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Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

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Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#131

Post by adrianN »

tonysdg wrote: post #75
craftyguy wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So national policy is essentially catering to the minority that live in rural areas? That seems backwards.

That minority controls a non-trivial portion of the nation's political power -- just look at the 2016 presidential election for evidence. I'm 100% for clean energy and reducing/eliminating fossil fuel use, but I also recognize the reality that electric vehicles just don't yet have the capability -- and more importantly, infrastructure -- to replace gas- and diesel-powered cars/buses/trucks. Telling rural Americans to…

It would be a good start if we replaced ICEs wherever possible, i.e. in cities. The majority of the people lives in cities, almost all car trips are well below fifty miles. If EVs work 100% of the time for 20% of the population that would already be a huge win for the environment and their sales could fund the R&D necessary to make them viable for the rest.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#132

Post by adrianN »

black_puppydog wrote: post #123
lenepp wrote: post #62

One interesting feature of articles like this that I don't really get is that they often leave out a huge huge quality of life benefit that electric vehicles bring: reduced urban machine noise.

don't worry about the noise. At least here in France we've got you covered with scooters all over the place, including the heart of town! these things seem to be mostly unregulated since the 80s or so when it comes to noise and "stinky" emissions... :|

Here in Berlin a good chunk of the scooters I see are already electric. I don't think that the noisy two stroke engines will live much longer.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#133

Post by adrianN »

justinator wrote: post #129
pingou wrote: post #124

"they consume 30 times more fuel than average sized cars". Is that true? That seems gigantic, I thought taking so bus was so much better for the planet than taking your car.

Bus weighs ~30,000 pounds. Car, ~4,000. So I would question this stat. At full capacity, a bus would be able to pack more people, in a much smaller space than a full capacity car, so there's your savings in fuel. Plus I would assume that one, larger engine in a bus is more efficient than ~10 smaller engines. There's also the hidden cost of manufacturing a bus - does one bus take less resources to manufacture than the…

Plus more busses means less congestion and smoother traffic causes less emissions.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#134

Post by konschubert »

rmason wrote: post #48

What's sad is that the majority of electric buses being purchased both in America and around the globe aren't manufactured in the US. We have a Silicon Valley company, Tesla, that kicked off the world-wide move to battery powered autos. Why is there not a US company recognized as the leader in buses? There are a few California companies on this list but they're tiny. Here in Michigan the leading player is French and…

>Why is there not a US company recognized as the leader in buses?

Culture, policy and structure.

Culture: The US considers public transport to be "for the poor". How many investors and founders in SV take the bus to work? Buses are seen as an outdated mode of transportation. Why create a company for a technology that you expect to be replaced by hyperloop/flying cars/ jetpacks.

Policy: Chinas political leadership made a decision that they want electric buses in their cities and that they want them to be built in China. Then, they created the environment that would enable this using directives or subsidies or whatever.

Structure: China is the manufacturing hub of the world. They have good engineers and they know how to make stuff. They have a deep, cheap, local supply chain. Things that the US may not have as much.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#135

Post by hackbinary »

Okay, cool. But the energy still has to be produced somehow. Are we shifting the diesel to coal power plants? So for every km driven, what is the comparative amount of CO2 produced? Is there a net benefit in this regard? Coal power plants might be more efficient, but then we are shifting the smoke stacks.

Then what about the batteries? The batteries need to be produced, and they have a useful lifespan, then need to be disposed of or recycled. How do we deal with all of that contamination?

Are we further ahead with electric cars and buses?

I went to the Volvo museum last year and learned that pneumatic tires consume something like 30% of the energy expended by road vehicles, should we not be focusing on better rail transport? Or solid tire technology?

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#136

Post by simonh »

fsloth wrote: post #105
abakker wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it really proves anything and it might be OT from your point, but, the confounding variable is that in the US - especially outside of the major urban areas - everything is just very far away in terms of miles. Lacking a car, you can expect life to be very difficult. there are still plenty of places in the US where the range of a tesla might be a borderline problem week-to-week. (though probably not as…

I think it is well known the car and petrol companies were heavy lobbyists in developing the transit architecture in the US (including zoning and so on) after the second world war. To exaggerate a bit, the entire country was designed to facilitate automobile sales. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_car_on_societ... In the continental europe most of the urban centers predate the automobile hundreds if not…

This was the one thing that really surprised me when I first visited the US in the 90s. We'd stop at a store or restaurant somewhere and the nearest neighbouring stores on either side would be 200m away, with their own huge parking lot and no pedestrian route between them. We were driving from Chicago to LA and so when we'd stop I'd want to stretch my legs, but the barriers in the way made a walk like that rally difficult. I couldn't understand why anyone would design a place like that. It was engineered around cars, not people.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#137

Post by simonh »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #92
abakker wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2015, Belgium had a Population density of 363people/Km^2. Massachusetts in 2015 had 336 people/KM^2. So, pretty close. The difference is that Belgium has a much more uniform population distribution vs Massachusetts. Secondarily, Belgium can define it's own national policy, while MA must compromise with the rest of the country, including CA, WY, MT, and NY, all of which have very different economic and practical co…

Obviously the US has some structural issues, otherwise it wouldn't have these persistent failures. All I'm doing is pushing back against the simplistic "but the US is so big compared to all those tiny countries". If you want to talk about density or uniform distribution... Why is Australian public transit so much better than American public transit? America's governmental structure isn't unique either. There are othe…

Frankly, political lobbying is strangling your country. Are there any other developed democracies that allow the level of political capture through lobbying and political donations as the US? That alongside gerrymandering and the politicisation of the judiciary and whole legal process. Not how I'd set up a democracy. The USA was far ahead of it's time for over a hundred years in many aspects of it's system of politics and governance, but right now it seems like it's really fallen far behind.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#138

Post by contras1970 »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #100
freddie_mercury wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously the US has some structural issues, otherwise it wouldn't have these persistent failures. All I'm doing is pushing back against the simplistic "but the US is so big compared to all those tiny countries". If you want to talk about density or uniform distribution... Why is Australian public transit so much better than American public transit? America's governmental structure isn't unique either. There are othe…

> Why is Australian public transit so much better than American public transit? I would guess it's because Australia is, like, 99% uninhabited and uninhabitable or borderline uninhabitable[1], which probably means they can focus resources almost exclusively on the few densely populated areas. Additionally Australia's urban population seems to be significantly higher than America's (~89% vs ~80% according to 5 seconds…

so USA has poorer public transport than Europe because the latter has much more uniform population distribution; USA also has poorer public transport than Australia because the latter has much more skewed population distribution.

american exceptionalism at its finest. :)

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#139

Post by richjdsmith »

pingou wrote: post #124

"they consume 30 times more fuel than average sized cars". Is that true? That seems gigantic, I thought taking so bus was so much better for the planet than taking your car.

My parents used to have an RV built on a freightliner chassis. While not a perfect example, it used ~6MPG in cities, and ~11MPG on highways (where it was driven 99% of the time). Also it was from 2004.

With all the things you find in an RV - Pop-outs, fridge, washing machine, etc, I would be amazed if it didn't weigh something similar, if not more than a city bus and at least equal to a inter-city bus.

Worst case scenario and all buses are driving around with 2004 level mileage, that is still only roughly 10x more fuel than the best mileage vehicles available today.

Smells like bullshit to me.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#140

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

danans wrote: post #21

It's a strange shift in affairs that China appears to have the greatest incentives (urban pollution, petroleum imports) today to advance clean transportation and energy while the US has stalled or moved backward, at least the Federal level. Western European countries, for whom fossil fuels don't seem to be an identity politics issue like in the US, are also making more progress in electrifying their transportation an…

It helps that China is a major producer of "rare earth" metals - that's the stuff you need for the accumulators. So they don't have a problem to get the accumulators in massive quantities.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/279953/rare-earth-produc...

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