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What percentage of the cars were electric? hybrids? diesel? hydrogen? natural gas? I am curious to hear your insights. I watch the traffic like this too and tr

What percentage of the cars were electric? hybrids? diesel? hydrogen? natural gas? I am curious to hear your insights. I watch the traffic like this too and try to tally up as many as I can as I try to count 1000 cars. How do you record what you find?

haltist 3y ago
I just sampled the cars during a 1 minute window by recording with my phone camera and then counted cars in slow motion. I guess if I had access to the cameras at the intersection I could feed the data through an ML model and get a more accurate count but it wouldn't change the order of magnitude and it was already around 10k cars per hour (or thereabouts). The place I live is somewhat affluent so there are plenty of Teslas and electric cars but it's not enough to make a difference. Conservatively maybe 1 out of 50 is electric, not enough to make a difference in terms of pollution and CO2 output.
dontlaugh 3y ago
It makes little difference. Even if electric cars were 4 more energy efficient than ICE cars (and considering their construction cost, they probably aren’t), that’s still nowhere near enough. They’re still cars. We could drop transportation energy use by at least 20 times if most of it was trains or trams.
- PaulKeeble 3y ago
  But if they are charged on green power, and in many countries now they are especially over night, then they are vastly better than ICE vehicles. The goal with electrical vehicles isn't right now they are obviously greener (they are) but the true potential only comes when the supply is green power too which is happening at an accelerating rate. Plenty of those EV's will have been charged at home on Solar, people tend to do both.
  - dontlaugh 3y ago
    That’s quite rare. And you could just as well use ethanol and biodiesel for the same zero emissions result. The advantage of (small) electric cars is moving emissions away from people, not in total carbon emissions over the lifetime of the vehicle.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  Transportation is <30% of energy use in Europe. If that percentage is already too much (spoiler: it isn't) - you'd be screwed no matter what. The reality is, you're moving in the right direction about as fast as you can. Rome wasn't built in a day. We didn't get into this mess over night, and we're not getting out of it overnight either.

haltist 3y ago

I just sampled the cars during a 1 minute window by recording with my phone camera and then counted cars in slow motion. I guess if I had access to the cameras at the intersection I could feed the data through an ML model and get a more accurate count but it wouldn't change the order of magnitude and it was already around 10k cars per hour (or thereabouts). The place I live is somewhat affluent so there are plenty of Teslas and electric cars but it's not enough to make a difference. Conservatively maybe 1 out of 50 is electric, not enough to make a difference in terms of pollution and CO2 output.

dontlaugh 3y ago

It makes little difference. Even if electric cars were 4 more energy efficient than ICE cars (and considering their construction cost, they probably aren’t), that’s still nowhere near enough. They’re still cars. We could drop transportation energy use by at least 20 times if most of it was trains or trams.

PaulKeeble 3y ago
But if they are charged on green power, and in many countries now they are especially over night, then they are vastly better than ICE vehicles. The goal with electrical vehicles isn't right now they are obviously greener (they are) but the true potential only comes when the supply is green power too which is happening at an accelerating rate. Plenty of those EV's will have been charged at home on Solar, people tend to do both.
- dontlaugh 3y ago
  That’s quite rare. And you could just as well use ethanol and biodiesel for the same zero emissions result. The advantage of (small) electric cars is moving emissions away from people, not in total carbon emissions over the lifetime of the vehicle.
onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
Transportation is <30% of energy use in Europe. If that percentage is already too much (spoiler: it isn't) - you'd be screwed no matter what. The reality is, you're moving in the right direction about as fast as you can. Rome wasn't built in a day. We didn't get into this mess over night, and we're not getting out of it overnight either.