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How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?

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Re: How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?

#51

Post by ZeroGravitas »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #40
arethuza wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Would I survive a crash? They're very tiny..." Isn't the real test how likely you are to be injured/killed per mile driven? Larger vehicles like SUVs might be safer if you are in an accident but that could be offset if they are more likely to actually be in an accident.

No, the real test is how survivable the vehicle is in a collision. Probability of suffering an accident is a separate discussion. If your family is T-boned in an intersection by a drunk driver who ran a red light, are you going to say, "Well, at least the odds of that happening were very small, since she rarely drives!" No, you're going to be dealing with serious injuries or possibly deaths and you're going to be say…

Or you'll be wishing that the drunk driver was in a smaller vehicle.

Or you'll be the one running over a child (possibly your own) and you'll be wishing that your car was smaller or had better visibility as you reversed.

Making up unpleasant stories is fine, but at some point actual numbers and statistics are required, and everyone getting larger and larger cars in some kind of arms race seems to have obvious downsides.

Re: How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?

#52

Post by Retric »

pessimizer wrote: post #36
madaxe_again wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Orders of magnitude doesn't mean 1000x - just 10x is enough. As to fracking - the wheels have already fallen off, low oil prices forced a production hiatus, stop/start is inefficient and costly, and you need only look at the headlong rush in the UK that kinda petered out to get an idea of where fracking is going - nowhere. The fossil sector is in big, big trouble - this chaotic oscillator will not stop until the mark…

> Orders of magnitude doesn't mean 1000x - just 10x is enough. That's "order" of magnitude, not "orders."

It's a vague term as: Other orders of magnitude may be calculated using bases other than 10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude

In base 2, 2x = 1 order of magnitude 8x = 3 orders of magnitude. Worse both informal definitions are in common usage.

Re: How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?

#53

Post by madaxe_again »

pessimizer wrote: post #36
madaxe_again wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Orders of magnitude doesn't mean 1000x - just 10x is enough. As to fracking - the wheels have already fallen off, low oil prices forced a production hiatus, stop/start is inefficient and costly, and you need only look at the headlong rush in the UK that kinda petered out to get an idea of where fracking is going - nowhere. The fossil sector is in big, big trouble - this chaotic oscillator will not stop until the mark…

> Orders of magnitude doesn't mean 1000x - just 10x is enough. That's "order" of magnitude, not "orders."

11x would be "orders", if we're playing semantic pedantry.

Re: How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?

#54

Post by tamana »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #42
tim333 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small electrical vehicles like that are going to be used mostly in slow moving urban environments and your chances of being killed are massively affected by impact speed so probably quite low.

Yet traditionally most accidents occur quite close to home. So they will be in many more accidents? Its the severity-probability product S(a)*P(a) that yields the 'suffering coefficient'

Removing long distance trails makes your trip mix biased toward short trips, but doesn't increase the rate of short trips.

Re: How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?

#55

Post by grandalf »

WJW wrote: post #50
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the real test is how survivable the vehicle is in a collision. Probability of suffering an accident is a separate discussion. If your family is T-boned in an intersection by a drunk driver who ran a red light, are you going to say, "Well, at least the odds of that happening were very small, since she rarely drives!" No, you're going to be dealing with serious injuries or possibly deaths and you're going to be say…

I'd prefer that they would have been not hit at all, which a more maneuverable vehicle with a shorter stopping distance might help with. Also, the probability I'm interested in is not the survivability in an accident, it is the total survivability over my lifetime, discounted by some percentage for cost etcetera. In your argumentation, everybody should drive around in tanks on the off chance that somebody else might…

I recently drove a European mini-van through Paris and it was a very tight squeeze... some streets were too narrow, and in one case a moped was parked 6" beyond the designated zone, which made the street impassible for me.

It was quite a fun experience, but in the future I'll rent a smaller vehicle.

Re: How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?

#56

Post by nathan_long »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #40
arethuza wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Would I survive a crash? They're very tiny..." Isn't the real test how likely you are to be injured/killed per mile driven? Larger vehicles like SUVs might be safer if you are in an accident but that could be offset if they are more likely to actually be in an accident.

No, the real test is how survivable the vehicle is in a collision. Probability of suffering an accident is a separate discussion. If your family is T-boned in an intersection by a drunk driver who ran a red light, are you going to say, "Well, at least the odds of that happening were very small, since she rarely drives!" No, you're going to be dealing with serious injuries or possibly deaths and you're going to be say…

Once, I was driving about 65mph on a state highway and a car pulled out of a farm road right in front of me. I had one or two seconds to react and swerve around them. They were probably going 10mph when I passed them.

I was driving a Toyota Camry. If I'd been driving a large truck, I probably couldn't have avoided the crash.

When I buy a car, I want to know both how likely it is that I can avoid a crash (manueverability, stopping distance, ABS, etc) and how likely it is that I can survive one if it happens. Both are relevant.

Consumer Reports' 2016 Automotive Edition had a lot of discussion about car safety. Most of it was centered on technology that helps to prevent accidents or make them less severe. Eg, if your car detects that you're about to hit something (Forward Collision Warning) and has Automatic Emergency Braking, you might not hit it, or hit it at 30mph instead of 60mph.

That could save your life. To say that the weight of your car is a safety factor but stopping distance isn't is just silly.

Re: How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?

#57

Post by tamana »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #51
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the real test is how survivable the vehicle is in a collision. Probability of suffering an accident is a separate discussion. If your family is T-boned in an intersection by a drunk driver who ran a red light, are you going to say, "Well, at least the odds of that happening were very small, since she rarely drives!" No, you're going to be dealing with serious injuries or possibly deaths and you're going to be say…

Or you'll be wishing that the drunk driver was in a smaller vehicle. Or you'll be the one running over a child (possibly your own) and you'll be wishing that your car was smaller or had better visibility as you reversed. Making up unpleasant stories is fine, but at some point actual numbers and statistics are required, and everyone getting larger and larger cars in some kind of arms race seems to have obvious downsid…

I suspect rearview camera/sensors are far better protection against bulldozing than small cars. No car is small enough to show a toddler under your tires.

Re: How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?

#58

Post by grandalf »

When you buy a car in the US, most of what you pay for is fancy molded plastic and attractive sheet metal work, cleverly organized by the manufacturer into trim level "tiers" intended to create maximum perceived value.

The package is then financed or leased with incentive financing and the sights are set on getting you to replace it after 2-4 years whether it needs to be replaced or not.

I think a 6 passenger mini-van could be manufactured for the US market (electric or gasoline) for under $8K if all the frills were removed.

This would entail simple, rubber bench seats, no radio (just a plastic bracket to snap in a smart-phone, which would also be used as a speedometer, and the smallest allowable engine.

I'd like to see an open hardware platform for car chassis, perhaps modeled after a successful platform like some of the 1980s Toyota trucks, designed to use abundantly available OEM and 3rd party parts.

Of course, self-driving electric cars might leap into reality before any of this is relevant, but once we stop owning our own vehicle, firms can focus on cost cutting for their fleets in ways that will usher in similar platform-style improvements that are difficult when people pick cars for aesthetic and emotional reasons.

Re: How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?

#59

Post by akgerber »

'Disruptive' means something worse and cheaper than eventually overtakes its more better, expensive competitors, like microcomputers versus mainframes.

Which makes the current market-winning electric cars, which are generally both more expensive and better than gasoline cars, not disruptive: http://www.vox.com/2016/4/12/11394260/tesla-not-disruptive

Re: How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?

#60

Post by TheCowboy »

madaxe_again wrote: post #17
steve19 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we're likely to see prices at the pump go up by orders of magnitude over a relatively short timescale Do you really believe that in a short period of time gasoline is going to cost a few orders of magnitude more... that's 1,000x the current cost? Post-fracking that's unlikely to happen. Prices may return to previous levels, but they won't move much more than that. Alternative energy will reduce demand for oil and t…

Orders of magnitude doesn't mean 1000x - just 10x is enough. As to fracking - the wheels have already fallen off, low oil prices forced a production hiatus, stop/start is inefficient and costly, and you need only look at the headlong rush in the UK that kinda petered out to get an idea of where fracking is going - nowhere. The fossil sector is in big, big trouble - this chaotic oscillator will not stop until the mark…

Where are you getting the information that stop/start is inefficient and costly for fracking? It's less than conventional oil wells. I've found a significant cost of fracking is establishing the wells.

If the price goes up that much, fracking is viable and will happen. The only way fracking is out of the equation if when low prices keep it from being profitable. Fracking presently functions as a cap on the price.

If prices vary wildly, then there are strategies to deal with that, and the variation needs to be explained. How does it come down so rapidly? Assuming healthy economics, probably because of fracking.

It doesn't make sense to say that market prices aren't demand driven just because other costs and factors exist. If suppliers will lose money at a given low price because of costs, eventually supply decreases and prices rise, etc.

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