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While I share your antipathy for low-efficiency vehicles, why is traveling around the national parks of the west a sad way to spend your retirement years?
by etrautmann 6y ago
While I share your antipathy for low-efficiency vehicles, why is traveling around the national parks of the west a sad way to spend your retirement years?
- rootusrootus 6y ago> low-efficiency vehicles Tangent: Are these actually low efficiency? Sure, 10 mpg (this is a more typical average, BTW, not 8 mpg) is terrible gas mileage ... for an average car. But a portable house that can drive down the interstate isn't just a car. Per pound, it doesn't seem that bad.
- iancmceachern 6y agoAnd when compared to air travel and hotel stays (which come with large water and heat costs associated with daily laundry) it's actually less of a carbon footprint.
- tomjakubowski 6y agomind showing your work?
- iancmceachern 6y agohttps://stanfordmag.org/contents/when-is-flying-greener-than-driving-essential-answer https://stanfordmag.org/contents/when-is-flying-greener-than... https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2015/09/evolving-climate-math-of-flying-vs-driving/ https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2015/09/evolving-climate-... "In addition, Sivak suggests carpooling, as having three or more person in a vehicle “completely” changes the comparison with flying. Indeed, with a few people in the car, “driving becomes less energy intensive than flying (even after taking into account the increased weight that the vehicle needs to carry).”" Edited to add quotes.
- tomjakubowski 6y agoThe comment was comparing two people taking an RV, not a commuter car, to air travel and hotel stays. I failed to mention it but was most interested in how the hotel laundry carbon footprint was a big factor.
- iancmceachern 6y agoThere are plenty of rvs that get similar fuel efficiency to cars. Anything on the sprinter chassis gets over 20 mpg typically. The laundry footprint is a large factor when considering hotel stays. If we add up both the carbon costs of the hotel stay and airfare added together it seems like it adds up to more than the RV option. That's all I was trying to highlight, I haven't done a research paper on it, just my perception.
- farnsworth 6y agoPeople don't stay in hotels getting daily laundry for months at a time
- Taylor_OD 6y agoYou haven't worked in consulting huh?
- chrisseaton 6y agoPeople absolutely do this. Some people literally live in hotels.
- Johnny555 6y agoThey do if they are on the kind of cross country tour that they'd otherwise make in an RV. Otherwise the argument becomes "Staying at home is better for the environment than traveling", which is true, not not really a fair comparison.
- d3ad1ysp0rk 6y agoThe average room takes 2 loads of laundry, which would be in the neighborhood of 10kw of electricity. 1 gallon of gas represents the same energy (ignoring losses) as 33kw. The average 2017 car in the US got 25mpg. So with a 15+mpg difference, you'd need to either drive 5 miles or less per day (0.3g difference), OR average 100 miles per day and have the hotels wash the laundry 20x as much.
- sokoloff 6y agoAre you not including the air travel component of the travel (which often results in the passenger choosing to travel much farther than a typical RV trip)?
- stickfigure 6y agoThere are a lot more costs (both paid and environmental) associated with hotels than just laundry? Staff, lighting, heating. Plus eating out, taxis, and air travel. Also, retirees roaming around the country in an RV generally sit in one place for a week or two at a time.
- iancmceachern 6y agoMissing a lot of costs for hotels, also missing the air travel which is the single largest contribution to emissions in this scenario.
- peatmoss 6y agoNow I’m dreaming of a recreational dirigible. Imagine drifting from town to town at low altitudes, relative quiet, and with a comparably low fuel consumption. This sounds like heaven.
- AYBABTME 6y agoA sailboat is 95% of this but you're floating around the oceans instead of the air. In both cases you'd need to be worried about storms and hitting stuff, and in both cases you're pretty fuel efficient.
- matt_s 6y agoWhy hasn't EV tech hit the RV world? How many batteries could one of those Greyhound bus size RV's, or smaller ones, hold? Maybe it has and I'm ignorant. I get that corporate shipping industries would benefit but a lot of delivery vans are the same platform as an RV. I think a Ford F350 is the size of those 25 ft uhaul rentals - about same size as a decent sized RV. RV's typically park somewhere for days, campgrounds could be good places for charging stations. If you have a stay booked for 5 days, it could even slow trickle charge over that time.
- daniellarusso 6y agoCybertruck can tow a fairly large Airstream.
- rootusrootus 6y agoHow far? That's really the biggest issue with electric towing right now. To get a reasonable range while towing a travel trailer, the EV needs four times the battery capacity, maybe more. This is a pretty big capital investment, and then you're toting around an extra few thousand pounds even when not towing. We will get there eventually, but I expect that tow vehicles will be amongst the last personal vehicles to be successfully electrified.
- naewonawonga 6y agoCybertruck is not real.
- porknubbins 6y agoI don’t know if there is a technical reason why EV hasn’t come to RVs, but having worked with some RV makers they are basically tiny luxury product makers compared to one of the biggest industries on the planet so probably like 1% of the R&D goes into RVs per inch compared to cars.
- Johnny555 6y agoMost RV makers buy an off-the-shelf chassis from Ford or Freightliner, so they can benefit from truck based electrification work.
- quickthrower2 6y agoThe greenhouse effect doesn’t care about why the CO2 was made. A portable house and essentials weighing probably 5kg can go on your back.
- jhayward 6y agoThis answer seems designed to either insult, denigrate, or cause offense. It’s not a substantive contribution to the conversation.
- rootusrootus 6y agoAre you prepared to legislate what constitutes allowable leisure activity? Require people to justify why they aren't choosing the smallest plausibly usable car, if they can justify a car at all? Submit to the government every vacation plan, every potential career change, every hobby to make sure it has the least environmental impact? For every choice you make, I guarantee someone can point out how you could have been more environmentally friendly. Let's not go down that path.
- quickthrower2 6y agoNope I would legislate via carbon tax. Then someone is paying more to use the suv unnecessarily that’s up to them.
- lmm 6y ago> Per pound, it doesn't seem that bad. That's circular reasoning; carrying zillions of kilos around with you is the part that's inefficient.
- rootusrootus 6y agoPerhaps, but going down that path means making a moral judgement about every activity someone undertakes. Fuel efficiency is at least fairly objective. Whether someone should stay at home instead of travel in their RV, that is a moral thing. And I'm pretty sure that just about 0 people have an unassailable record of life choices.
- lmm 6y ago> Perhaps, but going down that path means making a moral judgement about every activity someone undertakes. Fuel efficiency is at least fairly objective. That's like the drunk searching for his keys under the streetlamp rather than where he dropped them. Does that mean it's somehow environmentally friendly to drive an 18-wheeler on a road trip rather than a motorbike, because the per-ton fuel efficiency is higher? The fair comparison to an RV trip is an equivalent vacation experience, and while we can argue about the details of what that means, it's certainly not just an equal tonnage. > Whether someone should stay at home instead of travel in their RV, that is a moral thing. And I'm pretty sure that just about 0 people have an unassailable record of life choices. Ideally I'd like to set a carbon tax at a level that fully covers the costs of repairing the damage, and take the moral element out of the equation - then we can just say that x litres of petrol costs y, and it's up to you whether that's worth it or not. But given that we don't have such a thing (and these people are presumably not offsetting), I'd say that you should at least make sure the fun you're getting out of something is proportional to your emissions; if you're doing something that's marginally fun but extremely polluting then I do think it's fair to judge you for that.
- bkjelden 6y agoYea, they are. If for example, you look at the Ford chassis that is the basis for a majority of Class C RVs, the engine tech is a good decade or two behind what Ford is putting in their new trucks and larger SUVs. Unfortunately the RV industry is one where products are built to be sold, not to be used, and what's under the hood is not a selling point compared to how fancy the interior is. When reading a review of Ford's new hybrid F-150 a couple months ago, one of the comments at the bottom of the article really stood out to me - "Ford needs to get this in their RV platform ASAP". I tend to agree that that's actually a super clever idea - most RVs already have a standalone generator separate from the drivetrain, and rolling that into a hybrid system makes a lot of sense.
- paxys 6y agoExactly. The need to be productive for society until the day you die may have been a requirement in the past, but encouraging that today just sounds depressing.
- AussieWog93 6y agoTo be fair, the definition of "productivity" has changed a lot since the start of the industrial revolution too, from "helping your community make ends meet" to "engaging in soul-crushing, inhuman labour to make a group of wealthy investors who actively campaign against your well-being even wealthier".
- vkou 6y agoActually, prior to the start of the industrial revolution, the definition of "productivity" was "Spend nearly every waking hour tending the fields (that someone else owns) if you're a man, or spinning flax and wool (to make clothes for you and your family) if you're a woman." Not much left to better the community when keeping yourself fed and clothed[1] is two full-time jobs. And that's for free-persons, who aren't serfs, slaves, or indentured labourers. [1] Prior to industrialization, it took something close to ~3,000 work-hours a year[2] to keep a family barely-clothed. Add another thousand or three if you wanted to have a change of clothes for Sundays. [2] https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-they-make-it-part-iii-spin-me-right-round/ https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t...
- AussieWog93 6y ago>Not much left to better the community when keeping yourself fed and clothed is two full-time jobs. My point was, back then, your two full-time jobs benefited the community in and of themselves. I'm not trying to argue that we should go back in time to the dark ages (I like modern medicine and technology), but am just suggesting that workers would have been far more likely to find intrinsic satisfaction in the work they did back then because they both had more autonomy/personal input and could also directly see their labour benefitting the people they cared about.
- tomc1985 6y agoPersonally, RVs kind of miss the point of tooling around nature if one can wimp out and retreat to a house-on-wheels
- throwaway894345 6y agoThere are other ways to enjoy nature besides the Bear Grylls approach. :)
- tomc1985 6y agoSplit the difference with a tent and a couple of cots
- chrisseaton 6y agoWhat motivates someone to belittle people who aren't as hardcore about a hobby as them like this? What on earth do you care how someone else chooses to enjoy themselves?
- Johnny555 6y agoWhy do you assume that "tooling around nature" is the only point of traveling (whether by RV or otherwise)? I like being out in nature, but I also like having a comfortable bed and a kitchen (with refrigerator) where I can prepare full meals. The cooking part is why I like having an RV - while it's possible to find a hotel with a kitchenette, it's still a pretty limited kitchen (often without an oven) and you have to find a way to schlep your food around from hotel to hotel if you're on an extended trip. Plus, it's nice to have your own bathroom, especially during a Pandemic.
- stickfigure 6y ago"Why bother with a boat when you can just swim?"
- kbutler 6y agoNice to have a hard-sided sleeping unit for bear country. Nice to have a reasonable bed after an exhausting day canyoneering. Nice to have a heater for that sudden snowstorm in June. It isn't going on the backpacking trip (but could be a great mobile base for punctuated backpacking!) but it can facilitate a lot of great experiences (and can broaden the experience of people who wouldn't go on that backpacking trip...)