SUVs are offsetting EV car gains | Hacker News Reader

SUVs are offsetting EV car gains

the-ken.com

62 pointsa22a-dev96 comments

Meanwhile the German city Tübingen is raising the parking fee for SUVs by 6 times and other cities are thinking about this as well. They are too big for those cities.

https://www.rtl.de/cms/tuebingen-parkgebuehren-fuer-suv-fahr...

Let's see how it goes... the auto lobby is quite powerful in DE

Daimler (Mercedes) is quite close, and they complained loudly when Boris Palmer decided to drive a Prius rather than a Daimler car when he became mayor of Tübingen.

So yes, the auto lobby is quite powerful but the extent to which they can interfere with the business of a small liberal university town is very small.

Great. The rich can park while the poor cannot afford.

Who drives SUVs?

I will until my kids grow up, then might do small sedan. They are just too good with kids. Great for long trips too, but I rarely do those.

The poor already cant afford an SUV.

And in which World exactly do "the poor" drive SUVs?

Nissan and Renault both make appalling and cheap SUVs?

180€ pays how many monthly payments? Less than one?

Worse than that, poor people's bus or bike journeys end up being impeded by road hogging SUV's and other single occupancy vehicles.

Isn't it a illusion that poor people bike so much? I mean one of the most efficient indicators of real estate price is travel time to and from a city center.

Poor people can't afford cars. Cramming whole families into cheap apartments of questionable legality is not a great way to live, but you do what you have to.

This sounds highly location-dependent. I'm in rural America, and the poor here, with extremely rare exceptions, own cars. There are people living in dilapidated shacks with SUVs in the driveway.

Yes, that is very much an Americanism: house falling apart, shiny pretty car in front.

In Berlin at least there is a strong correlation between income and access to a car. Poor people take public transit and bike much more. They also tend to live close to major roads and suffer from noise and air pollution much more.

75% of the people with an income below 1500€/month don't have a car in Berlin. Only once you reach 3000€/month income (that's roughly the median income) the majority has access to a car.

That’s the point. It’s the point of so many things. If you can’t pay to offset the problem you impose on someone, you sometimes can’t impose on them.

That’s the idea.

What I meant is, do you really think the rich people will care? Will those people really not drive their SUV to the city?

They wont care, but their money can offset the harm done by their carelessness.

Maybe they will. If not you can increase the tax even more and, worse case scenario they still don't care and you still get the money to invest in public transportation :)

Under capitalism, any resource that has to be limited due to scarcity or the need to cut usage (in this case, parking space/car usage in cities) will be used by the rich. It's just how the system works.

Charge for parking? The rich can pay. Only allow cars with odd/even plates to enter depending on day of the week? The rich can have two cars, one even and one odd. Only allow electric cars? The rich can more easily buy one. Only allow to park at certain hours in the day? The rich can have more flexible timetables. Only allow to park for a limited time? The rich can have a chauffeur to drive their car away while they do their business. Don't allow to park at all? The rich don't even need to park, the chauffeur will drive their car away and that's it. Don't allow cars to enter at all? Rickshaws will get popular.

If you don't want to drop or radically reform capitalism, and you want to solve this kind of problems at all, it's just something you need to accept. It comes with the system that with money you have more means to adapt to any restriction.

It's true that charges like this are fairer when wealth is distributed more equally, so you make a powerful argument for wealth redistribution, but not against this policy.

Poor people have fewer cars, so they tend to benefit from less car-centric legislation. But anyway, even the new, higher costs are minuscule, at most 180€/year.

It says in the article that residential parking permits are only half the price for poorer people.

Unfortunate you are getting down voted. I've noticed HN is overrun by people with extreme left leaning views while they rake in tech salaries. SF is now literally a science experiment in petri dish - What happens when rich people, who pretend to care throw money at problems instead of actually getting involved?

I am confused on why some people don't get that SUV's are a preference because they do bring some benefits (namely more space, a bit higher guard (especially useful on shitty roads), and that the alternative aka MCV's / monovolume are just dead and were never a lot more drag efficient.

Does it suck to drive a SUV in a city ? Mostly yes, but is it better to tax people based on the car size ? Won't this just make some people have 2 cars now instead of 1 ?

I guess if they can afford an SUV, they can afford two cars.

But that is the point, two cars is much worse than one suv

Most SUV owning couples already have two cars.

Going into sterotypes mode now, guy drives regular car, wife drives SUV to take kids into school.

SUVs are more expensive on average than sedans or hatchbacks, but are not indicative of luxury clientele.

They surely are, people that count pennies to buy a class B car (rental category) aren't going to get any of those.

> I am confused on why some people don't get that SUV's are a preference because they do bring some benefits (namely more space, a bit higher guard (especially useful on shitty roads)

That's the reason why it's a tax or fee rather than a ban. If the benefits are worth it to you, fine, but you should pay for the social costs of your choices (which are not just high pollution but also taking up more road space and endangering other road users, especially cyclists and pedestrians).

> is it better to tax people based on the car size ? Won't this just make some people have 2 cars now instead of 1 ?

Seems pretty implausible. What would be the mechanism for that?

I don't know man SUVs might be more practical. But, I find them to look boring and for all old people. Sedans and hatchbacks definitely have a more fun look to them.

Which makes SUVs even more of a status signalling Veblen good - cost is correlated with status so cost increases can have perverse effects.

Tübingen is also, due to its topography, not really suited for too many cars in the city. Little space, river, hills, old and narrow streets. There's a lot of work being done to make it more friendly to cyclists and expanding public transport. Alas, the proposed tram was something too few people wanted.

When you read the article:

-It's currently €30/y for a permit and due to a change in law they're changing that to €120 for everyone.

-For anyone over 1800KG, that becomes €180/y. So "heavy car" drivers pay 1.5x what a lightweight car driver pays

-That limit is increased to 2000kg for EVs. That does mean that a early adopters who drive a Model S are likely to pay the increase tariff as well.

Sure, still not a bad idea but quite far removed from the oneliner "raising the parking fee 6x for SUVS"

Ah, I now see another article that states it is 6x more than the country's average. So it seems it has to do more about this specific city than SUVs.

Alternatively, the 536 hp, 5018 lbs (2276 kg) BMW i4 ("1,000 lbs (454 kg) more than most other 3 and 4 Series BMWs", not known as lightweight cars in the first place) apparently "is the electric BMW sedan you’ve been waiting for". New ways of wasting energy in maximum comfort, all around.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/10/the-2023-bmw-i4-is-the-...

>New ways of wasting energy in maximum comfort, all around.

"Over the course of 267 miles (430 km) and 8 hours, the car used 2.6 miles/kWh (23.7 kWh/100 km), bearing in mind that those miles were all driven in Germany and include running at the car's top speed of 140 mph (225 km) on derestricted autobahns."

ie. around 100 mpg. It is not even close to "waste", it is saving the planet in maximum comfort.

>It is not even close to "waste", it is saving the planet in maximum comfort.

It's less wasteful than the ICE equivalent but in no way can it be described as saving the planet. If you are really serious about saving the planet then you buy a bicycle.

>If you are really serious about saving the planet then you buy a bicycle.

bicycle is 100miles/kwh. Human body is 25% efficient, so it is just 25 miles/kwh for the energy coming in the food - so for all the bicycle disadvantages (low speed, open to elements, no meaningful cargo capacity) it is only meager 10x difference with that 2+ tons BMW i4 (and only 7x difference with my Prius Plugin).

The kwh in human food is much dirty than kwh for electric car, especially when electricity comes from renewables. The food requires tremendous expenditure of energy to produce it as well as it causes tremendous impact on the planet ecosystem due to agriculture.

I think the implied assumption is that you don't spend 6 hours a day riding the bike you just bought. Though conveniently, the obesity rates are high enough that even this wouldn't require an increase in calorie intake in the top polluting countries and would in fact be an overall improvement to national health. And you'd still produce much lower emissions.

On a sidenote, >10% of conventional fuel is made via agriculture, and seemingly around 5% of electricity production in the US, 10% in EU28[1].

[1] https://www.bpb.de/nachschlagen/zahlen-und-fakten/europa/751...

That top speed part must have been very short as seen from a recent modelY video keeping that 220ish km/h takes about 110kW of power.

As opposed to about 15kW for 90km/h.

A fairer comparison would be emissions over the car's lifetime. The electric SUV would still almost certainly come out on top, but it's probably closer than the 100 vs 15 MPG would make it seem.

> Battery manufacturing life-cycle emissions debt is quickly paid off. An electric vehicle’s higher emissions during the manufacturing stage are paid off after only 2 years compared to driving an average conventional vehicle, a time frame that drops to about one and a half years if the car is charged using renewable energy. Approximately half of a battery’s emissions come from electricity used in the manufacturing process

From https://theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/EV-life...

The important takeaway is that greener electricity grid will help both the emissions from manufacturing, as well as emissions from usage

> It is not even close to "waste", it is saving the planet in maximum comfort.

It is 100 % waste and you don't "save" the planet. Saving the planet = no car. Yeah, an EV is less wasteful than an ICE. Just don't think you save the planet.

> Saving the planet = no car.

Saving the planet = maximum one kid per couple.

While we are a lot of humans, we are nowadays far away from having too much kids.

Worldwide, we are already close to the replacement rate and projections see us falling below by 2070.

Most of the population growth is actually not "new kids getting born", it's "folks getting older than the generations before".

So, if population growth is your concern, don't tell people to have less kids. Tell them to stop getting so old.

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-popu...

You might enjoy this book, in which philosopher Ken Wilber humorously suggests we should tax incentives euthanasia for the elderly:

Boomeritis: A Novel That Will Set You Free is a polemical 2002 novel by American philosopher Ken Wilber, principally designed to explain Wilber's integral theory and to explain his concept of "Boomeritis". Wilber characterizes this as the deadly combination of a modern egalitarian worldview with a deep unquestioned narcissism commonly held by Baby Boomers and their children in the green meme of Spiral Dynamics, as opposed to Wilber's universal integralism.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomeritis

Saving the planet = every human commits suicide

Do whatever you can. The most effective strategies are often the least interesting.

that is a fallacy. Passenger vehicles are responsible for 10% of global emissions - so whether to drop it 4x (100mpg instead of 25mpg) to 2.5% or drop it to 0% wouldn't matter much. And using renewables for electricity we basically drop emissions to the rounding error around 0.

Using global emissions is a neat trick here, because globally almost everyone can't afford a car.

Emissions will have to be reduced across all sectors, so if you merely manage to drop it to 2.5% of current emissions, that'll be a larger percentage in 2030 and 2050. If the trend continues and more people get more cars and drive them more (saving the world all the while), the share will increase further.

Of course an infinite supply of green energy would solve everything, but unfortunately that's not available. We're not supplying enough green electricity to cover current demands, much less enough to cover the roughly doubled demand if we were to shift all transportation to EVs.

Plus the break-even for an EV vs ICE car is around the 100,000k mark, if I recall correctly, due to the energy required to build the battery in the EV.

So: it’s complicated. It’d take me over ten years to do 100,000 kilometres, so probably the best car is the one I already have.

This [1] claims 21,725km for the US and only 13,518km for Norways energy mix. The 100,000km number is quite old and was corrected down and down again several times due to more efficient battery production and changing energy mix.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d...

Excellent, thanks for the update :)

This new ice cream is low fat, I can eat as much of it as I want!

As other people have pointed out, the efficiency should be calculated over the car lifetime, and including the average efficiency at which the electricity is produced in the areas where the car test was run... Germany produces a LOT of electricity from COAL, so we are replacing benzin and diesel with coal... not very smart in my eyes.

Germany produces a LOT of electricity from renewables as well.

If you include nuclear then around 60% of the generated electricity was produced with low CO2 emissions.

100mpg in non-city driving is an improvement over the average driver but not a game-changing one; that's maybe 40% better than a small car, and significantly worse than a light motorbike. When you take into account the increased road wear and space taken up it might even be a net negative on the whole.

Electricity made from fossil fuels is about 40% efficient (depending on method) - so that 100mpg in the car turns into 40mpg overall.

The big benefit electric cars have is obviously that they can use renewable energy to charge, which reduces the carbon intensity of their electricity. But that's not a given - it depends hugely on location.

Electric cars are heavier, yes. And its easier than ever to get mad power out of electric motors. And it still will be more efficient than literally all ICE powered SUVs. In fact, the power figures are irrelevant IMO, as electric motors scale with demand a lot better. It is incredibly hard to make a reliable ICE that will be incredibly efficient and also capable of big power, but with electric motors, the only downside of having a lot of power is that the whole package probably needs a bigger battery.

CO2 output is a fixed manufacturing output (approximately proportional to vehicle cost ignoring taxes/incentives) plus a variable output approximately proportional to distance.

If you buy an electric vehicle for short lifetime distance (say, because trip length is limited), you can easily end up producing more CO2 from an electric vehicle than a cheaper ICE vehicle (depending at your location on how a marginal extra kWh is generated due to your marginal extra load on the electricity network).

I would like to see a graph of summed CO2 generated per driver on Yaxis per annum (including annualised fixed manufacturing costs), and distance on Xaxis. Two graphs, one for electric vehicles and one for ICE vehicles. At what distance is the crossover point for the two graphs? Do people with long commutes unsuitable for cheaper electric vehicles overwhelm the CO2 production?

Personally I think our CO2 production per capita is basically proportional to income: very few changes you make actually change the amount of CO2 produced… The CO2 savings with an electric vehicle are approximately proportional to the savings in $, and you then spend those $ on something else like a plane flight! It is actually quite difficult to make a difference — not that we shouldn’t try of course. It is also very hard to get facts versus greenwashing feel good delusions and deception.

If I recall correctly, it’s around the 100,000km for a similar sized vehicle EV vs ICE, when the EV is charged from a mixed source electricity supply similar to what most developed nations presently have (mostly coal, some gas and renewables).

The average age of cars on the road is above 10 years, if I recall correctly. This is plenty of time to rack up enough mileage to offset the carbon cost of manufacturing. Using averages, it seems like replacing a car with average MPG (25) with a car with 35 MPG, it only takes 7 years of driving to be better off CO2 wise. It takes even less for electric cars. I think most people overestimate how much CO2 is produced during manufacturing vs how much CO2 is produced by driving. I'm mostly going off of this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2IKCdnzl5k

Moreover, I don't believe that there is a daily commute that's more than 120 miles each way, and this is well within the capabilities of even reasonably priced electric cars today. If you have a charger at your workplace, you could accommodate even longer trips, however colder weather might make a big dent in the range of most electric cars.

Also, people in the EV conversion world tended to think that weight was the killer of efficiency. They later found out by experience that weight was much less important than wind resistance with the conclusion that speed is mostly killing your efficiency (along with shape of the car).

I’ve noticed this recently in my driving. As an experiment, I lowered my highway speed from 75mph to 65mph for a couple weeks, and my gas mileage went from about 26mpg to 34mpg. Car is epa rated for 33.

An enormous improvement in efficiency - that experiment has totally changed my driving habits. Knowing that, I can’t believe that I’m basically the slowest car on the road now (going 65, which is the speed limit!). Crazy to think about how much fuel we’re wasting by driving fast

You can get similar fuel savings by following a big vehicle like a truck.

Even at a safe following distance, the already moving air behind a truck lowers your effective speed by 20mph or so, saving 25-50% of the fuel bill. Trucks that have very little ground clearance (eg a big mudguard across the back) work best.

In the extreme case, in an EV, you can end a journey with more battery than you started with if you follow a truck closely (rather too close for safety, and in perfect conditions)

How would you gain energy in that situation? Surely the EV is still expending some energy? The only way that would work is if you were going down hill.

The effect of drafting though is incredible. If you're ever able to get behind a big truck on a bike, it basically becomes effortless to get up to 30mph and stay there. It's quite a thrill (just make sure you have an escape route)

I seriously doubt those numbers (-50% fuel, energy harvesting by driving behind a truck) AND you are giving incentive to try dangerous driving.

Please either back those numbers up with evidence or remove them for the sake of road safety.

On a flat (private) road, big container-hauling truck, 65mph, stick shift car following 20 feet behind... Put the car in neutral and you can follow for miles. You need to tap the brakes occasionally to stop yourself getting too close to the truck. That tells me no engine power is being used.

Obviously it's unsafe to do on the public road for a bunch of reasons, but it really shows how good automated vehicle convoys could be for the environment if they can get close enough.

Here is a video of the effects of the same airflow: https://youtu.be/xkbe2NP30Fs

Here's mythbusters doing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lttgT1XZVvE

They estimate the savings at insane 20 feet at 20 something. Far from your claimed 100%.

Could it be, that your road is not as flat as you think? That would also explain the necessary braking to not run into the truck, wouldn't it?

But I couldn't agree more: let the machines do that perfectly and safe. Let's reap those sweet 25-50% increase in fuel efficiency.

The truck they're following there doesn't go near the ground... I suspect you really need to not have any route under the truck for the airflow for it to really work well.

Make sure to not hog the fast lane :)

Haha of course I stay out of the way! :)

As an emergency response to the 1973 oil crisis, on November 26, 1973, President Richard Nixon proposed a national 50 mph (80 km/h) speed limit for passenger vehicles and a 55 mph (90 km/h) speed limit for trucks and buses

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law

My driving habits are changing when I drive my wife's hybrid. There's a gauge indicating the efficiency and I always try to "beat" my best: I can do as low as 2.5 l / 100 (about 94 mpg).

My gazzguzzler OTOH is not planet-friendly: about 20mpg cruising on the autobahn at 105mph / 170km/h. I plan to dump it one of these days for a (luxury) BEV.

> Crazy to think about how much fuel we’re wasting by driving fast

I agree. I can't help it yet but I'm working on it.

That's not very surprising:

kinetic energy = 1/2 * mass * velocity^2

Regenerative braking offsets a lot of the extra weight.

Quite OT, but the design language of BMW seems lost. I don’t know why the grill needs to be the most distinguishing feature on an electric car.

I made this comment to my wife yesterday. I like an aggressive grill on a car but find it quite funny that it’s becoming more fashionable as air intake is becoming less important.

The grille is one of the most characteristic design feature of a BMW. Don't forget that a BMW is a luxury product. Why buy a BMW if it does not look like one?

The grille has tripled in size - it’s like a WRX with a 5 foot tall spoiler on the back. It doesn’t look like a luxury product to me.

SUVs have much lesser chance of going mainstream than EVs in India. The fuel prices here are off the charts, and mileage is generally considered a very important factor in household purchases of cars.

SUV sales are increasing in India and this segment now outsells hatchbacks. See sales numbers

https://www.carwale.com/news/suvs-dominate-car-sales-in-indi...

EV will take time without a major company like Reliance or Tata investing heavily on infra to back it.

SUVs are already mainstream in India. In 2020, SUVs accounted for 29% of all car sales and suffered the least hit from covid sales decline.

That's because most of those sales are from institutional/corporate customers, not households.

Source?

Doesn’t this just mean that given the choice most who can afford to buy one prefer SUVs?

Main issue is practical situation of roads in urban areas of India and water logging. Everyone prefers to have a higher seating position to manage the same, apart from the flavor of the month factor. I am personally looking to buy my next vehicle and given the prices of EVs considering a micro SUV just launched because of the factors mentioned earlier.

This was very obvious when car manufacturers first started producing EVs in Germany. There's a law here that limits the "fleet CO2 output", i.e. the typical CO2 output of every car on offer is measured and the mean value is calculated and has to be lower than what's specified in the law.

During the dawn of EVs in Germany, manufacturers built some EVs but barely advertised them and also their prices were way above of their fully specced petrol versions. (Meanwhile bragging in documentaries about how efficiently and cheap they were able to produce said EVs.) You definitely got the feeling they didn't want to sell them. OTOH they usually published a new SUV at the same time - because they sold like hot cakes.

What about the EVs that can be classified as SUV? In Norway this is some of the most popular EVs..

These are much more expensive than your regular EV you pay extra for EV + EV being SUV in Ireland those start at prices between 70k-100k and something like Renault Zoe or Tesla non suv cost below 55k. In most of Europe at this stage EV is something upper middle class buys to show off that they can afford going into this new trend, middle and lower class still can’t even afford entry model EV for 20-30k and will continue buying diesel and petrol cars till you will be able to buy EV with decent mileage for less than 30k

Do you have a source for "to show off that they can afford going into this new trend" or is this just some stupid assumption?

I drive an SUV EV because I a) can charge at home, b) have a big dog and need the space, c) electricity is cheap here, and d) there does not seem to be an EV "Kombi" yet, which would be the perfect middle ground. I don't care what others think. Your second part of your sentence might be true, but the first one is just a silly assumption.

The Volkswagen ID.4 is an electric SUV and it starts at €34,436 (including EV grants): https://www.volkswagen.ie/en/new-cars/ID4.html

The Skoda Enyaq starts at €38,593: https://www.skoda.ie/models/enyaq-iv/enyaq-iv

The Audi Q4 e-tron starts at €49,550: https://www.audi.ie/ie/web/en/models/q4-e-tron/q4-e-tron.htm...

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