9 ms·

Electric cars are not the answer to air pollution, says UK adviser

dm319 9y ago
> “Encouragingly, attitudes toward car ownership do appear to be changing, with younger Londoners increasingly replacing little-used vehicles with car club membership and ride-sharing apps,” he said. I'm not sure an environmental conscience is the reason, rather the cost of keeping your car taxed and insured, then finding somewhere for it to stay in London, and then finding a use for it, outweighs simply using public transport. The article doesn't talk about electric cars reliance on whatever powers the national grid of that country - and they can only be as green as the country's means of energy production[1], although that is still better than a petrol/diesel car for most countries. [1] http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electric-cars-green http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electric-cars-green
- chriswarbo 9y ago
  > I'm not sure an environmental conscience is the reason, rather the cost of keeping your car taxed and insured, then finding somewhere for it to stay in London, and then finding a use for it, outweighs simply using public transport. That's (part of) the reasoning behind car tax, petrol tax, etc.: to turn vague, idealistic goals (environmental concerns, efficient public transport rather than umpteem invididual cars, etc.) into concrete economic decisions. The problem arises when these start to be abused, e.g. getting more people to drive in order to raise tax revenue ;)
- zamalek 9y ago
  > The article doesn't talk about electric cars reliance on whatever powers the national grid of that country Right! You'd be delusional to think that EVs are somehow solving pollution. However, they are almost like debt consolidation - each EV on the street becomes cleaner as each coal power plant is decommissioned. Burning dead dinosaurs in an engine will always be burning deal dinosaurs.
  - dTal 9y ago
    I hope it's not delusional to note that, even if you're burning fossil fuels to power your EVs, at least you're not doing it in the middle of urban environments, mere feet from houses, businesses, and sidewalks.
baldfat 9y ago
I think once we have automated cars people in major cities will stop owning cars. Membership to a "club" makes a ton more sense if you can call up a car on an app and it drives itself o your location.
- kylehotchkiss 9y ago
  I'm very curious. How will people react when people start smoking in these cars? I really can't wrap my mind around these cars having a well maintained interior without a driver to ask rule violators to leave.
  - Lio 9y ago
    I know you're really talking about the state of the interior in general but with regard to smoke they could be fitted with immobilising smoke alarms. If the smoke alarm goes off the car pulls over and stops at the side of the road. The rental company will already knows who in the car at any one time (or at least who has rented it) and they can just issue a massive cleaning fine. Like setting off an airline toilet smoke detector.
  - DanBC 9y ago
    The car will take photos of the occupants, stop the journey, send them a bill for cleaning, and add them to a banned user list.
- 6d6b73 9y ago
  Unfortunately this will make the pollution worse. For example if I drive my car to work, my car does 6 miles round trip . If someone else does the same in total we did 12 miles. However if we share one car and the car needs to go even a mile between two places, it will have to drive significantly more.
  - petercooper 9y ago
    If automated cars are billed per mile, you could still arrange the same sort of multi pickup trip you would ordinarily, I'd hope.
hokkos 9y ago
Particles from brake and tyre dust are bigger than from exhaust fumes, so less dangerous. Electric vehicles use regenerative braking so they uses brakes less. But they are heavier, but I think electric vehicle are still way better than other vehicles.
- CalChris 9y ago
  Yes. The regen breaks will last a long time. There's also a lot less maintenance and parts. But they do weigh more. Curb weight of a Nissan Versa is about 2400 lbs. Curb weight of a Nissan Leaf is about 3350 lbs.
- simonbarker87 9y ago
  When I test drove a Model S last year the rep proudly told me that many (around 10 I believe) of the Model S's in the U.K. had done over 150,000 miles and none had had a brake pad change yet thanks to the regen. I would say that the car slowed down about twice as quickly as a conventional car and I used the brakes much less than normal and unless another car was coming, the speed at the intersection was perfect for rolling through without using the brakes. This is all anecdotal of course but interesting change nonetheless I thought.
deelowe 9y ago
Boil the ocean much? Clearly they are a step in the right direction, no?
sammoth 9y ago
"It only reduces pollution by half, so there is no point"
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  More importantly, cars are not even the main pollution source in general. We could probably ban cars completely if not for social and lobby reasons. (Replace with rail and public transport.) But that is only a quarter of total pollution anyway. The real trouble is UK either needs desert solar with huge investment, nuclear power or drastic reduction in power use. Electric cars are not even a stopgap measure.
  - benjaminjackman 9y ago
    So it's kind of a virtuous cycle though. First cell phones and laptops drove up demand for energy storage and so battery tech and production efficiency improved and prices fell to the point putting them in cars was kind of sort of economically not insane. Now cars are driving up demand by another leap of magnitudes since each car requires magnitudes more batteries than a phone. The number of phones and cars people would like to own per capita is well within an order of magnitude though it's probably close. Eventually this enables storage of solar derived power an again order of magnitude larger application than cars in at first niche applications then eventually it will be broad based. Because just like the massive overprovisioning of dark fiber in the dotcom boom, one producers start competing in what is in some sense a dollar auction. The momentum of their growth and the people and processes tasked with ensuring that growth will fight to keep growing supply since it is their livelihood and perceived purpose to do so (both to grow the capacity and to justify that growth, those that don't justify won't be as likely to do the growth and will be selected against). This will lead to a massive amount of batteries being produced since there doesn't seem to be any supply limits beyond how many mines we can make (and then ocean water than can be filtered for lithium from what I have read). I therefore think that "the cars are only 1/2 as polluting and thus pointless" statement lacks vision and an understanding of the positive externalities of growing electric cars. The spin off tech is great. ICE cars have played that out. What was their most recent spinoffs? Tar sands / fracking? I guess we got a lot of cheap natural gas which was a step forward and what's really crushing coal. But if we get another oil spike I don't see the money flowing to oil just a much more agressive push towards EVs and battery tech.
sduclos 9y ago
hypothetically, forget friction (air, tire,..), then all energy injected with the accelerator must be remove by the break. So converting fuel to kinetic energy is only half of the emission. Breaking must save that energy and electric car (bike, truck,..) could do that. edit: hokkos beat me :|
devy 9y ago
The title is misleading. The main argument of Professor Frank Kelly from KCL is not against EV but against all cars. So burn calories by walking and cycling or use public transits, which is appropriate for highly populated megacities with severe congestion problems, let alone public health concerns.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  The title is misleading. The main argument of Professor Frank Kelly from KCL is not against EV but against all cars. Automated EV cars are a necessary step! Once automated EV cars become the norm, there will be even more value placed on Public Spaces of Value. Right now, the dirt and fumes from current automotive technology -- along with the requirement for vast paved areas for parking -- make it harder to achieve the traditional urban Public Spaces of Value so common in the US in the 18th and 19th centuries. (That said, not having horse excrement everywhere was an environmental boon of cars.) Once automated EV cars become the norm, society will think about urban transport differently, and we will change the urban environment in just as drastic a fashion as we did to make way for internet combustion engine cars. Right now, public spaces most often have to be of a large granularity. We can return to a time when urban Public Spaces of Value were ad-hoc and adjacent to residences and businesses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7fRIGphgtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7fRIGphgtk
  - alex_duf 9y ago
    I don't think autonomous cars are going to be more efficient than public transport since you'll still need plenty of them at peak time. And plenty of autonomous cars means traffic jams. They can't replace public transport on that aspect as the transport density is way higher in a train or a bus than on individual autonomous vehicles. Sure they are going to revolutionise car ownership but I don't think they will change the daily commute for the average office worker.
    - stcredzero 9y ago
      My point is, that the model of car ownership will change, along with a public awareness of the benefits of a different model. When everyone owned their cars, they had sunk costs that would align them against putting more public resources toward other forms of transit. When cars transformed urban landscapes into paved-over internal-combustion pollution zones, the traditional charms of Public Spaces of Value were obscured or in some cases wiped out. But when autonomous EV cars start to undo some of that mess, people will start to think, "You know, we still have these traffic jams, maybe there's a better way of doing things?" EDIT: >sigh< My whole point is that automated EVs will free public thinking, enabling yet further changes to the public's thinking about how urban transport works. Please provide a quote where I say that automated cars are more efficient than other forms of public transport. (I only say that they will be more efficient than current cars.) Also, please provide a quote that shows I consider automated EVs to be an endpoint in the evolution of transportation. I'm far too often unpleasantly surprised at the level of reading comprehension here on HN.
nkkollaw 9y ago
Well, of course one should walk or bike instead of taking the car, but if this is not possible EV are much better than regular cars, and if it's not the ultimate solution to air pollution it doesn't mean it doesn't help.
dade_ 9y ago
Tires and brake disks/pads aren't cars. If the chemicals that make them are so dangerous, why not focus on replacements? Last I checked, bicycles have tires that wear out too.
- paganel 9y ago
  > Tires and brake disks/pads aren't cars. I think they're part of a car, aren't they? I mean, you cannot drive a car with no tires, and it's advisable that you should also have brake disks/pads.
  - Lio 9y ago
    Well with regard to brake discs/pads I'm surprised that the electric car manufacturers are working towards a fully regenerative system. If you could return all of the forward momentum as energy to the battery that would remove the need for discs and pads.
    - mikeash 9y ago
      Mechanical brakes have two major advantages over regenerative braking. One is that they can handle extremely high transient power levels. For example, maximum-effort braking at high speed can easily involve over a megawatt of power in the initial stages. Dumping that power into your brake pads and rotors as heat is fairly easy to manage. Dumping that into your battery without wrecking it is much, much harder. For comparison, a high-end Tesla can charge at up to 120kW, and can discharge around 600kW in short bursts. The other advantage is that they're cheap, reliable, and can easily be built with redundancy. You can lose all of your car's computers and half of your brake hydraulics and still be able to stop the car. In order to have no mechanical brakes at all, you'd need a battery that could charge fast enough to absorb the power of full braking at maximum speed, and a sufficiently redundant drivetrain that you could still make regen work even if major components failed.
      - skybrian 9y ago
        Agreed. On the other hand, the brakes on a Prius are used much less. If pollution due to wear is an issue, that should help.
mrfusion 9y ago
I'm actually super excited about eliminating noise pollution when evs are common. Imagine walking through downtown midday and it sounds like 2am.
- jubabuba 9y ago
  Tires are as loud if not louder than the drivetrain noise of most modern cars
- soperj 9y ago
  I was excited about it too until i heard a tesla roll up behind me on my bike... It's less noise for sure, but they're not silent.
- Coincoin 9y ago
  Don't be, you must think of the children first! Europe is already talking about having laws forcing EV to make fake noises so that pedestrians can continue jay walking without looking for cars. So basically, current brown noise will be replaced with trademarked noises with recognizable frequencies.
anovikov 9y ago
Electric cars use regen braking so their breaking pads see many times less use than those of gas powered cars...
- Brakenshire 9y ago
  Yes, I had the same thought. Has anyone quantified the difference?
StillBored 9y ago
This didn't even cover the part of my rant from a couple days ago (heavy electric cars in areas deriving a lot of power from coal) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14877569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14877569
stuaxo 9y ago
Of course it won't "solve" the pollution in cities. It will lessen it to a greater extent. Power is generated away from.l cities and it is easier to mitigate the pollution all in one place. As other people have mentioned regenerative breaking helps too. No reason we can't encourage people out of cars at the same time as transitioning the remaining vehicles to electric.

> “Encouragingly, attitudes toward car ownership do appear to be changing, with younger Londoners increasingly replacing little-used vehicles with car club membership and ride-sharing apps,” he said. I'm not sure an environmental conscience is the reason, rather the cost of keeping your car taxed and insured, then finding somewhere for it to stay in London, and then finding a use for it, outweighs simply using public transport. The article doesn't talk about electric cars reliance on whatever powers the national grid of that country - and they can only be as green as the country's means of energy production[1], although that is still better than a petrol/diesel car for most countries. [1] http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electric-cars-green http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electric-cars-green

chriswarbo 9y ago
> I'm not sure an environmental conscience is the reason, rather the cost of keeping your car taxed and insured, then finding somewhere for it to stay in London, and then finding a use for it, outweighs simply using public transport. That's (part of) the reasoning behind car tax, petrol tax, etc.: to turn vague, idealistic goals (environmental concerns, efficient public transport rather than umpteem invididual cars, etc.) into concrete economic decisions. The problem arises when these start to be abused, e.g. getting more people to drive in order to raise tax revenue ;)
zamalek 9y ago
> The article doesn't talk about electric cars reliance on whatever powers the national grid of that country Right! You'd be delusional to think that EVs are somehow solving pollution. However, they are almost like debt consolidation - each EV on the street becomes cleaner as each coal power plant is decommissioned. Burning dead dinosaurs in an engine will always be burning deal dinosaurs.
- dTal 9y ago
  I hope it's not delusional to note that, even if you're burning fossil fuels to power your EVs, at least you're not doing it in the middle of urban environments, mere feet from houses, businesses, and sidewalks.

baldfat 9y ago

I think once we have automated cars people in major cities will stop owning cars. Membership to a "club" makes a ton more sense if you can call up a car on an app and it drives itself o your location.

kylehotchkiss 9y ago
I'm very curious. How will people react when people start smoking in these cars? I really can't wrap my mind around these cars having a well maintained interior without a driver to ask rule violators to leave.
- Lio 9y ago
  I know you're really talking about the state of the interior in general but with regard to smoke they could be fitted with immobilising smoke alarms. If the smoke alarm goes off the car pulls over and stops at the side of the road. The rental company will already knows who in the car at any one time (or at least who has rented it) and they can just issue a massive cleaning fine. Like setting off an airline toilet smoke detector.
- DanBC 9y ago
  The car will take photos of the occupants, stop the journey, send them a bill for cleaning, and add them to a banned user list.
6d6b73 9y ago
Unfortunately this will make the pollution worse. For example if I drive my car to work, my car does 6 miles round trip . If someone else does the same in total we did 12 miles. However if we share one car and the car needs to go even a mile between two places, it will have to drive significantly more.
- petercooper 9y ago
  If automated cars are billed per mile, you could still arrange the same sort of multi pickup trip you would ordinarily, I'd hope.

hokkos 9y ago

Particles from brake and tyre dust are bigger than from exhaust fumes, so less dangerous. Electric vehicles use regenerative braking so they uses brakes less. But they are heavier, but I think electric vehicle are still way better than other vehicles.

CalChris 9y ago
Yes. The regen breaks will last a long time. There's also a lot less maintenance and parts. But they do weigh more. Curb weight of a Nissan Versa is about 2400 lbs. Curb weight of a Nissan Leaf is about 3350 lbs.
simonbarker87 9y ago
When I test drove a Model S last year the rep proudly told me that many (around 10 I believe) of the Model S's in the U.K. had done over 150,000 miles and none had had a brake pad change yet thanks to the regen. I would say that the car slowed down about twice as quickly as a conventional car and I used the brakes much less than normal and unless another car was coming, the speed at the intersection was perfect for rolling through without using the brakes. This is all anecdotal of course but interesting change nonetheless I thought.

deelowe 9y ago

Boil the ocean much? Clearly they are a step in the right direction, no?

sammoth 9y ago

"It only reduces pollution by half, so there is no point"

AstralStorm 9y ago
More importantly, cars are not even the main pollution source in general. We could probably ban cars completely if not for social and lobby reasons. (Replace with rail and public transport.) But that is only a quarter of total pollution anyway. The real trouble is UK either needs desert solar with huge investment, nuclear power or drastic reduction in power use. Electric cars are not even a stopgap measure.
- benjaminjackman 9y ago
  So it's kind of a virtuous cycle though. First cell phones and laptops drove up demand for energy storage and so battery tech and production efficiency improved and prices fell to the point putting them in cars was kind of sort of economically not insane. Now cars are driving up demand by another leap of magnitudes since each car requires magnitudes more batteries than a phone. The number of phones and cars people would like to own per capita is well within an order of magnitude though it's probably close. Eventually this enables storage of solar derived power an again order of magnitude larger application than cars in at first niche applications then eventually it will be broad based. Because just like the massive overprovisioning of dark fiber in the dotcom boom, one producers start competing in what is in some sense a dollar auction. The momentum of their growth and the people and processes tasked with ensuring that growth will fight to keep growing supply since it is their livelihood and perceived purpose to do so (both to grow the capacity and to justify that growth, those that don't justify won't be as likely to do the growth and will be selected against). This will lead to a massive amount of batteries being produced since there doesn't seem to be any supply limits beyond how many mines we can make (and then ocean water than can be filtered for lithium from what I have read). I therefore think that "the cars are only 1/2 as polluting and thus pointless" statement lacks vision and an understanding of the positive externalities of growing electric cars. The spin off tech is great. ICE cars have played that out. What was their most recent spinoffs? Tar sands / fracking? I guess we got a lot of cheap natural gas which was a step forward and what's really crushing coal. But if we get another oil spike I don't see the money flowing to oil just a much more agressive push towards EVs and battery tech.

sduclos 9y ago

hypothetically, forget friction (air, tire,..), then all energy injected with the accelerator must be remove by the break. So converting fuel to kinetic energy is only half of the emission. Breaking must save that energy and electric car (bike, truck,..) could do that. edit: hokkos beat me :|

devy 9y ago

The title is misleading. The main argument of Professor Frank Kelly from KCL is not against EV but against all cars. So burn calories by walking and cycling or use public transits, which is appropriate for highly populated megacities with severe congestion problems, let alone public health concerns.

stcredzero 9y ago
The title is misleading. The main argument of Professor Frank Kelly from KCL is not against EV but against all cars. Automated EV cars are a necessary step! Once automated EV cars become the norm, there will be even more value placed on Public Spaces of Value. Right now, the dirt and fumes from current automotive technology -- along with the requirement for vast paved areas for parking -- make it harder to achieve the traditional urban Public Spaces of Value so common in the US in the 18th and 19th centuries. (That said, not having horse excrement everywhere was an environmental boon of cars.) Once automated EV cars become the norm, society will think about urban transport differently, and we will change the urban environment in just as drastic a fashion as we did to make way for internet combustion engine cars. Right now, public spaces most often have to be of a large granularity. We can return to a time when urban Public Spaces of Value were ad-hoc and adjacent to residences and businesses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7fRIGphgtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7fRIGphgtk
- alex_duf 9y ago
  I don't think autonomous cars are going to be more efficient than public transport since you'll still need plenty of them at peak time. And plenty of autonomous cars means traffic jams. They can't replace public transport on that aspect as the transport density is way higher in a train or a bus than on individual autonomous vehicles. Sure they are going to revolutionise car ownership but I don't think they will change the daily commute for the average office worker.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    My point is, that the model of car ownership will change, along with a public awareness of the benefits of a different model. When everyone owned their cars, they had sunk costs that would align them against putting more public resources toward other forms of transit. When cars transformed urban landscapes into paved-over internal-combustion pollution zones, the traditional charms of Public Spaces of Value were obscured or in some cases wiped out. But when autonomous EV cars start to undo some of that mess, people will start to think, "You know, we still have these traffic jams, maybe there's a better way of doing things?" EDIT: >sigh< My whole point is that automated EVs will free public thinking, enabling yet further changes to the public's thinking about how urban transport works. Please provide a quote where I say that automated cars are more efficient than other forms of public transport. (I only say that they will be more efficient than current cars.) Also, please provide a quote that shows I consider automated EVs to be an endpoint in the evolution of transportation. I'm far too often unpleasantly surprised at the level of reading comprehension here on HN.

nkkollaw 9y ago

Well, of course one should walk or bike instead of taking the car, but if this is not possible EV are much better than regular cars, and if it's not the ultimate solution to air pollution it doesn't mean it doesn't help.

dade_ 9y ago

Tires and brake disks/pads aren't cars. If the chemicals that make them are so dangerous, why not focus on replacements? Last I checked, bicycles have tires that wear out too.

paganel 9y ago
> Tires and brake disks/pads aren't cars. I think they're part of a car, aren't they? I mean, you cannot drive a car with no tires, and it's advisable that you should also have brake disks/pads.
- Lio 9y ago
  Well with regard to brake discs/pads I'm surprised that the electric car manufacturers are working towards a fully regenerative system. If you could return all of the forward momentum as energy to the battery that would remove the need for discs and pads.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    Mechanical brakes have two major advantages over regenerative braking. One is that they can handle extremely high transient power levels. For example, maximum-effort braking at high speed can easily involve over a megawatt of power in the initial stages. Dumping that power into your brake pads and rotors as heat is fairly easy to manage. Dumping that into your battery without wrecking it is much, much harder. For comparison, a high-end Tesla can charge at up to 120kW, and can discharge around 600kW in short bursts. The other advantage is that they're cheap, reliable, and can easily be built with redundancy. You can lose all of your car's computers and half of your brake hydraulics and still be able to stop the car. In order to have no mechanical brakes at all, you'd need a battery that could charge fast enough to absorb the power of full braking at maximum speed, and a sufficiently redundant drivetrain that you could still make regen work even if major components failed.
    - skybrian 9y ago
      Agreed. On the other hand, the brakes on a Prius are used much less. If pollution due to wear is an issue, that should help.

mrfusion 9y ago

I'm actually super excited about eliminating noise pollution when evs are common. Imagine walking through downtown midday and it sounds like 2am.

jubabuba 9y ago
Tires are as loud if not louder than the drivetrain noise of most modern cars
soperj 9y ago
I was excited about it too until i heard a tesla roll up behind me on my bike... It's less noise for sure, but they're not silent.
Coincoin 9y ago
Don't be, you must think of the children first! Europe is already talking about having laws forcing EV to make fake noises so that pedestrians can continue jay walking without looking for cars. So basically, current brown noise will be replaced with trademarked noises with recognizable frequencies.

anovikov 9y ago

Electric cars use regen braking so their breaking pads see many times less use than those of gas powered cars...

Brakenshire 9y ago
Yes, I had the same thought. Has anyone quantified the difference?

StillBored 9y ago

This didn't even cover the part of my rant from a couple days ago (heavy electric cars in areas deriving a lot of power from coal) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14877569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14877569

stuaxo 9y ago

Of course it won't "solve" the pollution in cities. It will lessen it to a greater extent. Power is generated away from.l cities and it is easier to mitigate the pollution all in one place. As other people have mentioned regenerative breaking helps too. No reason we can't encourage people out of cars at the same time as transitioning the remaining vehicles to electric.