Internal combustion, history's biggest engineering distraction?

Riding a petrol motorbike for 10 hours in a single day this weekend gave me plenty of time to think.No sat-nav, no emails, no notifications, no client calls and no distractions. 

 After a hundred miles of B roads, I started to think about the engineering behind my journey and how limited a Battery Electric Vehicle would be for this sort of adventure. That’s why I hadn’t switched yet. Clear conscience.

 A battery electric bike wouldn’t be capable of such high mileage, at a sustained speed in a single sitting... they just aren’t developed to that stage yet. And it’ll be a long time before they come close to their internal combustion equivalent. 

But was internal combustion a very comfortable distraction that’s actually held back the development of lighter power cells? Just to be clear, electric vehicles aren’t new and motors certainly aren’t new. In fact the electric motor was invented 40 years before a liquid fuelled Internal Combustion Engine. From an engineering perspective, when you compare the internal workings of an electric motor and an IC engine it’s difficult to understand how petrol and diesel vehicles have lasted so long. Hundreds of complex moving parts, all under immense strain throughout the entire process compared to immediate torque with almost no mechanical fricton.

The thing keeping us all from using a clean electric motor isn't actually range, its the weight of storing the power required to do that range. Even high tech lithium ion batteries are as heavy as a traditional engine blocks and hold a lot less energy than a full tank of fuel. However they do deliver it to the road far more efficiently.

 I came to the conclusion that if using liquid fuel to create forward motion hadn’t been considered as an option in the first place, we’d be a lot further down the road in the development of this technology for transport applications.

 With Covid-19 changing our business culture, there's a good chance Battery Electric Vehicles will fit in perfectly against a backdrop of increased remote working. Either way, I’m starting to think that the IC powered vehicles we’ve been bench marking against for so long are perhaps what's stopping us unlocking the full potential of this not-so-new technology. 

 Mitie has committed to having 20% of its fleet made up of Battery Electric vehicles by the end of 2020. To find out more about our pledge go to:

 https://news.mitie.com/news/mitie-drives-its-electric-vehicle-pledge-by-signing-up-to-ev100