Snorvey wrote:tjh290633 wrote:Snorvey wrote:The thing that always get me compared to an electric power plant is the sheer amount of.....well. ....stuff in a petrol engine. From the gearbox to the valve train, it's just incredible the level of engineering that's required.
Have you never looked at a 2-stroke engine? Very few moving parts.
TJH
Well of course. But before their demise they were getting more and more complex. Liquid cooling. Powervalves and Fuel injection to keep them quiet, tractable and sort of fuel efficient.
Some of the simplicity of electric vehicles is because they have not yet gone very far down that path of optimizing for the last few percent of cost or performance. I worked on electric vehicles and we figured that they should have gearboxes, if we were making 10 million. But the non-recurring engineering costs for custom motors were far lower than for custom gearboxes, so we oversized the motor and nixed the gearbox for a production of a few thousand.
Also most of the complexity of electric vehicles is not in the motor. Motor controllers have a great many parts, and a battery is way more complex than a petrol tank. The battery is where the chemical reactions that power the vehicle actually happen.