Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#121

Post by Frost1x » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 9:29 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #118

There is so much pollution that goes into making those vehicles, and all the waste from the batteries that need to be recycled every 8~10 years. This makes no sense from an environment perspective. You're better off buying older vans, that aren't so old they aren't inefficient, and just keep running those. Plus you're talking about more growth and selling more products, which is just more waste. We can't buy ourselve…

When a large business makes any significant investment decision, it has nothing to do with anything else but the perception of increased profit for the business.

Anything else is a side effect, always. If the action can be painted in a way that PR spins propaganda up that the people love or that quantified positive benefits from that PR result in net profits then we have successful alignment as a society (but the motive is never there). Amazon could have done this (or a partial) transition years ago but they didn't because it would have hurt their bottom line. Apparently now, this is more cost effective and the image/optics for the general public is more valuable.

Heck, most small investments big businesses make fit the same model but small investments get much less scrutiny (analysis) and typically give a better bang for the buck to society.

Now as to which is better for the environment... that's a very complicated matter and Amazon isn't concerned about that. If electric vehicles are better than we have proper alignment between goals to strive for in society and business actions. If not then we need to adjust incentives for businesses so they do get us to where we need to be.

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#122

Post by cloudwalking » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 9:31 PM UTC

leesec wrote: post #103

Honestly this is a good move, I just have a quick question: Does anyone anywhere have video footage of a Rivian actually being driven? Like, not in a commercial, someone genuinely driving it. I just want to know if they are anywhere close to having a production vehicle. If they have a single production vehicle that does what they say, then OK they "just" have to figure out scaling up the manufacturing. If they don't…

The Tesla truck will almost certainly beat them to mass market. Look how long it took Tesla to scale up production -- the Model S shipped in 2013. It wasn't until 2018 that Tesla built their 200,000th vehicle. Rivian hasn't yet shipped a single truck to customers; they're in for a long and difficult road ahead building out their production lines.

All that said I do hope Rivian is successful. I would absolutely buy an electric pickup truck.

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#123

Post by SethTro » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 9:35 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #118

There is so much pollution that goes into making those vehicles, and all the waste from the batteries that need to be recycled every 8~10 years. This makes no sense from an environment perspective. You're better off buying older vans, that aren't so old they aren't inefficient, and just keep running those. Plus you're talking about more growth and selling more products, which is just more waste. We can't buy ourselve…

EVs have much lower lifetime emissions than ICE.

I'd encourage you to read some of the great comments discussing this below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21019030

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#124

Post by beat » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 9:36 PM UTC

notdonspaulding wrote: post #70

perardi wrote: post #57

Warning: petty partisanship ahead. Our last Republican governor in Illinois spent some quality time trashing this company, which sure looks shortsighted in retrospect: https://www.adaptbn.com/home/2018/5/16/breaking-rauner-criti... He also made a point to trash all of Central Illinois as a place to do business, which is a heck of a strategy for business development. https://www.news-gazette.com/news/rauner-apologizes…

Fellow Normalite here, you still in the area? Would love to talk shop with a local Hacker Newser. Email in my profile if you're interested.

I grew up in Bloomington, the closest city in the world to Normal. I moved away before the Mitsubishi plant was built, tho.

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#125

Post by robmiller » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 9:39 PM UTC

larrywright wrote: post #84

notdonspaulding wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fellow Normalite here, you still in the area? Would love to talk shop with a local Hacker Newser. Email in my profile if you're interested.

Wow, I would not have expected to find so many Normalites here.

Checking in. Grew up in Decatur/Forsyth.

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#126

Post by qqqwerty » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 9:42 PM UTC

fallous wrote: post #79

danhak wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The typical internal combustion engine is only ~30% efficient, getting only ~10 kWh of energy out of that gallon.

Indeed. That does not, however, impact the actual energy available in a gallon of gasoline. Technically the 6kWh of energy spent on refining (or any other work) is itself subject to inefficiencies in generation, transmission, etc. It would also suffer from inefficiencies in the electrical storage and motive portions of an electric vehicle as well. And at the end of the day even if there were perfect 100% conversion i…

I think the point is that the energy inputs required to produce a gallon of gasoline could approximately power an EV vehicle roughly the same distance that a typical ICE could go on a gallon of gasoline. A quick google search seems to back that up.

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#127

Post by Brakenshire » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 9:49 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #118

There is so much pollution that goes into making those vehicles, and all the waste from the batteries that need to be recycled every 8~10 years. This makes no sense from an environment perspective. You're better off buying older vans, that aren't so old they aren't inefficient, and just keep running those. Plus you're talking about more growth and selling more products, which is just more waste. We can't buy ourselve…

Batteries don’t have to be recycled every 8-10 years, nowhere near. If you keep them within temperature and leave a safety margin they’ll outlast the car. There’s already plenty of data for Tesla batteries lasting hundreds of thousands of miles without significant degradation. Look after Lithium Ion batteries and they’re good for 1500 cycles, that’s 300k miles for a 200 mile car, 450k miles for a 300 mile car.

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#128

Post by hadlock » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 9:49 PM UTC

prions wrote: post #10

devmunchies wrote: post #2

whats the carbon footprint of producing a single van?

Carbon footprint is one thing to be critical about, but a bigger advantage with electric vehicles is removing point source pollution and moving the ghg production to powerplants. Powerplants are usually farther away from people (not idling under their windows) and often have more stringent emission standards than vehicles. There's also the opportunity to make electric vehicles with renewable energy barring the petrol…

Point source pollution, and also I am guessing, about 85% of dense urban daytime noise where average speeds are below 20mph. HVAC and tire noise make up a considerable portion of the remainder. Big cities are about to get a lot quieter over the next 20 years.

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#129

Post by cloudwalking » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

leesec wrote: post #113

gpm wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure making a single vehicle is harder to build than a large scale plant is... but I did find this via a quick google search: https://www.rivianforums.com/threads/preproduction-rivian-r1... I wouldn't assume it's not a submarine commercial though...

Yeah I've seen this, it also looks like a submarine commercial to me. What I'm more interested in is it's specs. Can it really charge as fast as they say? Does it really have that range and acceleration? I've seen the shell of one in person, but it just seems to me if you actually could make an electric truck go 0-60 in 3 seconds and last 400 miles you would just make a video of it doing that instead of making a mark…

EV acceleration is directly proportional to how much current you can pull out of the battery pack, which is directly proportional to the number of battery cells, which is directly proportional to overall range... On paper, yes those numbers are feasible.

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#130

Post by dbcurtis » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 9:51 PM UTC

Am I the only one who finds the spare tire location an absolute deal breaker? You have to unload the payload, and lift up the payload bed floor in order to access the spare. Now, I suppose this doesn't matter much to Amazon. But I have had the experience of being out the back-country where cell phones don't work, miles from a highway, changing a truck tire by myself. If I had to spend 1 or 2 hours unloading the truck before I could get at the spare, that would be a huge issue. At one point I was seriously considering writing a deposit check for a Rivian. The spare tire location told me instantly that this truck is not for me -- the designers have no idea how trucks are actually used. The utter cluelessness of that design decision boggles me.