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Comment by specialp

I just built an engine for my car. One thing I gained an appreciation for was how CHEAP cars and engines are. There's probably nothing else with as precise machining that is as inexpensive.

Engine cylinders are honed to accuracies that are less than 1 thousandth of an inch. Crank journals as well and rod journals. This is all precise machine work with metal. I use inches here because in machine work thousandths of inches is the language du jour. Transmissions are similar works of very precise and clean machine work.

The distance between a crank bearing or rod bearing is less than 2 thousandths on modern engines. A small amount of oil in that tiny space is all that keeps your engine from having metal on metal seizure.

So one would think that when EVs reach the same scale they will be significantly cheaper than ICE vehicles.

parent specialp 5 years ago

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