California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It • Hacker News Board

Re: California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It

#191

Post by nickpsecurity » Tue, Aug 04, 2015, 3:43 AM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #91

nickpsecurity wrote: post #68

That she pushes hydrogen so much is disturbing to me. The source we need will either be water or polluting processes. Water is something we should be protecting and conserving with battles going on for it all over. Definitely don't need to be putting Niagara Falls worth of it into cars. The alternative is commercial production which is anything but ecofriendly. That it contains less energy than gasoline for same volu…

I'm baffled by your inclusion of a link to a four year old anti-wind turbine rant in the Daily Mail at the end of an otherwise sane and sensible comment.

I glanced at the photo in search results before heading to work thinking it was the right article. It wasn't. Good catch. Here's the intended article that covers the damage of rare-earth mining and why most countries don't do it:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rar...

The point of including the topic was that these people talk all kinds of green while doing it using stuff made in most eco-damaging and unhealthy way. A little hypocritical. Further, they should bring up the reality of expanded mining of rare earth elements in these discussions [among other issues] and attempt to make a cost-benefit analysis of various approaches. Current approach is to pretend it doesn't exist or sweep it under the rug.

Re: California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It

#192

Post by Dylan16807 » Tue, Aug 04, 2015, 3:44 AM UTC

downandout wrote: post #157

This is yet another indication that people at the highest levels of government simply don't understand or care how free markets work. You don't raise demand for anything by mandating increasing levels of production of a product that people won't buy. You do it by incentivizing or subsidizing the development of a product (and in the case of cars, a nationwide infrastructure) that has advantages over those already in t…

Mandating production of something people don't want does not make people buy it, that's true.

But mandating production does make research happen, which drives prices down on the thing you want, and makes it closer to marketable.

And mandating sales means that the company has to discount it until demand gets high enough. As long as it's still worth it to them overall to do business in the state, that works just fine in the market.

This is subsidizing, it's just making the car companies pay for it more directly than a tax.

But it works about the same as a tax on non-electric cars that pays for electric car incentives.

Re: California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It

#193

Post by nickpsecurity » Tue, Aug 04, 2015, 3:49 AM UTC

gertef wrote: post #104

nickpsecurity wrote: post #68

That she pushes hydrogen so much is disturbing to me. The source we need will either be water or polluting processes. Water is something we should be protecting and conserving with battles going on for it all over. Definitely don't need to be putting Niagara Falls worth of it into cars. The alternative is commercial production which is anything but ecofriendly. That it contains less energy than gasoline for same volu…

Does water-powered hydrogren power consume freshwater? If you can get it the input from ocean, there is no scarcity problem.

There's still the issue of using our most precious resource up the way we do everything else. It could be done with desalination plants like they already use in California. There's also research into doing it more efficiently:

http://phys.org/news/2013-06-sea-ocean-hydrogen-fuel.html

So, dealing with the fuel source using ocean is a possibility. (light bulb) Might even be a solution to rising oceans as arctic caps melt. Now there's some original thinking on the topic haha. Probably wouldn't work in reality but might make a good movie scenario.

Re: California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It

#194

Post by ArkyBeagle » Tue, Aug 04, 2015, 3:53 AM UTC

stickfigure wrote: post #30

I don't get it. Mandating that auto manufacturers sell a certain percentage of electric vehicles seems a bit like legislating the weather. If CA really wants to push people into electric vehicles, why not manipulate the demand for electric vehicles? Perhaps add another dollar or two to the gasoline tax?

They hit the manufacturers because they're a large target.

An awful lot of people in or close to poverty still can't do without a car, and this will hit them the hardest. Even for people who make a modest living, an inordinate number of them drive something for their job.

55 MPG is an arbitrary and modestly ridiculous target that soon. A Prius stickers @ 51 MPG. And or course, SUVs and pickups are exempt.

At a loss of $15k per car, I'd have to seriously consider abandoning the California market were I Marchionne.

CARB are not ... nice people.

Re: California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It

#195

Post by OrwellianChild » Tue, Aug 04, 2015, 4:01 AM UTC

SovietDissident wrote: post #186

OrwellianChild wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I think you are trying to make an argument that opposes these more stringent emissions requirements (correct me if I'm wrong), but I could just as easily read these the other way... 1. Chrysler's fleet is so inefficient that they have to make one-off cars to bring up their average, losing money on each one. This regulation is single-handedly forcing them to improve their fleet or suffer massive hemorrhaging from…

"The electric car is one of the ways carmakers expect to lower their average fuel consumption and get to the 55 mpg average. The problem is, people aren't buying, whether all-electric or plug-in hybrid. General Motors is struggling to sell 10,000 Chevy Volts this year, and Nissan has sold just over 8,000 Leafs. For context, about 13 million cars are expected to be sold in the U.S. in 2011... The bad news is that the…

I really appreciate the thorough, cited reply! There isn't enough of this deep dialogue on the 'net, much less on HN. Upvoted, for that alone. :)

All of your concerns are rational considerations: integrated costs of materials, existing demand for electric/plug-in hybrid vehicles (though I think you'll see there's been growing uptake since your 2011 source!), sources of power on the grid skewing towards fossil fuels...

The ultimate question (one that you and I may ultimately all on different sides of), is whether or not things will always be this way. Also informing this is where things are going to. I don't have my sources available for proper citation (happy to share them later if you are interested), but share of forecasted new power generation is dominated by solar. Graduated regulations are integrating the cost of externalities for sources like coal and other polluters that make them look less like the sure bet they were in the past. The battery density, range, and charging capabilities of electric cars are improving dramatically under concentrated R&D. Tesla's entire company objective is to bring their technology down to consumer-level with the Model 3 in 2 years time. These developments and more signal to me that we are moving to a much more friendly ecosystem for the technologies that could push gasoline cars to the sidelines in very short time.

In this dynamically changing market, some companies (Fiat included, likely) will find themselves lagging due to a combination of internal organizational conflict or maybe just failing to "read the tea leaves" correctly. Witness GM and Chrysler going under when Ford stayed afloat in the 2008 crisis... Sometimes companies get it wrong and fail to innovate, and regulation like California is pushing is designed to incentivize the right kind of decision making out of even those who drag their feet.

Thanks for being willing to have this discourse with me!

Re: California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It

#196

Post by Dylan16807 » Tue, Aug 04, 2015, 4:09 AM UTC

nickpsecurity wrote: post #68

That she pushes hydrogen so much is disturbing to me. The source we need will either be water or polluting processes. Water is something we should be protecting and conserving with battles going on for it all over. Definitely don't need to be putting Niagara Falls worth of it into cars. The alternative is commercial production which is anything but ecofriendly. That it contains less energy than gasoline for same volu…

We use so much water that the amount to make fuel out of would have next to no difference. And it would cost barely any more to use desalinated water.

Not that I think hydrogen is better than batteries.

Re: California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It

#197

Post by toomuchtodo » Tue, Aug 04, 2015, 4:12 AM UTC

oofabz wrote: post #121

revelation wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats kind of what happens when you don't ever adjust it in 50 years and it's a fixed dollar amount.

The federal gas tax was last increased in 1993, 22 years ago.

Which is also why the federal highway trust fund is broke. Not just figuratively; it is literally out of funds.

Re: California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It

#198

Post by ArkyBeagle » Tue, Aug 04, 2015, 4:15 AM UTC

cmurf wrote: post #188

igravious wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never knew that. I thought it was upcoming competition from Tesla and the "writing on the wall" so to speak... I didn't know that legislation was manipulating the product output mix of Big Auto...

Yes it goes way back to California Emissions. California has legislated to drag auto manufacturers kicking and screaming to the contrary position for many years. I think it's unlikely engine efficiency, and battery technology would be as progressed as it is now without that. There is such a thing as government failure, just as there's such a thing as market failure. The problem with both is that perfect information,…

People were buying Hondas, Toyotas and Datsuns in the '70s. Part of that was mileage, some of it was price, part of it was ... a sort of rebellion. There was interest.

The US automakers were just downright bellicose. No real surprise; they're huge organizations and turning a thing that large takes forever. This was so profound that Roger Smith of all people started the recently defunct Saturn marque. GM remains cast in the same shape today.

Outside of electronic engine control and the stupefyingly dumb leaded gasoline, most EPA style "improvements" made cars less efficient and would have been unnecessary for properly tuned vehicles. I suppose it's lost for all time now, but Robert Pease had a great story about his Beetle not registering any emissions and his trouble with that ( an aircooled Beetle has a high enough exhaust gas temperature to theoretically emit no carbon monoxide ).

Regulation is extremely difficult - I think of it in terms of Brian Kernighan's "debugging is twice as hard" maxim but with a higher multiplier.

I think if you want clean air, $10 a gallon gasoline is a good start. This will be very disruptive. I have never seen proof, but I have heard many times one reason Reagan was popular was because gas prices dropped during his tenure.

The sad part is that we mostly use cars to subsidize land use patterns that could be taxed. Commuting is the least efficient thing ever devised.

Re: California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It

#199

Post by ArkyBeagle » Tue, Aug 04, 2015, 4:21 AM UTC

jonknee wrote: post #140

stickfigure wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have evidence for this? I seem to recall that low-mpg light trucks and SUVs were wildly popular in the US until the price of gasoline went to $4.

http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub... Since 1980 we've gotten about 50% better mileage over all. Considering the number of cars is greater today the real effect of gas saved is even more.

I'd credit most of that improvement on electronic engine control, and that really kind of had to evolve somewhat after 1980. You could see good improvement in cars from that time frame just by replacing the coil system with an SCR based ignition.

It's also difficult to explain how brittle a 1980 car's fuel handling system was. Now, having both controlled by the same computer leads to much improvement.

Re: California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It

#200

Post by ArkyBeagle » Tue, Aug 04, 2015, 4:24 AM UTC

schiffern wrote: post #81

tfinniga wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the linked pdf: "We have limited our studies to nuclear power because its capital costs are lower than wind and solar-electric power, and it has significant environmental advantages over fossil energy sources, which are not carbon-neutral."

If that (huge) assumption is allowed for this technology, why not EVs? You can paint a very rosy picture of any transport technology if you assume away fossil fuels.

Probably because the existing inventory of ICE based rolling stock has something like a half life of 20 years.

It'd also be nice to have some time in on good carbon sequester techniques in large scale.