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Good to hear. I'm not driving much myself lately, but I'm really excited about the health impact of removing combustion engines from our cities.

by k__ 6y ago

jillesvangurp 6y ago
Same here; but living in a big city I can't wait for diesel fumes to not be a thing when I'm riding my bike across town. It's not just annoying, this stuff is actually killing people. But because it's a slow killer nobody seems to care much. EVs are changing that as well; people are getting more critical of pollution like this because they know it is not necessary. The recent lock downs were kind of a preview of what might be in our near future when transport is cleaned up. In terms of tipping point, the other thing that is happening (besides battery cost dropping) is the massive ramp-up in production volume. Just a few years ago, Tesla producing more than 50K cars was news worthy. Last year they did half a million and they have a few more factories coming online this year. Also VW, GM, and other manufacturers are producing cars by the hundreds of thousands per year as well. Soon it will be millions. By mid this decade, the second hand EV market will also start ramping up. Right now a lot of people are still on their first EVs. It's basically a supply constrained market: people are buying these things as soon as they get produced. Most of the popular EVs have waiting lists for getting them and would be selling more if they could produce more of them. These manufacturers are still learning how to produce and design efficiently. A lot of the cars on the market right now are still designed to come in both ICE, hybrid, and EV configurations. That makes them less efficient and more costly to make. It's just not optimal. A few years from now, that will stop being a thing. There will just be too many purposely designed EVs on the market that will be a better deal overall. It's going to take a while for manufacturers to switch to producing EVs only. Production volume overall is something like 90M cars per year and only a few percent is EVs currently. Probably by the end of the decade it will be the other way around. There are billions of vehicles (cars, trucks, etc.) it will take a while for those to disappear. That being said, it will be similar to horses disappearing from the streets early last century. Once it makes sense economically, people will switch as fast as they can (function of price and production volume).
dzhiurgis 6y ago
Noise too. Wish they taxed cars by decibels too. Charge motorcycles, heavy machinery and sports cars like 100k a year.
- Daho0n 6y ago
  >Wish they taxed cars by decibels too Then the couple living down the road from me would have to pay the same for their Tesla as their neighbor would pay for their Ford Mondeo. When they drive past me they are emitting the same amount of nose to the roadside since all I can hear is wind and tire noise. Then you could measure the noise inside the car instead (or it would be a race to the bottom of who will put on the worst tires from the factory) and a huge Mercedes SUV would be dirt cheap compared to an old Nissan Leaf.
  - dzhiurgis 6y ago
    Yes we can tax those too. However wind noise in highway doesn’t change anything. Whereas motorbike can wake entire neighbourhood at 6AM (saw this few times in my life). Accelerating truck, bus or sports car can startle child or adult even taking off from pedestrian crossing.

Good to hear. I'm not driving much myself lately, but I'm really excited about the health impact of removing combustion engines from our cities.

by k__ 6y ago

Good to hear. I'm not driving much myself lately, but I'm really excited about the health impact of removing combustion engines from our cities.

jillesvangurp 6y ago

Same here; but living in a big city I can't wait for diesel fumes to not be a thing when I'm riding my bike across town. It's not just annoying, this stuff is actually killing people. But because it's a slow killer nobody seems to care much. EVs are changing that as well; people are getting more critical of pollution like this because they know it is not necessary. The recent lock downs were kind of a preview of what might be in our near future when transport is cleaned up. In terms of tipping point, the other thing that is happening (besides battery cost dropping) is the massive ramp-up in production volume. Just a few years ago, Tesla producing more than 50K cars was news worthy. Last year they did half a million and they have a few more factories coming online this year. Also VW, GM, and other manufacturers are producing cars by the hundreds of thousands per year as well. Soon it will be millions. By mid this decade, the second hand EV market will also start ramping up. Right now a lot of people are still on their first EVs. It's basically a supply constrained market: people are buying these things as soon as they get produced. Most of the popular EVs have waiting lists for getting them and would be selling more if they could produce more of them. These manufacturers are still learning how to produce and design efficiently. A lot of the cars on the market right now are still designed to come in both ICE, hybrid, and EV configurations. That makes them less efficient and more costly to make. It's just not optimal. A few years from now, that will stop being a thing. There will just be too many purposely designed EVs on the market that will be a better deal overall. It's going to take a while for manufacturers to switch to producing EVs only. Production volume overall is something like 90M cars per year and only a few percent is EVs currently. Probably by the end of the decade it will be the other way around. There are billions of vehicles (cars, trucks, etc.) it will take a while for those to disappear. That being said, it will be similar to horses disappearing from the streets early last century. Once it makes sense economically, people will switch as fast as they can (function of price and production volume).

dzhiurgis 6y ago

Noise too. Wish they taxed cars by decibels too. Charge motorcycles, heavy machinery and sports cars like 100k a year.

Daho0n 6y ago
>Wish they taxed cars by decibels too Then the couple living down the road from me would have to pay the same for their Tesla as their neighbor would pay for their Ford Mondeo. When they drive past me they are emitting the same amount of nose to the roadside since all I can hear is wind and tire noise. Then you could measure the noise inside the car instead (or it would be a race to the bottom of who will put on the worst tires from the factory) and a huge Mercedes SUV would be dirt cheap compared to an old Nissan Leaf.
- dzhiurgis 6y ago
  Yes we can tax those too. However wind noise in highway doesn’t change anything. Whereas motorbike can wake entire neighbourhood at 6AM (saw this few times in my life). Accelerating truck, bus or sports car can startle child or adult even taking off from pedestrian crossing.