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Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly

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Re: Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly

#401

Post by stellar678 »

GW150914 wrote: post #227
soperj wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet tons of people do it in europe with kids because the infrastructure exists.

You mean the rich, temperate parts of Western Europe, most of which could fit inside Texas? Sure. If you’re being more honest it’s the urban areas of the richer, temperate parts of Weatern Europe, which is an even smaller geographic area with a total population that’s less than the US, or about 1/5th of China or India. I love cycling in Paris and Amsterdam, not so much in New York City in the winter. I also wouldn’t…

Did not downvote - but your arguments about geographic size ring really hollow given the NHTS stats I shared originally which show that 60% of car trips are 5 miles or less.

Then you’ll add that you can’t cycle in the winter in New York because Western European has more moderate weather. But I’ll point out that many of the Western Europe capitals have a colder winter than NYC.

But then if you accept that, you’ll move on to claims about how you can’t go shopping for a 4 person family using a bike. Then I’ll share stats that the average US family size is 2.58, and that all kinds of stores offer home delivery.

The point is that people come up with a litany of rationalizations for the status quo, but it ends up sounding like apology for car culture when even heavy drivers would complain about all the negatives (congestion, parking, pollution, shitty drivers) in other forums.

I’m guessing some of that is behind the downvotes.

Re: Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly

#402

Post by stellar678 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #362
stellar678 wrote: post #35

They neglected a huge part of the coming electric vehicle picture: lightweight, slow-speed electric vehicles. Almost 60% of US car trips are 5 miles or shorter. (2017 ref: https://nhts.ornl.gov/tables09/ae/work/Job63697.html , 2009 ref: https://nhts.ornl.gov/tables09/fatcat/2009/vt_TRPMILES.html ) Scooters, e-bikes, and electric cargo bikes (not to mention the human-powered versions!) will soak up an enormous portion…

I'm excited for a critical mass of those kinds of vehicles. I want one now but someone in an SUV is going kill me one day so I avoid it.

Yeah - given all the data we have showing that SUV design is basically set up to kill pedestrians, I have to wonder when Ralph Nader is going to come out with “Unsafe at Any Speed 2”.

Re: Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly

#403

Post by jacquesm »

roel_v wrote: post #330
jacquesm wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They’re not useful for taking kids to school, Where I live a few hundred thousand kids are taken to school by bike every day. All the way up to age 10 or so it's pretty common to see parents with kids on the back (and sometimes on the front or both) of their bikes. https://www.24baby.nl/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/mamafiets.j...

No sane person would do so in any country that doesn't have the bicycle infrastructure we have in the Netherlands. I live in Australia and/or New Zealand a few months out of the year, and I've taken my kids to school there - it's insane to do so on a bike. And this was in places that actually have bike infrastructure and bike activism! Dutch people need to try cycling somewhere else before claiming that bikes are a c…

> No sane person would do so in any country that doesn't have the bicycle infrastructure we have in the Netherlands.

Totally agreed, but bike infrastructure is something that you can actually decide to implement.

Re: Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly

#404

Post by krallja »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #345
baxtr wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one thing that is really different is that digital cameras didn’t required a huge network of infrastructure to succeed. That’s unfortunately where you’re analogy breaks down

> digital cameras didn’t required a huge network of infrastructure to succeed. Yes, of course they do. What are you going to do with some .jpegs without the internet? Literally a huge network, and it was rolled out around the same time.

You print them, same as film. Either at home, or put them on a CD-ROM or thumb drive and take them to the printer’s.

Re: Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly

#405

Post by ben_w »

DennisP wrote: post #371
ben_w wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are one of the four main reasons why I don’t worry about the duck curve.

What are the other three?

1) Non-car storage (including but not limited to immobile batteries, pumped hydro, and hydrogen electrolysis)

2) Non-solar renewables (including but not limited to wind, geothermal, and tidal)

3) Inter-time-zone power grids (because PV is getting so cheap that 67% losses, 1000 watts at source being 330 watts at the plug, isn’t totally insane).

Re: Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly

#406

Post by adrianN »

mattferderer wrote: post #390
tjoff wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's either a very pessimistic view of electric car progress or a very optimistic view of self-driving capabilities. I think electric car revolution will be at least two decades earlier than self-driving. As far as electric goes we are starting to reap benefits of vast investment in better tech, manufacturing and vehicles purpose built for it. Self-driving is very far away and the best publicly available systems on…

The earliest electric cars I noticed on the streets were glorified golf carts. They were ideal for very short distances, like getting to work & running errands. Couldn't self driving cars in the very near future follow this same path? Find a very densely populated area. Get self driving cars to work very well in that area for short trips. Slowly expand to similar areas? I haven't followed either of these very closely…

That's kind of where self driving busses go. The first prototypes run short routes on aiports or something like that. But I don't think that short routes on normal streets are significantly easier than long routes on normal streets.

Re: Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly

#407

Post by cfmcdonald »

davidgould wrote: post #339
londons_explore wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only real benefit of electric cars is more environmentally friendly. Since the environment is a collective problem rather than an individual problem, the transition wouldn't ever happen without government intervention. Hence, I think the moment of inflection is entirely down to government policies, and very little down to consumer desires.

They are also a much better driving experience. Once you get used to one pedal driving and instant silent thrust, gas cars seem unresponsive and clumsy. Not going to gas stations is great too.

What do you mean by one-pedal driving? Surely electric cars still have an accelerator and a brake?

Re: Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly

#408

Post by chefkoch »

ben_w wrote: post #311
simonbarker87 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electric vehicles use roughly a third of the energy so that 30 PWh only needs to be an extra 10 PWh for the grid. We need to increase overall capcity by 50%.

10 PWh / year (just over 1 TW average) is currently a half-trillion dollar installation cost, assuming $0.23/W PV with a 50% duty cycle. Yes, this is still an improvement; yes it should be done; it’s just not trivial .

So one year the defense budget.

Seems possible

Re: Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly

#409

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

krallja wrote: post #404
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> digital cameras didn’t required a huge network of infrastructure to succeed. Yes, of course they do. What are you going to do with some .jpegs without the internet? Literally a huge network, and it was rolled out around the same time.

You print them, same as film. Either at home, or put them on a CD-ROM or thumb drive and take them to the printer’s.

Also infrastructure.

Re: Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly

#410

Post by BurningFrog »

parkersweb wrote: post #224
BurningFrog wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have money. They just don't care about potholes and uneven streets.

Sadly not true - father was a civil engineer in council highways dept before he retired. For years he had been saying that funding was so small they were having to patch roads where they should have been renewing the road bed. Now they can't even afford to do all roads. It might be a problem of funding allocation of course - but it wasn't a lack of desire.

Yeah, I'm saying maintaining infrastructure is not a political priority, because it doesn't win elections.

Not that the people working in infrastructure maintenance waste the money.

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