Welcome back to Geek Time advanced. How are you doing, Lulu?

Hi, Brad. I'm doing fine.

So we were talking about EV and gas powered cars. Do you have any interesting questions?

Actually, last time you mentioned, apart from gas powered cars, EV, there's a new thing on the horizon which is hydrogen cars就是氢能源车. I was wondering if we can start the conversation by perhaps going a little bit into that?

Okay, yeah. Hydrogen powered cars are something that several car manufacturers such as Toyota are developing, and BMW I think is going into a partnership with Toyota and going to develop even more in the future. But the interesting thing is you can create newer hydrogen powered vehicles, but you can also take older gas and diesel engines and convert them with a few different parts to make them into a car that will run on hydrogen power. You have to change like the gas tank, but the engine itself you just add in a new fuel injector, and basically you can have a hydrogen powered car.

That would make things a lot handier. Isn't it? People don't necessarily have to buy new cars in the future. They just convert their car or modify their car.

Mhm. Yes, especially for people who are really attached to like a classic car or something like that. They don't have to give up that car, they can keep it, they just have to convert it.

I see. So hydrogen, I'm assuming when hydrogen is used to power cars, it also doesn't cost or create pollution. That's the whole point, isn't it?

There's no carbon dioxide or methane that gas that comes out of the engine. Basically, what happens is now you have the hydrogen and it gets split. It goes into the atmosphere and combines with oxygen and basically just creates water vapors or combined with that. And so it doesn't really have any noxious gases that a gas car would. And the best thing is...

How do we refuel it?

Basically you just go to a hydrogen station. There's actually a few hydrogen stations in Japan that I've seen. It's not much different from your typical gas station, the way they store it's a little bit different. They don't have like a tank in the ground like they do with the gas, but essentially the same idea, you hook up your car, you just basically put the fuel into the car like you would a gas car. The major difference is it does require high pressures or low temperatures restoring the hydrogen. So it's not as easily usable as gas as we have it today.

I see. I because I was gonna ask if everything looks so perfect, then why not hydrogen instead of EV right?

But obviously there are certain limitations now. So that cannot be the only reason why we are pushing for electric vehicles. I pretty much I don't know if it's to the same extent, but most of the countries are trying to push EV, right?

Yeah, like when you look at EV, most EVs can go several 100 kilometers. There, I think a few of them are getting closer to like 1,000 kilometers on a charge, but the majority of people don't really do more than like a daily 30 kilometer round trip. Right? Yeah, people aren't going that far in their daily work, right? So they don't really need to have a car that can go hundreds of miles.

For daily commute, EV is more than enough within cities, but it's just like when you have to drive long distance, EV can be a little bit more difficult.

Yeah. It is a little bit more difficult, you do have to recharge but the nice thing is for like electric vehicles like if you're charging a battery from like 20% to like 80% it doesn't take as long. You can kind of think about it like when you add electricity to a battery, there's a bunch of little spaces open for those electrons to go into basically kind of think about it like the gas going into a car. When you have a bunch of space open, it's easier for the electrons to go into the battery. However, when you get really close to full, it takes so longer to charge it. So after about 80%, the charge time starts slowing down. So most people...

To 80%, that's roughly the same as if you charge your phone or other devices, it's the same. It's usually the last bit that takes much longer and they are just more efficient than gas cars, right? More energy efficient.

If you put gas in a car, only about 20 to 40% of the energy from the gas is going to power the car. A lot of it's going out in heat and that's why car engines get so hot. Whereas with an electric car about 85% of the electricity is actually used to power the vehicle where the other 15% is lost as heat. And so it's a lot more efficient through the energy that's being used.

I see, so since electric cars, EVs, there are so many great things about them. Now I know in China we have been pushing them quite a bit. You see really literally you see more and more and more EVs on the road. I also know people who, they do have a gas car, but they also bought an EV and they started using the EV a lot more. They started to drive EV a lot more, because it just simply costs less money to charge compared with to tank up, especially now the oil price or the petrol price goes up.

Now what is the attitude, general attitude? Let's say in the US first, and then we move on to Japan where you're currently living.

Yeah. In the US it's kind of like the split. You have the people in the coastal areas that pretty much really like hybrid or electric cars. And then you have kind of like the more central areas, the more rural areas where people absolutely hate electric cars for some reason. There are people who buy huge diesel trucks that create a lot of pollution. They actually do something to their car that makes it to bother electric cars and they park in electric car spaces. So they can just antagonize people that have electric cars. It's very interesting.

Is it a macho thing? Is it a masculinity things like EV is so quiet, it's just not macho enough compared with these gas guzzlers?

There's kind of like the whole idea of American Muscle. There's a V-eight in your Mustang or your truck. Like it has so much power, right? Actually I think it is a masculinity macho kind of thing that a lot of people have.

V-eight指 V8 发动机，这是一种常见的汽车发动机配置，以其强大的动力和声音而闻名，常与American muscle cars联系在一起。

Yeah, I've also heard about and for example in like daily conversation or even in movies and TV there's always like this, almost like a mockery or a stereotype of people who drive hybrid cars, who the heck drive a hybrid cars! That sort of idea. It’s like he drives an EV, oh, I see. You know, this stereotype. Is this still true that sort of people still have stereotypes?

Yeah, definitely like if someone drives a hybrid, they're often seen as someone who loves the environment and maybe kind of like a hippie or something like that. But in general, I think that attitude is kind of gone away, just because of like the cost of fuel, as you were mentioning earlier.

Yeah. What about the attitude in Japan? The only thing I know about Japanese cars are that they're really small.

Now like for I think when it comes to hybrid, hybrid is really popular in Japan like everywhere I go, I see hybrid cars. Occasionally I'll see electric cars, but I think the majority of people choose hybrids simply because they have a lot more option. I think most people they do their daily commute with public transportation. They use their car for things, vacations or going to the store going shopping. I don't think people really want to deal with installing charge point at their home or trying to find places to charge their car. And so hybrid just seems to be a better option.

Yeah. It is also like the infrastructure if the charging infrastructure is there.

Now how do these big car companies that are mainly focusing on petrol cars, gas cars? How did they feel about the increasing popularity of EV?

I think some companies are perfectly fine with making electric cars. I think a lot of them actually want to have more variety. They wanna be able to make gas park cars, they wanna make e-hybrids, they wanna make electrics. But before there was actually a conspiracy theory that like the oil industry and automakers were trying to stop EV is from being developed.

How do they do that? Sabotaging it?

So I don't know if you've heard of a term called like lobbyist.

Yeah, lobbyist 说客.

Yeah. And so they go to the government and they basically kind of push the government to prevent something. And I think that was kind of a big thing early on. But also there were a few car companies like General Motors in the States that were testing electric cars, but then just kind of stopped. They crushed all their cars and they didn't really have a good reason. They said we didn't really think we needed to have electric cars and so people kind of got this idea that maybe someone stop them from making electric cars.

Maybe like the oil industry.

Exactly right. When digital cameras were being developed, I'm pretty sure the film industry were kind of like trying to stop that.

Trying to sabotage. But you can't stop the trend, really, you can't turn back the tide. You're saying the lobbyists they are trying to also to talk to the government and try to stop electric cars.

A few ways they do it, they directly, but they also kind of create groups and they call themselves things like Californians Against Utility Abuse. So California has had a few issues with electricity and so some people are a bit afraid that if we start using a lot of electric cars, this could hurt the availability of electricity in an area.

Of electricity. So there will be power cuts or power shortage and that sort of thing. Okay, I see.

But actually this group is probably not a real group. It's probably actually created by a lobbyist and just to be made it seem like regular people complain.

Regular public opinion. Yeah, I see. So we're going into the whole conspiracy theory again.

Now before we wrap up this advanced episode about EV, I want to talk to you about the future. What do you think about the future of EV will be, because like currently we can see that, in the previous episode we're talking about mining lithium battery that can cause problem, can cause pollution, or charging... electricity generation can cause pollution, and so on so forth. Any future development that could probably solve these problems?

I think a lot of car companies, especially ones like Toyota are saying, to a lot of government people saying that we shouldn't make laws that force car companies to be only electric, because that's not a good way to go. They should let the car manufacturers look at other kinds of technologies such as hydrogen. Because it's... electric is probably not the future for all cars. Right? There's probably going to be other kinds of cars out there. But electric is really good option for a lot of people. The big issue is there's a few ideas being put out there right now. One of them is being able to swap batteries, so a person could drive into a charge station. If they had a really low battery, they could just do like a really quick 5 minute battery swap.

So they don't have to charge the battery. They can just swap the battery.

Yeah, that will probably not be so common unless a lot of manufacturers decide to keep one shape of battery, one style of battery. And that way it makes it easier to swap. But at one thing that is kind of gaining popularity is the possibility of being able to charge cars with an inductive force when you put... you can hook a USB cable up to your phone and charge it. But there are charges where you can just charge your phone by putting it over the charger. You don't have to actually connect anything into it. It runs by induction. And this might be something that we could use to charge cars as they move.

Change the charging method. And perhaps they can just make better batteries, really? That store more energy in it. Okay Right, so that's a little bit about the future or the possible future EV a way over yet to see. So on that note, we're gonna wrap up. Do you drive an EV or hybrid or guzzler? Let us know in the comment section. Thank you, Brad, for coming to the show.

No problem. See you in the next episode.

We'll see you next time. Bye.

Bye, everybody.