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Comment by originalvichy | Hacker News Reader

It’s worth reiterating the author’s short point about the future of EVs. ICE vehicles have been refined for decades now and no technological leap has been found that increases their efficiency. EVs have a greater amount of foreseeable improvements from improvements in battery tech to improvements in the recycling and reusing of the batteries.

It is a worthy investment to steer more money to EV production due to the simple fact that the stagnating effect innovation was not gonna go away. We should save petrochemicals for actual long term usage or actual critical uses like air travel.

It would be absolutely devastating for our future development if a major chunk of our fossil fuels was quite literally wasted on routine traffic when we could be using it to create novel materials out of it in 200 years’ time.

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There's been significant improvements in ICE efficiency in recent decades. Some of the biggest leaps include turbo charging, variable valve control and electronic fuel injection and there's still a lot more scope.

The car I drove in HS, 30 years ago got 25mpg. My current car, very similarly sized, gets 27mpg. Sure, I can merge on a freeway 4 seconds faster but the vast majority of efficiency improvements have not gone towards reducing our oil dependence.

Your new car likely weighs much more? The modern market demands a driving experience that's like sitting in our home - complete with huge sofa like seats, air conditioning, touch screen TVs, cameras and thousands of sensors. They can either cater to that or go out of business.

Carting around two tons of unnecessary random tech toys and the kitchen sink is inefficient regardless of the energy source. That's a separate problem.

Cars are heavier because they're safer. They aren't just stuffed with hundreds of pounds of electronics.

So instead of realizing gains in efficiency, cars were simultaneously made less efficient to realize gains in safety and comfort. The end result is still cars that are about the same as what they were decades ago.

But what do you propose as the solution if not electrification?

What make? Lots of cars are much bigger now than they used to be, even if the model names haven't changed.

how does it matter? are we supposed to keep downsizing/downgrading from the high school cars just to make up for all these trends that we didn't choose?

A lot of a modern car’s extra weight when compared to older models are mandated safety improvements.

Oh there's no doubt my modern car is objectively better in numerous ways. That said, we could be doing a lot more to optimize for fuel economy but the market doesn't seem to want that.

There are both fuel efficiency optimized cars and not optimized cars. You bought latter.

And the result has been only very small, incremental improvements in efficiency.

Average fuel economy for cars has improved by about 30% since 2005. I wouldn't call that small.

Is that only ICE or could it include hybrids?

Honestly, not sure. But I believe hybrids only represented around 3% of cars in 2013? So unlikely to be a big effect. Especially when you consider how much bigger cars are now, and how much more they weigh.

You are clearly ignorant to the technical capabilities & efficiencies of IC.

Why argue a case when you have not informed yourself of the opposing view?

There is currently not enough copper or trace minerals (nor operational capability of mines) available for replacement of current vehicles in the US with EVs.

There is not adequate power infrastructure for charging EVs.

There is not adequate power generation for EVs.

What you are trading is the ability of most people to own and operate their own vehicle.

That's too much energy for the poors to have at their disposal.

Keep that in mind while you make uninformed arguments.

California is mandating that all new cars be either EV or plug in hybrids by 2035; which is 12 years in the future. I am aware of no plans to outlaw existing vehicles. A typical consumer car lasts between 10-15 years, so we are talking about ~2045 until California starts finishing its EV transition (likely far longer to reach 100%, as some holdouts will keep gas cars alive longer). That is enough time to build up the capacity to support it. And if it turns out to not be enough time, we don't need to abandon EVs, we just need to push back the timeline.

That would be a problem if we instantly replaced all ICE cars with electric. But, that's not going to happen, and these are the least of the reasons.

None of that disqualifies the fact that it is short-sighted to burn all of our available petrochemicals for short length transport.

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