Why Gasoline Won a Century Ago, and Why It’s So Hard to Beat
By Edward A. Sanchez – April 2, 2021
In Episode Number 8 of The Watt Car Podcast, Phil and myself went down the rabbit hole of the feasibility of battery electric RVs and powersports vehicles. As I often do, I will preface any commentary to follow with the caveat that I’m not an engineer. However, I am a trained journalist, and have an innate curiosity about things that often lead me to spend way more time than is probably rational or advisable investigating certain subjects. Whether that makes me a “subject matter expert” or a self-deluded victim of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, well, I’ll let you decide. But in the course of the conversation, the fact of gasoline’s volumetric potency came up. Simply put, gasoline (and diesel as well) packs an amazing amount of potential energy in a relatively compact package.
To be precise, according to the U.S. EPA, one gallon of gasoline contains the potential energy equivalent to 33.6 kWh. That’s a lot of power. Conversely, it points out how horribly inefficient most ICE vehicles are when you consider the Tesla Model S P100 D has the equivalent of a three-gallon “fuel” tank yet can go more than 300 miles on a full charge. Still, the Tesla’s battery is not just a compact cube under the rear seat, but rather a huge, axle-to-axle panel of more than 7,000 cells strung together weighing 1,200 pounds.
The current volumetric inefficiency of EV batteries is not a new discovery or epiphany to engineers. It is both a persistent issue for battery engineers and a convenient retort for opponents and skeptics of EVs to point out as to why EVs are impractical or resource-inefficient on a holistic level. Jason Fenske, host of the outstanding Engineering Explained YouTube channel, has excellent explainer videos for both the volumetric efficiency disadvantage of battery packs as well as whole-lifecycle environmental impact comparison of EV versus ICE.
Finally getting around to the subject posed in the headline, there’s a simple reason that gasoline won out as the fuel of choice in the early 20th century, even though as many point out, there have been electric cars since the beginning of automotive industry itself. Then, as now, batteries took a long time to charge and had a limited range, only making them practical for short-range trips. Although it should be noted many early electrics boasted a range of more than 100 miles, albeit at lower speeds (usually around 15-20 mph).
Porsche’s early electric cars, produced around 1900, featured hub motors. They also boasted a top speed of about 15 mph. (Image courtesy Porsche)
Early electrics were favored by women and the urban wealthy for their silent, odor-free operation and easy driving characteristics (some things never change). Early ICE cars required an awkward, and sometimes dangerous startup procedure of turning the crank by hand until the advent of the electric starter in 1912. Throttle, brake, and gearshift controls were not standardized until later, so the driver had to learn the nuances of controls for each vehicle.
Until about the middle of the 20th century, the U.S. had regional patchworks of road networks, and electricity did not become commonplace on a nationwide basis until the 1920s. The Ford Model T was capable of an average fuel consumption of 21 mpg. Although laughably inefficient by today’s standards for its modest output of only 20 hp, its 10-gallon tank enabled a range of around 200 miles. In the absence of a reliable and ubiquitous electrical grid in the 1920s, gasoline quickly became the fuel of choice in a nation that at the time was still largely characterized by long distances and large expanses of rural, agrarian areas.
In 1900, Porsche produced an electric car and this, the Semper Vivus hybrid. (Image courtesy Porsche)
I could get all “tinfoil-hat” on you and bring up conspiracy theories that “Big Oil” buried the technology, but in reality, it was practicality and pragmatism that tipped the scales in favor of gasoline at the time. In a version of alternate history, if a concerted effort at battery development would have started and continued for the last century, could we be driving around in EVs today with 1,000-mile ranges that could recharge in five minutes and maintain 99 percent state-of-charge for one million miles? Perhaps, but that didn’t happen.
We’re now at a place where EVs are nearing the tipping point for affordability and practicality as everyday transportation for the majority of drivers. However, when exploring some of the edge cases of transportation, namely recreational vehicles and powersports, gasoline’s persistent advantage of portability and potency won’t be overcome easily. I am eager to see the electrification of “all the things” but I’m not so delusional as to think that full electrification is a practical answer for all transportation or portable power scenarios at this particular moment in time.
(Main image by Michael Gaida from Pixabay)
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