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Trains and buses suffers from last mile problems on each end. And you sometimes/often have to share an air space with rude, dirty, sometimes crazy people. Not s

Trains and buses suffers from last mile problems on each end. And you sometimes/often have to share an air space with rude, dirty, sometimes crazy people. Not so with individual vehicles. Now make them electric (to reduce pollution and enabling the getting off of fossil fuels) and automated (to reduce frequency of accidents, and wear-and-tear caused by aggressive driving, etc, etc.) and the trade-offs can look attractive.

bsimpson 15y ago
Admittedly, I'm no expert on electric cars, but they always make me feel like the emperor isn't wearing any clothes. Electricity is frequently generated by fossil fuels like coal. Electric cars don't reduce pollution, they just move it to wherever the coal is being burned. You have to get the electricity to the car from the far-away power plant, which means you're going to suffer from transmission loss (e.g. not every watt that is generated is going to make it to your drivetrain). Finally, we suck at making batteries. They're still big heavy lumps of highly toxic materials that wear out in relatively short amounts of time. What do you do with all the exhausted batteries? Like everyone, I'm all for making our infrastructure more environmentally-friendly. Sadly, I'm not convinced electric vehicles are anywhere close to where we'd need them to be. I feel like we have a lot of misplaced enthusiasm from people who want to clean up the industrial age a lot sooner than we realistically can.
- bdonlan 15y ago
  Moving the electrical generation to a central point allows you to build more sustainable power plants that only really work at scale - just try building a windmill on a single car, or a nuclear plant that can fir in your trunk.
- georgieporgie 15y ago
  Electric cars don't reduce pollution They most certainly do. Even the latest, most wonderfully advanced gasoline engines are positively filthy compared to a modern coal plant, which is positive filthy compared to a nuclear plant, which is positively filthy compared to a solar/wind/wave plant.
  - ars 15y ago
    You have that last one backwards, nuclear is cleaner than solar/wind/wave, because you are forgetting just how much land those need.
    - georgieporgie 15y ago
      How does land use have anything to do with pollution?
      - ars 15y ago
        Because you have to construct them, and it takes a ton of energy to do so. The construction process also produces a lot of waste.
        easp 15y ago
        You aren't taking into consideration the vast amounts of concrete and steel that go into a nuclear plant, nor the mining and refining of the uranium, nor, for that matter, it's disposal. Further, I think you are overestimating the impact of building and deploying wind turbines. They may require a lot of land, but their physical footprint is pretty small, and most of the land around them can be used for other purposes, like agriculture.
        ars 15y ago
        I am taking those into consideration. A nuclear plant produces a tremendous amount of energy for the materials it's made from. I was doing the math, and this document popped up as a search: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:UjtsvTfrOgQJ:www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/wind-concrete-steel-07.doc+&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShS9RRktG_eNeqbnoTZa_JCkPBNZdqboYOE6i7beemDjgYK4GJc5ZryJJ8i4MxfiO2YK7R87bOBIySvVayW7VC2GcwnxUWIM4zVwVP7LPYJ6blgXqoGy4Ub8FUQv_pkbIdPcYnp&sig=AHIEtbSQTCLuYOK3u4CG37_QbqZXH6EdLw https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:UjtsvTfrOgQJ:... So they did the math for me - wind turbines require 60 times as many resources as nuclear. The amount of uranium needed is tiny, very very tiny. And all the uranium ever made can be disposed of in one site, it's not really a lot. They also require far far more land. I don't just mean how much air space, but the actual tower. Wind turbines are better than coal, and since we are building lots of coal plants I am all for wind. But they are not better than nuclear - not even close.
jowiar 15y ago
>> And you sometimes/often have to share an air space with rude, dirty, sometimes crazy people. Oh come on. God forbid you are ever forced to interact with another human. The bubbleization of "society" is a concept that we are better served by fighting, not further embracing. Sure, there are some crazies on public transportation. I also met one of my best friends on a train. On the whole, the balance of public-transportation-riders I've interacted with has yielded far more beneficial interactions than negative ones. This as compared to my fellow car-commuters, whom which interactions generally fell on a spectrum between honks and extended medial digits.

bsimpson 15y ago

Admittedly, I'm no expert on electric cars, but they always make me feel like the emperor isn't wearing any clothes. Electricity is frequently generated by fossil fuels like coal. Electric cars don't reduce pollution, they just move it to wherever the coal is being burned. You have to get the electricity to the car from the far-away power plant, which means you're going to suffer from transmission loss (e.g. not every watt that is generated is going to make it to your drivetrain). Finally, we suck at making batteries. They're still big heavy lumps of highly toxic materials that wear out in relatively short amounts of time. What do you do with all the exhausted batteries? Like everyone, I'm all for making our infrastructure more environmentally-friendly. Sadly, I'm not convinced electric vehicles are anywhere close to where we'd need them to be. I feel like we have a lot of misplaced enthusiasm from people who want to clean up the industrial age a lot sooner than we realistically can.

bdonlan 15y ago
Moving the electrical generation to a central point allows you to build more sustainable power plants that only really work at scale - just try building a windmill on a single car, or a nuclear plant that can fir in your trunk.
georgieporgie 15y ago
Electric cars don't reduce pollution They most certainly do. Even the latest, most wonderfully advanced gasoline engines are positively filthy compared to a modern coal plant, which is positive filthy compared to a nuclear plant, which is positively filthy compared to a solar/wind/wave plant.
- ars 15y ago
  You have that last one backwards, nuclear is cleaner than solar/wind/wave, because you are forgetting just how much land those need.
  - georgieporgie 15y ago
    How does land use have anything to do with pollution?
    - ars 15y ago
      Because you have to construct them, and it takes a ton of energy to do so. The construction process also produces a lot of waste.
      - easp 15y ago
        You aren't taking into consideration the vast amounts of concrete and steel that go into a nuclear plant, nor the mining and refining of the uranium, nor, for that matter, it's disposal. Further, I think you are overestimating the impact of building and deploying wind turbines. They may require a lot of land, but their physical footprint is pretty small, and most of the land around them can be used for other purposes, like agriculture.
        ars 15y ago
        I am taking those into consideration. A nuclear plant produces a tremendous amount of energy for the materials it's made from. I was doing the math, and this document popped up as a search: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:UjtsvTfrOgQJ:www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/wind-concrete-steel-07.doc+&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShS9RRktG_eNeqbnoTZa_JCkPBNZdqboYOE6i7beemDjgYK4GJc5ZryJJ8i4MxfiO2YK7R87bOBIySvVayW7VC2GcwnxUWIM4zVwVP7LPYJ6blgXqoGy4Ub8FUQv_pkbIdPcYnp&sig=AHIEtbSQTCLuYOK3u4CG37_QbqZXH6EdLw https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:UjtsvTfrOgQJ:... So they did the math for me - wind turbines require 60 times as many resources as nuclear. The amount of uranium needed is tiny, very very tiny. And all the uranium ever made can be disposed of in one site, it's not really a lot. They also require far far more land. I don't just mean how much air space, but the actual tower. Wind turbines are better than coal, and since we are building lots of coal plants I am all for wind. But they are not better than nuclear - not even close.

jowiar 15y ago

>> And you sometimes/often have to share an air space with rude, dirty, sometimes crazy people. Oh come on. God forbid you are ever forced to interact with another human. The bubbleization of "society" is a concept that we are better served by fighting, not further embracing. Sure, there are some crazies on public transportation. I also met one of my best friends on a train. On the whole, the balance of public-transportation-riders I've interacted with has yielded far more beneficial interactions than negative ones. This as compared to my fellow car-commuters, whom which interactions generally fell on a spectrum between honks and extended medial digits.