Comment Just numbers, or some culture? (Score 3, Interesting) 44
It could certainly just be a numbers game; tons of ICE vehicles out there; or whether there's an issue with accumulated cultural assumptions and engineering priorities.
I can at least imagine that there's a difference in mindset between "this is a 12v lead acid starter battery; it'll put out a solid few tens of amps for the starter motor assuming it is working correctly; but its energy density is kind of trash and we mostly prefer not to dump additional systems onto it, especially when that exposes them to the slightly gross output of the alternator" and "This battery has been designed to fully provide for all energy requirements of a vehicle; if you displease it it will probably kill you and then burn vigorously for a day or two. A foundational assumption of all systems that need energy is that they'll be connected back to it in one way or another because there aren't other energy sources here."
Not like electric vehicle designers couldn't/don't make mistakes, and certainly some of their mistakes burn with the really exciting commitment of a large light metal fire; but the engineering culture around an ICE vehicle seems much more likely to produce a string of individually reasonable, collectively dangerous, "c'mon, it's just one little 12v system" requests that get bolted onto a fairly antique battery without too much broader thought; while analogous feature demands in a fully electric vehicle will either be judged high energy enough to potentially get brought into the high voltage wiring(which, barring gross negligence across the design is treated like it can and will kill you) or totaled in to some low voltage system budget that will be handled by a DC-DC converter designed with actual care because going from 600v to 12v isn't something you do as casually as just slapping another 12v requirement in parallel with the other stuff on the 12v battery and calling it good.
I can at least imagine that there's a difference in mindset between "this is a 12v lead acid starter battery; it'll put out a solid few tens of amps for the starter motor assuming it is working correctly; but its energy density is kind of trash and we mostly prefer not to dump additional systems onto it, especially when that exposes them to the slightly gross output of the alternator" and "This battery has been designed to fully provide for all energy requirements of a vehicle; if you displease it it will probably kill you and then burn vigorously for a day or two. A foundational assumption of all systems that need energy is that they'll be connected back to it in one way or another because there aren't other energy sources here."
Not like electric vehicle designers couldn't/don't make mistakes, and certainly some of their mistakes burn with the really exciting commitment of a large light metal fire; but the engineering culture around an ICE vehicle seems much more likely to produce a string of individually reasonable, collectively dangerous, "c'mon, it's just one little 12v system" requests that get bolted onto a fairly antique battery without too much broader thought; while analogous feature demands in a fully electric vehicle will either be judged high energy enough to potentially get brought into the high voltage wiring(which, barring gross negligence across the design is treated like it can and will kill you) or totaled in to some low voltage system budget that will be handled by a DC-DC converter designed with actual care because going from 600v to 12v isn't something you do as casually as just slapping another 12v requirement in parallel with the other stuff on the 12v battery and calling it good.
