Electric powersports, how technology really progresses and the long tailed future of ICE

The electrification of everything is full steam ahead. Drive through any city in America and the once rare (dare I say exotic) Tesla seems as ubiquitous as any other car on the road. Go to any EV digital media outlet and you’ll find a slew of press releases announcing all sorts of incredible electrified machines; from mind melting supercars to snowmobiles to the recently announced flying electric car. Anything that can be put to motion has engineers scrambling to replace gas engines with motors and gas tanks with batteries. However, this post is to broadly discuss the idea that much of this electrification is happening far too soon with billions of dollars of value destruction teetering on the cliff of imperfect timing. IE, these companies are betting too much against a technology that is not where it needs to be (nor will it be) to meet the mission requirements of the underlying product. ‘

Against the lens of human existence on this planet, we live in the wildest & fastest changing of times. Technological progress, at least in semiconductors & software, has been moving forward at an exponential clip for over 1/2 a century.

Though we may be bumping into first principles limitations of Moore’s Law, it seems to continue, at least in output, through other means of (parallel) compute & clever softwar engineering. We aren’t surprised when the software, hardware and underlying experience of whatever device we are buying is an order of magnitude better after only a handful of years of innovation. This is what we as consumers expect; change at this rate is the benchmark. However, when one shifts to a wider lens, this exponential technological change over long periods of time is only reserved for one industry (broadly speaking “tech” or “tech adjacent”), whereas most other industries progress much more slowly and in much chunkier ways.

It turns out the kind of progress we are accustomed to recognizing with respect to bits, bytes & transistors in silicone does not translate to that of atoms and energy storage and as a result EVs have two massive headwinds:

1. Batteries are far too heavy for many (otherwise obvious) applications.
2. The pace of battery innovation is slow relative to the need of these applications.

Lets address these two claims by first comparing the weight of a Tesla Model Y battery to that of an equivalent gas tank. To do this analysis, we need to know how much energy, measured in kwh, in one gallon of gas. Without making this a proof, the most agreed upon figure is a gallon of gas stores roughly 33.7 killowatt hours of energy. A Tesla Model Y Performance (my car, I’m using my car because this is my blog and it is all about me) has an ~82kwh battery. Some easy math here = 82/33.7 = 2.43. This is to say the Model Y “gas tank”, measured in gasoline gallons, would equate to roughly 2.43 gallons.

However, an electric motor is much more efficient than ICE at converting stored energy to kinetic energy (motion down the road). There is a lot of range to what I’m about to type, but gasoline ICE is somewhere between 12-30% efficient whereas an electric motor is between 77-90+% efficient. For the purpose of this blog post, lets use 22% for ICE and 85% for EV. This means your proverbial gallon of gas in your electric vehicle goes about 3.86x further.

Revisiting our earlier math, we need to take our 2.43 gallon “tank” and multiply it by a 3.86 efficiency boost which gives you 9.4. This is to say the Tesla 82khw battery is akin to a ~9.4 gallon tank of gas. Does this math checkout? Well, if you take Tesla’s supposed range (300) and divide it by its virtual gas tank size (9.4) you get 32 mpg which seems about right for a car of its size and weight. Obviously, there is a range of possible outcomes to the cocktail math used in this post, but we’re driving toward the all too important point – 9.4 gallons of gas in electric form weighs about 1,700 pounds or one gallon of electric gasoline weighs ~181 pounds or roughly 30 times more than a 6 pound gallon of gasoline. (worth noting, gasoline requires a container – ie a tank – which does add a marginal amount of weight with a 10 gallon tank weighing roughly 20 pounds).

While I recognize I’m ignoring certain driveline, transmission & other ICE related weights, we are an order of magnitude off of electricity being relatively close to an ICE when it comes to energy density & storage. Why does this all matter? Well, outside your standard around-town automobile, it turns out weight matters, a lot. Specifically, you start running into two problems very quickly as we begin to electrify everything.

1. The vehicle is flat too heavy if you put enough energy storage on board. This is the case with nearly all powersports (dirt bikes, snowmobiles, boats etc) or anything that flies. You might be able to get it off the ground, but you’ll be hard pressed to get flight times north of 20 minutes for any kind of “flying electric car” or similar.
2. Where weight is less an issue, you may be able to put enough energy storage onboard (though its ridiculously heavy) but now you have a charging problem. IE, even at current supercharger rates, it takes way too long to charge the batteries. This is what you’d run into with all heavy equipment, longer range semi trucks etc. There are some clever solutions here, but none of them all that scalable, especially against our ever-strained electric grid.

“But Jeff, Netflix started as a mail based DVD service because Reed Hastings saw the broadband revolution coming, won’t this be the same”?

In a word, no. Most of the EV applications outside the #runaroundtown car are banking on a huge breakthrough in battery technology beyond that the world has never seen. The below chart gives a rough estimation of the battery improvements relative to Shannon’s and Moore’s Law. We are seeing continued optimization, not the kind of “propeller airplane” to “jet engine” breakthroughs we’d need to expect a real world electrification of all things.

While I wouldn’t bet against this kind of breakthrough from ever happening, the “when” will likely be something akin to waiting on Fusion (perpetually 10 years ago), a broad cure for cancer, or the reversal of aging. Its the kind of breakthrough that when it happens, will change everything, but it won’t come about through current optimization strategies. Instead, it requires a complete paradigm shift that touches our understanding of both physics and chemistry. As a result, there are entire companies built upon a false hypothesis. Current battery technology is not able to support the mission of many of these products, and the rate of progress is far too slow for it to “catch up” before the company goes bankrupt (or is forced to pivot).

As unpopular as this statement may be – hydrocarbons will remain a huge part of putting humans to motion well into this century.

Jeff’s Note in Retrospect: This post ignores other challenges of the electrification of everything such as the burden it puts on an ever-aging grid, how many cycles a battery really lasts, the mining challenges (relative to the oil and gas extraction challenges) and recycling of the batteries.