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Comment by HEHENE | Hacker News Reader

>“My goal is to never own a gas car,” Giertz said. “I’m a part of a new generation of drivers that will only drive electric. I feel like I should pad this a little bit, but I’m not going to. Fuck oil companies. Seriously, fuck them.”

I can appreciate the sentiment, but this comes off extremely entitled and privileged. I do not think most of the drivers just earning their licenses are going to be able to afford electric cars, or have the means to charge the damn things.

Most kids will be getting hand-me-downs or buying cheap clunkers that should probably be headed to the junk yard and not their garage. And we're still many years away from all-electric cars being old enough to be cheap clunkers.

I'm really curious what generation of drivers Simone thinks she's part of, because it has to be the 1% of new drivers.

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> I do not think most of the drivers just earning their licenses are going to be able to afford electric cars

You don't have to afford an electric car to not own a gas car.

There are many cities where you need a car. Sure you could try to optimize where you live but that alone is a luxury that many cannot afford.

Yet many can't afford cars even in those cities.

There are many places where it's almost impossible to live a normal life without either owning a car, or heavily relying on someone who does.

There are many places where the opposite is true. Are we just focusing on the states here? The world is pretty big and most of it is unlike the USA.

We're not focusing on the states no. I live 10km outside one of the largest Danish cities and work across town, that is not doable with public transport or biking (biking would add 10km to my commute). It becomes even less possible when my child starts daycare and I have to pick her up no later than 17:00.

It's not even that I can't take the bus, it just adds 1 hour and 45 minutes in the morning and at least 1 hour in the afternoon.

Due to Danish taxes on cars and the high starting prices on electric cars it's becomes a problem for most people.

You can't even take the train across the country in Denmark, it takes to long. If you have a meeting at 9 in Copenhagen, you have to leave Aalborg (400km away) the day before. You have to fly or drive, which will be significantly cheaper anyway.

Does that mean the folks who are capable of living without a car shouldn't be proud of it?

No one is saying everyone should be without a gas car, just some folks have moved on and are proud of it.

No, I'll just Uber everywhere :)

Guess depends where you are/how far. It got expensive fast for me Ubering 15miles(one way) to work and back. Was about $60/day with tipping.

This depends a lot on where the person making this claim is from. Most of my acquaintances from rural areas all drive cars, not out of choice but necessity.

However, everyone that I know who lives in the city don't drive and never owned a car. It makes a lot of sense for those people to wait until their late 20's to get a car since there are good alternatives to driving.

It makes sense for them to wait until they are able to afford a car that is electric.

Electric cars are more affordable than ever and the trend will continue. Kids who are 18 years old today will without a doubt be able to get an electric car in 10 year without breaking the bank.

The word generation can carry a whole lot of nuance. I don't think she literally meant every single person in her generation.

Right, generation does not necessarily have to mean age group.

People talk about Git and Mercurial being a different generation of source control tools compared to Subversion and CVS. That refers to things rather than people, but the point is that the generation can refer to a set that is a distinct evolution of another set.

Glad you honed in on the "will only" comment to grandstand about privilege.

If Giertz changed that to less absolute language, poof, your comment disappears.

A philosophical difference, I guess. I'm normally one whose quick to criticize others as entitled and privileged, but I like this.

So what? You can still hate oil companies. She's talking about her own motivation.

The likelihood that my first car (if I ever buy one) will be electric is quite high.

The e-waste on those early generation electric clunkers could end up being just as big of a problem as gas cars as far as I can see. I would love to be proven wrong, but until they start making the heavy metals and REE containing components much more recyclable (and actually recycling them) we are doing pretty environmentally irresponsible mining and manufacturing to make these disposable vehicles.

These cars' batteries aren't ending up in landfills, they're being recycled via reuse, which is even better than the recycling you were probably imagining. As soon as an old first-generation EV is totaled and shows up in a salvage yard, the battery modules get bought up by someone online. There's tons getting sold every day on eBay as well. People are making home storage batteries (for solar systems and the like) from them mostly, or electrifying other vehicles, or other hobby projects with them. There's also a few companies importing them to offer aftermarket battery upgrades, repairs and refurbishment for these cars in markets they're not officially sold/serviced in. The car makers also have their own recycling programs; Nissan recycles used LEAF batteries into home storage batteries called xStorage for example.

Do you want to back that up? Because I have yet to see actual examples provided alongside this particular argument.

unless someone has a plan to burn and spew the old cells into the atmosphere, causing the earth to heat up, it will never be as big a problem as gas cars.

(that is the worst case, where auto makers just bury the cells in the ground. thankfully, that's not actually the case. they reuse battery packs and are scaling up techniques to recover the rare metals from them. you haven't heard much about this at scale because few packs have actually hit their end of life.)

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