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The lost history of the electric car – and the future of transport
- virwheeler 5y agoIf we can properly manage the traffic, I do think that we can slowly reduce the pollution produced by cars. One of the best alternatives is to go EV, but it is not yet heavily adopted by the public; thus, we can utilize our public transportation to reduce carbon emissions.
- jdofaz 5y agoDecent article but doesn't mention the NiMH battery and the EV1
- 1234letshaveatw 5y agoMaybe the author resides in CA? Not sure how you could also omit the Prius or how the other automakers are addressing sourcing concerns. It is a shame because the start of the article was engrossing. Going forward, I image that MDS is much less of a concern than the power grid and clean energy generation
- neartheplain 5y ago>Some men may have liked that electric cars’ limited range meant that the independence granted to their drivers was tightly constrained. This kind of gratuitous editorial speculation, based on precisely zero evidence in an otherwise factual article, is why I tend to avoid The Guardian.
- publicola1990 5y agoThis is such a journalistic dark pattern, throws the credibility of the whole article through the window.
- dang 5y agoOk, but please don't cherry-pick a provocation from an article and then rush into the HN thread with it. This is how we get tedious flamewars. Indignation plus sensationalism (a.k.a. flamebait) reliably gets the most upvotes (this was the top comment before I marked it off topic); the idea of this forum is to try to dampen that if we can. There are plenty of interesting things in the article, and we should be focusing on interesting things, not maddening things. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- musicale 5y agoI think focusing on the interesting points of an article vs. maddening bits is a good approach. Certain topics still seem to incite flame wars and upvote/downvote wars; I'm not even sure how to address the latter, though the HN guidelines (such as evaluating the argument rather than the speaker) seem sensible and may mitigate the former.
- neartheplain 5y agoI think it's interesting and worth mentioning when an author inserts an opinion disguised as a fact. I almost read right past it myself. If I hadn't posted my comment, others might've read the same article and internalized the author's opinon as historical truth.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- papito 5y agoSaw an electric car from the 1920 at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. Really, until then - I had no idea.
- karmicthreat 5y agoA friend of mine has a Henney Kilowatt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henney_Kilowatt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henney_Kilowatt. Its neat, but that thing is a death trap. Early electric cars just had to compromise too much to even work.
- mikestew 5y agoI would think the "death trap" feature to more a product of it being based on a Renault Dauphine[0] than of it having an electric drivetrain. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Dauphine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Dauphine
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mprovost 5y agoThe New Yorker writer James Thurber mentioned electric cars several times in his 1933 autobiography "My Life and Hard Times". (If you haven't read it, it's a real classic!) In the chapter "Draft Board Nights" his grandfather, who is a Civil War veteran, is trying to enlist in the Great War and takes his grandmother's electric car to go find General William Tecumseh Sherman. "[A] man who (or so he often told us) had driven a four-horse McCormick reaper when he was five years old did not intend to be thrown by an electric runabout."
- xyzzy21 5y agoThermodynamics is why electric was buried by gasoline in the 19th century. That reason hasn't changed! Only people who have zero STEM knowledge seemed to think otherwise.
- ciarcode 5y agoCould you please argument your POV?
- wolfram74 5y agoMy guess would be they're thinking a that running an engine to move the wheels of a car will always be more efficient than running an engine to move the wheel of a generator, transmit the electricity, charge a battery and then move the wheels of a car. Neglecting that power plants can run at temperatures small car engines can't, getting better carnot efficiencies, or using non-combustion methods of generating electricity.
- choeger 5y agoNot to forget the gained efficiency of distributing huge amounts of fuel to a single location vs. small amounts to many locations
- Gibbon1 5y agoThere are a couple of reasons gasoline won. While cars are nice in dense 19th century cities. Not strictly needed when you had street cars and walkable neighborhoods. And delivery services. They are more useful in rural America which was 60-70% of the population. And Rural houses didn't have electricity. No electricity no way to charge a car. Even city houses had very limited service, 10-20 amp was common. No power semiconductors which meant inefficient motors and chargers. Lead acid batteries have a quarter the energy density and output power that modern lithium ion batteries do. Which meant range sucked. And horsepower sucked.
- jokoon 5y agoroad transport is responsible for 12% of CO2 emissions. so electric domestic cars are not going to do a lot...
- NonContro 5y agoIt will still remove a significant amount of noise and air pollution from the ground-level of cities.
- jokoon 5y agoat 50km/h air friction with tires etc is half of the noise, and it goes from there.
- soperj 5y agoIf you've ever listened (from the outside) to an electric car going 50km/hr even, they're not quiet.
- jeromegv 5y agoI live next to a boulevard, 5th floor. The amount of black stuff that gets onto my balcony every day is absolutely insane. And to think that we are breathing that! I would fully embrace a full conversion for electric vehicle for that alone, this isn't just CO2, this is our air quality in cities.
- azinman2 5y agoKeep in mind that electric cars still have tire and break dust. Its not all tail pipes, tho clearly it’d be great to eliminate that.
- blendergeek 5y agoDue to regenerative breaking, electric vehicles (well at least Teslas) rarely use the breakpads, so less break dust. Tire dust will still be a problem.
- pomian 5y agoThe loss of horses meant immobilisation of the economy.... Really neat article about dependence on horses and their infrastructure. Sounds familiar. Just as we were talking about emp pulses, how our economy would be destroyed, etc.
- Robotbeat 5y agoPretty frustrating that they compare cobalt and rare earth to sustainability concerns for biomass and fossil fuels. Neither are required. To use Tesla as an example (because that's what the article used): Tesla's Model Ses originally had no rare earth magnets whatsoever in their motors, being induction motors, and Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries, used for most of Tesla's cars in China (where that chemistry is more common), use zero Cobalt. Plus in both cases, the substances aren't used up and destroyed as in fossil fuels but reused again and again, hundreds or thousands of times (and at end of life can be recycled), making the problem literally orders of magnitude less dramatic than with fossil fuels. It's really frustrating that it's so common to try to shoe-horn electric cars into the old narrative, but it's just a completely different story as fossil fuels. That isn't to say you CAN'T have problems with ethical mining, or ethical anything, but it just is not anything at all like the problems associated with fossil fuels. It doesn't make sense to collapse a complete different set of issues into the existing narrative, and to do it to generate clicks is reprehensible. You would think, with a title like "lost history of the electric car," they would do a small amount of research around lithium ion chemistry and rare earth metals and actually inform the viewer instead of repeating tired misconceptions that the semi-informed have.