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Yes, while 100 mpg per passenger is roughly 2x the best hybrid car, the presence of air travel as an option, especially in a business context allows individuals

Yes, while 100 mpg per passenger is roughly 2x the best hybrid car, the presence of air travel as an option, especially in a business context allows individuals to accrue many orders of magnitude _more miles_. MPG per passenger is the wrong unit. Gallons per person per hour of active transport seems like a better unit to measure. For example, say your non-hybrid car gets 30 mpg, and you average 30 miles per hour between city/highway, you're at 1 gallon per hour per passenger, assuming 1 person per car. For air travel averaging out at 500 mph, the 100 miles per gallon per passenger equates to 5 gallons per hour per passenger. So you would need to pack a plane with 5x the number of people that the 100 mpg number was measured at to even COME CLOSE to hitting the miles/passenger-hour of a non-hybrid car driven by a single driver. That's a crowded plane.

Robotbeat 7y ago
Passenger-hour is not an appropriate metric here. passenger-miles is. But I should point out here that electric cars usually get 100mpge or better. And it's already feasible to do road trips in a Tesla. I'll be doing a (short) road trip with my first-gen Leaf. For domestic trips, we can replace air travel with regional electric buses in the near term and electric airplanes in the mid-term. In the far-term, we can do even long-haul air travel using lithium-air batteries or very high performance lithium/sulfur or lithium metal anode batteries and extremely efficient airframes and multiple hops. That'd be faster and cheaper (at least in the US with high infrastructure costs) than high speed rail.
- esotericn 7y ago
  > electric cars usually get 100mpge or better Right, and the mpge metric is flawed, because it assumes a (typically bad) energy mix. 5km driven in the UK is equivalent to 100km driven in Sweden. The former sits at an average of approx. 300gCO2e/kWh. The latter at 15gCO2e/kWh. With electric cars, the ultimate situation is that all of the carbon cost is in the production of the car/roads and maintenance thereof. Which is another issue that can be targeted and mitigated. By contrast the only ultimate hope for a combustion powered plane or car is carbon capture. The 'MPGe' of an electric car in a country with 90%+ renewable energy is like, 1000 or something daft like that.
IanCal 7y ago
That's a very odd measure. That would put driving the car at 15mph getting 20mpg as better than 30mph getting 30mpg.

Robotbeat 7y ago

Passenger-hour is not an appropriate metric here. passenger-miles is. But I should point out here that electric cars usually get 100mpge or better. And it's already feasible to do road trips in a Tesla. I'll be doing a (short) road trip with my first-gen Leaf. For domestic trips, we can replace air travel with regional electric buses in the near term and electric airplanes in the mid-term. In the far-term, we can do even long-haul air travel using lithium-air batteries or very high performance lithium/sulfur or lithium metal anode batteries and extremely efficient airframes and multiple hops. That'd be faster and cheaper (at least in the US with high infrastructure costs) than high speed rail.

esotericn 7y ago
> electric cars usually get 100mpge or better Right, and the mpge metric is flawed, because it assumes a (typically bad) energy mix. 5km driven in the UK is equivalent to 100km driven in Sweden. The former sits at an average of approx. 300gCO2e/kWh. The latter at 15gCO2e/kWh. With electric cars, the ultimate situation is that all of the carbon cost is in the production of the car/roads and maintenance thereof. Which is another issue that can be targeted and mitigated. By contrast the only ultimate hope for a combustion powered plane or car is carbon capture. The 'MPGe' of an electric car in a country with 90%+ renewable energy is like, 1000 or something daft like that.

IanCal 7y ago

That's a very odd measure. That would put driving the car at 15mph getting 20mpg as better than 30mph getting 30mpg.