The Autowende has begun | Hacker News Reader

The Autowende has begun

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24 pointsfastned26 comments

Ah, a company that produces chargers telling us that electric cars are inevitable. Maybe it's true, but native advertising is not what will convince me.

Electric cars now outperform gas cars in acceleration. This has blown away the "vroom" advantage behind much automotive marketing. Electrics can also do it easily and routinely, without burning clutch plates and wearing out transmissions. Elon Musk has capitalized on this, with features such as "ludicrous mode". There are only five cars with a faster 0-60 time than Tesla's family hatchback. And two of them are partially electric. The three IC-powered supercars that can beat a Tesla can only do it by 100ms, they all cost upwards of $250K, and they're fragile, high-maintenance machines. (Especially the Veyron, where a tire change costs $90K).

IC cars have thus lost the "vroom" race. That's changed perception of electric cars.

The big remaining problems are cost, and trucks. We have yet to see a good electric pickup truck.

you know, I would love to buy a tesla, if I could afford it.

Sadly, I live in an apartment, without any garage, and I have no idea where I'd be supposed to charge it.

If you're just finding public parking on the street then you're pretty much out of luck for now. As EVs become more common, we might see charging stations installed for street parking. Imagine a row of parking meters, except they're J1772 connectors instead. Won't happen for a while though.

Speaking as someone who writes science fiction short stories sometimes, that is putting my jester cap on: That will not happen, the other current trend for cars is autonomous vehicles, so you can send your car to a charging station somewhere and call it back to wait in front of your door when you need it again.

Europe already has these

Link please?

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=london+electric+car+bays&s...

Many cities in Europe have exactly this. The spaces are reserved for electric vehicles and have chargers.

I was literally just wondering that, too. In NYC, for instance, there are a number of places [1] that are considered "destination chargers" that are parking garages throughout the city. I imagine that for an add-on fee to the monthly rental of a parking space, they also providing charging. That being said, I imagine it easily puts the potential monthly parking fee near $1,000.00 a month (given that it looks like indoor garage parking is generally around $600 - $700 a month.)

[1] https://www.teslamotors.com/findus#/bounds/43.02971601884381...

My last car purchase we thought about going with an electric but we only have a rented parking space. I'd love to have an electric car but there would need to be chargers with every parking meter here in the city. Having a garage here is a luxury that most of us don't enjoy.

Potential hidden motives aside, it seems to me pretty ineffective to focus on the different characteristics of internal combustion versus electric motors. We've known all this for a century. The only difference between the two that has ever mattered is that in the one case you can put 400 miles in your tank in five minutes, and in the other it takes 8 hours to put 200 in.

Electric car engines are efficient at converting electricity into motion. However, this neglects the efficiency of power plants at converting fuel into electricity, and the efficiency of transmission of electricity. Taking this into account, electric cars are generally about as bad for the environment as ordinary cars.

Of course, this depends on the cars compared, and more importantly, on how the electricity wherever you live is generated. The real point is: it's far more important to improve how we generate electricity than to get more butts in electric cars.

Even when your electricity is 100% coal, electrics are still pretty good. Look at a more realistic mix, and they're much better than gas cars. And the grid is getting more green by the day.

fair enough, but does anyone have any hard stats on this?

I ran the numbers in a comment a couple weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10527213

The quick version is, a Tesla gets an equivalent of 26MPG or so for CO2 emissions on 100% coal, and twice that on my Virginia mix of 1/3rd coal, 1/3rd gas, 1/3rd nuclear.

And for this calculation to be completely honest, you also need to account for the energy required to produce gasoline. So even when considering the case of 100% coal-produced electricity, gasoline gets an undeserved advantage.

I covered that in my comment as well.

It probably depends on the kind of car. I'd suggest you watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkj-vf1_pzQ (with english subtitles) - the guy is an automotive engineer. In the first 10 minutes, he compares how an electric car does in a coal-based electricity vs. non-coal. You can quickly see that in a country with heavy coal electricity mix, you're better off driving a gas car. Even Germany is break-even.

Do you have this in text form, or can you tell me where my numbers went wrong? The math is simple and the numbers behind it are all pretty easy to find.

Sure, it depends on the kind of car. A Tesla running on 100% coal is not as good as a first-generation Honda Insight. But if you compare similar cars then electric is at least at parity (for unrealistic 100% coal grids) and typically way better.

https://energieduthorium.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/la-voit... - check from slide 23 on.

He compares pretty much the same car, from the same (French) maker, but with one version of the car running on Diesel, and one electric. You can see already that in half of EU countries, including Germany, running a gas car is better than an electric one.

Not sure how that does work out in the US, but given that 2/3 of electricity mix in the US are from fossil fuels (from which about 40% coal), you should be closer to Poland. So essentialy, depending on the state where you drive your Tesla, you could be better off with gas powered car (in terms of CO2 emissions).

I'm surprised that car is so inefficient. The quoted kWh/mile is worse than a Model S, for a much smaller car. That is going to influence the conclusion a ton, no doubt.

I agree, we're looking at one tiny part of the big picture. However, to get to the clean energy endgoal, we have to start doing multiple things at the same time, which is what the article was talking about from the European manufacturing side.

Tesla is producing batteries in a net-zero factory, powered by solar and wind energy.

Superchargers by Tesla are using energy generated and transferred from solar carports and/or other places as much as possible.

If more customers buy more electric cars, the more the leverage they have on the politics to build more clean energy efficient generation grids. Right now, not enough people care about this and thus, not enough of the lawmakers do either.

"Tesla is producing batteries in a net-zero factory, powered by solar and wind energy."

Tesla is still building their battery factory. All they have right now, after a year, is a half-finished building shell.[1] Tesla is touchy about this; their security guards roughed up some reporters trying to get a picture of the place.[2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuDfFmUcJso [2] http://www.rgj.com/story/news/2015/10/09/rgj-photographer-ar...

That is an ever so slightly biased account of the situation.

Construction began in January, so it's not quite "after a year." What's there currently isn't exactly a "half-finished building shell" but is very close to producing batteries, with production slated to begin early next year. At the same time, it's much less than half finished, because the final factory is going to be huge, and they've only built a tiny part of it so far. Finally, Tesla isn't "touchy," they just don't like people trespassing and trying to run over their security guards.

Tesla's claim that they will producing batteries in a net-zero factory is almost certainly not true. They could do it by using their batteries and solar panels, but they almost certainly won't do that because they want reliability and affordability (like the rest of us). They will buy credit and that's where there claims of "net zero" come from. But they will almost certainly use grid electricity.

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