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EVs are the biggest false solution out there. We are looking at decimating larger and larger portions of the planet just to preserve our stubborn dependence on

EVs are the biggest false solution out there. We are looking at decimating larger and larger portions of the planet just to preserve our stubborn dependence on automobiles. I like automobiles and don't want them banned, but the real problem that we have is that we're dependent on an unscalable transportation solution: cars.

dieselgate 4y ago
You said it very well. I’ve personally found biodiesel to be the best stopgap solution for relying on a car - ymmv
gpm 4y ago
Eh, we're always going to need a fair number of vehicles as a society in an industrial and commercial capacity. EVs are by far the best solution for those vehicles. I don't think it's fair to call them a false solution, they're just not a solution to all our problems, only some of them. They're also a huge financial enabler for us scaling our battery production, and the grid scale battery technology that is resulting is hugely useful in terms of transitioning away from fossil fuel electricity production.
- socialismisok 4y ago
  They aren't a solution to transportation at large. They are a solution to some issues, of course.
- sbaiddn 4y ago
  "EVs are by far the best solution for those vehicles." Thats not obvious to me. Why is that the case? What are the assumptions in your assertion? are you assuming continuous innovations in mtls science? Are you assuming a certain electrical grid and generstion mix that may or may not exist? For example, large ships certainly fall under "commercial" vehicles, but any electrical energy storage (even inexistent ones) would be hard pressed to compete on CO2 emissions with our current grid make up. 50% thermal efficiency is really good! Well the same can be said about tractor trailers. Their engines aren't 50% efficient, but they're pretty darned good! Id be surprised if an EV drivetrain can beat them on CO2 emissions. And if ships and trucks diesel engines are made to run NG (LNG tankers already do) Forget it. EV's are a CO2 environmental disaster by comparison. So, again, what are your assumptions?
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Cargo ships can use batteries. See: Rapid battery cost declines accelerate the prospects of all-electric interregional container shipping https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01065-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01065-y > Modeling 5 to 10 GWh electrified containerships, researchers find that 40% of routes today could be electrified in an economically viable manner, before considering environmental costs. Electric Semi trucks are already happening.
    - sbaiddn 4y ago
      I never argued that some researcher hasnt tried it out. I argued that electric ships and semis are not good solutions. Certainly not with the current grid. The reason is straightforward, the grid has a certain thermal efficiency, one that ships basically match and semis approach.
      - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
        I'm not sure what specific grid you are talking about, but yeah, we should decarbonise our grids too. That's happening. Almost certainly already better in most of the world, and anyway if you're building ship charging stations you can buy new renewable PPAs at the same time to supply power.
  - adrianN 4y ago
    The obvious assumption in an all-ev-future is that the grid is carbon neutral.
    - sbaiddn 4y ago
      Is that assumption viable?
      - adrianN 4y ago
        Of course it is.
leesec 4y ago
Pretending like the largest economy in the world can just snap it's fingers and implement trains and public transit across a huge landmass is the biggest false solution out there.
- Victerius 4y ago
  We've tried nothing, and we're out of ideas. I'm looking forward to revisit this comment when we run out of raw materials for EVs and all the tooling and expertise to make ICE cars is long gone. Should be fun.
  - wolfram74 4y ago
    I'm assuming this statement is about the shortage of battery components and that over generational time scales we'll run out of the parts for that, since otherwise it's very similar components between ICE vs EV. Lead acid batteries are recycled at a rate of ~99%[0], is there a good argument for why we won't end in a similar regulatory environment for other transport scale batteries? I'm a big fan of non-car solutions (I just biked back from my neighborhood grocery store), but if someone's gonna buy a car, I'd rather it not be combusting continuously to run. [0]https://www.energy-storage.news/lead-acid-batteries-are-us-most-recycled-products-trade-group-says/ https://www.energy-storage.news/lead-acid-batteries-are-us-m...
    - danielheath 4y ago
      Lead acid batteries have an energy density about 1/10th that of lithium ion. Perhaps enough for some uses, but challenging for most cars.
  - _huayra_ 4y ago
    > We've tried nothing, and we're out of ideas. I'm gonna use this line whenever my pro-car cheems mindset [0] family complain about new bike lanes getting installed :D [0] https://normielisation.substack.com/p/cheems-mindset https://normielisation.substack.com/p/cheems-mindset
simondotau 4y ago
It might seem that way today, but scaling up the EV adoption looks very different to scaling up fossil fuel consumption. It won’t be long before demand for battery minerals is mostly satisfied by recycling — and the need for ongoing mining of virgin material is mostly eliminated. Furthermore, lithium is an extremely abundant mineral. It's available pretty much everywhere, including the deserts of Nevada and Australia. The idea that we have to destroy rare ecosystems to get it is ridiculous.
- Victerius 4y ago
  > Furthermore, lithium is an extremely abundant mineral. The idea that we have to destroy rare ecosystems to get it is ridiculous. 1880 AD: Furthermore, oil is an extremely abundant resource. The idea that we have to destroy rare ecosystems to get it is ridiculous. 142 years later: Look how they massacred my boy
  - jjoonathan 4y ago
    EVs don't work by burning lithium into the atmosphere.
  - smileysteve 4y ago
    16kg of lithium lasts ~2000 (*200 miles) recharges and can be recycled into a new battery pack with little lithium loss and a some energy input. 16kg of gasoline lasts 1 "cycle" for 18-45 miles. The output requires significant energy input to capture and convert the co2 and H2O back into a fuel.
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      Are you saying you get 18-45 miles from 16kgs of gasoline? If so, that’s amazingly bad.
      - smileysteve 4y ago
        Good call-out, multiply by 4
peter422 4y ago
I think the current assumption that every electrical car needs to have 300+ mile range is going to eventually break and stop this false line of thinking. In the future there will be a variety of cheaper EVs with shorter ranges which will both lower demand for battery resources while also achieving climate change goals. Car batteries will also undoubtedly be critical parts of the electrical grid in 5-10 years, so they'll be doing double duty.
- olyjohn 4y ago
  There already are cheaper EVs with shorter ranges. They have been around for years. * Nissan Leaf * Fiat 500e * Honda E * Ford Focus EV * VW Golf e-something * BMW i3 These are all fine cars that get you from A->B as well as any of the $100,000+ EVs that seems to be all over the road. They all have ranges that will get 95% of the population to work.
ajross 4y ago
That seems 100% backwards to me. The industry required for electric VEHICLES is largely independent of their implementation as passenger cars. The battery industry right now is, indeed, being driven by FAANG employees' insatiable demand for Teslas. But it's going to be available for buses and freight and everything else too. But getting investment in infrastructure only works well if there are high margins, which means that you have to sell the Teslas first. But pretending that somehow we don't need a giant lithium battery industry because we'll just eliminate vehicles of all kinds seems horrifyingly wrong.
- socialismisok 4y ago
  Moving freight by truck the way we do is wildly inefficient. We should be slamming our hands on the table for electrified freight rail, with trucks being a last mile (or in some cases, using rail spurs to warehouses like we used to).
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    And then you have the problem of freight trains competing with passenger trains for the same track.
    - socialismisok 4y ago
      In some corridors, that's true. But we currently have rail companies that fight tooth and nail to prevent passenger rail from existing. Personally, I'd love to see the post office running freight rail for the country, investing in electrification of rail, and focusing on moving as much freight as possible by train.
      - dmitriid 4y ago
        It's the opposite problem in Sweden. Priority is given to passenger trains and freigh suffers. They are locked in to decisions made decades ago (for example, single not double tracks in most places) and expanding the tracks is extremely costly and extremely slow (the bane of any modern development).
fny 4y ago
Did everyone forget about hybrid vehicles so quickly?
hibikir 4y ago
I'd much prefer that high density world myself, but this is a complicated problem. Rezoning as to make denser building possible, and even preferable by most people, would be great. But limiting ourselves for that solution isn't going to be enough. Many American cities could be 1/4th of the size they currently are while still being full of single family residential + townhouses. We could be even denser if we wanted to. It'd, however, make the current homes of 3/4ths of the homeowners basically worthless. The world might be a lot better if the latest ring of single family exurbs didn't exist, but it does, and people are not going to be happy to abandon their new houses. Do we give people their money back from their now unsellable houses? Are we happy with the fact that the lucky winners that are the real targets of rezoning becoming very rich, as their land is now going to house more the families than before? How many construction workers, and construction materials, are we going to get to increase our homebuilding speed by orders of magnitude? That's a lot of materials in exchange for abandoned houses. In practice, a change like this has to take 30-40 years minimum, and we sure shouldn't we waiting that long with gas cars. It's not a case of true solutions and false solutions: The problem is large enough that we'll have to apply many solutions at once.
- clairity 4y ago
  > "Are we happy with the fact that the lucky winners that are the real targets of rezoning becoming very rich, as their land is now going to house more the families than before?" there's a potential fix for that that's being tried in australia: rezoning windfall taxes (https://www.prosper.org.au/rezoning-windfalls/ https://www.prosper.org.au/rezoning-windfalls/ ; posted here too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32957896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32957896)
scythe 4y ago
The cornerstone of all public transit systems is the bus. Only the densest parts of major cities can put a train line near everyone. The electrification of buses has only just begun, but the advantages of electric buses are significant: there are no jerky gear shifts; there is no near-field diesel exhaust; there is potentially a longer vehicle lifetime; there is a reduction in the exposure of transit budgets to fuel price swings and consequent debt financing.
ekianjo 4y ago
Larger portions of the planet? Humans activities actually cover very little land overall, and also most of what we do is just scratching the surface of the crust. The planet is much bigger than what you see with your eyes.
- ergl 4y ago
  > Human activities actually cover very little land 51% of all habitable land is not "very little": https://ourworldindata.org/land-use#half-of-the-world-s-habitable-land-is-used-for-agriculture https://ourworldindata.org/land-use#half-of-the-world-s-habi...
great_tankard 4y ago
Yes. I've often wondered about how previous generations got certain things so wrong, but this is the first time I've been fully aware of a revolution taking place right under my nose and I feel mostly powerless to do anything about it. Even if mining all of the lithium and copper weren't such a disastrously extractive and exploitative process, big personal steel boxes would still be an awful mode of transportation for most people. Our insistence on building infrastructure such that cars are the only truly viable method of getting around diminishes my enthusiasm about what is otherwise amazing technological progress.
bottlepalm 4y ago
False solution? Why because mining isn't being done responsibly in some part of the world? You could say the same thing about literally anything as no supply chain is perfect. But if there's a problem somewhere, like with mining, you zero in and fix it. The fact that a problem exists doesn't invalidate the entire system. First principles approach - there's no shortage of materials in the crust, no shortage of energy from the sun, and no problem with cars. Your argument is that they're 'unscalable' well they don't need to be because the population will soon be declining.
lm28469 4y ago
Nah bro you're wrong, I swear to god this is the last time we do that, we'll find a solution _in the future_ (maybe) /s

dieselgate 4y ago

You said it very well. I’ve personally found biodiesel to be the best stopgap solution for relying on a car - ymmv

gpm 4y ago

Eh, we're always going to need a fair number of vehicles as a society in an industrial and commercial capacity. EVs are by far the best solution for those vehicles. I don't think it's fair to call them a false solution, they're just not a solution to all our problems, only some of them. They're also a huge financial enabler for us scaling our battery production, and the grid scale battery technology that is resulting is hugely useful in terms of transitioning away from fossil fuel electricity production.

socialismisok 4y ago
They aren't a solution to transportation at large. They are a solution to some issues, of course.
sbaiddn 4y ago
"EVs are by far the best solution for those vehicles." Thats not obvious to me. Why is that the case? What are the assumptions in your assertion? are you assuming continuous innovations in mtls science? Are you assuming a certain electrical grid and generstion mix that may or may not exist? For example, large ships certainly fall under "commercial" vehicles, but any electrical energy storage (even inexistent ones) would be hard pressed to compete on CO2 emissions with our current grid make up. 50% thermal efficiency is really good! Well the same can be said about tractor trailers. Their engines aren't 50% efficient, but they're pretty darned good! Id be surprised if an EV drivetrain can beat them on CO2 emissions. And if ships and trucks diesel engines are made to run NG (LNG tankers already do) Forget it. EV's are a CO2 environmental disaster by comparison. So, again, what are your assumptions?
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Cargo ships can use batteries. See: Rapid battery cost declines accelerate the prospects of all-electric interregional container shipping https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01065-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01065-y > Modeling 5 to 10 GWh electrified containerships, researchers find that 40% of routes today could be electrified in an economically viable manner, before considering environmental costs. Electric Semi trucks are already happening.
  - sbaiddn 4y ago
    I never argued that some researcher hasnt tried it out. I argued that electric ships and semis are not good solutions. Certainly not with the current grid. The reason is straightforward, the grid has a certain thermal efficiency, one that ships basically match and semis approach.
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      I'm not sure what specific grid you are talking about, but yeah, we should decarbonise our grids too. That's happening. Almost certainly already better in most of the world, and anyway if you're building ship charging stations you can buy new renewable PPAs at the same time to supply power.
- adrianN 4y ago
  The obvious assumption in an all-ev-future is that the grid is carbon neutral.
  - sbaiddn 4y ago
    Is that assumption viable?
    - adrianN 4y ago
      Of course it is.

leesec 4y ago

Pretending like the largest economy in the world can just snap it's fingers and implement trains and public transit across a huge landmass is the biggest false solution out there.

Victerius 4y ago
We've tried nothing, and we're out of ideas. I'm looking forward to revisit this comment when we run out of raw materials for EVs and all the tooling and expertise to make ICE cars is long gone. Should be fun.
- wolfram74 4y ago
  I'm assuming this statement is about the shortage of battery components and that over generational time scales we'll run out of the parts for that, since otherwise it's very similar components between ICE vs EV. Lead acid batteries are recycled at a rate of ~99%[0], is there a good argument for why we won't end in a similar regulatory environment for other transport scale batteries? I'm a big fan of non-car solutions (I just biked back from my neighborhood grocery store), but if someone's gonna buy a car, I'd rather it not be combusting continuously to run. [0]https://www.energy-storage.news/lead-acid-batteries-are-us-most-recycled-products-trade-group-says/ https://www.energy-storage.news/lead-acid-batteries-are-us-m...
  - danielheath 4y ago
    Lead acid batteries have an energy density about 1/10th that of lithium ion. Perhaps enough for some uses, but challenging for most cars.
- _huayra_ 4y ago
  > We've tried nothing, and we're out of ideas. I'm gonna use this line whenever my pro-car cheems mindset [0] family complain about new bike lanes getting installed :D [0] https://normielisation.substack.com/p/cheems-mindset https://normielisation.substack.com/p/cheems-mindset

simondotau 4y ago

It might seem that way today, but scaling up the EV adoption looks very different to scaling up fossil fuel consumption. It won’t be long before demand for battery minerals is mostly satisfied by recycling — and the need for ongoing mining of virgin material is mostly eliminated. Furthermore, lithium is an extremely abundant mineral. It's available pretty much everywhere, including the deserts of Nevada and Australia. The idea that we have to destroy rare ecosystems to get it is ridiculous.

Victerius 4y ago
> Furthermore, lithium is an extremely abundant mineral. The idea that we have to destroy rare ecosystems to get it is ridiculous. 1880 AD: Furthermore, oil is an extremely abundant resource. The idea that we have to destroy rare ecosystems to get it is ridiculous. 142 years later: Look how they massacred my boy
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  EVs don't work by burning lithium into the atmosphere.
- smileysteve 4y ago
  16kg of lithium lasts ~2000 (*200 miles) recharges and can be recycled into a new battery pack with little lithium loss and a some energy input. 16kg of gasoline lasts 1 "cycle" for 18-45 miles. The output requires significant energy input to capture and convert the co2 and H2O back into a fuel.
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    Are you saying you get 18-45 miles from 16kgs of gasoline? If so, that’s amazingly bad.
    - smileysteve 4y ago
      Good call-out, multiply by 4

peter422 4y ago

I think the current assumption that every electrical car needs to have 300+ mile range is going to eventually break and stop this false line of thinking. In the future there will be a variety of cheaper EVs with shorter ranges which will both lower demand for battery resources while also achieving climate change goals. Car batteries will also undoubtedly be critical parts of the electrical grid in 5-10 years, so they'll be doing double duty.

olyjohn 4y ago
There already are cheaper EVs with shorter ranges. They have been around for years. * Nissan Leaf * Fiat 500e * Honda E * Ford Focus EV * VW Golf e-something * BMW i3 These are all fine cars that get you from A->B as well as any of the $100,000+ EVs that seems to be all over the road. They all have ranges that will get 95% of the population to work.

ajross 4y ago

That seems 100% backwards to me. The industry required for electric VEHICLES is largely independent of their implementation as passenger cars. The battery industry right now is, indeed, being driven by FAANG employees' insatiable demand for Teslas. But it's going to be available for buses and freight and everything else too. But getting investment in infrastructure only works well if there are high margins, which means that you have to sell the Teslas first. But pretending that somehow we don't need a giant lithium battery industry because we'll just eliminate vehicles of all kinds seems horrifyingly wrong.

socialismisok 4y ago
Moving freight by truck the way we do is wildly inefficient. We should be slamming our hands on the table for electrified freight rail, with trucks being a last mile (or in some cases, using rail spurs to warehouses like we used to).
- dmitriid 4y ago
  And then you have the problem of freight trains competing with passenger trains for the same track.
  - socialismisok 4y ago
    In some corridors, that's true. But we currently have rail companies that fight tooth and nail to prevent passenger rail from existing. Personally, I'd love to see the post office running freight rail for the country, investing in electrification of rail, and focusing on moving as much freight as possible by train.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      It's the opposite problem in Sweden. Priority is given to passenger trains and freigh suffers. They are locked in to decisions made decades ago (for example, single not double tracks in most places) and expanding the tracks is extremely costly and extremely slow (the bane of any modern development).

fny 4y ago

Did everyone forget about hybrid vehicles so quickly?

hibikir 4y ago

I'd much prefer that high density world myself, but this is a complicated problem. Rezoning as to make denser building possible, and even preferable by most people, would be great. But limiting ourselves for that solution isn't going to be enough. Many American cities could be 1/4th of the size they currently are while still being full of single family residential + townhouses. We could be even denser if we wanted to. It'd, however, make the current homes of 3/4ths of the homeowners basically worthless. The world might be a lot better if the latest ring of single family exurbs didn't exist, but it does, and people are not going to be happy to abandon their new houses. Do we give people their money back from their now unsellable houses? Are we happy with the fact that the lucky winners that are the real targets of rezoning becoming very rich, as their land is now going to house more the families than before? How many construction workers, and construction materials, are we going to get to increase our homebuilding speed by orders of magnitude? That's a lot of materials in exchange for abandoned houses. In practice, a change like this has to take 30-40 years minimum, and we sure shouldn't we waiting that long with gas cars. It's not a case of true solutions and false solutions: The problem is large enough that we'll have to apply many solutions at once.

clairity 4y ago
> "Are we happy with the fact that the lucky winners that are the real targets of rezoning becoming very rich, as their land is now going to house more the families than before?" there's a potential fix for that that's being tried in australia: rezoning windfall taxes (https://www.prosper.org.au/rezoning-windfalls/ https://www.prosper.org.au/rezoning-windfalls/ ; posted here too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32957896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32957896)

scythe 4y ago

The cornerstone of all public transit systems is the bus. Only the densest parts of major cities can put a train line near everyone. The electrification of buses has only just begun, but the advantages of electric buses are significant: there are no jerky gear shifts; there is no near-field diesel exhaust; there is potentially a longer vehicle lifetime; there is a reduction in the exposure of transit budgets to fuel price swings and consequent debt financing.

ekianjo 4y ago

Larger portions of the planet? Humans activities actually cover very little land overall, and also most of what we do is just scratching the surface of the crust. The planet is much bigger than what you see with your eyes.

ergl 4y ago
> Human activities actually cover very little land 51% of all habitable land is not "very little": https://ourworldindata.org/land-use#half-of-the-world-s-habitable-land-is-used-for-agriculture https://ourworldindata.org/land-use#half-of-the-world-s-habi...

great_tankard 4y ago

Yes. I've often wondered about how previous generations got certain things so wrong, but this is the first time I've been fully aware of a revolution taking place right under my nose and I feel mostly powerless to do anything about it. Even if mining all of the lithium and copper weren't such a disastrously extractive and exploitative process, big personal steel boxes would still be an awful mode of transportation for most people. Our insistence on building infrastructure such that cars are the only truly viable method of getting around diminishes my enthusiasm about what is otherwise amazing technological progress.

bottlepalm 4y ago

False solution? Why because mining isn't being done responsibly in some part of the world? You could say the same thing about literally anything as no supply chain is perfect. But if there's a problem somewhere, like with mining, you zero in and fix it. The fact that a problem exists doesn't invalidate the entire system. First principles approach - there's no shortage of materials in the crust, no shortage of energy from the sun, and no problem with cars. Your argument is that they're 'unscalable' well they don't need to be because the population will soon be declining.

lm28469 4y ago

Nah bro you're wrong, I swear to god this is the last time we do that, we'll find a solution _in the future_ (maybe) /s