Similar to a headline that says “Food products not working”, without mentioning escalating costs for the average person. Those that could afford and early adopters are limited.
Trade shipping is incredibly efficient when it comes to moving large quantities of goods. Transportation, as a whole, consumes about a quarter of the world’s energy output. Meanwhile industry verges on near 60%. A large portion of that is refining and manufacturing coupled with new construction.
While I understand that people’s immediate reaction is that we need more EVs or, on the extreme end, somehow restrict cars. People also need to understand that’s not the sector that is going to have the most corrective impact on the coming climate disasters.
It’s already hard to convince people to use EVs, convincing them to use public transportation is even harder. It’s completely understandable why they don’t want to use public transportation tho: it kinda sucks in most countries. Here in germany it’s simply unreliable. If you use it to get to work, you can expect to get there late quite frequently and the same goes for the way home. Fixing the issues public transportation has and making cities less car dependent takes time and we don’t really have that much anymore. EVs aren’t perfect but it’s a compromise.
If you want to talk about real solutions to climate change I wouldn’t aim as consumer facing things like cars or household recycling. That’s all BS to make people focus on what their role in it is to distract from the fact that the vast majority of emissions come from things like:
Industrial and manufacturing processes Electricity and heat generation Transportation (with vast majority being bunker fueled chips, and agriculture.
Me getting 25mpg versus 30 ain’t moving the needle on the emissions numbers the same way moving to renewables for electricity generation and eliminating shipping emissions would. Or mitigating agricultural emissions which produces tons of the worst kinds of greenhouse gasses (methan and nitrous oxide).
And then we have fugative emissions from unintentional leaks or more accurately irresponsible processes and maintenance from things like fracking, oil/gas extraction and transport. Quite literally just drilling into gas and releasing it into the air.
But yea, my Honda is the problem.
I’m not saying everyone has a part to play, but don’t let the arguments and focus be on anything other than the big culprits of greenhouse gas emissions. We could pass meaningful regulations and provide meaningful incentives and actually move the needle on green house gasses.
Industrial and manufacturing processes Electricity and heat generation Transportation (with vast majority being bunker fueled chips, and agriculture.
Unfortunately I don’t run an industrial manufacturing process or shipping company… so there’s not much I can do there other than prefer to buy products/services that involve fewer emissions.
I’ve installed solar on my home… and some day I’ll probably add a battery (when they’re cheaper), but that’s about all I can do.
So for me at least, this stuff isn’t a huge priority. I’m already doing everything I can.
Me getting 25mpg versus 30 ain’t moving the needle on the emissions
Huh? That’s almost a 20% reduction in your vehicle emissions and private transport is a major contributor to greenhouse gasses. It’d definitely “move the needle”.
I’m not saying everyone has a part to play
I am. Might be a small part for some, but it’s a part. It could be as simple as using LED lighting instead of incandescents (10x lower emissions, and 10x lower power bill) or cooking with induction instead of gas (4x lower emissions, boils water 2x faster, and cheaper though how much depends on your gas prices).
Those two changes I suggested don’t even cost any money. They save money.
A lot of other changes also save money - green hydrogen, for example, was $4/kg two years ago and is $3/kg today… it was projected to be cheaper than gas some time between 2027 and 2040… but thanks to Russia’s war it’s already cheaper than gas now in some parts of the world. Suddenly the industry is scrambling to accelerate that transition.
The liquid natural gas industry has no long term future and not because of emissions - it’s just not going to be const competitive for much longer.
Well, one can attempt to make it easier going forward but this isn’t sim city where you can just demolish your entire infrastructure and remake it to suit your needs.
Doing so will take decades to even start to have an impact on personal vehicle usage. Decades we don’t really have.
I’m not really saying it can be done overnight. But imagine if all the money (heck even half the money) that went into trying to build electric cars went into building some good transit systems supported by strong transit oriented design. It would have done way more to tackle climate change than making cars EVs. It’s a long term process but one that far more likely to make a difference than EVs.
We used to lift cities up to support sewer systems and now adding relatively simple infrastructure seems out of reach. Neoliberalism has completely ruined our ability to invest in public infrastructure
Very much this. Lithium batteries are the best battery we’ve got (at manufacturing scale) so far in terms of energy storage density, but the best we’ve got isn’t very good.
Gasoline has an energy storage density of around 13 MJ/kg. That’s a ton of energy, so much so that a vehicle can waste most of it generating so much heat that we have to bolt on a cooling system (with the associated weight) and still have enough to go highway speeds for hundreds of miles on a quantity of fuel weighing less than one of the passengers.
Toyota loves hydrogen because it’s got a storage density slightly higher than gasoline. Hydrogen has some serious volume and storage issues, but the density is there.
Contrast that with lithium ion batteries at ~0.7 MJ/kg (for the really good ones, which usually aren’t used in cars). Less waste heat, to be sure, but the bulk of the vehicles weight, the main factor in speed and travel distance, is the insane amount of material necessary to store the “fuel”.
Electric motors are far more efficient than ICE, but we need orders-of-magnitude improvements in battery storage density before EV can really take advantage of the greater efficiency. Until then manufacturers don’t have a choice, EV will be heavy and thus expensive.
Hydrogen cars are basically EVs without the giant battery. So it neatly avoids the huge cost and weight problem. Which is why Toyota thinks they are the future.
This is a huge point. The other considerations are: EVs are balls expensive compared to ICE counterparts and often require $500-2k worth of electrical work at your house (assuming you even own it) to put in a charger. If you live in an apartment, good luck.
And oh, btw, the chargers aren’t standard. Each charging site has different plugs, apps you have to download, etc. Then there is the lack of charging stations that highlights the range anxiety people have with EVs.
Adoption would be so much faster if EVs cost $15-25k and there were adequate standardized charging options available.
This is kind of true. A lot of the maintenance requirements for ICE vehicles is not needed for EVs. So you save money on things like oil changes and if you can charge at home then charging is probably cheaper than gas. But that battery probably needs to be replaced after about 5 years and that is a very expensive maintenance cost.
No oil, timing belt, transmission. EVs are incredibly simple vehicles. Many years ago Tesla wanted a million mile battery, they are constantly getting better.
My 5 year estimate may actually be outdated already fortunately. First article popup about it shows 8 to 12 years now depending on the company and battery type. This is actually fantastic to see that as I was quite worried the tech would stagnate eventually.
I have a 2015 leaf and while the estimated battery range has gone from 90’s to 60’s on mileage, it’s still kicking and gets me around the city just fine.
That might be true for older cars that didn’t have good thermal management systems (like the old Nissan leaf) but not true anymore. Electric car batteries now regularly reach over 100k miles with only small degradation. If you baby it, it seems that 200k miles with only 10% range loss is to be expected now
I have a 2016 leaf. I’ve changed the tires. That’s the maintenance. It’s like $3 to ‘fill’, and that’s about the same as three gallons of ICE distance.
The battery is around 90% of what I bought it at.
I have yet to hit any of the problems people are afraid of, but I might just be lucky.
Yep these are all true points, but not unexpected as with any innovation. Just like how computers were immensely expensive, and without standards for decades.
EVs are relatively new in the scope of technology. Capitalism just wants to make you think it’s an issue. In reality this is gonna take time and lack the profits every company is striving for, which to them is a failure.
Yeah so I looked into this little while ago and I own my own house so in theory I can put the box in. The problem is I only have on the street parking and the house is set back away from the road and there’s a garden between the road in the house.
So how the bleeding hell am I supposed to charge a car? I’d have to run a long cable through the garden, over the fence, over the pedestrian walkway, over the grass verge and to the car. Someone is going to trip over it and then think they can sue me.
Or the government could just install a street furniture like they do parking metres, but I have no way to force them to do that.
So how the bleeding hell am I supposed to charge a car? I’d have to run a long cable through the garden
Personally I’d replace part of the garden with a driveway and parking space. Sure, it’s ugly. But it’s what billions of people around the world have.
Or the government could just install a street furniture like they do parking metres, but I have no way to force them to do that.
Most cities have a plan to do that (though it might just be a plan, with no funding allocated yet)… But there are challenges - in particular vandalism. They have been more successful/cheaper to maintain (and more likely to actually work when you park there) at locations with 24/7 security guards and quick police response times.
They also prioritise short term daytime parking as it’s better to charge EVs when direct solar is available - far cheaper than other power source (except hydro, but hydro generally can’t produce enough power). And they prioritise somewhere like a shopping district where you might only park for 45 minutes allowing dozens of people to charger their car per day instead of just one overnight. Shopping districts are also setup to prevent vandalism as well (and prevention is cheaper than repairs).
Every shopping mall in my city already has a parking spaces where you can charge an EV. In fact it’s often free (or at least, included in the price of parking at the mall). It works well enough but it’s never going to be as convenient as charging at home… those parking spaces are nearly always empty in my city, even though they’re free people would rather pay for the convenience of charging overnight.
Personally I’d replace part of the garden with a driveway and parking space.
Well I don’t really want to have to do that if I can help it because if I did that I wouldn’t really have a garden anymore, but also I don’t think I can anyway because there’s a grass verge and I don’t think I own that, I think the city does, and I would have to pull that up to lay the driveway.
But also if I rented I wouldn’t be able to do any of that anyway so they still need to go the street furniture route. I don’t think vandalisms are particular problem because if they put down load of them they just become common and people would ignore them. Also it’s a housing street, it’s not a random street in the city so the only people around here are people who live around here and vandalising your own stuff seems pretty dumb. I’m sure it’ll happen but I don’t think it’ll be a major problem.
Every shopping mall in my city already has a parking spaces where you can charge an EV.
In my experiences usually some prick with a pickup truck in them. Apparently it’s actually a offence to park in them if you don’t have an electric vehicle, but have yet to see the law enforce. One time I saw a cop parked in one so, there you go.
Personally? I’d have an electrician install a standing charger by the curb. I might end up doing that if my wife switches to a plug in hybrid next year.
I’m not sure how that’ll work with the easement though. But that’s future me’s problem.
You can charge any of them off a standard socket, so no, just no faster rate charging at the house.
Having a dedicated circuit installed with materials for the wire, breaker fuse, and conduit was $600 including electrician labor.
There is a universal charging standard. The ONLY company that doesn’t follow it is Tesla, but they too can use the universal chargers which also have multiple plug heads to use at source or you can carry one in your vehicle.
As for the lack of charging stations, you obviously don’t own an EV. The sheer mass of stations makes it possible to drive from 29 palms to Manhattan without worry. The cars will auto-add and find them for you on your route, and tell you which you need to hit with what charge time. You can even filter on types and cheatgrass rates for them to calculate your trip. This of all the things you stated is a tribal non issue that only gets even less with time.
There is a huge problem with charging but electrical connections and smart circuit load balanced charging at various times on the grid is easily doable in the time ranges of adoption we are seeking. There is a current chicken and the egg problem where government doesn’t invest in massive infrastructure because private companies haven’t crossed the tipping point on making it their primary focus… who haven’t done so because their customers lack the charging infrastructure and so around around it goes.
Having governmental targets like California’s are ways to break that cycle and force investment that makes public infrastructure changes viable to due to economies of scale.
the chargers aren’t standard. Each charging site has different plugs
IDK where you’re from, but in europe it’s all standardized and all cars, regardless of brand, use the same plug for both AC and DC charging. The whole app/rfid tag mess is true though.
We really need to change our culture to support mass transit and pedestrians more. I live in a town with fantastic bus service and extensive pedestrian infrastructure, and people in my apartment complex DRIVE THEIR CARS to a gas station/liquor store they could throw a snowball to. Hell, I’ve seen people make a longer walk to their car than it would’ve taken to get to their destination.
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