Science Practical Research Team

I'm getting increasingly concerned that Tesla will go under and set back the electric car industry a decade or more. At the beginning of the last century, electric, steam and gas all competed for the automotive industry, resulting in far more advancements in gas cars than electric over the decades. Thankfully, no one has brought back steam.

There are some recent breakthroughs with gas cars that actually could make them more efficient than many electrics, and they are already far more convenient to use. I have skin in this game because I have a Jaguar iPace on order (the company's first electric) and I sure don't want to be left holding a car I can't drive.

A couple of weeks ago I addressed The Weird Mistakes Killing Tesla, but in looking at the electric car market in general, it is possible that Tesla is, at least partially, the canary in a coal mine.

I'll explain why electric cars may not make it and close with my product of the week: the Dell XPS 15 -- my favorite Dell laptop and arguably the best laptop the company makes.

Why Gas Won the First Time Around

If you go back and look at the early gas, electric and steam cars, they were pretty similar in terms of creature comforts. Of the three, the gas car was the most complex and difficult to maintain. (You needed to be a plumber to maintain steam, and an electrician to maintain an electric car.)

The steam car took a while to start -- you had to build up steam -- and had a tendency to catch fire. The electric car took a long time to charge and lacked range, but you just turned a switch and off you went. The gas car had reliability problems due its complexity, but you could just fire it up and go. (Granted, a lot of people broke their arms trying to crank-start some of the cars.) Range, instant start and convenient refueling won.

Fast-Forward to Today

Given that steam isn't making a comeback, the competition is electric vs. gas cars. As before, both are very easy to start -- just turn the key and go. Electrics remain far less complex (at least with regard to the engine) and as a result, are potentially far more reliable. They're more like a rolling appliance than a typical car. Also, they put out far less pollution, though in areas where electricity is either oil- or coal-sourced, it's not as much as you'd think. With electricity far more common now, you can charge an electric car in your own garage.

However, electric cars lack range, and charging stations aren't as common as gas stations. Electric cars work best in cities, where there is lots of slow traffic, but charging them is a nightmare. There are no chargers on the street, and parking structures lack chargers. Should you run out of electricity, there is no equivalent to the two gallon gas can to get you running.

Basically, if you run out of power, you will need to be trailered or towed to someplace that has a charger, and high-powered fast chargers are still really hard to find (easier if you drive a Tesla, thanks to their superchargers).

This creates some Catch 22-like problems. For instance, electric cars suck on long trips because they take so long to charge -- but, particularly for Teslas, chargers are easier to come by than in cities, where they work better but where accessing available chargers often is very inconvenient.

Electric cars generally are easier to repair and more reliable, but few people know how to repair them, making any critical issue away from the dealer more problematic. You can get government subsidies and drive in HOV lanes with one person in an electric car, but both expire over time, so they aren't permanent benefits.

Further, there is still only one electric car company at scale -- Tesla -- and it is a negative news magnet at the moment. For instance, last month Luxembourg suggested, based on a very questionable test, that the Tesla S brakes are not trustworthy. It appeared to be less a test than a gambit to p**s off Elon Musk, but it did draw negative ink. (Tesla really needs to fund marketing.)

Speaking of Tesla, the firm is at high risk of going under, which -- given its status -- potentially could cripple the electric car market. Finally, gas engines have been getting improvements that could make them nearly as green as electrics, particularly in areas with coal- or oil-fired generators.

Fixing Electric Cars: All About Priorities

It is kind of annoying how often technology companies seem to treat a list of critical priorities in an emerging market as if they could pick and choose the ones they want. The biggest priority to fix is charging in cities. This is where the greatest need for electrics is for emissions, noise abatement and traffic -- and where gas cars are the least efficient.

Moving to wireless charging in parking places with chargebacks to the city could make parking meters obsolete and enable additional city revenue (upcharge on the electricity).

WiTricity and Qualcomm have systems in existence today that cities could install and mandate on electric cars.

This would eliminate the charging problem and flip the electrics from a disadvantage in terms of fuel into an advantage. Your car always would be charged and ready to go, regardless of whether you parked it on the curb or in a parking structure. You'd never have to plug it in.

Supercapacitor hybrid batteries provide the promise of near instant charging, the ability to actually road race an electric car, and the potential for a much lighter much and more efficient energy source.

We actually have supercapacitor hybrid batteries in market, but they are used to start heavy equipment in cold weather. Supercapacitors can be charged in seconds, they can be used to charge the lithium ion batteries in cars while you drive, and -- at least on paper -- they should allow you to charge up a car in less time than it would take to refuel one.

Granted, the amount of current you'd be moving is blow-up-a-building big, but that could be addressed by using robotic arms and having them deploy to the center of the car, so they are never near a human.

Finally, we need the equivalent of an electric gas can, so that when an electric car runs out of current it quickly can be given another 2-40 miles of range so it can drive to a charging station. This also should be used for Formula E so that we don't see the poor drivers pushing their race cars the mile or so back to the pits (which increases rather than reduces our electric range anxiety).

The fundamental problems that caused electric cars the fail the first time -- lack of capacity and charging time -- remain their biggest problems today. If electrics are to win this time, these problems must get top priority.

Wrapping Up

For a time, I was the lead battery analyst in the U.S. One of the problems that we are dealing with currently is that we went decades without advancing battery technology significantly. Much of the advancement has been in the last 20 years.

Gas, however, has had near constant advancement for the entire century. The result is that battery power is massively behind, but always one or two breakthroughs from breaking out.

A big current concern is that if Tesla fails, so does its charging network. One of its biggest mistakes was making its superchargers cost centers rather than profit centers so they could be spun out or sold at some point. (It likely still could that, but the superchargers would need to be adapted to also charge non-Tesla cars, particularly if Tesla failed).

So, while electrics certainly are better than they were a century ago, so are gas cars. If gas cars get much better, electrics once again will become redundant, and given that I'm buying one, I'd rather that didn't happen. Just saying...

We think we're the first advanced earthlings -- but how do we really know?
Date:
April 16, 2018
Source:
University of Rochester
Summary:
Imagine if, many millions of years ago, dinosaurs drove cars through cities of mile-high buildings. A preposterous idea, right? In a compelling thought experiment, scientists wonder how we would truly know if there were a past civilization so advanced that it left little or no trace of its impact on the planet.

It's a compelling thought experiment, and one that Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, and Gavin Schmidt, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, take up in a paper published in the International Journal of Astrobiology.

"Gavin and I have not seen any evidence of another industrial civilization," Frank explains. But by looking at the deep past in the right way, a new set of questions about civilizations and the planet appear: What geological footprints do civilizations leave? Is it possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record once it disappears from the face of its host planet? "These questions make us think about the future and the past in a much different way, including how any planetary-scale civilization might rise and fall."

In what they deem the "Silurian Hypothesis," Frank and Schmidt define a civilization by its energy use. Human beings are just entering a new geological era that many researchers refer to as the Anthropocene, the period in which human activity strongly influences the climate and environment. In the Anthropocene, fossil fuels have become central to the geological footprint humans will leave behind on Earth. By looking at the Anthropocene's imprint, Schmidt and Frank examine what kinds of clues future scientists might detect to determine that human beings existed. In doing so, they also lay out evidence of what might be left behind if industrial civilizations like ours existed millions of years in the past.

Human beings began burning fossil fuels more than 300 years ago, marking the beginnings of industrialization. The researchers note that the emission of fossil fuels into the atmosphere has already changed the carbon cycle in a way that is recorded in carbon isotope records. Other ways human beings might leave behind a geological footprint include:

Global warming, from the release of carbon dioxide and perturbations to the nitrogen cycle from fertilizers
Agriculture, through greatly increased erosion and sedimentation rates
Plastics, synthetic pollutants, and even things such as steroids, which will be geochemically detectable for millions, and perhaps even billions, of years
Nuclear war, if it happened, which would leave behind unusual radioactive isotopes
"As an industrial civilization, we're driving changes in the isotopic abundances because we're burning carbon," Frank says. "But burning fossil fuels may actually shut us down as a civilization. What imprints would this or other kinds of industrial activity from a long dead civilization leave over tens of millions of years?"

The questions raised by Frank and Schmidt are part of a broader effort to address climate change from an astrobiological perspective, and a new way of thinking about life and civilizations across the universe. Looking at the rise and fall of civilizations in terms of their planetary impacts can also affect how researchers approach future explorations of other planets.

"We know early Mars and, perhaps, early Venus were more habitable than they are now, and conceivably we will one day drill through the geological sediments there, too," Schmidt says. "This helps us think about what we should be looking for."

Schmidt points to an irony, however: if a civilization is able to find a more sustainable way to produce energy without harming its host planet, it will leave behind less evidence that it was there.

"You want to have a nice, large-scale civilization that does wonderful things but that doesn't push the planet into domains that are dangerous for itself, the civilization," Frank says. "We need to figure out a way of producing and using energy that doesn't put us at risk."

That said, the earth will be just fine, Frank says. It's more a question of whether humans will be.

Can we create a version of civilization that doesn't push the earth into a domain that's dangerous for us as a species?

"The point is not to 'save the earth,'" says Frank. "No matter what we do to the planet, we're just creating niches for the next cycle of evolution. But, if we continue on this trajectory of using fossil fuels and ignoring the climate change it drives, we human beings may not be part of Earth's ongoing evolution."