new piston cooling tech

Researching new piston cooling technology at this time seems a bit too late since it's going to be an electric world shortly.

Electric may make inroads into commuter cars, but it will not be replacing diesel any time soon.

I'll make you a bet. Within 10 years time, electric trucks will have replaced diesels. The loser has to fork up 5 cents. :)

How will they get a 20 ton reefer load of frozen cow parts from KC to Houston then from Houston to El Paso in the same truck leaving 4 hours later with 20 reefer tons of frozen veggies then from El Paso to KC with 20 reefer tons of onions 4 hours later? It's about 1000 miles each way. What powers the reefer pumps?

Battery power might be good for around town Houston but won't get me to Dallas.

Beats the heck out of me. Natural gas?

Electric 18 wheeler, it would need a very long electric cord.

Or a trailer full of batteries. No room for the frozen cow parts. Weight limit of 80,000 lbs.

Energy density...

and ... It took Solar Impulse 2 years to fly around the world using solar energy, proving it can be done but also showing how unfeasible it is.

Looks like diesel or coal is the way to go.

I once worked at a cow slaughtering factory, (Swift company). Those cow hides are HEAVY!

Ain't you never heard of extension cords? :)

The batteries of the future will have a higher energy density, at least tha t's what every single person working on electric vehicles are assuming. The future on energy production will not involve the burning of fossil fuels. My guess it's going to be nuclear.

The problem is that people have been working on batteries for electric cars for more than a century now and while the energy density of modern lithium batteries is a lot better than that of the Edison nickel-iron cells in that

1916 Dureya Electric, the pace of improvement has been very very slow.

In 1916, the only real limitation in performance of the electric car was the battery. In 2016, sadly this is still the case.

--scott

The reason it's been slow is that there's been little incentive to develop alternate sources of energy in a world full of cheap fossil fuels. The youn ger generation understands the importance of not burning fossils fuels and this is what will drive energy production in the future. My guess is that t he technology is going to explode.

The improvement in energy density will have to be immense -- something like 50 times the best batteries of today -- in order to match gasoline. (As to mass and volume, fossil fuels "cheat" by using oxygen from the atmosphere, whereas batteries carry all their chemicals with them.)

And breakers, breakers.

:) :)

I don't believe the energy density will have to be as dense as gasoline. Yo u forgot to add the weight of an engine, transmission, fuel tank, exhaust s ystem, cooling system, and other stuff needed for a gasoline engine when ca lculating the energy density of the system. In the electric car, most of th e weight/space is going to be for batteries. I suspect that what this means is that an electric car in the future will have a much farther range than any gas/diesel vehicle that we have today.

That's probably a moot point anyway. The number one problem of the near fut ure is going to be stopping fossil fuel use. If it ain't, it will be sooner or later. Fossil use will probably be only for folks without access to ele ctricity.

On the other hand, we have seen nearly a 50 times improvement in the past century. And the growth has been surprisingly linear, I think. So I could imagine in a little more than another century we might have something as good as gasoline, and all things considered a century isn't forever.

Not necessarily, you can have zinc-air primary cells using atmospheric oxidation too.

--scott