I have the same sort of fun in my manual transmission gas car

But even the biggest trucks out there don’t have 1,000 horsepower, and they’re built to haul heavy loads uphill in bad weather.

Yea I’ve been hearing that one since 2003 with my original Prius. That battery lasted 23 years before it crapped out, and modern battery tech is waaaaay better than that thing. Also it wouldn’t have been that much money to refurbish the battery if it hadn’t been too smashed up to bother.

It is funny because electric motors have nearly unlimited* torque depending on the kind. If you have thick enough power cables and winding conductors, you can just keep pushing it harder to get more torque.

It is like the thing they are very good at, besides sound levels, double or triple the efficiency, low/no maintenance, simpler with less parts, no emissions, etc...

Literally the only good thing about combustion engines are their fuel source energy density.

I think the problem is that motorheads see the enshittification of the auto industry as a whole and just say it's because of electric motors because it happened right about the same time as EVs started coming out and try to push back on the wrong thing.

Nah, his complaint was lack of torque.

Maybe just had torque confused with horsepower? That's been the historical trade-off between gas and electric. Sure, its very easy to get an electric motor to jump into action. But it is comparatively difficult to generate the same amount of power with equivalent fuel density.

A gallon of refined gasoline packs insane energy.

Much of which is lost to heat when combusted, which is the historical hang-up.

Not that batteries don't have their own heating problems. But the benefit of batteries is that they're an engineering problem we can solve with miniaturization, which we've become incredibly good at. We're at a soft ceiling in terms of engine chemistry. Petroleum is about as refined as we're going to get it. Combustion's math is what it is. Improvements to the efficiency of modern engines have stalled out as an automotive tool, even to the point that a gas engine powering an electric capacitor in a hybrid yields performance improvements over the gas engine just spinning the wheels directly.

I would love to replace work van with an electric one, but so far it's not possible for one main reason (other than cost)...I often tow quite heavy trailers and my diesel can tow 2500kg, but every electric van I've looked at can only tow 750kg. Maybe it's something to do with that?

I mean, I guess. Power output isn't what I'm really hoping for on new battery tech. What we have is perfectly capable of 0-60 times that only thoroughbred performance street cars can meet (like Ariel Atom territory), and the top speed is plenty.

Once you're putting down 500hp, tires start to become a limiting factor. The torque that goes behind that number can stress the limit on all but the largest tires with the stickiest compounds.

Safety, range, and weight reduction of new battery tech are great, though.

Current capacity, safety and power delivery are fine for most purposes, really.

LFP batteries really solved battery fires - they can't produce their own oxygen like older NMC batteries, so they just get really hot and die instead of going off like fireworks.

Once you get past 300 miles, you're pushing the limits of the average bladder and you need to stop before the car does.

With current electric trucks, if you're doing some city driving and plug the truck in when you take a break, a truck driver will run out of hours before the truck runs out of range.

Dog is cost money?

ShutUpAndTakeMyMoney.jpg

What if we compromise on fractional thousandths of a kilodog?

I took it more as a dig at Americans honestly...

The second line is KW hours compared to HP.

And the English still use pounds for weight and stuff pretty regularly.

So pounds and KW hours for them.

Small dogs and HP for Americans.

We're gonna need more dogs.

I accept your terms.

I appreciate the sanity check, but just to throw a monkey wrench into your model...

I think the square-cube law will bite you here. I expect power/mass isn't constant. Mass grows faster than cross-sectional area which is key in muscle performance.

Horsepower was originally used to describe the work that a horse could do over the course of an hour. Specifically, the number of times an hour a horse could turn a mill wheel at a brewery. These are estimates of peak power, not sustained power, so I would say that it's accurate that horses can produce significantly more than one horsepower in short bursts.

British imperial or US customary?