R32 GTR EV? The leaf of the Godzilla's!

[PranK]

https://www.dezeen.com/2025/01/06/nissan-electric-r32-skyline-gt-r-godzilla-sports-car/

 

I reckon this is pretty cool. Lots of other Resto mods have turned to ev power.

[GTSBoy]

You reckon?

I have to disagree. Notwithstanding that at some point we may all be forced to do this to our cars if we want to keep driving them, there is absolutely nothing about an electric-converted-previously-IC-car that is ever good. EVs that are built by OEMs on platforms that were originally IC already suck, let alone the shitty outcomes that result from doing it as a retro to something that was actually built as an IC car. This is because the platform really needs to be designed to house the battery in a useful place (ie, down as low as possible) and the motors are properly located relative to the wheels that they have to drive. Converted platforms already suck at this. But when you try to shove sufficient battery capacity into a previously IC car, you can't put it down on/in the floor, because that space doesn't exist. You can't find enough space where the fuel tank used to be (if it is an inboard fuel tank) and you don't want to hang it out behind the rear axle line if you had a rear fuel tank. And there's not enough space in the tunnel if you still want to use it for anything remotely like what it was originally used for. The engine bay is too big for a motor, and you'd really prefer that the motor for the rear wheels wasn't in the front engine bay anyway. And there's not enough room where the diff was for a proper man-sized E motor.

And then.... there is the complete lack of soul and emotion that is provided by EVs.

There are some cracking restomods out there. Like the Alfaholics GTA thingo. But it is petrol powered. Look at the alternative EV version of a GTA restomod by Totem. it is jaw droppingly beautiful. But by all reports is is objectively awful to drive, despite having 600 HP or something, simply because there is nothing there. It sounds like a sewing machine or a leaf blower. It should scream and wail and make the hairs on your neck stand up.

Oh, and it's 1500 bloody kg in a car that was <900kg when new. GTRs are heavy enough as it is without pushing them up to 2tonnes worth of pork.

[PranK]

Hahaha yep, point(s) taken.

I just like seeing different things and an EV in an R32 is pretty different.

I'm not on the EV band wagon, I'm waiting for synthetic fuels or hydrogen personally. 

[GTSBoy]

H2 (for cars) will never happen. It's not reasonable for any number of reasons. It's also not reasonable for almost all of the industrial uses that the fanbois say that it will be used for, again for a large number of reasons. There are some cases where it will be good. But, even those will be massively hampered by the economics. The only way that H2 can be economic is if we somehow manage to get from where we are to the other side of the economic-valley-of-death in which no-one can operate. You need there to be sufficient renewable generated electricity to be available so that it is effectively free. Once you are there, you can do whatever the hell you want and hang the efficiency. But until you get there, the ever diminishing value of electricity makes it harder and harder to encourage businesses to build the new generation capacity, and they will simply stop investing in generation projects. (I kinda think there needs to be just government money spent on building the required capacity in a non-commercial way, similar to how the first fossil fueled grids were built, as national-government owned utilities. And probably some nuclear in there to start. But this all should have started 10-15 years ago to avoid the chasm of death that we face right now).

Synth fuels will be much more likely, but will only occur is there is at least some renewable H2 production, because you need H2 to do it. And you need stacks of free (or at least extraordinarily cheap) energy because assembling molecules back into fuels is exactly the opposite process to burning the fuel, and the reason we burn fuels is because there is so much energy squeezed into each molecule. So you're somewhat subject to the same economic valley of death problem as above anyway. That is unless people are willing to pay the current equivalent of $5 or $6 per litre of petrol-ish liquid fuels. Can you imagine it? The squealing at $2 now is bad enough.

[PLYNX]

And at over $2 per litre I'm starting to consider setting up a corn mash still and converting over to alcohol and running mine on it ! 

Up side of that is it all doesn't have to go into the car !

Win win !

[Duncan]

3 hours ago, GTSBoy said:

....And then.... there is the complete lack of soul and emotion that is provided by EVs.....

I can't agree. If we hadn't all been brought up with the noise caused by the inefficiency of an ICE, no-one would actually ask for all that.

An EV is like any other car, it just goes better. 

[soviet_merlin]

I wonder where they got the donor car from and whether there are more. Looks clean at a glance.

Might be a good candidate for a RB26 swap  

[Ozdavroz]

[joshuaho96]

On 1/6/2025 at 9:37 PM, GTSBoy said:

H2 (for cars) will never happen. It's not reasonable for any number of reasons. It's also not reasonable for almost all of the industrial uses that the fanbois say that it will be used for, again for a large number of reasons. There are some cases where it will be good. But, even those will be massively hampered by the economics. The only way that H2 can be economic is if we somehow manage to get from where we are to the other side of the economic-valley-of-death in which no-one can operate. You need there to be sufficient renewable generated electricity to be available so that it is effectively free. Once you are there, you can do whatever the hell you want and hang the efficiency. But until you get there, the ever diminishing value of electricity makes it harder and harder to encourage businesses to build the new generation capacity, and they will simply stop investing in generation projects. (I kinda think there needs to be just government money spent on building the required capacity in a non-commercial way, similar to how the first fossil fueled grids were built, as national-government owned utilities. And probably some nuclear in there to start. But this all should have started 10-15 years ago to avoid the chasm of death that we face right now).

Synth fuels will be much more likely, but will only occur is there is at least some renewable H2 production, because you need H2 to do it. And you need stacks of free (or at least extraordinarily cheap) energy because assembling molecules back into fuels is exactly the opposite process to burning the fuel, and the reason we burn fuels is because there is so much energy squeezed into each molecule. So you're somewhat subject to the same economic valley of death problem as above anyway. That is unless people are willing to pay the current equivalent of $5 or $6 per litre of petrol-ish liquid fuels. Can you imagine it? The squealing at $2 now is bad enough.

What about renewable diesel and/or gasoline? I see some projects spinning up like de-oxygenating ethanol to make drop-in compatible bio-gasoline especially in CA. I still think the future is EVs and we should've all gone full throttle on nuclear power after the 1973 oil crisis like France. Despite 15 years of work in CA to reduce the CO2 intensity of generation with renewables our electric grid is still far worse than even "low carbon" nuclear power.

On 1/7/2025 at 12:12 AM, Duncan said:

I can't agree. If we hadn't all been brought up with the noise caused by the inefficiency of an ICE, no-one would actually ask for all that.

An EV is like any other car, it just goes better. 

ICE is pretty cool when you aren't depending on the stupid thing to be practical and reliable and cheap as possible to get you to work every day. It's kind of like mechanical watches or vacuum tube amps.

Edited 12 hours ago by joshuaho96

[GTSBoy]

35 minutes ago, joshuaho96 said:

de-oxygenating ethanol to make drop-in compatible bio-gasoline especially in CA

Well.... it's not just "de-oxygenating". If you do that you just have, most likely, ethane. So you still need to do a synthesis step to combine a number of ethanes/ethanols to make circa-8-chain hydrocarbons. And of course you don't want straight chain HCs, because n-octane actually has a negative octane rating (ie, it's worse even than the n-heptane which sets the zero on the octane scale!), so you have to do some tricky catalytic chemistry to synthesise branched HCs.

That's all doable - but it doesn't come for free. And.... it starts with ethanol, which is an agricultural product, and there will almost certainly never be enough of that as a base stock to replace the liquid fuels that are in use. You really wouldn't want to be planning to be using any more ethanol for fuels than is currently already used (in E10, E85s, etc). And ideally you'd be looking to reduce such usage, as it is largely wasteful, particularly in the stupid-ole'US-of-A where the corn lobby has organised it so that it's actually primary production corn that is used to make a lot of the ethanol, not by-products and waste, like it is (mostly) elsewhere.

So, what I said about needing free-ish energy probably still applies.

True synth fuels would be made from H2 and CO2, in a near reversal of the combustion process. In fact, given that the H2 would be split from water first, it actually is a complete reversal of the combustion process. But...energy intensive.

The human race burns something like 1 cubic MILE of crude oil, after it has been made into various fuels. Every year. That's a simply stupendous amount of energy. Just assume that the density is 900 kg/m3, and that the calorific value is 45 MJ/kg, then that is 165.9 x10^12 MJ of energy. Or more than 10^19 Joules.

You get a maximum of 1 kJ/s per square meter solar radiation falling on the planet's surface, and so if you halve that for daylight, and halve it again for average weather (highly optimistic) and then take ~25% for the very best efficiency of solar panels, then you need about 85.7 billion square metres of solar panels to generate enough electricity to replace that liquid fuel energy consumption. Each panel is about 1m2. That's a rather large number of panels.

We also burn about a cubic mile of coal.

We also use hydroelectric power. We also use nuclear. We also use a number of other sources, both "renewable" and not. You can kind of ignore the renewable ones (except for hydro, because it will all end up getting subsumed into pumped hydro for storing other renewables, and so it won't be the standalone renewable that it originally was), so we end up needing a multiple of the ground area number that I just arrived at.

[joshuaho96]

2 hours ago, GTSBoy said:

Well.... it's not just "de-oxygenating". If you do that you just have, most likely, ethane. So you still need to do a synthesis step to combine a number of ethanes/ethanols to make circa-8-chain hydrocarbons. And of course you don't want straight chain HCs, because n-octane actually has a negative octane rating (ie, it's worse even than the n-heptane which sets the zero on the octane scale!), so you have to do some tricky catalytic chemistry to synthesise branched HCs.

That's all doable - but it doesn't come for free. And.... it starts with ethanol, which is an agricultural product, and there will almost certainly never be enough of that as a base stock to replace the liquid fuels that are in use. You really wouldn't want to be planning to be using any more ethanol for fuels than is currently already used (in E10, E85s, etc). And ideally you'd be looking to reduce such usage, as it is largely wasteful, particularly in the stupid-ole'US-of-A where the corn lobby has organised it so that it's actually primary production corn that is used to make a lot of the ethanol, not by-products and waste, like it is (mostly) elsewhere.

So, what I said about needing free-ish energy probably still applies.

True synth fuels would be made from H2 and CO2, in a near reversal of the combustion process. In fact, given that the H2 would be split from water first, it actually is a complete reversal of the combustion process. But...energy intensive.

The human race burns something like 1 cubic MILE of crude oil, after it has been made into various fuels. Every year. That's a simply stupendous amount of energy. Just assume that the density is 900 kg/m3, and that the calorific value is 45 MJ/kg, then that is 165.9 x10^12 MJ of energy. Or more than 10^19 Joules.

You get a maximum of 1 kJ/s per square meter solar radiation falling on the planet's surface, and so if you halve that for daylight, and halve it again for average weather (highly optimistic) and then take ~25% for the very best efficiency of solar panels, then you need about 85.7 billion square metres of solar panels to generate enough electricity to replace that liquid fuel energy consumption. Each panel is about 1m2. That's a rather large number of panels.

We also burn about a cubic mile of coal.

We also use hydroelectric power. We also use nuclear. We also use a number of other sources, both "renewable" and not. You can kind of ignore the renewable ones (except for hydro, because it will all end up getting subsumed into pumped hydro for storing other renewables, and so it won't be the standalone renewable that it originally was), so we end up needing a multiple of the ground area number that I just arrived at.

Somehow Vertimass/Oak Ridge National Labs has figured out a catalyst that can convert ethanol into C9-C10 hydrocarbons in basically a single step without ending up with a bunch of ethylene or similar waste products: https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023224867A1/en

I still don't think anything like this will keep us from needing to transition to EVs regardless along with all kinds of other electrification, but things like this will go a long way towards alleviating the problem of how to electrify things like planes. Renewable diesel is seemingly an easier problem as well, Chevron is already running refineries for the stuff and the primary feedstock is tallow and other waste fats from agriculture.

[GTSBoy]

2 hours ago, joshuaho96 said:

Chevron is already running refineries for the stuff and the primary feedstock is tallow and other waste fats from agriculture.

Yes...but look at the numbers. There is a tiny tiny fraction of the number of Joules available, compared to what is used/needed.

Just because things are "possible" doesn't make them meaningful.