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Hi, everyone and welcome back to Geek Time, 欢迎回来【极客时间】. Hi, Brad.

Hi, Lulu, hello, everyone.

Long time no speaky. How's life treating you in Japan?

Pretty good. Can't complain about anything.

I heard last time we were talking you really got into car racing.

I've been into car racing for a while, but I actually entered my first race last month.

Wow, how did you do?

Did fairly good. I wasn't the fastest on there, but my car is pretty much stock except for I got a little bit better tires.

Okay. How many cars do you have right now?

Currently I have five cars, one in the States and four in Japan.

You have four cars in Japan. Wow. It sounds like you're pretty serious about it. I mean, I assume they're all gas cars.

They are indeed, they are all gas cars.

So I thought today let's talk about EV. LOL.

Okay.

我们今天来聊一下电动车 EV, short for electric vehicle, right?

Right.

So to talk about EV, Brad, you obviously know cars a lot more than I do. So let's talk about the different engines. So you have gas or, you say gas, British people say petrol. That's the same thing, gas, gas station, petrol station same thing.

Same thing, yeah. Gas or petrol is pretty much the way most cars are. In some places hybrids or electric vehicles are becoming more popular. Hybrid is kind of like in between where you don't have to charge the car, you use gas sometimes. And when you're going so fast, you use the electric power to drive the car. And so it's kind of an in between.

Okay. Can you give us... I know, I mean, you're basically from an engineering background, can you give us a little bit of a very, very like a for dummy version of how does it work with gas powered or petrol powered cars. How does the engine work?

Basically, you have a cylinder and within that cylinder, you have a little bit of gas and air, and then you ignite it, which causes an explosion, which causes a piston to move downwards. And that creates a rotational movement, basically kind of...

Drives the cars forward.

this rotational movement which causes the car to move.

I see. And just now you also mentioned hybrid, we said gas on the side and EV electric on the other side. In between there's a hybrid, 就是混合动力车. Right? Have you ever driven a hybrid car before?

I've never driven one, but I have been in them before. I have seen them working, but I've never driven one myself.

I've never driven them. I've seen them on the road. Does that mean that there is like a switch thing that you can just switch between gas and electricity?

It basically does it all automatically. When you're at a like a low speed, you automatically just use the electric power as long as there is some stored within the battery. Once the battery is depleted, then it goes back to the gas engine. The gas engine moves the car and while the car is moving, it's charging the battery.

I see, so this is very different from what I would imagine. I thought it was like a button or something.

Yeah, no, it's but I think some of them do have a button that you can push to just stay on electric power or just stay on gas power, but I've never driven one, so I've never really looked at the panels there.

I see. Now apart from gas hybrid EV, I've also heard something called hydrogen就是氢动力车. What is that? Is that what car makers are working on right now?

So hydrogen power is another way to power cars. So there's actually two ways you can do this. You can use hydrogen power to charge a battery which causes an electric motor to move. But you can also use hydrogen to just like a gas or petrol power. And so you can use an old engine and basically just power the car the same way. So it can be just used as like a regular petrol.

I see. And so now the car makers are they working on them? Is that like the future?

There are several manufacturers that are working on hydrogen powered cars. 10 years ago people were saying hydrogen power is never going to happen. It's going to be all electric. But over like the last 10 years. There's actually been a little bit of a shift to saying maybe electric isn't the only way we have to go...

Maybe hydrogen is also another alternative future.

Another way we can do. Yeah.

I think in china we're also working on that就是氢能源车. Alright, but bringing it back to EV, how long has EV been in existence, like what was the earliest EV?

To be honest, the first EV was almost 150 years ago.

What?

In the 1880s, there were the first electric vehicles and there were kind of just like tricycles in a sense, they were kind of like...

Like an e-bike.

Kind of like an e-bike but it was like a car, but you had two wheels on your right side like a bicycle and then a bigger wheel on the left side that was hooked up to the battery and the generator. They didn't go very far, of course, but it was basically just kind of like an early car. But in the early 1900s and the Studebaker car company actually had an electric car as well.

Mass produced? did they start to mass produce them?

They were going to mass produce them, but they stopped because the Ford actually created the assembly line and started making really cheap gas powered cars. And Studebaker couldn't really compete with that.

Oh, of course, that's when Ford started mass production, essentially, assembly line, 对. 福特那个时候开始流水线,开始批量生产汽车, so that would obviously make EV cars back then a lot more expensive to make compared to gas cars.

Yeah.

I notice that in China, these whole gas to EV conversion really only happened probably in the past 20 years I would like to say? A lot of the incentives were, because like in Beijing, you lived in Beijing you know, and it was and it still is, very difficult to get a license plate. So in the beginning they were trying to encourage people to switch to EV by offering more plates for EV cars, like if you buy an EV, it's easier for you to get a license plate compared with if you want to get a gas powered car.

I think in the US, the people... individuals were doing their own conversions and like the 1980s and the 1990s, you'll see some every now and then when you look at older cars for sale, you'll see people that converted their cars from a gas powered engine to an electric engine. But a lot of manufacturers didn't actually start doing that until the 2000s. There were a few companies that tried to do that, but it didn't really catch on.

Yeah. Okay, so that is a little bit of the history of EV. Now obviously when we talk about EV, people say EV is the future, why? Because environmentally friendly. This is the thing, it doesn't produce pollution not like the gas cars with exhaust fumes. But I always thought about the fact that the EV has to be recharged using electrical outlet, then producing electricity surely that must also contribute to pollution. No?

Right. When a car, an electric car is being driven, it's not creating any pollution. The other side though, is that when the electric cars are being charged, they are being charged with electricity and that electricity can come from like coal, natural gas or solar power even. Some charging stations depending upon where they're at. They might be getting a lot from renewable resources, but they might be getting a lot from like coal power...

Fossil fuel.

...actually causing a lot of pollution in that way.

So whilst driving EV does not cause pollution, generating electricity might cause pollution.

The nice thing is you can charge electric cars overnight. That means it's not taking so much on the power grid because most people are sleeping and most people aren't using the power grid which doesn't put much strain on it. So it's not creating as much pollution. But if you charge an electric car during the day and there's lots of people doing that, that's adding on to like the electrical grid which will actually cause even more pollution.

I see. I see. The other thing that I've heard is the battery. What kind of battery do they use? Do they use lithium? 就是理电池. Is this still the case?

Primarily, most batteries are using lithium batteries. There are some other batteries that are they're looking towards on the horizon but not quite being used just yet. But for the most part, lithium batteries are the majority.

Another concern that people tend to have and also you see it a lot on the news. I mean, in China recent years we've seen a lot of those on the news, is the safety issues. It’s is about EV just literally self combust or something. They crash into something and then they just start burning. How does...why is that, why is it easier? It seems like it's easier for EV to burn like that, to combust like that. 好像它撞了之后自燃好像是比gas cars, It seems like they are much worse than gas cars in this.

With gas, you can have gas and open air and the gas won't do anything, but a lot of the materials that go into batteries when air hits them, they'll explode. And they'll combust in the flame depends on the situation, but in most of the time, they'll just combust in the flame and you can't really put the flame out. The big issue with EV is is not just that they're oftentimes much heavier than gas powered cars, which means the accidents are much worse. So there's a much greater chance that those the batteries could be damaged during an accident. And once that reaction starts, it's really hard to stop it. You just kind of have to let it go. Sometimes they will go for days and days.

Wow. This is perhaps also why they were banning, I don't know if it's the same reason, but they were banning like e-bikes in the lift that you cannot push your e-bikes to take the elevator because like you said, especially in closed space, if there's a spark and then yeah, it will just combust within a minute or so.

Yeah.

And it's also toxic. The fume it releases is toxic.

Extremely. And then you've got the toxic fumes, you have the heavier...and not only that, they're quiet. So you don't really hear them coming, they actually started adding sounds took the electric cars so people can hear them a little bit easier. But, electric cars were hitting pedestrians twice as much because the pedestrians didn't hear the cars coming, they can hear a gas car coming but they can't really hear an electric car coming unless it's creating extra noise.

I mean, you are right. I’d never thought about it that way because when I walk on a roadside, I always complain about the gas cars being so loud and I was feeling thankful that the EVs are quieter but I never knew that from another angle pedestrians are less aware of an EV approaching, I guess.

Just think about how often you see people just walking across the street without being at an intersection and just how many electric cars are out there now and just it's a little bit dangerous nowadays.

Exactly. Okay, so we're going to wrap up the basic episode about EV. In the advanced episode, we're gonna go into it and maybe explore a little bit about the alternatives to EV and also conspiracy theories and attitudes around EV. Thank you, Brad. For coming to the show.

No problem. See you next time.

We'll see you next time. Bye.

Bye.

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文稿校对：Dongnia  & Jenny

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