39 ms·

The electric car as a talisman of false hope

138 points by umadon 7y ago

alexgmcm 7y ago
Honestly, I hope electric cars become commonplace just because of the reduction in noise pollution let alone PM and CO2 emissions. Furthermore, I'm not really sure what the author thinks we should do? How can we maintain modern civilisation without factories etc.? Reverting to some primitive state seems neither realistic nor desirable.
- mkj 7y ago
  I think you'll be disappointed, tyre and air noise doesn't change much at speed with electric cars.
  - tiborsaas 7y ago
    Maybe close to highways, but it's not my experience with electric cars. In cities they tend to travel slowly and thus minimal turbulence and tire noise.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    Time spent producing noise in a given location decreases with speed. The worst thing in terms of noise is not a car passing by every 10 seconds. It's a bus idling for 2 minutes in front of you.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      We now have hybrid buses that shut off at idle. Simple and effective noise reduction.
      - concert-gilled 7y ago
        We also have fully electric buses. https://www.volvobuses.com/en-en/our-offering/buses/e-mobility.html https://www.volvobuses.com/en-en/our-offering/buses/e-mobili...
  - r00fus 7y ago
    Many electric cars have a much lower drag. This means lower noise.
- seren 7y ago
  > Furthermore, I'm not really sure what the author thinks we should do? How can we maintain modern civilisation without factories etc.? Reverting to some primitive state seems neither realistic nor desirable. We could probably revert back to a 1920-1930 level of car without being in a "primitive" state. That means less individual car ownership, and more bicycles, public transportation and more local factories/shops. (But that was already 25 millions of car sold in the decade for about 100 millions inhabitant in the US, so it does not mean no car at all) The most limiting factor is that since the 1930s all our infrastructure or civilization organization is based on having cheap oil and cars, so even if technically feasible, the path to get there is not so easy...
  - ahje 7y ago
    > We could probably revert back to a 1920-1930 level of car without being in a "primitive" state. Reducing urban car ownership rates is a good thing, if nothing else it'll result in cleaner city air. It becomes more complicated when it comes to the modern forestry and agricultural industries, not to mention mining and a lot of other raw material extraction, which are all completely dependant on fossil fuel for powering machinery, bulk transports, backup power and so on. Replacing all that equipment will take many decades no matter how it's done, and we need to start looking at stuff like ethanol/bio-fuels/E-diesel and such right away. That would solve a large part of the problem the author describes as well -- it would be a nice interim solution while we renew the existing infrastructure.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      > Reducing urban car ownership rates is a good thing, if nothing else it'll result in cleaner city air. Maybe not if ownership is just replaced with higher Uber/Lyft usage.
- PeterStuer 7y ago
  You are in for a cold shower. Above 35 km/h (~22 mph) tire noise becomes the dominant factor. Besides, a large part of a modern vehicle's engine noise is designed. Some cars even go as far as play engine noises through added speakers.
  - mcot2 7y ago
    Source? Does this hold true for diesel trucks and buses and garbage trucks which are very common in cities?
    - cowsandmilk 7y ago
      > Does this hold true for diesel trucks and buses and garbage trucks which are very common in cities? I know from the hybrid buses in Boston that they are a massive reduction in noise for the passengers. When you're at a stop, it is great to not have that engine idling. Electric will only be better in that regard. The garbage trucks though seem to make a shit load of brake noise though. And noise from trash dumping on top of trash and being compacted.
      - concert-gilled 7y ago
        Won't electric trucks use regenerative braking?
    - PeterStuer 7y ago
      Below is a non-technical article on the subject. Large heavy utility diesel trucks like garbage trucks have huge engines, extreme start-stop patterns, lots of shifting. Those are loud by themselves. Also, they are low production volume and are only noise insulated in as far as regulation requires them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/americas-best-selling-cars-and-trucks-are-built-on-lies-the-rise-of-fake-engine-noise/2015/01/21/6db09a10-a0ba-11e4-b146-577832eafcb4_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/americas-bes...
  - Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
    The best noise reduction measure in cities is to limit cars to 30 km/h. Which, by the way, also actually reduces the time it takes to get to places by car (because you need fewer traffic lights), apart from obviously making the city much safer for bikes and pedestrians.
- michaelt 7y ago
  Some of the ideas that are popular with HN readers include: 1. Denser cities, like the centre of Paris or London rather than Los Angeles. 2. Walking, busses, metro systems, and cycle infrastructure for journeys within the city; high speed rail between cities. 3. Carbon taxes that cover the cost of recapturing the carbon. So ships and factories and things can keep operating, they've just got to plant some trees or whatever. 4. Nuclear power, alongside wind; solar; and a worldwide power grid to average out differences in production. 5. Remote working. Ideas less popular with the HN community, but that you'll hear elsewhere include: 6. An end to endless growth. 7. Vegetarianism for everyone. 8. Total bans on certain polluting activities, where taxes would unfairly impact the poor and not the rich. I'm sure you're aware of the political problems with all of these.
  - concert-gilled 7y ago
    1. How do we make existing cities denser? 2. Good where possible. Where cars are better suited, the cars should be electric. 4. Those will be EVs even better. 6. What does this entail?
- cowsandmilk 7y ago
  > Reverting to some primitive state seems neither realistic nor desirable. You'll see plenty of complaining online about DC's transit system, but to me it is an example of what can be done. Vienna metro station is ~13 miles as the crow flies outside the city center. It gets trains every 8 minutes and 12 minutes during rush hour. Compare to Boston where train stations at the same distance out have service every half hour during rush hour and once an hour outside of rush hour. Add to it that if you continue along I-66 much past Vienna, you enter HOT-3 lanes, where you either have 3 passengers in a car or pay a toll. Guess what the result is? People in the DC area take the metro at Vienna because there is frequency of service and are disincentivized from driving. People in Boston drive in. It isn't a primitive state or a postmodern crowded dystopia. The people commuting from Vienna mostly live a suburban life with yards. The infrastructure is just there to encourage taking the train.
  - ecpottinger 7y ago
    Here in Toronto the GO Train used to be one hour apart. If you missed your train you had to wait an hour for the next one. Of-course people drove in to work. Today the train is every twenty minutes, and every run is half to completely full. Why? Because on average people have to wait 20 minutes if they just missed the train, and if they just randomly arrive they often do not have to wait more than 10 minutes for a train. Result, people use the train more often and for more than just work since the train is available so often.
  - m4rtink 7y ago
    And if you add one or two levels of magnitude of improvement, you will get the insanely good train system in Japan. Seeing 14 car 300 km/h capable shinkansens arrive on the same track in ~4 minute intervals in Hiroshima station (and elsewhere) is something to behold. And the commuter system is sometimes ever crazier, with many lines running parallel in the city center, large stations having dozens of lines, together providing huge capacity. No wonder around 8 million people commute to central Tokyo, 1.3 million of them through a single station (Shinjuku).
- PeterStuer 7y ago
  Btw: In reference to noise pollution, expect to go batshit crazy once the low speed EV's start making all sorts of crazy sounds. Thank the automotive lobby that at the time keen on embracing a service model, got inspiration from the early mobile phones and wanted a 'ringtones for cars' business added. https://newatlas.com/eu-ev-acoustic-noise-avas/60022/ https://newatlas.com/eu-ev-acoustic-noise-avas/60022/
rebuilder 7y ago
Are there examples of societies radically changing their lifestyles in order to prevent a disaster?
- seren 7y ago
  Not answering directly, but the advantage of us humans is that our culture is pretty malleable. Something that was trendy a few decades ago might become horrifying by today's standard. For example, I would say that colonization was still regarded by some as mostly positively until the 1950s or 1960s, and today would totally look out of place (even if countries keep annexing their neighbors). So it is possible the change will come quickly, not necessarily only because of regulations, but also because of the social norms. See recent articles about "flying shame".
- tiborsaas 7y ago
  There are examples of change, but most of the times after disaster stuck. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/fire-of-london/ http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/fire-... That's human nature: if it ain't broken, don't try to fix it. And ignore those marginal, annoying naysayers, what do they know? But first let's install AC, nobody can work in these heatwaves :)
- Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
  Chinese one-child policy is the closest I can come to an example off the top of my head. A much milder change than the one required against global warming, and it required an authoritarian government, though...
  - seren 7y ago
    Although if we somehow could apply a global one child policy, it would halve the population every generation, it would help tremendously with carbon emission (but not so much for our growth or financial system)
    - sgt101 7y ago
ptah 7y ago
reminds me of slavoj zizek's point of how corporations use problems caused by consumption and come up with a solution that increases consumption, like the "2% of profits goes towards planting trees" type of scenario
pif 7y ago
> To have any chance of slowing down climate breakdown rather than accelerating it further, we need to change our entire way of life... I agree with him. And that's why I keep saying that global warming is here to stay. We had better to learn to cope with it rather than hoping it can be reversed!
- stuaxo 7y ago
  We're going to have to reverse it at some point. If we keep accelerating it there won't be any learning to live with it.
  - growlist 7y ago
    It's self limiting, with an attenuation in global population once a threshold is reached. I suspect we'll never reach a point where humanity disappears entirely - they'll just hang out in higher altitudes and latitudes.
  - lm28469 7y ago
    The more we let it go the harder it'll be to reverse / the more lifestyle changes we'll have to go through.
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  If we do nothing, then we get to learn to cope with an 8 degree rise in temperature. If we do something, maybe we can limit it to three degrees instead of our two degree target. Acknowledging we're going to miss our two degree target doesn't change the measures we have to take to mitigate climate change.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  I think global warming is not just here to stay, it's going to get as worse as it can get. If the west moves off of fossils the rest of the world will get them cheaper and still burn them all, it's too important to get cheap energy for all the countries that are not as rich as the west and still need a lot of growth. For that not to happen the west would have to somehow share and distribute all the wealth it accumulated with the rest of the world or somehow force the rest of the world into the middle ages, neither of which is realistically possible. Not sure what else can be done, but it seems the earth will inevitably return to the pre historic climate where all those fossils were still in the atmosphere. The problem of global warming is the problem of distribution of wealth in capitalism itself.
PeterStuer 7y ago
"Electric cars give us a sense that we can have change without having to change at all. They are a talisman of false hope." On a tangent issue: it going to get even worse. The automotive industry predicts total annual miles driven to go up by 300% when autonomous driving comes through.
- stuaxo 7y ago
  As an asthmatic I'm looking forward to a drastic reduction in the pollution in our cities. We still need to move to car free cities at the same time though.
  - PeterStuer 7y ago
    I agree with you that the very idea that it is somehow acceptable to have an 'exhaust' on a car that just belches out toxins is just as crazy as dumping your nightpot out the top floor window into the middle of the street. There was also a time in which that was deemed 'normal'. That said, a very large part of small particle dust produced by cars comes from wear, especially brakes, tires, road surface and crushed stuff by the weight of the car driving over. If there is a significant uptick in traffic, electric will be better than the equivalent traffic if it were all diesel, but the aggregate amount of micro dust might still go up compared to today's volume.
    - mcot2 7y ago
      Again, technology is not static. There are lots of folks working on the brake dust and tire wear issue. You should be happy to know that regenerative breaking on BEVs results in a lot less brake dust, although currently more tire wear due to more initial torque.
- mcot2 7y ago
  Miles driven should go up but with far fewer vehicles, since with autonomy cars can operate almost 24/7. But point taken, we will need those autonomous cars to be BEV and use renewable power.
charlesism 7y ago
Alot about our system of roads and cars strikes me as crazy. Most of the vehicles on the road have only one person in them, yet weigh as much as an elephant. Nobody drives under the speed limit, which is typically fast enough to result in hundreds of thousands of fatalities every year anyways. Every neighborhood designed primarily for these idiotically heavy vehicles, that occasionally drive over pets and children who made the mistake of wandering off a footpath. Then there’s the pollution, of course. I can’t imagine many people would accept the way we do things today, if we started from zero and someone proposed it, instead of the situation slow-boiling us over a period of a half century.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  The worst part about it IMO is traffic light and stops. In a city, if you can drive around 20mph (25 maybe) uninterrupted, you get in most places very fast, very pleasantly and with fuel savings since you never slow down. Instead of a smooth flow, you get drivers that do: - high accelerations - nervous braking - idle engine running between 30 - 60 seconds (120 max?) Pure waste. Maybe I'm asking for a problem too complex to solve, but a smooth oriented traffic organization would help. Well, that is until fossil fuels are removed from the market.
  - joking 7y ago
    Difficult for big vehicles, but changing the landscape and focusing more on personal mobility vehicles and a lot can be done (like the elevated roundabouts for bikes on Netherlands)
    - agumonkey 7y ago
      this is insane.. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elevated+roundabouts+for+bikes+on+Netherlands&t=ffcm&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fphotorator.com%2Fphotos%2Fimages%2Fthe-hovenring-cable-stayed-aerial-bicycle-roundabout-in-the-netherlands-near-eindhoven--52980.jpg https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elevated+roundabouts+for+bikes+on+... I've read tons of articles about bikes in netherlands and how they design roundabouts. But never this. It's a bit too much in terms of landscaping impact but it must be sooo lovely to bike..
Denzel 7y ago
His argument distills to: solve it all-at-once, or don’t solve it at all. This is an uninteresting and uninspiring line of thinking that ignores the nature of socially dynamic systems which don’t exist in a world of instantaneous cause-and-effect. His conclusion states that electric cars make a difference, but they don’t make a real difference: “I do think they can slightly reduce unsustainability” but “by switching from a regular car to electric I might think that I am making a real difference”. I’m sorry that the author doesn’t consider a real reduction in emissions a real difference. Look, it’s simple, climate change will require a concerted effort to change in multiple markets across multiple arenas. And the solutions are not mutually exclusive. People that buy electric cars to help the environment or become vegetarian, are probably more likely to make additional changes in their life, and persuade others to make changes as well, to reduce emissions. Most people arrive at the decision to purchase an electric vehicle exactly because they are questioning their way of life. Electric vehicles are not a talisman of false hope, they’re a singular step in the right direction.
- eptcyka 7y ago
  The argument isn't that doing _something_ is bad, it's that the amount of effort people put into obtaining their shiny non-paleolithic-compost-fueled-but-rather-battery-powered 2 tonne sledgehammers would be better spent changing policies that operate on organizational rather than individual units. How about we just stop buying as much shit from halfway across the world? Global trade requires us to spend stupid amounts of fuel in engines that have never been optimized for emissions. This of course involves making changes to global trade, this is a lot harder, but surely all those people who are capable of shelling out at least 30000$ (but in reality, barely anyone gets the cheapest model because this is a luxury item) could be doing things that make a bigger difference.
  - Denzel 7y ago
    You didn’t rebut any of my points. First, can you not buy an electric car and advocate and enact organizational or systematic change? They’re not mutually exclusive. Second, how do dynamic systems composed of many independent, self-directed agents change? Instantaneously or over some period of time? How long is that period of time? Probably much longer a period of time than it takes to purchase an electric vehicle (< 1 minute) and reduce your emissions immediately.
abhi152 7y ago
Ok, so the author suggests nothing.. He fails to describe the solution(if any). May be the solution is population control.
- jaimex2 7y ago
  Pretty much. He doesn't seem to grasp the reality that solving the problem is political and like gun laws in the US there are those that will oppose every change no matter how small every step of the way for money regardless of the human or planetary cost.
flr03 7y ago
We can imagine that the energy mix in EU will lean towards more renewable energy, increasing the benefit of electric cars over conventional cars. If indeed not decreasing yet, the number of cars sold seems to flatten and I can see that Europeans cities are transforming to make life more complicated for cars owners (ie LEZ tax in London) and easier for pedestrians and bikes. Several reasons to be optimistic.
mcot2 7y ago
“Still, in most cases an electric car is slightly less bad for the living planet than a comparable car with an internal combustion engine – if you can afford to buy one.” Bad article all around. There is bias in that statement alone referencing the price of EV’s after an admission that they are actually better for the environment already. This article also references almost every negative trope about BEV’s. What many of these articles fail to explore is any future advancements in technology that can solve some of the issues listed. Nothing in BEV technology is static, almost everything is improving from motor efficiency all the way to removing things like cobalt from batteries. It’s also possible that we will see a lot more localized solar and wind power for charging stations over time. Lastly, autonomy is coming which will be a game changer when paired with BEV technology.
lawlessone 7y ago
Electric vehicles would make a huge difference to me and many others that suffer from asthma. Moving the emissions away from the vehicles , away from city centres and roads to the factories and power stations where they can be controlled would save thousands of lives. Our children will look at us how we look at people during the industrial revolution. And a gradual change is better than no change at all.
- acd 7y ago
  Very true many countries in Europe has shifted to diesels due to lower co2 but they make the air dirty. Dirty air is bad for asthmatics. Hybrid gasoline/biogas can be as co2 efficient as diesel if not more with a lot cleaner tail pipe air. Almost zero local emission with 10kw batteries and upwards.
  - baud147258 7y ago
    The shift to diesel was also caused by a lower price of gas and a lower consumption for medium and long distances.
- growlist 7y ago
  Exhaust emissions are only part of the air pollution problem - brake discs and tyres contribute around 50%, as I recall. Depressing! But we need lighter vehicles all round, and less travelling in general.
  - NullPrefix 7y ago
    >brake discs Regenerative braking does not have this problem. Although the tyre problem remain.
    - growlist 7y ago
      Though the extra weight of the regenerative system has to be taken into account.
acd 7y ago
Electric batteries gives the most effect in shared transport such as buses and taxis. If I remember correctly it’s 50x more efficient with batteries in such public vehicles. This is due to higher utilization they buses drive all day vs private cars mostly are parked. This we should electrify public transport first for maximum carbon reduction.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- lota-putty 7y ago
  +1 Electric Public Transport -1 Battery based Public Transport
- PeterStuer 7y ago
  Smart Grids touted as 'the future' in the energy distribution sector are counting on all those parked batteries for their network balance.
693471 7y ago
I bought my EV for three reasons: 1. Traditional car maintenance is expensive and sucks 2. I'm betting due to natural disasters in the environment and in the Oval Office we will see fuel prices continue to rise 3. While I don't think it will save the planet by itself, it can certainly save lives. Emissions are dangerous to breathe in and we are willfully ignoring it.
- ensiferum 7y ago
  And the energy comes without emissions? :)
  - srfilipek 7y ago
    Depends on where you live. In West Virginia? No, it's almost all coal based. In Vermont? Yes, their grid is 100% renewable. Source: https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html
  - 693471 7y ago
    The electricity required to refine a gallon of gas is 6kW, so add that into the equation on what I'm not responsible for emitting. ICE vehicles are doing double duty on emissions but nobody's paying attention.
bryanlarsen 7y ago
This is an extremely counter-productive line of thinking. Slowing climate change to manageable levels requires massive costs and sacrifice, but not insane levels. In terms of cost, single figure trillions. IOW, similar to the Apollo project or the Iraq war. A heck of a lot cheaper than WWII.
bryanlarsen 7y ago
Two me, reading the graph in the article brings up two priorities: 1: transition to renewable energy 2: figure out how to lower the carbon emissions during 1&2 sound a lot easier than completely transitioning off motorized personal transportation. #2 can be done with appropriate government incentives, like a $100/ton carbon tax + equivalent tariff. Producers will use alternate energy sources and otherwise eliminate carbon wherever it costs them less than $100/ton to do so, and the $100 can pay for sequestration when it costs them more. Of course #2 will significantly increase the price of a car. This will also help to convince people to use alternatives. But cars will still be significantly cheaper than they are in Denmark or Norway, yet those two countries are still fairly car oriented.
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  Low carbon energy! The article listed pure renewable energy but if it was biofuel, emissions would be high. We must stop talking about renewability and focus on sustainable, low-carbon energy. They are not the same. Further example: nuclear fusion is low carbon and sustainable but not considered renewable. If we charged EVs with nuclear fusion power stations, we'd all be happy.
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  Oops, "2: figure out how to lower the carbon emissions during vehicle production"
growlist 7y ago
We could for example: 1. Incentivise retrofitting of electric transmissions to cars with internal combustion engines 2. Disincentivise the introduction of new models, visual updates etc. to existing cars via taxation 3. Incentivise durability and repairability - force car makers to produce cars that are modular and easily repaired, enforced limits on pricing of spare parts, force open-sourcing of designs etc. Of course all of above would likely smash the car makers' current business model to pieces - and when you get down to it this is the real problem with the kind of genuine, general change we need to see in order to save the Earth. Sustainable approaches simply will not deliver the kind of reduction in consumption required. Everyone is going to have to accept a much poorer lifestyle. The main blocker to me is the rich: how are they going to justify their continued opulence when the companies they own (are forced to) produce so little for the average person?
- sokoloff 7y ago
  > Incentivise retrofitting of electric transmissions to cars with internal combustion engines What would that do to help? Modern transmissions are fairly efficient (basically anything with a lockup torque converter is now very good and any manual or computer controlled manual transmission is excellent in terms of efficiency). I can’t see what an electronic transmission on an ICE engine would do that would possibly pay back.
  - growlist 7y ago
    Removal of the ICE in favour of electric I meant, in case I wasn't clear. Massive amounts of power etc. are required to produce the chassis, bodywork etc. - it makes sense to get a lifetime's use out of them rather than throw away the whole thing just because the ICE has gone out of fashion.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      Ok. The transmission is a very specific (and overly specific for your intended meaning) assembly, so it was indeed not clear.
RickJWagner 7y ago
"Tesla sales are up seven-fold from Q3 2015 to Q3 2018" Wow. I consider that a good sign. Electric cars are progress.
esotericn 7y ago
The charts on the page directly contradict the headline. In the renewable energy case emissions are miniscule, and in fact only come about because the chart assumes large emissions during manufacture - a lot of the processes involved in producing an EV could be done with renewable energy, and would be if we instituted a carbon tax or otherwise forced the issue.
cmrdporcupine 7y ago
Seems to me a lot of people are so attached to carculture that they can't even read the article properly. The author sees all sorts of good things about electric cars. I drive them myself. I love cars. But... The points the article makes about cars being part of a larger flawed system of urban and rural development are spot on. 'Self-driving' cars will only make this worse. Even just the excessive prevalence of hard-top surfaces in roads and parking lots leads to environmental catastrophe when flooding begins. Urban sprawl leads to farmland and natural area destruction. The car is the ultimate symbol of entitled consumerist individualism, and it is becoming more and more unsustainable. The net effect of every household being in car(s) with a population as big as we have is really bad, even if all emissions were to be eliminated. If all the private investment money being dumped into self-driving technology at the moment were public money being put into urban mass transit, just think of what could be accomplished...
- whenanother 7y ago
  urban mass transit is never used by the wealthy. the last thing people with ill gotten gains want to do is to be around others who can identify them and see with their own eyes how much they’ve stolen. and they don’t want to be around their own kind as there’s no honor amongst thieves.
  - dragontamer 7y ago
    Senators use the DC Metro and Stock Market traders in NYC use their subway. Big Subway systems in big cities are pretty famous for seeing executives in suits and celebrities sit in the same bus as beggars. > ill gotten gains That's... quite an assumption you're making there. Sure, some execs are assholes. But most true wealth is driven through cooperation.
    - rpmisms 7y ago
      I think he's making the morally dubious jump to say that corporate profits are immoral.
Mvandenbergh 7y ago
Why is the embodied carbon in the manufacture of the car the same in all the energy mix scenarios? Surely quite a lot of electricity is used in manufacturing electric vehicles. Also, solutions that rely on substantially reconfiguring living patterns - moving from driving-required suburbs to walkable communities also have large embodied carbon costs. It's all well and good to say that suburbs are energy inefficient but the US has a lot of them already built.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  > solutions that rely on substantially reconfiguring living patterns Surely switching to bikes or electric bikes is not that substantial and immediately eliminates a lot of car related problems.
  - Mvandenbergh 7y ago
    Sure but there are many houses that are surrounded by just more houses for many, many kilometres with the nearest concentration of offices and other places of work, stores, and transport hubs (if there even are any) very substantial distances away. It's challenging to increase cycling when that is the case.
upofadown 7y ago
You can see this false hope expressed all the time in media articles that assume that we will just electrify all the cars with no other changes to how we do transportation. That hope is why we are told how important it is to get chargers absolutely everywhere, that charging needs to be fast and how important it is that electric cars have the same range as petroleum cars. The thing is, cities don't want any sort of cars these days. So in most cases the type of energy used to propel a car is beside the point and a lot of this discussion doesn't matter any more.
bjourne 7y ago
The numbers are somewhat contested. See potholer54's well-sourced video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwMPFDqyfrA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwMPFDqyfrA He cites ghg savings of about 20-30% for a common mix of electricity production sources. Of course, Jussi Pasanen is still completely right. The only solution is to stop driving cars.
- phtrivier 7y ago
  Fine. Which rural neighborhood do we nuke first ? Big cities can definitely phase cars put, and should electrify their public transportations for the people who can't bike. Some form of "small number of passengers, not short but not long range" trips are going to have to be done ouside of cities, unless you displace people. If "displacing people to cities" is your advocated policy, or "preventing people from traveling at all", that's a legitimate point to argue, but be prepared for fierce resistance from well meaning people (who're not going to massively vote for you...)
kaolti 7y ago
The author has a point. Out of all the other industries dominated by massive corporations - and we know how they go about doing business - the first priority to save the planet is for John Doe to buy a new product! Also, let's create a culture where we feel justified to shame people who don't do it. Of course nothing is black and white. I love electric cars and will probably get one. I think they're really cool and would love to do my bit in keeping things green. BUT at the same, you got to see a bit of irony in the whole thing don't you?
jaimex2 7y ago
What an absolute garbage piece. Solving environmental impact is extremely political and is fought every step of the way by those with vested interests. This adds nothing to help improve things, it actually does the opposite. Yes, we know if we went back to pre-industrial revolution we'd stop impacting the planet. Good luck with that.
wffurr 7y ago
I made this same point on an article about "where will apartment dwellers and city dwellers with street parking charge their EVs". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20678842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20678842 It was a question that was completely missing the forest for the trees. Just like this article is claiming all the EV boosterism is doing. An EV car is still a car. It's still three tons of steel that goes way too fast and gets used in all manner of inappropriate ways. As an EV owner, you are still part of the problem. Not to mention that you just bought a fantastically expensive vehicle to signal how much you "care" about the environment, but not enough to give up any creature comforts. And how many anti-malaria bednets could you have bought instead if you got a used fuel efficient ICE or, gasp, no car at all? Much higher impact would be accelerating retrofitting our cities and towns for other modes of transportation: bikes and scooters, massively expanded public transit, and walking.
Nasrudith 7y ago
Looking at other articles the guy seems to be full in apocalyptic thinking - a few in he has an article on "Collapse" and lifeboat thinking. Those are words are downright toxic meme symptoms referring to paranoid and evil ideologirs respectively. They are like referring to science based medicine as "alleopathic" is a sure sign that they are off the deep ene in alternative medicine. To explain "collapse" briefly there is even a /r/Collapse convinced of coming doomsdays from various sources from any fear de jure from ebola, economic meltdowns, or global warming. "Lifeboat ethics" refers to a rehash of Malthusians and Eugenicists arguing helping people who are worse off is actively immoral and rapidly justifies travesties. There is a reason I skip straight to evil when describing them - when in power their actions can have no other end.
patientplatypus 7y ago
One of the things I like to do when half in the bag in a bar and blagging to a new friend is to say, "Look - pick a direction - any direction - and tell me what you see." And what they see is plastic and metal and bar bottles with paint on them and more plastic and all the detritus of human society. And every piece of it, as far as the eye can see!, will be garbage in 6 months to 20 years and sit on the ground and leech poisons into the Earth and nothing will grow from it. Every. Single. Piece. We, as human beans, have broken the cycle of life and death where something grows, flowers, dies, rots and something else grows and flowers. This idea that we can make a new shiny thing that will become more garbage to fix all our problems so we can keep eating more isn't going to change that. The solution is that we simply have to do with less. And people will kill each other before they admit that. It's already starting to happen now.
theworld572 7y ago
Electric vehicles are ranking number 26 in terms of total cost and total atmospheric reduction of CO2: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank So its not a talisman, but it is certainly a real step in the right direction. I don't hear anybody saying that electric cars means we can just forget about the other causes of climate change? A very contrarian article that just argues against a straw man. I suspect people who write articles like this are usually the ones who revel in being smarter than everybody else.
choeger 7y ago
From my European perspective, this reads like a typical leftist pov. First of all, of course everyone has to change their way of living. This has been the corner Stone of left ideology since forever. And then of course the attack on EV, because it is not about the climate, but about individuality. Individual travel simply does not fit into a world view where everyone has to change their way of living into the rational way. And offering a different solution is heresy.
La-ang 7y ago
Too little too late? That's the best the writer could say? Pessimism is not what we yearn for.
g8oz 7y ago
Some perspective on EVs: Project Drawdown lists CO2 reduction by adoption of better cars as #49 in it's ranked list of of climate change solutions. #1 and #2 are refrigerant management and onshore wind turbines respectively.
krak12 7y ago
I started working on electric cars way before Tzero helped create Tesla Roadster. Wasted my young ages trying to explain the benefits of EV and died with no support at all. Next year Tesla turned into a billion dollar company. Our fault? Being located on Europe, instead on USA. And yes, Rimac uses our tech on their power trains. 14 years later.
alkonaut 7y ago
So we transition to EV's and we change power to non-fossil fuels. It's not hard it just costs money and requires some sacrifice. I'm on 100% renewable now. If I wasn't already, I'd happily pay twice what I pay now to ensure I was at least on non-fossil if not on renewable.
JeffL 7y ago
Once we get self driving, there could be far fewer cars per person. If you amortize that part of the bar chart of emissions which comes from producing the vehicle and divide it by, say, 20, and continue to develop new solar and wind farms, the BEV looks really amazing compared to current non-self driving ICE cars.
- JKCalhoun 7y ago
  I tell people who are waiting for self-driving cars to take the bus.
buboard 7y ago
It's much more impactful for the tech community to push for remote work everywhere except where it's physically necessary than to convince everyone to buy a battery car. Where i live it's impossible to use one anyway due to non-robust electicity network. Despite being an island that is sunny year round, its not possible to incorporate more renewables into the system, so the main source of electricity remains oil. I bet the main buyers of battery cars live in big cities anyway. https://image.slidesharecdn.com/emissionsfromdrivingtowork-1213018860684874-9/95/emissions-from-driving-to-work-4-728.jpg?cb=1212993525 https://image.slidesharecdn.com/emissionsfromdrivingtowork-1...
jmpman 7y ago
I have an electric car because it lets me get in the carpool lane. I understand that investing the delta between an electric car and an ICE into some sort of carbon capture technology would likely be better for the environment, but then I wouldn’t be home for dinner 15min earlier.
blendo 7y ago
About 300,000 cars cross the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge every day. I think the author's point is that if they were all electric, there would _still_ be 300,000 cars crossing the bridge each day, and the problems of road maintenance costs, pedestrian safety, and soul-deadening commute times remain. Fewer GHG emissions, to be sure. A good next step would be to focus on reducing the total energy of the system. Minimizing 1/2 m v^2 is your friend here -- reduce weight and reduce speed.
lm28469 7y ago
Have anyone seriously studied the impact of switching to all-electric cars on a global scale ? I read that there are over a billion passenger cars right now, let's say we manage to shift them all to electric by 2050 (not saying this is realistic), sure it'll move the air pollution out of the city, but what about long term pollution, manufacturing, recycling, &c. ? Would it really solve the problem or simply move it out of our sight for a few decades ?
sunkenvicar 7y ago
Everyone can drive an electric car with the Green Nuclear Deal.
lucas_membrane 7y ago
More inconvenient truth in TFA. Note that the market price of electricity hit $9.00/kwh in Texas last week. IICC, that would be maybe a couple of Benjamins to charge an electric car, suggesting that there will have to be bigger changes than electric cars if we really want to keep things the way they are.

138 points by umadon 7y ago

Honestly, I hope electric cars become commonplace just because of the reduction in noise pollution let alone PM and CO2 emissions. Furthermore, I'm not really sure what the author thinks we should do? How can we maintain modern civilisation without factories etc.? Reverting to some primitive state seems neither realistic nor desirable.

mkj 7y ago
I think you'll be disappointed, tyre and air noise doesn't change much at speed with electric cars.
- tiborsaas 7y ago
  Maybe close to highways, but it's not my experience with electric cars. In cities they tend to travel slowly and thus minimal turbulence and tire noise.
- imtringued 7y ago
  Time spent producing noise in a given location decreases with speed. The worst thing in terms of noise is not a car passing by every 10 seconds. It's a bus idling for 2 minutes in front of you.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    We now have hybrid buses that shut off at idle. Simple and effective noise reduction.
    - concert-gilled 7y ago
      We also have fully electric buses. https://www.volvobuses.com/en-en/our-offering/buses/e-mobility.html https://www.volvobuses.com/en-en/our-offering/buses/e-mobili...
- r00fus 7y ago
  Many electric cars have a much lower drag. This means lower noise.
seren 7y ago
> Furthermore, I'm not really sure what the author thinks we should do? How can we maintain modern civilisation without factories etc.? Reverting to some primitive state seems neither realistic nor desirable. We could probably revert back to a 1920-1930 level of car without being in a "primitive" state. That means less individual car ownership, and more bicycles, public transportation and more local factories/shops. (But that was already 25 millions of car sold in the decade for about 100 millions inhabitant in the US, so it does not mean no car at all) The most limiting factor is that since the 1930s all our infrastructure or civilization organization is based on having cheap oil and cars, so even if technically feasible, the path to get there is not so easy...
- ahje 7y ago
  > We could probably revert back to a 1920-1930 level of car without being in a "primitive" state. Reducing urban car ownership rates is a good thing, if nothing else it'll result in cleaner city air. It becomes more complicated when it comes to the modern forestry and agricultural industries, not to mention mining and a lot of other raw material extraction, which are all completely dependant on fossil fuel for powering machinery, bulk transports, backup power and so on. Replacing all that equipment will take many decades no matter how it's done, and we need to start looking at stuff like ethanol/bio-fuels/E-diesel and such right away. That would solve a large part of the problem the author describes as well -- it would be a nice interim solution while we renew the existing infrastructure.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    > Reducing urban car ownership rates is a good thing, if nothing else it'll result in cleaner city air. Maybe not if ownership is just replaced with higher Uber/Lyft usage.
PeterStuer 7y ago
You are in for a cold shower. Above 35 km/h (~22 mph) tire noise becomes the dominant factor. Besides, a large part of a modern vehicle's engine noise is designed. Some cars even go as far as play engine noises through added speakers.
- mcot2 7y ago
  Source? Does this hold true for diesel trucks and buses and garbage trucks which are very common in cities?
  - cowsandmilk 7y ago
    > Does this hold true for diesel trucks and buses and garbage trucks which are very common in cities? I know from the hybrid buses in Boston that they are a massive reduction in noise for the passengers. When you're at a stop, it is great to not have that engine idling. Electric will only be better in that regard. The garbage trucks though seem to make a shit load of brake noise though. And noise from trash dumping on top of trash and being compacted.
    - concert-gilled 7y ago
      Won't electric trucks use regenerative braking?
  - PeterStuer 7y ago
    Below is a non-technical article on the subject. Large heavy utility diesel trucks like garbage trucks have huge engines, extreme start-stop patterns, lots of shifting. Those are loud by themselves. Also, they are low production volume and are only noise insulated in as far as regulation requires them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/americas-best-selling-cars-and-trucks-are-built-on-lies-the-rise-of-fake-engine-noise/2015/01/21/6db09a10-a0ba-11e4-b146-577832eafcb4_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/americas-bes...
- Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
  The best noise reduction measure in cities is to limit cars to 30 km/h. Which, by the way, also actually reduces the time it takes to get to places by car (because you need fewer traffic lights), apart from obviously making the city much safer for bikes and pedestrians.
michaelt 7y ago
Some of the ideas that are popular with HN readers include: 1. Denser cities, like the centre of Paris or London rather than Los Angeles. 2. Walking, busses, metro systems, and cycle infrastructure for journeys within the city; high speed rail between cities. 3. Carbon taxes that cover the cost of recapturing the carbon. So ships and factories and things can keep operating, they've just got to plant some trees or whatever. 4. Nuclear power, alongside wind; solar; and a worldwide power grid to average out differences in production. 5. Remote working. Ideas less popular with the HN community, but that you'll hear elsewhere include: 6. An end to endless growth. 7. Vegetarianism for everyone. 8. Total bans on certain polluting activities, where taxes would unfairly impact the poor and not the rich. I'm sure you're aware of the political problems with all of these.
- concert-gilled 7y ago
  1. How do we make existing cities denser? 2. Good where possible. Where cars are better suited, the cars should be electric. 4. Those will be EVs even better. 6. What does this entail?
cowsandmilk 7y ago
> Reverting to some primitive state seems neither realistic nor desirable. You'll see plenty of complaining online about DC's transit system, but to me it is an example of what can be done. Vienna metro station is ~13 miles as the crow flies outside the city center. It gets trains every 8 minutes and 12 minutes during rush hour. Compare to Boston where train stations at the same distance out have service every half hour during rush hour and once an hour outside of rush hour. Add to it that if you continue along I-66 much past Vienna, you enter HOT-3 lanes, where you either have 3 passengers in a car or pay a toll. Guess what the result is? People in the DC area take the metro at Vienna because there is frequency of service and are disincentivized from driving. People in Boston drive in. It isn't a primitive state or a postmodern crowded dystopia. The people commuting from Vienna mostly live a suburban life with yards. The infrastructure is just there to encourage taking the train.
- ecpottinger 7y ago
  Here in Toronto the GO Train used to be one hour apart. If you missed your train you had to wait an hour for the next one. Of-course people drove in to work. Today the train is every twenty minutes, and every run is half to completely full. Why? Because on average people have to wait 20 minutes if they just missed the train, and if they just randomly arrive they often do not have to wait more than 10 minutes for a train. Result, people use the train more often and for more than just work since the train is available so often.
- m4rtink 7y ago
  And if you add one or two levels of magnitude of improvement, you will get the insanely good train system in Japan. Seeing 14 car 300 km/h capable shinkansens arrive on the same track in ~4 minute intervals in Hiroshima station (and elsewhere) is something to behold. And the commuter system is sometimes ever crazier, with many lines running parallel in the city center, large stations having dozens of lines, together providing huge capacity. No wonder around 8 million people commute to central Tokyo, 1.3 million of them through a single station (Shinjuku).
PeterStuer 7y ago
Btw: In reference to noise pollution, expect to go batshit crazy once the low speed EV's start making all sorts of crazy sounds. Thank the automotive lobby that at the time keen on embracing a service model, got inspiration from the early mobile phones and wanted a 'ringtones for cars' business added. https://newatlas.com/eu-ev-acoustic-noise-avas/60022/ https://newatlas.com/eu-ev-acoustic-noise-avas/60022/

rebuilder 7y ago

Are there examples of societies radically changing their lifestyles in order to prevent a disaster?

seren 7y ago
Not answering directly, but the advantage of us humans is that our culture is pretty malleable. Something that was trendy a few decades ago might become horrifying by today's standard. For example, I would say that colonization was still regarded by some as mostly positively until the 1950s or 1960s, and today would totally look out of place (even if countries keep annexing their neighbors). So it is possible the change will come quickly, not necessarily only because of regulations, but also because of the social norms. See recent articles about "flying shame".
tiborsaas 7y ago
There are examples of change, but most of the times after disaster stuck. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/fire-of-london/ http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/fire-... That's human nature: if it ain't broken, don't try to fix it. And ignore those marginal, annoying naysayers, what do they know? But first let's install AC, nobody can work in these heatwaves :)
Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
Chinese one-child policy is the closest I can come to an example off the top of my head. A much milder change than the one required against global warming, and it required an authoritarian government, though...
- seren 7y ago
  Although if we somehow could apply a global one child policy, it would halve the population every generation, it would help tremendously with carbon emission (but not so much for our growth or financial system)
  - sgt101 7y ago

ptah 7y ago

reminds me of slavoj zizek's point of how corporations use problems caused by consumption and come up with a solution that increases consumption, like the "2% of profits goes towards planting trees" type of scenario

pif 7y ago

> To have any chance of slowing down climate breakdown rather than accelerating it further, we need to change our entire way of life... I agree with him. And that's why I keep saying that global warming is here to stay. We had better to learn to cope with it rather than hoping it can be reversed!

stuaxo 7y ago
We're going to have to reverse it at some point. If we keep accelerating it there won't be any learning to live with it.
- growlist 7y ago
  It's self limiting, with an attenuation in global population once a threshold is reached. I suspect we'll never reach a point where humanity disappears entirely - they'll just hang out in higher altitudes and latitudes.
- lm28469 7y ago
  The more we let it go the harder it'll be to reverse / the more lifestyle changes we'll have to go through.
bryanlarsen 7y ago
If we do nothing, then we get to learn to cope with an 8 degree rise in temperature. If we do something, maybe we can limit it to three degrees instead of our two degree target. Acknowledging we're going to miss our two degree target doesn't change the measures we have to take to mitigate climate change.
zzzcpan 7y ago
I think global warming is not just here to stay, it's going to get as worse as it can get. If the west moves off of fossils the rest of the world will get them cheaper and still burn them all, it's too important to get cheap energy for all the countries that are not as rich as the west and still need a lot of growth. For that not to happen the west would have to somehow share and distribute all the wealth it accumulated with the rest of the world or somehow force the rest of the world into the middle ages, neither of which is realistically possible. Not sure what else can be done, but it seems the earth will inevitably return to the pre historic climate where all those fossils were still in the atmosphere. The problem of global warming is the problem of distribution of wealth in capitalism itself.

PeterStuer 7y ago

"Electric cars give us a sense that we can have change without having to change at all. They are a talisman of false hope." On a tangent issue: it going to get even worse. The automotive industry predicts total annual miles driven to go up by 300% when autonomous driving comes through.

stuaxo 7y ago
As an asthmatic I'm looking forward to a drastic reduction in the pollution in our cities. We still need to move to car free cities at the same time though.
- PeterStuer 7y ago
  I agree with you that the very idea that it is somehow acceptable to have an 'exhaust' on a car that just belches out toxins is just as crazy as dumping your nightpot out the top floor window into the middle of the street. There was also a time in which that was deemed 'normal'. That said, a very large part of small particle dust produced by cars comes from wear, especially brakes, tires, road surface and crushed stuff by the weight of the car driving over. If there is a significant uptick in traffic, electric will be better than the equivalent traffic if it were all diesel, but the aggregate amount of micro dust might still go up compared to today's volume.
  - mcot2 7y ago
    Again, technology is not static. There are lots of folks working on the brake dust and tire wear issue. You should be happy to know that regenerative breaking on BEVs results in a lot less brake dust, although currently more tire wear due to more initial torque.
mcot2 7y ago
Miles driven should go up but with far fewer vehicles, since with autonomy cars can operate almost 24/7. But point taken, we will need those autonomous cars to be BEV and use renewable power.

charlesism 7y ago

Alot about our system of roads and cars strikes me as crazy. Most of the vehicles on the road have only one person in them, yet weigh as much as an elephant. Nobody drives under the speed limit, which is typically fast enough to result in hundreds of thousands of fatalities every year anyways. Every neighborhood designed primarily for these idiotically heavy vehicles, that occasionally drive over pets and children who made the mistake of wandering off a footpath. Then there’s the pollution, of course. I can’t imagine many people would accept the way we do things today, if we started from zero and someone proposed it, instead of the situation slow-boiling us over a period of a half century.

agumonkey 7y ago
The worst part about it IMO is traffic light and stops. In a city, if you can drive around 20mph (25 maybe) uninterrupted, you get in most places very fast, very pleasantly and with fuel savings since you never slow down. Instead of a smooth flow, you get drivers that do: - high accelerations - nervous braking - idle engine running between 30 - 60 seconds (120 max?) Pure waste. Maybe I'm asking for a problem too complex to solve, but a smooth oriented traffic organization would help. Well, that is until fossil fuels are removed from the market.
- joking 7y ago
  Difficult for big vehicles, but changing the landscape and focusing more on personal mobility vehicles and a lot can be done (like the elevated roundabouts for bikes on Netherlands)
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    this is insane.. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elevated+roundabouts+for+bikes+on+Netherlands&t=ffcm&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fphotorator.com%2Fphotos%2Fimages%2Fthe-hovenring-cable-stayed-aerial-bicycle-roundabout-in-the-netherlands-near-eindhoven--52980.jpg https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elevated+roundabouts+for+bikes+on+... I've read tons of articles about bikes in netherlands and how they design roundabouts. But never this. It's a bit too much in terms of landscaping impact but it must be sooo lovely to bike..

Denzel 7y ago

His argument distills to: solve it all-at-once, or don’t solve it at all. This is an uninteresting and uninspiring line of thinking that ignores the nature of socially dynamic systems which don’t exist in a world of instantaneous cause-and-effect. His conclusion states that electric cars make a difference, but they don’t make a real difference: “I do think they can slightly reduce unsustainability” but “by switching from a regular car to electric I might think that I am making a real difference”. I’m sorry that the author doesn’t consider a real reduction in emissions a real difference. Look, it’s simple, climate change will require a concerted effort to change in multiple markets across multiple arenas. And the solutions are not mutually exclusive. People that buy electric cars to help the environment or become vegetarian, are probably more likely to make additional changes in their life, and persuade others to make changes as well, to reduce emissions. Most people arrive at the decision to purchase an electric vehicle exactly because they are questioning their way of life. Electric vehicles are not a talisman of false hope, they’re a singular step in the right direction.

eptcyka 7y ago
The argument isn't that doing _something_ is bad, it's that the amount of effort people put into obtaining their shiny non-paleolithic-compost-fueled-but-rather-battery-powered 2 tonne sledgehammers would be better spent changing policies that operate on organizational rather than individual units. How about we just stop buying as much shit from halfway across the world? Global trade requires us to spend stupid amounts of fuel in engines that have never been optimized for emissions. This of course involves making changes to global trade, this is a lot harder, but surely all those people who are capable of shelling out at least 30000$ (but in reality, barely anyone gets the cheapest model because this is a luxury item) could be doing things that make a bigger difference.
- Denzel 7y ago
  You didn’t rebut any of my points. First, can you not buy an electric car and advocate and enact organizational or systematic change? They’re not mutually exclusive. Second, how do dynamic systems composed of many independent, self-directed agents change? Instantaneously or over some period of time? How long is that period of time? Probably much longer a period of time than it takes to purchase an electric vehicle (< 1 minute) and reduce your emissions immediately.

abhi152 7y ago

Ok, so the author suggests nothing.. He fails to describe the solution(if any). May be the solution is population control.

jaimex2 7y ago
Pretty much. He doesn't seem to grasp the reality that solving the problem is political and like gun laws in the US there are those that will oppose every change no matter how small every step of the way for money regardless of the human or planetary cost.

flr03 7y ago

We can imagine that the energy mix in EU will lean towards more renewable energy, increasing the benefit of electric cars over conventional cars. If indeed not decreasing yet, the number of cars sold seems to flatten and I can see that Europeans cities are transforming to make life more complicated for cars owners (ie LEZ tax in London) and easier for pedestrians and bikes. Several reasons to be optimistic.

mcot2 7y ago

“Still, in most cases an electric car is slightly less bad for the living planet than a comparable car with an internal combustion engine – if you can afford to buy one.” Bad article all around. There is bias in that statement alone referencing the price of EV’s after an admission that they are actually better for the environment already. This article also references almost every negative trope about BEV’s. What many of these articles fail to explore is any future advancements in technology that can solve some of the issues listed. Nothing in BEV technology is static, almost everything is improving from motor efficiency all the way to removing things like cobalt from batteries. It’s also possible that we will see a lot more localized solar and wind power for charging stations over time. Lastly, autonomy is coming which will be a game changer when paired with BEV technology.

lawlessone 7y ago

Electric vehicles would make a huge difference to me and many others that suffer from asthma. Moving the emissions away from the vehicles , away from city centres and roads to the factories and power stations where they can be controlled would save thousands of lives. Our children will look at us how we look at people during the industrial revolution. And a gradual change is better than no change at all.

acd 7y ago
Very true many countries in Europe has shifted to diesels due to lower co2 but they make the air dirty. Dirty air is bad for asthmatics. Hybrid gasoline/biogas can be as co2 efficient as diesel if not more with a lot cleaner tail pipe air. Almost zero local emission with 10kw batteries and upwards.
- baud147258 7y ago
  The shift to diesel was also caused by a lower price of gas and a lower consumption for medium and long distances.
growlist 7y ago
Exhaust emissions are only part of the air pollution problem - brake discs and tyres contribute around 50%, as I recall. Depressing! But we need lighter vehicles all round, and less travelling in general.
- NullPrefix 7y ago
  >brake discs Regenerative braking does not have this problem. Although the tyre problem remain.
  - growlist 7y ago
    Though the extra weight of the regenerative system has to be taken into account.

acd 7y ago

Electric batteries gives the most effect in shared transport such as buses and taxis. If I remember correctly it’s 50x more efficient with batteries in such public vehicles. This is due to higher utilization they buses drive all day vs private cars mostly are parked. This we should electrify public transport first for maximum carbon reduction.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
lota-putty 7y ago
+1 Electric Public Transport -1 Battery based Public Transport
PeterStuer 7y ago
Smart Grids touted as 'the future' in the energy distribution sector are counting on all those parked batteries for their network balance.

693471 7y ago

I bought my EV for three reasons: 1. Traditional car maintenance is expensive and sucks 2. I'm betting due to natural disasters in the environment and in the Oval Office we will see fuel prices continue to rise 3. While I don't think it will save the planet by itself, it can certainly save lives. Emissions are dangerous to breathe in and we are willfully ignoring it.

ensiferum 7y ago
And the energy comes without emissions? :)
- srfilipek 7y ago
  Depends on where you live. In West Virginia? No, it's almost all coal based. In Vermont? Yes, their grid is 100% renewable. Source: https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html
- 693471 7y ago
  The electricity required to refine a gallon of gas is 6kW, so add that into the equation on what I'm not responsible for emitting. ICE vehicles are doing double duty on emissions but nobody's paying attention.

bryanlarsen 7y ago

This is an extremely counter-productive line of thinking. Slowing climate change to manageable levels requires massive costs and sacrifice, but not insane levels. In terms of cost, single figure trillions. IOW, similar to the Apollo project or the Iraq war. A heck of a lot cheaper than WWII.

bryanlarsen 7y ago

Two me, reading the graph in the article brings up two priorities: 1: transition to renewable energy 2: figure out how to lower the carbon emissions during 1&2 sound a lot easier than completely transitioning off motorized personal transportation. #2 can be done with appropriate government incentives, like a $100/ton carbon tax + equivalent tariff. Producers will use alternate energy sources and otherwise eliminate carbon wherever it costs them less than $100/ton to do so, and the $100 can pay for sequestration when it costs them more. Of course #2 will significantly increase the price of a car. This will also help to convince people to use alternatives. But cars will still be significantly cheaper than they are in Denmark or Norway, yet those two countries are still fairly car oriented.

acidburnNSA 7y ago
Low carbon energy! The article listed pure renewable energy but if it was biofuel, emissions would be high. We must stop talking about renewability and focus on sustainable, low-carbon energy. They are not the same. Further example: nuclear fusion is low carbon and sustainable but not considered renewable. If we charged EVs with nuclear fusion power stations, we'd all be happy.
bryanlarsen 7y ago
Oops, "2: figure out how to lower the carbon emissions during vehicle production"

growlist 7y ago

We could for example: 1. Incentivise retrofitting of electric transmissions to cars with internal combustion engines 2. Disincentivise the introduction of new models, visual updates etc. to existing cars via taxation 3. Incentivise durability and repairability - force car makers to produce cars that are modular and easily repaired, enforced limits on pricing of spare parts, force open-sourcing of designs etc. Of course all of above would likely smash the car makers' current business model to pieces - and when you get down to it this is the real problem with the kind of genuine, general change we need to see in order to save the Earth. Sustainable approaches simply will not deliver the kind of reduction in consumption required. Everyone is going to have to accept a much poorer lifestyle. The main blocker to me is the rich: how are they going to justify their continued opulence when the companies they own (are forced to) produce so little for the average person?

sokoloff 7y ago
> Incentivise retrofitting of electric transmissions to cars with internal combustion engines What would that do to help? Modern transmissions are fairly efficient (basically anything with a lockup torque converter is now very good and any manual or computer controlled manual transmission is excellent in terms of efficiency). I can’t see what an electronic transmission on an ICE engine would do that would possibly pay back.
- growlist 7y ago
  Removal of the ICE in favour of electric I meant, in case I wasn't clear. Massive amounts of power etc. are required to produce the chassis, bodywork etc. - it makes sense to get a lifetime's use out of them rather than throw away the whole thing just because the ICE has gone out of fashion.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    Ok. The transmission is a very specific (and overly specific for your intended meaning) assembly, so it was indeed not clear.

RickJWagner 7y ago

"Tesla sales are up seven-fold from Q3 2015 to Q3 2018" Wow. I consider that a good sign. Electric cars are progress.

esotericn 7y ago

The charts on the page directly contradict the headline. In the renewable energy case emissions are miniscule, and in fact only come about because the chart assumes large emissions during manufacture - a lot of the processes involved in producing an EV could be done with renewable energy, and would be if we instituted a carbon tax or otherwise forced the issue.

cmrdporcupine 7y ago

Seems to me a lot of people are so attached to carculture that they can't even read the article properly. The author sees all sorts of good things about electric cars. I drive them myself. I love cars. But... The points the article makes about cars being part of a larger flawed system of urban and rural development are spot on. 'Self-driving' cars will only make this worse. Even just the excessive prevalence of hard-top surfaces in roads and parking lots leads to environmental catastrophe when flooding begins. Urban sprawl leads to farmland and natural area destruction. The car is the ultimate symbol of entitled consumerist individualism, and it is becoming more and more unsustainable. The net effect of every household being in car(s) with a population as big as we have is really bad, even if all emissions were to be eliminated. If all the private investment money being dumped into self-driving technology at the moment were public money being put into urban mass transit, just think of what could be accomplished...

whenanother 7y ago
urban mass transit is never used by the wealthy. the last thing people with ill gotten gains want to do is to be around others who can identify them and see with their own eyes how much they’ve stolen. and they don’t want to be around their own kind as there’s no honor amongst thieves.
- dragontamer 7y ago
  Senators use the DC Metro and Stock Market traders in NYC use their subway. Big Subway systems in big cities are pretty famous for seeing executives in suits and celebrities sit in the same bus as beggars. > ill gotten gains That's... quite an assumption you're making there. Sure, some execs are assholes. But most true wealth is driven through cooperation.
  - rpmisms 7y ago
    I think he's making the morally dubious jump to say that corporate profits are immoral.

Mvandenbergh 7y ago

Why is the embodied carbon in the manufacture of the car the same in all the energy mix scenarios? Surely quite a lot of electricity is used in manufacturing electric vehicles. Also, solutions that rely on substantially reconfiguring living patterns - moving from driving-required suburbs to walkable communities also have large embodied carbon costs. It's all well and good to say that suburbs are energy inefficient but the US has a lot of them already built.

zzzcpan 7y ago
> solutions that rely on substantially reconfiguring living patterns Surely switching to bikes or electric bikes is not that substantial and immediately eliminates a lot of car related problems.
- Mvandenbergh 7y ago
  Sure but there are many houses that are surrounded by just more houses for many, many kilometres with the nearest concentration of offices and other places of work, stores, and transport hubs (if there even are any) very substantial distances away. It's challenging to increase cycling when that is the case.

upofadown 7y ago

You can see this false hope expressed all the time in media articles that assume that we will just electrify all the cars with no other changes to how we do transportation. That hope is why we are told how important it is to get chargers absolutely everywhere, that charging needs to be fast and how important it is that electric cars have the same range as petroleum cars. The thing is, cities don't want any sort of cars these days. So in most cases the type of energy used to propel a car is beside the point and a lot of this discussion doesn't matter any more.

bjourne 7y ago

The numbers are somewhat contested. See potholer54's well-sourced video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwMPFDqyfrA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwMPFDqyfrA He cites ghg savings of about 20-30% for a common mix of electricity production sources. Of course, Jussi Pasanen is still completely right. The only solution is to stop driving cars.

phtrivier 7y ago
Fine. Which rural neighborhood do we nuke first ? Big cities can definitely phase cars put, and should electrify their public transportations for the people who can't bike. Some form of "small number of passengers, not short but not long range" trips are going to have to be done ouside of cities, unless you displace people. If "displacing people to cities" is your advocated policy, or "preventing people from traveling at all", that's a legitimate point to argue, but be prepared for fierce resistance from well meaning people (who're not going to massively vote for you...)

kaolti 7y ago

The author has a point. Out of all the other industries dominated by massive corporations - and we know how they go about doing business - the first priority to save the planet is for John Doe to buy a new product! Also, let's create a culture where we feel justified to shame people who don't do it. Of course nothing is black and white. I love electric cars and will probably get one. I think they're really cool and would love to do my bit in keeping things green. BUT at the same, you got to see a bit of irony in the whole thing don't you?

jaimex2 7y ago

What an absolute garbage piece. Solving environmental impact is extremely political and is fought every step of the way by those with vested interests. This adds nothing to help improve things, it actually does the opposite. Yes, we know if we went back to pre-industrial revolution we'd stop impacting the planet. Good luck with that.

wffurr 7y ago

I made this same point on an article about "where will apartment dwellers and city dwellers with street parking charge their EVs". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20678842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20678842 It was a question that was completely missing the forest for the trees. Just like this article is claiming all the EV boosterism is doing. An EV car is still a car. It's still three tons of steel that goes way too fast and gets used in all manner of inappropriate ways. As an EV owner, you are still part of the problem. Not to mention that you just bought a fantastically expensive vehicle to signal how much you "care" about the environment, but not enough to give up any creature comforts. And how many anti-malaria bednets could you have bought instead if you got a used fuel efficient ICE or, gasp, no car at all? Much higher impact would be accelerating retrofitting our cities and towns for other modes of transportation: bikes and scooters, massively expanded public transit, and walking.

Nasrudith 7y ago

Looking at other articles the guy seems to be full in apocalyptic thinking - a few in he has an article on "Collapse" and lifeboat thinking. Those are words are downright toxic meme symptoms referring to paranoid and evil ideologirs respectively. They are like referring to science based medicine as "alleopathic" is a sure sign that they are off the deep ene in alternative medicine. To explain "collapse" briefly there is even a /r/Collapse convinced of coming doomsdays from various sources from any fear de jure from ebola, economic meltdowns, or global warming. "Lifeboat ethics" refers to a rehash of Malthusians and Eugenicists arguing helping people who are worse off is actively immoral and rapidly justifies travesties. There is a reason I skip straight to evil when describing them - when in power their actions can have no other end.

patientplatypus 7y ago

One of the things I like to do when half in the bag in a bar and blagging to a new friend is to say, "Look - pick a direction - any direction - and tell me what you see." And what they see is plastic and metal and bar bottles with paint on them and more plastic and all the detritus of human society. And every piece of it, as far as the eye can see!, will be garbage in 6 months to 20 years and sit on the ground and leech poisons into the Earth and nothing will grow from it. Every. Single. Piece. We, as human beans, have broken the cycle of life and death where something grows, flowers, dies, rots and something else grows and flowers. This idea that we can make a new shiny thing that will become more garbage to fix all our problems so we can keep eating more isn't going to change that. The solution is that we simply have to do with less. And people will kill each other before they admit that. It's already starting to happen now.

theworld572 7y ago

Electric vehicles are ranking number 26 in terms of total cost and total atmospheric reduction of CO2: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank So its not a talisman, but it is certainly a real step in the right direction. I don't hear anybody saying that electric cars means we can just forget about the other causes of climate change? A very contrarian article that just argues against a straw man. I suspect people who write articles like this are usually the ones who revel in being smarter than everybody else.

choeger 7y ago

From my European perspective, this reads like a typical leftist pov. First of all, of course everyone has to change their way of living. This has been the corner Stone of left ideology since forever. And then of course the attack on EV, because it is not about the climate, but about individuality. Individual travel simply does not fit into a world view where everyone has to change their way of living into the rational way. And offering a different solution is heresy.

La-ang 7y ago

Too little too late? That's the best the writer could say? Pessimism is not what we yearn for.

g8oz 7y ago

Some perspective on EVs: Project Drawdown lists CO2 reduction by adoption of better cars as #49 in it's ranked list of of climate change solutions. #1 and #2 are refrigerant management and onshore wind turbines respectively.

krak12 7y ago

I started working on electric cars way before Tzero helped create Tesla Roadster. Wasted my young ages trying to explain the benefits of EV and died with no support at all. Next year Tesla turned into a billion dollar company. Our fault? Being located on Europe, instead on USA. And yes, Rimac uses our tech on their power trains. 14 years later.

alkonaut 7y ago

So we transition to EV's and we change power to non-fossil fuels. It's not hard it just costs money and requires some sacrifice. I'm on 100% renewable now. If I wasn't already, I'd happily pay twice what I pay now to ensure I was at least on non-fossil if not on renewable.

JeffL 7y ago

Once we get self driving, there could be far fewer cars per person. If you amortize that part of the bar chart of emissions which comes from producing the vehicle and divide it by, say, 20, and continue to develop new solar and wind farms, the BEV looks really amazing compared to current non-self driving ICE cars.

JKCalhoun 7y ago
I tell people who are waiting for self-driving cars to take the bus.

buboard 7y ago

It's much more impactful for the tech community to push for remote work everywhere except where it's physically necessary than to convince everyone to buy a battery car. Where i live it's impossible to use one anyway due to non-robust electicity network. Despite being an island that is sunny year round, its not possible to incorporate more renewables into the system, so the main source of electricity remains oil. I bet the main buyers of battery cars live in big cities anyway. https://image.slidesharecdn.com/emissionsfromdrivingtowork-1213018860684874-9/95/emissions-from-driving-to-work-4-728.jpg?cb=1212993525 https://image.slidesharecdn.com/emissionsfromdrivingtowork-1...

jmpman 7y ago

I have an electric car because it lets me get in the carpool lane. I understand that investing the delta between an electric car and an ICE into some sort of carbon capture technology would likely be better for the environment, but then I wouldn’t be home for dinner 15min earlier.

blendo 7y ago

About 300,000 cars cross the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge every day. I think the author's point is that if they were all electric, there would _still_ be 300,000 cars crossing the bridge each day, and the problems of road maintenance costs, pedestrian safety, and soul-deadening commute times remain. Fewer GHG emissions, to be sure. A good next step would be to focus on reducing the total energy of the system. Minimizing 1/2 m v^2 is your friend here -- reduce weight and reduce speed.

lm28469 7y ago

Have anyone seriously studied the impact of switching to all-electric cars on a global scale ? I read that there are over a billion passenger cars right now, let's say we manage to shift them all to electric by 2050 (not saying this is realistic), sure it'll move the air pollution out of the city, but what about long term pollution, manufacturing, recycling, &c. ? Would it really solve the problem or simply move it out of our sight for a few decades ?

sunkenvicar 7y ago

Everyone can drive an electric car with the Green Nuclear Deal.

lucas_membrane 7y ago

More inconvenient truth in TFA. Note that the market price of electricity hit $9.00/kwh in Texas last week. IICC, that would be maybe a couple of Benjamins to charge an electric car, suggesting that there will have to be bigger changes than electric cars if we really want to keep things the way they are.