Originally Posted by
ricortes
I'm not sure you've thought this out yet. Room temperature super conductors at bare minimum mean instead of running 8 gauge wire everywhere, you can do it with virtually a thread and no transmission losses or overheating. Same thing in the motor/field windings of course.
I thought it through just fine, and even explained.
Motors that can put out 9 hp and are the size of a hair dryer exist today. I gave pretty close examples of consumer level motors, and that's way more power than an electric bicycle needs, and while a car needs a lot more power, it won't mind a motor that's twenty times larger much.
Yes, room temperature superconductors could make these even smaller, more efficient. But they're already good enough now -- the thing keeping electric cars and bikes from taking off is
not the motor -- it's the power supply. Batteries. In the future, that could be fuel cells or ultracapacitators, but for now, it's batteries.
Side note: if we could actually invent/discover them, room temperature superconductors could make ultra-inductors a much better power storage device than ultra-capacitators. That might solve the entire energy storage problem right there if they can handle a sufficiently large magnetic field before being made non super-conductive.
Maybe I should have used a fuel cell that ran on ethanol as it would take a smaller leap of faith.
Yes, but the fact that you mentioned sugar was the smallest part of my argument. The more significant part is that motors are good enough already -- it's the power source that's holding electric vehicles back.