Is every part of the electric "sustainable" cars renewable? Is lithium or whatever they make these batteries out of "green"? Are we trading gas for some other limited resource?
The Netherlands is making moves to ban all non-electric vehicle sales by 2025
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Re: The Netherlands is making moves to ban all non-electric vehicle sales by 2025
#22> Electric vehicles – including self-driving cars – are clearly the future Partially off-topic, but it feels very weird when people put electric and self-driving cars into the same basket. Those are 2 different problems. There're electric cars which are not self driving. There're cars aiming to be self-driving, that are not electric.
Electric vehicles are many many times simpler than their gas-powered cousins. This simplicity is passed onto the self-driving computer as fewer variables.
Also, the primary downsides to electric vehicles -- longer refuel times, reduced range -- are mostly irrelevant when a computer is doing it by itself. Nobody cares if their self-driving taxi spends 10 minutes recharging itself between every pickup.
Re: The Netherlands is making moves to ban all non-electric vehicle sales by 2025
#23Is every part of the electric "sustainable" cars renewable? Is lithium or whatever they make these batteries out of "green"? Are we trading gas for some other limited resource?
A pretty major part is of course how the electricity is being generated. If it's coming from coal plants, electric is not going to be a big improvement (though still a slight one, because as dirty as coal plants are, they're still more efficient that your own personal internal combustion engine). But if it's part of a move towards all wind, solar and other clean energy production, then that's going to have a huge impact.
Re: The Netherlands is making moves to ban all non-electric vehicle sales by 2025
#24In this case I think the approach taken by the US is better -- set aggressive fuel economy standards and let the market either a.) figure out new technologies for much better fuel economy b.) figure out electric vehicles are cheaper My point here specifically is not that the numbers the US chose are correct (let that be for another debate), but that this method of effectively restricting/"banning" gasoline cars is be…
c.) lie and cheat their way around the standards
Re: The Netherlands is making moves to ban all non-electric vehicle sales by 2025
#25Will they compel landlords to install chargers in all parking spots? What about street parking? Or are people who don't own garages simply screwed, as in the US?
I'm not sure about other cities, but if you own an electric car in Amsterdam, you're guaranteed to get a charging spot near your home. As long as nobody in your neighbourhood has a visitor with an electric car, this means a guaranteed parking spot, which is an enormously valuable perk in this city.
Re: The Netherlands is making moves to ban all non-electric vehicle sales by 2025
#26It's noteworthy that 90% of energy used in the Netherlands is fossil fuels[1] (as of 2013, anyway). This means electric cars will emit GHGs comparable to a 40-50mpg gasoline-powered car. Hopefully they do some major work to clean up their grid electricity. Electric cars are a necessary step to reducing GHG emissions, but without a clean grid they are pretty pointless. [1] https://www.iea.org/Textbase/npsum/netherland…
I haven't read the linked report, but I'm guessing that's mostly industrial usage? From anecdotal evidence of the people I know (which is also biased), most consumer electricity is 'green' (wind, solar, and sometimes biomass). In general this is not more expensive than 'grey', so many people opt for it.
Re: The Netherlands is making moves to ban all non-electric vehicle sales by 2025
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We already have an energy-saving self-driving mechanism - ... (and obeying the speed limit.) Obeying the speed limit is irrelevant; the actual speed is. A given car at a given speed consumes the same amount of fuel per unit distance regardless of what the speed limit is. All the data indicating that "speeding wastes fuel" is basically just proving that fuel economy is a function of engine power output.
Actually it's more to do with air resistance. It increases exponentially at higher speeds. You also don't burn less by driving really slow, since the engine burns some amount of fuel just by running at any speed. 40 mph is the sweet spot, supposedly. Driving at the speed limit will definitely save you more fuel than speeding.
> Actually it's more to do with air resistance. It increases exponentially at higher speeds. You also don't burn less by driving really slow, since the engine burns some amount of fuel just by running at any speed. 40 mph is the sweet spot, supposedly.
Actually, the sweet spot is dependent on the design and condition of the car. I'm not sure where exactly it is, but I think you are right that it is usually around 40.
> Driving at the speed limit will definitely save you more fuel than speeding.
How does a number on a sign affect how much fuel I'm burning? If, as you indicated, the sweet spot for my car is 40 but the speed limit is 30, how am I saving fuel by going 30 instead of 40? What if the speed limit is 65? If they drop it to 60 am I suddenly using more fuel? If they increase it to 70 can I now go faster without using more? The speed limit is totally irrelevant to fuel consumption.
Re: The Netherlands is making moves to ban all non-electric vehicle sales by 2025
#28> Electric vehicles – including self-driving cars – are clearly the future Partially off-topic, but it feels very weird when people put electric and self-driving cars into the same basket. Those are 2 different problems. There're electric cars which are not self driving. There're cars aiming to be self-driving, that are not electric.
Electric vehicles are many many times simpler than their gas-powered cousins. This simplicity is passed onto the self-driving computer as fewer variables. Also, the primary downsides to electric vehicles -- longer refuel times, reduced range -- are mostly irrelevant when a computer is doing it by itself. Nobody cares if their self-driving taxi spends 10 minutes recharging itself between every pickup.
> Electric vehicles are many times simpler than their gas-powered cousins
What does engine complexity have to do with driving complexity? I imagine that a computer would drive a car using interfaces analogous to those we use; namely gas, brake, steer (and I guess a shifter to put it in drive).
Re: The Netherlands is making moves to ban all non-electric vehicle sales by 2025
#29It's not as radical as the headline suggests. > There are moves within the country to ban all petrol and diesel vehicle sales by 2025.
So people will just travel an extra 15 minutes to the next country to buy their dinosaur-powered vehicles instead. This won't do anything but push sales tax money out of the country unless they also do something like ban new vehicle registrations as well as sales.
Or unless the neighboring countries follow suit.
Re: The Netherlands is making moves to ban all non-electric vehicle sales by 2025
#30It's about sales and it's very far from an implementation. One major issue is the EU, I heard on the radio (BNR) that it is not even legally possible for the Netherlands to banish sales of goods that are not banished in other parts of the EU. It's a nice discussion-starter though.
(Not EU resident here) How hard is it to cross an internal EU border, buy a car, and take it back home?