Why Tesla batteries SUCK!!

so wider Tesla batteries suck like 10 times worse as an energy storage system than a gas tank car from the last millennium well it's a fascinating story that starts with my last video about Elon Musk and his great idea to use cold gas thrusters to augment his new electric car with rocket thrusters on it for real yes what are they gonna burn I think uh hi ultra-high pressure compressed air well just don't call gas thrusters now that did seem to split Elon Musk fans right down the middle between those who just thought he was joking and those he thought he was being visionary which I've got old man he's about to kinda set me off so if you want to cut to the meat of the video skip ahead to about the six-minute mark otherwise strap in Dorothy I'm about to have a bit of a rant about some of the most annoying fanboys on the Internet Elon Musk fans in fact boys this video about why Tesla battery suck is kinda just for you Krish of a Julie I devotion and lack of will to acknowledge facts is just that god damn annoying so where did we get up to hi yes Elon Musk fans being split over whether he was just trolling just kidding about putting cold gas thrusters on a car which kinda makes me scratch my head I mean for me you know the Hyperloop was clearly a joke no no sane person could have proposed this but they took it seriously then his idea of inventing the car underground it was clearly a joke billions of people to take their cars into the middle of a city like that makes sense or something I mean he was clearly joking or Clinton that he could dig tunnels for 1% of the cost that professional engineers could dig them for which was clearly a joke but they took it seriously all claiming that he was gonna use rockets like planes which honestly takes credulity to Allah verging on religion but now peace like that Oh which was clearly a joke hook line and sinker now Elon Musk was proposing to use cold gas thrusters to make his cars go faster and maybe even fly something that is a thousand times more plausible than things like the Hyperloop or that rocky thing and what ill musk fun to come out with oh no no he was clearly joking here sure let's ignore the fact that Elon Musk's been talking about this for about six months let's ignore all of these news articles that didn't think he was joking it's ignore the fact that Elon Musk when he's talking to Joe Rogan obviously isn't joking let's ignore the fact that if you go to a video from where the air mask fan you'll find it absolutely littered with comments saying how amazing this new idea of Elon Musk's is I mean really masks fans ignored all of the really really preposterous stuff he proposed that in the u.s. being serious this time he's proposed something less stupid than normal and now we you think this time he's joking you think that's going to be a good defense just in why I thought it was obvious that it was a joke Elon Musk makes a joke Thunderfoot makes a thirty five minute video on it actually clothes Elon Musk is a joke which is why Thunderfoot made a thirty five minute video on it leave it to Thunderfoot to obsess and narcissistically trying to debunk an obvious joke for half an hour Bryce charters just when it seems like Elon has done the craziest thing ever he comes up with something even better it would be nice to see more people like him constantly pushing the limits of what we think is possible of course it will happen he said he would sell flamethrowers he said it would dig a tunnel under la he said he would put his car into space he said he would add thrusters to a car it's Elon Musk we're talking about yes I know I'm just obsessed with Elon Musk it's nothing to do with debunking crap like this for over 10 years things like religion or scam artists hucking empty promises by coating them with scientific jargon such that the average guy who doesn't actually return to look into this sort of stuff they actually sound plausible they sound like they know what they're talking about however if you know what you're doing with a few simple calculations you can show what they're promising is simply not possible all practical they're promising something that they will never be able to deliver I tell you what I'll do I'll show you my idea I give you the Springfield monorail this time they're talking about putting SpaceX's rocket thrusters on their next-generation Tesla Roadster [Music] but okay please please please tell me this is true what this one say moving goalposts no no no no it's nothing to do with what I showed was wrong with Elon Musk the problem is that I'm obsessed with Elon Musk that's why I'm wrong but just in case you did think this was a good argument let me just tell you it's not looking good when your best argument is you're obsessed with Elon Musk really that's the best you've got there were no arguments here it's not based on facts or reasoning or anything like that no attempt to actually show why anything that I said was wrong the best you've got is are but you're obsessed with venom fan eggs or creationism or religion which proves that God exists or you're obsessed with feminism you're obsessed with Anita sarkeesian which shows you must be a misogynist or you're obsessed with Brett Satan Sargon and Trump and look how great they're working out and now yes there are actually people out there who think but you're obsessed with musk is somehow convincing that it's an original and winning argument nonetheless there were some interesting comments which brought up hydrogen powered cars because they baked tanks of high pressure hydrogen in them now there's actually a fascinating topic which I had always assumed had gone nowhere for several reasons most notably hydrogen scares the crap out of me now I'm a hard and experienced man when it comes to dealing with dangerous stuff nuclear reactors and high-energy particles no problem some of the most toxic elements known to man anytime things that explode regularly high-pressure gases no problem cryo liquids and so forth I've worked with them all and hydrogen still scares me I've experienced small-scale hydrogen explosions and they're terrifying yet can't see hydrogen and you can't smell it yet it has one of the highest propensity to explode of any gas when mixed with air and that's why it's dangerous you get a regular gas leak and it's far more likely to burn then explode you get a hydrogen leak and give it a bit of a chance to mix with the hair it will almost always explode I don't like hydrogen I said someone suggest running a car with it I'm notably cautious the second reason why I won't want to use hydrogen as a fuel is simple while hydrogen itself per kilo is one of the highest energy densities of any chemical fuels what you might be thinking hey that's a good thing not a bad thing then you add the weight of this storage vessel and hydrogen go to remain one of the most energy dense chemical fuels - one of the least energy dense chemical fuels take for instance my 50 liter cylinder which could take up to two hundred atmospheres doesn't really matter 200 atmospheres of which gas that cylinder weighed about 50 kilos so how much hydrogen could it stall well 50 liters of hydrogen is about two moles so that's about 4 grams per atmosphere for a cylinder like this yeah it's not very dense which is the reason why hydrogen balloons float better than helium balloons so at 200 baths two hundred atmospheres a cylinder like this would contain about 800 grams of hydrogen that's not even kilogram in a 50 kilogram cylinder so if we take a look at energy density hydrogen per kilo is about three times the energy density of gasoline so a kilo of hydrogens worth about three kilos of gasoline so to store the equivalent of three kilograms of gasoline you've got a 50 kilogram tank that's a bloody heavy gas tank now I used to have a small master which I drove all over the place in America and had a 13 gallon fuel tank on it 50 or so liters which held about 40 kilograms of fuel storage tank itself weighed about 15 kilograms so in nothing special car built in the last millennium got about 35 miles per gallon so it would do about 450 miles on a tank of gas which when full weighed about 55 kilos and it's heaviest and 15 kilos at its the lightest so a single passenger weighs about a 100 kilos or so so the energy storage device on my car worried about half of what a person would weigh let's compare this to the modern Toyota hydrogen gas car which has a range much less than my car from the last millennium it carries about five kilograms of hydrogen which they correctly say is about the equivalent of five gallons of gas but that five gallon equivalent of gasoline comes in fuel tanks that have a combined weight of about a hundred kilograms and that's even using high tech low weight cylinders it's still gonna have an energy density once you factor in the fuel tank about half that of gasoline so it's gonna weigh about a hundred or so kilos when it's full and 90 kilos when empty haha but that's nothing let's now compare this to Elon Musk's baby the Tesla Model 3 which according to Tesla's website has a range of about 200 miles and I just want the Elon Musk fans to just savor this moment with the Tesla Model 3 range the Tesla Model 3 range is one of the best of any electric vehicle available today traveling up to 215 miles on a single charge again much less than my old gas-powered car from the last millennium but its battery weighs half a bloody ton are you getting this the energy storage for my car with a 500 or so mile range from the last century was 50 kilograms the best a modern electric car can do is managing half that range on an energy storage system that weighs ten times this much and to make things even worse that battery weighs exactly the same when it's full as when it's empty so when my gas tanks full of gas it weighs about 50 kilos and when it's empty 15 the Tesla battery weighs about 500 kilos when it's full 500 kilos when it's empty holy smokes the Tesla Model 3 battery alone please about half as much as my old car then yeah get on to refuelling time I could refill my car in a few minutes refueling a hydrogen car apparently takes a comparable amount of time although like I said I'm personally terrified of hydrogen I don't ever see myself fueling a car with it but whatever minutes they reckon to refuel a half ton Tesla battery well the model 3 according to the Tesla website has a charge time of 20 to 30 hours and if you take you to a super charging station someone's kindly done a time-lapse of that and it takes just under two hours although that's apparently with the long range Tesla battery there is a range of about 300 miles nonetheless with a super charging you're probably looking at over an hour for about 200 miles of range so from driving it 70 miles per hour or so I'll deplete the Tesla battery in about 3 hours at which point I'll have to stop and recharge which optimistically the super charging station is gonna take about an hour where's my old gas-powered car from the last millennium drive for about six hours and only has to stop to refuel for about five minutes and that's the reason why Tesla batteries suck and video is hoping that there's gonna be some great battery revolution here it's not going to habit watch my video on super batteries busted battery technology is probably as energy dense as it's going to get if you want to maintain things like safety reliability and recharge ability Tesla batteries might suck when they're compared to gas as an energy storage system but that's only because all batteries suck is an energy storage system when compared to gasoline if you're just seeing how well you can do with batteries Tesla batteries are actually pretty good it's just in terms of energy density they're still an order of magnitude worse than a gas tank I mean this is just a harsh reality some things are almost as good as it's gonna get you're never going to get a chemical fuel it's ten times better than gasoline cuz gasoline is pretty much the apex of what you can do with the chemistry and batteries aren't far off that either hydrogen suffers a similar problem storage devices for hydrogen almost always end up turning it from one of the highest chemical density fuels to one of the lowest so Bo more along the lines of burning wood or something all I have to admit these Toyota folks looked like they were pretty serious about this hydrogen stuff there the 700 bar cylinder in the car which as I previously expressed I would want nothing to do with but their crash tests make it look like they've actually thought this through seriously they also have for some strange reason someone shooting one of their very expensive composite cylinders with a gun now according to Toyota's YouTube channel here what they want to show you is that the me raised carbon fiber tang undergo a test of a high-powered 50 caliber gunshot from point-blank range the high caliber bullet pierces the tank and the structure remains intact the tank does not burst wait it's probably a good thing this hydrogen tank here has about twice the pressure in it that these tanks have and that's just the energy from the pressurized gas mix the hydrogen there with air and then ignite it you will get a detonation about 10 times this size the gas merely escapes through a hole and disperses into the atmosphere with no catastrophic rupture like I was saying with hydrogen that's almost as bad special high-speed cameras slow down the action to showcase the strength and innovation of the tech at work well ok let's take a quick look at that what you see here is a little spread dust coming out of the tank but that spray of dust is going at roughly the speed that the gas is coming out of the tank at so the spray starts about here and ends about here some 25 frames later during which time that dust has moved I'm gonna estimate about 30 centimeters so 25 frames at 30,000 frames per second is about one millisecond this stuff is going about a third of a meter in a millisecond which means it's going about 300 meters per second which it's about the speed of sound it's coming out of that cylinder at about 600 miles per hour or 1000 kilometers per hour with no way of shutting it off and maybe just to really drive that point home bullets also trouble at about the speed of sound this one's probably a bit faster you know being a high-velocity bullet of some sort so all I have to do is play the bullet impact backwards and we have an internal calibration for something doing about the speed of sound and we can play the dust injection alongside it and you see that the gas is coming out of the cylinder at about the speed of sound they've also simulated a fuel tank failure which is actually about right for a gas car there is a huge energy density in the gas tank of a car but it's actually quite hard to get an explosion out of it in the way that you can get an explosion out of a high-pressure gas cap but the interesting idea that you know in the event of an emergency the cylinder just vents and flashes the gas off is actually if it works not such a bad idea so flashing the gas off just venting it and burning it's probably not that dangerous quite a big flame threat must be said but the problem comes is if the gas doesn't burn while you're venting it because like I say you mix hydrogen with air in almost any way and it's very prone to detonation thanks to the very low minimum ignition energy required for hydrogen air mixtures 1/10 that required for igniting a gasoline air mixture for instance an invisible or static spark from a person can cause ignition which means that if it doesn't vent and burn while it's doing it you have a giant a potential detonation cloud over your vehicle now the downside of gas of course is it makes carbon dioxide when you burn it and yes that contributes to global warming but then again an electric car charged with electricity from a gas or coal power station release is just as much carbon dioxide so where does this leave us yes electric cars have a place but that place isn't everywhere for range and charging times they're just never going to cut it for runabouts in town yeah they're pretty good the more so if they're actually powered by a renewable and cheese sauce but then again if you're keen there are alternatives just like when you burn gas you get a huge amount of energy and carne oxide and water it is possible to reverse that process of course it takes a huge amount of energy so you've got to put in at least as much energy that is released when you burn it in the first place it's chemically challenging to do it's a massively energy intensive exercise but if you're willing to do that it does mean that gasoline at that point becomes a carbon neutral fuel the downside of this of course is almost everyone misses the point for clickbait headlines you know let's turn carbon dioxide into a fuel and these ideas are just massively pimped out there and just skim over the idea that you've got to put at least as much energy into it as you got from burning it in the first place you can't cheat the laws of thermodynamics maybe that's a story for another day so if you enjoyed this video give it a thumbs up and ring the notification bell and if you really enjoyed it subscribe and maybe consider supporting this channel through patreon always being on the road why are the mountains go funny colors [Music] [Music]

Channel: Thunderf00t

Views: 467,076

Rating: 3.9120557 out of 5

Keywords: tesla, elon, musk, battery, model 3, model s, roadster, scam, hydrogen, car, toyota, mazda, protege, mirai, milage, fuel, cell, pressure, gas, thunderf00t, busted

Id: 3K43XC9J82Q

Length: 22min 25sec (1345 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 06 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/KarKraKr]

As far as Thunderfoot videos go, this one is actually one of the least terrible ones. I mean the facts are mostly right for once and other than needlessly clickbaiting about something that isn't even part of the video (he talks about Tesla batteries specifically for a few seconds at most) it's sensible enough. Energy density of batteries is pretty bad, that's not wrong. He rightly bashes hydrogen for being bullshit. By the end I just wanted to ask "well mate, how do you want to drive then?" Methane produced with the sabatier reaction, is that what the amazingly detailed slide at 21 minutes is supposed to symbolize? That ain't cheap buddy.

Oh and speaking of cheap, he of course misses that the limit on range is price much more than weight of the battery which would be readily apparent had he made it clear that he took his numbers from the cheapest Model 3 that isn't even being produced yet. Classic Thunderfoot cherrypicking. But yeah, seen much worse from him, this is downright tame in the stupidity department.

[u/CMWRON]

What a bunch of bollix. Weight comparisons alone do not mean much. If they did then no one on earth would ever buy a Rolls Royce. Yes, batteries are less efficient by weight than gasoline but that's only a very small part of the equation and does not take into equation the whole powertrain (engine, transmission, exhaust, cooling system etc.). What about service, performance, lack of emissions or noise and overall life? Mazda, really? ICE is going away not just because of emissions, but because of waste. Most engines and transmissions built to compete with todays demands are junk after 100k miles. Tesla has currier and Uber vehicles with over 300k and the service cost was pennies compared to ICE and the vehicles perform just as well as new, with only a small range loss.