While I share your antipathy for low-efficiency vehicles, why is traveling around the national parks of the west a sad way to spend your retirement years?
Tangent: Are these actually low efficiency? Sure, 10 mpg (this is a more typical average, BTW, not 8 mpg) is terrible gas mileage ... for an average car. But a portable house that can drive down the interstate isn't just a car. Per pound, it doesn't seem that bad.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2015/09/evolving-climate-...
"In addition, Sivak suggests carpooling, as having three or more person in a vehicle “completely” changes the comparison with flying. Indeed, with a few people in the car, “driving becomes less energy intensive than flying (even after taking into account the increased weight that the vehicle needs to carry).”"
Edited to add quotes.
The laundry footprint is a large factor when considering hotel stays. If we add up both the carbon costs of the hotel stay and airfare added together it seems like it adds up to more than the RV option. That's all I was trying to highlight, I haven't done a research paper on it, just my perception.
Some people literally live in hotels.
Otherwise the argument becomes "Staying at home is better for the environment than traveling", which is true, not not really a fair comparison.
The average 2017 car in the US got 25mpg. So with a 15+mpg difference, you'd need to either drive 5 miles or less per day (0.3g difference), OR average 100 miles per day and have the hotels wash the laundry 20x as much.
Also, retirees roaming around the country in an RV generally sit in one place for a week or two at a time.
I get that corporate shipping industries would benefit but a lot of delivery vans are the same platform as an RV. I think a Ford F350 is the size of those 25 ft uhaul rentals - about same size as a decent sized RV.
RV's typically park somewhere for days, campgrounds could be good places for charging stations. If you have a stay booked for 5 days, it could even slow trickle charge over that time.
That's really the biggest issue with electric towing right now. To get a reasonable range while towing a travel trailer, the EV needs four times the battery capacity, maybe more. This is a pretty big capital investment, and then you're toting around an extra few thousand pounds even when not towing.
We will get there eventually, but I expect that tow vehicles will be amongst the last personal vehicles to be successfully electrified.
Box-shaped vehicles are just going to have massive energy demands above 45MPH or so due to physics. On top of this, the engine just doesn't mass that much more (in absolute terms) than a car engine, so the mass savings for an electric motor are not increased that much. All this means an electric RV with any reasonable range is going to be heavy.
Hybrid technology might makes sense though as they already have demand for a large-ish battery, and dynamic braking could really reduce wear on the brakes.
Many RVs are already making compromises with furnishings, water (fresh, grey, black), electrical (non-motive, but often much of lighting, electronics, heat, cooking, hot water, cooling), and gear.
Add 100s or 1,000s of kilos of batteries, and further compromises are necessary.
1) EV has been very expensive until relatively recently + RVs are a relatively low volume market => slow to re-design all vehicles. Yes, they re-design the stuff on top fairly often, but not AFAIK the chassis itself. I'd definitely be interested if I'm wrong about this though, rapid chassis evolution would probably be interesting to read about.
2) RVs are often used for long-distance and far-from-Civilization™ trips, which very much does not fit well with the (lack of) charging infrastructure. And even when you do go along highways, the charging time (due to higher power use + storage) is going to be substantially longer than on cars, which are already quite lengthy.
re 2: Driving to somewhere with RV hookups would mitigate that a lot, which honestly would cover the vast majority of how many RVers I know use their vehicles. Charging overnight or longer is probably fine... but campgrounds will definitely not like you (and a bunch of other RVs) drawing that much power, they're simply not wired for enormous load. It'll take time for that stuff to be rebuilt.
The travel patterns of many RV'ers means they need big (and expensive) batteries -- drive 200 miles, then spend days or weeks in one place, but since they are driving at highway speeds in a non-aerodynamic vehicle they burn a lot of energy just pushing through the air and don't get to recoup much in regenerative braking like a delivery truck might.
Even though many campgrounds are wired for 50A service, they may struggle when they have 100 RV's all trying to charge at the same time at that rate.
A portable house and essentials weighing probably 5kg can go on your back.
For every choice you make, I guarantee someone can point out how you could have been more environmentally friendly. Let's not go down that path.
That's circular reasoning; carrying zillions of kilos around with you is the part that's inefficient.
That's like the drunk searching for his keys under the streetlamp rather than where he dropped them. Does that mean it's somehow environmentally friendly to drive an 18-wheeler on a road trip rather than a motorbike, because the per-ton fuel efficiency is higher? The fair comparison to an RV trip is an equivalent vacation experience, and while we can argue about the details of what that means, it's certainly not just an equal tonnage.
> Whether someone should stay at home instead of travel in their RV, that is a moral thing. And I'm pretty sure that just about 0 people have an unassailable record of life choices.
Ideally I'd like to set a carbon tax at a level that fully covers the costs of repairing the damage, and take the moral element out of the equation - then we can just say that x litres of petrol costs y, and it's up to you whether that's worth it or not. But given that we don't have such a thing (and these people are presumably not offsetting), I'd say that you should at least make sure the fun you're getting out of something is proportional to your emissions; if you're doing something that's marginally fun but extremely polluting then I do think it's fair to judge you for that.
Unfortunately the RV industry is one where products are built to be sold, not to be used, and what's under the hood is not a selling point compared to how fancy the interior is.
When reading a review of Ford's new hybrid F-150 a couple months ago, one of the comments at the bottom of the article really stood out to me - "Ford needs to get this in their RV platform ASAP". I tend to agree that that's actually a super clever idea - most RVs already have a standalone generator separate from the drivetrain, and rolling that into a hybrid system makes a lot of sense.
Not much left to better the community when keeping yourself fed and clothed[1] is two full-time jobs. And that's for free-persons, who aren't serfs, slaves, or indentured labourers.
[1] Prior to industrialization, it took something close to ~3,000 work-hours a year[2] to keep a family barely-clothed. Add another thousand or three if you wanted to have a change of clothes for Sundays.
[2] https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t...
My point was, back then, your two full-time jobs benefited the community in and of themselves.
I'm not trying to argue that we should go back in time to the dark ages (I like modern medicine and technology), but am just suggesting that workers would have been far more likely to find intrinsic satisfaction in the work they did back then because they both had more autonomy/personal input and could also directly see their labour benefitting the people they cared about.
Also, by your logic it wouldn't be enough for people to work around the clock just to survive in hunter-gathering times
The problem with being a hunter-gatherer is that your agricultural neighbours move in, settle down, work their asses off, have lots of children, and then war with you until they push you off your land. And nine times out of ten, they win this war, because their way of life supports a lot more people per acre of land.
This is why the world is full of agricultural societies, and the few remaining hunter-gatherers have been pushed into unproductive, fringe territories.
I like being out in nature, but I also like having a comfortable bed and a kitchen (with refrigerator) where I can prepare full meals. The cooking part is why I like having an RV - while it's possible to find a hotel with a kitchenette, it's still a pretty limited kitchen (often without an oven) and you have to find a way to schlep your food around from hotel to hotel if you're on an extended trip.
Plus, it's nice to have your own bathroom, especially during a Pandemic.
Nice to have a reasonable bed after an exhausting day canyoneering.
Nice to have a heater for that sudden snowstorm in June.
It isn't going on the backpacking trip (but could be a great mobile base for punctuated backpacking!) but it can facilitate a lot of great experiences (and can broaden the experience of people who wouldn't go on that backpacking trip...)