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[Richard230]

Yes.  Electric motors are just too simple.  Here is an animated video showing the German way to make refined 500-million-year-old dinosaurs generate power: 

Sometimes it is best not to know how sausages are made.   

[mrwilsn]

Thanks Richard! I love watching good videos showing how a Rube Goldberg device works [emoji6]

Sent from my XT1060 using Tapatalk

[firepower]

I love the mechanical engineering, all the precision and use of limited volume. Excellent video.
But i love the simplicity and effiency of EV more. I was sold on  it after seeing "who killed the electric car" documentary.

[BenS]

I love the mechanical engineering, all the precision and use of limited volume. Excellent video.
But i love the simplicity and effiency of EV more. I was sold on  it after seeing "who killed the electric car" documentary.

Wow, I just watched "Who killed the Electric Car", for the first time, after you mentioned it. We keep hearing about the car companies hanging on to the combustion engine just so they can profit, and it kind of sounds too ridiculous to believe, but proof is right there in that doco! That was a real eye opener!

Regarding the BMW video, it's amazing how complex the combustion engine design is these days, with so many moving parts to wear out, when it could be so simple as a battery, controller, and a motor with a couple of bearings!

[MrDude_1]

Regarding the BMW video, it's amazing how complex the combustion engine design is these days, with so many moving parts to wear out, when it could be so simple as a battery, controller, and a motor with a couple of bearings!

This misconception bothers me. Perhaps its because I understand both engine design and electronics.

Sure the modern engine has multiple moving parts. However its design and operation is well refined and understood, so "parts to wear out" becomes moot at production levels.


However what bothers me more is... there is no such thing as a "controller". There is no "battery" These are sub-assemblies as complex as any internal combustion engine, transmission or axle.
There are literally 1000s of discrete parts, that must all be assembled at a microscopic (if not molecular) scale... voltage regulators, comparers, microcontrollers(containing more parts), resistors, caps and huge power transistors... all operating within massive magnetic fields that could interfere if not accounted for.
And that is just the controller.


You think you have a BATTERY in your bike? No.
You have a sub-assembly of complex highly sensitive voltage dividers that help a couple microcontrollers "see" the voltage of a few bags of complex chemistry that had to be made JUST RIGHT.  You have mechanical contactors, and then you have more electronics to detect if that contactor worked.
You have critical battery connections that could overheat if you dont have them connected properly. If they are designed incorrectly, years from now they may corrode and suddenly overheat.

You think your motor is simple? There are literally less than 1000 people on the planet that can accurately comprehend and design a motor like that without software that goes through millions of iterations (in seconds) to figure out how to make it efficient.  IF you fail to make it efficient, it may "work" but you end up having to deal with MASSIVE amounts of heat. There is a reason that there are not 100s of shops cranking out EV sized motors, when they are soooo simple.



No. Saying EVs are simple and ICE are complex is also saying you are ignorant of the engineering behind both. Its a bandwagon thing no better than the ICE motorcycle forums laughing at the slow electric bikes that cant even go 100miles.

[PhreaK]

Solid point. You forgot the firmware that then runs those sub assemblies too (including ECU'S, launch control etc in ICE engines). All in all, regardless of the drive train, it's a feat of engineering across the board. It's pretty damn sexy when you get something that combines mechanical, electrical, chemical and software engineering in such a well refined way.


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[firepower]

I posted another video Electric Car Revolution it give detailed history of electric car vs  ICE cars , its sad that invention of electric starter motor killed electric cars.
Original electric cars were simple motors and batteries. No firmware lol.

http://electricmotorcycleforum.com/boards/index.php?topic=5362.0

[BenS]

Regarding the BMW video, it's amazing how complex the combustion engine design is these days, with so many moving parts to wear out, when it could be so simple as a battery, controller, and a motor with a couple of bearings!

This misconception bothers me. Perhaps its because I understand both engine design and electronics.

Sure the modern engine has multiple moving parts. However its design and operation is well refined and understood, so "parts to wear out" becomes moot at production levels.


However what bothers me more is... there is no such thing as a "controller". There is no "battery" These are sub-assemblies as complex as any internal combustion engine, transmission or axle.
There are literally 1000s of discrete parts, that must all be assembled at a microscopic (if not molecular) scale... voltage regulators, comparers, microcontrollers(containing more parts), resistors, caps and huge power transistors... all operating within massive magnetic fields that could interfere if not accounted for.
And that is just the controller.


You think you have a BATTERY in your bike? No.
You have a sub-assembly of complex highly sensitive voltage dividers that help a couple microcontrollers "see" the voltage of a few bags of complex chemistry that had to be made JUST RIGHT.  You have mechanical contactors, and then you have more electronics to detect if that contactor worked.
You have critical battery connections that could overheat if you dont have them connected properly. If they are designed incorrectly, years from now they may corrode and suddenly overheat.

You think your motor is simple? There are literally less than 1000 people on the planet that can accurately comprehend and design a motor like that without software that goes through millions of iterations (in seconds) to figure out how to make it efficient.  IF you fail to make it efficient, it may "work" but you end up having to deal with MASSIVE amounts of heat. There is a reason that there are not 100s of shops cranking out EV sized motors, when they are soooo simple.



No. Saying EVs are simple and ICE are complex is also saying you are ignorant of the engineering behind both. Its a bandwagon thing no better than the ICE motorcycle forums laughing at the slow electric bikes that cant even go 100miles.

Yeah mate, there's no need to go all tech on me!!! I have a basic understanding of how both systems work and what parts are involved, and if I believed an Electric system was literally so simple, I'd be out the back trying to make one from scratch, and wouldn't have bought a bike! I was merely joining in the casual conversation about how many moving parts and processes are needed for an ICE vehicle to operate and make power, compared to an Electric powered vehicle, after it's been designed and assembled!

[drumgadget]

Great video, for sure!  Makes one appreciate both the refined complexity of the Boxer twin AND the capability of the latest CG animation techniques.

As a dedicated ICE motorhead (70+ bikes in my life and counting .... ), I will admit that I tended to think of ebikes in simplistic, "block diagram" terms ..... despite having had a career in custom motion control systems for movie FX.  That is .... until I bought an older Zero bike and began to open up the black boxes in my mind.  Thinking about the  possibility of malfunction has made me acutely aware of the complexity (and in the case of the Zero, vulnerability .... !).  BenS, I really like your description of the "battery" in an ebike - albeit a more modern one than my 2011 S with its 336 individual Molicells .......

Still running OK, though ..................

Mike

[Spoonman]

ROFL - ah here - in a world where the vast majority of people, and even garages, know f*ck all about what makes their car/bike/golfbuggy run, YES EV's ARE SIMPLER! Saying otherwise is entirely counter productive - there's as much or more nanomolecular wizardry in any ICE ECU than there is in any motor controller; and if you're about to tell me that it's easier to produce petrol than it is to produce a battery then you may pull the other one on that aswell.

Is there a monumentous amount of science behind both - yes, unquestionably.
Is there a driving force of world class industry experts behind both - yes, unquestionably.

The complexity involved in modelling electromagnetic fields is alluded to above - how does that contrast against the complexity of modelling the thermo-fluid dynamics of a combusion chamber; not to mention including the intake and exhaust tracts.

There's no question but that both disciplines require astonishing expertise built up over the last 100 years.

BUT - is it more likely that the ballet of precision which is the ICE is more likely to cause problems than an EV drivetrain - yes, unqestionably.
Why? Because the EV's drivetrain *IS* simpler.


I'm all for having people appreciate the knowledge involved in producing the technology we so readily take for granted today (just take a look at what you're using to read this on for a start) - but "simpler" or "more simple" is a perfectly appropriate term to descibe the relative complexity of an EV drivetrain vs and ICE equivalent.

[Richard230]

Since I have one foot in the steam age, I only think about physically moving parts. I never thought about electric vehicles the way MrDude1 explains them. Interesting subject, but if a part doesn't move, I don't know what to do if it breaks.   

[mrwilsn]

No. Saying EVs are simple and ICE are complex is also saying you are ignorant of the engineering behind both. Its a bandwagon thing no better than the ICE motorcycle forums laughing at the slow electric bikes that cant even go 100miles.

Comparing apples to apples....the analogy to the controller would be a carburetor or fuel injection and ECU.  For the battery it would be the gas itself.  An electric MOTOR is orders of magnitude less complex than an IC motor.

The amount or complexity of the engineering behind each technology does not equate to the simplicity or complexity of the end product.  Good engineers spend a lot of engineering hours to make their end products as simple as possible.

You can spend a lot of engineering hours and come up with an elegant simple design or you can spend those hours and build a rube goldberg machine, it all depends on your desired end outcome.

[BenS]

BenS, I really like your description of the "battery" in an ebike - albeit a more modern one than my 2011 S with its 336 individual Molicells .......

Still running OK, though ..................

Mike

That wasn't my description, that was quoted from mrdude's lecture.

[MrDude_1]

if you're about to tell me that it's easier to produce petrol than it is to produce a battery then you may pull the other one on that aswell.

I would outright state this.
It is so simple to produce petrol that it was a waste byproduct produced in the late 1800s.
Its so simple I could distill it in my backyard with nothing more than what moonshiners use.  Dangerous to do so? yes.  but it is simple.

A lipo battery on the otherhand, is so complex that even a global company like Nissan  cannot make them on a competitive scale and maintain reliability. The chemistry is touchy, and not understood on a true technical level by more than a few hundred people worldwide. I could not create a lipo battery in my garage... yet I could distill gasoline from crude. I could still make a simple piston engine in my garage, using nothing more than a mill and lathe.


Now can everyone do that? no. But you can always point out someone that cant change a lightbulb. With nothing more than tools and guidance though, I could teach anyone willing on how to do everything I just described.

[CrashCash]

Sure the modern engine has multiple moving parts. However its design and operation is well refined and understood, so "parts to wear out" becomes moot at production levels.

Not really. Ask a car service tech about "pattern failures" - this is when a particular model of car has an issue in the design where it always breaks in a certain way and always needs the same repair. A recall is where this pattern failure is so bad it could get someone hurt or killed and needs to be proactively fixed. That shows the designs are not quite so well understood.

And moving parts wear out or go out of adjustment.

A modern ICE vehicle is just designed to wear out past the warranty period.

An electric bike is "simple" in that it's got very few moving parts to fail or wear out, and "simple" in that there's no maintenance.

The main "part" that wears is the battery chemistry, and the bikes are new enough we haven't reached an answer on that.

Sure, the controller and BMS are really complicated, but the good thing is it's all solid state digital electronics, which is really robust once it gets past the "bathtub curve" of initial failures. Except for the contactors, there's no moving parts to wear and a lot fewer failure modes.

It's like when ICE went from points to electronic ignition. You had weights spinning on springs at engine RPM to set the timing advance and a breaker that had to be fine-tuned as to the exact opening point. That went out of adjustment (or just plain broke) in a couple months and the regular tune-up cleaning it and setting it back to the correct positions made a big difference.

Now you don't hear of an "igniter box" failing pretty much ever. It just keeps on truckin' and you never have to tune it up.

It's a lot more complex internally than the simple spinning weights and cammed breaker, and needs to be made in a clean room semiconductor foundry, but it's got a lot less failure modes.

I can't produce a modern battery, but I'm sure there's folks on this forum that could wind their own motors and make their own controllers from discrete semiconductor components. You can probably make a lead-acid battery at home too.

It won't be a Zero, but then your homemade simple piston engine in your garage won't be a CBR engine either.