Irish Wake for BMW, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, ect

http://gizmo.do/Qt03zjo

Germany banning the combustible engine in the country by 2030. No more nice, sporty cars

Better buy one while you can!

That's great news for US auto manufacturers, as car production will have to shift here.

1. A Tesla can outperform all those makes in terms of speed, so sporty cars aren't going away.
2. BMWs are generally crap these days. I've known a couple of people who bought new ones, and dumped them after a year or so due to them having all kinds of crazy problems.
3. Odds are, that by the time 2030 rolls around, most folks won't even own cars in Germany or anywhere else. They'll just rent a self-driving one from Uber or Lyft or similar companies when they need one.

But where are Uber and Lyft going to get zero-emission cars?

What will they use for batteries, as the current boutique cars like the Tesla already maxed out world lithium production?

Who says they'll be using lithium batteries, or even batteries at all, by that point in time? Or maybe, Musk's asteroid mining project will be providing us with ample sources of lithium from space.

I guess the EU plan is to use Mr. Fusion.

Or fuel cells.

Buying an American made car



I'd rather shit in my hands and clap

No internal combustion, eh?

Time to dust off this old bit of automotive history:

America makes great cars. I have a 2016 Malibu. I took it out to the country and got 47 mpg.

or this

We've been waiting on fuel cell vehicles since about 1965. They're always four years away. They will always be four years away.

After somebody figures out a good way to store hydrogen, they will still be four years away.

But that's okay because once the EU stops the use of internal combustion engines, people will switch back to horses and rethink everything.

In 1979, Chrysler was all set to begin production on a turbine car which got 22 MPG, but had to shelve the idea because they were broke.

Detroit Electrics are in production.

Was the Chrysler a steam turbine? Gas turbines are still internal combustion engines, and thus will not be allowed by the EU.

Spoilsport. Yes, it was a gas turbine.

Guess somebody didn't tell Honda that.

Toyota has begun selling them in California.

But hey, let's not limit ourselves to hydrogen. Aluminum offers possibilities as a fuel.

There's also boron.

Or maybe a thorium nuclear reactor in every car.

That's great if you want to pay $60,000 to $75,000 for a short range econobox.

The Toyota mixes 5 kg of hydrogen at 10,000 psi with nickel-metal hydride batteries, which are an environmental nightmare.

But surely with increased demand, the price of platinum for hydrogen fuel cells will drop.

Or, they could switch to graphene.

Assuming, of course, Musk's Planetary Resources doesn't crash the prices of platinum first.

Which is great if you like riding around with hydrogen at 10,000 psi. When the nickel-metal hydride or lithium battery catches fire, it will be a sight to see!

And of course the problem with hydrogen is that it's not a fuel. Nobody has a hydrogen well.

Just ask anyone who owns a Samsung Note 7. You planning on throwing out your smartphone any time soon?

Prior to the mid-1800s, nobody was exactly thrilled to strike oil on their property, either. Hydrogen can be produced in any number of ways, and as demand for it increases, people will find cheaper methods of producing it. Like graphene.

There is no "cheap" way to produce hydrogen because you always have to start out with an even cheaper energy source, which you could instead use as, you know, "energy".

Hydrogen is a storage technology, and not a very good one. That's why we don't use if for much except rocket boosters where we use it as a cryogenic liquid at extreme expense. Methane, propane, methanol, or dimethyl ether make much more sense as alternative fuels, and they are pretty easily produced from coal. Another attractive fuel is octane, which can be produced from dimethyl ether using a zeolite catalyst.

You mean like water?

So, in short, you're saying that there's no problem doing away with the ICE in 14 years.

No. Methane, methanol, DME, and octane run great in piston engines.

Hydrogen sucks because you end up with an extremely heavy storage tank to hold a few pounds of it.

SpaceX isn't even considering hydrogen for their upper stage boosters. That's how much it sucks, and that's with the far easier to handle liquid form.

That's nice. Why aren't we using it now?

Yeah, I can remember when people said the same thing about cars because of all those heavy lead acid batteries they'd need. Remind me again why there's no electric cars today.

They're using methane, which can easily be used in fuel cells.

We do. Some countries use primarily methane for their cars. Indy cars ran on methanol till 2007. Chinese run buses on DME, which is better than diesel fuel in diesel engines. And octane is the gold standard for gasoline.

In terms of market share, there are virtually no electric cars today. Selling 20,000 would be a massive month. They've never broke 1 percent of the market, despite being around for over a century.

Methane produces CO2. It can't be used in an emission free vehicle.

"Some countries." Any of those countries the US or Germany?

One could say the same thing about PCs a few decades ago. Tesla's sales figures have been steadily increasing since they launched their first car. Tesla is the first large-scale electric car manufacturer that the world has seen in about a century. Hardly fair to compare them to the likes of the Corbin Sparrow, which didn't nearly have the kind of capital investment that Tesla had.

So? You're assuming that the technology related to such vehicles will remain static. It won't, regardless of the regulations put in place or the sources used to power cars.

Yes, the US uses octane as a component of gasoline. 100 octane fuel is fuel that ignites just like octane.

They're not going to repeal the law of physics to make hydrogen liquid at room temperature. Nor or we going to see truly massive improvements in consumer battery technology that will let them rival conventional fuels for power density because the more energy we put in the battery, the bigger the resulting explosion when it shorts internally. A high-energy battery is essentially a highly reactive monopropellant like pure hydrogen peroxide. Sometimes those just blow up.

When combusted, methane always produces CO2 and H20. That's how it produces energy. You could instead have it produce carbon monoxide but it's not as efficient.

Not what I meant, and you know it. Does the US or Germany use methane as the primary fuel for vehicles? It's a simple question. Don't wait for this comment to post, go ahead and answer it now.

And you know what? Gasoline powered cars "just sometimes blow up." Gasoline and kerosene have far more energy density than hydrogen or even lithium batteries do, yet you've got no problem putting a smartphone in your pants pocket near your dick. Gee willikers, do you think that's a good idea?

So, you run it through a fuel cell, which does away with combustion. Or, you employ something like a carbon capture technology.

Yes. Look at some commercial and government fleets which use methane in cars and buses. There are over 100,000 in use here, and over 20 million natural gas vehicle worldwide. However, they are outnumbered here by propane fueled vehicles, which is easier to store. And for non-vehicles powered by propane, look at almost any fork lift. The reason we don't use much methane is that although it's almost infinitely easier to use than hydrogen, it's quite a bit harder to use than propane or gasoline.

Gasoline cars don't just blow up. They burn. That's because the fuel requires outside oxygen to combust. Every smoker carries a 60 Watt-hour BIC lighter in their pocket. An iPhone battery is only about 5 Watt-hours. The difference shows just how much batteries suck compared to conventional fuels.

If you run methane through a fuel cell, you're still going to get CO2. Otherwise carbon would coat the electrodes and kill the reaction. And we do capture the carbon from internal combustion engines, we just don't do it onboard the vehicle. Instead we cleverly turn it into strawberries and tomatoes. It's plant food.

Why do those idiot, authoritarian Germans always have to do this shit?

If electric cars match or exceed IC engined cars in purchase cost, fuel mileage, power, as well as maintenance costs, then this will be a self solving problem. It will take care of itself. All other things being made equal, most people will naturally shift over to buying electric cars, because they cost less to run. And guess what? It's already happeneing. Look at Tesla, currently the flag carrier, the technological leader in this area, but others will catch up eventually. Their high end electric cars beat the pants off supercars costing five to ten times as much, while costing only four or five odllars per charge compared to however many fucktons it is now to fill up with petroleum fuel, and the range is comparable with IC cars. The P90D has about 250 - 260 miles per charge, the new P100 has over 340 miles AFAIK. And they have a much more affordable Model 3 coming out now, but still powerful, still over 300 miles of range and still costing a pittance to charge up.

With the tech having matured to where it is now, market forces alove will drive the vast majority of drivers over to electric going forward.

A few petrolhead enthusiasts would keep prized old cars around for the love of them. But they would be a small community of enthusiasts, similar to those who own classic cars today. Their impact on gas emissions would be negligible.

But noooooo they gotta go stamp a big authoritarian jackboot down on eveything. The Germans have literally not changed at all since the era of the Reich.