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Comment by fallingknife | Hacker News Reader

They have like 20 moving parts vs. 2000 in an ICE, and no transmission. The technical superiority of EV's is nothing like Linux vs Windows / MacOS.

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> no transmission

Mostly single-speed transmissions but not exclusively: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a28903274/porsche-taycan-t...

Yes there's a couple two speeds out there (I think we'll see more as EVs replace heavier vehicles)

A single speed transmission can only really be called a transmission in a universe where cows are spherical.

It transmits torque from one axis to another axis, so....yeah it's a transmission.

In no wheeled vehicle context is a simple gearbox that cannot engage/disengage, change speed or change direction referred to as a transmission.

Yes, it's a textbook correct terminology but completely irrelevant anywhere else (hence my comment about spherical cows)

If we're going to get technical, the transmission of a vehicle is everything that exists between the motor and wheels. Americans tend to think of the gearbox when referring to a car's transmission; much like we call a computer a CPU and we also refer to a single chip inside the computer a CPU. A gearbox with two gears is still a gearbox.

I'm still waiting for the ultimate EV that's got 4 in-hub direct drive motors. Until then, we're stuck with transmissions.

> I'm still waiting for the ultimate EV that's got 4 in-hub direct drive motors.

Total aside, I know, but man would that would be awesome.

FYI: https://deepdrive.tech/ Albeit currently only rear wheel drive inhub.

This is the biggest selling point of EVs for me. Driving an EV vs an ICE car is like the difference between streaming a movie vs dealing with a VHS tape.

I’m still waiting to see a Cat D11 with an electric motor or a mechanic who can fix a used EV battery or what planet we’re going to get the lithium and cobalt from to make billions of EV cars. I don’t think we share a common definition for technical superiority.

Lithium isn't that much of a problem, but cobalt might bring some fresh freedom to parts of Africa.

And there's plenty of competitive, cobalt-free battery chemistries coming to the fore.

And as you hint, cobalt's damage is a political problem, not a "we don't have enough of it" problem. With proper regulations, the battery industry could clean up what has been a long-accepted human rights nightmare. But nobody seems to complain about it unless they can use it as an excuse to continue fossil fuel use.

There are 7M tons of cobalt reserves in the world. That is a “we don’t have enough of it” problem.

Known reserves, not reserves. (https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-cobalt.pdf).

Same known reserves were 4.5M tons in 2000. (https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prd-wret/assets/palladium...).

Despite all the extraction that happened during those 20 years, we now have more known reserves than before, because unsurprisingly, the more you look for something, the more of it you find.

Discovering 2.5M tons in 20 years does not come close to the demand. You would need at least 3X the rate of discovery forever assuming we only ever serve the need of passenger vehicles and never increase world vehicle production. That’s a big hand-wave.

Reserves grew despite increased extraction. So far we are discovering faster than we can extract. Obviously it is something to keep an eye on but panic is not warranted.

That type of vehicle is ideal for electrification. Electric motors have maximum torque at zero RPM. A lot of haul trucks are already electric, and just use diesel to generate electricity for the electric motor.

I don't understand your skepticism about mechanics being able to service electric vehicles though. Why the doubt?

Ideal? Huh. You’d think CAT would just do that sort of thing on their own for equipment with price tags in the millions. That Diesel engines are required to produce the electricity underscores that battery energy density is not comparable to petroleum products.

Are you aware of someone with a machine shop having fixed a battery made of exotic minerals? I’m not.

> what planet we’re going to get the lithium and cobalt from to make billions of EV cars

This one. Lithium and cobalt are slightly less abundant in the oceans and Earth's crust than nitrogen and there's more of it than lead or boron, which are produced at much greater scale than lithium or cobalt [1].

The problem isn't the amount it's the concentration of the elements in economically extractable ore. That's rapidly changing as various extraction methods reach economies of scale.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...

You seem to be expecting to get a waterfall out of a pond. That we will just push the ocean through a fantasy machine that gives you the minerals you want is Lysenkoism.

If by fantasy machine you mean existing mining and evaporative extraction technology - like those used to produce boron in California and Turkey - then yes.

That’s fascinating! Can you please share the name of one of those operations or the companies operating them? I can only find academic papers referencing pilot projects.

Examples are Searles Valley Minerals which extracts boron from the brine under Searles Lake, CA [1] and Rio Tinto's lithium extraction plant which uses waste rock from the Borox mines in Boron, CA [2].

It takes time to spin up production to 10 million tons per year - which is the scale of boron or silicon production according to the wiki - but now that lithium is worth something, it's just a matter of time and incentives.

[1] http://www.svminerals.com

[2] https://www.riotinto.com/en/news/releases/2021/Rio-Tinto-ach...

You don't fix batteries, you replace them. Lithium is not a major supply issue. Tesla is already moving away from cobalt entirely. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmorris/2020/07/11/teslas-s...

> You don't fix batteries, you replace them

Yes. That’s my point.

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