression ignition engines or whatever else automakers think up mostly because i think it's cool but also because it's actually logical based on today's circumstances so thank you all so much for watching and if you have any questions or comments of course feel free to leave those below

Channel: Engineering Explained

Views: 4,083,053

Keywords: gasoline, diesel, gas engine, diesel engine, combustion engine, ICE, EV, ICE vs EV, electric car, tesla, tesla model 3, tesla model y, gas vs electric, energy density, consumer, buy a new car, buy used car, car buying, environment, green cars, cars, trucks, profit, car makers, engineering explained

Id: Hatav_Rdnno

Length: 14min 32sec (872 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 05 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/mirageqt]

" not because I am sponsored but because I am basic " oh Jason..

[u/[deleted]]

One point not often made is that while an EV might go 350 miles on a charge, and it can be sportier than many ICE cars in certain regards, it cannot do both well at the same time without adding significant time to the trip due to long recharging sessions. An ICE sports car, however, can be driven spiritedly on the entire road trip and at worst require an extra 5-10 minute fill up along the way.

This is one of the main reasons I won’t buy an EV yet as a single car owner. It requires the compromise of babying the car to gain range, or having fun with it but only over short distances. Until the ranges are long enough that I can drive spiritedly over 400 miles- meaning it’s going to need an overall “babied” range of 700 miles- it will continue to be a compromise I personally am unwilling to make. That or it needs an equivalent recharge time. The 4 hour drive to the cottage on summer weekends is the time I have the most fun with my car- not during my traffic filled commute.

[u/BaconStripsss]

Can't replace the sound of a V8

[u/celicaxx]

I see the problem as them trying to essentially legislate ICE engines gradually out of existence, by making the emissions and fuel economy requirements so onerous, thus requiring manufacturers to make a less reliable more delicate engine with a lot more electronics that can go wrong. It didn't help either that car manufacturers didn't take Obama's fuel economy mandates seriously when he made them over a decade ago, and now are scrambling and running with their hair on fire to try to meet them. Couple it with cars needing to be heavier and contain more safety equipment, that also makes said emissions and fuel economy targets harder to reach, it's basically a slow legislative kill on ICE engines. An electric car has no efficiency targets to reach in the same manner, so it naturally succeeds in such an environment.

I would make the argument an ICE car is more difficult overall to build, but you could compare it to say, VCRs vs DVD players. VCRs at the end of their lifespan cost less than DVD players when they first came out, but VCRs in actuality are a lot more complex mechanically to make, cost more to ship, etc. So the initial high price of DVD players was just to pay off R&D costs, at the end of the life of where most people were buying DVD players, they cost $20, whereas even the cheapest VCR new was $50-60 (and remained that price until no more were sold) when DVD players were $80-100, and when DVD players first came out they were $200+ when VCRs were $70-100. It's just hard if you owned a VCR factory to turn it all around and build DVD players, and that's where cars are now. Of course if you compare the technologies, VHS went almost but not quite as far as DVD in resolution/picture quality (with S-VHS) and there was even DVHS which was Bluray quality on VHS, but the cost and complexity was just too much for those machines, and optical media could do the same results cheaper after the R&D was paid off.

That said, I can see electric cars taking over in much of the world very soon, but not USA or Russia until probably 2040-2050, simply due to the vastness and population density of the countries, and that both countries drive a lot. Pollution is less noticeable with a low population density, and driving distances get longer.

[u/UncleCrazyMan]

Lots of talk about energy density but not really much on energy efficiency. Yeah Gas is energy dense, but the majority of the energy is not used to propel the car and is lost due to inefficiencies. Electric motors have much higher efficiency than gasoline, so while pound for pound it is less energy, it also doesn't need as much to produce the same power. Also, when comparing the weight you can't ignore everything else associated with the engine. Batteries are heavier... ok how about electric vs gas engines? What about the drive train? Does a battery weigh more than a engine, exhaust, transmission, etc? If so, how much different? How much does an electric motor add to the weight? What about space? Does a battery take up more space than all of the drive train components of a fuel burning engine? How much more? How much does an EV take up? Looking at tesla, it seems there is not a huge jump in weight and there seems to be similar if not more storage with the EV design.

This also holds true when it expands outside of the car and the infrastructure required.A single powerplant pushing power to hundreds or thousands of charging stations is more efficient than pumping, shipping, processing, storing, shipping, storing, pumping, then burning fossil fuels. This also addresses the weight issue. The weight of the battery is higher at any single point in time, but it is far less over time than fuel. How many pounds of fuel are pumped, stored, transported, before eventually being burned? Multiply that over 100k miles and the poundage of energy heavily favors electric.

Meanwhile his argument related to costs is also skewed. The Nissan Leaf for example is far less than the amount quoted as the profitable line. But forgetting that, shouldn't one expect that emerging technologies are more expensive than existing technologies? We have to build the infrastructure to produce the new systems. We also have to build the infrastructure to support those systems. The entire point of investing in electric technologies is to lower that cost and expand the infrastructure to make it a viable alternative to fuel. We are approaching that point which is why the EV market is starting to become a real element as opposed to a niche subset.

TLDR, when ignoring all advantages of electric, fossil is better.

[u/sngz]

put the rav4 prime features / performance into a a luxury sports sedan or coupe and i'll switch to EV tomorrow.

[u/bigbura]

Dude needs to get that right front brake system on the Tesla 3 looked at. I bet there's chunks of metal in the outer pad causing the deep grooving on the disk. This is a manufacturing defect and should be warranty work as stopping power is sub-optimal and wear and tear higher than normal.

Now that the safety talk is out of the way, he does a great job at summing up the current realities of private transportation options.

The cool thing is his Tesla 3 holds the equivalent of 3 gallons of gas in that battery pack and delivers over 100mpg equivalency. I don't see any ICE cars achieving such thrifty mileage.

[u/[deleted]]

Seemed odd to leave out the cost factor on batteries and only talk about weight. So far batteries are getting cheaper a lot faster than they're getting lighter, and weight hasn't been shown to be much of a challenge to performance in EV's. IMO EV battery packs are more likely to get bigger & heavier (or at least stay the same weight) rather than lighter as manufacturers can afford to pack more cells in them for the same amount of money.

TL/DR reduced weight is useful but increasingly irrelevant as batteries get 20% cheaper per year.

[u/Lhankor_Mhy]

*liquid fuelled internal combustion engines