Electric cars: The death of the internal combustion engine
economist.com
economist.com
There may be a decrease in the number of cars; the increase in car sharing may be higher than the increase in miles, but I doubt it.
But congestion? That's going to get a lot worse, it's not going to be the utopia that people here seem to expect.
https://www.wired.com/2016/08/self-driving-cars-will-improve...
Econ 101!
The people who end up driving despite the tolls, parking elimination, etc. are those who can't afford the rent near the public transit system. Cars are a significant cost for them, but not as much as the rent premium they'd have to pay for a well-connected location.
That's a very Ameri-centric view. In most European countries people of all classes live near and regularly take public transit.
It's astonishing how much some people are willing to pay for the pleasure of driving free of traffic... We should charge them as much as they are willing to pay...
[1] http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/the-...
I’m not sure but I believe the batteries are still too expensive. Also, we might need solid state batteries before we have acceptable range and charging speed for many people.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/253065-toyota-wants-leap...
Finally, the US federal subsidy, Norway’s subsidy, etc have helped the recent models. However, the US subsidy will disappear for Tesla, for example, shortly after they reach the 200,000 car limit.
Battery costs are dropping steadily and it seems like it won't be too much longer before TCO for an EV is lower than even a cheap gas car, but we're not there yet.
http://metroenergy.org/2017/03/10000-off-nissan-leaf-june-30...
I bought a lightly used one for $8,500.
Perhaps even adding discounts for riders willing to trek the last mile on foot.
There's a big assumption here that this dynamic routes would actually be more efficient than the simple fixed routes we have now. I'm skeptical.
In Seattle, Google just gives its employees a bus pass, because their public transit system isn't full and dysfunctional.
By reducing people's sunk cost in cars, it may well free up the public mind to alternative forms of transportation. A lot of political inertia comes in the form of personal sunk costs. Also, self driving vehicles could themselves be used to expand public transit. IIRC, In Portland in the 90's, there was this thing called the "Custom Bus" where an late-night adapted bus route could be formed by people phoning in a request for a pickup within 2 miles of a normal bus route. Automated vehicles and networked computers could let us do an even better job of adaptive transportation.
I love this conversation. The US new auto sales run rate is ~17 million vehicles/year, with an average price right around $35k. That's $595,000,000,000 per year in capital being allocated to automotive mobility alone. Think what better things we could do with that capital (or everyone could work far less!) if we only spent a fraction of that on automotive capital costs.
Holy crap. That's more than 5% of GDP.
The cost of not being a subsistence farmer, I suppose. (Somewhat joking, but a big part of what makes modern civilization possible is mobility and a lot of that requires cars. In some situations, they're less important but they're still common pretty much anywhere.)
In America, the privately owned vehicle isn't just transportation, it's a status symbol. That's not going to change just because someone crunched some numbers.
That's not the question. Can you afford your own car if the cost efficiencies are no longer there because there are so many fewer cars on the road?
How many people own their own Cessna versus buying tickets on Southwest? Even with a private pilot license, I would never consider owning a plane myself. Too expensive!
The biggest reason is generational die off.
We're already seeing younger people forgoing even getting a license. Urban population growth is rendering it less valuable.
The only cohort that licensing is up is boomers. 55-75 are more likely to have a license than they were a generation ago.
Licensed 16 year drivers is way down. Something like half the number are licensed versus a generation ago.
Some of it is "blamed" on cost of owning a car. Those that can afford it but don't buy say they just don't need it. Rides are readily available; friends, Uber/Lyft, and pub trans are enough for a lot of folks as urban density increases.
I'd post references but this is easily Googled from multiple sources. And I'm on a slow mobile connection right now.
Younger folks tend to see cars as noisey, smelly, expensive, and passé already. Not sure that status symbol thesis holds up
That might be some of it, but Millenials on average are also less well off than older cohorts; they simply can't afford a new car, or possibly even a car at all (but might require one; not everyone lives in a metro with good public transit).
Autonomous cars (if used exclusively) over time should decrease safe separation, increasing capacity, but there's a limit to the gains from that.
Some additional gains if they are networked at routing is optimized to utilize all available roads rather than just the usually-best route.
For example I doubt we'll see any benefits of decreased safe separation in cities where there are cyclists and pedestrians and other factors that are hard to predict.
My prediction would be that the efficiency gains will be marginal and will be dominated by other factors that affect congestion.
Well, yeah, that applies to roads with exclusive use of autonomous vehicles, which clearly doesn't apply to roads shared with cyclists and pedestrians, but limited access freeways. But even within cities those can serve as arterial routes.
Platooning https://youtu.be/t9uEPnGI6zA?t=54s
Shuttling to and from stations
Road pricing to get people to share
More road available as there would be less parked cars
Pity the motorcyclists, walkers, and cyclists who dare to get in your way.
Maps and GPS triangulation or pinpointing operates on a margin of error and sometimes routes you to a wrong location even in New York
Some congestion, but other congestion will get better. Parking shortage is a form of congestion that will get better when cars can drop you off rather than needing to find a parking space. Also, circling and searching for parking when there's little available causes congestion. There's few more frustrating driving experiences than being stuck behind someone going 10mph while looking for parking.
I can imagine one of the initial big selling points to self-driving cars will be a "go earn money" mode where, instead of parking your car, you tell it what time to come back and pick you up and it goes to drive for Uber/Lyft in the interim and accepts any ride that doesn't preclude it from returning in time.
I guess it's not sexy to implement the tried-and-true, but it's a lot more sexy to dream.
They are not ready to be widely deployed but are close, which is why we're talking about them. It's an exciting technology with great potential impact on the future and a lot of that impact is positive.
As far as bikes go: no one is complaining about them. It's all in your mind.
As far as public transit: autonomous cars will improve it. By my calculations, autonomous car will be cheaper, unsubsidized, than a $2.50 bus ride subsidized by the city from our taxes (SF has ~$1 billion budget to fund money-loosing bart, buses etc.).
And that's cars. Things will be even cheaper if we get buses to be autonomous. At which point it's likely bus service will be cheaper and provided by a commercial company (the only reason public transport is government owned is because it looses money, so it wouldn't exist as private company).
If you've ever implemented anything in your life, you should know that completely new solutions often come with unexpected failure modes. Very well thought out solutions often address all of these, but more often than not we have to address failure modes through iteration. Unfortunately, physical infrastructure isn't like software: iteration isn't nearly as cheap or fast.
> As far as public transit: autonomous cars will improve it. By my calculations, autonomous car will be cheaper, unsubsidized, than a $2.50 bus ride subsidized by the city from our taxes (SF has ~$1 billion budget to fund money-loosing bart, buses etc.).
And how will that scale? When SF's streets are filled grid-to-grid with vehicles that can only fit 5 people at once (and will probably only accept 4 due to customer sentiment), what will we do then? Also, care to share your calculations?
> And that's cars. Things will be even cheaper if we get buses to be autonomous. At which point it's likely bus service will be cheaper and provided by a commercial company (the only reason public transport is government owned is because it looses money, so it wouldn't exist as private company).
A bus driver is far from the main cost of a bus service. Many buses in SF/Berkeley are already electric or hybrid, so it's not even fuel anymore. Buses are expensive because they are large vehicles and because maintaining them is expensive. Autonomous driving tech won't make a bus cheaper to purchase or maintain.
Also, it's easy to see how driverless cars could be used along with public transit or biking for different parts of a trip.
More of the same, should have stayed wit the eco-friendly solution back then, shouldnt we? And yet, its not the same society we would have had.
Look for the emergent problems. It's the insightful thinker who can observe cars then predict strip malls and parking lots. It's the emergent problems which will point the way to new disruptive business opportunities.
The capability of "autonomous" is also overstated - at the moment there aren't the Level 6 autonomous cars that would be capable of dead-head journeys.
This isn't inherently true. You only get an increase in usage if people want/need that usage but previously couldn't have it. (i.e, if there was already a shortage -- if we were severely undeserving the need previously, or a new undeserved need was discovered).
If there is no shortage already and/or no newly-discovered need for something, then making something cheaper or easier does not increase it's usage.
(This is the big common mistake nearly everyone makes when talking about "Induced Demand". If you don't understand that Induced Demand is really about critical shortages further up the chain, then you trap yourself into doing nothing under the false belief that any new capacity added will automatically "induce" a failure of the new system).
It seems like if slightly less-preferable alternatives are already being used, this would be enough to induce demand when the price drops a bit. Many car trips are optional; consider shopping and the ability to combine trips or order online, if you're motivated to do so. Also, there are many alternatives for entertainment, whether by going somewhere else or staying home. And people do take traffic into account when choosing when and where to drive.
For instance, no one says "we shouldn't make the air cleaner. If clean air became too cheap or too easy to breathe, people might breathe too much". Such a thought is ridiculous. It's understood that, once we have enough so that there is no longer any shortage for anyone, demand simply won't rise, no matter how much cheaper or easier to use that becomes. To the extreme that it's infinitely easy and has absolutely no cost for me to breathe extra clean air right now, but I still don't over-breathe because it would be pointless, there's nothing to gain by doing that.
Another example is a hospital. No one says "we should never build a new hospital. If healthcare becomes too cheap or too easy to get, people might become overly-healthy." Or "If we build a new hospital, we'll just encourage people to be more sick". Someone will even print up some misleading statistics. They'll say, "see, last year we had a 500-bed hospital, and it was always full of sick people. Now we have two 500-bed hospitals, and they're both full. Sickness has doubled since last year! We have more sick people now than ever before". It's understood that a new hospital does not create sickness, it does not induce sickness. These people were still sick, they just weren't counted because they weren't in the hospital. They were getting ill at home or at work, and not getting recorded at the hospital because it was already full.
---
Transportation works the same way. But it's been so under-built, poorly-built, and under-serviced for so many years, that everyone approaches it with starvation mentality to scrape by with, instead of approaching it as a problem to be actually solved well.
Cheaper and more convenient cars do not create demand, they expose shortages up the chain. There is already, today, many people who have a shortage of housing and transportation across the US. Clean/cheap/safer cars allow them to meet needs that previously were unmet. This will create the illusion of new congestion (because transportation will be more accessible to people), but that congestion is not new, it already existed. It just was not being not measured, it was spilling out into other areas where it is unaccounted for (such as people who ordering online who would have preferred to shop in stores but couldn't, or people just giving up on life altogether and not going places they want or need to go, because no transportation exists to make the trip possible).
For example, Autonomous cars will likely increase total car trips because empty cars will be summoned around to places. That's not really new demand though, that's an exposing of a critical shortage of parking. If Autonomous cars were cheap enough, and parking was cheap enough, Autonomous cars would never need to make empty trips. They could wait for people right where people already are without any problems. But because most cities have a critical shortage of parking, that shortage will spill out into the streets as "induced demand", where cars will waste lots of time and energy driving around empty into and out of cities, just so they can avoid parking in cities. Autonomous cars "solve parking" by moving parked cars into city streets and circulating them. It's not new demand, its old demand being pushed around to different places, hot-potato style.
Similarly, autonomous cars will likely increase total driving distances, as they make it easier for people to live further away from cities and endure longer commutes. But this too isn't really induced demand for cars, this is an exposing of the critical shortage of housing that most US cities have. If there was enough quality affordable housing in cities, people wouldn't waste their time commuting further away, even if doing so had zero cost. But because we are not willing to solve that problem, it too will spill out into our transportation infrastructure, and then get blamed on "cars" or "induced demand", when neither is a really accurate representation of the problem, nor an accurate path for finding a solution.
It seems like this isn't likely to be settled via armchair reasoning in an online discussion; someone needs to look at the data (for example, at pricing), and that's likely to lead to a complicated economics discussion.
You're right that it's not infinite; I don't want to spend 8 hours a day commuting just because someone else is doing the driving. But, speaking as someone who lives about an hour outside of the nearest large city, I would absolutely go in more for the evening--as well as take more weekend trips--if I didn't have to drive.
That's likely typical of a lot of people, albeit not everyone.
Right now the set of potential drivers are limited to 16 to around 80 (though many seniors may be forced to stop earlier). When skill and attention and licensing are no longer requirements for driving, then children and seniors that would have been forced to bicycle, walk or take transit will be able to call an autonomous car.
The problem will be when fewer than 100% of vehicles are autonomous, then it will simply remain as awful as it is today.
Firstly, I disagree about your congestion claim. It is 'easy' to program self-driving cars to create road trains, where cars ride at speed with centimeters distance. That way, road capacity can easily quadruple. Traffic may slow down in rush hour, but traffic jams due to driver misjudgments could become a lot rarer, if not a thing from the past.
Traffic jams due to cars breaking down also might be avoidable. Cars could be programmed to push other cars out of the way, if one were to break down.
I also disagree with your claim the number of cars will go down. Reason? For many people, cars are too much of a status symbol. They also serve a bit as an extension to one's home (both psychologically and practically, for example to store a child's seat, umbrella, tennis rackets).
So why, if everybody able to afford a car today will still be able to afford one, would they do away with it?
Also, I don't see lots and lots of possibilities of decreasing the peak demand for cars. Many people still will want to go to work between 7 and 9 (all else being equal), and most cars will not be able to make two trips between suburbs and offices in a single rush hour (even without congestion, as I expect people to move further out of town in response, where gardens are larger and houses cheaper). Also, parents who can afford it will have third or fourth cars to drive their kids to school.
I think it's possible if we start building new cities designed for walking, instead of just expanding our current cities, with all the problems that presents. I think the trick would be to strictly limit their footprint to something that would allow anyone to walk from one end to another in ~30 minutes. You can still have a big city, you just have to rely on the world's greatest form of public transportation (the elevator) and build up.
Aside from the serenity of not having cars wiz around, dividing up the city and running people over, there are a bunch of other benefits. Not having to provide services to every residence makes the government's job much easier (so less government); the city would become more of a community if everyone is always walking everywhere and running into each other; you'd have more public green space since the city would be surrounded by a large green loop; and it could fit into some really amazing locations, like a lush valley, or between a lake and a mountain. You can connect a bunch of them with a hyperloop (or something as simple as a bus service).
I'm genuinely curious on this note. I love utopian visions of cities, but also recognize that even if they existed, more than a few folks wouldn't want to inhabit them.
I would never want to live in that district. Reasons:
- Buildings are very close to each other which makes the place dark and noisy(sound bounces off the walls).
- Rent is high, because apartments are so close to everything that landlords can get away with high prices.
- Trash day is once a week, because you can't have a garbage truck roaming the streets every morning waking everybody up.
- Summer is hell, because air can't travel through all this tight space.
Once you get rid of the roads you create a perverse incentive to place something there instead, e.g. buildings. And this is what ultimately happens.
Also: assuming you're walking at a brisk pace of 6km/h. In 30 minutes you're going to travel 3km, which means that in order to be able to walk from one end to another you'll need a city with an area of at most 7km^2.
While I agree with the rest of your points, "once a week" trash service is pretty standard in many areas. And if you have properly integrated mechanisms within buildings, even that might be more often than needed.
How many inhabitants do you think that will be?
We can build new cities, or expand current ones, with concepts in place that eliminate the need for travel, but a more pressing problem that requires immediate attention is the population currently in cities.
In the given circumstances, mass public transport systems (like the one envisaged by Musk) are the best way forward, IMO.
Electric cars are the next best option, considering the overall eco-friendly nature of coal to miles drive efficiency of electrical systems, plus their suitability to go off grid.
To me one major focus point seems to be investment in technologies, concepts and constructs of nano-grids, at the level of individual communities and homes, drastically reducing fossil fuel usage. This could be a major push point for governments, and yes, problems of this scale require massive push from governments, to pull people kicking and screaming into a greener future, before it's too late. For that the world need strong leaders and forward thinkers.
To quote an example, in India, where I am from, the govt. is pushing very hard for solar power generation, to the detriment of existing thermal power plant manufacturing infrastructure. There is a lot of resentment in affected companies, vendors, operators, etc, for this move. But what has to be done has to be done. Left to their own, or to market forces, we will boil ourselves dead.
Remember, climate change has a lot of lag. It's effects are not immediate, nor apparent until it is too late. We are already seeing that now.
> Aside from the serenity of not having cars wiz around, dividing up the city and running people over, there are a bunch of other benefits. Not having to provide services to every residence makes the government's job much easier (so less government); the city would become more of a community if everyone is always walking everywhere and running into each other; you'd have more public green space since the city would be surrounded by a large green loop; and it could fit into some really amazing locations, like a lush valley, or between a lake and a mountain. You can connect a bunch of them with a hyperloop (or something as simple as a bus service).
This seems too fantastical to be made true in reality. Maybe I'm wrong, but IMO it's better we plan and do things keeping in mind the nature of the average human. After all, we still have huge swaths of population still thinking climate change is not caused or accelerated by human activities.
I think you could argue that my idea is less fantastical than Musk's. People have built and migrated to new cities since the dawn of civilization. It's a more recent phenomenon that we stopped building large cities. My idea doesn't require any new technology. It doesn't require the government to do that much. It doesn't require people to behave any differently that what is natural.
Groceries were a total pain in the ass, every time.
I'd love to see designs that rely less on cars as a sole means of transportation. They still have a place in the ecosystem, however, and they serve a useful function.
I hope that you realize that cities are not just begun and built up (like the ghost-cities of China), but are built up over time because the area was desirable and people migrated to those areas.
The US isn't in the habit of just building a city somewhere. That just doesn't happen.
That -new city building- is something that happens when a country's GDP is slipping so low they have no choice but to spend money (looking at you China) to falsely inflate their growth metric.
In the west, we are capitalist driven. That means a city will spring up around a feature. Doesn't matter what that feature is, but it's growth is organic and not necessarily well-planned as you're suggesting.
We could theoretically do this, but we don't.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/mar/21/china-west-gh...
I personally think America could benefit from taking a little bit of China's approach here. Can you imagine how much more affordable housing would be in San Francisco if a bunch of "unnecessary" / "ghost" housing got built before all the new tech jobs moved in.
And sure, it's possible to misjudge things, not every future plan will be wildly successful. But what's really the worst case scenario? "Oh no, we built too much housing. I guess apartments will be really easy to afford. I guess we can start sheltering homeless people really cheaply now, or artists can retrofit some for cheap studio space."
The high cost of completely changing your fleet of vehicles, your driver and mechanics training and bringing in a whole new set of vendors and service professionals to tie it all together.
> My first suspicion is that fossil fuel transportation is still cheaper.
Yes, it's just about a lot more than the vehicles themselves.
Two groups of people will drive ICEs in that future. Poor people who are still driving 2023 Camrys and rich people driving higher end or enthusiast target ICE stuff.
More than a few in the latter group will consider such an attempt at shaming them as an invitation to spin the tires all the way through the intersection when the light turns green. Tire smoke smells bad to most people.
Anyway, it's just an idea. I guess I'm bored. Cheers!
They already have electric weed-eaters. I can easily imagine those engines having a battery, complete with a solar powered charger, likely with an option for direct power. If your house power is solar as well, it still works.
I don't think this stuff is hard to imagine.
Large earth movers are a different beast, simply because of the heavy load. I predict these will be much further off. But so long as they have enough power, I don't see the issue with them being electric at some point.
Lawn equipment is fairly low-hanging fruit for electrification, much easier than cars, and would have a disproportionate impact on air quality.
As I said, the current crop of battery-powered weed whackers are apparently pretty good. When I've looked into robo electric-powered lawn mowers though, they really seemed to be for pretty minimal yards. I don't keep much of my property as lawn and, still, nothing out there seemed like it would be very effective.
With recent advancements in electronics, DC power seems to be a good bet, especially when considering the ubiquity of solar systems.
I wouldn't doubt that. I have a carbon-neutral wireless electric weed-eater. Throw some spinning blades on it, and it will cut down small trees too. I also have a carbon-neutral wireless electric lawnmower. And a carbon-neutral wireless electric snowblower.
You can buy all three yourself, today, in the US at almost any Home Depot store nationwide.
I almost guarantee those plastics were not manufactured using a carbon-neutral process.
http://metroenergy.org/2017/03/10000-off-nissan-leaf-june-30...
I bought a lightly used 2015 for $8,500 in 2017.
- No AC - No Heaters - Light weight - Ample amount of luggage space - Not much range required
Charging while driving the car through induction. https://www.wired.com/2013/08/induction-charged-buses/
Self driving car guidance built into the roads. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/178640-volvo-designs-mag...
Road signs that communicate to the cars via wireless protocols etc. https://phys.org/news/2017-05-traffic-frisco-cars-technology...
For example - taking a vacation up in the mountains. No power, limited direct sunlight for solar, and your car is your lifeline. Or cross-country travel that isn't on the highways (i.e. no superchargers every 100 miles). Limited to 400 miles in a day, and required to stay at a hotel or spot with a plug in. Or someplace not in the continental US - for example Alaska or Canada.
That said, I think my ideal theoretical vehicle would have an all electric power train, and a gas turbine generator for those long trips. Best of both worlds (combustion and electric).
Now, as part of your trailer, you have extra energy storage, perhaps some solar capacity to refill the trailer batteries, possibly using the movement of the vehicle itself too.
Trailer too much? You also have the option of a "luggage case" on top, which isn't as powerful as the above but still lets you have freedom and maybe has a little wind turbine that works as you drive.
And I'm pretty sure we'll have some cars that just automatically come with extra batteries, for exactly the sort of travel you are talking.
(For those who didn't have their morning coffee today: the power that this wind turbine would capture would be (fraction of) the one coming from your car's battery. I.e. this would do nothing but increase the drag.)
Sigh. Time for a new keyboard.
I'm keeping that one around for awhile; thanks for the laugh.
But I can see it being sold. We put fake blowers, oversized spoilers, and other such things on cars now.
It's fine as a proof of concept, and maybe even for a daily driver with a bit of emergency range, but not for my aforementioned trips.
It sounds like you want a Volt. 53-ish miles of zero-emission electrical driving. If your battery dies, the gas generator clicks on, and a single tank of gas gets you an extra 315+ miles at freeway speeds.
It's not perfect. But (IMHO) it's pretty close to the best of both worlds, since the i3 isn't allowed to have a real range extender.
A few gallons of fuel can certainly add more than a 100 miles.
As a point of their reliability, most of the old pumpjacks you've seen about (if you're my age) are powered by turbines. Turned on, and left running for years without stopping.
So for small turbines and with safe speeds, I guess the efficiency is compromised.
Having said that, I have come across efficient micro-turbines.
http://www.jetmodelproducts.com/amt.htm
157 N/16KG thrust at 450 g/min (grams, not gallons ;))
For vacations though I tend to travel between two countries that have announced that all cars will be electric relatively soon. Maybe a solution for the future is a standardized small shipping container that goes with you by train to fairly near a destination then gets put on the back of something like a small electric pickup truck that you rent while there.
There are currently about 44,000 Charging outlets in the US [1]. So just to keep up with the increase miles we drive each month, and not increase the percentage of electric vehicle miles, we need to install more than 50% as many charging outlets as have ever been installed EVERY MONTH forever. Time for that exponential curve to help us out some more.
[0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA [1]: https://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity_locations.html
[1] https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/quizzes/answerQuiz16.shtml
So every home is a charging station and if the range for EVs keep increasing 10 percent per year we will reach 400 miles in 2 years, 500 miles in less than 5 years. By then, road side charging stations will be for people driving more than 7 hours in a day and for the very forgetful.
I drove more than 300 miles in one day once this year, and I still haven't driven more than 400 miles in a single day this year.
Even if you commute 30 miles to work and 30 miles back, you would only have to charge your Tesla model 3 in the weekends. In 5 years you could drive 100 miles a day and still only charge your EV every weekend.
Charging stations are for long trips or connivence at points of interest.
I hate this metric. Its nearly meaningless to the average person. Why not report it for what it is, days of lost life expectancy per person?
I will stipulate to the fact that electrical vehicles are more efficient. But efficiency doesn't equate to "less expensive."
https://electrek.co/2016/10/10/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-challenge...
Anyway, I think the whole idea of a tax savings classified as a subsidy is ludicrous. It's as if the federal government owns 100% of may paycheck, and the 70% they allow me to keep is then a subsidy.