Engine technology using metal pistons with rings sealing against a tightly machined cylinder wall not going away because of how mature & refined this method of extracting mechanical energy from chemical reactions between fuel & oxygen in earth's atmosphere.
Look at the energy density difference between the best rechargeable battery & gasoline.
Gasoline 12,000-watt hours per kilogram Amprius 500-watt hours per kilogram
That means gasoline contains 24X more energy per unit mass than the best rechargeable battery! In other words, as the thermal efficiency of gasoline engines continues to increase even more of the fuel's energy will be translated into mechanical output to move the vehicle, often using the following: Toyota Prius engines already around 40-50% thermal efficiency & mass produced. Next we will see the following technologies applied to engines.
Direct Injection of Gasoline + Port Injector to Clean Valves
Continually Variable Valves (Pneumatic Freevalve or Solenoid)
Continually Variable Compression (Hydraulic articulation of crank mount)
Mutli-mode ECU control of combustion with HCCI & SCCI
Engineering Engine Optimization
CFD optimized fuel combustion patterns to optimize fuel energy extraction while keeping combustion temperatures low to reduce NOX formation while also improving low RPM torque output. Extensive use of general adversarial AI design tools applied to the CFD or computational fluid dynamics simulations will enable GM, Toyota & the worlds other largest automaker to continually improve engines to boost their energy efficiency, energy density, power per unit volume, thermal efficiency, while also lowering the emissions using air injection, plasma exhaust treatment, catalytic converters, more O2 sensors and enhanced ECU compute with sensor fusion optimized combustion control that enables peak fuel economy and peak performance so your 1000 HP performance SUV can get 50+ MPG on regular gasoline when driven normally at legal safe speeds with moderate acceleration in traffic as supercapacitor based idle stop systems prevent fuel use when the vehicle stopped not moving.
EV Range Anxiety Disappears with Experience
After you have a Nissan LEAF SV or similar for a few months & get used to the charging regime & actual real world range depending on HVAC use & driving style & route, the range anxiety should fade away. Remember that low range EV's are great grocery getters, great low distance commuter vehicles and are terrible for road-trips. A hybrid great for fuel economy on long road trips. Use EV's around town where their no-tail pipe emissions make a big improvement to local air quality as the best-case scenario. EV's have superior stop & go performance. Like your smartphone or other portable electronics, no engine or fuel means the EV does not emit air pollution when used. This means you can have your EV on inside a closed garage without being exposed to carbon monoxide like would happen if you did the same with a typical gasoline fueled vehicle on inside a closed garage.
Ultralight EV's
Anything that reduces mass on an EV improves range & performance. Axial flux motors are 6X smaller & half the mass of radial flux motors, making smaller lower mass mounts & smaller EV batteries possible. Replacing copper in the battery with titanium lowers the battery mass. Mixing graphite with silicon improves the battery anode. Using fluoride treated polymers makes a solid state fireproof superior performance electrolyte solution that also eliminates the need for an electrode separator film. Using magnesium, aluminum, and titanium in the vehicle suspension, wheels, panels, and other strong parts of the body or frame or spaceframe, means that anything that reduces steel use will enable weight savings & boost battery range, handling & acceleration.
Making the EV platform lighter or lower mass makes the vehicle better everywhere. Composites are another pathway to making stiffer lower mass vehicles parts, panels, & structures, like prepreg epoxy glass fiber or carbon fiber enhanced glass fiber, lower cost high mass performances composites. More plastics & polymers, more fibers, more fabrics, more petrochemicals & new polymer technologies. Weight or mass savings techniques used in powersports & motorsports & aerospace, and many of these same ideals are diffusing into the automotive industry, especially improved aerodynamics to reduce drag at higher speeds.
Engines & Batteries Sticking Around
GM says engine & EV technologies will be developed at the same time, concurrently. That there is no reason to give up engine development since battery technology so early & limited right now. Many vehicles are used in different applications with different energy needs. While a used Nissan LEAF EV might work well for local in-city urban commuting, it lacks the capacities & range needed for heavy duty use cases. Your not everyone, some commercial applications required vehicles to have much more energy to haul containers full of goods in class 8 commercial trucks for example. Such heavy duty low speed turbo diesel vehicles can be retrofitted with a propane like DME fueling system, as demonstrated in South Korea, such that DME can be a drop in replacement fuel for petrochemical diesel engines and works better with more torque, more power, and much lower emissions, and only costs $1/ gal at commercial quantities.
Hybrid Easing the EV Transition
Plug-in Hybrid & Hybrid vehicles are bridge technology to enable gradual conversion towards electromotive prime power while still making good use of the high energy density of fuels that can be refilled quickly at gas stations by the millions worldwide, where adding 10 gallons of gas to a vehicles fuel tank only takes about 5 minutes. Even L4 or level 4 EV charging at 1 MW targeting 10 min charging. So liquid fuel refills provide a very hard target for EV charge speed improvement. Then again, since most light duty vehicles are parked 20+ hours per day, even L1 extension cord charging can ad 40-80 miles of range while the EV parked overnight or during the day. There are billions of regular power outlets that an EVSE charging cable can be plugged into to trickly charge battery electric vehicles slowly while they are parked for many hours. In the USA there are also more than 50,000 public L2 chargers that charge at 240vac 15-40amps or 3-8X faster than L1. L3 DC fast charging at 10-150kW means 1% per minute charges.
EV Motors + Engines = No Transmission
Honda IMA & Toyota HSD show that blending EV traction motors with engines can eliminate the need for a transmission. Automotive transmissions are complicated, expensive & failure prone. Where the Axial electric motor works best is when the gasoline engine not working best, and where the gasoline engine working best the electric motor not working best. In this way putting the Axial flux electric motor on the crank as the flywheel enables direct drive systems as Koenigsegg demonstrated. Axial flux motors offer smaller sizes & lower mass with same output as larger heavier radial flux motor, meaning they have a waterfall effect on EV efficiency.
New & Emerging Bio-Fuels Renewable
Emerging biofuels like biodiesel which has been around for a long time to upcoming bio gasoline will enable cleaner combustion using renewable fuel sources. Methanol & ethanol, propane, butane, DME or dimethyl ether, hydro diesel, ammonia, cellulosic ethanol, wood fuels, switch grass fuels, crop waste fuels, synthetic fuels, plastic to fuel conversion fuels, waste oil to fuels, trash gas & fluid fuel, chemical waste fuels, there are lots of ways to take waste from one area of society and make fuels for use in internal combustion engines.
Liquid Piston & Rotary Engines
There are many different internal combustion engines being developed like the Liquid Piston engine which is similar to an inverted rotary engine when the housing is triangular and the rotor lobed to spin seal inside the swept area of the housing. This means all the benefits like low mass & higher operating speeds, and less moving parts but without oil burning apex sealing problems of the Wankel Engine or Mazda widely commercialized rotary engines used in the RX7 lineup or RX8 later & even the CX30 hybrid as a range extension generator now.
Smaller, Direct Injection & Turbo-Charging
The 2 L Turbo the most common, each cylinder with 500cc of displacement. These can be intercooler boosted to 700 HP in high performance vehicles, while more domestic vehicles can get a bit over 200hp. These are used on more than 600 models of light duty passenger vehicles from the worlds automakers. In terms of bore & stroke, mass to power ratio, cost to performance, the 2 liter 4 cylinder gasoline engine a kind of sweet spot in engine designs in terms of getting the best of a lot of variable compromises.
Mixing Trade-Off's
With batteries & engines, it's always a mix of compromises in terms of materials, designs & technologies. We can make diamond gold batteries that last millions of cycles & hundreds of years, but they cost so much that they have few applications where they make sense. An engine can be made of ceramics with helium lubricant & free pistons that never touch the cylinder walls, magnetic sapphire bearings & all sorts of exotic technologies, but it would be hard to mass produce & cost more than the target MSRP for the vehicle. Consider than a typical F1 car engine has to be heated to 154F to start because of the tight tolerances, such that all the metals have to be warmed up to expand to close to their operating temperature dimensions.
Aerospace H2+ PV + TSF Batteries
Hydrogen fuel cell electrics + Sky Facing Solar PV surface energy capture & low mass polymer batteries with solid state electrolyte polymer that are fireproof. For passenger EV' the fuel has to be converted to electricity used for final drive in electric ducted fans propulsion final drive technology. Any energy captured using the fans as a generator like brake regen in a common ground EV or solar energy captured from sky facing surfaces using PV technology, all of this can be stored in energy butter packs onboard using the latest titanium silicon fluoride Li-ion based aero batteries. TSF makes aerospace Li-ion with up to 650 watt hours per kg, but they are so expensive we are unlikely to see them used in passenger light duty vehicles like a electric car or truck or SUV.
Na-ion EV's
In the consumer vehicle space, we are more likely to see Na-Ion cheaper broadly commercially mass produced for near future electric vehicles of all kinds. Na-ion will largely replace Li-ion because it offers better cost performance. That means you get a larger 150-350kWh battery pack for the same price as a 50-100kWh lithium battery.
EV Storage Battery Fading
Batterie calendar life storage capacity fading during long term EV storage. This means if you park an electric vehicle for 25 years, the battery pack will be dead and needing to be replaced. A gasoline car in an automotive museum like the LeMay in Tacoma, can be stored for hundreds of years without needing anything other than the starting battery & some hoses & gaskets to be replaced.
Long Term Vehicle Storage
Want to store a scooter, motorcycle, car or truck for a very long time? Bag it in a large plastic bag then use an can of oil fogger to soak everything evenly, then purge the bag with nitrogen gas from a tank & seal it up. Store the bagged fogged vehicle at a constant temperature & pressure. During the fogging process, you can also fog plastics & soft polymer surfaces with bisphenol based plastic restoration products that act as polymer moisturizers to keep the plastics from cracking long term. Its also wise to drain the gasoline, oil, and other fluids.
Vacuum Bagging Vehicles
Vacuum storage another option, with oil vapor & desiccation. After oil fogging all the metals in every nook and cranny, and coating the plastics with plastic restoration fluids, you bag the entire vehicle in a thicker fluoride polymer plastic bag & then use a vacuum pump to pull a strong vacuum to shrink wrap the vehicle with a gas vacuum seal. Vacuum bagging with oxygen absorbers & desiccants inside the vehicle, can make the vehicle last storage for hundreds of years.
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