Electric vehicles are way more energy-efficient than internal combustion
motortrend.com
motortrend.com
While phasing out ICEs entirely is clearly an urgent necessity, it would be wise to invest in a world where we move more towards these superior modes of transportation, instead of going for EVs, which are a slight improvement, but not at all as big of an improvement as we could realize with trains and bicycles.
There is some potential in reduction by moving jobs to WFH when possible, but this is not mutually exclusive with migrating to energy efficient means of transportation and urban development. Hence, I don't think it's relevant in the discussion.
I also have a theory that widespread WFH makes dense cities obsolete. Dense cities seem to originate from big money appearing somewhere and everyone building around it, eventually reaching the typical situation where the highest-paid can afford to live there and everyone else commutes in and out. If the housing, roads, or public transit are expanded, more people come and saturate them again, because the commute is worth the pay. (If it's just roads, such commutes are super polluting.) But when the execs and higher-paid workers don't need to be there in person, it dominoes. There's no extra money to be made providing physical goods/services in that area, and no incentive for such a forced commute or crammed living quarters. Physical laborers end up working locally, and more isolated, less dense, lower-income but lower-cost-of-living cities form. I used to work in SF and observe these things closely, and now I'm watching what happens as many of the techies leave.
Highway construction demolished a lot of neighbourhoods in cities. In the U.S, the demolished neighborhoods were also disproportionately low-income and majority non-white neighborhoods.
>I also have a theory that widespread WFH makes dense cities obsolete. Dense cities seem to originate from big money appearing somewhere and everyone building around it, eventually reaching the typical situation where the highest-paid can afford to live there and everyone else commutes in and out. If the housing, roads, or public transit are expanded, more people come and saturate them again, because the commute is worth the pay. (If it's just roads, such commutes are super polluting.) But when the execs and higher-paid workers don't need to be there in person, it dominoes. There's no extra money to be made providing physical goods/services in that area, and no incentive for such a forced commute or crammed living quarters. Physical laborers end up working locally, and more isolated, less dense, lower-income but lower-cost-of-living cities form.
This is only really true if work is the only reason someone would live in a dense city, and it's not. Cities are a thing because they allow for economies of scale in all things, be that culture, dating, transportation or otherwise.
This efficiency is somewhat obscured by a plethora of reasons right now - car-oriented infrastructure subsidised by people not utilizing that infrastructure is one of the higher ones on the list.
The space a highway or other road takes up is nowhere close to the space it allows to inhabited, though. LA County is the perfect example of an area that has grown via roads to become non-viable for trains. It's just too spread out. Without the roads, tons of households would be cut off from jobs they commute to, again the low-income ones. I'm not justifying the original construction of the highways, just saying what would happen if we went back.
> This is only really true if work is the only reason someone would live in a dense city, and it's not. Cities are a thing because they allow for economies of scale in all things, be that culture, dating, transportation or otherwise.
Regular cities make sense for that. You get two of each kind of business in proximity, and most people are good with that. Dense cities go beyond that point and get to where less scalable resources become strained, like housing. It's a clear sign when people are commuting from outside that something is wrong. Yes, some people still prefer the excitement, but usually just the young and single. SF pre and post tech boom, and during/after 2020, gives you an idea of how many people are just there for the work.
Local example: There were plans in the 1950 to have a highway cross through Berlin Kreuzberg (The A106, today Oranienstraße for the locals). Part of those plans were put in motion, the buildings around Kottbusser Tor date back to those ideas. Massive local protests put a stop to that. More recent example from Berlin: the current extension of the A100.
You can find enough examples of highways cutting through existing neighborhoods in the US if you look around a little. To cite [1]
“ Planners of the interstate highway system, which began to take shape after the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, routed some highways directly, and sometimes purposefully, through Black and brown communities. In some instances, the government took homes by eminent domain.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/14/utrecht-restor...
See: the cross Bronx expressway
On a personal note: in the 1970s an entire city block of very old homes in my city was taken via eminent domain to make room for a parking garage.
Does this mean we should throw our hands up and not make an EVs? No, that would be a bad strategy, a complete non-option. We must halt the climate crisis, this is quite frankly mandatory.
So, how do we tackle this issue? If we want to deal with the problem in a timely manner, we have to work within the framework we already have today. This means some degree of replacing ICEs with EVs. Crucially though, we need to realize that the framework itself is bad, and requires replacement in the future. This means halting investments in non-sustainable built environments, building energy-efficient transportation infrastructure to connect existing places where it makes sense, and only building new places with appropriate transportation infrastructure.
Defeatism is not on the roadmap.
> single family homes are way worse with regards to energy efficiency,
We’re definitely not going to get everyone into small urban apartments in the next 50 years. We couldn’t build the necessary apartments fast enough, and the costs would be enormous for a relatively small reduction in emissions. The better value for money is building out our clean energy capacity as quickly as possible and disincentivizing waste via carbon pricing.
> Defeatism is not on the roadmap.
Cool, then let’s just terraform Mars and call it a day. Of course, we have to be realistic which means no terraforming Mars or building hundreds of millions of apartment units and equivalent rail infrastructure.
Road to hell is paved with good intentions or something.
Good old genocide is the ultimate conclusion to that and undeniably the most effective option.
I don’t get it. The idea is not not force people to need cars by building poor infrastructure and poorly planned cities. I’d love to not need to own a car (and I’m not American).
Not sure why you keep talking about genocide and to be honest it’s not quite coherent.
A personal car gives incredible freedom, especially to the poor. Suddenly they can live affordably far from work, choose better work places, do work on the side, transport luggage on the cheap.
Inevitably, the only way to stop people from getting cars is to make the licensing and their cost prohibitively expensive.
So they will take overcrowded trains that may not be on time, and/or live in closets or be lucky not to get into a serious accident on a bike/moped in a city not made for them.
Solving battery energy density and EVs are a good compromise.
But yes, you're right, cities should not be planned around cars. Imo, there should be more of them actually, but alas it seems that's a lost art and everyone's gathering in whatever big cities were made in the past couple of centuries or earlier.
Genocide is a dumb example stemming from my belief that death is better than life in squalor heh. Obviously most people don't think that.
Does it take into account the farming and supply chain costs of that food it's about 15% efficiency by calorie, compared with gasoline which is close to 90% efficient IIRC. Or is it just food/fuel energy -> work?
The lifecycle emissions of an EV depend on how the electricity was generated, and the total emissions of cycling depends on the diet of the cyclist - even though the energy per distance is the same regardless.
Yes, that might be true, but it's the "coal" that's the issue, not the recycling. It says so little useful about recycling that it's basically a lie. But it does suggest we should phase out coal, not just to make recycling cleaner, but for everyone that uses electricity.
Similarly, I assume this study looked at red-meat reared in a GHG callous manner. Which says basically nothing about bicycles, but does tell us that we should take the obvious steps we're already aware of to decarbonize food. Not because it helps cyclists be more efficient, but because it's a smart thing to do for everyone who eats.
> Indeed, the use of fertilizers, methane gas released from livestock like cattle and massive food waste all contribute to the vast carbon footprint of food production. Since land is both a source and a sink of CO2, land-clearing for new agricultural terrain in tandem with deforestation drives harmful emissions, equating to approximately 26% of the global total.
It doesn't count the manufacturing of each. It's still a valid comparison without it, cause most Americans who have a bike probably also have a car that they need for trips that aren't bike-able, and also cause it helps to separate fixed and marginal costs anyway.
They also picked a car that is twice as efficient as the average car for comparison and the most meat-heavy fiery possible (essentially meat only). That’s interesting as a though experiment, but not as a basis for policy- which is exactly what they state in their preface.
Also, you'll still need the roads for logistics.
My point about maintenance also still stands.
Common gasoline engines have an efficiency around 30-40%, assuming modern high-efficiency designs. For older designs this is closer to 20%.
If heavier were better, we’d see all Tour de France riders use cast iron wheels and frames ;)
Decarbonising Transport: A Better, Greener Britain
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... .pdf
> But we cannot, of course, simply rely on the electrification of road transport, or believe that zero emission cars and lorries will solve all our problems, particularly for meeting our medium-term carbon reduction targets to 2035. Road traffic, even on pre-pandemic trends, was predicted to grow by 22 percent from 2015 to 2035 much of it in cities, where new roadbuilding is physically difficult and disadvantages communities.
> We cannot pile ever more cars, delivery vans and taxis on to the same congested urban roads. That would be difficult for the roads, let alone the planet, to tolerate. As we build back better from the pandemic, it will be essential to avoid a car-led recovery. As I said in “Decarbonising Transport: Setting the Challenge” in March last year, we must make public transport, cycling and walking the natural first choice for all who can take it. Many journeys are short, could be done differently – and were done differently, in the very recent past. Even ten years ago, for instance, more children walked to school. We want to reduce urban road traffic overall. Improvements to public transport, walking and cycling, promoting ridesharing and higher car occupancy, and the changes in commuting, shopping and business travel accelerated by the pandemic, also offer the opportunity for a reduction or at least a stabilisation, in traffic more widely. That will benefit everyone, drivers included.
So to me it feels like those who use this as an opportunity to undermine EVs, aren't really helping.
My position is a general anti-car position, with a particular disdain for ICEs. See my other comments in the thread for my thinking on the way forward.
The extra leverage that urban traffic has to prioritise zero local emissions, lightweighting for pedestrian safety, vehicle redesign for visibility, silent operation, small vehicles for avoiding congestion (e.g. cycle couriers) is a lever to get general road transport and rural trucks to low emissions faster. It also lets more people into the cities (which is happening anyway but ICE vehicles are slowing it down)
This simply is pre-WWII urban planning. We used to have sustainable cities and comprehensive passenger rail systems before we teared them down for cars and suburbia.
The fact that conservatives broadly have taken the position supporting of cars and car-oriented development is one of the most absurd things imaginable. Socialized inefficient infrastructure that was not even a thing a hundred years ago being considered a conservative policy, a real hoot.
I'm a conservative, and I would love to have more walkable/bikeable cities and to not need a car.
I'll admit to this not being an opinion I hold based on any kind of scientific observation, this does seem to be an opinion I have anecdotally observed among rural- and suburban-populations, which tend to lean more towards the conservative political spectrum than their urban counterparts.
>I'm a conservative, and I would love to have more walkable/bikeable cities and to not need a car.
Kudos.
[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/1031678/gdp-and-real-gdp...
With a quick google i found this graph https://www.cbpp.org/wealth-concentration-has-been-rising-to... which suggests that the present is much more unequal than the 1970s, but still hasn't risen to the level of inequality from the pre WW2 era.
That being said, cities don't have to look like the US dystopian suburb. Germany, for instance, is full of towns and cities that are walkable, bikable, and impose no artificial restrictions on car ownership and usage. It's the big cities that have problems with cars due to space constraints. But that's not an inherent property of cars. They start to see similar issues with cargo bikes and will arguably face problems with kitchen ownership at some point.
This is purely a function of contemporary car-oriented infrastructure, nothing more. People do indeed select the choice that is most convenient, and the built environment as is today does favor the use of cars.
Though, for all the reasons mentioned in this thread, and more, this is a grim mistake.
>That being said, cities don't have to look like the US dystopian suburb. Germany, for instance, is full of towns and cities that are walkable, bikable, and impose no artificial restrictions on car ownership and usage. It's the big cities that have problems with cars due to space constraints. But that's not an inherent property of cars. They start to see similar issues with cargo bikes and will arguably face problems with kitchen ownership at some point.
Cargo bikes scale far better than cars. Germany, while better than the U.S, is still not peak built environment. As a nation they lean quite a bit on cars.
That's a huge misunderstanding. They scale in exactly the same way: they have space usage that grows linearly with the number of owners. They are of course smaller, but also carry only one adult. A city that has a problem with x million cars will have the very same problem with 3x million cargo bikes. That's a serious problem, because cities tend to grow ever more dense. The constant factor simply doesn't change the equation. The only thing that scales better is a shared mode of transportation, but that doesn't offer the same level of freedom as individual transportation and is often not as efficient as one would like (e.g., subways getting overcrowded during rush hour).
Trains only go where there are tracks. Tracks are much more expensive to build and maintain than roads. Trains to do not run on demand.
Bicycles do not protect riders from the elements. Bicycles are not suitable for hauling large or heavy objects, or many objects.
This whole anti-car thing is getting tiresome. Yes, the US needs to dial back its car culture. But cars do have a place, and fill a niche that other transportation methods cannot fill.
You're correct in the sense that trains and bicycles are, true, more energy efficient. I'm not even looking for numbers here, because it's irrelevant.
What you're missing is that real humans occasionally need to move a mattress. Or just bring home groceries once a week. Or have kids. Or that a full quarter of the population are seniors. Or that quite a few people live in places with hard winters. You think it's a coincidence that Netherlands is the country of bicycle riders? Gulfstream :) They hardly have any snow or ice - just walk around in the street there, and it'll hit you that most buildings have windows that take up half the wall. Cold is just not a concern there, the way it would be in a lot of other places.
If you compare an EV with a train on an energy efficiency PoV, yes, the train may be twice as efficient (or less?). But an EV covers 80% of energy requirements (it's CLEAN, cheaper than gas, less carbon generating, less likely to subsidize oil-based dictatorships), while also not having you haul a toddler, an infant and 3 bags of groceries through snow from the train station half a mile away.
Yup, private carriages are the only option for your occasional weekly or monthly tasks.
I guess its also just outright impossible to just allow for mixed zoning that'd allow for daily grocery shopping as well.
And I'm saying this while owning... let me count... 4 bikes, one of which is electric. And I absolutely love Uber electric scooters.
But no matter how I try to get creative, I just can't think of a way where you can have bike infrastructure covering everything. Too many pieces missing. Where would you park all those cargo bikes near train stations? And again, what do you do in winter with two kids?
Small city EVs on the other hand require no new infrastructure, zero major investments, are a fraction of the cost of a car, are non-polluting, and do 90% of what a normal car does. And when going on holiday - yes, you can take the train, which is what I'm actually doing btw.
All they need is a very small regulatory change. Allow no-highway cars with speed limits and none of the safety features of modern cars. Just do that.
People have pointed out that most people can use bikes for pretty much everything, but obviously there will be a need for the occasional car. Some people will need to use cars more, other less. But if you make the simple mindset change of first planning to bike there and then falling back to the car if you deem it infeasible, we’re already most of the way.
Most of the safety concerns for bikes disappear as soon as a certain amount of bikers are in the streets and the infrastructure isn’t actively hostile to them.
Even in the Netherlands, bicycles was the most dangerous mode of transportation in 2021, with 207 fatalities. Cars came in second with 175 deaths.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/523310/netherlands-numbe...
When a car kills a cyclist it's not the bicycle being dangerous, and you can't compare numbers directly without normalizing by some metric (hours, km, trips). Although in the latter fallacy I believe correcting it will make bikes look worse.
Also keep in mind people of all ages are allowed to ride bikes, which is luckily not the case for cars. This source does say elderly and children are more likely to be part of cycling accidents (not necessarily fatal) https://www.veiligheid.nl/kennisaanbod/infographic/infograph...
Also driving under influence is (hopefully) much more prevalent in case of cyclists.
Hence, car drivers switching their transportation mode to bikes don't have the same risks as the entire cycling population.
I get what you are advocating for. I have had several periods in my life where I used a bike as my primary form of transportation. But it only works well in a pretty narrow set of circumstances.
Small EVs are the type of cars that are needed the least. They are a car for those cases where you essentially did not need a car.
People prefer living in places they can dress in t-shirts and shorts. But trying to dress in a t-shirt in the snow won't make you happy.
It's true that all else being equal, a walkable city is the best. But we don't have that, and we're not likely to have it soon. All we can do is work on a solution for today and tomorrow. And I really don't see OP's original point of trying to skip EVs.
Tesla alone has received enough in subsidies from california to build a decent transit system for about a quarter of its population.
Internal combustion engines are sized at a point where they are profitable and efficient.
Electric motors allow us to make terribly small cars, and their small batteries will mean even more efficiency improvements. Combined with self driving abilities and we no longer need to own our own car…just hop on the city infrastructure and get driven to your destination.
In fact if we make it small and light enough you could suspend the car from a metal rail and now have an extra lane up in the roadway above the regular traffic. And then you can add another metal rail layer…and another. And you no longer need intersections because the rails can dip down or up to cross each other. So the biggest source of traffic latency (stoplights) and bandwidth limitations (not enough road surface area) will be eliminated.
Eventually we may build entire city blocks pre-fabricated with vertical and horizontal elevators inside, so you no longer need your own vehicle to navigate. Heating costs will be proportional to the external surface area and not to the volume enclosed by the building.
I live in a small/midsize city with relatively ok public transit for its size and the only places I ever take it is to downtown or the airport - places where parking logistics are terrible and it's easy to get to on public transport. Anywhere else (like going to the store or work) and getting there takes hours without a car. Living in areas that have better connections or better walkability triples my housing cost, so I own a car and drive. Cities need to be significantly more dense for more trains to make sense, but that density means clearing out all of the less dense buildings and building new. That's extremely costly and doesn't actually help the environment because of the massive amount of carbon needed to fix that everywhere.
And real humans can occasionally rent a car. Maybe it is not worth holding thousands of dollars' worth of rusting metal for that occasional odd job.
As for snow and ice, Oulu, Finland is an example of how infrastructure defines the way people live:
And quite a few of them have will have unplanned trips to do from very sparsely distributed locations (also known as "houses in the countryside") to other very sparsely distributed locations (aka "their doctor" or "their family").
Also, car loan is perfectly suitable for planned, long distance trips with lots of cargo, which unfortunately happen at the same time for everyone (they're also known as "vacations"). I would not want to be Hertz on the 15th of August in a world without personal cars - unless you ban people from traveling cross country to see their family twice a year, which might be required.
I used to bet on "small scale on demand public transportation", but it requires either "communities paying drivers" or "engineers solving self-driving in rural roads", none of which is happening anytime soon.
In the meantime, though, we have to invest in trains, bike lanes, and downsize cars at the same time as electrifying them.
But yes, of course children need a different kind of transportation.
Though, arguably, it's easier to pedal with your toddler on your back than with your grandma !
What's the typical age limit ?
Moreover, it’s also just convenient to be able to get across town in half the time that you can by public transit.
People without cars also have to do that. Groceries can be walked home (i know because i do it) and they also fit on busses. Mattresses are a rare thing and you can rent a taxi.
Prior to that I was relying on public transportation, renting something for vacation, and coordinating with others.
In the US that was not sustainable.
It’s just that there is trains between them. Or buses that are not greyhound. By « we » I mean Europe. It’s small, but large enough.
And yeah, density, yadada …
It’s fine. Différents place, different organizations. You guys also have a massive army so you will end up being right.
Electric cars? They're not really any of these things. They're just not quite as bad as gas vehicles.
I practical terms, when using words to actually mean something as opposed to bash opponents over the head with them, EVs take away something which is burning gas exactly in the places with the most population density and replaces them with something which is not burning oil in the places with the most population density. What's left in terms of local pollution? Break pads? Still less than gas vehicles, due to regenerative breaking. Microparticles from tires? Yeah, that's about it.
If you also want to count pollution from manufacture and energy generation, then you kinda have to also count pretty much every activity humans engage in, including hiking in the woods because your backpack is manufactured somewhere, using energy.
The effects of car pollution for human health are 99% burning fuel. EVs take this away. I think it's fair to call them non-polluting, and not play word games with this.
Producing an EV and building and maintaining car infrastructure uses massive amounts of fossil fuels and entails horrifically destructive mining of large quantities of rare elements such as cobalt and niobium.
All for the end result of wasting vast amounts of time, space, and tax money in any urban area to force a suburban lifestyle that is even more destructive, economically unsustainable, and wasteful.
If you want to disincentivise congestion, or car accidents, or road wear, or suburban sprawl fine.
But don't just spout climate change denier talking points about EVs.
EV busses are a hot trend right now, they make public transport cheaper, safer and greener.
Do you really want people to believe that they are environmentally worse than the ICE vehicles they are replacing? What about urban delivery trucks going EV? How does spreading that fiction help?
https://www.transportenvironment.org/wp-content/uploads/2021...
How do you account for dangers of battery production and disposal? Are injured EMTs and mechanics, due to high voltages, also considered? How do you account for pollution of installing upgraded transformers and lines to the bus depot for charging batteries?
Have they all missed these deaths that you've uncovered? Enough death and destruction to overwhelm the well studied impacts of air pollution?
Their only upside is nimbys might let you have a transit system if you suggest them.
If your neighborhood is well planned, with good access to public transportation, groceries, daycare, etc. then renting a car becomes viable for the cases bikes don't cover.
Trains, trams, buses and bicycles don't need to cover every case.
A family probably only needs one cargo bike. An brand new _expensive_ cargo bike costs around the same as the yearly cost of a car.
If you think your car costs less, calculate your TCO.
Cars carry 5 people and can cost between $5k and $10k.
So cargo bikes are really no match.
They really don't.
I'm not sure why you need 5 people for the things listed above, like carrying groceries?
> can cost between $5k and $10k.
And how much per year in insurance/tax/maintenance?
$5k for a _very nice_ cargo bike capable of transporting 1-2 kids too young to cycle on their own.
$4k for _nice_ bikes for each adult. ($2k x 2)
$3k for _good_ bikes for each kid as they grow out of the cargo bike. ($1k x 3)
$1k a year on maintenance for the bikes if you don't want to do it yourself.
$1k for locks and a crash course on how to lock your bicycles to stuff making it too much of a pain to steal.
That's $15k, or the cost of your lower end for a car for 3 years.
So between year 3 and 4 you can start either just replacing the bicycles with new nice ones because you like brand new, get yourself even more expensive electrified bikes, or spend it on other stuff.
And all the while here you could also settle for just "decent" bicycles which cost way less.
That car will last you 10 years something you can hardly say about the cargo bikes.
You don't need a new car every year.
The equivalent cargo bike to a $5k car is below $500 and kids bicycles are below $100.
Edit: As for why I calculated like that? It is quite normal for a car to cost $5k per year. You have insurance, maintenance, repairs, taxes, financing, depreciation and fuel to pay for.
If you _only_ spend $5k on a car you're either going to skimp on a lot of those costs or pay it in maintenance, repair, and fuel... or you should compare it to the same tier of bicycles. Used bicycles you fix up yourself.
You're making the assumption that the cargo bike seats only one person, when a parent could easily seat two children on a cargo bike.
You're making the assumption that everyone would be using the cargo bike as their primary day-to-day transportation, when the cargo bike is mostly useful for either transporting young children, or when transporting cargo. At other times a more reasonable choice would be to use a regular bicycle.
You're making the assumption that cargo bikes take up as much space as cars which is just downright false.
Also, there is close to no second hand cargo bike volume so it is absolutely a fair comparison.
If I want to buy a vehicle I don't care if second hand cargo bikes are available or not. I know that second hand cars so exist though.
Most people don't pay $40k up front, instead they pay $4k to $10k per year for a new car.
On the contrary, it's highly relevant in a world where we have a very pressing energy issue.
>What you're missing is that real humans occasionally need to move a mattress.
Cargo-bikes can cover many of the transportation use-cases the average person has, and the rest can be covered by utilizing shared transportation vehicles. No private vehicle ownership is necessary here, and private vehicle ownership and its use as the primary mode of transportation is >80% of the problem.
>Or just bring home groceries once a week.
Cargo-bikes, closer shops, public transportation, grocery delivery and/or higher frequency of shopping solves this
>Or have kids.
Cargo-bikes, public transportation solves this
>Or that a full quarter of the population are seniors.
Bicycles, public transportation solves this isse. Additionally, car infrastructure is more exclusionary to seniors than the alternatives - same with children, who are not allowed to operate a car. Not to mention people with disabilities. All more discriminated against by car infrastructure than the alternatives.
>Or that quite a few people live in places with hard winters. You think it's a coincidence that Netherlands is the country of bicycle riders? Gulfstream :) They hardly have any snow or ice - just walk around in the street there, and it'll hit you that most buildings have windows that take up half the wall. Cold is just not a concern there, the way it would be in a lot of other places.
Bicycle rates are not statistically correlated with neither local climate, nor topology for that matter. Infrastructure is more or less the sole deciding factor.
>If you compare an EV with a train on an energy efficiency PoV, yes, the train may be twice as efficient (or less?). But an EV covers 80% of energy requirements (it's CLEAN, cheaper than gas, less carbon generating, less likely to subsidize oil-based dictatorships), while also not having you haul a toddler, an infant and 3 bags of groceries through snow from the train station half a mile away.
Essentially all of these problems can be solved satisfactorily with alternatives. Note that clean is also relative - the alternatives are very significantly cleaner than car-oriented transportation.
And we have barely even touched the subjects of transportation mode lethality nor economic discrimination, which are hugely significant - cars kill more than any other mode of transportation, and is more expensive both on the individual and societal level, making them a huge burden for poor people.
Can you use a cargo bike to do groceries? Sure. Can you rent a car to carry a mattress? yes. Can you carry two children on a bicycle? Ehh, ok, let's pretend you can, or you just take the bus.
But this is ignoring the fact that in the past hundred years, people have repeatedly chosen to own a car. Yes, including in places with good public transport. And surprising enough, even when the cost of a car + maintenance + repairs + financing + gas is a lot higher than just taking the bus, not to mention the comparatively trivial price of a bike. The very fact that you just don't see that many cargo bikes anywhere, but see cars everywhere is a pretty strong hint. That's the default hypothesis - that cars actually do bring value in people's lives. All you're offering to counter this is a list of "in specific contexts, bike may solve the same problem in shittier ways". I'm sorry, but I just don't see how freezing your ass off in winter on a bike is even remotely acceptable.
In my youth I actually tried this. Spent a winter with a motorcycle, and another winter with a bike. Both were complete and utter failures. I actually burned a set of gloves when I left them on the engine to get warm. And biking on the snow and ice... ugh. The bruises.
Plus small practical things. A cargo bike or a bike with a trailer basically take just as much parking space as a small car. And are a hellof a lot easier to steal.
Cars may kill more people than bikes, but you can't snap your fingers Thanos-style and have all cars replaced with bikes. Dramatically increasing the number of bikes in the street means mixing bikes with cars, which means a lot more dead people. I know it's the car's fault, but such is life, the universe is not fair. Still means more dead people.
> Bicycle rates are not statistically correlated with neither local climate, nor topology for that matter. Infrastructure is more or less the sole deciding factor.
I call bullshit. Smelly, stinky bullshit. In the same city, with the same infrastructure, I see with my own eyes bikes and electric scooters disappearing in winter and reappearing in spring. That'd be just impossible if climate had no bearing and only infrastructure mattered.
They aren't saying weather doesn't matter. Just that people use weather as an excuse for bad infrastructure which matters much more, and is easier to change.
Also, people may not be aware that e-bike cargo van deliveries are already a thing in urban areas. Being enclosed from the rain is not a unique advantage of cars and removing cars from urban areas as much as possible is a necessary first step.
You might say, well that's just a small electric car and technically you'd be correct. A small, light, electric "car" that can intermix with pedestrians and cycles and wheelchairs and mobility scooters.
I'm sorry for appearing confrontational, but the original comment was pretty much "we should ignore EVs and just skip to trains+bikes because they're better". I'm not disputing that bikes are ok, and as it happens I own several and love riding scooters. But taking "bikes are ok" and using it as a stick with which to hit EVs has just one result: later adoption of EVs, more people dying early because pollution, more carbon in the air.
I didn't say that we need to chose just one solution. OP did, quite clearly. And then followed up with arguments which are rather weak, to which I'm responding a bit less politely than I otherwise would.
But in relation to the point you made about bad or cold weather being a factor for bikes being an impractical mode of transport. Please take a few minutes to consider the points and examples provided in this video (1).
TLDW: There is a town in Finland (Oulu) where cycling is a primary mode of transport (over a fifth of of all trips are by bike and 77% of people cycle occasionally) even in winter when it gets down to -20 Celsius.
Weather is always spouted as a reason for not investing in bike infrastructure which is really annoying because that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. It's the lack of safe and adequate bike infrastructure that stops people from cycling. Anyway, I thought it was worth adding that point of nuance to the discussion.
This is not an argument that (EV) cars can be replaced by trains+bikes. This is a solid argument, with which I agree, that bikes have a place in a transportation ecosystem and they should be encouraged. I was never disputing this - I own several bikes, and I actually prefer to rent uber electric scooters over uber cars.
I just wanted to clarify a bugbear with me which is the "people don't use bikes because the weather is crappy". I know nuance is lost in such a few amount of words and that's probably not what you are saying in totality but i just wanted to highlight this point.
As an aside, I lived in a large city where amenities such as supermarkets were relatively far away. For a couple of years I got away with not owning a car and using a bike for all shopping needs. There are some examples of where a car would have been way more convenient but the fact of the matter is I made do without it. There are a large number of trips that I made with the bike that I wouldn't have done if I did have a car. Humans are creatures of convenience. There are some trips where a car (or something similar) is absolutely essential but for the vast majority it is not. In situations of necessity it is amazing what can be achieved. We are not living in an age of necessity with regards to means of transport but we really should be if the climate science is to be believed.
The corollary is that real human civilizations have to move goods over roads with ICE trucks for the foreseeable future unless batteries approach the energy density of diesel.
It not going to happen overnight, and currently bans on new sales only are scheduled for like 2040, but they're likely to be brought forward as people get more confortable with the idea.
Starting with last mile delivery in urban areas, trucks are going electric today. And it's not initially about energy density, it's about the poisons and pollution they emit.
So far it's not, the state of the art prototypes can not do the required job.
Maybe it will be something like fuel cells instead, who knows.
https://www.volvotrucks.com/en-en/news-stories/press-release...
Green Hydrogen will be part of the answer in the next 5 years or so, but it's not a blocker right now. There's plenty of semi trucks that have tasks that are within the current battery limits.
Blue Hydrogen and small Fuel Cell hybrids got pushed harder than they should have been by some oil and gas people, which left a bad taste in many people's mouths but, as long as it's not being used for something that you could do with mains electricity or batteries instead, Green Hydrogen is part of the solution. We need it for making chemicals and fertilizer and as an analog to pumped hydro storage.
A view on this from a anti-oil and gas angle is here:
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/09/01/cleantech-talk-chemical...
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/09/03/cleantech-talk-chemical...
Hydrogen cars, no. Hydrogen shipping, maybe. Hydrogen for chemical feedstocks, yes.
When that equation changes (which it will do eventually), clean hydrogen production will win out and at that time, we'll need infrastructure to support it. The question is just: when will it happen?
> The cheapest cost of production for grey hydrogen in the world today comes in at a monthly average price of $1.71/kg in the US Midwest, according to Platts, with green hydrogen in the US Northwest coming in at $3.73/kg. Subtract the $3/kg via the tax credit, and that renewable H2 would cost a developer $0.73/kg to produce.
If we were to discussion energy in transportation the context is much richer and complex. The easiest way to see this is in weight. A EV car in general is much heavier than ICE cars, sometimes by a factor of 3x, which happens to cancel out the energy efficiency of the EV. We also have to consider reduce, reuse, repair and recycle aspect. EV car is generally more electronica complex and (according to what I have read), have worse reuse and repair aspect than ICE cars. EV might win on the recycle aspect, and train/bicycles obvious win on the reduce aspect.
We also have to consider drive distance. The average trip for a car (using statistics form my country) is 5km, which most of those being commute to and from work, with a majority within biking distance. Of course, if people need a car to transport kids, participate in hobbies, regularly transporting large items, then they might simply use that same tool to travel to and from work as a convenience. Owning a car enables unnecessary travel with car as well as enabling the necessary travel.
And finally we need to consider how stations for stores, buses and trains are designed. Train stations are not designed for a person to haul a toddler, an infant and 3 bags of groceries. Subways however are rather much designed to make transporting a toddler and a single bag of groceries a fairly acceptable experience, and since subway stations generally has good coverage, people don't need to have 3 bags of groceries. Supermarkets that focus on subway users tend to be located in the subway stations, while supermarkets that focus on car users that travel a few miles from the store tend to have large parking lots and be located at the outer edges of cities near big highways.
This isn't true.
The law in my country has a combined maximum weight limit (car + trailer) as part of their driving license, which has cause a bit of a problem with EVs. The extra weight from battery mean that there isn't much room to drive the car with a trailer, a problem which political is starting to gain some traction. The argument being put forth is that people are forced to use ICE car to pull things like boat trailer just because the law was designed for more lighter ICE cars.
If there is no additional weight with EVs then the law doesn't need to change. Are you saying that the people arguing that EV is being hindered are wrong?
Just as a small hint about that. EU has recently change their rules. The previous allowed max was 3.5 tons, but electric and gas powered cars has been given an exception to increase the max to 4.25 tons in acknowledgement that those cars tend to be heavier, and that the previous limit restricted the use of lower emission transportation. Source: Revision of the Directive on Driving Licences.
Of course politicians could be wrong and there is nothing to make it physical impossible to build a light weight EV. Restricting weight reduces road maintenance and decreases the breaking distance and if there is no need for increasing the maximum then everyone is better off with the old maximum.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/314719/average-car-and-v...
It's funny you mention the Netherlands as your proof for your little list of gotchas. The Netherlands handles all your little gotchas fine, and so do more northern countries like Sweden.
The problem is the convenience of a car makes it not worth just putting on a layer of clothing for the weather. Use a car if you're going to travel 100km, but don't be like the rest of the people in my Montana town and use a car to go pick up the groceries 3 miles away just because it's 42 degrees and you're cold.
See by saying you need a car for these extremes you are actually just making excuses to use a car all the time.
Road trips? Why are you taking them in a personal vehicle? Because there isn't competent public transportation.
I'm against car ownership. Oh you can't get anywhere without a car? Maybe build another lane to a place where I care.
I have the short end of that equation, so I'm commuting 20 minutes by car (vs. nearly 2 hours by bike or by bus). It just doesn't make sense to have transit go regularly enough or direct enough to where I'm commuting to (one rider buses are worse than cars!!).
It's hard to change you life to avoid such a convenience, but it's possible if you try.
Assuming I'm an average driver, and across a 30-year career, that commute is increasing my changes of dying something like 0.3%, given the number of miles I'm driving (that's a whole lot higher than I expected!) by car vs. 0.03% by bus. But...by bus, I've spent an additional 3% of my entire life (assuming I live 100 years = 876,000 hours) commuting, so the balance of that equation shifts pretty far in favor of car commuting (and I'll switch to electric at some point soon once EVs are purchasable without a 6-12 month wait...).
I will grant you that riding a bike 4 hours per day would probably improve my lifespan more than that 4 hours (due to improved fitness), though will likely also cost me my relationship because all I'll be doing is working and commuting to work. But this would enable me to move closer to work! Win/win!
Yes. You're replying to the meme comment: "We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas." and you're literally saying you're out of ideas.
>by doing what, exactly?
You've already mentioned you have a 30 minute commute. What could you do to reduce that? Maybe your SO has better options for public transportation to their work than you do and you could move to take advantage of that while giving you a commute close enough to bike. You could car pool. You could work with your local government to increase public transit options. Get an E-bike and take that to the faster public transportation routes instead of waiting 2 hours on the bus. You could just take the bus.
My bus option is a single transfer. But it still takes 2 hours. Bike to the transfer takes the same amount of time as taking the bus. E-bike 20 miles is a possibility, though we're probably talking higher chances of death that way than a car. Biking by human power would probably be lower chance of death (due to lower speed and better cardiovascular health).
Working with the local government generally doesn't work...especially for something like this where it's adding a bus route for one (which is worse than a single occupant vehicle). I'm like the definition of a case where single occupant EVs make sense...
Most people in the Netherlands who can afford it still have a car though. Yes i do a lot by bicycle but a car is far superior for many errands and trips.
That's a kind of 'frictionless cow' blind spot as well. If personal ICE and electric cars disappeared from existence tomorrow, we'd adapt.
You're also conveniently leaving out cost. Transportation costs in walkable cities with good public transportation is considerably cheaper. Cars, gas, insurance, maintenance, parking, etc. is extremely expensive. My current transportation costs are roughly $80 a month. When I had a car, they were roughly $800 a month (with averaged maintenance costs included).
(Most) Folks aren't saying that cars shouldn't exist, just that in cities, they should not be what we design for, because their convenience for some people results in the inconvenience of most people.
EVs should replace ICE cars, but we should restrict how cars can be brought in the city, and we should limit where and how they park (especially by eliminating free parking). The costs related to this should be progressive, based on income.
Those forms of transportation are slower than cars.
Agreed. So much time gets killed by the mathematically unscalable car infrastructure, where many many hours get killed when people are stuck in traffic. These hours are essentially impossible to make more productive as well, as drivers are unable to perform other tasks while at the wheel. Public transportation does not suffer from this shortcoming, and bicycle infrastructure is inherently more scalable and hence traffic congestion is not a thing when it comes to bicycle infrastructure. Time spent bicycling also doubles as exercise, further enhancing the time-efficiency of this mode of transport.
>Those forms of transportation are slower than cars.
Not inherently. This is a mere matter of infrastructure, nothing else. Dense urban environment and rapid transit is clearly less time-wasting than the suburban car-oriented development, in essentially every aspect imaginable.
Writing this from one right now, going 200 km/h while having breakfast.
However I agree, wherever possible, less cars would be good. Public transit and bicycles work well in those regions, which have the proper infrastructure. Some European cities are quite good in this respect, others are following.
Fun fact though: between an efficient electric car (like the Tesla Model 3) and an electric train or even a Diesel bus, there is little efficiency difference, in a lot of cases the electric car wins. But trains win on not contributing to congested streets etc.
Cool as hell, though. When going to visit one of my grandparents, I usually pass by a decommissioned railroad that now does bicycle draisines for tourism-purposes. I really should go ahead and ride that some day, it seems like a lot of fun.
In the US, trains would require an expenditure of trillions of dollars with a multi-decade long fiscal commitment for an idea that's deeply unpopular with the citizenry. Ain't gonna happen here in our lifetime. Maybe in other countries, but not the USA.
You can buy an electric car today.
Hyperloop being near vacuum to remove/reduce friction from the area, while vehicle likely on floating MagLev skate, accelerating up to 1,223 kmph should certainly beat all current technology?
That said, I just can't see America reorganizing already built-up areas around trains, if only because it would require the government to purchase too much land just to lay the tracks.
I absolutely think that all new development should be done in a transportation-first level of density. But the existing burbs are a lost cause. And so we end up with electric cars.
- but -
We lack an intimate and personal understanding of the byproducts of ICE cars. We use a liquid fuel that we rarely actually see. The emissions are almost completely in gas form that we don't see. You don't have to "unload" bricks of CO2 and particulate from your vehicle.
But imagine what it would be like if you did. Imagine if CO2 was sludge that you had to handle. For every 10 gallons of gas you put into a car (approximately 70 pounds) you would have to unload approximately 200 pounds of CO2 (not counting water or other byproducts). You would have to find a place to put that. Do you drop it off at the filling station? What do they do with it? How many trips would you have to make to unload it? A 5 gallon bucket of water weighs about 40 pounds, if our sludge had that density, it would be 5 of those 5 gallon buckets. Many people struggle to carry a 5 gallon bucket (not you dear reader, other weaker people).
I don't think CO2 is actually toxic sludge, this is a mental exercise. I do think CO2 is a pollutant. I think if we had to personally and physically deal with CO2, no one would bitch about the minerals used in EV production.
Judging by the fact that so far, we've been on the worst trajectory considered by the IPCC [1], CO2 has a good chance of ending humankind within a century. That is not directly "toxic", but it is dangerous.
I view CO2 like I view processed sugar - if you have an energy deficit or energy balance, it's probably fine in small amounts; if you have a surplus, it's not ok.
I've been thinking about the industrial miracles of the 19th and 20th century. Steel, Aluminum, Concrete, Gasoline, Natural Gas, Plastic, Glass, Integrated Circuits, Artificial Fertilizers, Air Conditioning, Automobiles. If you only look at the positive side, all of these are truly miraculous - they've provided humanity with incredible increases in productivity and happiness. They've let people live longer and in less hospitable places. They've supported a higher population level than people expected was possible.
But those miracles have terrible side effects. I won't list them, it's too depressing.
The problem--same as with any other modern system--is that there are far more variables to consider to arrive at total system-wide costs, many of these are "trust me" trade secrets of various manufacturers, and the feds themselves (thanks to regulatory capture) have also been known to fudge numbers in the favor of one private interest over another, so even those numbers aren't above cross-examination.
This is not a pro or anti EV post as much as a humility one. I see a bunch of web developers nerd-sniping each other over personal recollections of industry PR (everthing in the media, pro or con, is somebody's PR, BTW).
Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. TCO is going to be a fairly good approximation of overall system-wide efficiency. Companies can only loss-lead for so long before going bankrupt, and they can only externalize costs for so long before being sued into oblivion. If EVs truly are this superior, nothing is going to stop them.
[0]https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/08/electrifying-tran... [1]https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/atv.shtml [2]https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/data/browser/#/?v=9&f=A&s=... [3]https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=107&t=3 [4]https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_02.html
Why aren't hybrid drivetrains in Semis, RVs ... everything. Within 5 years of the Prius there should have been legislation mandating PHEVs for practically all consumer transport.
With a hybrid you can run an engine in the Atkinson cycle which (apparently) enables diesel-level mileage out of gasoline. You get the regen braking that dramatically improves city driving.
Every five years after the Prius is another travesty that we didn't have this legislation coming down the pipe.
By now in 2022, 25 years after the Prius and Insight, we should have had 50% or more of new cars being PHEV hybrids with 50+ mile all-electric range. It would have brought Russia to its knees, the Saudis would be an afterthought in policy, and we'd be so much more resilient.
And hybrids in addition to atkinson should enable other tricks for efficiency gains besides carnot output to reclaim heat from the engine and exhaust, like turbochargers do. Gas turbines at the utlity scale are at 60% efficiency.
Oh well.
The problem with PHEVs is that so many people never plug them in, unless the automaker does something to them like with the BMW i3 REx, in which case said people wouldn't want them.
And when gas is at $5.00, an economic incentive.
Their tiny EV range requires them to be charged daily, which makes at-home charging a necessity in practice. But having such a good access to charging is also a thing that makes BEVs convenient. From this perspective PHEV a poorly-performing BEV with a baggage that reduces its performance, range, and efficiency, and occasionally is a less-efficient ICE to potentially save 20 minutes of time after 2-3 hours of driving at highway speeds.
The best use of available battery supply is to do PHEVs. For city traffic you get a huge gain in all-electric driving.
But really, this would have required forethought about 10 years ago to push car makers to have the scaled production ready for hybrid drivetrains. They don't, and so what I think is that all-BEVs will transition in.
What really sucks is that if we had hybrid drivetrains in mass production ten years ago in most consumer transport, then the used car market would now be full of them.
As it stands, BEVs will come in the new cars, but dirty ICEs will stick around for a decade at least.
It would have been so nice for that used car market to be PHEVs.
F1 engines have something called an MGU-H which recovers thermal energy from the engine (turbocharging) but can also spool up electronically etc.
They can reach something like 50% thermal efficiency, but these are truly complicated machines.
1) electric motors are very high torque
2) electric drivetrains aren't really that complicated.
3) the hybrid battery isn't that large, so it's not the space for that
4) all the engine has to do is recharge the battery. Mazda could have probably done a rotary or honda done a miraculous small engine to do the recharging.
Sure I get that the early hybrids were complicated, they probably had both the electric drive and the engine delivering power and balancing things. But with skateboard design EV platforms (and that is over 10 years old at this point), the industry would have produced a very efficient and likely cheaper than a traditional big engine ICE platform with incentives and regulations by now.
It probably is moot now. 200 wh/kg at pack level LFP is coming into mass production, and 150 wh/kg sodium ion is coming next year. But for midwesterners, long haul truckers, RV drivers, and other long distance frequent drivers, the 50 mile PHEV with 200 wh/kg LFP should have a ten year lifespan and deliver carbon emissions savings.
But... oh well.
Our environment would look much better now, if they had.
But in my eyes, the time for hybrids is over, any new car should be pure electric as it is simpler and way more efficient.
The reving and idling or low power output of the ICE can be avoided if it is in some power plant somewhere.
If we are battery constrained today, we need to consider the most efficient use of our limited battery supply. Start/stop idle technology is much cheaper than 1000lbs of lithium batteries in each vehicle.
----------
It looks like the most efficient solution involves like 50lbs of batteries, rather than the gross 1000+lbs of batteries that BEV fans want to use per car.
Living in low or high density urban environments is far more efficient in pretty much every single way that we can measure. CO2, energy, land use, water use and so on, and not just by a little but by a huge margin.
Transport can be electrified trains, trams, trolly buses, metros. This uses very few battery materials and essentially no new technology. All technology read to deploy in large numbers.
This would also 'solve' the housing crisis as increasing density around transportation with mixed use is what leads to much cheaper living cost (housing and transportation need to be seen together).
This talk by famous City Planner Peter Calthorpe is really good and goes into detail. He and his teams were charged with making a few projection plans for California and have really good numbers on all of these things (except the nuclear I mentioned):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUtdFbK4YG4
He has other great talks about his work in China as well, this is a bit more academic:
U also wish EU didnt have the silly 25 km/h limit on ebikes, I can pedal faster than that myself
Also, did you know about the EU speed pedelec category L1e-B? It gets classified as a moped with maximum speed of 45 km/h and maximum 4 kW power.
and use overhead cables
We had trolley busses like 100 years ago
For this to work however you need to change far more then just the buses, you need to change the whole development pattern. I put some great links in my other comment.
> The metals thing is a problem the markets will solve because the tech is largely solved.
The metals thing comes from Russia (nickle) and Congo (Cobalt), and Argentina/China (Lithium).
The steel thing is *already* solved, with 88% of USA's steel being composed of recycled steel. You're hoping that some magic recycling process spins up over the next years to make Lithium sustainable, when it clearly isn't right now.
Lithium is mostly from Chile, Argentina and Australia but its mostly refined in China.
> You're hoping that some magic recycling process spins up over the next years to make Lithium sustainable, when it clearly isn't right now.
The amount of lithium even if 100% recycled isn't nearly enough to cover what is needed. We know how to recycle it, in fact we have far more recycling capability then we have material that we can recycle. Everybody invest in recycling but there is not much to actually recycle yet.
Seeing your comment above made everything make sense; it's pretty dang "not my style" but whatever floats (or tows) your boat
There's lots of things the markets haven't "solved".
Also, getting a lot more nasty things out of the Earth will also most probably mean more dead kids in the mines of Africa, but I'm sure the market won't advertise that. At least the Saudis don't directly kill kids in their oil-fields explorations (they kill them only indirectly in Yemen, with the guns they've purchased from the West using the money they got from the oil-fields).
But sodium batteries are very nearly in mass production so while we're continuing to insist that petrol is 100% of the problem cars cause rather than 50% I guess that will do.
The same could be achieved on a small scale if someone would simply make it
Personally I'd be interested in a pure electric drive HEV with a high efficiency diesel generator. Give me just enough battery for around town (100 miles maybe?) and just enough generator to extend my trip to ~300 miles. The generator doesn't need to be large (and expensive) enough to be capable to drive from directly at highway speeds, but just enough to extend the range when needed.
Heck make the power units "modular" in 3 ft x 4 ft boxes and let me mix and match power sources. I'll start out with a 1 battery and 1 diesel setup, but could upgrade to 2 battery power packs later if I drive around town a lot. (^_^)
I was joking but actually modular "power packs" would be cool.. You could replace one at a time vs a full $20k battery. Or take one out and plug it into your home. Maybe even rent a extra diesel pack for that coast-to-coast trip. Hmmm, wish I had the energy to start random companies. ;)
So you would need to park and let the generator slowly charge your car? Why not just charge the car at a charger at that point?
Make the generator large enough so that it can generate enough power to directly run the electric motor for highway driving.
The main reason would be cost and weight. Full EV card are still too expensive for many. I'm guessing there's a sweet spot that'd be much cheaper than either but would provide more range when needed. But as the other commenter points out the ICE + 20 mile pack might win out on efficiency of scale.
You only need the generator to be able to extend the driving time to around 8 hours to cover 99% of use cases, so if your battery can do 2 hours then the generator only needs to produce 3/4 of the energy in the minimal case.
What you are proposing would require the generator to be 3-20x as large as the alternative.
A car that uses 10kW average and has a 50km range is usable with a 7.5kW generator and stopping to charge every 200km. Knowing you have the ability to stop and charge or limp at 3/4ths speed to the next charger would allow more confidence pushing the boundaries.
A small battery means a 15 minute break to charge every 2 hours is viable and not a deal breaker for someone who only needs range infrequently.
A nice thing about current PHEVs is that they have smaller batteries than full EVs, which could matter in a battery-constrained market.
I wonder how reliable the portable diesel generators are. The huge ones in datacenters are known to have trouble starting up sometimes, so they're tested frequently.
Diesels require higher compression than gasoline and must be built stronger as a result. Which explains the higher cost of diesel engines in general.
No actual diesel engines can muster up much higher than 60%.
That's 85% of the crankshaft energy moving the wheels. Once you multiply in your ICE efficiency which will be around 30% for anything that fits in a car or truck you're looking at 25%
Burn the same deisel in a big turbine and chemical->wheel efficiency going via power lines and a battery will be in the 30-40% range, but with the advantage of being able to mix in solar.
Moving a giant metal and plastic box for each individual human is still a gross waste of resources though and we should subsidize mass transit and active transport infrastructure rather than spending vast amounts of common money on roads and parking lots.
But heat recovery is also paired with diesel, depending on the usage, with nearly complete conversion efficiency.
All the calcs for electric are bullshit. Every engineer that isn't a bleeding heart acknowledges this. They have either fudged the production cost or disregarded the recycling cost or ignored the mining expense, drive like a puritan with no climate control... on and on.
Well then how about an electric car driving full out in freezing temps? Or with the A/C max?
I can take nearly 100% of the waste heat from a diesel genset working at maximum efficiency with 42% conversion
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Airborneplein,+6828+KP+Arn...
It's extremely efficient.
I dunno. Maybe I just haven't experienced the right ones, but my experience is that the most pedestrian friendly urban spaces have mostly (roughly) straight lines and right angles and lots of natural or man made barriers to free flow of cars to prevent them from going too fast. I don't know how you can square that circle.
Thanks for the link, a bit sad to read to following(!)
> later fell out of favor with traffic engineers there, as it was seen as prioritizing flow of pedestrians over flow of car traffic.
Unless it does that awful hybrid “turn if no one is crossing” crap that I hate as both a driver and pedestrian.
Putting roundabouts onto streets is not a binary decision: some intersections could be roundabouts, some could be lights, and others could be roundabouts with lights.
Four way stops are one of the dumbest inventions of man kind that are way over used in North America. Everyone has to stop all the time and it leads to scary situations at 2 way stops because people don't expect those anymore.
Here is a great video about life without stop signs in the Netherlands: https://youtu.be/42oQN7fy_eM
And here are some infinitely better alternatives:
Low traffic + low speed: raised intersections where right goes first.
Medium traffic + medium speed: priority road with yield signs on side streets and roundabouts
High traffic + medium speed: traffic lights
High traffic + high speed: grade separated intersections
Maybe for people coming from the west, but it'd undeniably be way way better for people coming from the south.
Small roundabouts don't have this problem.
Almost everyone were going from the highway to the parking except me.
I had to wait for a bus that was going straight so you could enter or two cars going straight in a row.
It got so bad that the workers started to give way to those coming from the starved road so it sorted itself out I guess.
Idle is like 0.15 gallons/hour. There's no way 25 mph uses that little gas, if 60mph uses 26 times as much.
What 1960s car are you driving? :) Should be getting 50-80mpg at 60mph.
Also, with solar and wind in the fray, and increasing renewable energy share, having an all electric energy consumption economy is better logistically and environmentally.
1 gallon of gas contains 33.7 kWh of energy. [1]
The average ICE car goes 24 miles on 1 gallon of gas. That's 0.7 miles per kWh (24/33.7 ≅ 0.7).
The Tesla Model 3 goes about 4.1 miles per kWh. That's 5.8x further per kWh, or 5.8x more efficient!
Most of the difference is because ICE engines are inefficient. They waste energy. Just like the article says. :)
The point made by the article about the source of electricity from power plants was simply that EVs are more efficient even when charged from coal fired power plants! Your point about the "ICE in some power plant somewhere" is temporarily true... as the grid de-carbonizes there will be fewer and fewer emissions from grid-scale generation. (Nuclear + renewables is my personal guess for where we're headed.)
It's kind of sad that several threads here are playing devil's advocate. Unless some dramatically better tech takes the world by storm in the next 2-3 years, EVs are going to completely take over the market. Economies of scale should dramatically drive down costs over the next 5-10 years, and then all new cars will be EVs. No one will want the old, expensive, dirty, loud ICE cars. And this is really good news for everybody!
[1] https://www3.epa.gov/otaq/gvg/learn-more-fuels.htm
[2] https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10310
[3] https://ecocostsavings.com/electric-car-kwh-per-mile-list/Obviously the same is true for the electricity in the EV, but that’s dependent on the energy mix in your area. If it’s primarily renewables, this is another efficiency increase in favor of the EV.
Doesn’t this ignore how the fuel was produced, and delivered (refineries, fuel trucks, power plants, charger losses)? Are those losses negligible compared to the 1kWh once inside the battery or fuel tank? If so, then the comparison is fair
The articles point is also that BEVs are more efficient even if a fossile plant is used, since the plant can operate at better efficiency than a small ICE that also need to idle and rev to bad rpm ranges. Which was what I was trying to convey.
Also not sure why you think electric vehicles are not aerodynamic – the Tesla Model S Plaid has a drag coefficient of 0.208.
.13 but I really need to drive around fewer behemoths to feel safe in it. Maybe a 4 wheel will make up for it?
Regardless, the lowest drag coeff cars in the world seem to be electric ones so GC's point is still... strange.
But the problem is regulatory. China already has a number of under $5000 city cars that are perfectly fine for driving around. Problem is that they're completely illegal in Europe or US.
We utterly need a category of city vehicles that are barred from highways, can be driven in cities, and lack 90% of all the newer and ridiculously expensive safety features. We're moving in a direction where new cars are mandated to read the speed limits indicators and follow them. Honestly I'm hoping this particular piece of news is bunk, but it definitely wouldn't surprise me - regulators love regulations, car manufacturers love having extra features to sell, and it's fool-proof protection against cheaper alternatives.
A city car needs safety belts, and a built in speed limit. That's it.
+ It's classed as a supermini, which can just about fit 4 adults. It's the same as a VW Polo, Ford Fiesta, Renault Clio.
+ Kerb weight of 970kg, which is less than ICE cars of a similar size.
+ Around €12,000 with incentives.
+ Top speed of 125km/h, so you can drive safely on highways (in the truck lane).
- Range is around 240km, but for its intention as a 'city car' that's more than enough.
- 1 star EuroNCAP rating.
- Battery doesn't have thermal management.
If I buy a 60k electric vehicle today, how long will it be until I replace the batteries? 10 years? 20 years? At what point does the maintenance cycle, render the car worthless?
Even after 12 years, the Saturn SL1 I had still worked as a car. There would still be maintenance cycles (oil, brakes, etc). But if you took that into the cost of ownership, it's still relatively cheaper than buying a new car.
In northwestern Europe, the reason would be low emission zones. "Sorry, this type of car is not allowed here anymore." is a real thing here.
These are not old or bad cars to a lot of people. Many are not able to afford car mobility anymore due to low emission zone restrictions on these cars.
It's easy for the upper middle class or above running society to develop a blind spot for this. "Just buy recent a second hand car or a new Dacia Spring" is not the answer if the money for that is missing.
Has enough attention been paid to this social side of the low emissions zones? I'm not so sure.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards#Em...
The emissions testing was a result of the 1970s/1980s smog crisis.
The BMS babies the batteries. Forget what you think you know about LiPo from laptops and cellphones. For example: you can't get a Zoe without A/C. Why not? Because the battery is air cooled, by the A/C. If there is capacity left over AFTER ensuring the battery is comfortable, it is shared with the human occupants. :)
Tyre wear can be heavy in EV's if you put your foot down a lot, brake wear is a lot lighter.
At about 200k the battery may well go - but at 200k you can expect something major in your ICE drive chain to go. A new gearbox can set you back $6k - that's pretty similar to the cost of a tesla battery replacement.
Starter $800 (on warranty).
AC $400.
Transmission service $1500 at 70k.
Coolant flush $400.
2 set of brake pads @ $400 a piece.
Timing belt $200.
Battery $100.
Oil changes at $30 every 3k miles. Lets call it $1k total.
Cabin Air filter change every 15k miles $20
Bottom heat shield $100
Shocks @100k miles $250
A battery replacement is an economical choice for an EV. You could buy a new vehicle or buy a life extension of another decade plus. That's how long the battery lasts and there's very little else in the vehicle that is very likely to start falling apart. Electrical engines last a long time. Drive trains are much simpler. And parts for that are relatively cheap. So even if the engine were to fail, replacing it would be pretty straightforward and cheap probably.
E.g. a Nissan Leaf battery replacement will set you back around 7000 dollars. A lot of money for sure. But it will last quite long and when there's really nothing else wrong with the vehicle, it's a perfectly rational decision to make. Lots of original Nissan Leafs from 12 years ago are still driving around and quite a few will survive into their second and third decade. As it is one of the older EV models available, that's a great benchmark. We're talking first generation technology. The batteries and drive train were more primitive. Cooling and battery management were not a thing yet. Etc. Just great little vehicles. And a 7K battery doubles their original range (from 20kwh to 40kwh).
This is better than Tesla which charges $12-20k + labor + parts to change the battery pack. But $7k is still a big chunk of change. That will set a price cliff on the car. Basically if it is worth $13k, but you're going to need a battery change in the next year, the true price of the car will be worth $6k on the market. Cars that are less than $7k become effectively worthless as the new buyer will be guaranteed to have to replace the battery pack on them.
This happens with home sales. Like if a house needs a new roof, the buyers will ask the home owners to discount the price of the new roof off the house.
I wonder if we have any newer information that doesn't rely on predictions?
Id suspect you do lots of highway miles with no gear changes (hence no clutch wear). Manufacturers now aim for ideal 150K life on a clutch, but that's aspirational, not the median by any means.
What's not to understand about such a simple comparison?
To clarify, most EV cars use only regen braking until either the pedal is pressed (Tesla regens automatically by letting off the accelerator) or when the pedal is pressed hard (most other EVs).
On a Nissan Leaf, mild regenerative is always engaged in Eco mode unless you touch gas. Otherwise when you put on the brake it's regenerative + extra braking with pads if necessary.
On BMW i3 it brakes regeneratively once you slip the gas. If you use the brake pedal hard it's still regen + pads.
On VW id.4 it's quite like on the Leaf.
On all three it's pads only braking only when the battery is fully charged.
So they don't encourage only charging to 90% like on Tesla to maintain good braking action?
It is interesting to consider how to make "brake by wire" safe. Stop and consider it a second...
(Answer:)
The pedal has failsafe interlock between your foot and the master cylinder which is "normally closed". When you ask for braking and the computer is running right, and the propulsion system can regen, then the brake pads will receive zero hydraulic pressure. If anything keeps regen from working (computer or network failure, batter is full, you are asking for more braking than the motor can make), the failsafe kicks in and your foot is connected straight to the master cylinder in order to make as much hydraulic pressure at the pads as you care to make.
Downvote me all you like, the chart is claiming that EVs are perpetual motion machines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32458027
I'm disappointed in HackerNews.
some of the cars that i've seen have EV equivalents that are so significantly more costly that the gas savings only start to work out at around 1.25-2x the average driving distance of a personal vehicle owner. it makes no sense for example for me to replace my glc300 with a eqc. and if you don't drive at least 10k miles/yr, the kona electric is more expensive than the kona ice.
a lot of discussions revolve around downgrading from an expensive ice to a cheap ev to make the cost work but that seems a bit disingenuous. of course getting a cheaper car is cheaper. when we do like-for-like, a lot of the advantages disappear.
In short, that's why a lot of commercial fleets are transitioning to electric. Dollar per mile is the only relevant metric there. ICE vehicle technology is basically going obsolete rapidly. Commercially, that game is over.
And the gap is widening every year. We've had a period where the tax incentives were important, helpful and necessary. But that is increasingly just a nice to have thing.
Fundamentally, it's not technically hard to build much lighter and efficient electrical vehicles. So, if the current ones are cost effective now, imagine how much more cost effective they could be.
My Tesla can go 4 miles with 10 cents worth (1 kWh) of electricity, or 40 miles per $1.
Obviously there can be mitigating factors, but even if you drive a 50 MPG ICE car, or your electricity is unusually expensive, or you drive your Tesla at 85 mph and only get 2 miles per kWh, it's still no contest.
Basically, if you charge using solar panels that you own, the miles per dollar is a function of maintenance, and purchase cost of the vehicle and panels. The efficiency of the panels or vehicles are not a factor at all since the variable cost is 0$/mile. You only have variable cost when you charge the vehicle somewhere else. The non variable cost is basically the ownership of the vehicle and panels. Which you might simplify via e.g. leasing constructions.
One number I challenge, though, is "0-4% for auxiliary use". My AC on an EV looks to be closer to 15% of cruising energy in a hot clime, and I know that my ICE cars always had a significant drop in MPG when I ran the AC, too. In addition, heating is "free" in an ICE car while it's probably a similar 15% in an EV car.
They do this with the Octovalve and a highly efficient (Tesla designed) heat-pump.
They aren't, though. Supercharging is an order of magnitude slower than filling up a tank, and most of the time you're charging overnight. These are non-trivial differences to people who, say, rely on on-street parking for their vehicle. Ditto if you run out of juice (no jerrycan equivalent), or need to get something serviced (mechanics for BEVs are still rarer).
The two are effectively equivalent most of the time, but there are some non-trivial differences that conveniently get glossed over. 20% of first time BEV purchasers sell their car and go back to an ICEV, so it's probably important to be honest about the distinction.
See https://chargemap.com/cities/oslo-NO
It's not that hard to build infrastructure to support EVs, since electricity already is everywhere in a city.
Just saying "they can" doesn't make it so. I've relied on on-street parking before, as have most of the people I know. None of them would consider running a cable from their apartment to the curb to charge their car to be a practical solution, which is why the solution is for cities to make public chargers ubiquitous (see the previous comment).
Because they can't do everything that a standard car can do.
>Putting fewer car-miles in a city is a very good thing. Especially when your car spews exhaust everywhere it goes.
I don't believe anyone is arguing otherwise. But if you're arguing that having a less capable vehicle that encourages less driving is a good thing, I'd point out that a) the market is unlikely to accept that, and b) this is mostly a city design problem that is orthogonal to the type of car you drive.
In addition, I don't have to babysit the pump when refilling my Tesla. I can sit in the car in air conditioned comfort and check my email or watch Netflix on the console while the car is filling. I can walk away from the car and use the restroom and buy a snack and stretch my legs while the car is filling. All that is impossible or illegal if I'm alone while refilling my ICE car.
My point is that refills of the two cars are completely different experiences that cannot be compared with a simple time scalar. Refilling the Tesla is vastly more pleasant even if it takes a bit longer.
One of these is going from empty to full, the other isn't. You can split hairs all you like on whether or not it's good enough to charge from 20%-80%, the reality is, a petrol bowser is filling a standard vehicle at a rate of 3.5MW, with zero attenuation of the charging rate as you approach a full tank. They just aren't equivalent.
>In addition, I don't have to babysit the pump when refilling my Tesla. I can sit in the car in air conditioned comfort and check my email or watch Netflix on the console while the car is filling. I can walk away from the car and use the restroom and buy a snack and stretch my legs while the car is filling. All that is impossible or illegal if I'm alone while refilling my ICE car.
Okay, if that works for you, more power to you. It doesn't work for me. I don't have any love affair with petrol stations, but if it's a choice of refilling the tank in 5 minutes every other week versus plugging my car in every night, or planning my trip around charging stops, I'll pick the former every time.
I even like doing backroads trips where there are no superchargers and I have to think creatively about where to get electricity. That's fun for me, but I understand how it might not be for everybody.
Obviously, there’s a point at which a downslope will offer regen, but these are the slopes where a manual transmission car would pickup speed if placed into neutral.
On one that curves and bends up and down, it is possible to capture back some energy, though, you do have to spend the energy required to go from point A to point B.
Really don't see the arguments when the bulk of electricity generation in the world comes from burning fossil fuels - EV's are just feel good measure for people like eating packaged food does not remind you of the abattoirs.
Losses due to friction, drag, and heat are NOT magically made up for with regenerative braking.
You're forgetting about gravity. People brake when traveling downhill, which is essentially using gravity to charge the battery (similar to hydroelectric energy).
Imagine you had a line of 24 people and you asked them to cross a room with traps that kill 2/3rds of them.
66% of the people make it and for the 18 people who survive, send them round an outside corridor and back to the start and ask them to cross again.
This time 12 make it, repeat.
No more than 24 individual people can ever make it across the room, but even if we stop after a 2nd cycle already we have 30 crossings. One way to express that is that the crossing equal 125% of the initial people input into the system.
We haven't broken physics, were just arguing semantics.
Let's do the math:
d = losses = 10% + 18% + 3% + 4% = 0.35
p = power to wheels
r = regeneration fraction = 0.22
p = (1 - d * p) + r * p
solving for p gives an efficiency of 64%. Not 87-91%.
It links to this:
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/atv-ev.shtml
In the bottom left corner, the image says "Percentage total may exceed 100% because regenerative braking recaptures energy and reuses it."
Also, it says: "Energy to wheels: 65% to 69% + 22% (recovered) = 87% to 91%"
Switch to the "City" tab, and the result is "94% to 100%".
It's not impossible to produce more useful work than the electricity being used - see for example heat pumps, which derive most of the heat from cooling down water (or air) which is "free", so they can generate 3-4W of heat out of 1W of electricity.
This violates all known principles of physics. You can't use more energy than is input.
First, you accelerate - this converts electricity from the battery into kinetic energy. Then, you brake - this converts kinetic energy to electricity and stores it in the battery. You can then convert it back into kinetic energy the next time you accelerate. Effectively you get to spend 22 out of 100Wh that you put in at the power socket twice. You can get 122Wh from the output of the battery before it's empty because it has a second input.
I find the confusing thing about this argument is that the kinetic energy that is eventually recuperated due to braking is counted as productive work. So this 87-91% ratio is how much kinetic energy was produced in total ("Energy to Wheels") - whether it eventually turned out to be useless due to braking or not - divided by the electricity charged at the power socket.
In contrast, an ICE car can't recuperate at all for lack of technology to synthesize gasoline, so the kinetic energy is converted to waste heat energy.
What would violate the principles of physics is if the captured energy were larger than the electricity that was originally put in (assuming no other inputs like a downward slope) - that would be a perpetual motion machine. At 100% recuperation, the car could never move.
The kinetic energy also came from the battery. There is no "extra" energy coming from nowhere.
> You can get 122Wh from the output of the battery before it's empty because it has a second input.
No, no, no. You cannot extract 122Wh from a battery that only has 100Wh in it. That "second input" also came from the battery. If your notion worked, you'd be a shoo-in for a Nobel Prize.
I'm not sure exactly how they calculate the 22% but I assume they need to model how often the car brakes to arrive at that.
There are heavy EV trucks in mining that have to discharge their batteries into the grid because they are net positive.
This isn't perpetual motion, it's just that electric generators/motors are quite efficient at turning rotation into electricity and vice versa.
That's the 0.22 in the equation, and it's taken from the article's chart.
> I assume they need to model how often the car brakes to arrive at that
It's not hard to measure it in an actual car.
> it's just that electric generators/motors are quite efficient at turning rotation into electricity and vice versa.
It's overall 64% efficient. The 87-91% figure given in the article is based on bad math and/or a total misunderstanding of basic physics.
That won't change the fact that EVs are and should be on the way out. All the engineering of the world has not made them come close to the relative (really just relative) simplicity of EVs.
I also like ancient phone networks, CRTs, and mechanical calculators. And preserving small numbers of them as artifacts is invaluable, but only with a small number of enthusiasts or in a museum. There are a few Ford Model T still around...
EV powertrains aren't "simple" and are in fact "intricate", honestly to a higher level than ICEs. Even the motor itself is complex. But honestly, complexity is a bad thing. It means there's more things that can fail.
But "electric motor turns axle" is, at its surface level, and much more boring principle than "controlled concurrent explosions timed in the right way actuate pistons which actuate shaft which turns axle". And by default at least an electric motor has a much more linear power curve than an ICE one, so purely at surface level transmissions tend to follow a simpler principle as well.
It's why I mentioned old phone networks and CRTs as well.
I'm almost ready to start using them for Uranium before they get decom'd. I've trained myself on 7 years of this satellite data.
What we really can't see through is smoke and cloud.
Note: I maintain the Google Earth-based datasets for the USGS ASTER and LANDSAT7/8-based surficial mineralogy program. That includes actually going out to various locations and verifying signal readings. I've done this since 2016 as an unpaid volunteer (its pays me due to the minerals I'll find.)
I never suggested that. Geological surveys paint a decent picture of what minerals can be mined from where. This is a well known process. Mining companies can relocate equipment and employees, especially if they have federal funding. It is a win for the federal government, national security and a win for the mining companies and their current/former employees. I will email congress to suggest it.
Some time ago I suggested something similar for semi-conductor production and it was not received well on HN either. Today the federal government is putting billions into local chip production. How well that money is put to use remains to be seen, but it is happening.
"The emissions from Materials production and refining of the ICE are roughly 40 per cent less than for the BEV"
https://www.volvocars.com/images/v/-/media/project/contentpl...
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths#Myt...
https://www.autoblog.com/2021/06/29/electric-vs-gas-emission...
Second - your own source concluded that the studied BEV has lower lifetime emissions (including manufacturing) than the studied ICE car, albeit with a high uncertainty - they estimate that the the BEV has 27-54 tonnes of emmissions vs 58 tonnes for the ICE, or 47-93% of the ICE's lifetime emmissions.
Buyers are opting for other excellent cars like the Kia EV6, the VW ID.3/ID.4/ID.5, the Hyundai Ioniq 5, the Mercedes-Benz EQC, the Polestar 2 and the BMW iX. The number of excellent options is rapidly multiplying, which is good for everyone.
I refuse to even consider a Tesla for a host of reasons but I'm keeping an eye on the other options.
Thus, when you are comparing the efficiency of electric cars with combustion engine cars, you have to take into account the efficiency of the electricity generation process.
Stationary power plants are incredibly efficient, to the point that burning gasoline and transmitting electricity to an EV is still way more efficient than burning gasoline in a car.
You may be mixing up things with natural gas used for heating. Fuel -> heat is most efficient at the destination. But ICE cars don't run on heat, they radiate it away as waste.
https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html
Getting cars on electricity also centralizes the problem of emission control and improvements.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/lifeti...
Cars last 100k+ miles now, and that 13k break-even number in your link is with the current US energy mix, which is rapidly decarbonizing. It is a big deal, and worth moving to EVs.
- traditional well in the US
- fracking in the US
- offshore
- Canadian tarsands
Edit: This article has some interesting information on Energy Return on Investment (EROI)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
Yes many do. Some are written off in their first year.
The main point is if we all miraculously switched to EVs, there are savings in emissions to be had, but it wont fix the problem.
This is the whole problem. Its only a small step forward but people think it'll make a huge difference. Ideally people would move to a small urban apartment and walk or take public transport. EVs let people continue to drive and think they're OK.
There is so much FUD out there from the professional astroturfers and the cranky old amateurs. But EVs will follow the path that solar and wind are: the sheer economics will sweep away ICEs in inexorable fashion.
source for this? the article you linked doesn't seem to provide lifetime carbon emissions, nor does a 20k mile break-even point imply that there "isn't a huge difference" in lifetime emissions
https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html shows the difference in annual emissions
https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/hybrid-electric/news/a... debunks the myth that the tesla battery is worth 8 years of driving, but still says its a bit over 2 years.
But yes, US gasoline is also sourced from the US primarily. (Texas and Alaska). With a terminal at Brent / Arkansas.
Natural Gas? A bit, for corn-based ethanol (the Nitrogen fertilizers used to make modern corn fields requires a surprisingly large amount of energy, of which is primarily given through Natural Gas IIRC). Various calculations I've seen however, suggests that Ethanol uses less greenhouse gasses than say Electric vehicles (since most of our power grid is still coal / natural gas based). Aside from that one guy who keeps making anti-ethanol research papers for the last 15 years.
The bulk of energy going into corn is the sun, all natural solar energy. A bit of it is hacked together with Nitrogen fertilizers that must be accounted for, but still better than other methodologies. The other major greenhouse gas issue is the greenhouse gas costs of converting forested land into farmland, and this seems to be the biggest area of debate.
------------
Bonus points: Switchgrass based ethanol uses no fertilizers, meaning its 100% green. Since Switchgrass grows naturally in the US Fields (unlike Corn, which is a domesticated crop), Switchgrass is arguably better for the environment (or at least, more "natural"). The lack of fertilizers needed for it to grow is proof to how its a plant designed for our geography.
So Switchgrass solves the fertilizer and land-conversion issues.
I would actually have been a fan of that solution if it was the 90s, but its time has come and gone.
Also, you realize you are still producing harmful emissions when driving that car threw a city right?
Cobalt can easily be mined in North America, there is no reason it has to come from Cobalt. If that is the issue, the solution is not to drive around with ethanol.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/02/us-biofuel-manda...
If youre going to compare switch grass, why don't you compare that against the best scenario for EVs. No cobalt, lithium extracted from sea water, powered from a clean grid? The switch grass is still going to require fertilising, maybe not as much, but if you're removing nutrients you have to replace them.
It is true that building an EV in the first place does embody more carbon, but the payback time is not that long (under 15,000 miles with a clean enough grid and under 50,000 even on the dirtiest grids). As the grid and supply chain decarbonizes that embedded carbon of manufacturing will also drop.
An EV gets cleaner as the grid you drive it on decarbonizes. An ICE vehicle will emit for its whole lifespan and will get worse fuel economy and emit more particulates, SO2 and NOX as it ages.
Anyone who claims EVs will save the planet is deluding themselves, but electrified transport needs to be one of many, many steps we take to decarbonize.
Run the math. The 2-million hybrids will save the world faster than 100,000 EVs. Let's say ICE is 30MPG, Hybrid is like 40MPG to 60MPG. Even at the low end 40MPG, 2 million hybrids is the same number of emission savings as 350,000 EVs.
--------
Pure ICE technologies are also more important. Going from 20mpg to 25 mpg will have a bigger impact due to the huge number of ICE cars being made.
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There are 289 million vehicles to replace in the USA. The sad truth is that 1 million EVs/year changes nothing. We need faster production and faster replacement.
And there is no entity who can make 1 million EVs/year.
You need not replace every vehicle right away, just enough to replace the largest consumers of fossil fuels.
> Run the math.
There are no spherical cows.
https://insideevs.com/news/602725/tesla-3-million-cars-prduc...
289 million vehicles. At that rate, it will take over 100 years to replace all ICE vehicles.
> You need not replace every vehicle right away, just enough to replace the largest consumers of fossil fuels.
You mean semi-trucks and busses? How many years has Tesla-semi been in development hell now?
Electric semi-trucks will eventually come. But at this point, I'm thinking its going to be Fuel Cell electricity through Hydrogen rather than batteries.
Is consuming total US TAM going to happen? Unlikely, but the broad strokes of the transition are apparent; you could even stick this in Excel to reasonably extrapolate. Importantly, EVs don’t need to replace every combustion vehicle, only enough so that petroleum supply infra is no longer economically sustainable. At that point, existing fossil vehicles become stranded and only good for salvage.
When we look at European nations + Japan and even China, their strategy for sustainable green energy is shifting into Hydrogen. The technology offered by fuel cell technologies is the one that I'm frankly more willing to bet on for the future to be frank. Especially with regards to large trucks (ie: semi-trucks and busses).
--------
As you've noted earlier: its the large vehicles we need to focus on. And the largest vehicles (ex: semi-trucks) are not practical on Li-ion. Not yet anyway.
Of course GM and Ford are both building up EV factories in North America. VW is currently scaling its plant. Hyundai/Kia are opening an EV plant in the US. And so are many others.
> When we look at European nations + Japan and even China, their strategy for sustainable green energy is shifting into Hydrogen.
No its not. That is what some politicians and big oil are talking about. If you are looking what is actually happening, hydrogen is very, very little.
Japan has been obsessed with hydrogen for literally 40 years and have done everything they can to push it other then just straight up paying people per mile of hydrogen driving. And yet in reality Tesla alone outsells all hydrogen vehicles in Japan.
> The technology offered by fuel cell technologies is the one that I'm frankly more willing to bet on for the future to be frank.
So the technology that had huge amount of investment and has produced essentially no practical results is the one you want to hang your hat on? What convinced you, the total failure of mass production or the really bad end-to-end energy efficiency? With so much systematic failure its really hard to pick one convincing factor.
> Especially with regards to large trucks (ie: semi-trucks and busses).
Just a note to a comment above. The Tesla Semi was not in 'development hell'. Its simple the reality that with the same number of chips and batteries making more different vehicle types makes no sense. Semi needs lots of batteries, this is not a technology question, but a supply chain question.
For buses you have many options, traditionally trolley, you have LFP, you have high-nickel and many other already deployed like Lithium Metal Polymer. There are sodium batteries coming and many other things as well. Practically speaking 99% of bus routes in the world can be done with battery electric batteries.
For trucks, the waste majority of routes are well within reach of Lithium batteries and battery electric will be far cheaper then hydrogen for all of those routes. Hydrogen trucks architecture is far more complex, leading to far more cost. Hydrogen will always be more expensive then electricity so it will never beat battery electric on those routes. So why would anybody want a hydrogen truck?
If you have to drive some stuff from San Fransisco to Alasca maybe hydrogen has some use but practically its basically 1% of the market.
Even VW announced they will stop investment in hydrogen trucks and they were pushing that for a long time. Other truck makers like Volvo still talk about hydrogen sometimes but what they are actually deploying and commercializing is guess what, battery trucks. The same goes for Daimler, they talk about hydrogen, but they will first deliver like 4 different battery electric trucks and then maybe a hydrogen truck sometimes toward the end of the decade. Of course most of those late 2020s hydrogen turcks will never actually be deployed, they will just continue to push it back while releasing battery electric trucks.
I just can not understand why people are still in love with hydrogen. It has been a total failure for literally 50 years and is basically systematically out-competed in every field. Its bad in end-to-end efficiency and its bad for vehicle architecture as well.
If you really want to go synthetic chemical, then why not just use methanol or dimethyl ether, you can continue to use ICE. Doesn't cost that much more to make then hydrogen and has many other advantages.
Or hydrogen fuel cell trucks and haulers:
https://thedriven.io/2022/08/04/hyundai-rolls-out-27-heavy-d...
https://thedriven.io/2022/06/21/volvo-unveils-hydrogen-power...
https://www.volvoce.com/global/en/news-and-events/press-rele...
https://www.cummins.com/news/releases/2022/05/11/daimler-tru...
The main fault with your thinking is that you're fully bought into the false dichotomy of it being BEV versus FCEV.
The choice isn't FCEV or BEV, the choice is both FCEV and BEV.
Sure have your FCEV trucks, but lets be real, it will likely be 2% of market share in trucking.
All I see here is that you're overexcited and you desperately want your "team" to "win". It's not very rational.
And the market share will be very low. Sorry I don't have a complex mathematical and simulation model that can predict if it will be 0% or 5%. My best guess is that is likely below 2% but I could be of by 100%.
My point is quite simple, the market will be very small.
You in comparison have not really provided no convincing argument that it will have a high market share.
If you want to assign a 'team' to me then, if you want then I am on team 'lets use energy efficiently' and also on team 'lets not have the government continue to give money to automotive companies to develop hydrogen technology'.
If that were true then you'd be advocating for trains and trams, not trucks, buses, or cars. Trains and trams are more energy efficient than automobiles.
> also on team 'lets not have the government continue to give money to automotive companies to develop hydrogen technology'
But you presumably still want government handouts for BEV and EV charger development.
I am literally doing that. I love trains and public transport. I'm a huge advocate of increase use in local cargo trains. I am even a fan of cargo trams. In the city where I work Zurich they have started using cargo trams for things like garbage and that's amazing.
I'm also a fan of electric trolley lines on highways for trucks rather then pure battery electric.
But we are not debating that right now, we are debating battery trucks verses hydrogen trucks.
> But you presumably still want government handouts for BEV and EV charger development.
Not really actually. I much much prefer that investment going into general urbanism including public personal and cargo transport. Given 75k cars a government handout is insane policy.
What I would support carbon tax and also toll booths for driving into cities.
You literally aren't.
> we are debating battery trucks verses hydrogen trucks
No, you're making your original mistake again. It's not battery trucks versus hydrogen trucks. The choice isn't BEV or FCEV, the choice is both BEV and FCEV.
> No, you're making your original mistake again.
Technology is almost never 100% dominate, when we are debating 'VHS vs betamax' we don't say 'I don't think VHS won over beta-max because some people still use betamax'. Of course FCEV trucks will exists that's not a question really worth talking about, its trivial.
If we are having a quality discussion in terms of technology the debate is about witch of these technology will more fundamentally and systematically transform our society. If we are talking a "VHS vs betamax" the answer is clear and everybody in the world, other then you apparently, understand what we are talking about. And in this case, I have made and argument that battery electric will win the waste majority use cases.
And your response is to quibble with the way I'm formulating thing, even when you clearly know that I don't mean no FCEV truck will exist in the future, rather then making any real argument. Bye.
Uh huh. You've repeatedly claimed FCEVs are a "total failure" even though companies like Hyundai have been running them in Switzerland for a couple of years now:
https://thedriven.io/2020/07/08/hyundai-ships-first-fcev-hea...
It's not quibbling to correctly recognize your false claims as false and your misguided perspective as misguided.
Also, is this true for building a new EV vs building a new ICE car? People just regularly replace their cars and vehicles, and in that sense the transition need not necessitate any more carbon than would've otherwise happened.
good breakdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RhtiPefVzM
Technically correct, as lithium isn't a rare earth. Lithium mining isn't free from controversy, however. The "Lithium Triangle" in South America contains most of the world's known lithium reserves. Mining companies in Chile, the world's second-largest lithium producer, have less than a sterling human rights record:
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/lithium-mining-leaving-chiles-i...
> It also needs rare earth metals which are mined by workers living the life of slaves.
First off, 'rare metal' is a specific group of metals that don't have much use in batteries. Batteries are made from Nickel, Manganese, Cobalt, Aluminum, Cooper, Lithium and Graphite. Non of these are 'Rare Earth' Metals.
Of course EV do use Rare Earth Metals but so do ICE cars, the difference is not actually that large. EV Motors have some more Rare Earth then would be found in ICE cars but its hardly a difference worth talking about much.
What you are referring to is like Cobalt mining. Cobalt mining is mostly done in the Congo and so of course has issues with working conditions and child labor. For the most part, about 80% of Cobalt is actually mined in traditional strip mining and workers there are very comparable to workers in all other types of industrial mining. Most large EV companies pretty much exclusively buy from the large mining operations.
The bad conditions, specially for children, come in in about the rest of the 20%, what is usually called artisanal mining operations. These are often private mines and the workers are not slave, they 'own' the mines but of course they are still poor and live in bad conditions and children working there is of course bad. But even there, its not universally the case, there are large efforts done to try to track those mines and reward those that have good conditions and block the others. Th
The problem is, there is a huge intensive for those mined materials to find a way into the supply chain. And since all these materials get refined in China its hard to verify.
But what people don't tell you, is that oil manufacturing also uses a large quantity of cobalt. So the idea that somehow EV are uniquely bad makes no sense if you look at it that way.
In addition, pretty much every manufacture is pushing out cobalt even from high nickel batteries. And of course LFP batteries that will make up over 50% of the market in the next decade don't use cobalt. Neither do next generation batteries like Sodium.
> But actually building all its parts not only consumes way more energy compared to combustion cars.
While this is true now, this is mostly because of the less mature supply chain. Its not inherently the case. If you started fresh building up a ICE supply chain it would suffer from many of the same problems.
A Tesla made in Texas for example will have almost everything in one building and will likely be far more efficient then many ICE vehicles.
But it just takes time for the industry as a whole to optimize the whole supply-chain end to end.
So its really not a good argument against EV. This will automatically solve itself as you scale.
And even if it uses 20% more CO2 during manufacture, over the lifetime its still dramatically less CO2. And arguably just as important, the emissions that ICE cars blow into cities is horribly for the health of people and specially children.
In my area, a local republican committee is very concerned about the fate of bunny rabbits, birds of prey and riverbank erosion. Amazing and inspirational, except the catalyst is that a bunch of land was cleared to build a factory, in an polluted industrial park, to manufacture wind turbine components.
Even though said turbines will be installed ~200 miles away, windmills attract a lot of ire in some circles.
I also find it interesting to replace “precious metals” in your comment with “fossil fuels”, which also require destructive mining and have limited volume.
Yes, EVs are not without their problems, but compared to the status quo they are a major improvement, in particular to the much larger problem of CO2 and climate change that dwarf the local impacts from mining.
Lithium iron phosphate battery are already in mass production and will be a huge part of the EV industry going forward.
> iron-sulphide
Not sure what iron-sulphide has to do with anything. There are lots of competing chemistries. Sodium will likely have a large part in the market. LFP already is and has lots of room for improvement as well.
> Then there's the whole tire problem...
I prefer trains to cars too but that's no reason to make up stuff.
There are a lot of very confident claims here but little substantiation other than academic postulations.
' The final loss of energy is from auxiliary electrical components like heated seats, lights, the audio system, and windshield wipers. Taken together, these accessories can consume up to 2% of the vehicle’s total energy intake.'
Ironically the complete reliance in BEVs to run accessories off their batteries is one of the major reasons battery life is so poor.
This sort of of vague proselytizing isn't helpful and arguably misrepresents BEV and to a lesser extent hybrid maturity IMO.
I thought that we were seeing batteries retain 75% performance past 250k miles?