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Zero-Emission Vehicles Progress Dashboard [pdf]

29 points by zeristor 4y ago

adrianN 4y ago
I hate it when "zero emission vehicles" stands for "electric cars". We have trains, bicycles, and a number of non-car electric vehicles too. We should try to reduce the number of cars on road, not just make them electric.
- Rygian 4y ago
  The word "cars" appears exactly once in the whole dashboard, so I would assume it covers consumer vehicles, not cars.
- pelasaco 4y ago
  why? Assuming that all vehicles are zero emission vehicle, why should we reduce the numbers of cars from the streets?
  - adrianN 4y ago
    Because cars have negative externalities other than carbon emissions.
    - VBprogrammer 4y ago
      Keeping the number of cars on the road flat would be a huge achievement. The fact is that cars provide a huge amount of utility which is hard to give up unless you live in a dense city with good public transport provisions.
      - adrianN 4y ago
        Carcentric city planning and good public transport are pretty much mutually exclusive.
        ThunderSizzle 4y ago
        Not necessarily, but that's how the anti-car crowd wants to frame the discussion, which is why it's not going to get anywhere. If you want to increase non-car infrastructure, you need to convince people it's in their best interest, not attempt to punish them for owning a car. People would love to have an fast, safe, and convenient system for getting around, and right now, that's a car. Most anti-car discussions talk about punishing people for having a car without trying to replace it with something sensible that is fast, safe, and convenient. Of course there's push back.
        adrianN 4y ago
        If you want to increase non-car infrastructure you either have the problem that you have room, but density is insufficient (e.g. suburbia, cities with too many huge parking lots), or that there is no room (e.g. reasonably dense metro areas). In either case you need to fundamentally restructure the infrastructure to make public transport attractive. That's not really possible without making life worse for drivers.
        ThunderSizzle 4y ago
        Again, that's where you lose the discussion. You think motorists love huge parking lots or wide roads. They don't. They couldn't care less - they just want sufficient parking and sufficient travel lanes to get around. If there's one fast lane with less traffic, they'll be happier than 5 lanes of slow traffic. They don't want congestion, and are willing to support initiatives that reduce congestion. Right now, the only consistent initiative is either painting bike lanes in the middle of no where that no one will use or adding more car lanes. But the frame of the discussion right now is to punish motorists for being motorists - they don't have a choice. They can't afford to live closer (or there's no options that give what they are looking for), and there's no safe, fast, or convenient way to any place they need to go without a car. Give them a safe, fast, and convenient way from suburbia to downtown, and they'll support reducing highways into half their size. Right now, the discussion is "suburbia bad, car bad, you bad - be better"
    - pelasaco 4y ago
      for example?
      - adrianN 4y ago
        For example they need a lot of nonrenewable resources to build.
        pelasaco 4y ago
        trains much more and bikes (not a lot in comparison with a car), but still, too.
        adrianN 4y ago
        Trains transport a lot more people per resource. There is obviously no alternative with zero impact. Even walking uses nonrenewable resources. Cars are just much more wasteful than other modes of transportation.
  - CalRobert 4y ago
    Drivers kill over 40,000 people a year in the US, and over a million people a year around the globe. Drivers are the leading cause of dead kids in many places, and places built for driving are extremely unpleasant for walking, biking, chatting, etc. They also are very expensive to provide services to and maintain.
  - socialismisok 4y ago
    Here are a few reasons: Cars still pollute - dust from tires causes harm to lungs and streams and is contributing to the decline of salmon populations. Cars are heavy, damaging roads, increasing maintenance costs compared to electric bikes or public transit. Cars are large, and need to be parked. That means larger roads and more parking lots, rather than using the space for housing, businesses, or parks. Bikes, buses, and trains don't have the same problem. Cars reduce access to cities - highways and arterials are difficult to cross, and divide neighborhood activities. Cars are dangerous, humans are generally only moderately adept at driving them. We have tons of injuries and deaths because people are bad at driving. (Or have to drive when they shouldn't.) Cars are inefficient. The energy used to move 1 person via a car compared to any other form of transport is one to two orders of magnitude higher. Cars require distributed energy rather than the centralized infrastructure that public transit requires, which means many small chargers rather than one electrified rail. Cars aren't affordable for everyone, leading to inequalities in who is eligible to work at certain jobs. There are probably more reasons, but cars are a deeply inefficient and costly means of transport.
    - nwah1 4y ago
      More reasons: It makes the world uglier, noisier, and homogenized. It makes urban regions hostile to families with children. It creates a constant feeling of stress and aggression (road rage) It requires a surveillance state, a police state, and thousands of laws that all must be followed precisely to uphold. And this takes away justice system resources that could be used for other things. The roads must constantly be under construction, adding annoyance and expense for everyone. Congestion wastes innumerable hours of our lives. Not great with kids because car seats are expensive, annoying to install, and keeps you more tied to one vehicle because ridesharing and rentals don't always have them. They are an attractive target for thieves because they are among the single most expensive things people own and you can use the loot itself to escape. It comes with an endless barrage of annoyances for the drivers: parking fees, tolls, insurance, tickets, license renewals, city stickers, emissions tests, maintenance, car washes, refueling, getting towed, getting booted, etc.
- zeristor 4y ago
  Or even just walk. I mean if cities were more walkable there'd be less need to join the arms race of more and more aggressive cars on the road.
  - ketzu 4y ago
    I mean... walking is clearly not a vehicle. It is an important part of sustainable and pleasant city planning, though!
p0w3n3d 4y ago
Electric car is not zero emission. And never will be, unless it's made from renewable materials and battery is charged with sun.
- codeulike 4y ago
  A zero-emission vehicle, or ZEV, is a vehicle that does not emit exhaust gas or other pollutants from the onboard source of power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-emissions_vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-emissions_vehicle
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    So a very long way from "zero emission" then, depending on where its power comes from. I guess if you stretch the definition rules sufficiently my 25-year-old 4.6 litre V8 4x4 is a "Negative-Emission Vehicle" because it actively reduces the amount of toxic pollution in the air, when you take it down some of the more polluted roads. Drive it in a bus lane and the exhaust gases are cleaner than the air it's sucking in - it's warm carbon dioxide and water vapour, with all the HC, CO and particulates stripped out.
    - pwinnski 4y ago
      You can imagine a worst-case scenario for the electricity used to charge the cars, or you can imagine a best-case scenario. The car itself is zero-emission by the definition posted. You are hypothesizing that the electricity used to charge the car comes from a dirty source, but that has nothing to do with the car itself, and in Texas for example, it's easily to choose a "100% renewable" energy provider. I just checked PowerToChoose[0] and found 26 "100% Renewable" plans available from companies like CleanSky[1]. 0. https://powertochoose.org/en-us https://powertochoose.org/en-us 1. https://cleanskyenergy.com https://cleanskyenergy.com
      - Gordonjcp 4y ago
        It's the same in Scotland. Right now the whole country is powered by 100% renewable energy but everything is priced based on all power being generated in and for London from natural gas, because we have to prop up England's failed capitalist experiment.
Rygian 4y ago
The market trend seems to confirm the Clean Hydrogen Ladder [1] prediction that Fuel Cell Vehicles are a bad idea. Quote: "FCVs continue to find it difficult to compete with BEVs on cost and popularity and are unlikely to gain market share in the passenger vehicle segment." [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-michael-liebreich/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-mic...
- VBprogrammer 4y ago
  I was reading some assesment from the UK Health and Safety executive that in order to meet the same capacity as a typical petrol / diesel station a hydrogen station would need 2 truck deliveries of liquid hydrogen per day, something like 5% of trucks on the road would be employed delivering hydrogen.
  - jbms 4y ago
    Thanks, have you got a link to that because I'd like to read it? I assume the primary counterargument would be that hydrogen production can be either onsite or local so in practice that wouldn't be the result.
  - derbOac 4y ago
    For some perspective, I remember a time when hydrogen was assumed to be the best option for ZEV because battery energy density wasn't practical. I don't really have any favorites, but it seems like this stuff changes over time.
TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
Is it only me, or those graphs are resembling S curve which is slowly getting to its plateau, because rich people bought their BEVs and poor can't afford them?
- alex_duf 4y ago
  I think it's more of a supply issue than a demand issue, and covid made the situation worse.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Used EVs filter their way down to less well off auto consumers over time, with well heeled consumers buying the latest gen.
  - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
    That sounds more like a wishful thinking, because on used cars you will see Tesla and Chevy Bolts for price of new units and Nissan Leaf with depleted batteries.
    - neogodless 4y ago
      The pricing in used cars is more so a factor of current overall automotive market conditions, than it is due to electric cars. Though, for sure, there just aren't a lot of EVs to buy (used or new), so the used ones are commanding higher prices for anyone trying to make the switch. But those same market conditions are also encouraging manufacturers to target the high end first. As conditions evolve, budget (electric) vehicles should become more available.
- cantaloupe 4y ago
  BEVs remain mostly a luxury purchase right now in the west, but the price of the average EV in China has been dropping precipitously (almost 50% in the last 10 years) [1]. Several big US auto manufacturers are also gearing up to break into the ~$20k market in the next few years. [1] https://www.euronews.com/next/amp/2021/09/28/china-s-carmakers-are-making-cheaper-electric-vehicles-and-they-have-their-sights-on-europ https://www.euronews.com/next/amp/2021/09/28/china-s-carmake...
roter 4y ago
For somebody not well-versed in EV developments, pg. 13, titled "EVs will have 17 times the battery capacity of stationary storage systems by 2030", made interesting reading. On a side note, I found many of the graphs difficult to differentiate.
tacker2000 4y ago
A very interesting point shown here is the extremely large amount of overall energy storage/saving capacity that will be in the EVs themselves and the questions of how to “leverage” that, by bi-directional charging, for example. What else could be possible here? Huge grids powered by “undriven” EVs, whilst their owners receive cashback?
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Just demand shifting of charging will have a big impact. EVs are a battery and and a computer on wheels. Charging automatically when the grid is cheap and green is going to really help the roll out of renewables.
- tromp 4y ago
  > The cumulative storage available from the EV fleet is so large that if it were all available, it would saturate revenues in the power system. This means there is likely a limit to the share of vehicles that charge bi-directionally. Having too much EV battery capacity available to support grid energy storage seems like a very nice problem to have and should further boost investments in wind and solar. I hope that bidirectional charging ports become a requirement on all high-priced future housing.

29 points by zeristor 4y ago

I hate it when "zero emission vehicles" stands for "electric cars". We have trains, bicycles, and a number of non-car electric vehicles too. We should try to reduce the number of cars on road, not just make them electric.

Rygian 4y ago
The word "cars" appears exactly once in the whole dashboard, so I would assume it covers consumer vehicles, not cars.
pelasaco 4y ago
why? Assuming that all vehicles are zero emission vehicle, why should we reduce the numbers of cars from the streets?
- adrianN 4y ago
  Because cars have negative externalities other than carbon emissions.
  - VBprogrammer 4y ago
    Keeping the number of cars on the road flat would be a huge achievement. The fact is that cars provide a huge amount of utility which is hard to give up unless you live in a dense city with good public transport provisions.
    - adrianN 4y ago
      Carcentric city planning and good public transport are pretty much mutually exclusive.
      - ThunderSizzle 4y ago
        Not necessarily, but that's how the anti-car crowd wants to frame the discussion, which is why it's not going to get anywhere. If you want to increase non-car infrastructure, you need to convince people it's in their best interest, not attempt to punish them for owning a car. People would love to have an fast, safe, and convenient system for getting around, and right now, that's a car. Most anti-car discussions talk about punishing people for having a car without trying to replace it with something sensible that is fast, safe, and convenient. Of course there's push back.
        adrianN 4y ago
        If you want to increase non-car infrastructure you either have the problem that you have room, but density is insufficient (e.g. suburbia, cities with too many huge parking lots), or that there is no room (e.g. reasonably dense metro areas). In either case you need to fundamentally restructure the infrastructure to make public transport attractive. That's not really possible without making life worse for drivers.
        ThunderSizzle 4y ago
        Again, that's where you lose the discussion. You think motorists love huge parking lots or wide roads. They don't. They couldn't care less - they just want sufficient parking and sufficient travel lanes to get around. If there's one fast lane with less traffic, they'll be happier than 5 lanes of slow traffic. They don't want congestion, and are willing to support initiatives that reduce congestion. Right now, the only consistent initiative is either painting bike lanes in the middle of no where that no one will use or adding more car lanes. But the frame of the discussion right now is to punish motorists for being motorists - they don't have a choice. They can't afford to live closer (or there's no options that give what they are looking for), and there's no safe, fast, or convenient way to any place they need to go without a car. Give them a safe, fast, and convenient way from suburbia to downtown, and they'll support reducing highways into half their size. Right now, the discussion is "suburbia bad, car bad, you bad - be better"
  - pelasaco 4y ago
    for example?
    - adrianN 4y ago
      For example they need a lot of nonrenewable resources to build.
      - pelasaco 4y ago
        trains much more and bikes (not a lot in comparison with a car), but still, too.
        adrianN 4y ago
        Trains transport a lot more people per resource. There is obviously no alternative with zero impact. Even walking uses nonrenewable resources. Cars are just much more wasteful than other modes of transportation.
- CalRobert 4y ago
  Drivers kill over 40,000 people a year in the US, and over a million people a year around the globe. Drivers are the leading cause of dead kids in many places, and places built for driving are extremely unpleasant for walking, biking, chatting, etc. They also are very expensive to provide services to and maintain.
- socialismisok 4y ago
  Here are a few reasons: Cars still pollute - dust from tires causes harm to lungs and streams and is contributing to the decline of salmon populations. Cars are heavy, damaging roads, increasing maintenance costs compared to electric bikes or public transit. Cars are large, and need to be parked. That means larger roads and more parking lots, rather than using the space for housing, businesses, or parks. Bikes, buses, and trains don't have the same problem. Cars reduce access to cities - highways and arterials are difficult to cross, and divide neighborhood activities. Cars are dangerous, humans are generally only moderately adept at driving them. We have tons of injuries and deaths because people are bad at driving. (Or have to drive when they shouldn't.) Cars are inefficient. The energy used to move 1 person via a car compared to any other form of transport is one to two orders of magnitude higher. Cars require distributed energy rather than the centralized infrastructure that public transit requires, which means many small chargers rather than one electrified rail. Cars aren't affordable for everyone, leading to inequalities in who is eligible to work at certain jobs. There are probably more reasons, but cars are a deeply inefficient and costly means of transport.
  - nwah1 4y ago
    More reasons: It makes the world uglier, noisier, and homogenized. It makes urban regions hostile to families with children. It creates a constant feeling of stress and aggression (road rage) It requires a surveillance state, a police state, and thousands of laws that all must be followed precisely to uphold. And this takes away justice system resources that could be used for other things. The roads must constantly be under construction, adding annoyance and expense for everyone. Congestion wastes innumerable hours of our lives. Not great with kids because car seats are expensive, annoying to install, and keeps you more tied to one vehicle because ridesharing and rentals don't always have them. They are an attractive target for thieves because they are among the single most expensive things people own and you can use the loot itself to escape. It comes with an endless barrage of annoyances for the drivers: parking fees, tolls, insurance, tickets, license renewals, city stickers, emissions tests, maintenance, car washes, refueling, getting towed, getting booted, etc.
zeristor 4y ago
Or even just walk. I mean if cities were more walkable there'd be less need to join the arms race of more and more aggressive cars on the road.
- ketzu 4y ago
  I mean... walking is clearly not a vehicle. It is an important part of sustainable and pleasant city planning, though!

p0w3n3d 4y ago

Electric car is not zero emission. And never will be, unless it's made from renewable materials and battery is charged with sun.

codeulike 4y ago
A zero-emission vehicle, or ZEV, is a vehicle that does not emit exhaust gas or other pollutants from the onboard source of power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-emissions_vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-emissions_vehicle
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  So a very long way from "zero emission" then, depending on where its power comes from. I guess if you stretch the definition rules sufficiently my 25-year-old 4.6 litre V8 4x4 is a "Negative-Emission Vehicle" because it actively reduces the amount of toxic pollution in the air, when you take it down some of the more polluted roads. Drive it in a bus lane and the exhaust gases are cleaner than the air it's sucking in - it's warm carbon dioxide and water vapour, with all the HC, CO and particulates stripped out.
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    You can imagine a worst-case scenario for the electricity used to charge the cars, or you can imagine a best-case scenario. The car itself is zero-emission by the definition posted. You are hypothesizing that the electricity used to charge the car comes from a dirty source, but that has nothing to do with the car itself, and in Texas for example, it's easily to choose a "100% renewable" energy provider. I just checked PowerToChoose[0] and found 26 "100% Renewable" plans available from companies like CleanSky[1]. 0. https://powertochoose.org/en-us https://powertochoose.org/en-us 1. https://cleanskyenergy.com https://cleanskyenergy.com
    - Gordonjcp 4y ago
      It's the same in Scotland. Right now the whole country is powered by 100% renewable energy but everything is priced based on all power being generated in and for London from natural gas, because we have to prop up England's failed capitalist experiment.

Rygian 4y ago

The market trend seems to confirm the Clean Hydrogen Ladder [1] prediction that Fuel Cell Vehicles are a bad idea. Quote: "FCVs continue to find it difficult to compete with BEVs on cost and popularity and are unlikely to gain market share in the passenger vehicle segment." [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-michael-liebreich/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-mic...

VBprogrammer 4y ago
I was reading some assesment from the UK Health and Safety executive that in order to meet the same capacity as a typical petrol / diesel station a hydrogen station would need 2 truck deliveries of liquid hydrogen per day, something like 5% of trucks on the road would be employed delivering hydrogen.
- jbms 4y ago
  Thanks, have you got a link to that because I'd like to read it? I assume the primary counterargument would be that hydrogen production can be either onsite or local so in practice that wouldn't be the result.
- derbOac 4y ago
  For some perspective, I remember a time when hydrogen was assumed to be the best option for ZEV because battery energy density wasn't practical. I don't really have any favorites, but it seems like this stuff changes over time.

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago

Is it only me, or those graphs are resembling S curve which is slowly getting to its plateau, because rich people bought their BEVs and poor can't afford them?

alex_duf 4y ago
I think it's more of a supply issue than a demand issue, and covid made the situation worse.
toomuchtodo 4y ago
Used EVs filter their way down to less well off auto consumers over time, with well heeled consumers buying the latest gen.
- TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
  That sounds more like a wishful thinking, because on used cars you will see Tesla and Chevy Bolts for price of new units and Nissan Leaf with depleted batteries.
  - neogodless 4y ago
    The pricing in used cars is more so a factor of current overall automotive market conditions, than it is due to electric cars. Though, for sure, there just aren't a lot of EVs to buy (used or new), so the used ones are commanding higher prices for anyone trying to make the switch. But those same market conditions are also encouraging manufacturers to target the high end first. As conditions evolve, budget (electric) vehicles should become more available.
cantaloupe 4y ago
BEVs remain mostly a luxury purchase right now in the west, but the price of the average EV in China has been dropping precipitously (almost 50% in the last 10 years) [1]. Several big US auto manufacturers are also gearing up to break into the ~$20k market in the next few years. [1] https://www.euronews.com/next/amp/2021/09/28/china-s-carmakers-are-making-cheaper-electric-vehicles-and-they-have-their-sights-on-europ https://www.euronews.com/next/amp/2021/09/28/china-s-carmake...

roter 4y ago

For somebody not well-versed in EV developments, pg. 13, titled "EVs will have 17 times the battery capacity of stationary storage systems by 2030", made interesting reading. On a side note, I found many of the graphs difficult to differentiate.

tacker2000 4y ago

A very interesting point shown here is the extremely large amount of overall energy storage/saving capacity that will be in the EVs themselves and the questions of how to “leverage” that, by bi-directional charging, for example. What else could be possible here? Huge grids powered by “undriven” EVs, whilst their owners receive cashback?

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Just demand shifting of charging will have a big impact. EVs are a battery and and a computer on wheels. Charging automatically when the grid is cheap and green is going to really help the roll out of renewables.
tromp 4y ago
> The cumulative storage available from the EV fleet is so large that if it were all available, it would saturate revenues in the power system. This means there is likely a limit to the share of vehicles that charge bi-directionally. Having too much EV battery capacity available to support grid energy storage seems like a very nice problem to have and should further boost investments in wind and solar. I hope that bidirectional charging ports become a requirement on all high-priced future housing.