14 ms·

it does seem to me that we have decided on a date for the solution (EVs) without high confidence that the dependencies (generation) will actually be ready by th

it does seem to me that we have decided on a date for the solution (EVs) without high confidence that the dependencies (generation) will actually be ready by that date. but besides that, I'm not convinced that EVs are the best solution to begin with. EVs solve only one of several major issues with ICE vehicles. they still shed tire/brake particles, take up tons of space, encourage sprawling development, and are just as hazardous to pedestrians. I can't help but think this massive investment of time and resources might be better spent on public transit that is actually pleasant to use. pax will typically optimize for travel time over all else. if the fastest option is public transit more often than not, personal vehicles will become a niche that doesn't matter much from an emissions perspective. btw, I am an auto enthusiast. I love driving and I love cars. but it seems to me that most people don't enjoy driving at all. imo we would all be better off if cars were enjoyed intentionally by a small minority of enthusiasts. why spend so much to fix something most people don't like to begin with?

mbgerring 3y ago
The massive investment in time in resources is mostly private capital, on the assumption that that capital will see a return, which is unlikely to ever happen with public transit. I agree with you, and I also know we are running out of time to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. I’m resigned at this point to doing whatever is likeliest to get the job done in time. And either way, the busses, trains and ferries all need to be electrified too, and any grid improvements, advancements in battery tech etc. will also help those efforts.
JoshTriplett 3y ago
> but it seems to me that most people don't enjoy driving at all. While many people don't enjoy driving, many people do prefer cars as a mode of transit. Don't assume that people "don't like cars", whether or not they like driving as an activity. People overwhelmingly prefer cars. > if the fastest option is public transit more often than not That's a very high bar to reach. And you also have to take into account the hassle of transit not actually getting you where you want to be. It's one thing to have a transit system that can get you between cities or to a large general area; it's another to have a transit system that can get you from an arbitrary door to an arbitrary door, which a car can do.
- nicoburns 3y ago
  People do often prefer driving. However, people tend to not like the effects that other people driving has on their life. Public transport starts to look a lot better when you take that into account too.
  - brianwawok 3y ago
    If you don’t live in a mega city it doesn’t matter though. I live in a metro area of ~250k people. No traffic is so bad a 2 lane road doesn’t still move. So drive away my neighbors! Preferable in an EV powered by green energy.
    - oblio 3y ago
      A city of 250k people could have awesome public transit if it wanted to.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- benjiweber 3y ago
  I mean in London the fastest option is public transit more often than not, and you get pretty close to door to door.
  - nine_k 3y ago
    Same in Manhattan! Now we only need to make most of the US as dense as London at least. I don't think it's realistic. (Also, have you tried to afford a place to live in London, to say nothing of Manhattan?) People "prefer cars" because people prefer detached houses and low-density living. Not all of them, but plenty enough. For them, an EV is the only electric option. In cities, of course, public transit should predominate, and should be developed and improved, while car presence should become lower and lower.
    - leetcrew 3y ago
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
EVs are actually phasing out both brake particle emmissions and brake fluid, by returning to "drum brakes" when regen isn't enough. https://www.continental.com/en/press/studies-publications/technology-dossiers/drum-brake/ https://www.continental.com/en/press/studies-publications/te... > The drum brake offers even further attractions, the environmental particulate emissions are vastly reduced when compared to the traditional disc brake system technology, that will bring upcoming decisive decisions to comply with increasingly stricter environmental requirements. While combustion engines have had to comply with increasingly stringent emission limits in recent years, the focus has now widened to include foundation brakes. The fine brake dust generated from the brake system can have far-reaching adverse effects on human health, depending on the size of the particles emitted. Experts expect stricter legal requirements from the EU Commission by 2025 at the latest. Drum brake technology takes advantage of the enclosed housing system, allowing the brake dust particulates to be accumulated within the enclosed system that can be collected and disposed in a controlled manner that protects the environment.
- lnsru 3y ago
  These things rust as hell in their enclosures. Volkswagen group EVs with rear drums are catastrophic development. Take press releases and advertisement with a grain of salt next time.
  - leoedin 3y ago
    Until perhaps 10 years ago, drum brakes were standard as the rear brakes of almost every car. They lasted pretty much the lifetime of the car.
    - lnsru 3y ago
      Yes. My cheap motorcycle had drum brakes and was fine for many many kilometers. The problem with electric vehicles is that they brake with motors and not with brakes. Brakes gather dust and silently corrode. Apparently latest vehicles periodically activate brakes without driver’s intervention to prevent corrosion and uneven wear.
iinnPP 3y ago
I was downvoted into oblivion for suggesting part of the EV solution will be to force people out of driving and into using a Waymo-like service. Seems pretty obvious to me. I also don't drive and don't use public transportation or cabs. I walk and get stared at awkwardly for it. I personally cannot wait for a time when a traffic light doesn't result in me almost dying because people can't follow basic rules of the road. I just got back from a 10min walk where I was able to kick(and damage) the bumper of a SUV after I had to dodge their left hand turn when I had a walk clearance and witnessed a car blow a completely red (for 30seconds...) red light and nearly collided with a thankfully aware driver making a left hand turn during an advance. Edit: My city is considered a dream compared to the close by moronic drivers of Toronto Ontario.
- least 3y ago
  > Seems pretty obvious to me. I also don't drive and don't use public transportation or cabs. I walk and get stared at awkwardly for it. Being able to walk everywhere you need to go is a massive luxury. Especially without any public transportation? Sounds really nice. It's just not feasible for most people and it won't be any time soon.
  - iinnPP 3y ago
    What is stopping them exactly? I live in a well off area on the outskirts of a city of 500,000. Driving across the city takes an hour. I have lived in the south-east, south, north, central, west, southwest, and northeast areas of the city and have been able to walk everywhere my entire life. I guess people don't like luxury because a large chunk of my neighborhood will drive their 8-seater SUV(alone) to the convenience store on the corner for a drink. I have met precisely zero people from my area who walk to the grocery store nearby where I pickup my fresh produce every few days. People are just lazy.
    - aiilns 3y ago
      Let me get this straight. You're asking what's stopping people from walking everywhere? And instead of thinking for like 5 seconds and realizing someone may work 15km away from home you write a senseless comment about people driving to the grocery store and concluding that what's stopping people from walking everywhere is that they're lazy. OK.
nostrademons 3y ago
I think the long-term solution to transit problems is intermodal passenger pods that can shuffle between self-driving cars, trains, aircraft, watercraft, and elevators. Containerization for people, basically. You'd hop in your pod which is basically another room in your apartment when not in use, and then the building would shuffle you down the elevator to the subway. Once you're outside of city limits, it'd transfer you to a self-driving car to take you to a hike in the mountains. Or it could send you to the airport, security scan you on the way, and your pod would fit straight onto the aircraft without any need to get out, go through security, wait at the terminal, or interact with other passengers. Or it might transfer you to commute rail to get to the general vicinity of your workplace, and then a self-driving scooter for the last mile to work. EVs are a useful step in that direction though. Something like the Rivian skateboard platform lends itself very well to containerized passenger transport, since the passenger body can just be loaded straight onto the chassis. Plus this model generally has shorter, fewer, and more predictable vehicle miles, which makes EV charging easier.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  What is this actually solving other than adding tons of mechanical failure points? Why not just use a door? People already don't move around enough.
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    Transit time, particularly in the transfer points between types of transportation. Imagine leaving for the airport 30 minutes before take-off time rather than 2 hours, and not needing to spend half an hour de-planing and collecting your baggage. Many short-haul commuter flights (eg. ~1H from SFO to Reno or LAX to Vegas) become viable, and HSR is much more practical if you don't need to worry about connections or last-mile transportation. You could commute Merced -> Google in about 50 minutes with this system, less than the shuttle to SF currently takes. It'd be 2 stops on CA HSR (Merced -> Gilroy -> SJC, 30 minutes), then 1 stop on a Caltrain baby bullet (SJC -> MTV, 15 minutes), then a self-driving car for the 2 miles from MTV Caltrain to Google (5 minutes). Best of all, you wouldn't need to interrupt what you're doing - you could take a nap, or code, or read a book, or watch a TV show and not need to put it away every time you switch transportation modes. Think of what that'd do to housing prices, if the commutable distance from the Bay Area extended out to the Central Valley. Also, computer-controlling all the individual vehicles allows the possibility of moving transfers. Imagine if HSR didn't need to come to a stop for passengers to embark and disembark. The self-driving car could instead accelerate up to ~100mph and the train would decelerate to that, and then pods would move over as their chassis lined up. One of the biggest issues with rail transportation is that you lose much of the travel time to stops, acceleration, and deceleration; get rid of that your trains can go much faster. There's a lot of benefit to using self-driving cars/scooters only for the last-mile and using bulk transport like trains or planes for the majority of the trip, too. It's fewer vehicle miles overall and a shorter trip radius for the EV, which cuts down on overall energy use and makes recharging simpler.
amluto 3y ago
> they still shed tire/brake particles They shed a whole lot less brake particles due to regenerative braking.
phkahler 3y ago
Public transit only works when the stops are all in high density areas. Most the the US is not suitable for it. We might improve it in areas where it makes sense though.
- xvedejas 3y ago
  I used to think this, but you'd be amazed how many small towns in Europe have train stations. The eastern third of the US is high enough density for this, we've just chosen to put our money into interstates and the like instead.
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    Trains take you from one place where you don't want to be to another place where you don't want to be. They are not a substitute for privately-owned transportation, except perhaps in dystopian fiction.
    - TexanFeller 3y ago
      They work wonderfully in extremely dense places like London and Tokyo, but they're awful absolutely everywhere else. Definitely nothing in America that compares to foreign trains yet, it would take us 50 years to come close to catching up.
    - danenania 3y ago
      Trains connecting town centers obviously can’t solve everyone’s transportation needs, but they can help to enable a car-free or reduced-car lifestyle for those who want that and are willing to design their lives around it. Even if that’s only, say, 10% of the population in less dense areas, it could still make a significant impact on traffic and emissions as well giving an economic boost to downtown areas, since there’s now a reason for people to live near them.
    - crote 3y ago
      And that's why you are supposed to design your environment. One railway station is in the suburbs, the other is in a high-density office park. Problem solved!
tshaddox 3y ago
> it does seem to me that we have decided on a date for the solution (EVs) without high confidence that the dependencies (generation) will actually be ready by that date. Isn’t that what it means to set a goal to complete some task? Of course it means that you also aspire to accomplish all the dependencies by that date.
throw0101b 3y ago
> it does seem to me that we have decided on a date for the solution (EVs) without high confidence that the dependencies (generation) will actually be ready by that date. "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…": * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon Perhaps we should consider being more aspirational than practical. > but besides that, I'm not convinced that EVs are the best solution to begin with. I'm all for putting more effort into moving towards less car-centric and more human-centric developments, but until there's (more) progress on that front, we need to make parallel progress on reducing carbon in our current system: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
- leetcrew 3y ago
  I think using a rare moment of broad public alignment to change our transit paradigm is a lot more aspirational than issuing patches to a fundamentally broken system.
  - yellowapple 3y ago
    I suspect that broad public alignment would be far less broad and far less aligned the moment one suggests actually changing said transit paradigm to any significant degree.
Retric 3y ago
That’s hogwash, swapping 100% of new cars to EV’s represents roughly a 1% increase in electricity demand per year. We can quibble about how flexible the grid is, but historically demand has increased much faster than that in several periods. As a sanity check. Cars last ~25 years on average. So 100% new EV’s represent roughly a 4% changeover per year. Average load per EV works out to roughly 450 watts, because they use a lot of power when their on but most people aren’t driving that long per day. Actual use depends on various factors like charging efficiency etc but roughly 15,000 miles at 4 kWh / mile is only 3,750 kWh per year + charging inefficiency call it 4,000 kWh [per EV] * 282 million [cars] * 0.04 [% new cars per year] = 45 TWh per year vs ~4,000 TWh of total US electricity demand. (Edit: fixed units.) By comparison demand increased by roughly 100TWh/year from 1985 to 1990. Demand only really leveled out between 2010 and now. https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-consumption-since-1975/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-co...
- SnorkelTan 3y ago
  Do people actually replace the battery in cars once it dies and continue to use the car? Former Coworkers old Prius had the battery stolen out of it and insurance totaled the car. Wondering if the lifetime between ice and ev is valid.
  - quonn 3y ago
    Why would the battery die? This is not a smartphone. For LFP batteries I expect multiple decades of use, even the other Tesla batteries are holding up with only around 5-15% of capacity loss after a decade.
  - shagie 3y ago
    Yes, but its a "its cheaper than a new car" ... but if you're dealing with insurance it is "its more expensive than totaling it." I had a Honda Civic hybrid that had its battery pack die back in 2009. It was going to be a $3000 repair with a 2 week "its in the shop" while waiting for the battery (it wasn't something they stocked). I bought a new car (an Insight) because I needed a car (it was on a road trip). The value of the Civic as a trade in would be near zero - the value of the trade in was similar to the cost of the repair. This can be seen even today with my Insight if I was to try to trade it in or repair it - my 2010 Insight has a trade in value of $2620 - $3707 (and it is in fine working condition). If this was about a car that had a value of $3000 when working that needed a repair of $3000 to get it back into that range of working - that's the insurance definition of totaled. A battery pack for the Honda is Insight is $2049 : https://bumblebeebatteries.com/products/hybrid-batteries/honda/beemax-replacement-hybrid-battery-honda-insight/ https://bumblebeebatteries.com/products/hybrid-batteries/hon... If the battery fails on my Insight, I'll be getting that repair rather than getting a new car because it's still cheaper than a new car. But if it was a "dealing with insurance" then it is by definition totaled.
carlmr 3y ago
I currently have a ~30 min commute by car and ~40 mins by train. I still pick the train because I can read stuff for 20 mins uninterrupted. I don't have to get worked up about traffic, someone merging without indicating, etc. But the same connection is scheduled every 10 minutes, so I don't need to plan around it. On my last job with a 15 minute car commute vs 30-50 minutes by bus (the bus was often not on schedule), I always picked the car. Especially because I can't read in the bus anyway from the way it moves. I might have picked the bus if it didn't only come every 15 minutes and sometimes be delayed by 20. Especially because connections then become less time intensive. Public transit works well when you don't need to check the schedule and can just go at any time, certain that your train will come in the next 3-5 minutes, and any connection does the same.

mbgerring 3y ago

The massive investment in time in resources is mostly private capital, on the assumption that that capital will see a return, which is unlikely to ever happen with public transit. I agree with you, and I also know we are running out of time to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. I’m resigned at this point to doing whatever is likeliest to get the job done in time. And either way, the busses, trains and ferries all need to be electrified too, and any grid improvements, advancements in battery tech etc. will also help those efforts.

JoshTriplett 3y ago

> but it seems to me that most people don't enjoy driving at all. While many people don't enjoy driving, many people do prefer cars as a mode of transit. Don't assume that people "don't like cars", whether or not they like driving as an activity. People overwhelmingly prefer cars. > if the fastest option is public transit more often than not That's a very high bar to reach. And you also have to take into account the hassle of transit not actually getting you where you want to be. It's one thing to have a transit system that can get you between cities or to a large general area; it's another to have a transit system that can get you from an arbitrary door to an arbitrary door, which a car can do.

nicoburns 3y ago
People do often prefer driving. However, people tend to not like the effects that other people driving has on their life. Public transport starts to look a lot better when you take that into account too.
- brianwawok 3y ago
  If you don’t live in a mega city it doesn’t matter though. I live in a metro area of ~250k people. No traffic is so bad a 2 lane road doesn’t still move. So drive away my neighbors! Preferable in an EV powered by green energy.
  - oblio 3y ago
    A city of 250k people could have awesome public transit if it wanted to.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
benjiweber 3y ago
I mean in London the fastest option is public transit more often than not, and you get pretty close to door to door.
- nine_k 3y ago
  Same in Manhattan! Now we only need to make most of the US as dense as London at least. I don't think it's realistic. (Also, have you tried to afford a place to live in London, to say nothing of Manhattan?) People "prefer cars" because people prefer detached houses and low-density living. Not all of them, but plenty enough. For them, an EV is the only electric option. In cities, of course, public transit should predominate, and should be developed and improved, while car presence should become lower and lower.
  - leetcrew 3y ago

ZeroGravitas 3y ago

EVs are actually phasing out both brake particle emmissions and brake fluid, by returning to "drum brakes" when regen isn't enough. https://www.continental.com/en/press/studies-publications/technology-dossiers/drum-brake/ https://www.continental.com/en/press/studies-publications/te... > The drum brake offers even further attractions, the environmental particulate emissions are vastly reduced when compared to the traditional disc brake system technology, that will bring upcoming decisive decisions to comply with increasingly stricter environmental requirements. While combustion engines have had to comply with increasingly stringent emission limits in recent years, the focus has now widened to include foundation brakes. The fine brake dust generated from the brake system can have far-reaching adverse effects on human health, depending on the size of the particles emitted. Experts expect stricter legal requirements from the EU Commission by 2025 at the latest. Drum brake technology takes advantage of the enclosed housing system, allowing the brake dust particulates to be accumulated within the enclosed system that can be collected and disposed in a controlled manner that protects the environment.

lnsru 3y ago
These things rust as hell in their enclosures. Volkswagen group EVs with rear drums are catastrophic development. Take press releases and advertisement with a grain of salt next time.
- leoedin 3y ago
  Until perhaps 10 years ago, drum brakes were standard as the rear brakes of almost every car. They lasted pretty much the lifetime of the car.
  - lnsru 3y ago
    Yes. My cheap motorcycle had drum brakes and was fine for many many kilometers. The problem with electric vehicles is that they brake with motors and not with brakes. Brakes gather dust and silently corrode. Apparently latest vehicles periodically activate brakes without driver’s intervention to prevent corrosion and uneven wear.

iinnPP 3y ago

I was downvoted into oblivion for suggesting part of the EV solution will be to force people out of driving and into using a Waymo-like service. Seems pretty obvious to me. I also don't drive and don't use public transportation or cabs. I walk and get stared at awkwardly for it. I personally cannot wait for a time when a traffic light doesn't result in me almost dying because people can't follow basic rules of the road. I just got back from a 10min walk where I was able to kick(and damage) the bumper of a SUV after I had to dodge their left hand turn when I had a walk clearance and witnessed a car blow a completely red (for 30seconds...) red light and nearly collided with a thankfully aware driver making a left hand turn during an advance. Edit: My city is considered a dream compared to the close by moronic drivers of Toronto Ontario.

least 3y ago
> Seems pretty obvious to me. I also don't drive and don't use public transportation or cabs. I walk and get stared at awkwardly for it. Being able to walk everywhere you need to go is a massive luxury. Especially without any public transportation? Sounds really nice. It's just not feasible for most people and it won't be any time soon.
- iinnPP 3y ago
  What is stopping them exactly? I live in a well off area on the outskirts of a city of 500,000. Driving across the city takes an hour. I have lived in the south-east, south, north, central, west, southwest, and northeast areas of the city and have been able to walk everywhere my entire life. I guess people don't like luxury because a large chunk of my neighborhood will drive their 8-seater SUV(alone) to the convenience store on the corner for a drink. I have met precisely zero people from my area who walk to the grocery store nearby where I pickup my fresh produce every few days. People are just lazy.
  - aiilns 3y ago
    Let me get this straight. You're asking what's stopping people from walking everywhere? And instead of thinking for like 5 seconds and realizing someone may work 15km away from home you write a senseless comment about people driving to the grocery store and concluding that what's stopping people from walking everywhere is that they're lazy. OK.

nostrademons 3y ago

I think the long-term solution to transit problems is intermodal passenger pods that can shuffle between self-driving cars, trains, aircraft, watercraft, and elevators. Containerization for people, basically. You'd hop in your pod which is basically another room in your apartment when not in use, and then the building would shuffle you down the elevator to the subway. Once you're outside of city limits, it'd transfer you to a self-driving car to take you to a hike in the mountains. Or it could send you to the airport, security scan you on the way, and your pod would fit straight onto the aircraft without any need to get out, go through security, wait at the terminal, or interact with other passengers. Or it might transfer you to commute rail to get to the general vicinity of your workplace, and then a self-driving scooter for the last mile to work. EVs are a useful step in that direction though. Something like the Rivian skateboard platform lends itself very well to containerized passenger transport, since the passenger body can just be loaded straight onto the chassis. Plus this model generally has shorter, fewer, and more predictable vehicle miles, which makes EV charging easier.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
What is this actually solving other than adding tons of mechanical failure points? Why not just use a door? People already don't move around enough.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  Transit time, particularly in the transfer points between types of transportation. Imagine leaving for the airport 30 minutes before take-off time rather than 2 hours, and not needing to spend half an hour de-planing and collecting your baggage. Many short-haul commuter flights (eg. ~1H from SFO to Reno or LAX to Vegas) become viable, and HSR is much more practical if you don't need to worry about connections or last-mile transportation. You could commute Merced -> Google in about 50 minutes with this system, less than the shuttle to SF currently takes. It'd be 2 stops on CA HSR (Merced -> Gilroy -> SJC, 30 minutes), then 1 stop on a Caltrain baby bullet (SJC -> MTV, 15 minutes), then a self-driving car for the 2 miles from MTV Caltrain to Google (5 minutes). Best of all, you wouldn't need to interrupt what you're doing - you could take a nap, or code, or read a book, or watch a TV show and not need to put it away every time you switch transportation modes. Think of what that'd do to housing prices, if the commutable distance from the Bay Area extended out to the Central Valley. Also, computer-controlling all the individual vehicles allows the possibility of moving transfers. Imagine if HSR didn't need to come to a stop for passengers to embark and disembark. The self-driving car could instead accelerate up to ~100mph and the train would decelerate to that, and then pods would move over as their chassis lined up. One of the biggest issues with rail transportation is that you lose much of the travel time to stops, acceleration, and deceleration; get rid of that your trains can go much faster. There's a lot of benefit to using self-driving cars/scooters only for the last-mile and using bulk transport like trains or planes for the majority of the trip, too. It's fewer vehicle miles overall and a shorter trip radius for the EV, which cuts down on overall energy use and makes recharging simpler.

amluto 3y ago

> they still shed tire/brake particles They shed a whole lot less brake particles due to regenerative braking.

phkahler 3y ago

Public transit only works when the stops are all in high density areas. Most the the US is not suitable for it. We might improve it in areas where it makes sense though.

xvedejas 3y ago
I used to think this, but you'd be amazed how many small towns in Europe have train stations. The eastern third of the US is high enough density for this, we've just chosen to put our money into interstates and the like instead.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  Trains take you from one place where you don't want to be to another place where you don't want to be. They are not a substitute for privately-owned transportation, except perhaps in dystopian fiction.
  - TexanFeller 3y ago
    They work wonderfully in extremely dense places like London and Tokyo, but they're awful absolutely everywhere else. Definitely nothing in America that compares to foreign trains yet, it would take us 50 years to come close to catching up.
  - danenania 3y ago
    Trains connecting town centers obviously can’t solve everyone’s transportation needs, but they can help to enable a car-free or reduced-car lifestyle for those who want that and are willing to design their lives around it. Even if that’s only, say, 10% of the population in less dense areas, it could still make a significant impact on traffic and emissions as well giving an economic boost to downtown areas, since there’s now a reason for people to live near them.
  - crote 3y ago
    And that's why you are supposed to design your environment. One railway station is in the suburbs, the other is in a high-density office park. Problem solved!

tshaddox 3y ago

> it does seem to me that we have decided on a date for the solution (EVs) without high confidence that the dependencies (generation) will actually be ready by that date. Isn’t that what it means to set a goal to complete some task? Of course it means that you also aspire to accomplish all the dependencies by that date.

throw0101b 3y ago

> it does seem to me that we have decided on a date for the solution (EVs) without high confidence that the dependencies (generation) will actually be ready by that date. "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…": * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon Perhaps we should consider being more aspirational than practical. > but besides that, I'm not convinced that EVs are the best solution to begin with. I'm all for putting more effort into moving towards less car-centric and more human-centric developments, but until there's (more) progress on that front, we need to make parallel progress on reducing carbon in our current system: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

leetcrew 3y ago
I think using a rare moment of broad public alignment to change our transit paradigm is a lot more aspirational than issuing patches to a fundamentally broken system.
- yellowapple 3y ago
  I suspect that broad public alignment would be far less broad and far less aligned the moment one suggests actually changing said transit paradigm to any significant degree.

Retric 3y ago

That’s hogwash, swapping 100% of new cars to EV’s represents roughly a 1% increase in electricity demand per year. We can quibble about how flexible the grid is, but historically demand has increased much faster than that in several periods. As a sanity check. Cars last ~25 years on average. So 100% new EV’s represent roughly a 4% changeover per year. Average load per EV works out to roughly 450 watts, because they use a lot of power when their on but most people aren’t driving that long per day. Actual use depends on various factors like charging efficiency etc but roughly 15,000 miles at 4 kWh / mile is only 3,750 kWh per year + charging inefficiency call it 4,000 kWh [per EV] * 282 million [cars] * 0.04 [% new cars per year] = 45 TWh per year vs ~4,000 TWh of total US electricity demand. (Edit: fixed units.) By comparison demand increased by roughly 100TWh/year from 1985 to 1990. Demand only really leveled out between 2010 and now. https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-consumption-since-1975/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-co...

SnorkelTan 3y ago
Do people actually replace the battery in cars once it dies and continue to use the car? Former Coworkers old Prius had the battery stolen out of it and insurance totaled the car. Wondering if the lifetime between ice and ev is valid.
- quonn 3y ago
  Why would the battery die? This is not a smartphone. For LFP batteries I expect multiple decades of use, even the other Tesla batteries are holding up with only around 5-15% of capacity loss after a decade.
- shagie 3y ago
  Yes, but its a "its cheaper than a new car" ... but if you're dealing with insurance it is "its more expensive than totaling it." I had a Honda Civic hybrid that had its battery pack die back in 2009. It was going to be a $3000 repair with a 2 week "its in the shop" while waiting for the battery (it wasn't something they stocked). I bought a new car (an Insight) because I needed a car (it was on a road trip). The value of the Civic as a trade in would be near zero - the value of the trade in was similar to the cost of the repair. This can be seen even today with my Insight if I was to try to trade it in or repair it - my 2010 Insight has a trade in value of $2620 - $3707 (and it is in fine working condition). If this was about a car that had a value of $3000 when working that needed a repair of $3000 to get it back into that range of working - that's the insurance definition of totaled. A battery pack for the Honda is Insight is $2049 : https://bumblebeebatteries.com/products/hybrid-batteries/honda/beemax-replacement-hybrid-battery-honda-insight/ https://bumblebeebatteries.com/products/hybrid-batteries/hon... If the battery fails on my Insight, I'll be getting that repair rather than getting a new car because it's still cheaper than a new car. But if it was a "dealing with insurance" then it is by definition totaled.

carlmr 3y ago

I currently have a ~30 min commute by car and ~40 mins by train. I still pick the train because I can read stuff for 20 mins uninterrupted. I don't have to get worked up about traffic, someone merging without indicating, etc. But the same connection is scheduled every 10 minutes, so I don't need to plan around it. On my last job with a 15 minute car commute vs 30-50 minutes by bus (the bus was often not on schedule), I always picked the car. Especially because I can't read in the bus anyway from the way it moves. I might have picked the bus if it didn't only come every 15 minutes and sometimes be delayed by 20. Especially because connections then become less time intensive. Public transit works well when you don't need to check the schedule and can just go at any time, certain that your train will come in the next 3-5 minutes, and any connection does the same.