7 ms·

EVs aren't going to save the world, but they will save the auto industry for a few years.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
If the V for vehicle is taken literally, then they will do more good than just big BEV SUVs in cities designed around cars. Think delivery moped and ebike trikes, or commuter ebikes, trains and buses. Last mile delivery vehicles etc. But, if the alternative to the BEV SUV is an ICE SUV then they'll still help a lot, saving lots of money and many lives.
Robotbeat 4y ago
Basically no lefties/urbanites would’ve made that argument before Tesla made EVs viable and attractive to normies. Back in the “Who Killed the Electric Car” days, it would’ve been extremely odd for people with environmental concerns to be like that. EVs are a massive, massive improvement, and while I like improving stuff (or using alternatives) to reduce further downsides, I don’t think we should look a gift horse in the mouth, here.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  As a city-dweller whose main practical problems with cars are around pedestrian and cyclist safety, noise pollution, and the hostility of car-centric infrastructure to human life in general, this sounds a lot like "you'll take what we give you and be happy about it."
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    As a city-dweller, I'll be glad when the decline of ICE cars removes the loud sound of accelerating engines, and the reduction of PM2.5 particulates improves my health. Sure, it's not a cure-all, and more pedestrian areas, better bicycle infrastructure, more medium-density housing with walkable neighborhoods, and heat-pumps instead of burning oil or gas are still important issues. But just switching from ICE to electric engines is a cheap win that I'm glad to get as well.
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      It's better than nothing but I don't intend to be happy about it alone. I don't even think it'll be cheap in the end. Road maintenance is already expensive and neglected in cities. Making cars heavier is not going to help at all, it's just shifting the pain around.
    - asdff 4y ago
      As a city dweller I won't be so sure. Most of the noise I hear on the cement road is from the tires, and those big fugly tesla suv-sedan things are loud when they roll up with their 5000lb of weight. Most of the PM2.5 we are left with today is from tires anyhow thanks to the catalytic converter and unleaded fuel. That part isn't going away. To be honest I wish the climate crisis would promote people into lighter vehicles and mass transit versus just more of the same unsustainable patterns, but here we are. The green thing to do now is to replace your working car that is already built and delivered to your door with one 2000lbs heavier. Seems like green washing more than actual action to me. You would think bike lanes everywhere would be an easy win given how cheap they are, but its like no one really cares about doing anything but taking the car everywhere.
      - hedora 4y ago
        A 2022 Model 3 weighs about 3700 pounds. A 2022 ICE Ford Mustang (the coupe, not the SUV) weighs 3850 lbs. A 2022 Model Y (SUV) weighs 4400 pounds. A 2022 ICE Ford Explorer weighs 6100 pounds. Maybe this is because Ford sucks at making reasonable-weight vehicles, right? Well, a 2022 Ford Mustang Mach-E weighs 4700 pounds, which is a bit overweight vs. the Model Y, but still way lighter than their old flagship SUV. I'm not sure how, but in the US, EVs are somehow lighter than comparable gas vehicles.
        dragonwriter 4y ago
        > I'm not sure how, but in the US, EVs are somehow lighter than comparable gas vehicles. You are just using the wrong comparators. A Tesla Model Y is more comparable (for instance, it's a lot closer in dimensions) to the 3,700 lb Ford Escape SUV than the 4,400 Ford Explorer.
  - dahfizz 4y ago
    Imagine wanting to live in the same square mile as millions of other people and then getting upset that you have to deal with millions of other people trying to live their life. If you require everyone around you to to have the same priorities as you, then you may be happier in a smaller town.
    - 1270018080 4y ago
      Are you suggesting car drivers move to smaller towns where it's actually economically efficient to use them? You wouldn't want car drivers imposing their noise, pollution, financial cost, infrastructure cost, and displacement on the millions of other people trying to live their life. It's very insightful of you to imply that cities should be designed for people, and not cars, so those millions can actually use the density to their advantage.
      - hedora 4y ago
        How about this? Let's move the population of Dallas Fort Worth to San Francisco, and vice versa, and see how quickly people's opinions about vehicle ownership change. The main issue with having cars (or not) is that infrastructure that costs many orders of magnitude more than the cars has to be rebuilt if you want to switch between car-dependent and walk/bike-everywhere.
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      Yes absolutely, the only way for many people to live in one place is for them all to drive cars for all trips within that place. There are no other possible configurations.
- culi 4y ago
  > EVs are a massive, massive improvement To be honest even this is a bit of an overstatement. An MIT study found that a huge chunk of the lifetime emissions of a vehicle is in the production alone. EVs, mostly due to their batteries, have much much higher production emissions. And given how dirty our current energy production is (and the added costs and inefficiencies of storing and transporting electricity) we won't feel the benefits of EVs offsetting the initial added costs for many many years Also given how notoriously unreliable certain brands like Tesla have been (27th of 28 in Consumer Reports reliability index) it's possible that the added maintenance costs will push this break even point even further down the road But as of right now all we've really managed to do is push these emissions from the first world (combustion emissions) to the third world (production emissions) EDIT: link to MIT study: https://energy.mit.edu/research/mobilityofthefuture/ https://energy.mit.edu/research/mobilityofthefuture/ Around 40% of an EVs lifetime emissions are from production alone. Tesla's tend to be even higher because of the larger batteries and less efficient production
  - nevereveragain 4y ago
    > For similar-sized vehicles in the U.S. today, per-mile lifecycle (including vehicle and battery production) greenhouse gas emissions for battery electric vehicles run on the present U.S.-average grid electricity are approximately 55% of the emissions from conventional internal combustion engine vehicles. Electric vehicles have almost half the lifetime emissions. That's huge, no matter how you spin it.
    - culi 4y ago
      Sure but with about 167% as many emissions from production, I'm just saying there's going to be an immediate increase in emissions. Also one thing missing from this analysis is maintenance. The three factors taken into account are initial production (much higher for EVs), cost of fuel production (also much higher for EVs), and emissions from fuel combustion (0 for EVs). However batteries don't last forever and it still remains to be seen that EVs can reach the maintenance costs of combustion engine vehicles (with Tesla being a notable argument against EVs potential)
- CalRobert 4y ago
  EV's are an improvement compared to "the same but with petrol" but the thing is, but we are squandering an opportunity to have cities where people can bike and walk places (the reason they can't is the cars) and other issues are coming to light, namely the heavier weights and faster acceleration making them even more dangerous for people using bikes and walking than fossil fuel cars.
  - bluecalm 4y ago
    Bike, walk or use lightweight electric vehicles (e-bikes, 3wheelers, mobility scooters) which need a small fraction of the power, fraction of the resources to produce, are safer, smaller (thus higher throughout on city roads) and quieter. The problem with electric cars is that they are still cars.
  - clairity 4y ago
    yes please. i have these conversations with people here in LA and they look at me like i'm an alien. but LA is really the perfect city for dense, multi-modal, mixed-use neighborhoods because of the perfect weather (esp. low humidity) and relatively flat terrain. all we need to do is convert street parking into bike lanes, and build a few parking structures in the oldest neighborhoods that were built before onsite parking was common (this mitigates the biggest legitimate objection for getting rid of street parking).
    - asdff 4y ago
      LA has a lot of low hanging fruit with the classic "two parking lane four car lanes and a center turning lane" arterial that is laid out about every half mile in the cardinal directions across the entire county. Just nix the turning lane and two car lanes, and turn the existing bus lines that run along those arterials into BRT and LA would become a model for the western world of how to run low cost transit. It will never happen of course, because the city council and most wings of local government are openly corrupt with regular FBI indictments.
      - clairity 4y ago
- 11235813213455 4y ago
  light EVs are massive improvement https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/planet/are-electric-cars-a-truly-sustainable-solution/ https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/planet/are...
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    /comparable/ EVs are a massive improvement.
    - 11235813213455 4y ago
      if more than half PMs come from tires and dust, I'm not sure
  - hedora 4y ago
    The emissions graph only considers particulates, so it's massively undercounting air pollution improvements from EVs.
    - 11235813213455 4y ago
      Do you have figures for this? it says: "non-exhaust particles represent 59% of PM10 and 45% of PM2.5 emissions", so about half of fine particles are non-exhaust (brake, tires, road dust). If you also count the fabrication process, the batteries, the new infrastructures and electricity footprint, the additional weight (for the same size), it's possibly a small gain over thermic engines, but nothing super obvious
- jeromegv 4y ago
  >Basically no lefties/urbanites would’ve made that argument before Tesla made EVs viable and attractive to normies. May be you didn't pay attention? They were already protests in the 1970s to stop the non sense of building highways in the middle or urban centres. Jane Jacob was talking about it in the 1960s. It's not so much about environmentalists but urban designers have been talking of the negative impact of car culture on our society and way of life for decades. Both things can be true. EVs are better than ICE cars. Not having your lifestyle and cities designed around cars for every single trip is better than EVs. And we can switch to EVs gradually while also making our dense communities more livable. Not everything revolves around Elon Musk ideas, as much as he would like many to believe.

If the V for vehicle is taken literally, then they will do more good than just big BEV SUVs in cities designed around cars. Think delivery moped and ebike trikes, or commuter ebikes, trains and buses. Last mile delivery vehicles etc. But, if the alternative to the BEV SUV is an ICE SUV then they'll still help a lot, saving lots of money and many lives.

Robotbeat 4y ago

Basically no lefties/urbanites would’ve made that argument before Tesla made EVs viable and attractive to normies. Back in the “Who Killed the Electric Car” days, it would’ve been extremely odd for people with environmental concerns to be like that. EVs are a massive, massive improvement, and while I like improving stuff (or using alternatives) to reduce further downsides, I don’t think we should look a gift horse in the mouth, here.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
As a city-dweller whose main practical problems with cars are around pedestrian and cyclist safety, noise pollution, and the hostility of car-centric infrastructure to human life in general, this sounds a lot like "you'll take what we give you and be happy about it."
- wongarsu 4y ago
  As a city-dweller, I'll be glad when the decline of ICE cars removes the loud sound of accelerating engines, and the reduction of PM2.5 particulates improves my health. Sure, it's not a cure-all, and more pedestrian areas, better bicycle infrastructure, more medium-density housing with walkable neighborhoods, and heat-pumps instead of burning oil or gas are still important issues. But just switching from ICE to electric engines is a cheap win that I'm glad to get as well.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    It's better than nothing but I don't intend to be happy about it alone. I don't even think it'll be cheap in the end. Road maintenance is already expensive and neglected in cities. Making cars heavier is not going to help at all, it's just shifting the pain around.
  - asdff 4y ago
    As a city dweller I won't be so sure. Most of the noise I hear on the cement road is from the tires, and those big fugly tesla suv-sedan things are loud when they roll up with their 5000lb of weight. Most of the PM2.5 we are left with today is from tires anyhow thanks to the catalytic converter and unleaded fuel. That part isn't going away. To be honest I wish the climate crisis would promote people into lighter vehicles and mass transit versus just more of the same unsustainable patterns, but here we are. The green thing to do now is to replace your working car that is already built and delivered to your door with one 2000lbs heavier. Seems like green washing more than actual action to me. You would think bike lanes everywhere would be an easy win given how cheap they are, but its like no one really cares about doing anything but taking the car everywhere.
    - hedora 4y ago
      A 2022 Model 3 weighs about 3700 pounds. A 2022 ICE Ford Mustang (the coupe, not the SUV) weighs 3850 lbs. A 2022 Model Y (SUV) weighs 4400 pounds. A 2022 ICE Ford Explorer weighs 6100 pounds. Maybe this is because Ford sucks at making reasonable-weight vehicles, right? Well, a 2022 Ford Mustang Mach-E weighs 4700 pounds, which is a bit overweight vs. the Model Y, but still way lighter than their old flagship SUV. I'm not sure how, but in the US, EVs are somehow lighter than comparable gas vehicles.
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        > I'm not sure how, but in the US, EVs are somehow lighter than comparable gas vehicles. You are just using the wrong comparators. A Tesla Model Y is more comparable (for instance, it's a lot closer in dimensions) to the 3,700 lb Ford Escape SUV than the 4,400 Ford Explorer.
- dahfizz 4y ago
  Imagine wanting to live in the same square mile as millions of other people and then getting upset that you have to deal with millions of other people trying to live their life. If you require everyone around you to to have the same priorities as you, then you may be happier in a smaller town.
  - 1270018080 4y ago
    Are you suggesting car drivers move to smaller towns where it's actually economically efficient to use them? You wouldn't want car drivers imposing their noise, pollution, financial cost, infrastructure cost, and displacement on the millions of other people trying to live their life. It's very insightful of you to imply that cities should be designed for people, and not cars, so those millions can actually use the density to their advantage.
    - hedora 4y ago
      How about this? Let's move the population of Dallas Fort Worth to San Francisco, and vice versa, and see how quickly people's opinions about vehicle ownership change. The main issue with having cars (or not) is that infrastructure that costs many orders of magnitude more than the cars has to be rebuilt if you want to switch between car-dependent and walk/bike-everywhere.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    Yes absolutely, the only way for many people to live in one place is for them all to drive cars for all trips within that place. There are no other possible configurations.
culi 4y ago
> EVs are a massive, massive improvement To be honest even this is a bit of an overstatement. An MIT study found that a huge chunk of the lifetime emissions of a vehicle is in the production alone. EVs, mostly due to their batteries, have much much higher production emissions. And given how dirty our current energy production is (and the added costs and inefficiencies of storing and transporting electricity) we won't feel the benefits of EVs offsetting the initial added costs for many many years Also given how notoriously unreliable certain brands like Tesla have been (27th of 28 in Consumer Reports reliability index) it's possible that the added maintenance costs will push this break even point even further down the road But as of right now all we've really managed to do is push these emissions from the first world (combustion emissions) to the third world (production emissions) EDIT: link to MIT study: https://energy.mit.edu/research/mobilityofthefuture/ https://energy.mit.edu/research/mobilityofthefuture/ Around 40% of an EVs lifetime emissions are from production alone. Tesla's tend to be even higher because of the larger batteries and less efficient production
- nevereveragain 4y ago
  > For similar-sized vehicles in the U.S. today, per-mile lifecycle (including vehicle and battery production) greenhouse gas emissions for battery electric vehicles run on the present U.S.-average grid electricity are approximately 55% of the emissions from conventional internal combustion engine vehicles. Electric vehicles have almost half the lifetime emissions. That's huge, no matter how you spin it.
  - culi 4y ago
    Sure but with about 167% as many emissions from production, I'm just saying there's going to be an immediate increase in emissions. Also one thing missing from this analysis is maintenance. The three factors taken into account are initial production (much higher for EVs), cost of fuel production (also much higher for EVs), and emissions from fuel combustion (0 for EVs). However batteries don't last forever and it still remains to be seen that EVs can reach the maintenance costs of combustion engine vehicles (with Tesla being a notable argument against EVs potential)
CalRobert 4y ago
EV's are an improvement compared to "the same but with petrol" but the thing is, but we are squandering an opportunity to have cities where people can bike and walk places (the reason they can't is the cars) and other issues are coming to light, namely the heavier weights and faster acceleration making them even more dangerous for people using bikes and walking than fossil fuel cars.
- bluecalm 4y ago
  Bike, walk or use lightweight electric vehicles (e-bikes, 3wheelers, mobility scooters) which need a small fraction of the power, fraction of the resources to produce, are safer, smaller (thus higher throughout on city roads) and quieter. The problem with electric cars is that they are still cars.
- clairity 4y ago
  yes please. i have these conversations with people here in LA and they look at me like i'm an alien. but LA is really the perfect city for dense, multi-modal, mixed-use neighborhoods because of the perfect weather (esp. low humidity) and relatively flat terrain. all we need to do is convert street parking into bike lanes, and build a few parking structures in the oldest neighborhoods that were built before onsite parking was common (this mitigates the biggest legitimate objection for getting rid of street parking).
  - asdff 4y ago
    LA has a lot of low hanging fruit with the classic "two parking lane four car lanes and a center turning lane" arterial that is laid out about every half mile in the cardinal directions across the entire county. Just nix the turning lane and two car lanes, and turn the existing bus lines that run along those arterials into BRT and LA would become a model for the western world of how to run low cost transit. It will never happen of course, because the city council and most wings of local government are openly corrupt with regular FBI indictments.
    - clairity 4y ago
11235813213455 4y ago
light EVs are massive improvement https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/planet/are-electric-cars-a-truly-sustainable-solution/ https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/planet/are...
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  /comparable/ EVs are a massive improvement.
  - 11235813213455 4y ago
    if more than half PMs come from tires and dust, I'm not sure
- hedora 4y ago
  The emissions graph only considers particulates, so it's massively undercounting air pollution improvements from EVs.
  - 11235813213455 4y ago
    Do you have figures for this? it says: "non-exhaust particles represent 59% of PM10 and 45% of PM2.5 emissions", so about half of fine particles are non-exhaust (brake, tires, road dust). If you also count the fabrication process, the batteries, the new infrastructures and electricity footprint, the additional weight (for the same size), it's possibly a small gain over thermic engines, but nothing super obvious
jeromegv 4y ago
>Basically no lefties/urbanites would’ve made that argument before Tesla made EVs viable and attractive to normies. May be you didn't pay attention? They were already protests in the 1970s to stop the non sense of building highways in the middle or urban centres. Jane Jacob was talking about it in the 1960s. It's not so much about environmentalists but urban designers have been talking of the negative impact of car culture on our society and way of life for decades. Both things can be true. EVs are better than ICE cars. Not having your lifestyle and cities designed around cars for every single trip is better than EVs. And we can switch to EVs gradually while also making our dense communities more livable. Not everything revolves around Elon Musk ideas, as much as he would like many to believe.