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The Way Is Led By.... MAZDA?

by Karl Denninger
2017-08-19 06:35

Mazda has announced that it has mastered and will produce HCCI gasoline engines, dubbed SkyActiv-X, for their 2019 vehicles.

This has been attempted by car manufacturers for some 30 years, yet tiny Mazda, not Honda, not Chevy, not Ford -- has apparently finally done it.

The value of this breakthrough cannot be overstated.

If it works to anywhere near its promise this breakthrough will utterly destroy the EV industry -- including Tesla -- for light passenger vehicles.

Mazda knows what it has as well -- it has announced that it has no intention of selling these engines to any other vehicle makers.

Let's be clear: This engine and the vehicles it will be deployed in will utterly decimate the EV industry. The only remaining argument for EVs will be political, not economic or energy-related. I note that gasoline can be produced from any carbon source desired, which means it's an infinitely-renewable fuel and it has zero range issues since the tank can be refilled in a couple of minutes. The infrastructure to refuel a gasoline vehicle not only exists everywhere there are literally no places within the United States where you are more than a quarter-tank away from another fueling station on any road you choose to drive.

This will not be true for EVs for decades, if ever.

Further, battery-powered vehicles suffer from an inherent physical infirmity that cannot be overcome -- the reactants for their energy production must all be carried inside the case of the battery. An ICE, on the other hand, obtains one of its reactants from the atmosphere -- oxygen -- and thus it will always have a massive size and mass advantage.

This in turn means the EV always loses in the total energy budget (from source to the wheels) calculation and it always will because the more mass you must accelerate the more energy is required. Since you must carry the reactant and product mass with you in a battery all the time you therefore must lose in this regard.

We do not use petrol for fuel because we're pigs -- we do it because nobody can get 114,000 BTUs into a one-gallon liquid container via any other means than liquid hydrocarbons. To put it more-succinctly, one gallon of gasoline is equivalent to ~33 kilowatt-hours of electrical energy; an "80 kWh" battery, assuming you can use all of it (you can't; depth-of-discharge limits range from 50-85% without damaging the pack) has less than two gallons of gasoline in energy contained in it at full charge and it not only massively outweighs the 12lbs of gasoline (by 100x!) it also consumes many times the physical space.

These are physical laws; they cannot be violated by political decree.

Diesel engines have, under heavier and heavier constraint on both particulate and NOx emissions, been forced to turn to expensive, efficiency-robbing and complex exhaust treatment systems. These systems make the economic argument for current light-duty diesels impossible.

This problem does not apply to HCCI gasoline engines; traditional catalytic converters with common closed-loop fuel control, as has been available and in-use now for close to 20 years, is sufficient to meet those requirements.

What this means is that 50mpg highway-mileage mid and full-size sedans are now scheduled for production. A "light" hybrid that can recapture braking energy and use it in city driving (a huge amount of the energy lost in city driving, occurring at relatively low speeds where air resistance is not a major factor, is from braking) will make that sort of mileage possible in the city as well, but whether the additional cost will be worth it is another question -- I suspect the answer is "no."

I note that my current Mazda "6" can break 40mpg on the highway if I keep the speed at or under 65mph (and I have proved it on multiple tanks in the real world) so reaching 50mpg is pretty-much right up the middle in terms of expectations.

I will finally note that in over 110,000 miles of operation to date my current SkyActiv Mazda 6 has required exactly zero in terms of maintenance input other than routine oil and filter changes, plus tires and one set of brake pads. In other words the argument that the EV will "win" on service costs is flat-out bunk and I have no crazy-expensive battery pack to worry about either.

Put it all together and the bottom line is this: It's coming folks.

You see, this won't be a $30, $40 or $50,000 car -- base models should be right around $20,000 -- with a cost-per-mile of operation nearing if not at the lowest among vehicles on the road today. Oh, and reports are that it has forced induction via a supercharger and as such the engine both has a higher peak output than the current SkyActiv engines for a given displacement and materially-superior torque as well.

What this means is that there is neither an economic or "green" argument for EVs compared against a vehicle powered by this technology.

Bye-bye Tesla.....

https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=232310