Electric Vehicles (Cars, Planes, and Ships)

This feels like this is a bunch of words being placed into the mouths of people who say that electric cars is not the major leap in saving us from climate change as it's being sold to us. We are not trying to absolutely eliminate cars. We are not saying that E Vs are not an improvement over IC Es. We are not trying to tell everyone to go back to the horse and carriage. We are stating that continuing to focus infrastructure on cars and foregoing substantial changes that would reduce our dependence on them, especially for those who don't want them is not going to save us from climate crisis in the long term. It will only at best delay it long enough that people within a certain age group who got to drive their cars will not have to live with the eventual consequences.

And changing behaviors will only work if it's incentivized or forced systemically or environmentally. Putting out electric personal vehicles will only get people to adopt it if it's better than IC Es for what they value (getting to point A to point B at a price point they care about in a time they can tolerate). That's either done by the alternative being better or the current status quo becoming worse. Unless we are willing to completely subsidize the electric vehicle industry that every EV is as cheap and convenient as an ICE (or put in regulations that effectively outlaw personal IC Es), adoption rates will be too slow to bring out the systemic change needed to stem catastrophe. And if we're making up dream scenarios of widespread adoption of self-driving electric cars, we can add zoning changes and more tax funded electric buses and trams. But for a lot of us who don't hail the electric car as the next great step, a lot of us at the very least are asking that more money be put into electric buses and electric rail and less be put into another lane on the highway.

There are ways to densify places to better increase housing supply or better and more efficiently use space in smaller footprints, but that's outside the scope of this thread. This is a discussion thread, not Congress or a State Capitol or a Mayoral Hall. So not having a fully thought out proposal is asking a bit much, considering we're neither politicians, urban planning activists, or civil engineers. We are stating our priorities and bringing what knowledge we have gleaned from tangential learning or being hobbyists, to state where we as laymen best think our direction should go.

If we actualy cared most about actions that would actualy impact environmental impact, and not just flashy items that attract attention... we wouldnt even be focusing on cars in the first place... gas or electric.

Changing all lights on the planet to be LED instead of incandescent bulbs where there still used would save as much energy and emissions then removing every single car from the road permanently. Not a reduction permanent removal.... and this isnt even touching the waste caused by them burning out in months compared to decades for LED.

Yet every time climate impacts cone up people go right to vehicles, rather then the less flashy but very important fractional gains to be had by modernizing systems across the board.

But it is much easier to get people's attention by saying "let's move away from cars" then it is to say "lets actualy use the better light bulbs".

Edited by Imca on Apr 14th 2024 at 5:51:19 PM

I don't know of anybody here, nor any EV advocate (who's not just an online troll) who has seriously suggested that we not also adopt smart city development policies, mass transit, and so on.

This may not be Debate Hall, or whatever, but I've got plenty of studies and white papers that I can cite showing that (a) BEVs are substantially less polluting than ICEVs even in the worst-case power-generation scenarios and (b) there are well-considered plans to phase out fossil fuels globally that don't require eliminating cars.

Perhaps I'm not following the right people, but I haven't seen concrete plans for the "eliminate cars" point of view. I promise to give them a fair read if they exist.

Incidentally, the suggestion that the auto industry as a whole is behind electrification out of some conspiracy to remain viable is kind of absurd considering how badly most existing automakers are sandbagging the effort.

I can't speak for everyone, obviously, but my house uses LED bulbs exclusively, with maybe a few compact fluorescents left over from when they were an intermediate step. You can still buy CFLs in many places, but it's all but impossible to buy incandescent bulbs in a store in the US.

As noted before, it's possible I'm not swimming in the right circles, but the furor over light bulbs is dead.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 14th 2024 at 5:01:07 AM

Its more of a world wide problem then an American and European problem witch if I am being generous is probaly why its ingnored... if I am being less generous it comes across as performance activism of focusing on flashy things that are in near reach rather then the things that would actualy do the most good... because like you noted every one seems to ignore that you cant just rebuild a socioty overnight to be less car dependent, even being generous the urban development alone not to mention the social changes take decades...

Counter for example the inefficiencies in global lighting technology alone actually outweigh any thing we could possibly do with transportation as a whole.

Like another fun one is that half of the worlds kerosene production still gets burned in lamps...

And as a reminder for any one who doesnt know, Jet Fuel is Kerosean and thus planes are counted in that statistic....

Edited by Imca on Apr 14th 2024 at 6:03:22 PM

Sure, the rest of the world matters. I think I was mentioning earlier that this whole idea of smart urbanism is a fairly Eurocentric concept... or maybe "developed world" is a better way to state it, since many Asian nations have put a ton of effort into dense urbanism.

Air travel is already working on decarbonization, at least to some extent, but it is likely to be the last place¹ that goes full neutral. The main reason for that is energy density. Batteries are, for now, just too heavy to be useful in medium- to long-range aircraft. E-fuels, like synthetic kerosene, are a possibility, as is hydrogen, and experiments are already in progress along those lines.

One of the biggest budget items for an airline is fuel. They have all the economic incentives to push for cleaner tech if it saves them money in the long run. Being more environmentally friendly is a bonus.

¹Space travel is the actual last one, since there's no way to eliminate chemical combustion to get things off of Earth in a hurry. But we can still be carbon-neutral if we manufacture hydrogen and methane through electrolysis.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 14th 2024 at 5:11:04 AM

Like I mentioned it above, but I just feel like elaborating on it especialy, the focus on "we shouldn't be adopting electric, and instead be directed twords railroads" is what really gets me, I love trains... I really do, there super cool and very effecient... and like I grew up with an actual working train network which was very nice.

But here is the catch, when I left home for the US, all the way back in 2012, we had just begun work on a new high speed rail line to connect 3 major cities... and in 2013 the goverment threw a shit tone of money at the project in order to get it done by the 2020 olympics.

We are now in 2024, and the line doesn't even connect 2 cities yet, with the estimation at the time the Olympics were held that that chunk of line would be done in 2027, and as of this year the time frame was pushed back again to 2034

And this is coming from a nation that is famous for its ability to construct and operate high speed rail.... so how the fuck does one expect the United States, a nation which has famously let its railroad deteriorate and languish... to some how string together its urban centers together with high speed rail any time within the next half a century if we cant even get a single line done in two decades.

And here is the bonus catch, the US would be completely unable to use any of its existing railway, they just are flat out incapable of operating high speed passenger stock... This isn't an opinion either, the recent high speed rail construction in flordia had to tear up all the existing track and rebuild it because the demands of modern trains are of much tighter tolerances, and much more gentle curves then the literal steam locomotives the US rail infrastructure was designed for.

The US isn't starting from zero on high speed rail, its starting from less then zero as the existing infrastructure has to be scraped first.

This is all ignored however in favor of just saying "focus on trains not cars"... when EV's can rather feasibly replace 90% of gas powered vehicles in 20 years, the same time frame its looking like the construction of a single line of high speed rail is going to take back home....

Its a solution now and with climate change we cant really wait around for the rebuilding.

Edited by Imca on Apr 14th 2024 at 6:23:23 PM

Question — who among posters here actually owns and drives an EV? It just seems so weird that most of the posters here talking about EV in the EV thread don't even have one.

I never claimed we should abandon electric cars in favor of trains. I don't see those two things as mutually exclusive. I don't know anything about kerosene, but my point was that a systemic change away from car based infrastructure would have a bigger impact than individuals switching to E Vs. That isn't the same thing as giving up on E Vs. And for the record, it isn't impossible for the US to fix it's infrastructure. Europe had many of the same problems up until the late 90s. You have to start small, like creating a cycling lane, or turning one lane on a highway into a bus lane or tram line.

And also not responding to congestion with building more lanes, because we've known about induced demand for 60 bloody years now; road widening does not help. <_>

I was visiting my grandma in Houston last week. 50% of my trip was driving. I counted 16 lanes. Our hotel was next to a Walmart super center. Still had to drive there since there weren't any sidewalks.

That is what happens when we spend generations building our infrastructure to cater to cars. In the USA at least the auto industry lobbying played a big part in that.

This is what happens when you let corpos tell you how you build your country. You get a country that is built around what they want instead of what everyone needs.

The confounding thing is this isn't rly good for business. More time stuck in traffic means less time in the office, more commuting costs if someone bills the company for travel time, and overall less productivity.

You think the auto industry gives a shit about that as long as people are buying and driving their cars?

Corporate types of a specific industry couldn't care less how it affects other industries.

Edited by M84 on Apr 15th 2024 at 5:11:25 PM

It's not like anyone in this thread is saying "All Cars Gone Now!", only that we're saying that mass adoption of BEVs is not the solution we care to hang our hopes on with regard to transportation emissions and sustainability and are not enthusiastic about spending more resources towards expanding car infrastructure on the down-the-line goal that hopefully in a decade or so, maybe 60% or more of the cars on the road will be electric. All the studies that say BEVs are better than ICEs only matter if you can guarantee mass adoption and that it's also is actually the workable solution that will solve things. If you can't get enough people to adopt, it's about as good a solution as saying everyone riding trains that people are complaining about. If it doesn't actually solve the issue, it's effectively telling an obese person to switch to diet soda. Helpful, and if it gets ball rolling, could be good overall, but not where you want to stop. It's also trying to hang systemic change on the hopes of widespread individual choices, if we don't make BEVs effectively the only choice.

Again, a lot of us are advocating increased public transport (which isn't only trains). In a lot of places, putting a dedicated bus lane with more buses or on-road trams can use up much of the existing infrastructure and that can also be electrified. But more infrastructure spending is used trying to make driving less intolerable, when it should have been used to make public transport viable. It won't hit everyone, but neither will BEVs, but used correctly, it will handle a decent chunk and have a greater impact.

@Imca

I think with regards to this thread at least, we don't broach other solutions because it's outside the scope of the topic, when we're primarily talking about electric transportation. In terms of personal emissions, one of the biggest things anyone can do is to have one less child. Barring that, being car-free, reducing air travel, reducing meat consumption, even washing your clothes with cold water would be a greater decrease in personal emissions than upgrading your light bulbs. The last two, people of means who could afford an EV, can do fairly easily and cheaply. But I'm just gonna stop going on this tangent.

Edited by HeyMikey on Apr 15th 2024 at 2:33:55 AM

Afraid not chief, electric lighting alone costs 20% of our entire power consumption as a species, this makes sense when you realize that an electric light bulb consumes the equivalent of 714 pounds of coal per year◊... and then you realize just how many of them we use every where, pretty sure some in your home probably mount multiple.... that's enough power BTW to drive a F-150, you know those stupidly big American trucks.... 1000 miles, 1600 kilometers... again per light-bulb....

This just really isn't a consumption of fossil fuels we generally think about because we just plug light-bulbs in and then forget about them, then get build monthly by the utility company.

Additionally, I had a look while pulling the numbers here.... there is still about 2/3rds of electrical lighting consumption we can save in the US and EU by switching over to LED bulbs, not the full 90% because of rapid adoption going on.... but apperntly the commercial sector hasn't adopted LED nearly as fast as the home sector.

Most of our power use as a species comes down to stupid inneffeicencies once you start looking into it... switching from electrical furnaces to heat pumps would knock another 25% about off residential power use in the US for instance.... even more more in the EU...

The planet runs on systems that were built in the second half of the 1900s, and we have much better ones by now.... but we aren't switching near as fast as we need too, I don't know if its upfront cost which we could hopefully solve via grants/tax-credits paired with fines and regulations... or if its people just not realizing how much power there wasting and how much money is on the table if they quit... I imagine its probably a mixture of both.

2020 Nissan Leaf here, not a purchase I am exactly happy about... not because the car is bad, its pretty nice as far as cars go, but because I didn't exactly want to own a car in the first place... but well... working in the US made that pretty much mandatory. :/

Edited by Imca on Apr 15th 2024 at 7:24:17 PM

Yeah I hate driving too. Being in Taiwan makes it easier but it is still a pain.

I thought this thread was about electric vehicles and transpiration, not LED bulbs? And again, these things are not mutually exclusive. We can be more sustainable by building better transportation infrastructure AND using better lightbulbs.

The point of it is that going "Well we shouldn't be focusing switching to electric cars, there still bad for the environment" is a flawed stance, likely driven by the you-tube algorithm because I honestly follow those channels too and know whats being said... the points of evidence being.

A) That switching the American infrastructure to not be car eccentric is a task that we will not see complete within our generation... Even if we got it started tomorrow with full government backing, its just not going to be done before Millennials and Gen-Z are dead.... that level of infrastructure work is on the order of a century... meanwhile vehicle electrification can be done in 20 years, 10 years to switch the industry... then another 10 years for natural vehicle end of lifespan replacement... its a much more feasible task.

B) That going right to "All cars bad" misses the point any way that cars aren't even the largest source of removable fossil fuel waste that we have, not by a long shot... It tries to drive the focus right to a task that is both incredibly hard to accomplish with marginal gains, while taking focus off the tasks that are within clear reach of capabilities today, with much larger gains to be had in the process.

Electric vehicles are very much needed as a result, there a very good way to extract what short term gains we can get back from the transportation sector out of it while we take care of every thing else.

Its kind of like the nuclear/renewables argument as far as I see it, an all renewable grid would be nice... but its just not feasible any time soon... Nuclear works today, so the focus should be on it... because unless we focus on it, the existing option does worse damage.

Edited by Imca on Apr 15th 2024 at 8:21:05 PM

I don't have a full EV but I do have a PHEV that I drive as an EV 90%+ of the time.

My understanding is that by certain metrics PHEV's actually beat E Vs on environmental impacts if (and that's a big if for the average PHEV owner) they are driven with that kind of ratio. The fuel you do burn in that last 10% of driving is more than compensated for with the much smaller battery.

This won't be the case as battery technology improves and isn't the case now for a lot of PHEV owners since not everyone has a commute that falls within the EV range (typically 20-40 miles) or is able/disciplined enough to charge it every day.

Edited by Falrinn on Apr 15th 2024 at 4:20:46 AM

x5 I'm not sure an infographic from a place called Prescriptive Data, Inc. that links to a study that isn't a study, but an article from a place called Visual Capitalist makes for a good source. Not to mention the infographic with the lightbulb itself doesn't have a source either and I doubt SaveYourMoneyCutCarbon is a scientific institution. Though I have replaced all my bulbs, so it's not like I'm against removing all incandescent bulbs. If new incandescents were made illegal tomorrow, I wouldn't care. Also, I was speaking about personal consumption, which may not exactly be a one-to-one comparison. This meta-analysis from Institute of Physics publishing, puts changing out lightbulbs at the low-end of impact, compared to the going plant-based diet with an estimated 8 times the impact of personal bulbs or cold water washing which is about twice as much.

But swinging this back to Electric vehicles, the study I cited does say there are benefits to switching to an electric car, but states it in a general getting a more efficient car in general for the average person. Their studies put 1.15 tCO2e per year for an electric car, and if I went with a car-free lifestyle, that would be saving that 1.15 metric tons. Though I could also do that by just buying a more efficient car or reducing my car usage by a quarter. Theoretically, if I had an electric car, I could gain the difference between my gas car and an electric, but the issue comes into play, that electric cars in my area are not feasible for me.

Where I live has no charging stations and will never have charging stations without government funding and a lot of time, because I have an outdoor condo parking lot that can't keep enough funds to keep the asphalt paved, let alone installing charging stations. I'm also friends with very economically strapped people. They currently have an old clunker of a minivan as their only car, and only one of them had the ability to drive. They don't have money to get a full on electric vehicle, unless it comes down to used car prices, and again, the whole infrastructure lacking charging stations deal. A good portion of our town has their cars in outdoor parking because we live in apartments or condos with outdoor parking. We're not going electric anytime soon. That's the thing about banging on about EVs, and railing against public transport. It's a very privileged solution. Increasing public transport (which can be buses which wouldn't take 2 generations dying out to implement), tends to be much better for economically disadvantaged, which can also be electrified, so even more benefits.

Edited by HeyMikey on Apr 15th 2024 at 4:32:56 AM

Doesn’t help that Tesla scrapped their plans for more affordable cars recently.

The counter argument though is that you cant exactly rail against Cars until the public transport is in a situation that its usable, or you run into the situation that we are getting up here in NY that also fucks over the poor... where to try and encourage people to drive less and reduce congestion, there introducing a congestion tax.... 15$ a day.... which is basically 1 less hour of work for any one making minimum wage.

The city argues that this will be a good thing, and it will reduce traffic and emissions, and ever thing else you here normally... And you know what? If this was Europe I would agree... but every one who isn't from Manhattan including the poorer boroughs like the Bronx is pointing out that the busses are just flat unusable, they exist sure, but there kept in awful condition, they don't run on time, they often don't go where you need to go.... and while if you actually do the math a car is more expensive, bus fare as it is presented is a huge turnoff making them look substantially more expensive.

Basically what it boils down too is that if you don't want to loose your job it becomes a 15$ a day poor person tax, because you have to take the car any way even though the bus exists... and the upper classes can just kind of eat that cost, while lower classes cant.

Which is the kind of point I am trying to get too, I am not railing against public transport, public transport is fucking great when it works, I am railing against the fact that almost every public transport initiative I have seen presented only ends up screwing over your average Amercian commuter, while not addressing the situation until after you have already screwed them over if at all.

Busses are a good start indeed, but you have to make sure the busses are there, that there clean, that the fares are reasonable, and that they run on time and to a wide verity of locations before you start discouraging car use... which is a lot harder of an ask then just "lets have more busses"

And honestly, at that point I would imagine car use would discourage itself... who wants to pay thousands used, or tens of thousands new for an asset that only decreases in value as time goes on... I know I sure don't.

Edit: Bonus fact, the proposed congestion tax is also like 30$ for work vehicles too, because like... fuck any one that actually has to use a vehicle for a job like any kind of delivery man, utility worker, and so on I guess...

Edited by Imca on Apr 15th 2024 at 8:57:21 PM

That's just an argument against bad public transportation, not against public transportation in general. Try selling EVs if charge time is 12 hours and the nearest station is 2 miles down the road, but it would be fallacious and a strawman to say that represents the intended EV solution. The easy way to mitigate that is actually use infrastructure money to get more buses, expand the web, make specific lanes, and subsidize the cost such that buses are cheaper on the users end. And that would be faster to get up than making charge stations for EVs or building another lane on the highway that will get used up within a month, without the knock-on effect of pushing more living spaces out in order to make room for it.

When public transportation doesn't work, most of it is because all the money was spent making cars better (for some given definition of better) instead of for public transport. It's not like when we improved car infrastructure, we did it out support for the poor, we bulldozed entire minority neighborhoods to do that. But expanding out car infrastructure doesn't help the poor folks and spending it on EV infrastructure doesn't. If the public infrastructure doesn't work, actually fund them, implement them intelligently and subsidize the tickets. Induced demand can work the opposite way. You make public transportation better, it will induce demand for people to use public transport to get to places faster and cheaper, which will then cause an increase in usage, which will require more investment to meet the new demand, and so on.

Edited by HeyMikey on Apr 15th 2024 at 5:15:04 AM

Or at the very least, make the damn EV more affordable for everyone.

Implementing them intelligently is pulling a lot more weight then you realize there, the MTA just spent millions of dollars installing new turnstiles in order to stop fare jumpers, saying that that would get them much more revenue and make the trains better.

Instead they ended up making a system that you can bypass by sticking your hands behind to trier the exit sensor which it has to have in order to comply with the Americans with Disabilities act (to be clear here, having to have the sensor is a good thing, this is railing against the useless expense of the new turnstiles themself) or just walk an entire class room through in the time it takes for the gates to close after a single person pays.... so they have to get the NYPD to watch them in order to make sure people don't racking up the costs of paying additional cops as well.

The new turnstiles end up costing millions upfront, are easier to bypass, and now have a constant expenditure of police observation... meanwhile the subways had a 60% on time percentage, were derailed twice, and one was even taken on a joyride.... in the month of January alone.

It shouldn't be rocket science to see that the reason the subway isn't being used isn't because fare jumpers are bypassing the que and that you would get better results by spending those millions on train maintenance so they didn't smell like piss and actually stayed on the tracks like they were supposed too... Heck I would argue you would probably make more money off of that then the turnstiles too since it would mean that people would actually want to use the subway rather then it being an option of last resort...

Yet here we are...

Throwing money at public transport doesn't solve the problem when the money isn't spent intelligently, and politicians treat the public transport budget like a corruption piggyback.... I believe it was Coumo for instance diverted the train maintenance fund to pay for upkeep on a ski resort.

Its really not as simple as you make it out to be to make public transport in the US better, since your going to have to clear out the political corruption first as well... and I don't even know how you would get started on such a task.

Agreed, thats why I think the Biden adminsitration was on the right track with its tax rebate for electric vehicles, before it limited it to electric vehicles made in the US due to Auto Union lobbying.

With that Tax Credit a Nissan Leaf was actually cheaper then a Kia Sedan... and Kia is already considered one of the cheapest manufactures out there.

Edited by Imca on Apr 15th 2024 at 9:27:34 PM