StarTalk Radio - Engineering the World’s Fastest Cars with Jason Fenske

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

What's the maximum a car can accelerate? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, and Gary O’Reilly learn how fast cars can really go, how tires work, and the differences between combustion and electric cars with host of Engineering Explained, Jason Fenske.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/engineering-the-worlds-fastest-cars-with-jason-fenske/Thanks to our Patrons Brian Flowers, Everett Rubel, Sienna Howlett-Wagner, Scott Ware, and Charles Mugnolo for supporting us this week.Photo Credit: Maurizio Pesce from Milan, Italia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Sports Edition. Let me bring on my co-host, Gary O'Reilly. Gary, how you doing, man? Hey, Neil. All right. Former soccer pro from the UK and now retired and serving as our part-time announcer. But you announce other, you actually still announce soccer games, don't you? Yeah. Yeah, I get to pollute the airwaves.

Okay. And tell people who are much younger than me what they're doing wrong and sometimes what they're doing right. There you go. There you go. And Chuck, how are you doing, man? I'm doing great. I do the same thing as Gary, except without sports attached. Okay. I just tell young people what they're doing wrong and why they suck. So, Gary, what did you cook up, you and your producers cook up for today?

All right. We recently, or you recently, did an explainer, how fast can a car accelerate? And it triggered a lot of interest, and a real amount of interest. And our audience... This is our spinoff, just the 10-minute explainer. 10, 15-minute explainer, yeah.

I mean, it's been phenomenally successful, but this one really did sort of grab a certain audience. And they were asking, you know, get someone from Formula One on, get someone from NASCAR on. We want to know everything that's going on. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. And, well, FYI to all of our audience, we're working on that.

Okay. Hopefully we'll have both those boxes ticked in the coming months. So stand by, be ready. While we wait for those to drop, I'm going to pop the hood, take a look inside, find out how and why cars are doing 0-60 in under three seconds, which is bonkers for me, growing up with things that did it in nine.

Wait, for Americans, 0 means zero, okay? Yes, sorry. Zero to 60. 0. But first, I mean, I suppose really in the classic sense, we need someone to come along and kick the tires. So we found that person. And that person is Jason Fenske.

Now, if I've pronounced that correctly, congratulations, me. If I haven't, my apologies, Jason. You did great. Thanks, Gary. I did great. Yay. English isn't my first. Yes, it is my first language, yes.

He's a mechanical engineer. He's a YouTube car guru. I'll explain it that way. And he is founder, owner, and host of the Engineering Explained channel on YouTube. And this channel is so popular. It's got three and a half million subscribers and has been on the air for about the last 12 years. So, Neil. Well, wait, so that's not even what's impressive. Okay, three and a half million,

so what? The total number of views to all of his videos is more than 600 million. So, we're talking serious,

serious access into people's gearhead ways in the world. Yeah, but most of that was one guy without a life. Chuck speaks the world. Yeah, but most of that was one guy without a life.

Chuck speaks the truth. I appreciate you having me. What I like here was the introduction of, the audience wanted someone from Formula One, so we reached to the bottom of the barrel and found this guy. And we found an engineer. Found an engineer.

We've got these things in the pipeline, Jason. Yeah, they're really going to happen. Couldn't keep our audience waiting any longer. I don't think that, I think his point was, your intro sucked. No, no, no, no, no. I don't think that you put me in my deserving place.

No, no, no, we're joking. All right, so here's the thing. I put out a, what we call an explainer video, which is random stuff in our civilization that I think could benefit from highlighting the physics that's going on in it. And one of them was, you know, what's the maximum a car can accelerate under sort of normal conditions? And when you do that with sort of a frictional coefficient of one and which is rubber on

concrete or asphalt which is a very high friction level there you come up with more than three seconds but not much more and yet we realize that there's some cars that are doing better than that and the only way i understand that from my physics background is that the car is somehow attaching itself to the road and going beyond the coefficient of friction of one, maybe getting more than one as a coefficient of friction as from a dead stop zero to 60 acceleration. So we're trying to find out here from you, is that right? Were my my calculations correct and what is the future of this sort of acceleration crown that is currently owned by my record show here a tesla 2021 s 2.0 yeah model s i think is current fastest and i like your calculation methodology here i think it's very

cool and yes if you look at like, okay, if you have one G, if you have one gravity pulling down on that car, that's your max Excel, right? Up over three seconds, right. Yes, that gives you like something like 2.7 seconds, I believe it is, as your like theoretical limit. And yet we know it's possible to beat that, not only because it's done, but like you can look at a car

and say, okay, we have cars that have decelerated from 60 miles per hour to zero in less than 100 feet. And so that means the average acceleration or deceleration in this case is greater than 1G. They're doing what seems impossible.

So what you described is correct in that the tires... Wait, that can happen if you crash into a wall. Yeah, I was going to say. No Wait, that can happen if you crash into a wall. Yeah, I was going to say. No, it can't happen if you crash into a wall. Is that how we walk to now? But we're doing this purely with tires.

Oh, okay. Okay, gotcha, gotcha. Slow down with tires. All right, gotcha, gotcha. Yes. I mean, the reverse is true also, right? Like you can put a rocket on the back of a car, and then you're no longer limited by tires and your acceleration.

Correct. But as far as street legal tires, today's limit is about two seconds. Car companies have said they beat that. They're lying because there's this old industry standard of how we test zero to 60 that actually starts

at like six miles per hour. So it's nonsense. So you're really getting a rolling start. Yeah, yeah. Yes, exactly. That's what it's called. It's called rollout. And you get, everyone deletes the first foot and says, the first foot doesn't count.

And the first foot should count if it's a zero to 60. If it's a six to 60, all right, fine. Plus, Jason, your timings here are to the hundredth of a second. So these things matter, right? This Tesla we have in 2.06 seconds. The Ferrari LeFerrari SF90 at 2.1 seconds.

The Porsche 911 Turbo S lightweight, 2.24 seconds. Yep. And likely these numbers you're seeing are with rollout deducted so the real number would be about 0.2 to 0.3 seconds longer than what those numbers say um so for example when this tesla got the record and they said it was like 1.99 seconds the actual time was like 2.3 seconds you know they were like, we broke two seconds.

He didn't, but it's cool. It's still cool. I just got to tell you that that's kind of like an A-hole Elon Musk thing. Here comes an Elon joke. Okay. I feel it coming. Go on.

Get it out of your system. No, that was it. I'm just saying. Get it out of your system. That just seems so very Elon. You know what I mean? Yeah. He's not in his defense.

No, I know it's the standard in the industry. Yes, exactly. Porsche doesn't do it, so props to Porsche. We can direct positive vibes towards Porsche for doing it right. Now, how mad was Ferrari that Tesla beat them in a 0-60? That's got to piss them off. Oh, yeah. And it's interesting, too, because it's like you can spend $3 million on a car

or you can spend $100,000 on a car and they both hit 60 in the same amount of time. That's a bummer, right? That's how electric cars have really brought the price disparity down from performance cars. I didn't make that announcement. So, of course, the Tesla is electric. The Ferrari is hybrid. And didn't make that announcement. So, of course, the Tesla is electric, the Ferrari is hybrid, and the Porsche was internal combustion. So, we're actually comparing

three different kinds of motors here. Okay. Yes. All right. So, Jason, how are you cheating to beat the acceleration of 1G? What are you doing to arrive at that? Yeah.

So, I think it's an interesting question and it's like, it's difficult. I don't know. I guess it's a good answer. But if you think about like, how does a tire work? Like how does a gear work, for example? A gear works by meshing within a groove and you can push against that, right? And a tire works in a similar way where it meshes into the road. So it can push laterally against the road, whether that's for decelerating, accelerating, cornering, whatever. So you can exceed, you know, that 1G if you were to just assume a perfectly smooth surface, one sitting on the other. I don't see how you can exceed 1G if it's one smooth rubber on any other smooth surface, unless it's gummy and it's sticky.

So in other words, if you had a textured surface, then like you said, the gears, then the rubber can dig into the texture and then push off of it the way gears would. And then you're not limited to the friction. Correct. Okay. But when you want that texture to be on the road and not on the tire? Correct. Because if the tire is completely flat and the road is textured, then you get the road digging into the tire.

But if the tire is textured and the road is flat or even textured, you don't get as much grabbing. I don't think it matters. Okay. As long as one intersects the other. Jason, that's why we have you here. Talk, Jason. So the rubber is soft, right? The road is hard.

So the rubber is the one that kind of goes into the grooves of the road. The road is a very rough surface. You have, you know, softer rubber gives you a better launch. And so you have that rubber sink into the road. And then, you know, it propels you forward like a gear could. If it was a gear sitting on, you know, like a pinion. Right. like a gear could. If it was a gear sitting on, you know, like a pinion, rack and pinion type system where the wheel is, you know,

the pinion and the rack is on the ground and then you accelerate using that gear. Just using rubber instead of a gear and that rack. So the best case scenario would be to go zero to 60 on tires made of chewing gum. Which flavor?

Oh, it's got to be Bubblicious. It's got to be, yeah. Oh, okay. Wait, Jason. So are they doing this on the same track? And does that track have nicks and dings in it? And are they using the same rubber tires? Because if none of those are the same,

then we're not comparing which car can accelerate. We're not really doing that. It's all silly. It's all for hubris, right? Like that's why we do these comparisons. Chuck is kind of right about the chewing gum thing and that in drag races, they will actually like spray down essentially glue

so that when you launch, your tire is sitting on this glue right at the very start. So you get a really good start. So that is done. And that is the way that Tesla says that they got their 1.98 second or whatever it was. And so it's like, okay, it was done on a drag strip. You deleted some time and you used glue.

It's like, so once you put all these into like context, it's like, well, you can just take a drag tire, which is much more capable than street tires, and you can beat two seconds all day long. And then they forgot to mention they also use the Ferrari. That was the final thing we did. All right.

Elon Musk has become dick dastardly out of Wacky Races, right? So there's nothing he won't do to choose. I don't understand that sentence. Say that again? Do you know they sayly out of Wacky Races, right? So there's nothing he can't do, he won't do to change. I don't understand that sentence. Say that again? Do you know they say the animation Wacky Races? Oh. Oh, okay.

Dick Dastardly. Dick Dastardly. Yeah, Dick Dastardly with a double O. Okay, go ahead. No, no, that's fine. You were too busy being scientific. Okay. The rest of us were wasting our time in front of the TV, obviously.

So, okay, Jason, before we get to the rubber on the surface, what between an electric motor and an internal combustion engine is different that makes this thing go, put so much power and energy in there that they can do this sort of speed? So what's the difference really there? What's going on? Because I don't personally understand that much. Fundamentally, there's a different energy source, like a battery versus a fuel tank. But as far as how they accelerate, I think there's two key differences

between a combustion engine and an electric motor. The electric motor and how they behave, I should state. So the electric motor is going to have torque immediately. It starts out, its torque curve at zero is basically peak torque and it remains that way until you're limited in power. So it starts out, its torque curve at zero is basically peak torque, and it remains that way until you're limited in power. So you get all of your torque immediately,

right at the beginning when the core isn't moving. A combustion engine requires a certain RPM, so it has to rev up to a certain RPM in order to reach that peak torque. So you have a delay there in when, not only when you are able to reach your maximum acceleration, but also delay in when you ask for it versus when you receive it. So that's the second difference being the response of an electric motor. Hey, I want these electrons to move. They do that very quickly. The response of a combustion engine, I want this air that's in an intake to then go into a cylinder, get pulled down, get compressed, explode. You're asking for that to happen.

And, of course, that can't be an instant process. So as far as response, when you press on the pedal. And then it's got to turn the piston, which goes to the crankshaft, which goes to the thing, which goes to the wheel. All that's got to happen. Exactly. Yes. It's a long process. So when you press that pedal down, whichever go pedal it is, gas or electric,

the electric one is going to respond so much quicker than the gas one because so many more things have to happen for that combustion to start happening and to react to what you asked it to do. All right. One thing electricity is really good at is rotating things. So that's what turbines are, that's what turbines are. That's what, just rotate.

That's all it wants to do. And that's what it does best. So whereas gasoline, you got to like, you need your Rube Goldberg device to end up turning your wheels at the end of that path. Right. Yeah, we use reciprocating motion to create circular motion with combustion engines versusating motion to create circular motion with combustion engines

versus circular motion to create circular motion with electric motors. Exactly. Perfectly worded. Perfectly worded. The rotary engine does exist, and Mazda did just bring it back in Europe. Commercial. Yep. Which, by the way, no one bought into.

Like, not the way they thought. They were like, it's a rotary engine. And America was like, so what? Well, yeah. Okay, so describe, tell us about the Wankel engine. Well, one of the big flaws is that it burns oil by design. So you actually inject oil into the combustion chamber where this rotary is spinning. But it's very different in that traditional engine.

You have a piston that moves up and down. You have four strokes, and that gives you your combustion process. You still have these four cycles in a rotary engine. Intake, compression, power, exhaust. But it's all done with this little Dorito that spins inside of a housing. And so it has rotational motion from

the start. So it's a three-sided rotating thing, the Dorito. Yeah. You mentioned food. That's it. Chuck's going to be gone for a while. His mind's going to wander. So it's a three-sided rotating thing. A Dorito is a three-sided tortilla chain. You mentioned food. That's it. Chuck's going to be gone for a while now. His mind's going to wander. Now he's interested in it again.

I never knew I liked rotary engines until just now. Okay, I have to give a geopolitical historical fact here, if I may. It's a public service announcement. The Wankel engine, I remember when Mazda introduced it, the big selling point was, a big selling point, was that it had one-third or two-thirds fewer parts,

fewer moving parts than a regular engine, which meant it would not break down as often. And in a world where cars broke down, this was a highly desired feature. That was before cars, even internal combustion engine cars, were so reliable that no one is worried in the morning. But Jason, I don't know how old you are, but I'm old enough to remember. There was a chance every morning that your car might not start.

There was a chance, okay? And you did not always know if you'd get to work on time in your own car. So this was a selling point at a time when car engines basically failed. Cars would be on the side of the road with the hood open. That doesn't happen anymore. So if that's no longer a selling point, why would anyone want a Wankel engine? That's my question back to you, Jason. Well, I think the enthusiast spirit is probably the real answer of like why someone might want it today. Unfortunately, they brought it back

as a range extender. So I don't think that's what people were looking for. Okay, but more miles per gallon. Okay. Yeah. Yes, exactly. So basically just to generate electricity. The advantage miles to tens is its size. So they're very compact because you have three chambers where combustion is basically this four-stroke cycle is occurring in three separate places at any given time. Whereas in a piston cylinder engine, if you have one cylinder, you have one place where that's happening. So you can have really good power density, meaning the engine can be very small and compact. That's its biggest advantage.

It has emissions disadvantages up until this point. Maybe Mazda has created some tricks for the one that's coming out. But yeah, there aren't huge upsides to it returning other than it's cool. You lost me at wanker. That's the problem. There's an L on the end there. Wanker. That's the problem. What? There's an L on the end there. Wanker. Wanker.

Oh. Never let the truth get in the way of the game. One of Chuck's mottos. We got to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk to Jason about, is there anything that's limiting the top speed of cars at all? Where does that go? Where does that go?

Where does that land? When we come back with our special guest, Jason Fenske on StarTalk Sports Edition. We're back. StarTalk Sports Edition. Today, we are not up in the hood. We are under the hood. Hey. Caught me by surprise on that one.

I thought that should show. Gotta tell the truth. So we're up under the hood with Jason Fenske. And Jason, you have a whole platform. Engineering Explained. I don't know. So we're up under the hood with Jason Fenske. And Jason, you have a whole platform, Engineering Explained. Could you just give us a minute? Tell us what that is. Sure. So the idea started back when I was in college about 12 years ago.

Majoring in? Majoring in mechanical engineering. There you go. Go for it. I thought I might actually learn something about cars while I was getting this major, and I didn't. I just did a bunch of math problems. So that was kind of disappointing.

So I created this platform, which was basically taking the intimidation out of cars from an engineering standpoint. They're very complicated. So the platform essentially is, how do cars work from an engineering standpoint? In a bunch of videos, just kind of breaking it down to bite-size digestible pieces of information.

I love it. I love it. A very popular YouTube destination with like a zillion viewers, views of all of the videos. We're not at a billion yet, so I don't think I can say a zillion, but it would be cool to achieve a billion. A zillion is just some number bigger than you remembered to say. But yeah, when you hit a billion, come back here. We'll teach you how to say the word. Yeah, great. All right, so Jason, tell us what...

Wait, I don't think you answered me from the first segment. Oh, I do that. Is there some feature of the track or was it glue they sprayed on the tires only for that two second acceleration compare comparison um we're all three cars the tesla the ferrari and the uh porsche were coming in at around two seconds why don't they just why don't they just dig grooves why don't they just dig grooves into the track? That would be a train. That would just make it a train.

So like the big companies that do this testing, aside from the brands themselves, like Car and Driver Motor Trend, the big names in doing these tests, they do things consistently. So they have their one track that they do it at. They apply atmospheric weather corrections to their numbers. So there is a standard in place so that you can say, this is fair to compare these two. You're on different tires. So that

alone means they're going to have differences, right? It's whatever tire the car company chose to put on them. And some companies will be a little mischievous here and say, we offer this tire as the sports package so they can get these good numbers. And then realistically, they want you to get a different tire or something like that. Right, right. A more road-friendly tire for your life. But yeah, I think in the example with Tesla, they picked the track where they said it had to be done at.

They said it needed to use this glue. They wouldn't let MotorTrend do it at their own facility until later MotorTrend argued enough. And then eventually they let them do it. Yeah, and then they got different numbers. And that's where the real number of 2.3 comes from. Okay, so we all know, or you may have paid attention, it started maybe 15 years ago on off-ramps that have a sharp curve. It started maybe 15 years ago on off-ramps that have a sharp curve. There are grooves in the road that enable the car to,

that prevent the car from sliding off into the railing on the outer edge of that turn. And those grooves came from NASA when they wanted to make sure the space shuttle, when it landed, because it doesn't because it lands with no engine, right? So it's just parachutes and some brakes. So it can't reverse the thrust of the engine to slow down. So space shuttle runways are very long. They wanted to make sure that the shuttle wouldn't drift from crosswinds or anything.

So they grooved it. Upon learning how effective that was, that became part of our road design for exits that where you're coming from high speed, you have to get to low speed. My question to you, Jason, is… I thought it was just lazy road workers not finishing the road. I didn't even know this, but now I'm going to get a question about it. Yeah, so now just check it out. And somewhere there's been a risk from before, there are these grooves. So the rubber cannot slide sideways against it easily.

All right? You will not skid sideways when you have grooves because the rubber is digging in, just like you said earlier, Jason, with the gearing. My question to you is, if you make a speed track where those grooves are now sideways to you, okay? They're not in the direction you're going.

They're at right angles. Now the tire can dig in like grooves of a gear, and now you could, sky's the limit in the acceleration. It would seem to me. You're right. You're right. I think that would work. I didn't know about the grooves thing. I had always thought it was just a wear thing

because I guess some vehicles have different track widths, so it would be difficult to say this is the set groove for everyone. But you're absolutely right about the tire thing. And in fact, in off-road tires, so with most tires that come on our cars, the tread is all basically on the outside of that tire, the part that touches the ground. On off-road tires, you'll see that tread come down on the sidewalls. And so the reason for that is because off-road, you may be coming up to a rock. And so, you know, that rock has, let's say, a 90-degree angle.

You want to use all the grip you have. So you'll use both contact surfaces, whether it's the right side of the tire or beneath the tire, to climb up. I never thought about that. You can do something very similar with grooves in a track. Okay. Which is why when you watch those… It was just a straight line.

When you look at those YouTube videos, it looks like these off-road trucks are Spider-Man. They're literally climbing up rocks. It's so weird. My sister has a car that can do that. Each wheel can be independently not only suspended, that's easy, but they can also turn differently. I mean,

it's crazy. They all have steering. They all have steering. It is alive. Wow. All right. So Jason, I'm finally rested on the acceleration questions. So now let me ask you, how come no one's going 300 miles an hour on a racetrack? What's going on there? Have we not? Yet. So, I guess maybe we haven't. I think there's a few car companies that have products that say it can be done. I thought Bugatti hit 300.

Yeah, I think Bugatti did hit 300. I don't want to say things. Yeah, it's going to look poorly now no matter what because I don't know. But I think Bugatti did do it. They have the capability. There's a few other cars out there that are capable. And essentially, it's a power question and not a tire question, which is kind of fun. You're limited by aerodynamic drag.

So however much power you put in your car and however small you make it, the smaller you make it, the less drag it's going to have. The more aerodynamic you make it, the less drag it's going to have. And more aerodynamic you make it, the less drag it's going to have. And then the more power you give it. Tell us how drag scales with velocity, with speed. So the force of drag is, the equation has velocity squared in it. Power is force times velocity, so power is velocity cubed. So when it comes to aerodynamic drag the force coming against you is increasing with a squared exponent as you reach higher speeds so it's very difficult to overcome you need a lot more power

each time you want to go a little bit faster yeah so so in other words so the air resistance against you is significant at high speeds and practically ignorable at low speeds. Is that a fair statement there? Yes. Yes, exactly. So in like with zero to 60 times, one thing that you can use to help in acceleration is downforce, but you don't have that at low speeds because you don't really have much aerodynamic drag. There's nothing helping to push your car down on the ground because you could use downforce

to theoretically have greater acceleration. If you have a big force pushing your car down down then that means the amount of grip you have is greater and thus you can accelerate faster is it is it cheating to draft a car above that's above the speed oh i don't i don't think they allow it as far as like if you say you got the record and you were just, you know, behind a 747. By the way, I told you, I said this story in one other episode. I'm going to say it again. I had a car where you could see what your instantaneous miles per gallon was. All right.

Yes. All cars can do that, right? Most today can. So I was always fascinated by that. What was my miles per gallon as I went uphill? What was it as I was going horizontal? That was downhill. day can so i was always fascinated by that what was my miles per gallon as i went uphill what was it as i was going horizontal yes that was downhill obviously the miles per gallon goes up very high and i said let me try something and i took the car and i drove i would say dangerously close i don't recommend this at home to uh 18 wheeler truck And as I got closer and closer,

I'm on a level road now, and I was getting 24 miles per gallon, which was the advertised sort of highway mileage for this car. As I got closer, it then said 28 miles per gallon, 30, 35, 50, 100, infinity. It could not, when I was within 12 feet of the back door of the car. You created a perpetual motion machine in that moment. I was like, holy shit.

I'm using no energy right now, but now I can't just, you know, text my friend to tell them that because I'll die if the truck stops short. But it was, that drafting is something. I mean, that's very real phenomenon. Yes. You know, a similar comparison, if you think about wake surfing, so a boat is going along and you're surfing the wake of that boat, you're using no energy, right? You're not using anything to propel you. You're using the energy of the vehicle in front of you. So that truck can have a wake behind it of this like suction because it's punching this giant hole in the air and then

it's creating this suction behind it. Perhaps some of that suction could even be pulling you, meaning, yeah, your energy use could be zero if you had the perfect design. And I would add that many people don't get this right, and you probably see this, Jason, And I would add that many people don't get this right, and you probably see this, Jason, that when you draft off of someone else, you make them more efficient. Yes, exactly.

They say, get off my back. I don't want to drag you. No, you're not. No, you're not. I'm making you more aerodynamic by coming behind and disrupting the vacuum that would otherwise be pulling you backwards. I don't think we should excuse tailgating, though. I think what we're going to do right now and disrupting the vacuum that would otherwise be pulling you backwards. This is the geese flying thing, isn't it? I think what we're going to do right now is create a dangerous precedent

for drivers who are just like, screw that. Gas is high. New gas is high. Okay, Jason, go back to the electric vehicles for the time being. Sure. We've seen it on a combustion engine. Man went, I need to make this thing go faster, and then did the turbo.

Is there such a thing that you can bring into an electric motor that has a similar effect? Because if we're talking about cars that go fast, we are looking mainly at electric vehicles now. Well, don't confuse acceleration with top speed. So acceleration, but now we need to get a top speed up

for these sort of things. Are we, do you, is there an equivalent for the turbo for an electric motor? I like this question. And my initial thought about it is no, but there's still kind of a way, right? Like, the question is, thought about it is no, but there's still kind of a way, right?

The question is, can you get more power out of a motor? And you can with electric motors just like you can with combustion engines. It's simply a matter of heat, and eventually that heat means the device fails, whether it's a combustion engine or an electric motor.

I think the answer to your question as it relates to electric cars is a bigger battery. Because basically what happens with batteries is that there is a certain discharge rate, which we say is acceptable, whatever that may be. And so if you have a small battery on a per cell basis, that one individual cell, there's a maximum limit of power that can go out of it. So if you have more cells, that means there's a greater maximum power. So simply the size of the battery here. So that is why we see all these records today.

It is literally what a battery, the word battery means. It's like a series of these cells, right? When you have a battery of armor, it's a series. So that is the, we think of batteries as a Duracell, right? But it is literally the sequence of these cells. Go on, I have to slip that in there.

Yes, yes. No, that's very fair. So the more of these you have, which is why you see cars like, you know, the Tesla or the Porsche Taycan or the Lucid Air hitting these records, it's because they have massive battery packs. You won't see a small battery vehicle hitting these giant numbers.

And the reason is the battery is too small, so it doesn't have as much power to discharge. So it's very different from like a fuel tank because no one goes, oh, the size of my fuel tank is huge. Like no one cares, whatever, you can drive far, cool. That doesn't impact how much power you can make. How much power you can make is impacted by how quickly you can put that fuel into your engine.

Jason, we're talking now we're jacking the weight up. Now the blessing becomes a curse. Well, it's disappointing. It's disappointing because there's not this small single device like a turbo that you throw in and suddenly you're making 50% more power. It's like you can tune the battery to go to a higher discharge rate and you can put more power in your motor. It doesn't mean that will be reliable. It doesn't mean your things will last as long, but it can be done above like there's know, there's limits that we say this is safe and

it will last us 200,000 miles. Now I got to bring Gary's question back in. And so the point is, what you're saying is I can go faster, all other things being equal, if I have a bigger battery because then I have more energy to draw from. However, now I'm going really fast, but I'm in a very high air resistance regime, A. Yes. B, the mass of the car is huge now. Yes.

Is there some plateau where there's no faster speed an electric car can go because the battery would have to be too damn large? That's a great question. I don't know what the limit would be, but I mean, I think it would be quite high because you can just think about something that's very long and narrow, right? Like a train. Like if you have the space to do it, I think putting practical limits on that question could make it fun. If you have the space to do it, like there's so much energy you can put in a battery and you can make it really long.

And so you could have this absurd number that could happen but like that would happen on city streets uh you know within a mile of distance yeah then it becomes a much more fun question so is this the challenge now for car designers for or unless it's battery designers in in separate from the car designers not really because think about it right now. I mean, what's the top speed on these electric cars? It's a buck whatever. Yeah, 80. Like, how much more do you want to...

I mean, how much faster do you really want a car to go? Chuck, how many people do you think are asking that question right now? I want this thing to go faster. What municipality, what government is going to say, oh, yeah, bring your 300 mile an hour, you know, electric car.

Mass produce that and put it on the street. No. No. Germany. No government is going to. Germany for one. The Autobahn. The left lane. You got me. I forgot about the Autobahn. That's fine. Let's be honest. They are Germans. They're very restricted people. Okay?

Let's be clear. They're the only people on Earth that you can give no speed limit, and they actually respect the fact that there's no speed limit. I mean, okay, Chuck. Chuck raises an excellent point, though, in that I think realistically, if you were to ask someone who drove, let's say, one of these insanely fast electric cars, do you want it to be faster? They might want it to be lighter. They might want it to handle better.

But I don't necessarily think they're going to say, oh, yeah, it wasn't quick enough for me. It's like, this is as quick as it gets. And keep in mind, no one mentioned this, that at some level, it's not how fast you can go. Does the car still maneuver at those speeds? Right. Can you do things in the car? It goes 260 miles an hour, but it doesn't turn. It doesn't turn.

It's a straight line. And the only way to stop, the brakes won't work because they're not hard. See, the thing is for me now, is it not then top speed that we are now calling our holy grail for EVs? Is it, I need this thing to go cross country. I need a thousand plus miles out of this.

It's range more than speed. It's all about range. I got to tell you, Neil has a very cool electric vehicle. And the first time I was in it, he scared the bejesus out of me. I'm still trying to rub the brown stains off the car. Listen, I ride motorcycles,

and it's the closest thing to a motorcycle acceleration that I've ever experienced in a car. Yeah, it was there for you. It's just there. It's just always there. You need it. Guys, we've got to take a quick break. When we come back in the third segment,

Jason Fenske will tell us what is the future of fuel and energy that's going to drive us on the countryside or on the racetrack when StarTalk Sports Edition continues. We're back. StarTalk Sports Edition. This one is up under the hood. How do cars work? How do engines work? We've got Jason Fenske from Engineering Explained.

There's an entire universe, an entire culture he built around his expertise in mechanical engineering and his interest in cars, which is a beautiful place to hang out, especially if you're a car geek, as so many people are. So Jason, I want to just sort of lead off with just a reflection on a bit of physics history. So for the longest while, just a reflection on a bit of physics history. So for the longest while, we had the steam engine. It was great. And the first automobiles had steam engines in them, all right?

Of course they would. Why wouldn't they? Before the internal combustion engine was perfected by, I guess, Carl Benz. But my point here is people said, I got an engine. I can convert chemical energy into kinetic energy. Why don't I make an airplane out of this? Okay. So they started trying to design airplanes with steam engines. And they found out that steam engines just weren't powerful enough.

So they said, let's build a bigger steam engine. And so they build a bigger steam engine. What are they doing? They're heating coal or wood. It boils water the water evaporates creates a steam pressure that drives a turbine or drives whatever it is you need it to drive the point is that steam engines that were powerful enough to fly an airplane made the airplane too heavy to fly. Period.

And it was this weird, frustrating fact. And Langley, in fact, has whole books attempting to fly using steam engines. And this didn't work, and plan B didn't work, and there he is scratching his head. And it was not until the internal combustion engine, which got a lot of energy in a small volume, could then be uplifted by the Wright brothers into the Wright Flyer. And that gave us airplanes. And so I'm just fascinated, Jason, when you describe the fact that, yeah, if you want to make your electric cargo faster, just give it a bigger battery. And at some point, I'm saying that's not going to work. We're going to top out. But anyway, that was just my historical note there. But let's continue this. Jason, what's the future of fuel here? What are we talking about? Yeah, so I think, like, let's take

this. If you think about airplanes, and you brought brought up airplanes and it's a great point, it is very difficult to have commercial flight today using electric power because energy density is not there. Jet fuel puts a ton of energy into a very small amount of space, not much weight. Electric car batteries are massive. They're super heavy and they don't have that much energy. To give people an idea, say take a modern Tesla with a 100-kilowatt-hour battery pack. That's about three gallons of gasoline. So this is an object that weighs over 1,000 pounds, and it has the energy equivalence of about three gallons of gas. In other words, about 20 pounds of gas. That's a huge difference, right?

Now, electric cars are way more efficient, so there's an advantage there in that when gasoline combusts, you're at maybe 33% efficiency. If you're doing well, an electric motor can be at 95% efficiency. So you can triple your efficiency, but you still have to have this giant object. So the challenge is going to be weight. Just to say that another way, so you have the same energy in an electric battery and in your three gallons of gas. The three gallons of gas, like you said,

weighs 20 pounds. The battery weighs 1,000 pounds. However, you'll get many more miles out of those 1,000 pounds for the same amount of energy in the battery than you would have

out of the gasoline. Yes. Because of the efficiency of the motor. Yeah, okay, gotcha. Yes, exactly, which is why we don't have three gallon gasoline cars, right? They're 12, 15, 20 gallons.

So you can actually drive a useful distance. How big is a motorcycle tank? It says three gallons. Yeah, those are small. Yeah. Okay. Go on. So as far as, hey, can we solve this airplane problem without using gasoline?

There are ways to do it. Hydrogen is one fuel which we can use, and we're experimenting with cars. There's been production cars that use hydrogen, I believe, actually. Maybe I'm wrong on that statement. No, no, you're right. So fuel cell, as far as like the Mirai.

The fuel cells. And then, yeah, Honda Clarity. And so then from hydrogen, there's also another step you can take because hydrogen itself is not very dense. So if we go back to our analogy, we've got three gallons of gas, we've got, you know, a thousand pounds of battery.

One gallon of gasoline stored, the way we store hydrogen today, which is like as a high pressure gas, we need about seven gallons of hydrogen. So you still need a lot of space. Hydrogen is very light. That's a good thing. But it takes up a huge amount of

space. So, you know, if you have a 10-gallon tank in your car, you now need a 70-gallon tank to go the same distance. You need a bubble butt on your car. Yes. Hydrogen is also very flammable. I was going to say, is hydrogen going to lead to a car that basically you name,

oh, the humanity. No. Oh, the humanity. The Hindenburg. But, yeah, Jason, hydrogen is flammable, but so is gasoline. So what's the trade-off here? Well, the trade-off is that, oh, and it's actually on, this is my whiteboard combustion on hydrogen.

But as you burn hydrogen with oxygen, your only emissions is water. So H2O. So that's the big advantage in that you don't have CO2 produced as a byproduct of this combustion product. So, yeah, that's the advantage. Is hydrogen more volatile than gasoline? I mean, because Neil brings up a great point. They're both combustible.

So is one more volatile? I don't know the answer to that question. Do you want to test it? I'll tell you. So, if you have a basin of gasoline and you toss in a match,

it'll first light the vapors, because there's a lot of gasoline-oxygen mixture there, and then the top of the gasoline will just burn. Whereas if you light a balloon filled with hydrogen, the whole thing explodes instantly. Yes.

Great. Yeah. By the way, so do you remember Indiana Jones, where he's at the Nazi base camp in the desert, and he gets into the fight with that big pugilist guy, and the gasoline spills, and then it ignites at one end. And then it works its way all the way through the little snake.

If that was a line of hydrogen, the whole thing would just explode all at once. That would have been a terrible scene. Another challenge. People, car enthusiasts in particular, like to look at hydrogen as a solution that is not electric cars. And another big challenge with it, as we're talking about this volatility here, is that you have these tanks and they're at 10,000 PSI.

That is what it is stored at in order to get enough hydrogen into a small enough space that it becomes useful. Again, we're still way off the gasoline. By the way, in rocket launches, it's not even about the pressure. It's about cooling it. So they cool the hydrogen until it liquefies. Now, a liquid hydrogen is way denser

than any gaseous hydrogen even at high pressure. But the rocket is plugged in to freezer... Yes. Elements. Elements right until it's ready to launch. So BMW did this. That's why there was ice falling off of it in Florida.

Remember, you see the ice fall off on a launch. That's why. That's why this is happening. So go on. So BMW actually did this. They had a liquid hydrogen car called the Hydrogen 7 in like 2007. The challenge is, as it's sitting in your garage, of course, that hydrogen starts to rise in temperature, right? So even though they had this really well insulated fuel tank, eventually you have to let that fuel

out. So they said in about 12 days, you can lose your whole fuel tank, which like, we don't want that, right? By the way, I remember when they were parading that around, and they gifted me, I think actually in my office, I have a one, a half liter canister of water, and it says BMW exhaust from when they were parading around that 7. Because it was based on their Model 7, I think. What a great marketing team they have. Yes, yes.

So, I mean, okay, Jason, we've gone through hydrogen and we're kind of like coming up with a whole load of no's. Yes. As this is. Yes. So there must be this between situation. There's another step. Is it the biofuels?

I mean, Formula One racing is going sustainable with its fuels. Really? Yes. Yeah. We're looking at 2026, they're going to have

all sustainable fuels in their hybrid racing cars and I think by 2030 they're hoping, he says, that they'll be carbon neutral

by 2030. Okay, so these will be, so this will be Formula Two, not Formula One. Oh, thank you. So, I this would be Formula 2, not Formula 1. Oh, thank you. So, I mean, with sustainable foods,

are we at this flux capacitor on our DeLorean? Are we just going to be putting trash in this? We can essentially make gasoline. We can take hydrogen. We can take CO2. We can do some fancy chemistry, and we can create gasoline without ever having taken anything out from the ground as far as fossil fuels. The challenge is it's very expensive and it takes a lot of energy.

So for a racing series like Formula One, that's no problem. They can spend $50 a gallon and they're not going to care. and they're not going to care. Porsche has said recently that they think their current price per gallon of a synthetic fuel that's made using these processes is about $40 a gallon. And they want to get it down to like- Oh, no problem. Yeah, exactly. So it's like, we can say this, and if we can get it cheap, great.

But you have to think about theoretical limits, right? Like, there is a certain amount of energy required to create that fuel. And that will always be greater than if you were to just take that energy and put it in a battery and then move the car. Right. So there are processes, maybe like airplanes,

where, hey, we don't have the capacity to carry all this weight. Maybe we should go the synthetic route, even though it's less efficient from a total energy standpoint. It's green, so that's great. We didn't have net emissions from it. But for things like cars, it's very challenging.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the oil in the ground, other than the cost to extract it, is basically free energy. It's free. It's sitting there. Nature made that energy density in the oil, right? And you take it out and it's ready to use. So interesting you say that, Jason, that we have the ability to just basically make gasoline,

but it takes more energy than the energy you'd get out of the gasoline you made. So it would have to be for a purpose. The sun made that oil, but the sun is also available to us at all times. oil, but the sun is also available to us at all times. And I think the real path forward is batteries and solar together. So, you know, some means of sustaining and increasing the gain of a battery than, you know, than burning something. This public service announcement brought to you by Chuck Nice. Thank you. You know how I feel about fossil fuels. We all know how I feel about fossil fuels.

Before we get to Chuck's solution, there's ethanol e-fuels. Yeah, what about all that? What about all that? Yeah, so where are we with using them? Because they're used in Formula One and in IndyCar, but they use different e-fuels. One is an E10, one is an E85. Yes.

So what are the, you know, does this produce Chanel number five as a byproduct or water or what does it do? These are challenging because if you look at what the people who make it say, you know, one perspective, they say this is 60% of the emissions, talking about ethanol coming from corn here, this is 60% of emissions as gasoline. So it's still a significant amount, though a significant savings, you know, according to the best case of the industry that creates it. If you look at studies that have been done on what are the actual emissions, some say it's equal, if not higher, than gasoline.

And so there's this spectrum of, okay, maybe at best we do what? A 40% improvement using corn-based ethanol. There are better solutions. You don't have to use corn. You can use all kinds of different crops. Sugar is much better than corn anyway. But there's all kinds of lobbying issues there because America makes corn. We don't make sugar.

Yes. Yes. Yes, exactly. So we're starting from a problematic point because we've decided corn must be the way America does it. And unfortunately, it's not the best way to do it. The emissions will always be greater than other solutions. All right. We got to land this plane or park this car. Before we do, Neil. What?

Before we do, there's something that's kind of an itch I need to scratch here. We talk about batteries. We talk about how we're going to make them lighter, how they can store more, how they can do this, how we can weigh less, et cetera. But what are we doing with disposal? Because these things are packed full of rare earth minerals, right? And we're going to just tip them into a landfill site and walk away? Because we're solving one problem while we create another. So where are we going forward with this? You sound like you're blaming Jason for it. into a landfill site and walk away? Because we're solving one problem while we create another.

So where are we going forward with this? Sorry to sort of... You sound like you're blaming Jason for it, man. No, no, no, no, no. Like I said, this is a curiosity. Yeah, Jason. What's up, man? What's up with that? What's your problem, bro?

All right. I just like putting poison into soil. Yeah. If you've got a connecting flight, I'm sorry, but we're circling the airport now before this baby lands. Go. No, I think it's a great point

and I feel like it should be discussed more and I feel like it's one of those things where it's just like, oh, like we can ignore that because EV is so new and we don't have an insane quantity of dead EV battery pack just sitting there useless, right?

I don't know from a chemistry standpoint if there are super hard changes that occur within the battery. But to the best of my knowledge, all the elements are still in there, right? Yeah, I think so. That's fair. So it's currently mostly a matter of cost. Is it worth doing? And we like to historically do things based purely on cost

and disregard any other factors. And you can shift the cost to the environment and say, well, the environment got screwed, but I saved a dollar. So I would prefer to see that we do this the right way, right? And we recycle all of these. And I don't think, again, it's that easy to just throw your electric car battery in the trash. I was going to say.

They're not going to just pick it up. As this scales, I think what we'll see is that battery collection and battery recycling becomes a business and an industry in itself. Yes. And when the profit presents itself in that industry,

those problems will almost take care of themselves because somebody will be making money. Even if it is the actual battery company manufacturers. But somebody, whether it's a secondary market or the battery manufacturers themselves or the end user in terms of recouping costs, somebody's going to make money somewhere and that's where you'll see incentives. Yes.

Chuck Nice for a city council. Chuck Nice is running for city council. Well, you can think of that battery as like a concentrated solution of all the elements you need to make batteries. So from that standpoint, it's like, this is very valuable. It has all the stuff that I want. And there are small companies today that are doing this process and trying to split the minerals and then reselling them. And one other point that was left unnoted, that we seem to forget that the act of making an electric car does itself have

a carbon footprint. And that's not often folded into what it is people say they're saving for having done so. So true. We gotta end it there. Jason, it's been a delight to have you on this. Good stuff. Thank you for having me. Hey, Jason.

I really appreciate it. We can't make this the end of our conversations about this because cars are endlessly fascinating. They're past, present, and future. And that's where your head is up under the hood, if not in the hood, and that's good enough for us.

Thank you so much. Really appreciate y'all having me. You got it. All right. Chuck, Gary, we got to call it quits there. Always a pleasure. So, Neil deGrasse Tyson here for a StarTalk Sports Edition. This one was up under the hood, how cars work, basically, with our special guest, Jason Fenske. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.