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Comment by sambeau | Hacker News Reader

The focus for these kind of alternatives should be on aviation—with the most difficult fuel to replace. Maybe we'd need this for classic cars, emergency generators and a few other smaller things, but even classic cars can get electric refits. Cars, motorbikes, trucks etc should be electric; shipping needs to embrace sail-electric hybrids; and bio-fuels/synthetic fuel should be aimed at aviation (and maybe as a stop-gap for shipping). My 10¢.

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Obviously you're not a car guy if you earnestly believe classic cars should almost always be refitted with an electric engine rather than using a more environmentally friendly fuel replacement. We shouldn't just toss the old functional engine & ECU & other components into the landfill. You're seeing it from a tech perspective. No, Sam, the Porsche 964 is not comparable to the latest shiny MacBook where you can just throw it away after you've had your 2 years of fun and the non-replaceable battery looks like a pillow and Apple refuses to update your OS. My 10c is I'm all for the synthetic gasoline instead of completely gutting classics and just turning them into almost-sleeper "classic body & suspension with a Tesla motor thrown into it". That being said I don't mind the electric conversions but to imply they should be done rather than just switching fuels is silly at best. I see it in the same category of project as an engine swap, it's something that's done for fun or more power, not something that ought to happen to every classic.

It depends on the car.

My first car (in 1986) was a barn find 1964 Triumph TR4a. If I had that car today, I'd EV swap it in a heartbeat because

- The car is not super rare

- The inline 6 it came with is under-powered, un-reliable, and I've never seen a triumph engine that went more than a few years without a leak (have had 5 between myself and my parents)

- it would massively increase the likelyhood that I'd daily drive it, if I knew it would start and run reliably & wouldn't leave me stranded.

- engine parts are not easy to find.

But I'd never EV-swap something super rare, or something that has a better, more common, more reliable engine

gestures broadly at all the people driving 20 miles each way to work every day getting 20 mpg in not a classic car

You should be thankful to EV drivers for making the only fuel classic cars take last longer.

Classic cars being refit to be electric is like using strawberry flavoured candy to replace fruit, or GPU shaders to replace a Trinitron.

Modern cars already exist, you can just use those. There aren’t enough proper classics in existence to matter from a carbon perspective.

I think there is space for both. While I like preserving the technology, there are cases where the EV conversion adds some charm to the original vehicle. The period-incorrectness is captivating in many instances.

Pre safety body designs had a lot more design flexibility.

Plus, there are designs where the internal combustion engine is not a goal, but the best tech available at the time - those designs can only be fully realized with technology that wasn't available when the original design came out.

Thinking of the Bizzarrini Manta, the Ferrari Modulo, the Maserati Boomerang, or the Citroen Karin.

Cars can be art. You dont have to justify it technologically.

And iterating on art is also art.

Classic cars are a tiny fraction of miles driven by cars and cars is only a fraction of fuel used.

The EPA and carb need to be a lot more concerned with 90% use cases and much less concerned with 100% cases. Lower emission standards for PHEVs.

You fight with the army you have. There are hundreds of millions of gas burning vehicles that are going to be on the road for years. Synthetic fuel allows you to transparently replace the source with a carbon neutral equivalent without any new hardware requirements. As you build out additional synthesis capacity, you can hit more markets.

  >You fight with the army you have.

You craft the analogy to suit your conclusion.

Building an "army" of E-Gas synthesis capacity (and worse, an "army" of the 300+% increase in wind and solar to cover inefficiency) is harder than replacing that "army" of cars with EVs.

E-Gas greenwashes fossil fuel stranded assets, but it's not a serious attempt at an energy source.

I view classic cars as a "preservation" exercise, and the kind of thing where paying extra for synthetic gasoline is "worth it" for a historical demonstration.

That being said: For hobbyists who use a classic car as a base for something custom, I have no problem with whatever method of propulsion they use.

> The focus for these kind of alternatives should be on aviation—with the most difficult fuel to replace.

Why is aviation fuel the most difficult to replace?

An aircraft burns fuel and gets lighter as it flies its route. Batteries are always heavy.

The difference in energy density is much more important.

The specific energy of gasoline is 46.4 MJ/kg, while that of a Samsung inr18650 Li-Ion cell is 958.1 kJ/kg. Even accounting for the much lower efficiency of a turbofan engine the difference is quite significant.

Because weight matters a lot in an airplane, and hydrocarbons are the densest form of fuel. Adding 20% to the weight of a car isn't really a big deal; adding that to a plane makes the entire enterprise fail.

If they can find a way to transform carbon-neutral electricity into a hydrocarbon, then they can keep airplanes going without having to burn fossil fuels. But it's hard to make that efficient enough to be economically viable.

> Adding 20% to the weight of a car isn't really a big deal

And typically the car can't go as far on a single charge as a tank of gas. I can usually go about 200 miles on a typical charge in my (cough) "300" mile EVs, but my last gas car could go about 400 miles between visits to the gas station. (But I don't care because I just plug in when I get home.)

That being said, I once rented an Infiniti that could barely do 200 miles on a single tank of gas.

To get back to the point: Batteries are just too heavy for airplanes, so unless there is a major breakthrough, synthetic gasoline is currently the most promising way to make airplanes carbon neutral.

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