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Comment by marcell | Hacker News Reader

Irrelevant to the consumer? Hardly:

> it stinks. > it's toxic. > it's too noisy.

These three points affect anyone who lives near heavy automobile traffic. Just because it's an externality doesn't mean it doesn't exist!

> its price is too determined by foreign politics.

When gasoline prices doubled from $2/gallon to $4/gallon, people certainly thought that was relevant. The price spike is partly responsible for the rise in hybrid vehicles.

> it puts high stress and heat on the car, requiring constant maintenance.

Oil changes every 5k miles and major services every 15k don't qualify as "just works" in my book.

> it's not shelf stable.

I'll grant you this one is irrelevant to consumers.

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> it stinks. > it's toxic. > it's too noisy. These three points affect anyone who lives near heavy automobile traffic. Just because it's an externality doesn't mean it doesn't exist!

I live near a heavily trafficked road. To be honest these aren't problems; the noise issue is far outweighed by a) people playing uber-loud music on their car stereo (not any different with electric cars) and the noise of the electric train (BART) that runs above the road.

Well, yes, if there's a train right by the road, of course it will be louder. A train is one of the noisiest things you can have around. That's hardly a point in favor of gas cars. This seems a bit like trying to demonstrate that eating a bucket of deep-fried twinkies isn't so bad for you by comparing it to a bottle of bleach.

As an example of the externalities of gasoline, living near a highway has been shown to have high correlation with the incidence of childhood asthma hospitalizations.

Fair enough about stink and noise, but personal experience really isn't good for judging toxicity. Automobile-related pollution is a pretty big deal, but it manifests as large-scale health changes, not immediate personal changes.

(too late to edit the parent) I didn't so much want to defend gasoline cars, as to observe that the externalities are much less of a burden nowadays than people might expect. I was surprised by this myself, but then vehicles in California are orders of magnitude cleaner than the cars I grew up with.

> Oil changes every 5k miles and major services every 15k don't qualify as "just works" in my book.

There are few items in this day and age that don't require owners to perform periodic maintenance. Tesla cars aren't immune from requiring annual inspections (http://www.teslamotors.com/service) either.

I don't know why people are writing off stinks/toxic/noisy. As someone who has at various times lived near large roadways, this is a huge concern. Car pollution is a really big problem

Because its a problem which affects the environment, not the consumer. You could buy an electric car and it wouldn't help one bit. You'd have to get everyone to buy one.

It's a problem of external effects. Now if we would make an effort to attribute the costs of these external effects to their originator, internal combustion engines would be wholly unavailable to anyone under 1M$ net worth almost instantly. We don't do so because a) it takes effort (and thereby generates costs all in itself) and b) we usually don't care about the plight of future generations and those around us and c) we want the economy not to crash.

And we don't even know about all the external effects that gasoline cars have; there was this article in Mother Jones [1] recently that correlated leaded gas to the crime rate, owing to the detrimental effects lead has on the human brain.

[1]: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...

Have you ever sat in traffic? I used to commute in Houston and even with a fairly decent filter on the A/C it stunk.

If you're changing your oil every 5,000 miles, you're wasting your money.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/your-money/11shortcuts.htm...

Unless you drive an older car. My 14 year old Saturn's oil was rough when I changed it at 3200. I can probably take it to 5000 now that it has synthetic blend in it, but I'm not going to take a chance with a 154,000 mile old engine.

>These three points affect anyone who lives near heavy automobile traffic. Just because it's an externality doesn't mean it doesn't exist!

However, it occurs over such a timespan that the immediate effects are a non-issue, just long-term. The average person does not take into serious consideration the 30+ year effect of a decision, but a more near-term one.

> this one is irrelevant to consumers.

Not if I want to put my car in long-term storage. Then this, too, becomes quite relevant.

Can we stop acting like this is a problem when $5 chemicals off the shelf at your local auto parts store fixes this problem?

Yes we can.

Well, the Tesla cars' batteries are permanently wrecked and have to be replaced - at a cost of about half the price of a new car! - if you put them into long-term storage without leaving them connected to a charger, or if the charger becomes unplugged or loses mains power. That's even worse!

"Oil changes every 5k miles and major services every 15k don't qualify as "just works" in my book."

Newer cars require oil change/service every 30000 km / 2 years. That would be ~20k miles.

> These three points affect anyone who lives near heavy automobile traffic. Just because it's an externality doesn't mean it doesn't exist!

And the externalities of electric cars matter quite a bit to the people who live next to coal-fired power plants.

Good point, but it is a lot easier to get away from a power plant.

More concentrated, and more efficient, so it affects fewer people and creates less pollution overall. Additionally, we can power them with zero emissions power sources once we get there. People should really stop trotting out the coal power plant argument in trying to claim that this is somehow a relative weakness of EVs, because it's really not.

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