Hacker News Reader

The charger/car chicken/egg problem was largely just a matter of "who's going to shell out the capital to make it happen" kind of problem, not really a question of "is this even technically possible given what we have in the next 10 years of development".

IIRC the idea of reusable rockets was mostly considered possible just risky and pointless when the only real customers (at the time) tend to have seemingly infinite budgets if you drag it out of them. SpaceX bet on the reusable rockets and the gamble paid off handsomely, and showed there is quite a market for things when you bring the launch costs down 5-10x. It turns out a lot of people would like to put things in to space at that price point.

A lot of these big achievements are largely having the willingness to throw capital at a potentially risky but otherwise technically seemingly possible ideas. Self-driving cars are not in the same category as EV chargers when it comes to a "can we do this" kind of thing.

>I'd be tempted to guess that they've had a larger impact on reducing emissions than any other single company on the planet.

I need to remember the name of the book where I read that, but statistically the people who buy Teslas produce more global emissions than others, simply on the fact that manufacturing a Tesla vehicle produces nearly 2x emissions as manufacturing an equivalent ICE, and the class of people who can easily afford Teslas engage in a lot of environmentally damaging activities like excess consumerism, lots of traveling, etc. versus the people who can only afford to keep using their ICE car instead of throwing them away to buy a Tesla.

It's one of the reasons why despite the boom in EV adoption, global emissions are also skyrocketing with them. So EVs alone won't save this planet. In fact, according to that book, if we were to replace all ICE cars on the road with EVs, the manufacturing, materials and the mining necessarily to extract all the materials necessary for that to happen, would cause such an increase in emissions that would be catastrophicall to the planet.

So the solution is actually less cars for earth, not more cars except Teslas instead of ICEs. It was an interesting analysys that I need to find.

Self driving cars in the form of fleets of autonomous robo-taxis that you hail on demand, would solve that "too many cars on earth" problem since most cars stay idly parked all day anyway, but we're very far away from actually achieve that level.

> he fact that manufacturing a Tesla vehicle produces nearly 2x emissions as manufacturing an equivalent ICE,

And those extra emissions are paid for before the car reaches half its lifetime.

The point was that EV manufacturing is definetly not free of emissions. And all car owners switching to EVs is resposible for a lot of upfront environemtnal damage, not just "saving the world" as they like to tell themselves.

Raising and rebuilding most cities in the US to reduce car usage is also definitely not free of emissions.

You don't need to raise cities. Public transportation is more environmentally friendly than everyone driving alone in $80k EVs.

The point was that ~~EV~~ bus manufacturing is definetly not free of emissions. Operating busses is definitely not free from emissions either.

The point was that ~~EV~~ train manufacturing is definetly not free of emissions.

Buying an EV instead of an ICE reduces net emissions. Riding the bus instead of buying an EV reduces emissions more, but it is still not zero. Should more people ride the bus? Sure! But I'm not in charge of my city's planning, I can't make them buy more busses and hire more drivers.

I bought an EV when a family member was needing a cheap car, so I sold them my old cheap ICE. I was probably going to buy a new car anyways, so its not like I went out and crushed my ICE and dropped it in the lake and then suddenly willed a new EV into existence creating new emissions. A car was going to get built, I was going to buy one.

Nothing is ever free from emissions, but people taking buses is still more eco friendly than those same people riding alone in expensive EVs.

> But I'm not in charge of my city's planning, I can't make them buy more busses and hire more drivers.

Sure, but we do live in democracies no? Where we have the power to change those in charge to others who will if our goals if we desire our goals to be betters public services including transportation.

Simply starting with a defeatist mindset of "nothing will ever change from our leadership so it's every man for himself to better his own situation, I got mine you go get yours" will never work for the environment. It does work for selling a lot of cars though.

If we can't change anything collectively, what about those living in less democratic countries?

And I'll vote for it to change and lobby the people around me for change and ride the bus when it makes sense, but what to do for the decade+ until things change and I need a new car?

If the answer is "buy a used car", well, we'll quickly run out of those.

Of course, but politicians have no incentive or pressure to improve public transportation when everyone already owns cars and is contempt with this status quo.

I've seen this play out lots of times.

Public transportation only improves when the vast majority of citizen depend on it because then have skin in the game, otherwise it gets shelved and forgotten and stays run down as a charity to the poor.

The initial emissions cost of an EV is somewhere in the range of 5 - 10% of total emissions of the ICE over its lifetime. Then as to the consumerism bit, there's generally two types people who buy Teslas. The practical side isn't doing excess consumerism and is likely to buy something like a Toyota Camry or RAV4 instead, still causing 10x the emissions eventually. The other side, luxury and consumerist, is going to be buying a Mercedes instead and still doing all the excess consumerism and traveling. EV are a net emissions positive on the margin, but feel free to inhale the particulate emissions sitting in traffic if you'd prefer. Only about 5 million globally dying of air pollution every year...

>Then as to the consumerism bit, there's generally two types people who buy Teslas ... The other side, luxury and consumerist, is going to be buying a Mercedes

Pointing fingers and shaming groups of people we don't anecdotally like for one brand or another, is not how statistics work. Statistically rich westerners, whether they drive a tesla or a Mercedes, all engage in environmentally destructive activities through excess consumerism and lavish lifestyles than less well off people.

For example according to that book, statistically rich westerners, the tesla owning kind, tend to have bigger single family houses, buy a lot more stuff they don't need, throw away more food, travel and fly a lot more or go golfing or have heated swimming pools. Less well off people on the other hand can't afford eco-friendly Teslas but they also have much more eco friendly hobbies, travel less, live in denser housing, consume less stuff, therefore tend to be less environmentally damaging than the Tesla owning class by simple fact that they're poorer.

>but feel free to inhale the particulate emissions sitting in traffic if you'd prefer.

You're pointing out a "false choice". Yes, it would be nice that we all switch overnight to EVs, but the truth is that the global emissions of replacing all the existing cars on earth and replacing their numbers 1:1 with EVs is not feasible at that scale without destroying the planet in the process of mining and manufacturing at that scale needed to achieve the conversion.

The secret to the environment is less cars overall, not more cars but EVs. Therefore less consumerism in general. But tell rich westerners they need to stop owning/using cars see how that goes.

Hence the ever increasing global polluting despite the growing number of EVs.

I'm in agreement that EV's are not a panacea, less cars and consumerism would be better, and the political difficulties of reducing those are especially fraught.

However, since rich westerners did the politically realistic move of increasing emissions standards and EV's, we are actually reducing our emissions[0], instead of doing nothing but hand-wringing that we "should" have less cars and get nowhere because 3/4 of the US won't have it.

Per capita US emissions are down 25% since 2007 and peaked back in 1979.

We help the environment by finding the wins whereever we can politically. If you get too idealistic, you halt progress because the rest of westerners aren't in for the ride.

[0]https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states

Fair enough. but out of curiosity how much of those emissions are strictly down to EVs?

Because to me it seems emissions went down to tougher broader environmental policies, especially on coal, rather than just people buying EVs now, as ICE cars were only 9% share of emissions anyway, yet people tend act as if they're the main culprit for it.

I'm pretty sure the move from coal to gas was way more effective at reducing emissions than the "move" from ICE to EV.

Of course it was. Which is why we shouldn't be advocating for purist idealistic moves, but practically what can we do to reduce emissions the most per $.

> keep using their ICE car instead of throwing them away to buy a Tesla

I imagine very few people are taking their older ICE and crushing it and shoving it into a landfill once they buy a Tesla.

Buying the Tesla is (usually) offsetting the sale of a different new ICE and selling/trading in the old care to add to the used market, not demanding a new car that would have never been built to come into existence and then destroying the old car.

This is the right line of thinking. Best to consider the situations where someone buys a Tesla vs. what would've happened instead.

> statistically the people who buy Teslas produce more global emissions than others [...] and the class of people who can easily afford Teslas engage in a lot of environmentally damaging activities like excess consumerism, lots of traveling, etc.

This line of argument has nothing to do with Tesla or EVs. If you aim to make the case that the wealthy produce more emissions, that seems fairly clear, whether EVs exist or not.

> It's one of the reasons why despite the boom in EV adoption, global emissions are also skyrocketing with them. So EVs alone won't save this planet. In fact, according to that book, if we were to replace all ICE cars on the road with EVs, the manufacturing, materials and the mining necessarily to extract all the materials necessary for that to happen, would cause such an increase in emissions that would be catastrophicall to the planet.

> So the solution is actually less cars for earth, not more cars except Teslas instead of ICEs. It was an interesting analysys that I need to find.

Obviously, things would be better if people just stopped buying cars. Obviously, things would be better if everyone had good public transport available and dense development and didn't need cars. Obviously, things would be better if just less people existed and didn't need to be transported. None of this contributes in useful fashion to the here and now. I can go to my city development planning meetings and argue against car-oriented development and seas of parking until I'm blue in the face (and I do), but cities take generations to change. Cars, on the other hand, can be largely cycled out within a generation and a half. And like it or not, cars aren't going anywhere.

> Twenty years ago there were no electric cars

Uhm...what?

First of all there were Chevy EV1s then. In fact it was Chevy cancelling the EV1 in 2003 that was part of the inspiration for Tesla's founders to found Tesla. (Musk was not yet involved).

Second there was AC Propulsion's tzero. The Tesla founders had a test drive in one before they founded Tesla and urged AC Propulsion to start manufacturing them, but AC Propulsion wanted to be a designer and licensor of electric car technology for others rather than a car maker. The Tesla founders than founded Tesla.

Musk came into the picture when he test drove a tzero, and also urged AC Propulsion to go into manufacturing. Instead AC Propulsion directed him to to Tesla where he became an investor and then chairman.

What Tesla did was become the first modern car company to go all in on electric cars that were intended for ordinary car buyers (although it first it was just luxury sports car buyers). I think they were also the first to go with lithium batteries.

How far into this timeline of promises do you get before coming to the realization that nobody is this stupid, so the only other option left is lying for profit?

https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/

>Twenty years ago there were no electric cars

But there were electric cars before the model T.

Surely you aren't misinterpreting what I said as "electric cars literally didn't exist" instead of "electric cars existed in inconsequential numbers"? That would be a tad disingenuous.

It's not disingenuous to assume that you meant what you said.

> I don't have to agree with the man's recent decisions around Twitter or politics to credit his past accomplishments

If Musk had been a "good leftie" he would have been carried on arms both here as well as in the media because of his work in furthering the electrification of transport. Bezos does play that role and as such is not targeted like Musk is even though his companies have had a detrimental effect on retail employment opportunities, even though working conditions in Amazon warehouses are know to be less than optimal. It is also why there is no criticism on Bezos buying the Washington Post since he runs it as a "good leftie" would.

Here's a thought experiment: Imagine Musk buying the New York Times and changing the editorial board to use it as a counterweight to Bezos' WaPo. He'd bring back the likes of Bari Weiss, get rid of the identity politics crowd and see to it that the clear left-wing bias the NYT has been burdened with is would be undone. All the news that's fit to print would again be the motto. No more 'DEI' nonsense, nothing of the sort, back to basics. Now there would be the Bezos-owned WaPo doing the whole DEI/oppressor/oppressed/identity-politics thing versus a NYT which attempted to critically [1] report on the state of the city/country/world. What would the reaction to such a take-over be, who would get the support of the like of CNN/MSNBC, who would you support?

[1] as in the 1980's dictionary sense of the word 'critically', not as in the 'critical theory' deconstruction-type criticism.

You could see the online public opinion shift against him in real time on Reddit the second he started mentioning some politically conservative viewpoints. I bet someone smarter than me could figure out a way to graph it.

You mean his anti-Semitism comments?

Yeah, your comment on it is a perfect illustration, thank you.

Most Jewish people in the US are Democrats, and it's pretty much been the party platform the last ten years to push "hatred against whites" and to immigrate "hordes of minorities."

Apparently the latter is a conspiracy theory against Jewish people as a whole, though I've certainly never heard it. Perhaps Elon hadn't either. To call him affirmatively replying to that tweet antisemitic is a huge stretch. Should someone in his position be commenting on stuff like that? Probably not, but I think it's insane it's as big of a deal that it is.

For what it's worth I just unsubscribed to a particular Patreon because the guy running it was clearly pro-Hamas/anti-Israel from what he's been posting on Twitter. I'm in no way an antisemite myself.

To your comment as whole - no, I was referring to perhaps...5 years ago?