5 ms·

I wonder if Tesla is considering a potential regulatory advantage as well, which though by nature more iffy (since it's down to the whims of leadership) could s

by xoa 11y ago

I wonder if Tesla is considering a potential regulatory advantage as well, which though by nature more iffy (since it's down to the whims of leadership) could still be a very potent marketing point. One technique for pollution reduction that China at least as implemented is to simply brute force reduce the number of allowed cars on the road (though even for them it's hard to enforce), for example by having odd/even license plate days. However, an electric car obviously contributes nothing, and it seems like a number of genuine interests would exist to exempt them from any road restrictions. To a lot of people a guaranteed license to legitimately drive when a traditional vehicle would be banned could be worth a major premium. It could make a lot of sense for Tesla to go very, very hard on a full package environmental protection (both internal and external) offering, because a lot of favorables line up for them. The most polluted places simultaneously make their advantages far more important and also contain higher percentages of people with the money to pay for a Tesla, even in countries that are lower on the average nationwide GDP/capita or HDI scales.

optforfon 11y ago
- the license plate thing as far as I know is only in Beijing where they're really desperate to do anything - The cars in general are pretty new (people are heavily in debt to finance their cars and iPhones). In the big cities you never see the typical eastern european thing where someone put their foot down on the gas and a plum of exhaust comes out. Every car seems to run clean. Taxis are old, but they run on natural gas. - All scooters are electrics. This is actually amazing to see for the first time b/c you never hear about it in the west. But 99% of the scooters are electric and silent. It's amazing. And we're talking about like half the traffic is on scooters. So this is big!. Funny enough I wouldn't even know where to buy one in the west. - the reality is that the pollution is almost entirely from the factories and powerplants. It really looks different from what you see from cars. It's like a haze.. sorta like fog, but more gray. But it's very uniform and everywhere. Electric power is very very cheap in China. They're scared of the price ever going up b/c it's take a toll on manufacturing.
- kbenson 11y ago
  > It really looks different from what you see from cars. It's like a haze.. sorta like fog, but more gray. But it's very uniform and everywhere. Cars can cause it too. Long time Los Angeles residents can attest to that. The fuel efficiency and smog requirements in recent decades have made it much less likely though[1]. 1: https://www.google.com/search?q=la+smog&tbm=isch#tbm=isch&q=la+smog+now+and+then https://www.google.com/search?q=la+smog&tbm=isch#tbm=isch&q=...
  - optforfon 11y ago
    Ah, the LA smog always looked a disgusting yellow to me. But I've only see in the past 10 years
    - kbenson 11y ago
      You missed something really (horrendously) special then. It was much worse 25-30 years ago. I grew up in Northern California, but have relatives that live in LA, so we visited regularly.
- xoa 11y ago
  >- the license plate thing as far as I know is only in Beijing where they're really desperate to do anything Beijing has a population of over 21 million, and also a major concentration of the kinds of demographics that Tesla currently targets best. And I've seen similar measures at least discussed in other cities, because the problem truly is desperate and it's not getting any better. I don't think that odd/even exactly is going to be implemented in general, if only because it can be economically self-defeating, enforcement is very hard, etc., but there seem to be good odds that politicians will seek ways to internalize the costs of anything that contributes to air pollution. And politics being politics, it also would not be surprising if inordinate (and inefficient) pressure falls on things that are very visible to the common citizen and have less backing from entrenched interests, even if a bigger problem comes from something farther away. Vehicles are a clear target, particularly once it's no longer a zero-sum as more and more practical alternatives start to exist. Again, only talking politics here not whether it's necessarily the best place for governments to focus on because governments have a regrettable history of not simply doing the most rational thing. Politics can work the other way too of course (China would still prefer to be making everything internally and gaining access/control of all IP rather then importing), but I can see why Tesla might consider this an area that could be a significant central plank and competitive advantage for them in the near term vs traditional car makers.
josu 11y ago
In Mexico City there is also a traffic reduction program [1], but both electric and hybrid cars are exempted. There is a list of exempted cars which includes the Tesla Model S [2]. New cars used to be exempted too, but from April to July new cars are included in the program too, which means that high-income individuals are now feeling the pain too, so I'm guessing that new Teslas will start popping up in Mexico City. [1] http://www.hoy-no-circula.com.mx/ http://www.hoy-no-circula.com.mx/ [2] http://www.sedema.df.gob.mx/sedema/index.php/verificacion-hoy-no-circula/verificacion-vehicular/hologramas-que-se-pueden-obtener http://www.sedema.df.gob.mx/sedema/index.php/verificacion-ho...
slg 11y ago
>However, an electric car obviously contributes nothing... Electric cars are the future and are much cleaner alternative, but can we not bend the facts like this? Electric cars use electricity to charge. Lots of electricity comes from fossil fuels (about 2/3 in the US and higher in China). Using your electric car in turn almost always results in using fossil fuels. Reducing driving results in less electric which results in less fossil fuel which results in less pollution. The quantities are certainly different but the equation is still the same.
- riphay 11y ago
  This is true, however the generating stations are located much further away and have a smaller impact on smog in cities.
- dmode 11y ago
  I think the author meant that electric cars won't pollute the immediate neighborhood in which they are being driven
- xoa 11y ago
  >but can we not bend the facts like this Right back at you. Can we please not bring up this utterly inane and incorrect talking point every single time the topic of electric vehicles is discussed? The equation is absolutely not the same. >Electric cars use electricity to charge. Lots of electricity comes from fossil fuels (about 2/3 in the US and higher in China). Obviously true, but also completely irrelevant. Part of the core advantage of using electric machines in general is that electricity acts as an abstraction layer between energy production and consumption, two areas which have wildly divergent time horizons, economics and politics. At one point all machines were tightly coupled to specific energy production systems, but now engines are one of the only ones left. Loose coupling has fundamental advantages in terms of achieving goals, and that includes pollution production. Electric cars, like any other electric machine, do not produce emissions themselves like a direct hydrocarbon system does. The energy sources feeding them may have hydrocarbon combustion as part of the mix, but they don't need to, and that that's a separate issue is precisely the point. Cars tend to have significant life times. An ICE car by definition locks in emissions for that entire time, but what if a company announced fully scalable, commercially cheap fusion a year from now? Or more realistically, look at how the price of solar has continued to plummet. What if 5 years from now solar completely dominates on price, with significant upgrades made to grids (include energy storage) allowing the contribution of fossil fuels to electric generation to plummet in turn? In a world that was 100% electric powered (or close enough, aircraft seem likely to remain a sticky wicket for longer) that would translate into an instant response in terms of overall emissions. But if ICE cars still dominated, then in turn they'll continue to emit anyway even as the overall world changes as they continue in service for decades. All this too ignores additional basic advantages of making even fossil fuel combustion more centralized. Power plants can have higher temperature deltas and thus better fundamental thermodynamic efficiencies. It is easier to regulate and enforce better scrubbers, carbon pricing, and so forth on a small number of centralized plants then hundreds of millions of distributed mobile point emitters. Geographic considerations can be taken more easily into account with power plants placement. Investment in the grid and electrical production benefit the efficiency of a higher percentage of the economy, more rapidly, then even transportation alone. So no, "a significant amount of electricity current comes burning coal" does not make loosely coupled electric appliances (of which fully competitive mass production economic electric cars are merely one of the more recent ones) at all the equivalent of tightly coupled fossil fuel consuming machines. ## Edited to add for anyone reading this down the road ## On the front page of HN right now: "The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11617988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11617988 This is exactly the sort of development that underlines why decoupling usage and generation matters. It's hard to predict even 5 years ahead of time let alone decades, yet represents a significant continuing shift of the economic foundation for policy strategies. Every single electric appliance, be it a brand new mobile device or a decades old fridge, benefits from power generation shifts right away. Every single ICE car cannot.
patrickg_zill 11y ago
A variation of odd/even is also used in the Philippines. Manila has (some) rich people - I remember seeing an Audi R8 on the highway there.

by xoa 11y ago

optforfon 11y ago

- the license plate thing as far as I know is only in Beijing where they're really desperate to do anything - The cars in general are pretty new (people are heavily in debt to finance their cars and iPhones). In the big cities you never see the typical eastern european thing where someone put their foot down on the gas and a plum of exhaust comes out. Every car seems to run clean. Taxis are old, but they run on natural gas. - All scooters are electrics. This is actually amazing to see for the first time b/c you never hear about it in the west. But 99% of the scooters are electric and silent. It's amazing. And we're talking about like half the traffic is on scooters. So this is big!. Funny enough I wouldn't even know where to buy one in the west. - the reality is that the pollution is almost entirely from the factories and powerplants. It really looks different from what you see from cars. It's like a haze.. sorta like fog, but more gray. But it's very uniform and everywhere. Electric power is very very cheap in China. They're scared of the price ever going up b/c it's take a toll on manufacturing.

kbenson 11y ago
> It really looks different from what you see from cars. It's like a haze.. sorta like fog, but more gray. But it's very uniform and everywhere. Cars can cause it too. Long time Los Angeles residents can attest to that. The fuel efficiency and smog requirements in recent decades have made it much less likely though[1]. 1: https://www.google.com/search?q=la+smog&tbm=isch#tbm=isch&q=la+smog+now+and+then https://www.google.com/search?q=la+smog&tbm=isch#tbm=isch&q=...
- optforfon 11y ago
  Ah, the LA smog always looked a disgusting yellow to me. But I've only see in the past 10 years
  - kbenson 11y ago
    You missed something really (horrendously) special then. It was much worse 25-30 years ago. I grew up in Northern California, but have relatives that live in LA, so we visited regularly.
xoa 11y ago
>- the license plate thing as far as I know is only in Beijing where they're really desperate to do anything Beijing has a population of over 21 million, and also a major concentration of the kinds of demographics that Tesla currently targets best. And I've seen similar measures at least discussed in other cities, because the problem truly is desperate and it's not getting any better. I don't think that odd/even exactly is going to be implemented in general, if only because it can be economically self-defeating, enforcement is very hard, etc., but there seem to be good odds that politicians will seek ways to internalize the costs of anything that contributes to air pollution. And politics being politics, it also would not be surprising if inordinate (and inefficient) pressure falls on things that are very visible to the common citizen and have less backing from entrenched interests, even if a bigger problem comes from something farther away. Vehicles are a clear target, particularly once it's no longer a zero-sum as more and more practical alternatives start to exist. Again, only talking politics here not whether it's necessarily the best place for governments to focus on because governments have a regrettable history of not simply doing the most rational thing. Politics can work the other way too of course (China would still prefer to be making everything internally and gaining access/control of all IP rather then importing), but I can see why Tesla might consider this an area that could be a significant central plank and competitive advantage for them in the near term vs traditional car makers.

josu 11y ago

In Mexico City there is also a traffic reduction program [1], but both electric and hybrid cars are exempted. There is a list of exempted cars which includes the Tesla Model S [2]. New cars used to be exempted too, but from April to July new cars are included in the program too, which means that high-income individuals are now feeling the pain too, so I'm guessing that new Teslas will start popping up in Mexico City. [1] http://www.hoy-no-circula.com.mx/ http://www.hoy-no-circula.com.mx/ [2] http://www.sedema.df.gob.mx/sedema/index.php/verificacion-hoy-no-circula/verificacion-vehicular/hologramas-que-se-pueden-obtener http://www.sedema.df.gob.mx/sedema/index.php/verificacion-ho...

slg 11y ago

>However, an electric car obviously contributes nothing... Electric cars are the future and are much cleaner alternative, but can we not bend the facts like this? Electric cars use electricity to charge. Lots of electricity comes from fossil fuels (about 2/3 in the US and higher in China). Using your electric car in turn almost always results in using fossil fuels. Reducing driving results in less electric which results in less fossil fuel which results in less pollution. The quantities are certainly different but the equation is still the same.

riphay 11y ago
This is true, however the generating stations are located much further away and have a smaller impact on smog in cities.
dmode 11y ago
I think the author meant that electric cars won't pollute the immediate neighborhood in which they are being driven
xoa 11y ago
>but can we not bend the facts like this Right back at you. Can we please not bring up this utterly inane and incorrect talking point every single time the topic of electric vehicles is discussed? The equation is absolutely not the same. >Electric cars use electricity to charge. Lots of electricity comes from fossil fuels (about 2/3 in the US and higher in China). Obviously true, but also completely irrelevant. Part of the core advantage of using electric machines in general is that electricity acts as an abstraction layer between energy production and consumption, two areas which have wildly divergent time horizons, economics and politics. At one point all machines were tightly coupled to specific energy production systems, but now engines are one of the only ones left. Loose coupling has fundamental advantages in terms of achieving goals, and that includes pollution production. Electric cars, like any other electric machine, do not produce emissions themselves like a direct hydrocarbon system does. The energy sources feeding them may have hydrocarbon combustion as part of the mix, but they don't need to, and that that's a separate issue is precisely the point. Cars tend to have significant life times. An ICE car by definition locks in emissions for that entire time, but what if a company announced fully scalable, commercially cheap fusion a year from now? Or more realistically, look at how the price of solar has continued to plummet. What if 5 years from now solar completely dominates on price, with significant upgrades made to grids (include energy storage) allowing the contribution of fossil fuels to electric generation to plummet in turn? In a world that was 100% electric powered (or close enough, aircraft seem likely to remain a sticky wicket for longer) that would translate into an instant response in terms of overall emissions. But if ICE cars still dominated, then in turn they'll continue to emit anyway even as the overall world changes as they continue in service for decades. All this too ignores additional basic advantages of making even fossil fuel combustion more centralized. Power plants can have higher temperature deltas and thus better fundamental thermodynamic efficiencies. It is easier to regulate and enforce better scrubbers, carbon pricing, and so forth on a small number of centralized plants then hundreds of millions of distributed mobile point emitters. Geographic considerations can be taken more easily into account with power plants placement. Investment in the grid and electrical production benefit the efficiency of a higher percentage of the economy, more rapidly, then even transportation alone. So no, "a significant amount of electricity current comes burning coal" does not make loosely coupled electric appliances (of which fully competitive mass production economic electric cars are merely one of the more recent ones) at all the equivalent of tightly coupled fossil fuel consuming machines. ## Edited to add for anyone reading this down the road ## On the front page of HN right now: "The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11617988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11617988 This is exactly the sort of development that underlines why decoupling usage and generation matters. It's hard to predict even 5 years ahead of time let alone decades, yet represents a significant continuing shift of the economic foundation for policy strategies. Every single electric appliance, be it a brand new mobile device or a decades old fridge, benefits from power generation shifts right away. Every single ICE car cannot.

patrickg_zill 11y ago

A variation of odd/even is also used in the Philippines. Manila has (some) rich people - I remember seeing an Audi R8 on the highway there.