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This may be a bit off-topic, but these comments are really eye-opening. I had no idea that anti-EV sentiment was so strongly held. Especially among HN users, wh

This may be a bit off-topic, but these comments are really eye-opening. I had no idea that anti-EV sentiment was so strongly held. Especially among HN users, who you would assume would be more likely to see the benefits of new technology. What's disappointing is that all the talking points are the same-old tired fossil fuel propaganda from a decade ago. We have made progress, and we can make more progress if we all pull together. It's seems crazy that in the 21st century the best option we have for the storage and transfer of energy is "let's burn stuff". We can do better than that.

maallooc 6y ago
But the best option is to burn stuff. The best batteries avalible has a density of 0.4 MJ/L while gasoline has 34 MJ/L.
mymythisisthis 6y ago
I would like to start by banning all diesel...this is something that can be done immediately. All city buses can run an regular gas or propane, same with large transport trucks. I'd like my city to become a bicycling paradise. It's the best way of getting around for under 30km.
- jefftk 6y ago
  Uh, could you say why you want to ban diesel in particular?
  - brianwawok 6y ago
    It releases a fair bit more gunk into the air. Bunker oil is even far worse.
  - sjg007 6y ago
    Diesel has higher particulates and pm2,5s.
perryizgr8 6y ago
Letting people choose petrol and diesel vehicles is not "anti EV". I believe sales of electric cars will automatically eclipse petrochemical ones gradually, government coercion and suppression of individual liberty is not required.
- GreenWatermelon 6y ago
  The climate doesn't wait and doesn't care. it's better to accelerate the adoption of Electrical cars by any means necessary before the occurrence of apocalyptic events.
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    Then ban private jets too. If the climate doesn't wait and doesn't care, then allowing wealthy people to pollute the ever-living fuck out of the environment solely because they're wealthy is even more perverse than placing the enormous burden on poor and middle class people to buy a new technology that has shit infrastructure.
alibarber 6y ago
I have no strong opinions on this other than that it's inevitable at some point. However, a theory: Many of the HN crowd here are quite likely to live in an urban area, in an appartment without a fixed parking space. There is no 'charging at home'. Sure there're a decent number of plugs around - but for _everyone_? Not by a long shot. What this law is basically saying is that there will be no practical way for these people to own a car - not least without significant infrastructure work and public investment (and corresponding political will), which is, not always something you want to bet on. Given the healthy dose of skepticisim anyway - I'm not entirely surprised this is being received with less than universal excitement.
- azalemeth 6y ago
  I've never found the need to buy a car in my life. I'm 34. I commute everywhere by bicycle, and my partner (who also doesn't own a car) and I get heavy things delivered. It is possible, and, for the sake of the planet, I really think that this is a great thing that we should be celebrating. Most people on the planet live in cities, and I really think that we should try to wean them off fossil fuels.
  - romanoderoma 6y ago
    Heavy things delivered means you are contributing to pollution as well as anybody else What's really polluting the atmosphere is not people's cars, it's the constant and unstoppable traffic of goods delivered from country to country for no real reason other than "economy of scale" A friend of mine has asked for an eye pencil replacement the other day because it was delivered of the wrong colour It costed a couple euros and came from Korea They gladly sent another one and picked up the old one For a two euros eye pencil Imagine what the fashion industry produces when it moves the 30 billion pounds of clothes that every year are discarded in UK Not to say that people don't pollute, but that the control should start on who produce the most pollution and also profit from it, not from the last ring of the supply chain
  - alibarber 6y ago
    Sure - I lived in London for years and didn't own a car. I also commuted by bicylce and I thought it was great. Sometimes the highlight of my day! But people in general don't like having their options constricted even if it's for the greater good. It's human nature and I think the best ways forward are to get people excited about the electric future. 'In 10 years electric cars will be so good you'll forget we ever bothered with petrol' would probably be a more effective way to get people excited. Unfortunately that'd need to come from a pretty credible source, and they'd get the credit for it, and so in the absence of that - just make this law! It's easy, and who will be around in 10 years (in politics) anyway?... That's why I'm raising my eyebrows a bit at this.
gambiting 6y ago
I live in the UK and I'm 100% for it in theory, but 100% against it in practice. I currently have an electric vehicle - the only kind of usage scenario where it works and is absolutely brilliant is charging at home. That's about it. Public charging is a joke, vast majority of stations either don't work, are occupied most of the time, or cost so much money to use that it would literally be cheaper to drive a diesel car. We visited our friends some time ago in London for a few days(before lockdown). They live in an apartment so no way I could run a cable to the parking space. No problem I thought - there's a Shell station nearby with a charging point, several ChargeYourCar points at car park not far away, and I could see on ZapMap that there were two charging points on the street - and worst case scenario there are rapid chargers along the way at few motorway stops. We got there and basically - all ChargeYourCar points were out of order for 3 days we were there, the 2 charging points on the street were only for permit holders(something that ZapMap didn't mention), and the one single charging point at the Shell station nearby was occupied every single time I checked. So we stopped at the motorway services in the end, where they had 4 rapid charging points - all taken. We waited 30 minutes for someone to leave, once they left the car wouldn't connect - had to ring up the number on the charger, finally the customer service advisor restarted the point for me and it started charging. Only another 45 minutes of waiting and we had enough charge to get home. Oh and the charge was literally £0.49/kWh(I pay £0.05/kWh at home on a night tariff) - I had a Qashqai 1.6dCi few years ago that I could fill up for that much and drive down to london and back. Again, the car itself is brilliant. It is the future. I have no idea how people still drive around in cars that burn anything to move - they are loud, having to have gears is stupid, having to keep buying fuel is stupid. And yet. I can't imagine that the UK government and the private sector will get their act together and somehow, in 9 years, the infrastructure will be amazing, and they will find answers to questions like how do you charge at an apartment or a house with no dedicated parking space. I'm eagerly awaiting to hear about these solutions.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  How do you expect this to change? Whatever the downsides of electric cars, rampant global warming is clearly much worse. (And yes, stopping it will require more than just switching to electric cars.) Perhaps if electric vehicles were mandated, fast charging stations would be more widely available...
ggreer 6y ago
It’s not anti-EV sentiment. It’s anti-blanket-ban sentiment. Even a decade from now there will be some use cases where gas vehicles are a better fit than EVs. Instead of a blanket ban on new gas cars, it’s less coercive and more economically efficient to tax their externalities. I’m not a fan of gas vehicles. The only car I own is a Tesla. Still, I’m aware that gasoline cars do have certain advantages and banning them outright seems more detrimental than taxing them.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  The climate doesn’t care about economics, only total parts per million of atmospheric CO2. It is mind boggling it’s taken us this long to appreciate the gravity of the situation and new combustion vehicle bans are kicking in. I’m sure even when crop failures and mass migrations happen, some will still complain about their rights to burn fossil fuels for energy. We pulled progress and growth forward through incurring an enormous energy debt (burning ancient sunlight for 100+ years), and now it’s time to pay it back.
  - gambiting 6y ago
    Right, but we also recognize that eventually the impact of something is so small that it's not worth banning. Why are Lamborghinis allowed to be sold despite emissions easily going into hundreds of grams of CO2/km? Because legislators have correctly recognized that the number of Lamborghinis sold each year, and the average amount of miles they are usually driven is absolutely negligable and has close to no impact on climate change. That's why small car manufacturers who produce few thousand cars a year have an exemption from the new emissions regulations enforced by the EU from next year - they just don't matter at all. Once the market gets to a point where the sales of ICE cars are around few percent out of all, maybe even less - then there's no point in banning them at all. Clearly only people who absolutely need them are buying them, because no one else does. So....why ban them? And it looks like the market is absolutely heading towards that point anyway, with truly draconian fines in the EU introduced soon and general apetite for electric cars showing strong growth in the car sales. We'll be there in 10 years, full ban or not.
Razengan 6y ago
> Especially among HN users, who you would assume would be more likely to see the benefits of new technology. HN users generally seem to care about their own convenience at the cost of everything else, as seen by all the support for things like Electron.
john_moscow 6y ago
It's merely about usability. EVs are great for short commuting hops, but offer no solution if you want to have a road trip with daily mileage exceeding the full battery range. Also note that the posted ranges are "under best possible circumstances", so factor in real-world use, battery degradation and not wanting the charge to drop below 20-30% for your own peace of mind, and your effective roadtrip range is sliced in half. Sure, there are charging stations, but if you are traveling with kids, having an extra 1-hour break, could be a huge headache. A common standard for batteries that could be quickly exchanged at a charging station, instead of charging them, could solve the problem 100%, but instead we see governments forcing less effective solutions into everyone's throat.
- strawberrypuree 6y ago
  My husband and I took a road trip of 4,682 miles in a Tesla, with a dog. We stopped every 3 hours and charged for 30 minutes. It was not only possible, but easy, because those stops corresponded to lunch, coffee, dinner, and sleeping. The dog needed to be let out, I needed to stretch my legs, etc.
  - john_moscow 6y ago
    It's harder with kids. Tesla gets a reasonable range due to squeezing everything to the limit. Getting the same range out of a minivan-sized vehicle without tripling the cost of batteries would be rather tricky. Also when you travel with kids, you make longer breaks when the kids need them. In that case, picking a random gas station nearby filling the gas while my wife runs everybody through the toilet and distributes snacks, makes things easier. Doing it exactly on schedule with a forced 30-minute wait in a fixed location would be much trickier.
xkcd-sucks 6y ago
> Especially among HN users, who you would assume would be more likely to see the benefits of new technology. I think people closer to the frontlines of tech understand better the problems with new technologies as they are implemented in practice, hence more people prefer having the choice to use older, less sexy, more time-tested technologies.
neya 6y ago
I'm a technical savvy IT consultant with more than 10 years experience. I have dealt with automotive software for more than 5 years with various clients. Some of my perspective is based on that. I drive a diesel car currently and I plan to keep it as long as possible. Depending on where you live, EV's may range from moderately practical to unrealistic. I travel to many countries frequently and have lived across APAC including India. If you talk about a country like Singapore, which is very small in real estate (literally called a tiny red "dot"), sure. EV's are quite reasonable, also somewhat practical. It's good for daily commute or going around the island, sure. If you talk about a country like India, then, it's highly impractical to own one. First, you need proper infrastructure across such a massive land area, which by itself could take decades to get right (currently, India doesn't have them). Then, you need to factor in the populace and thus the long queues you're going to be facing in the public charging spots. Because India is such a vast country, if you wanted to travel from the southern most point of the country to the topmost (Kanyakumari to Kashmir), it's going to be impossible with just an EV and relying on public charging points. The charging time alone would add up quite quickly over such a long duration. I do a quarter of that stretch frequently - Banglore to Kanyakumari or sometimes even from Chennai. It takes me 8 hours on an average including a 1 hour meal break. And the fuel stations are just so easily accessible across this entire stretch. It costs me just $50 for one way and $70 for a 2 way journey of about 700-800 kms. If I was driving an EV, the best range I can get is about 250 kms (based on the options available in India and not quoting optimistic manufacturer ratings, but based on real world traffic conditions in India) on my Hyundai Kona. Charging to 80% takes about an hour. If you do the math, I'm going to be spending 3 hours just on charging alone. The cost for charging is also much more expensive compared to what I'm going to be spending on oil. It's a clear cut decision for me, especially when I have to travel long distances. And I'm not even factoring the risk of what happens if my car breaks down in the middle of the highway, which a local mechanic will have no idea on how to fix. During my work experience, I have audited some of the code for some popular manufacturers out there. EV cars are actually not about battery tech, it's about software. They run basically everything from a software "engine". That actually scares me, especially because I'm a software engineer. The modern EV has a lot of things going down under the hood. This is so unlike my Suzuki diesel which is simply an old school car with a battle-tested ECU (the same ECU is reused across many models, manufacturers for decades now) made by Bosch. The code in there is very simple and doesn't try to do a lot. It takes care of firing the pistons at the right time, making sure the turbocharger doesn't overwork, it takes care of the locks and alarms in the car and that's about it. It doesn't do all the "smart" stuff that a modern EV does. Like talk to the manufacturer telling them where I am exactly. Or when I should service my car. Or what playlists I would enjoy listening to. The infotainment system on my Suzuki is separate, for instance. There is no software "engine". As someone who prefers dumb speaker systems and TVs instead of "smart" speakers and TVs, I prefer regular, old-school cars than the modern "smart" EVs. If they made a dumb EV, for sure, I'd go for it for my city use, but it still doesn't meet my criteria for long distance travel as explained above. This is why I consider EV's highly impractical FOR ME. And this argument about "let's burn stuff" - did you know many charging points consume power off the grid, especially in India? And many people like me who own the Kona, actually carry around a portable Honda generator in our boot (which runs off petrol) which can charge the car for worse case situations. > What's disappointing is that all the talking points are the same-old tired fossil fuel propaganda from a decade ago. My point is, we are not there yet and we have to acknowledge that. You can't cast judgement on the rest who don't use an EV simply because it's not practical for them. That's elitist. EV's aren't necessarily "better" for everyone.
lm28469 6y ago
It depends at which scale you look at it. EVs are nice because you get less emissions locally, but in the grand scheme of things you just displaced the pollution and created new problems (lithium, cobalt and rare earth mines, battery recycling, power source, updating the grid &c). > We have made progress, and we can make more progress if we all pull together. The question is, is it enough ? It feels a bit like we're curing the symptoms but not their causes. There are 1.5 billion vehicles in the world, we should strive to reduce their number, not continue to expand it, EVs aren't a miracle, 1.5 billion EVs are still a huge problem
- _ph_ 6y ago
  The impact of electric vehicles is minimal compared to ICE vehicles. An ICE vehicle burns like 20 tons of fuel during its life time. An electric vehicle needs less than 10 kg of lithium, which can be completely recycled at the end of life. The next generation of Tesla batteries will be cobalt free and no lithium battery contains any rare earths. That is an urban legend. Switching to electric doesn't mean to increase the number of vehicles, they are built instead of ICE vehicles. Ideally, we reduce the count a lot, but every single vehicle built needs to be electric.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    * If generation is 100% carbon free
    - _ph_ 6y ago
      Electric cars are a win in almost all countries already, but of course, if we want to prevent climate change, we have to convert energy production to be 100% carbon free, and that quickly. Basically every electric car bought today will eventually run on 100% carbon free electricity. Any ICE vehicle will run on 100% carbon.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

maallooc 6y ago

But the best option is to burn stuff. The best batteries avalible has a density of 0.4 MJ/L while gasoline has 34 MJ/L.

mymythisisthis 6y ago

I would like to start by banning all diesel...this is something that can be done immediately. All city buses can run an regular gas or propane, same with large transport trucks. I'd like my city to become a bicycling paradise. It's the best way of getting around for under 30km.

jefftk 6y ago
Uh, could you say why you want to ban diesel in particular?
- brianwawok 6y ago
  It releases a fair bit more gunk into the air. Bunker oil is even far worse.
- sjg007 6y ago
  Diesel has higher particulates and pm2,5s.

perryizgr8 6y ago

Letting people choose petrol and diesel vehicles is not "anti EV". I believe sales of electric cars will automatically eclipse petrochemical ones gradually, government coercion and suppression of individual liberty is not required.

GreenWatermelon 6y ago
The climate doesn't wait and doesn't care. it's better to accelerate the adoption of Electrical cars by any means necessary before the occurrence of apocalyptic events.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  Then ban private jets too. If the climate doesn't wait and doesn't care, then allowing wealthy people to pollute the ever-living fuck out of the environment solely because they're wealthy is even more perverse than placing the enormous burden on poor and middle class people to buy a new technology that has shit infrastructure.

alibarber 6y ago

I have no strong opinions on this other than that it's inevitable at some point. However, a theory: Many of the HN crowd here are quite likely to live in an urban area, in an appartment without a fixed parking space. There is no 'charging at home'. Sure there're a decent number of plugs around - but for _everyone_? Not by a long shot. What this law is basically saying is that there will be no practical way for these people to own a car - not least without significant infrastructure work and public investment (and corresponding political will), which is, not always something you want to bet on. Given the healthy dose of skepticisim anyway - I'm not entirely surprised this is being received with less than universal excitement.

azalemeth 6y ago
I've never found the need to buy a car in my life. I'm 34. I commute everywhere by bicycle, and my partner (who also doesn't own a car) and I get heavy things delivered. It is possible, and, for the sake of the planet, I really think that this is a great thing that we should be celebrating. Most people on the planet live in cities, and I really think that we should try to wean them off fossil fuels.
- romanoderoma 6y ago
  Heavy things delivered means you are contributing to pollution as well as anybody else What's really polluting the atmosphere is not people's cars, it's the constant and unstoppable traffic of goods delivered from country to country for no real reason other than "economy of scale" A friend of mine has asked for an eye pencil replacement the other day because it was delivered of the wrong colour It costed a couple euros and came from Korea They gladly sent another one and picked up the old one For a two euros eye pencil Imagine what the fashion industry produces when it moves the 30 billion pounds of clothes that every year are discarded in UK Not to say that people don't pollute, but that the control should start on who produce the most pollution and also profit from it, not from the last ring of the supply chain
- alibarber 6y ago
  Sure - I lived in London for years and didn't own a car. I also commuted by bicylce and I thought it was great. Sometimes the highlight of my day! But people in general don't like having their options constricted even if it's for the greater good. It's human nature and I think the best ways forward are to get people excited about the electric future. 'In 10 years electric cars will be so good you'll forget we ever bothered with petrol' would probably be a more effective way to get people excited. Unfortunately that'd need to come from a pretty credible source, and they'd get the credit for it, and so in the absence of that - just make this law! It's easy, and who will be around in 10 years (in politics) anyway?... That's why I'm raising my eyebrows a bit at this.

gambiting 6y ago

I live in the UK and I'm 100% for it in theory, but 100% against it in practice. I currently have an electric vehicle - the only kind of usage scenario where it works and is absolutely brilliant is charging at home. That's about it. Public charging is a joke, vast majority of stations either don't work, are occupied most of the time, or cost so much money to use that it would literally be cheaper to drive a diesel car. We visited our friends some time ago in London for a few days(before lockdown). They live in an apartment so no way I could run a cable to the parking space. No problem I thought - there's a Shell station nearby with a charging point, several ChargeYourCar points at car park not far away, and I could see on ZapMap that there were two charging points on the street - and worst case scenario there are rapid chargers along the way at few motorway stops. We got there and basically - all ChargeYourCar points were out of order for 3 days we were there, the 2 charging points on the street were only for permit holders(something that ZapMap didn't mention), and the one single charging point at the Shell station nearby was occupied every single time I checked. So we stopped at the motorway services in the end, where they had 4 rapid charging points - all taken. We waited 30 minutes for someone to leave, once they left the car wouldn't connect - had to ring up the number on the charger, finally the customer service advisor restarted the point for me and it started charging. Only another 45 minutes of waiting and we had enough charge to get home. Oh and the charge was literally £0.49/kWh(I pay £0.05/kWh at home on a night tariff) - I had a Qashqai 1.6dCi few years ago that I could fill up for that much and drive down to london and back. Again, the car itself is brilliant. It is the future. I have no idea how people still drive around in cars that burn anything to move - they are loud, having to have gears is stupid, having to keep buying fuel is stupid. And yet. I can't imagine that the UK government and the private sector will get their act together and somehow, in 9 years, the infrastructure will be amazing, and they will find answers to questions like how do you charge at an apartment or a house with no dedicated parking space. I'm eagerly awaiting to hear about these solutions.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
How do you expect this to change? Whatever the downsides of electric cars, rampant global warming is clearly much worse. (And yes, stopping it will require more than just switching to electric cars.) Perhaps if electric vehicles were mandated, fast charging stations would be more widely available...

ggreer 6y ago

It’s not anti-EV sentiment. It’s anti-blanket-ban sentiment. Even a decade from now there will be some use cases where gas vehicles are a better fit than EVs. Instead of a blanket ban on new gas cars, it’s less coercive and more economically efficient to tax their externalities. I’m not a fan of gas vehicles. The only car I own is a Tesla. Still, I’m aware that gasoline cars do have certain advantages and banning them outright seems more detrimental than taxing them.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
The climate doesn’t care about economics, only total parts per million of atmospheric CO2. It is mind boggling it’s taken us this long to appreciate the gravity of the situation and new combustion vehicle bans are kicking in. I’m sure even when crop failures and mass migrations happen, some will still complain about their rights to burn fossil fuels for energy. We pulled progress and growth forward through incurring an enormous energy debt (burning ancient sunlight for 100+ years), and now it’s time to pay it back.
- gambiting 6y ago
  Right, but we also recognize that eventually the impact of something is so small that it's not worth banning. Why are Lamborghinis allowed to be sold despite emissions easily going into hundreds of grams of CO2/km? Because legislators have correctly recognized that the number of Lamborghinis sold each year, and the average amount of miles they are usually driven is absolutely negligable and has close to no impact on climate change. That's why small car manufacturers who produce few thousand cars a year have an exemption from the new emissions regulations enforced by the EU from next year - they just don't matter at all. Once the market gets to a point where the sales of ICE cars are around few percent out of all, maybe even less - then there's no point in banning them at all. Clearly only people who absolutely need them are buying them, because no one else does. So....why ban them? And it looks like the market is absolutely heading towards that point anyway, with truly draconian fines in the EU introduced soon and general apetite for electric cars showing strong growth in the car sales. We'll be there in 10 years, full ban or not.

Razengan 6y ago

> Especially among HN users, who you would assume would be more likely to see the benefits of new technology. HN users generally seem to care about their own convenience at the cost of everything else, as seen by all the support for things like Electron.

john_moscow 6y ago

It's merely about usability. EVs are great for short commuting hops, but offer no solution if you want to have a road trip with daily mileage exceeding the full battery range. Also note that the posted ranges are "under best possible circumstances", so factor in real-world use, battery degradation and not wanting the charge to drop below 20-30% for your own peace of mind, and your effective roadtrip range is sliced in half. Sure, there are charging stations, but if you are traveling with kids, having an extra 1-hour break, could be a huge headache. A common standard for batteries that could be quickly exchanged at a charging station, instead of charging them, could solve the problem 100%, but instead we see governments forcing less effective solutions into everyone's throat.

strawberrypuree 6y ago
My husband and I took a road trip of 4,682 miles in a Tesla, with a dog. We stopped every 3 hours and charged for 30 minutes. It was not only possible, but easy, because those stops corresponded to lunch, coffee, dinner, and sleeping. The dog needed to be let out, I needed to stretch my legs, etc.
- john_moscow 6y ago
  It's harder with kids. Tesla gets a reasonable range due to squeezing everything to the limit. Getting the same range out of a minivan-sized vehicle without tripling the cost of batteries would be rather tricky. Also when you travel with kids, you make longer breaks when the kids need them. In that case, picking a random gas station nearby filling the gas while my wife runs everybody through the toilet and distributes snacks, makes things easier. Doing it exactly on schedule with a forced 30-minute wait in a fixed location would be much trickier.

xkcd-sucks 6y ago

> Especially among HN users, who you would assume would be more likely to see the benefits of new technology. I think people closer to the frontlines of tech understand better the problems with new technologies as they are implemented in practice, hence more people prefer having the choice to use older, less sexy, more time-tested technologies.

neya 6y ago

I'm a technical savvy IT consultant with more than 10 years experience. I have dealt with automotive software for more than 5 years with various clients. Some of my perspective is based on that. I drive a diesel car currently and I plan to keep it as long as possible. Depending on where you live, EV's may range from moderately practical to unrealistic. I travel to many countries frequently and have lived across APAC including India. If you talk about a country like Singapore, which is very small in real estate (literally called a tiny red "dot"), sure. EV's are quite reasonable, also somewhat practical. It's good for daily commute or going around the island, sure. If you talk about a country like India, then, it's highly impractical to own one. First, you need proper infrastructure across such a massive land area, which by itself could take decades to get right (currently, India doesn't have them). Then, you need to factor in the populace and thus the long queues you're going to be facing in the public charging spots. Because India is such a vast country, if you wanted to travel from the southern most point of the country to the topmost (Kanyakumari to Kashmir), it's going to be impossible with just an EV and relying on public charging points. The charging time alone would add up quite quickly over such a long duration. I do a quarter of that stretch frequently - Banglore to Kanyakumari or sometimes even from Chennai. It takes me 8 hours on an average including a 1 hour meal break. And the fuel stations are just so easily accessible across this entire stretch. It costs me just $50 for one way and $70 for a 2 way journey of about 700-800 kms. If I was driving an EV, the best range I can get is about 250 kms (based on the options available in India and not quoting optimistic manufacturer ratings, but based on real world traffic conditions in India) on my Hyundai Kona. Charging to 80% takes about an hour. If you do the math, I'm going to be spending 3 hours just on charging alone. The cost for charging is also much more expensive compared to what I'm going to be spending on oil. It's a clear cut decision for me, especially when I have to travel long distances. And I'm not even factoring the risk of what happens if my car breaks down in the middle of the highway, which a local mechanic will have no idea on how to fix. During my work experience, I have audited some of the code for some popular manufacturers out there. EV cars are actually not about battery tech, it's about software. They run basically everything from a software "engine". That actually scares me, especially because I'm a software engineer. The modern EV has a lot of things going down under the hood. This is so unlike my Suzuki diesel which is simply an old school car with a battle-tested ECU (the same ECU is reused across many models, manufacturers for decades now) made by Bosch. The code in there is very simple and doesn't try to do a lot. It takes care of firing the pistons at the right time, making sure the turbocharger doesn't overwork, it takes care of the locks and alarms in the car and that's about it. It doesn't do all the "smart" stuff that a modern EV does. Like talk to the manufacturer telling them where I am exactly. Or when I should service my car. Or what playlists I would enjoy listening to. The infotainment system on my Suzuki is separate, for instance. There is no software "engine". As someone who prefers dumb speaker systems and TVs instead of "smart" speakers and TVs, I prefer regular, old-school cars than the modern "smart" EVs. If they made a dumb EV, for sure, I'd go for it for my city use, but it still doesn't meet my criteria for long distance travel as explained above. This is why I consider EV's highly impractical FOR ME. And this argument about "let's burn stuff" - did you know many charging points consume power off the grid, especially in India? And many people like me who own the Kona, actually carry around a portable Honda generator in our boot (which runs off petrol) which can charge the car for worse case situations. > What's disappointing is that all the talking points are the same-old tired fossil fuel propaganda from a decade ago. My point is, we are not there yet and we have to acknowledge that. You can't cast judgement on the rest who don't use an EV simply because it's not practical for them. That's elitist. EV's aren't necessarily "better" for everyone.

lm28469 6y ago

It depends at which scale you look at it. EVs are nice because you get less emissions locally, but in the grand scheme of things you just displaced the pollution and created new problems (lithium, cobalt and rare earth mines, battery recycling, power source, updating the grid &c). > We have made progress, and we can make more progress if we all pull together. The question is, is it enough ? It feels a bit like we're curing the symptoms but not their causes. There are 1.5 billion vehicles in the world, we should strive to reduce their number, not continue to expand it, EVs aren't a miracle, 1.5 billion EVs are still a huge problem

_ph_ 6y ago
The impact of electric vehicles is minimal compared to ICE vehicles. An ICE vehicle burns like 20 tons of fuel during its life time. An electric vehicle needs less than 10 kg of lithium, which can be completely recycled at the end of life. The next generation of Tesla batteries will be cobalt free and no lithium battery contains any rare earths. That is an urban legend. Switching to electric doesn't mean to increase the number of vehicles, they are built instead of ICE vehicles. Ideally, we reduce the count a lot, but every single vehicle built needs to be electric.
- fomine3 6y ago
  * If generation is 100% carbon free
  - _ph_ 6y ago
    Electric cars are a win in almost all countries already, but of course, if we want to prevent climate change, we have to convert energy production to be 100% carbon free, and that quickly. Basically every electric car bought today will eventually run on 100% carbon free electricity. Any ICE vehicle will run on 100% carbon.

deleted 6y ago

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