Engineering the World’s Fastest Cars with Jason Fenske

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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk, sports edition. Let me bring on my co-host, Gary O'Reilly. Gary, how you doing, man?

• 0:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Hey, Neil.

• 0:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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?

• 0:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, yeah, I get to pollute the airwaves.

• 0:38Gary O'Reilly?

  And tell people who are much younger than me what they're doing wrong and sometimes what they're doing right.

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go, there you go. And Chuck, how you doing, man?

• 0:45Chuck Nice?

  I'm doing great. I do the same thing as Gary, except without sports attached. I just tell young people what they're doing wrong and why they suck.

• 0:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Gary, what did you cook up, you and your producers cook up for today?

• 1:00Gary O'Reilly?

  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-

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is our, this is our spin-off, just the 10-minute explainer. We have 10, 15-minute explainer, yeah.

• 1:16Gary O'Reilly?

  And it's been, it's been phenomenally successful, but this one really did sort of grab a certain audience. And they, 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. So 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 naught to 60 in under three seconds, which is bonkers for me, growing up with things that did it in nine.

• 1:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, for Americans, naught means zero, okay?

• 1:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, sorry.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Zero to 60.

• 1:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Zero. 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. If I've pronounced that correctly, congratulations me. If I haven't, my apologies, Jason. You did great. Thanks, Gary. I did great. Yay. Um, English isn't my first, yes, it is my first language, yes. Um, he's a mechanical engineer. He's a YouTube car guru. I'll, I'll, 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 a three and a half million subscribers and has been on the air for about the last 12 years. So, uh, Neil?

• 2:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, wait, so, 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, we're talking serious, serious access into people's gearhead ways in, in the world.

• 3:02Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but most of that, most of that was one guy without a life.

• 3:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Chuck speaks the truth.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  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 on the internet.

• 3:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh. Found an engineer.

• 3:23Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, we've got, we've got these things in the pipeline, Jason. So we just couldn't keep our audience waiting any longer.

• 3:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I don't think that, I think his point was, um, your intro sucked.

• 3:35Gary O'Reilly?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  I don't think you put me in my deserved place.

• 3:40Chuck Nice?

  No, no, no, we're joking.

• 3:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So, so here's the thing. I put out a, 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, 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 are 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.

• 4:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And going beyond the coefficient of friction of one, maybe getting more than one as a coefficient of friction. And from a dead stop. Zero to sixty acceleration. So we're trying to find out here from you. Is that right? Were 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? Two point oh six seconds.

• 4:57Speaker 03

  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?

• 5:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Upper, over three seconds. Right, right.

• 5:12Speaker 03

  Yes, that gives you like, something like two point seven 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 sixty miles per hour to zero in less than a hundred feet. And so that means the average acceleration, or deceleration in this case, is greater than one G. They're, they're doing what seems impossible. So what, what you described is correct in that the tires.

• 5:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, that can happen if you crash into a wall.

• 5:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was gonna say. Oh, it can't happen if you crash into a wall. Is that how we, is that how we walk to the? But we're doing this, we're doing this purely with tires.

• 5:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, oh, okay. Okay, gotcha, gotcha. Slow down with tires. All right, gotcha, gotcha.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  Yes. I mean, you, 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 in your acceleration.

• 6:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  But as far as street legal tires, our, 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 sixty that actually starts at like, six miles per hour. So it's nonsense. But. So you're really getting a rolling start.

• 6:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  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 sixty. If it's a six to sixty, all right, fine.

• 6:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, plus, plus, Jason, your timings here. Are to the hundredth of a second. So these things matter.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right?

• 6:49Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly.

• 6:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  2.06 seconds, the Ferrari, uh, LeFerrari SF90 at 2.1 seconds, the Porsche 911 Turbo S Lightweight 2.24 seconds. So.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 7:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  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. And it's like, you didn't, but it's cool. It's still cool.

• 7:27Chuck Nice?

  I just gotta tell you that that's kind of like an a-hole Elon Musk.

• 7:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here comes an Elon joke. Okay. Yeah, I feel it coming. Go on. Get it out of your system.

• 7:36Chuck Nice?

  No, that was it. I'm just saying.

• 7:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get it out of your system.

• 7:39Chuck Nice?

  Seems so very Elon. You know what I mean?

• 7:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's not the in his defense.

• 7:43Chuck Nice?

  No, no, I know it's the, I know it's the standard.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  A lot of, yes, exactly. Porsche doesn't do it. So props to Porsche. Like, we can direct positive, uh, vibes towards Porsche for doing it right.

• 7:54Chuck Nice?

  Now, how mad, how mad was Ferrari that Tesla beat them in a zero to 60? That's gotta piss them off.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. And it's interesting too, because it's like you can spend $3 million on a car or you can spend a hundred thousand dollars on a car and they both hit 60 in the same amount of time. Like, that's a bummer, right? Like, that's how electric cars have really brought, uh, the, the price disparity down from performance cars.

• 8:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't, I didn't make that announcement. So of course the Tesla is electric, the Ferrari is hybrid and the Porsche was in internal combustion. So we're actually comparing three different kinds of motors here. Right? Okay.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So Jason, how do you, what do you, how are you cheating to beat the, the acceleration of 1G? What are you doing to arrive at that?

• 8:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think it's a, it's a, 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, 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, uh, whether that's for decelerating, accelerating, cornering, whatever. So you can exceed, you know, that one G if you were to just assume a perfectly smooth surface, one sitting on the other.

• 9:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't see how you can exceed one G if it's one smooth rubber on any other smooth surface. Unless it's gummy and it's sticky.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  So.

• 9:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so in other words, if you had a textured surface, then like you said, the gears, then the rubber can dig into the texture.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 9:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then push off of it the way gears would. And then you're not limited to friction.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 9:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 9:39Chuck Nice?

  But when you, when you want that texture to be on the road and not on the tire?

• 9:44Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 9:44Chuck Nice?

  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, uh, grabbing.

• 9:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think it matters.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 9:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As long as one intersects the other, right? But Jason, that's why we have you here. Talk, Jason.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  But like, so the, 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 rubber is a, the road is very rough surface. You have, you know, softer rubber gives you a better lot. And so you have that rubber sink into the road and then, you know, it propels you forward like, like a gear could. If it was a gear sitting on, you know, a, like a pinion, um.

• 10:25Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  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 in, in that rack.

• 10:36Chuck Nice?

  So the best, uh, case scenario would be to go zero to 60 on tires made of chewing gum.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  Which flavor?

• 10:48Chuck Nice?

  Oh, it's gotta be bubble-licious. It's gotta be, yeah.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 10:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No worries. Wait, wait, Jason. So are they doing this on the same track?

• 10:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  Correct, 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.

• 11:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then they forgot to men- they forgot to mention they also used the Ferrari.

• 11:56Gary O'Reilly?

  So what we're discussing here-

• 11:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright.

• 11:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Elon Musk has become Dick Dastardly out of Wacky Races, right? So there's nothing he can't do, he won't do to cheat.

• 12:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I don't understand that sentence. Say that again.

• 12:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Do you know they say the animation, Wacky Races?

• 12:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. Dick Dastardly.

• 12:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Dick Dastardly, yeah. Dick Dastardly with a double O.

• 12:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, go ahead.

• 12:15Gary O'Reilly?

  No, no, that's fine. You were too busy being scientific.

• 12:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 12:17Gary O'Reilly?

  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, on the surface, what, what between an electric motor and an internal combustion engine is different? That makes this thing go, puts so much power and energy in there that it can do this sort of speed? So what's the difference really there? What's going on? Because I don't, I don't personally understand that much, so please-

• 12:43Speaker 03

  Fundamentally, there's a different energy source, right? Like a battery versus a fuel tank. But as far as how they accelerate, I think there's, 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. 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

• 13:26Speaker 03

  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.

• 13:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 gotta happen.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 14:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. One thing electricity is really good at is rotating things. So that's, you know, 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 gotta like, you need your Rube Goldberg device to end up turning your wheels at the end of that, end of that path. Right?

• 14:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, we use reciprocating motion to create circular motion with combustion engines versus circular motion to create circular motion with electric motors.

• 14:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, perfectly worded, perfectly worded.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  The rotary engine does exist.

• 14:53Chuck Nice?

  Ah, just bring it back in Europe. 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?

• 15:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, yeah, okay. So describe, tell us about the Wankel engine.

• 15:11Speaker 03

  Well, uh, 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. Uh, but it's very different in that a traditional engine, you have a piston that moves up and down. Uh, 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.

• 15:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a three sided rotating thing, a Dorito.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that.

• 15:45Gary O'Reilly?

  You mentioned food. That's it. Chuck's gonna be gone for a while now. Cause his mind, his mind's gonna wander.

• 15:50Chuck Nice?

  I never knew I like.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  Interested in it again.

• 15:51Chuck Nice?

  I never knew I like rotary engines until just now.

• 15:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. I have to give a geopolitical historical fact here, if I may. Uh huh. This is a public service announcement. Uh, 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.

• 16:13Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 16:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if, if that's no longer a selling point, why would anyone want a Wankel engine? That's my question back to you, Jason.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  Well, I think like 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.

• 17:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But more miles per gallon. Okay, yeah.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. So basically just to generate electricity. The advantage Mazda sends is its size. So they're very compact because you have three chambers where combustion is basically this this four stroke cycle is occurring in three separate places at any given time. Whereas in a, you know, 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 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 there aren't there are huge upsides to it returning other than it's cool.

• 17:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You lost me.

• 18:00Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, wanker. That's the problem.

• 18:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's that? What?

• 18:03Speaker 03

  There's an L on the end there.

• 18:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wankle, wankle.

• 18:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh. Never let the truth get in the way of the game.

• 18:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, guys.

• 18:12Gary O'Reilly?

  One of Chuck's mottos.

• 18:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got to take a quick break. When we come back, we're gonna talk to Jason about is there anything that's limiting the top speed of cars at all? Where does that go? Where does that land? When we come back with our special guest, Jason Fenske on StarTalk Sports Edition.

• 18:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Sports Edition. Today, we are not up in the hood. We are under the hood. Hey.

• 18:56Chuck Nice?

  Caught me by surprise on that one.

• 18:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Night talk, Chuck.

• 18:59Chuck Nice?

  Gotta tell the truth.

• 18:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know. So we're we're up under the hood with Jason Fenske. And Jason, you have a whole platform, Engineering Explained. Could just give us a minute.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 19:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell us what that is.

• 19:12Speaker 03

  Sure. So the idea started back when I was in college, about 12 years ago.

• 19:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Majoring in.

• 19:19Speaker 03

  Majoring in mechanical engineering.

• 19:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. Go for it.

• 19:22Speaker 03

  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 sized, digestible pieces of information.

• 19:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love it. I love it. Very popular YouTube destination with like a zillion viewers, views of all of the, all of the videos.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  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.

• 20:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So Jason, tell, tell us what, wait, I don't think you answered me from the first segment.

• 20:21Speaker 03

  Oh, I do that.

• 20:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there some feature of the track? Or was it glue they sprayed on the tires only for that two second acceleration comparison? Were all three cars, the Tesla, the Ferrari and the 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.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  So like the, the big companies that do this testing, aside from, you know, the, the brands themselves, like Car and Driver Motor Trend, the big names in, 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. They so there is a 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 like means they're gonna have differences, right? It's whatever tire the car company chose to put on them. And some some companies will be, you know, a little mischievous here and say like, we offer this tire. And as like the sports package so they can get these good numbers. And then realistically, they want you to get a different tire, something like that.

• 21:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. A more road friendly tire for your life.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  But yeah, I think for 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 Motor Trend do it at their own facility until later Motor Trend argued enough. And then eventually they let them do it. Yeah, and then they got different numbers. And that's where the the real number of 2.3 comes from.

• 21:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  OK, so we all know, or you may have paid attention. It started maybe 15 years ago on off ramps that have a sharp curve. There are grooves in the road that enable the car and 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, it's 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.

• 22:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Upon learning how effective that was, that became part of our road design for

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 22:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  I didn't even know this, but now I'm gonna get a question about it.

• 22:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so now now just check it out. And 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.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  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. Um, so it would be difficult to say this is the set groove for everyone. Uh, but you're absolutely right about the tire thing. And in fact, um, in off-road tires, so with, with most tires that are 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 it.

• 24:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I never thought about that. Interesting.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  You can do something very similar with grooves in a track.

• 24:24Chuck Nice?

  That's just, which is why, if it was just a straight line. When you look at those YouTube videos, it looks like these, these off-road trucks are Spider-Man. They're literally climbing up rocks. It's so weird.

• 24:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My sister has a car that can do that, right? It's each, each wheel can be independently, not only suspended as just that's easy, but they can also turn differently. I mean, it's, it's, it's crazy.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, they all have steering.

• 24:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They all have steering, right. It's like the thing is, it is alive, you know?

• 24:53Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 24:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So Jason, I'm finally rested on the acceleration questions. So now let me ask you, um, why are, how come no one's going 300 miles an hour on a racetrack? What's going on there?

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Have we not? So, um, I guess maybe we haven't. I think there's a few car companies that have products that say it can be done.

• 25:13Chuck Nice?

  I thought Bugatti hit 300.

• 25:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I think Bugatti did hit 300. I don't want to say things, and yeah, it's going to look poorly now, no matter what, because I don't know. Uh, but I think Bugatti did do it. They, they have the capability. Uh, there's a few other cars out there that are capable. And essentially it's a power question, um, uh, and not a tire question, which is kind of fun. You're, 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, uh, the less drag it's going to have. And then the more power you give it.

• 25:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell us how drag scales with velocity? With speed?

• 25:51Speaker 03

  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.

• 26:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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?

• 26:26Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, exactly. So in like with zero to sixty 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, then that means the amount of grip you have is greater and thus you can accelerate faster.

• 26:51Chuck Nice?

  Is it, is it cheating to draft a car above that, above the speed?

• 26:57Speaker 03

  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.

• 27:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, I, I told you, I told, I said the story in one other episode, I'm gonna say it again. I had a car where you could see what your instantaneous miles per gallon was. All right?

• 27:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 27:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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?

• 27:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 27:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 an eighteen 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, of the back door of the, of the car.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  You created a perpetual motion machine in that moment.

• 28:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Holy shit. I'm, 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, is something. I mean, that's very real phenomenon.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  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 there. And then it's creating this suction behind it. Perhaps some of that suction could even be pulling you, meaning, yeah, your, your energy use could be, could be zero if you had the perfect design.

• 29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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. You're not, 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. This is the geese flying thing, tailgating.

• 29:26Chuck Nice?

  I think what we're gonna do right now is create a dangerous precedent for drivers to just like, screw that. Gas is high.

• 29:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, Jason, go back to the, the electric vehicles for the time being.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 29:45Gary O'Reilly?

  We've seen it on in combustion engine, man, when I need to make this thing go faster and vented 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.

• 30:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, don't confuse acceleration with top speed.

• 30:07Gary O'Reilly?

  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?

• 30:18Speaker 03

  And my initial thought about it is no, but there's still kind of a way, right? Like, the question is, can you get more power out of a motor? And you can with electric motors, just like you can with, you know, 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'd say is acceptable, whatever that may be.

• 30:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 31:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 31:34Speaker 03

  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 bar, 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.

• 32:11Gary O'Reilly?

  But Jason, we're talking, now we're jacking the white up. Now the blessing, now the blessing becomes a curse.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  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, you know, there's limits that we say this is safe and it will last us 200,000 miles.

• 32:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no. I gotta 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, however, now I'm going really fast, but I'm in the, in the, in a very high air resistance regime. A, B, the mass of the car is huge now. Is there some plateau where there's no faster speed an electric car can go because the battery have to be too damn large?

• 33:22Speaker 03

  That's a great question. I don't know what the limit would be, but, 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, you know, within a mile of distance. Yeah. Then it becomes a much more fun question.

• 33:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm.

• 33:56Gary O'Reilly?

  So is this the challenge now for car designers? Unless it's battery designers in, in, separate from the car designers themselves?

• 34:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not really, because think about it right now. I mean, what's the top speed on these electric cars? It's like, it's a buck.

• 34:10Chuck Nice?

  Whatever.

• 34:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, eighty, yeah, yeah.

• 34:12Chuck Nice?

  Like, how much more do you wanna, I mean, how much faster do you really want a car to go?

• 34:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Chuck, how many people do you think are asking that question right now? I want this thing to go faster.

• 34:22Chuck Nice?

  What municipality, what government is gonna say? Oh, yeah, bring your, bring your three hundred mile an hour, you know, electric car. Mass produce that and put it on the street. No, no.

• 34:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Germany, Germany for one.

• 34:37Chuck Nice?

  The autobahn. Okay, left lane. You got me. I forgot about the autobahn.

• 34:41Gary O'Reilly?

  That's fine.

• 34:42Chuck Nice?

  Yes, but 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.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  I mean, I think 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 gonna say, oh, yeah, it wasn't quick enough for me. It's like, this is as quick as it gets.

• 35:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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? Can you?

• 35:29Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 35:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do things in the car?

• 35:32Chuck Nice?

  It goes two hundred and sixty miles an hour, but it doesn't turn. It doesn't turn.

• 35:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can't have a straight line.

• 35:38Gary O'Reilly?

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

• 35:53Chuck Nice?

  Range, more than speed. I gotta tell ya, Neil has a very cool electric vehicle. And the first time I was in it, he scared the bejesus out of me.

• 36:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm still trying to rub the brown stains off the car.

• 36:10Chuck Nice?

  I've never, I'm, listen, I ride motorcycles. And it's the closest thing to a motorcycle acceleration that I've ever experienced in a car.

• 36:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was there for you. It's just there.

• 36:20Chuck Nice?

  It's just always there.

• 36:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You need it. Guys, we've got to take a quick break. When we come back in the third segment, uh, Jason Fenske will tell us what is the future of fuel and energy that's going to drive us uh, on the countryside or on the racetrack when StarTalk Sports Edition continues.

• 36:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 some, 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? Yeah.

• 37:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Before the internal combustion engine was, 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, 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.

• 38:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That were powerful enough to fly an airplane, made the airplane too heavy to fly. Period. And it was, 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 right flyer, and that gave us airplanes. And so I, I'm just fascinated, Jason, when you describe the fact that, yeah, if you want to make your electric car go faster, just give it a bigger battery.

• 39:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And at some point, I'm saying, that's not going to work. You're going to top out. But anyway, that was just my historical note there. But let's, let's continue this. Jason, what's the future of fuel here? What are we talking about?

• 39:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think, like, let's take this. If you think about airplanes, and you 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, to give people an idea, say, take a modern Tesla with 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?

• 40:00Speaker 03

  Now, electric cars are way more efficient, so there's an advantage there. And that when they come, when they, when gasoline combusts, you're at maybe 33% efficiency. If you're doing well, you know, 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.

• 40:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 40:41Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 40:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just because of the efficiency of the motor. Yeah, okay, gotcha.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  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.

• 40:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How big is a motorcycle tank? It says three gallons.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, those are small.

• 40:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay, go on.

• 40:58Speaker 03

  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 Ben production cars that use hydrogen, I believe, actually. Maybe I'm wrong in that statement, but.

• 41:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you're right, you're right.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  Fuel cell as far as like the Marai.

• 41:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The fuel cells.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  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, 1,000 pounds of battery, one gallon of gasoline stored, the way we store hydrogen today, which is like as a high pressure gas, is about, 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.

• 42:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You need a bubble butt, you need a bubble butt on your car.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  Yes. Hydrogen is also very flammable.

• 42:08Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, isn't, is hydrogen gonna lead to a, you know, a car that's basically you name, oh, the humanity.

• 42:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 42:17Chuck Nice?

  Oh, the humanity.

• 42:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Hindenburg. But, yeah, Jason, hydrogen is flammable, but so is gasoline. So what's the trade off here?

• 42:27Speaker 03

  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. Yeah. So that's the big advantage in that you don't have CO2 produced as a byproduct of this combustion product. So, yeah, there's, that's the advantage.

• 42:51Chuck Nice?

  Is hydrogen more volatile than gasoline? I mean, because Neil brings up a great point, they're both combustible, so is one more volatile?

• 43:01Speaker 03

  There, there, I don't know the answer to that question. Do you want to test it?

• 43:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, I can tell you, I'll tell you, I'll tell you. So if you have a basin of gasoline and you toss in a match, it'll first light the vapors, all right, 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.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 43:31Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 43:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 huge list guy?

• 43:40Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 43:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and the gasoline spills?

• 43:43Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 43:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then it ignites at one end?

• 43:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, and then it works its way.

• 43:47Chuck Nice?

  And then it works its way all the way through the little snaking.

• 43:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If that was a line of hydrogen, the whole thing would just explode all at once.

• 43:52Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that would have been a terrible scene.

• 43:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. 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, you know, small enough space that it becomes useful. Again, we're still way off of gasoline.

• 44:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, in rocket launches, we don't, it's not even about the pressure, it's about cooling it. So they cool the hydrogen.

• 44:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 44:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 44:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Elements. Elements, right until it's ready to launch.

• 44:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 44:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 44:58Speaker 03

  So BMW actually did this. They had a liquid hydrogen car called the Hydrogen Seven 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.

• 45:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  Which like, we don't want that, right?

• 45:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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. And from when they were parading around that Seven, because that was, it was based on their, on their Model Seven, I think. What a great marketing team they have.

• 45:44Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 45:46Gary O'Reilly?

  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.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 45:54Gary O'Reilly?

  As this is, so there must have, there must be this between situation.

• 45:59Speaker 03

  There's another step.

• 46:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Fossil fuel. Is it the biofuels? I mean, Formula One racing is going sustainable with its fuels.

• 46:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really?

• 46:07Gary O'Reilly?

  And I think, yeah. So 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.

• 46:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so these will be, so this will be Formula Two, not Formula One.

• 46:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, thank you. So, I mean, with sustainable fuels, are we at this flux capacitor on our DeLorean?

• 46:32Speaker 03

  So we can do it.

• 46:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Are we just going to be putting trash in?

• 46:35Speaker 03

  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, you know, out from the ground as far as fossil fuels. The challenge is, it's very expensive and it takes a lot of energy.

• 46:53Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  So for a racing series like Formula One, that's no problem, right? They can spend fifty dollars a gallon and they're not gonna care. Porsche has said recently that they think their current price per gallon of, you know, a synthetic fuel that's made using these processes is about forty dollars a gallon.

• 47:12Chuck Nice?

  Oh, no problem.

• 47:14Speaker 03

  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, like, 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.

• 47:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 47:32Speaker 03

  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, you know, net emissions from it. But for things like cars, it's very challenging.

• 47:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the risk of stating the obvious, the oil in the ground is, other than the cost to extract it, is basically free energy. Nature made that energy density in the oil, right? And you take it out and it's ready to use. So, 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...

• 48:17Chuck Nice?

  Well, the sun made that 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.

• 48:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This public service announcement brought to you by Chuck Nice.

• 48:41Chuck Nice?

  Thank you.

• 48:45Chuck Nice?

  We all know how I feel about fossil fuels.

• 48:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Before we get to Chuck's solution, there's ethanol, e-fuels, I mean.

• 48:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, what about all that? What about all that?

• 48:55Gary O'Reilly?

  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. So what are the, you know, does this produce Chanel number five as a byproduct? Or water or what does it do?

• 49:15Speaker 03

  These are challenging because if you, 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 the 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, 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.

• 49:56Chuck Nice?

  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.

• 50:04Speaker 03

  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.

• 50:17Chuck Nice?

  All right, we gotta land this plane or park this car.

• 50:20Gary O'Reilly?

  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 gonna 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 gonna 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? Sorry to sort of.

• 50:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You sound like you're blaming Jason for it, man.

• 50:50Gary O'Reilly?

  No, no, no, no, no. Like I said, this is a curiosity. Yeah, Jason, what's up, man?

• 50:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's up with that?

• 50:56Gary O'Reilly?

  What's your problem, bro? All right, if you've got a connecting fly.

• 51:00Speaker 03

  Putting poison into soil.

• 51:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 51:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, if you've got a connecting fly, I'm sorry, but we're circling the airport now before this baby lands.

• 51:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go.

• 51:07Speaker 03

  So what's? No, I think, 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. Uh, because EV is so new and we don't have an insane quantity of dead EV battery pack just sitting there, useless, right? Um, I don't, 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, the, all the elements are still in there, right?

• 51:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I think so. That's fair.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  It's currently mostly a matter of cost. Uh, is, is it worth doing? And we like to historically do things based purely on cost and disregard any other factors. And you can put, shift the cost to the environment and say, well, the environment got screwed, but I saved a dollar. So I, I would prefer to see that we do this the right way, right? And we recycle all of these. Uh, and I don't think, again, it's, it's that easy to just throw your electric car battery in the trash.

• 52:00Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say.

• 52:01Speaker 03

  They're not gonna just pick it up.

• 52:02Chuck Nice?

  As this scales, I think what we'll see is that battery collection and battery recycling becomes a business and an industry in itself.

• 52:11Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 52:11Chuck Nice?

  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 gonna make money somewhere and that's where you'll see incentives.

• 52:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 52:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck Nice for City Council. Chuck Nice is running for City Council.

• 52:42Speaker 03

  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.

• 52:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 52:52Speaker 03

  And there are small companies today that are doing this process and trying to split the minerals and then reselling them.

• 52:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And one other point that was left un, unnoted, that. We seem to forget that the act of making an electric car does itself have a carbon footprint. So true. And that's not often folded into what it is people say they're saving for having done so. So true. Yeah, we gotta, we gotta end it there. Jason, it's been a delight to have you on this. Good stuff. Thank you for having me.

• 53:22Chuck Nice?

  Hey, Jason.

• 53:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 53:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you so much. Really appreciate y'all having me. You got it. All right. Chuck, Gary, we gotta call it quits there. Always a pleasure. 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.