Are car engines more efficient because they breathe air?

So I was wondering how come we still put gasoline/diesel engines in modern cars, when we have perfected electric engines? It seemed like a conspiracy to keep oil flowing.

Then I realized that the internal combustion engines are more efficient because they "steal" half of the fuel from the air. The fuel tank only contains half of the fuel you're using, and you don't pay for the oxygen! Jet fighter engines do the same trick.

Will we be stuck with gasoline engines for a hundred more years, the old tech that ain't broke so we're not fixing it?

Other urls found in this thread:

greentechmedia.com/articles/read/look-america-is-only-39-efficient
fueleconomy.gov/feg/powerSearch.jsp
energyresourcefulness.org/Fuels/ethanol_fuels/flex_fueled_vehicles_around_the_world.html
boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=2764787&postcount=7
nrel.gov/hydrogen/production_cost_analysis.html
abc.net.au/news/2017-05-11/hydrogen-breakthrough-could-fuel-renewable-energy-export-boom/8518916
cryodiffusion.com/products-and-services/cryogenic-cylinder-for-lng/cryogenic-cylinder-for-lng-for-taxis-buses-and-trucks/
eurekalert.org/features/doe/2001-10/dnl-agr060302.php
waste-management-world.com/a/1-the-lithium-battery-recycling-challenge
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_station_failures
nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html
who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/
yournewswire.com/reporters-10-years-jail-fukushima/
tepco.co.jp/nu/fukushima-np/f1/smp/2015/images/drainage_150304-j.pdf
tepco.co.jp/news/2014/1241559_5918.html
twitter.com/makomelo/status/474538144943980546
fukushima-diary.com/2015/01/dosimeter-fukushima-citizen-counts-40-lower-actual-maker-admits/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_dose_(radiation)
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

I guess when the atmosphere runs out of oxygen, we'll switch to electric, sure.

SMDH TBH FAM, go back to high school chemistry class. Air allows for combustion to occur but the fuel is what provides energy. The main issue is energy storage. You carry around more energy potential in your fuel tank than all those battery banks, and you can replenish your energy store in something like 2 minutes.

You do not want gasoline or diesel engines to disappear. They are comparatively very low tech, in a shtf situation you can rip out most of the gay electronics and still get it to run.

how come the only ones that work are on trains?

This 100%.

A perfectly tuned gasoline engine will always run at a ratio of about 13 units of air to one unit of gasoline not because the air contains any energy, but because a combustion engine basically starts a fire in each cylinder, and fire requires oxygen to burn. Any less air and the engine can't burn all the fuel it is given, but any more air and the efficiency of the engine decreases because the extra air wastes space in the cylinder.

Electric cars have been around since 1898 but never took off until 100 years later because the range was too short, they took too long to refuel, and the batteries were heavy as fuck. Most modern electric cars still have short ranges, charge times measured in hours or days, and batteries that are heavier and more expensive to manufacture than a big block V8. Although electric vehicles have improved over the years, these problems haven't been solved in the last 120 years, and aren't going to be any time soon.

t. /o/

Modern ICE are approximately 30% efficient at converting chemical energy into motion. Modern car electric motors are about 90% efficient at converting chemical energy in a battery into motion.

The explanation in gives us the context of why the motor industry has overwhelmingly produced ICE over electric motors to move cars.

...

We put gasoline/diesel engines in our cars because they are better.
Yeah, electric might have a fugton of low-rpm torque, but electric engines can't rev for shit and will never be truck engines. If electric engine has too much load on it, which it can not spin the wheels for, it will fucking ignite.
Gasoline engines are way better for both your and tree health. Making a electrical car needs 2 metric fucktons of chemicals, which will have to be recycled in 5 years, because they age badly. While regular car needs steel, some fully recyclable plastics, and some evaporating or not-dangerous chemicals.
Good luck trying to make a decent offroader or enthusiast car with electric engine. Not nearly enough user-servicable. If gasoline/diesel engine fails completely (blown piston head, worn rings, fractured carter etc), it can be fixed either by replacing the part or with some welding. If electric engine fails completely, that means your car deserves a dumpster.
Just... fuck you. As long as your electric car gets charge from burned coal, your arguments are not nearly valid. My car uses 8-12 liters of gasoline on 100km, burns them completely, and can go 600 kilometres on a full tank. If i used a diesel, it would be even less.
There are no actual benefits from electric cars outside of some special places on earth like big cities and hippie-towns.
Also if an electric car runs out of change in middle of nowhere, nobody will be able to give you any fuel.

NOw that we are talking about cars, I would like to know the advantages/disadvantages of gasoil and diesel. Which one is better? Anything to know about them?

Batteries.

They don't need batteries.

The only electric car that I can see working is when someone will put the work of tesla into cars.
Radio transmitted energy.
No need for battery.
But you need pylons scattered a bit everywhere.
Plus we don't know yet the effects of such technology on human health.

You fags realize you need to generate electricity somehow like burning stuff or producing faggy windmills before it can enter your faggy electric car batteries?

given the amount, this will be dangerous af

because what if that energy accidentally enters a living human body instead of a car? or fries some other unintended tech part?
Even if this is solved somehow, good luck proving it to normies.

Diesel more thermodynamically efficient at steady state operation. Gasoline MUCH more thermodynamically/chemically efficient in transient conditions (such as acceleration)
This disparity has been somewhat reduced thanks to modern turbos/engine controls but it is still generally true. If you've ever seen a firetruck spew black smoke when they are going full throttle from a stop this is why. The combustion efficiency goes to shit and the air/fuel ratio goes all out of wack.

The combustion characteristics of diesel and the mechanical characteristics (bore/stroke and rod/stroke ratios, high compression ratios, low speed turbos) of diesel engines make for a massive torque output at low rpm off-idle, hence they make small diesel engines feel more powerful than they are (less frustrating to drive a small car in stop and go traffic) and provide a YUUUGE advantage for big behemoths like buses and trucks. A nice side-effect of diesel engine construction is that in making it tough enough to survive the diesel cycle and the rigors of driving, they tend to last forever

Not my specialty but that's the gist of it.
t. mechanical engineer.

Electric cars are an environmental disaster with all the heavy metals. Libcucks never talk about it or care but this is a very big issue.

Combustion engines have their own share of problems. CO2 is fucking irrelevant. What the CIAniggers in the controlled media don't tell you is that more CO2 = more plant growth, so homeostasis will be reached after a short time. What is more worrisome are the oxides of nitrogen and sulphur. Highly toxic, and difficult to control. Perfect combustion emits CO2 and water vapor, but you're burning some oil as well, and depending on the engine condition (rpm, accel, jerk, temperature) you have these toxic byproducts formed. Emissions controls do a decent job but are far from perfect.

There is an environmental cost to everything we do but there are many ways to mitigate impacts no one gives a fuck about. Stop forcing people to commute into a fucking office setting - millions of gallons of fuel saved. Stop being fags about business hours (why the fuck does someone who works on the east coast need to be on the road during east coast peak hours when the rest of the team is in colorado? Offset by two hours, avoid all the traffic and pollution). Stop being gay about light rail. Stop being gay about infrastructure (one busy intersection worth of stop signs produces about the same amount of pollution in a year as a small country's non-commercial air travel).

And of course, stop incentivizing niggers, poos and chinks by giving away technology and trying to 'develop' the third world.

That's why I said

Normies still think that cellphone technologies is safe.
With enough memetics and marketing you can make anyone believe in anything.


The whole problems is, has always, is how do we produce energy and stock it.
But the central problem is the quantity of human population.
Less humans = less resources needed.
Either the world is going fullclusterfuck or eugenics are going to come back.

Faggy electric car batteries mined by African children then refined in a process which does more damage to the atmosphere then burning 10000 litres of petroleum.

run.
Not In a prius. They need the electric motor to start first it won't run entirely on gasoline

It's called radiation and the effects are known and are very dangerous. Cancer and shit

My last car was a V6. My new one is a V4 that puts out just as much power and is much more fun to drive. It's not about how much oil you use, it's about how you use it.

electric car is more efficient. car engine is much less efficient than the fucking powerplants that make the electricity that charges most electric cars.

electric hasn't replaced combustion because

if you're thinking use supercaps to replace batteries, they have high power density but low energy density.

battery tech has been improving though which is why there's been a greater push in electric vehicles the past 10 years.


you sound like an oil driller gtfo fucking disgusting

I'll gtfo in my sweet new car fag

What's up with this shitposting thread?

lol, no.
Certainly you do have a bigger carbon footprint in the production of electric cars, and of course thanks to the dirty grid you have a small, additional carbon footprint, but compared to petrol it's about even, maybe slightly less worse.
Then you have to take into cancerous nanoparticles from non-regenerative brakes in petrol cars, and various other shit coming out of the tailpipe besides CO2.

Basically, combustion is cheaper upfront.

i bet it's a caddilac with the stolen rims and tinted windows and shitty paint job and no muffler and got a fucking boot stupid niggerfucker. fucking them niggercattle right?

Lithium and lead acid byproducts not CO2 that's just a meme

Where have you ever seen a cadilac with a v4 engine faggot?

niggers

Someone's jelly. Sorry you drive a 1988 supra bro

Sad.

i aint jelly of a nigger fucking oil driller. white race master race, go fuck your nigger cattle.

i'm gonna go drive around the block just 4u

Are you overweight? I'm sorry. Good thing is, you've got a lot of options.

bitch i'm swole as fuck getting ready for the upcoming jewish racewar

"Swole" doesn't include blubber, big goy

No but the production process is more CO2 intensive than regular petrol cars.
But, then you also have to take into account that once batteries are effectively at the end of their lifespan in an electric vehicle, they make great grid storage batteries. Then, after that, they still can be recycled for the heavy metals.
You can see this in Elon 'DUDE WEED ON MARS LMAO' Musk's business plan right now. He wants to sell grid storage, and there's a partnership to recycle their batteries once they're basically useless for everything else.

come at me bro i do 360 no scopes from 2000 yards irl, also 30 years of judo you gonna get wrecked i'll h@|< your shitty server and fuck your gf just for laughs.
not fucking your gf i don't fuck niggers

Are you pretending to be retarded? Look up "heat engine" and "Carnot theorem". An internal combustion piston engine made of non-exotic materials has an efficiency limit of about 37%. We're pretty close to that number.


So electric trains and ships don't exist. The Tesla S has something like 900 ft lbs of torque at 0 rpm, and the falloff is linear with speed since it's just an induction motor. If you hooked it to a building, either the building is falling over, or you're roasting the tires. If you welded the axle to the ground, the firmware would back off current when it was clear that nothing's moving and the motor temp is rapidly rising.

Yes, atmospheric oxygen does increase the energy density of gasoline, compared to fuels that can be burned using their own oxygen. This is also why "air-breathing" aircraft such as jets require less fuel than a rocket, as the rocket must carry its own oxygen supply, so a focus of current spacecraft research is on "hybrid" engines that can switch from atmospheric jet turbine operation to vacuum-sealed rocket motor operation, and even liquify atmospheric oxygen to "fill up" for spaceflight during atmospheric flight.

There are, however, numerous types of electric battery that also use atmospheric oxygen to similar advantage, ranging from continuous flow batteries such as hydrogen fuel cells, to more conventional "primary batteries" such as zing-air, both of which require ventilation to obtain atmospheric oxygen.


Also, the typical automobile is poorly maintained, and as such is only 20% efficient, many being even less efficient:
greentechmedia.com/articles/read/look-america-is-only-39-efficient

Note that other fuels, such as alcohol, natural gas, and hydrogen (as well as diesel, to a lesser extent) burn much more efficiently in conventional engines than gasoline, typically in the 60%-80% range. Electric batteries are of course vastly more efficient, nearing 100% efficiency in the best designs.

Cuckchan-tier

Yeah, shit like ocean acidification are all jewish lies :^)

Looks like OP isn't the one who needs to go back to highschool chemistry.

not an argument

not an argument

Thank you for giving us a thread that isn't about computing, though I question whether or not this is trolling due to the quote below.


In short, the amount of energy contained in a tank of gas is orders of magnitude higher than that which is contained in a battery of the same volume/mass. Batteries also take much longer to charge. Hydrogen fuel cells are about as close as we can get to the energy density of gasoline without burning things. Unfortunately, they require platinum as a catalyst, something that is ridiculously expensive. Perhaps if we had asteroid mining we could lower the price and prevent ourselves from destroying our only planet, but that's still decades if not a century away.

This millennium pisses me off. We were promised flying cars and got twitter instead.

Lithium Air batteries, motherfucker. Have you heard of them?

There are a lot of provisos to keep in mind, though. As has already been mentioned, gasoline engines (not to mention all the other moving parts in a typical vehicle's drivetrain) are extremely inefficient compared to an electric car's. Electric power is much easier to transmit and more widely available. Many incidental processes in a car (braking, commonly, but others in theory as well) can harnessed to supplement battery power. Any type of battery chemistry (NiMH, Li-ion, VLA, etc.) can be implemented as a fuel cell, eliminating nearly all of its weight penalty. Some designs of non-rechargable alkaline batteries can also be "refilled" with fresh metal paste from an efficient recycling process. Onboard batteries can be quick-swapped, or supplemented with auxiliary batteries for unusually long drives.

No

1.) Internal Combustion Engines REQUIRE Oxygen to actually burn. Gasoline must be mixed with oxygen. HOWEVER, oxygen itself does not make an engine any more or less efficient.

2.) Internal Combustion Engines require a fuel source to mix directly with the oxygen. HOWEVER, more gas alone doesn't necessarily mean efficiency either

Too much gas and not enough oxygen is wasteful and you'll end up with an "unclean burn" leaving behind unburnt fuel inside the cylinder. This can actually reduce the life of the engine resulting in misfiring of the cylinder

Conversely;

Too much oxygen is also inefficient because it results in the fuel being burned too quickly.

How do we balance the air/fuel mixture?
Well, in the old days you got oxygen directly from the cars grill/intake, it would then go through something called a "venturi tube" pulling gas in via a vacuum pressure into the cylinder head. Today's cars are actually electronic. A modern car has at least one or more computers managing the engine. This can be an Engine Control Unit (ECU) Transmission Control Module (TCM) or in more recent cars both components are now part of the single Powertrain Control Module (PCM).

The cars Engine Computer uses several sensors located in the engine for temperature, ambient pressure, and oxygen levels, and uses this information to electronically inject the right amount of fuel/air mixture into the cylinders via a spray/pump assembly called the "Fuel Injectors"

Do you actually have brain damage?
There are many ways to measure efficiency and different fuel sources have different levels of efficiency depending on the application. In addition, fuel efficiency does not scale properly with required workloads. Alcohol burns far too quickly by itself to perform any useful mechanical work outside of very small workloads for example. And diesel is really only efficient for larger engines that are designed to produce high torque at lower RPM for a good reason. It would be extremely foolish to make a claim as bold as saying electric cars are "100 percent efficient" because they're still subject to their own drive train losses that rise exponentially with applied workload on components like the induction motors.

You seem awfully attached to these LAB, did you invest your savings into some stock?

Alcohol has long been used for vehicle fuel, and can easily be stored in properly designed tanks, you'd probably recognize it most easily as "E100", where it produces far greater combustion efficiency in a vehicle designed for it than gasoline, and is commonly used in vehicles large and small, clear to trucks. As for diesel, it too is far more efficient than gasoline, and even in small passenger cars, produces superior efficiency under the EPA's "city" MPG regime compared to equivalent gasoline models. None of this is particularly obscure information, as a quick spin through the EPA's database comparing fuel types of the same vehicles illustrates:
fueleconomy.gov/feg/powerSearch.jsp

Of course, gasoline is far more dominant in the USA than in many other countries, especially outside fleet vehicles, but this far from indicates any inherent technical superiority. For instance, South America and Southeast Asia use large amounts of natural gas vehicles, Brazil almost entirely uses alcohol, and Europeans commonly use diesel for all classes of vehicles.

As for my comment about electric efficiency, I was clearly referring to the batteries themselves, which waste less than 1% during discharge except in extraordinarily poor thermal conditions. As for the rest of an electric drivetrain, particularly the motor, it is of course less efficient (75%-95%, depending on design, over most of its load curve), but still far more efficient than any type of engine.

nah, they'll only induce into a tuned coil with an identical or similar resonant frequency, it forms a band-pass filter like pic related, the chance of current being induced into your body is non-existent. Anyone who has operated a tesla coil, even the very high frequency miniature ones, will agree.


what if gravity suddenly turns off and your wheels become useless? haha got you wheelfag!!
shielding
if the kikes convinced them 6 quintillion were gassed in chambers with wooden doors, I bet you can convince them gamma rays are healthy for your bones


you're a fucking retard, microwaves can't cause MUH CANCER, and the energy emitted by your phone is not enough to even raise the temperature of any part of your body by 0.000001%, it literally does nothing


neck yourself, fucking retarded nigger

Not to impinge on this terribly interesting discussion of a technology barely capable of double-digit percent efficiency over ranges of a few inches, but I've got a crazy idea.

What if, try and stay with me here, we used some sort of vehicle capable of receiving energy over wires?

That's great if the entire planet is covered in railroad tracks. For everything else, you kind of need something that can move independently.

Stand outside next to a burning pile of chemicals. Doors are only necessary to keep people near the source of the gas.

They are same in the fact that they are all radiowaves

Electromagnetic and particle radiation are different as well as different aplitudes/frequencies of EMR. Saying that gamma and meter waves are the same thing is like saying a BB and and a .50BMG are the same.

Same in the fact that they are both ammunition types

A bicycle?

The overwhelming majority of normalfags are remarkably sedentary creatures of habit, and worse, generally urbanites concentrated into a handful of population centers:

They also tend to do little everyday travel for more mundane reasons, with typical commutes for tasks such as work, shopping, or even recreation averaging 10 miles or less.

As a result, the overwhelming majority of people are too boring to have any use for a car most or all of the time.

E100 (or 100% Ethanol) was used more rarely then you think. In countries with vehicles equipped for ethanol the highest was more commonly E85 at most. And its not as efficient as you think. Gasoline is far more efficient than ethanol, the Brazilian government just hyped it to save taxpayers money on petrol subsidies. I am not saying its impossible, but you're making it sound like pure ethanol is some fucking miracle fuel.

Wires will obviously beat wireless in every single usecase, however you can't stretch wires everywhere, but you can stretch wireless everywhere, that's quite literally wireless's SINGLE advantage over the wired master race


What does a """burning pile of chemicals""" have to do with gas chambers, schlomo? You know Zyklon B gas was explosive, right? It would've leaked through doors onto the SS soldiers outside and gassed them as well or blew up the entire camp
not to mention zyklon b was a pesticide and couldn't reach a high enough concentration to actually poison humans


You're just baiting but I'll swallow. The great big difference gamma rays, XRays, hard UV have with radio and microwaves is that the former is small enough to penetrate your cells and hit your DNA, causing it to break apart and causing mutations, which are usually auto-corrected by the cells, but when a light particle strikes in JUST THE RIGHT PLACE and is not auto-corrected, that's what you call cancer. Radiowaves and microwaves etc are so large they can't do that, literally meters large all the way down to the centimeters and so on.
They're not "all bullets" as one cannot even penetrate chicken wire and the other, in its most extreme form, can penetrate through maybe meters of lead.
It's not like comparing a BB gun to a 50 BMG, it's like saying a soft spitball is capable of doing the same damage as a pic related

Real world efficiency of a Combined cycle gas turbine for power is 51%, add in your transmission losses and conversion losses to and from batteries and you'd be lucky to get but a few percentage points more than an internal combustion engine.

Given that your power is probably coming from an aging brown coal burning plant you're less efficient than internal combustion and are making more CO2, plus far more embodies energy. The only think electric has going for it is energy security, so you don't have to buy Saudi oil.


If only we weren't deforesting at a rate of knots.


This is a solved problem, an old technology known as the overhead wire.

You're not a radio ham.

Alcohol is unquestionably a more energetically efficient fuel for appropriate engines than gasoline, due to inherent characteristics such as octane rating:
energyresourcefulness.org/Fuels/ethanol_fuels/flex_fueled_vehicles_around_the_world.html

My point isn't that alcohol is so great (in fact, fermented bio-ethanol in particular is a blatant Ponzi scheme if the whole production-use cycle is included), but that gasoline (and ICE drivetrains in general) are almost exactly the worst of all available options, mechanically speaking.


One of the primary benefits of stationary generation, aside from its greater efficiency for generating power, is that it can be colocated with other applications for the "waste energy" that it produces. Heating, cooling, steam, even mechanical rotation or fluid/gas pumping. As a result, with good zoning and infrastructure, practical efficiencies nearing 100% can be approached.

One other interesting aspect of electric vehicles (and other conservation technologies like geothermal building HVAC) is that they act as electrical "grid storage", doing so more efficiently than dominant pumped hydro reservoirs. This flattens out grid demand, both allowing conventional power stations to operate at peak efficiency, and reducing the amount of dedicated grid storage needed for transient sources like solar or wind.

This goes moreso for gasoline, too. Extracting and refining oil into gasoline (even before using it to power inefficient motor vehicles) hasn't had positive "emergy" from practically any oilfield on earth for decades, instead operating as a lossy means of storing energy from typical positive-emergy sources such as coal, natural gas, and hydro.

...

A higher octane rating is not always a good thing. It means the fuel will burn faster but have a higher activation energy. It would be more efficient if the engine was running at a high-RPM constantly, like an Ethanol-turbine engine, which in fact do exist. But cars, in case you hadn't realized, are not redlining most of the fucking time.

Please just stop, you're embarrassing yourself.

2/10 got me to reply

Looks like someone hasn't heard of the Mazda RX-8. :^)

I've repeatedly emphasized that all of these different fuels require somewhat or entirely different engine designs for optimal efficiency when burned in an engine. Leaving aside non-piston-based designs such as turbines (which, even for gasoline, are more efficient in most use cases), the best piston design for alcohol is actually more like a Diesel cycle than Otto cycle.


Wanker

10/10 kys

1/10, funny, got me to reply, too straightforward sound sincerely dumb.

Physicist here:
One thing that haven't been mentioned in this thread is cars which would use hydrogen as fuel.

How does it work:
- make electricity with your favorite environment friendly method
- transfer electricity through wires
- take water and make hydrogen with electrolysis
- run your car with burning hydrogen instead of gasoline, and produces clean water as a result
Nice huh? Not to mention hydrogen containers today can be much safer than gas tanks in an accident.

So why don't we use them yet? What is the deal? Probably just the fact that the produced clean water vapor has 13x more greenhouse effect than the same amount of CO2.

nvm I'm retarded and can't form a coherent sentence.
Sorry for being retarded anons, I'll kill myself now. Ignore any imposters pretending I'm not a stupid faggot.

Highschool dropout here:

Hydrogen production is an energy loss process, and the transport of hydrogen is too expensive to make it viable right this moment.

Exhaust from gasoline vehicles already produces large amounts of water vapor. Due to the higher efficiency of hydrogen as a fuel, hydrogen produces less water vapor than fossil fuels:
boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=2764787&postcount=7

Also, burning hydrogen in an engine is much less efficient than reversing the electrolytic process in a fuel cell to power electric motors, so the only reason to burn hydrogen in the future will be as a means of using electricity to fuel jet engines.

Just like gasoline production, except less so well-to-wheel.

Except gasoline doesnt have to be put under pressure/stored at stored at -253°C/mixed with other chemicals just to be transported

Nobody cares about greenhouse gas effect of water. The atmosphere is more or less already saturated with the stuff due to, y'know, all that water lying around in the oceans. The problems with hydrogen are all related to zero infrastructure and poor energy density, with an honorable mention of hydrogen being difficult to store.

...

Who are you trying to quote? That post said nothing of the sort.

Full-cycle figures already include the compression/liquifaction penalty, and still beat gasoline in price. This lead will only grow as fossil fuel prices continue rising:
nrel.gov/hydrogen/production_cost_analysis.html

This penalty can be mostly eliminated using a turboexpander-generator, though I'm not aware of anyone using them on vehicle fuel tanks as of yet.

It is difficult to contain pure hydrogen using the technology we have at the moment. Hydrogen acts by binding itself into hydrogen shaped holes that exist in the container. When it can't bind itself to the container, it will simply escape the container meaning we lose our fuel relatively quickly even when we don't use it. The hydrogen fuel cells have this moment have this problem.

The most effective kind of container for pure hydrogen is thick lead containers. These kinds of containers are less than ideal for use in a road automobile.

Perhaps there will be some kind of engineering breakthrough in the future regarding hydrogen storage but for the moment, it is less practical to replace conventional combustion engines with our current state of hydrogen fuel cell systems.

I'm so glad they had an infrared camera available so they could confirm thermodynamics. Also,
For all we know, the difference between pink and purple could be 1/100 F.

Simple steel or aluminum tanks can hold pressurized hydrogen with negligible losses for months. Liquid hydrogen tanks, especially small ones as in vehicles, are thermally insulated, reducing boiloff to ~1% per day, while stationary tanks are as low as .3% per day.

Australians came up with a new technology that makes transporting helium viable (supposedly). Something about moving it as ammonia.


Right, because liquid hydrogen tanks holding hundreds of tons of helium being transported across continents requiring thermal insulation is SO cost effective.

Go be stupid elsewhere.

abc.net.au/news/2017-05-11/hydrogen-breakthrough-could-fuel-renewable-energy-export-boom/8518916

Leaving all that aside, you realize cryogenic liquefied gas tankers have been ubiquitous for decades, right?

diesel-electric master race coming through

reminder that anti-train is anti-white

So what's the cost of keeping an active cryogenic liquified hydrogen tank on a five seat car?

gtho nigga, gas-burning Turbo Three or get the fuck out.

FFS Holla Forums, stop inserting my tripcode when I don't want it.

kill yourself tripfag

There aren't any such commercial vehicles I'm aware of, but for the very similar LNG, about the size of a small trunk for 20 gallons:
cryodiffusion.com/products-and-services/cryogenic-cylinder-for-lng/cryogenic-cylinder-for-lng-for-taxis-buses-and-trucks/

is its eco friendliness
electricity != hydrogen != cars

It looks like you're trying to say we should generate electricity (not eco friendly in the scale required atm), transport it over grid, then produce hydrogens, an energy minus process.

Maybe not now, but there's a couple things to keep in mind. First, the eventual goal is of course to switch all energy generation away from unsustainable sources, and hydrogen is the only way to use that energy in many applications. Second, hydrogen is an excellent transitional fuel, both because devices that consume it (engine or fuel cell) can trivially be compatible with most fossil fuels, and because those fuels are easily converted into hydrogen.

There is also the peripheral point that emphasizing distributed electrical storage such as hydrogen in as many application as possible means free grid storage, which makes the generally intermittent nature of sustainable power sources better for grid baseload.

...

There's no reason why we can't proudce hydrogen with nuclear power plants. There's no problem if we lose overall energy given that nuclear energy is exceedingly abundant.

>c: hope tokamakinertially confined fusion happens
Nah

It's trivial to recycle spent plant plutonium to become usable plant plutonium. This process of recycling plutonium can be repeated a number of times. At our current levels of plutonium, there's no reason why it can't be continually recycled and usable into the 22nd century.

...

That's my point, the only viable avenue for nuclear is plutonium breeders. And they're rife with unique problems, like proliferation-prone fuel, the fact that breeders are still (decades later) experimental for power generation, their resulting hilariously bad operational reliability compared to conventional reactors, and that one of a breeder's potential accidental failure modes (also doable through sabotage) is to detonate like an atomic bomb.

BURNING hydrogen is clean. OBTAINING it filthy as all hell.

The process of making hydrogen cheaply is the dirty little secret of the fossil fuel industry. Almost no hydrogen is made with electrolysis, because it costs a goddamn fortune in electricity, and the laws of thermodynamics means that you're taking big efficiency losses at every stage. It'd be more efficient just to pipe that electricity straight into batteries or gravity storage via the electrical grid.

Almost all molecular hydrogen (H2) is actually made using with methane (CH4) and water (H2O) using a process called methane steam reforming. Super-hot steam cracks the methane's carbon and hydrogen apart, and the hydrogen is captured.

But here's the fun part: all those C's and O's don't just vanish. They like to get together and have a little party. The result? Staggering amounts of CO2.

I trust you see the problem here.

you funny guy

lmao, that's bullshit. SFR's have a negative thermal coefficient of reactivity when you shut off the cooling pumps. It's not going to fucking explode, it just shuts itself down.

Assuming all energy generation is nuclear, without breeders.


PDF related:

How would that work, doesn't a hydrogen fuel cell do H2 + O = H2O + Electricity? How does that deal with, say, gasoline?
Also, how would gasoline be converted to hydrogen? Plant->Electricity->Hydrogen?

There are many types of fuel cell other than hydrogen+oxygen (encompassing nearly all battery chemistries, and most fuels), but probably the best transitional approach would be using a compact onboard reformer in concert with a hydrogen fuel cell, sometimes called an indirect or reformed fuel cell, which produces total system efficiency roughly equivalent to an ICE for fuels other than hydrogen. While the most popular target for this is methanol, due to its easy handling and inexpensiveness, such reformers have been made for pretty much any hydrocarbon. Gasoline other aromatic fuels do require a few extra components, similar to a reversed catalytic converter:
eurekalert.org/features/doe/2001-10/dnl-agr060302.php

gasoline AND other aromatic fuels

Liquid fuel is the best energy storage medium for cars.
Batteries are expensive, volatile, have a short lifespan and the chemicals used in them are very unfriendly to the environment.

Thats why we have cars like the Prius which use a petrol engine to generate electricity for the electric motor.

Why did I keep saying helium?

Yes.

Depends on where you live. Where I live, our electricity is from hydroelectric, wind, and nuclear. Even if you factor in the whole process from mining ores to make the equipment and damage from damming rivers, it's still all cleaner than fossil fuels.

Besides, centralized power is more fuel efficient and easier to contain emissions. Modern natural gas turbines feeding a power grid that chargea batteries is cleaner than gasoline.

That is changing really fast. Solar and wind is getting cheaper every year, at an accelerating pace.

True. Methane fuel cella are actually one of the few "not batshit insane" possibilities for vehicles, especially if the methane is synthesized in an energy-efficient way from atmospheric CO2. It'd be carbon-neutral.

Hydrogen, in addition to the poor energy efficiency, is rock fucking stupid as a long term storage mechanism. It leaks out of everything. Molecular H2, the form used in fuel cells and rockets, is the smallest molecule in the universe. There's a reason that H2-burning rockets are fueled just before launch, right on the launch pad. Even space agencies dealing it. That's why RP-1 fuel (basically kerosene) is uaed wherever possible.

Pumped hydro is absolutely cheaper. All you need is a hill, excavators and concrete, antifeeeze, and water pumps and pipelines. Hydrogen needs super-expensive cryogenic storage. You can't just pump it into a big metal tank.

Oh and
to rebut arguments doesn't make you look smart. It makes you look lazy.

How about easier+safer(less that can go wrong) transport? And it was used for fucking Zeppelins several decades ago, it can't be that bad.

There are ways to store hydrogen as chemical compounds that are very hydrogen dense and dont leak.
But they are incredibly volatile at the moment.

Ammonia would even work.

Just like hydrogen

Yeah, even if burning natural gas in-engine is more efficient than charging batteries, the increased electrical demand from electric vehicles will force the issue of building more capacity and increasing conservation with modern technology. Such economies of scale for new technology will in turn accelerate decommissioning our current fleet of (far beyond intended operating lifespan) power generators.

IMHO, the best system for smaller stuff like automobiles and computers in the future would be to simply use an existing battery chemistry in fuel cell form, which would have similar performance, but be much cheaper and lighter, because the electrolyte is stored in a cheap tank, and the cell stack is barely big enough to keep a supercap or whatever topped off. Probably lithium-air fuel cells.

Hydrogen is probably best suited to grid storage, aircraft (due to its lightness), and ships (to supplement turbosails).

And? Steel or aluminum canisters hold it at pressure with negligible losses.

Hydrogen can be liquified anywhere in tanks with boiloff comparable to reservoir evaporation, or (similarly to CAES) compressed in subterranean sites, all at similar round-trip efficiencies to pumped hydro. That kind of flexibility is worth a lot of money, even compared to more efficient systems like molten salt.

Where are you getting all this lithium from for your gigantic volatile batteries?

I presume you're referring to the environmental impact of lithium production, rather than the preposterous "peak lithium" scenario. In spite of the name, most of the mass and expense in lithium batteries is actually other metals like cobalt and nickel, lithium accounting for around 3%, and the overwhelming majority of current lithium consumption is for applications other than batteries. Either way, batteries are highly recyclable, the main reason they aren't recycled simply being that they are even cheaper to make from scratch, which can be solved by imposing "closed-loop recycling" mandates on manufacturers.
waste-management-world.com/a/1-the-lithium-battery-recycling-challenge

My main reason for favoring lithium cells in the long term is simply their tremendous efficiency, performance, and engineering flexibility, for off-grid applications. As for the sheer scale of the transportation market? Really, there are too many cars and trucks, and too much needless commuting. Switching more traffic to (electrified) rails, centralizing more cargo in routed larger delivery vehicles rather than individual shopping trips, and having more white collar jobs telecommute, would ultimately reduce off-grid-powered traffic to a fraction of its current volume.

If they're so cheap to manufacture then why are replacement lithium batteries for vehicles so expensive?

His argument is that a gasoline or diesel (or coal) engine doesn't have to carry its own reducing agent, whereas a battery does.

More like, ITT anons circlejerk over internal combustion engines. Please show me a single user supporting electric here

An electric motor is some magnets and copper coils. One moving part, the output shaft.


As long as your gasoline gets made at refineries running on burned coal, your arguments are not nearly valid

The ONLY reason for gas/diesel is that it is easier to store and transport. aka batteries suck>You fags realize you need to generate electricity somehow like burning stuff or producing faggy windmills before it can enter your faggy electric car batteries?

Factologies:

EVs are inefficient because there's no way to store electricity that's as cheap and compact as the energy stored in liquid fuel. An amount of gasoline of a given volume has more energy that any battery the same size can store as electricity.

Electric and hybrid vehicles have been pushed into the market recently by government actions. In the past all the studies done showed that overall they were not more efficient than just using one properly-designed IC engine, when all of their additional manufacturing and maintenance costs were factored in.
The main long-term cost of operating an electric vehicle is not the electricity; it is replacing the batteries as they expire.
This is the reason that the ONLY electric vehicles that have attained worldwide use is trains fed by overhead wires; they can use electrical motive power but they escape the technical requirement of using massive storage batteries.
,,,,
It is also the reason that Tesla and hybrid car companies make sure their batteries will last at least ~5 years; so that the manufacturer or the original purchaser doesn't have to pay the replacement cost of those batteries.

In practical terms, diesel piston engines are still currently the cheapest and most-efficient option for cars. The main reason is because of the source energy costs: there's nowhere on Earth that electricity bubbles up out of the ground if you drill a hole (and that's probably a good thing) but there's still a lot of places where oil will do that.

Turbine engines are the most efficient type in theory but their efficiency is directly proportional to their operating speed, and so far nobody has found a good way to utilize them for low-speed vehicles.

Trains use diesel-electric engines not because they're efficient, but because train engines must operate with full-torque at zero RPMs. The only two kinds of engines that can do that is D-valve steam engines and other engines with an electric drive coupling. And the D-valve steam engines can actually be built *more* powerful than diesel-electrics, but their maintenance costs are far higher. Some icebreaker ships still use them, tho most new ones have gone to diesel-electric and have to put up with having much less power than comparably-sized ships had 50 years ago.

Aside from the inconvenience of dealing with fuel, probably the cheapest and most efficient common option is natural gas.

Volcanism? Ground thermal gradient? Not to mention constantly pouring out of the sun, sky, and sea.

Gasoline hasn't had a well-to-wheel positive ERoEI for decades, it's just a lossy storage mechanism for natural gas and coal now.

There have been designs to deal with that for ages, but turbines are essentially prohibited on roads due to FUD laws targeting their exhaust systems. And the very most efficient are actually Stirling engines, but of course their power/weight ratio is unsuited for vehicles.

Top ebin

Listen, hippie, coolant boiling and fuel compaction is an extremely small probability with the absolute bare minimum adequate safety design. The plant that the hippies are talking about is a mismanaged piece of shit, and I'm not taking seriously any hippie garbage that has a heading in their article reading "MONJU IS LIKE A NUCLEAR WEAPON WAITING TO EXPLODE"

The US still has a defueled SFR, the EBR-II, designed with large pools of sodium surrounding the reactor, with completely passive safety systems requiring no human intervention. The EBR-II is meltdown proof, and any scenario mirroring the two major nuclear disasters cannot happen.
Of course, the EBR-II was defueled precisely because of shitty organizations like Greenpeace, who in reality are just oil lobby shills, the trolls of the environmentalist world. The democrats and George Bush Jr. set back Gen IV reactors almost two decades, all because Greenpeace (oil lobbyists) convinced stupid faggots like you that nuclear breeders are just a dream, despite the fact that there had been little work on them thanks to gubmint preferring the Navy's LWR's.

Diesel has a substantial penalty imposed by the need to refine it from oil, whereas natural gas requires little processing, and is probably the highest ERoEI fossil fuel. Most modern turbine designs that use cryogenic fuel precool intake air (increasing oxygen density) and recover exhaust heat as part of a turbocompound system, further increasing efficiency.


My point wasn't that it's the most probable failure mode, but that something so embarrassingly awful is possible at all, both accidentally and as the result of sabotage, is the pièce de résistance of all the other problems plaguing breeders compared to conventional reactors. And that's without mentioning all the other issues nuclear has, best to just set the whole thing aside until somebody gets fusion working.

He was speaking relatively, i .e. compared to recycling manufacturing new devices is cheaper.

First part of this post was missing. Oops.


Relative to other options. And, as I've repeatedly emphasized, using a fuel cell design would cut costs greatly by shrinking the cell stack compared to a typical battery of the same chemistry and storage capacity.


It's not that bad, mostly just typical baiting IMHO. About half the posts are just arguing for competing methods of powering cars with electricity.


Though some options are much lighter, like hydrogen. And the additional range is wasted most of the time anyway, especially for a second car:

Including all refills and service, electric has had cheaper TCO for decades, as the smaller number of moving parts, greater drivetrain efficiency, and especially lower price of electricity more than offset the greater upfront price of batteries. This is why subsidies are crucial.

k

>muh (((phd)))
found the jew

It's also a very small probability that we get hit with an asteroid tomorrow and all die.
All fissionable material has the possibility in these scenarios to go supercritical.
Again, with the bare minimum adequate safety protections, and proper design, SFR breeders are meltdown proof, and explosion proof, with regulation done with large sodium pools surrounding the reactor.

Some moron with a "doctorate" just rambling off possibilities, like "AN EARTHQUAKE COULD DESTROY EQUIPMENT" is obviously super smart. He's obviously ahead of his time, and he has all the answers, we should've thrown in the towel on breeders in 1994 when this prophetic document was released.

Actually, his argument is equally applicable to the unknowns of asteroids. There's no one that can model that probability to an absolute certainty, so why should I even bother going to work and continue living? Why are you even replying to this thread? You should be drinking and not going to work, we might all die next week.
"It can go wrong. Therefore, something will go wrong. Just close Pandora's box, that ship has sailed. Just focus on fusion reactors for another 100 years." It's a fallacy.

...

The threat of being wiped out by an asteroid is simply a fact of life, one that human labor can only decrease. The threats of nuclear power, given myriad alternatives at our disposal? Very much the opposite.

Literally minimal threats compared to wind. Green energy sources yield more casualties than nuclear power. The only threat from nuclear power is when you use outdated designs, or you don't maintain the plants.

What other options? You never said anything about other options.
This literally makes no sense. "Oh they're so cheap to manufacture that it's not cost effective to recycle them".
Meanwhile in the real world they're expensive as shit. Meaning that recycling must be even more expensive. Which would lead a reasonable person to believe that something that's that expensive to do can in fact not be very easy and efficient.
But oh you had a link to some random website so it must be true.
I can see why you use the apple logo.

The arguments against nuclear are "it can happen, therefore it will happen." Based on bullshit scare films like The China Syndrome and focusing on reactors whose commercial equivalents were 30 years out when the "paper" you linked was written. Really, it's not a paper, but an oil lobby talking points piece, because that's what Greenpeace as an organization is.
We've done safe and integral fast reactors, we know they work and we know that they're orders of magnitude safer than 60 year old commercial technology that every hippie points to, crying "muh Chernobyl/Fukushima." Period.

According to UN numbers, there's an estimated total 5,000 premature deaths between Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Casualties: ~200,000-~250,000 over the last 100 years.
Massively polluting, non-recyclable, has definitely killed more than nuclear has, just in rooftop installation deaths alone.
Avian genocide.

Yeah, green is "safe".

>disposal (the overwhelming majority stuff like LLW that can't be used as fuel)
MUCH safer than wind, solar, tidal, or geothermal.


The other popular battery technologies (lead-acid, Ni-Cad, NiMH) are heavier, bulkier, less efficient, or have a shorter lifespan, meaning higher TCO. Of course, given how stodgy the battery market has been, that will hopefully change. And as for the specific thing I was talking about (lithium-air fuel cells), their theoretical performance is unmatched by anything else for automotive applications.


The example you offered, EBR-II, was an exceptional outlier. Nearly every other reactor of its type (including its direct predecessor) suffered from constant operational failures, and its successor (S-PRISM) failed to resolve many other potential problems. Of course, this is assuming everything is built, operated, and maintained as intended. If breeders were expanded beyond a handful of experimental showpieces, I sincerely doubt standards would hold up in the face of (thoroughly precedented even in the relatively tiny nuclear industry) opportunities for tremendous graft and corruption.

Disposal is overrated, it's a political problem because normalfags don't know what the fuck they're talking about.
Nuclear waste sits on site in dry cask and it's not going anywhere. Meanwhile, as soon as hippies stop being faggots, you can then reprocess that "waste" as fuel, and the end result of the next generation's waste only has a "dangerous" half-life of a hundred years or so.
I'll also remind you that none of those points are dangerous. Compared to the chinese mining practice that give you your precious solar panels, the digging up of material for a uranium-plutonium fuel cycle is as clean as digging a garden.

You mean, it was done right, and hippies shut it down because they fell back on their favorite "muh nuclear KILLS."
You can bet that the fucktards you're linking to will still be around in a century when fusion achieves break-even, and they'll be whining about how "A FUSION REACTOR IS LIKE A SOLAR FLARE WAITING TO HAPPEN." "MILLIONS WILL DIE."

Nice reliable sources you provided, it's great knowing anons are intelligent enough to not just pull numbers out of their ass

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_station_failures
nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html
who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/

Your move, fucktard.

Also note that 5,000 is an over the top liberal estimate, the real number is much lower at this point in time. There were only 40 attributable, premature deaths caused by Chernobyl circa 2008.
Fukushima is the absolute worst case of failure compared to the dogshit Soviet reactor meant to make material for bombs, and yet it was relatively benign. Mostly the cleanup crew, again. Sad, it didn't need to happen, lack of government regulation standards with teeth, but since the fucktard wants to play the "safer" "green doesn't kill" numbers game, I'll gladly play it, and win.

Yeah, don't have to actually click any of that shit to know you're retarded.

Should get a trip so we can filter you

Yeah that's what happens when you live in shithole where the state makes up radiation readings then jail you for publishing your own radiation readings and doctors lose their pay for giving fukushima as cause for cancer

Why don't you provide the REAL and AUTHORITATIVE statistics to counter the ones that I pulled out of my ass, then?
It should be quite easy to demonstrate that I'm full of shit, as you say.

I've seen several documentaries showing people running around with dosimeters and you're full of shit. There's hot spots but the destruction and abandonment you see has more to do with the fact that a fucking tsunami hit. And there's certainly more rad exposure in many places on earth that have nothing to do with "muh man made ebul noocyulur poison." It's funny, why don't hippies ever acknowledge that living in the mountains, going to the beach, or bathing in many natural springs sometimes comes with high doses of radiation.

Hope you get cancer and die before you get a chance to accidentally breed

yournewswire.com/reporters-10-years-jail-fukushima/
tepco.co.jp/nu/fukushima-np/f1/smp/2015/images/drainage_150304-j.pdf
tepco.co.jp/news/2014/1241559_5918.html
twitter.com/makomelo/status/474538144943980546
fukushima-diary.com/2015/01/dosimeter-fukushima-citizen-counts-40-lower-actual-maker-admits/

No, I get it from watching actual documentaries.
Your first link is hilarious. The robot stalled inside one of the containment vessels, after completing a survery of 14 of 18 of the locations it needed to survey. Yeah, no shit, there were 3 nuclear meltdowns because on-site AC was lost. No one disputes that this was the worst case scenario for commercial nuclear technology, and that the company didn't have adequate safety protections versus other plants that survived just fine. But, aside from that, yeah, there's going to be a shitload of ionizing radiation in the containment vessels.

As for your second image, it depends on the level of tritium, and the exposure. I'd be surprised if we're talking more than 10 average millirems per year. Do you know what tritium is? Or are you just pissed off because it's "radioactive." Do you get pissed off when you see supermarkets selling banannas? Do you eat banannas? Or is it okay because it's "natural"?

Third, I don't read or speak moon, and no one gives a fuck about whatever point you're trying to make with those two links.

Lastly, linking to some bullshit about a chink dosimeter in some attempt to imply that there's a conspiracy when it comes to rad levels shown on various films or in various reports, without being shown what dosimeters are being used first, is typical of a batshit greenpeace fag.

It's not even close. Consider what would happen today if we had a global famine, plague, or other natural disaster the Earth happens to be fond of - like a 21st century black death with a larger reach due to air travel. There'd be too much disorder to maintain the reactors. None of them are walk-away safe, they'd all melt down. Even 'spent' fuel outside of reactors would catastrophically fail with no maintenance. Nuclear with our current designs is madness and should have never been rolled out.

I don't get it, are you too thick to realize how stupid you are?

ok kid

Right. In those 69 years damn engineers didn't learn a thing about nuclear power. Those fools don't even know that a single cup of uranium ore could kill 6000000 million people. If one even farts at the nuclear power plant the damn thing will collapse and kill everyone and everything. We better destroy all of the 449 nuclear power plants in the world and replace them with coal based power plants. As we all know, coal is not nearly as dangerous as scary nuclear power. We need to stop fusion research as well. There is no telling what madness will those scientists bring us again. Coal is the way to go.

>i get my opinions from the (((msm)))

You have no idea how various nuclear energy works. Do you think this is some sort of fucking chain reaction that you can't stop for months? The biggest risk is lack of cooling. So, if a scenario comes in which 1) the power grids fail and 2) their on-site power fails and 3) presumably the backup generators fail, within a short period of time after a SCRAM or before they can even carry out a SCRAM.
You need power to cool it down, otherwise it melts down. If there's ample warning to shut the thing down, what you're describing cannot happen. Did you not know what a meltdown is? But as time goes on the amount of cooling needed is dramatically reduced.

But whatever fag, we're having a baseload energy crisis and the only alternative is to burn natural gas and goal. Green energy cannot provide a baseload. Keep believing the lies about the "noocyulur poison."

dude stop mansplaining
msm told me that nuclear energy and the right are bad.
(((green energy))) and the left are good.

This is a load of horseshit for two reasons.

First, when a battery is at the end of it's life, it's done. You're not going to magically wring out a thousand more cycles of meaningful energy storage/release. It may take 500 cycles for the battery to go from 100% to 70% capacity, but only 100 to go from 70% to 10%, and 10 to go from 10% to 0.01%.

Second, batteries are terrible for grid storage. AC->DC->AC conversion is inefficient, the batteries themselves don't last long enough to be economically viable, and they're not suited for rapid charge/discharge cycles.

You clearly don't how radiation works, nor how much of it is purely cosmic.

Elon Musk and Tesla intend to prove you wrong in South Australia.

At least no one will miss your genes when you die

Not an argument

Not the guy you are replying to but those measurements are barely above background radiation, variations in ground composition and atmospheric conditions could easily account for the difference. He wasn't complaining about the unit of measurement either.

Also that image being from XKCD makes no differences as it has more than enough sources for the content it contains.

As for the actual radiation, the danger posed by it is heavily dependant on the type of radiation, for instance alpha radiation has a high effective dose compared to gamma rays per Sv but it only can effect you if the source is inside your body (alpha particles are stopped by the layer of dead cells on your skin but gamma rays can penetrate your body with ease). It also depends where on your body you get exposed, your brain is quite resistant to radiation exposure while your colon isn't.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_dose_(radiation)

Elon Musk and Tesla are going to have a hard time disproving physics.

Not only are the measurements barely above (or at/below) background radiation and dominated by local factors, they're easily within the margin-of-error of a fast-integrating meter like the handheld unit shown in the picture. Those cheap handheld units are intended to give an approximate indication quickly, and a single particle is enough to cause a large spike on the fractional-microsievert scale. Given that radiation at those low levels is essentially random, there's literally zero meaning in the difference between the two measurements

...

So fishes can't breathe now?

Why does Tesla need to disprove physics?

The key here is "in the vehicle." I don't know the specifics, I'm not a tesla fag, but I believe their packs effectively load balance and use the usual charging cycle tricks to prolong lifespan, but there's a point where it's useless in the context of a drivable car. We're taking 150 mile range, down from 300. It's not that the batteries are useless, it's just that it's not that useful for an electric vehicle.