Cybertruck...or how NOT to build a vehicle

[jdurand]

re: Hydrogen, I explain it as hydrogen in this case is just a battery. You either crack water with electricity given to you free by unicorns or you get it from fossil fuel.

IF you could get pure hydrogen out of a well, then it would be a fossil fuel.

Mentioning natural gas, the new Russian gas fields provide a nice service to their customers... The natural gas supplied for burning is pretty close to pure methane. All the non-burnable impurities are removed before the gas goes in the pipeline.

Of course Russia then has a nice supply of these things (like helium) if you wish to buy them...separate from the fuel gas.

[old kodger]

The question of fusion, (or fission) reactors in cars leaves us with a real problem in the direction of terrorists.Why blow up one building when you can delete the whole damn district.

[Frank S]

Looking up Brown's Gas on wii leads to this amusing sentence: "This mixture may also be referred to as Knallgas (Scandinavian and German Knallgas: "bang-gas"),"

:-)

I do think this should be an obvious means to manage the 'no solar power at night' problem; use some of the electricity generated by a solar installation to crack water, then burn the O2 and H2 back into water at night. This does run into some issues namely that the places with the best potential for solar power..tend to be the places with the least water.

Another stray thought...why has no one ever made a diesel-electric truck? It works really well for ships and trains, is there some lower bound of efficiency or power that would make it not useful for small vehicles? Even conventional hybrid cars, afaik, alternately power the vehicle via the gas engine and batteries.

Actually A diesel electric truck would revolutionize the transportation industry. Since you could have electric motors located in every wheel of both the truck and the trailer .
I used to have conversations with some friends of mine about this. The way I saw it since an electric motor develops near instant torque can be controlled through the RPM range from zero to what ever. electric motors can be used as regenerative braking as well so having a 35 hp electric motor in every wheel of the truck and trailer would be more available power than a 600 hp diesel feeding a transmission.
Loose the entire gear train and you have a significant weight savings. design the generator with 12 or 24 poles or even 36 poles design the diesel engine to run at 400 to 600 RPM for its best output and Idles at 100, ( I have one that runs at 600 wide open.) add a battery module to the tractor and one to the trailer. Let the engine just idle while driving on the batteries or rev up and cut in when needed recharging the batteries and adding the additional energy to pull the long hills. going down hill the wheels are going to charge the batteries.
Back when I used to have these conversations the capacitor battery cells were unknown where as now the same battery pack to power my idea would weigh less than 1/3 of what it would have then. I can visualize an 80,000lb rig getting as much as 20 MPG at times and 10 MPG at its worst usage

[Frank S]

The question of fusion, (or fission) reactors in cars leaves us with a real problem in the direction of terrorists.Why blow up one building when you can delete the whole damn district.

I don't remember which Clive Cussler novel it was in but in one of the books the Japanese had installed nuclear bombs in the Air-conditioning compressors of a freighter full of cars which they had planned to detonate once the cars were circulated through out the cities Either Dirk Pitt or his replacement Steve Austin and crew saved the day as usual. Of course the book is fiction, but think of how real it could be with a million fission reactors running around in a few major cities at the same time especially with so many features in cars today completely controlled by their computers and most are even connected via wifi now days

[MeJasonT]

Frank, Clive Cussler is purely fictional never mind his books.
He is supposed to be a world renown salvage expert as well as a writer, I have never heard so much poop come out on one man. Bob Ballard is another. They have both made ridiculous claims regarding how ships have sank and where they would be found only to be proved wrong on more occasions than I can remember. They are both made out to be hero's by the tabloids when it comes to locating wrecks and both treat their teams really badly giving them no recognition at all - just saying.

My favourite quote at the minute is one an old boy in Ohio when he was interviewed by John Saunders at NYCCNC. The guy said "its like a turtle on a fence post, you just know it didn't get there on its own". He was describing how he had built his business from scratch having escaped Germany's concentration camps during the war and now manufactures more than 1 billion part a year - yep that's right 1 billion machined parts. They make contacts and clips for electrical isolators and contactor's.

[Toolmaker51]

is it fair when the tesla is the one which takes up the slack, then is rolling for the start?
would they have got the same results with the same tyres on the F150, and the F150 had the rolling start?

The Tesla probably has far greater weight over rear tires [battery pack], plus electric motors once energized are producing torque.
Battery pack of an Model 3 model weighs about 1800 pounds...also unknown if the Tesla 2 or 4 wheel drive model.

I'm not a particular fan, but I admire pure nerve and the scale he operates at. Where would we be, sans innovators and rebels?