- Better battery performance and lifespan.
- Improved charging time and technology.
- Distance cars can travel in a single charge.
- Increased torque and horsepower.
- Affordability and increases is mass production.
And most importantly, increases in the necessary infrastructure to support long-distance travel (exactly the topic at hand)
Did you read his link? The point the guy makes is completely correct.
Let's say tomorrow some grad student gets fusion going at a very low price. The best way to use this to power cars would be to use it to create a fuel with a high energy density. If you had 'free energy' you'd extract C02 from the atmosphere and turn it into a hydrocarbon.
"The ones that are technically trained get it right away: hydrocarbons, which we burned today have the greatest energy density possible of all fuels. Things that have carbon in them. Will people fly airplanes? Usually people say yes for the same reasons. Well, how are you going to make the airplanes fly? Battery. Batteries are pretty heavy. Oh--you can't have airplanes unless you have hydrocarbon fuels. You could in theory do it with hydrogen, but it's highly dangerous, noxious fuel. Quantum-mechanically, we know the energy content of those fuels is optimal. There will never be anything that beats them."
A massive breakthrough in energy density for batteries might be possible but it's unlikely. Huge resources have been put into improving batteries and while they have improved it's not been enough to get near the energy density of hydrocarbons.
"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them" - Albert Einstein.
Why, O why do we think that problems have to, must be and will be solved at the same level and direction of thought the problems were framed in? Besides the whole point of a disruptive technology is that the solutions generally come as a bolt from the blue, completely surprising even the biggest experts in those areas. Directions from which those solutions come from are so radically different paths than originally they would come from. And this has not happened once, twice but many times.
Over confidence in science especially with regards to the negative aspects is not a good direction to begin with.
Bernoulli's principle is indeed how airplanes fly. Your link shoots down the silly equal-time theory, not Bernoulli's principle.
Basically, airplanes fly for three reasons:
1. The wing deflects air downwards.
2. Air moves faster over the top of the wing than over the bottom. Much faster than the equal-transit theory indicates.
3. Air pressure is higher on the bottom of the wing than on the top.
The important thing that few people seem to grasp is that all three are equivalent statements. They aren't additive. There aren't three different reasons airplanes fly, there's one reason airplanes fly, with three different ways to look at it.
This interesting. You say there is one reason airplanes fly. But "deflecting air downwards" is causing an lifting force by action=reaction (the way a rocket works) and "air pressure is higher on bottom of the wing than on the top" is causing a lifting force by pressure differences.
Those are different reasons, or am I mistaken here?
Nope, they're completely inseparable. If you deflect air downwards, no matter how you do it, you must end up creating a pressure differential where air pressure is higher on the bottom than on the top. If you create such a pressure differential, then no matter how you do it, you'll end up deflecting air downwards.
Pressure is just a fancy way of saying force per area. The air pressure on the bottom of the wing is just the downward force exerted by the wing on the air, divided by the wing's area. The only way to deflect air is by applying a force to it, and the only thing applying a force to it is the wing.
> Well, how are you going to make the airplanes fly? Battery. Batteries are pretty heavy.
You could get a huge win by offloading the power to ground stations and beaming it aboard. You'd still need some onboard power reserve for reliability and backup reasons, but you could offload most of it. This would let you lighten your airframe, which has a snowball effect, allowing even more lightening and more efficiency. Get the craft light enough, and VTOL becomes a possibility, meaning you could land these things on heliports downtown and not have a 1 hour trip to the airport.
Just think of it as "high speed rail" with lower infrastructure costs and fewer right-of-way problems.
Well mechanical engines were there from a couple of centuries in fact. The steam engine was invented a ton lot of years before fuel driven cars caught on.
