Comment by tclancy

wtf are you talking about? I drive one of these cars every day (that I need to drive, which isn’t that often really) without leaded gasoline.

It’s the punchy little m10 motor, 4 speed transmission, and incredibly low curb weight that make these cars fun to drive. You lose all that with an electric conversion.

As an aside, the most powerful F1 engine ever put on the track was made by modifying the little 4-banger m10 found in the BMW 2002. Fun fact.

I guess there's always the risk for a rig failure.

I looked a bit on doing the same, but came to the conclusion that it will be expensive to fulfil racing rules requiring the boat to be able to maintain speed for 5 hours ie around 25-30 NM range.

As it is now, I have about 500 NM diesel range on my boat, which is basically 3-4 days continuous runtime. Cutting it down to 25nm and 5 hours requires minimally 100kWh.

For a blue water boat, 500 NM is not quite acceptable, but can be fixed with jerrycans for a couple of dollars. An all electric blue water boat would clock in at an unrealistic 2MWh of batteries with a weight at least 20 metric tonnes. 10x the load capacity of my boat.

This is silly, but I've also wondered if you could make a boat that can anchor and recharge batteries from ambient current, sort of like stationary regenerative braking. I'm sure it would take way too long to be worth it, but it was a fun idle thought.

Uh, car batteries are much heavier than most ICE’s. The curb weight on teslas’s are crazy high.

BYD can be lighter because they skip on safety gear and proper structural elements - in my experience.

Series hybrids can compete with parallel hybrids, because the full decoupling of the engine from the wheels claws back some of the efficiency you lose through the energy conversion. It's series-parallel hybrids they can't really compete with, because those are able to do the same trick, but they also lose less energy in conversion, because the engine does some of the heavy lifting.

Series hybrids are great for packaging, though. Parallel and series-parallel commit to certain packaging decisions like having a transmission, or a long, monolithic unit, because it's the mechanical coupling that buys them smaller motors and potentially better efficiency. Series hybrids don't care about any of that, so even though you have bigger motors and potentially higher losses, you have more freedom over where things go.

Personally, I think there's a massive untapped market in converting old cars to hybrid engines. You wouldn't try to upgrade the old engine, you'd design a smaller and more power dense package and rip all of the original gear out. Because electrification lets you cut the size of the engine down so aggressively, this is probably a feasible strategy. As you pointed out, series hybrids are probably best suited to this because of their packaging flexibility. As others have pointed out, there's tremendous potential there for replicating original driving characteristics using software and the electric motor. And if we're being honest, off-road vehicles probably should get rid of the transmission and low range, because electric motor torque is just better. As is, the potential for cars is enormous, but we're getting the worst possible outcomes thanks to legislation.

Not true. The CdA (coefficient of drag multiplied by frontal area) matters far more for range than the weight for range. That is a smaller EV, which may very well be heavier can have a higher range and efficiency.

Electric engines are already very efficient (particularly compared to internal combustion). If you go from 90% to 95% efficiency, you don't save much in terms of battery.

ETA: Internal combustion engines half a century ago had an efficiency of 20%, now they're at 40%. That cuts the fuel you need to carry in half. Electric engines are near 100%, and as I said, going from 90% to 95% efficiency cuts required battery by a bit more than 5%, so peanuts.

In the video the yasa guy said most of the weight loss is from getting rid of the yoke.