Live data from Hacker News

Electric cars make up 54% of cars sold in Norway in 2020

theguardian.com

251–260 of 279 posts

Re: Electric cars make up 54% of cars sold in Norway in 2020

#251
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put it charitably, it is not a widely held viewpoint that pressurized hydrogen tanks and fuel cells are a superior automotive technology to batteries.

Which is why the disruptive risk is so high here. There’s already enough fuel cell cars out there that we know pressurized hydrogen tanks work safely. That so many people ignore or dismiss this fact is potentially leading many companies in the wrong direction.

There is plenty of material about why hydrogen isn't really better just a google away. Plenty of smart people have evaluated it and realized it's not worth it. Toyota is the only company left that still pretends that it's relevant... while slowly electrifying their fleet.

Re: Electric cars make up 54% of cars sold in Norway in 2020

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Artificially reducing supply by whatever means is going to have a similar effect on the consumer as a tax, prices and the cost to the consumer will rise

Reducing the supply has the effect of not taxing your own citizens more than the rest of the world. Also, a tax at the gas pump hits the everyday Joe (or in Norway, Mittias) disproportionately. Lots of fuel is consumed without ever going to a gas station.

It has the effect of increasing the price, just like a tax

Re: Electric cars make up 54% of cars sold in Norway in 2020

#253
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we not pretend that electric cars don't pollute the planet? To be clear, I am a big fan of electric cars. But this seems to have become another one of those things that has become so polarised you're not even allowed to express healthy skepticism.

ICE vehicles have very little headroom for "environmental growth" whereas electric seems to have very high levels of headroom. Batteries from more common elements, better recycling, more renewable energy to charge them. As much as I love big trucks, there is no "zero carbon diesel". So it isn't pretending, they really are a lot better for the planet in the mid-term and forward.

there is also the environmental cost of replacing the worldwide fleet of vehicles with EVs, and replacing fuel based infrastructure with electric infrastructure. I would love to see a study done on the environmental impact of car ownership in a place like Cuba, where they fix and reuse 70 year old cars to this day due to sanctions. They've certainly avoided all the shipping pollution that the auto industry would have imposed at least.

I think our disposible lifestyle needs to be fixed. Replacing your perfectly good thing with shiny new x% better thing is not necessarily green when you consider the costs of manufacturing that thing, shipping it to you, and disposing with your old thing.

Re: Electric cars make up 54% of cars sold in Norway in 2020

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't even mentioned how Tesla is the only company that doesn't sponsor at least one (I think they all sponsor multiple) traditionally powered racing teams, whose development goes into premium powered, traditional gas powered automobiles. Not exclusively. Formula 1 and Le Mans use hybrid engines. Formula E and Extreme E are battery electric racing series. Why doesn't Tesla have a Formula E team?

All four also have off road racing teams (those were the only ones I was familiar with, sadly). I don't follow Formula 1 or Le Mans, I'm afraid. As for Formula E, that's a great question. It seems like it should be right up their alley, but I'm almost positive AI is verboten and that would be a non starter for Tesla.

> but I'm almost positive AI is verboten and that would be a non starter for Tesla

Then they can join Roborace which is all about AI:

https://roborace.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roborace

Although sometimes the AI is more artificial and less intelligent:

https://www.thedrive.com/news/37366/why-that-autonomous-race...

Re: Electric cars make up 54% of cars sold in Norway in 2020

#255
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why the disruptive risk is so high here. There’s already enough fuel cell cars out there that we know pressurized hydrogen tanks work safely. That so many people ignore or dismiss this fact is potentially leading many companies in the wrong direction.

There is plenty of material about why hydrogen isn't really better just a google away. Plenty of smart people have evaluated it and realized it's not worth it. Toyota is the only company left that still pretends that it's relevant... while slowly electrifying their fleet.

Most of that stuff is written by people with a financial motivation and are likely biased. You can’t take them too seriously.

Toyota, Hyundai, Honda are all investing and expanding investment. That’s for passenger cars specifically. Once you go into industrial and heavy transportation it’s a vast group of companies.

People who are paying attention knows that there’s a major revolution afoot. The people with tunnel vision are the people who don’t realize this or are ignorant of these events.

Re: Electric cars make up 54% of cars sold in Norway in 2020

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was intense demand for the Leaf in California. The waiting list was a year long through 2016, and in LA at least there was still a waiting list well into 2017. However, Nissan only ever made a few thousand Leafs a year and only made them available in select markets. By comparison, the Model 3 went into production in 2017 and they built the 500,000th in March of 2020. BMW, VW, Toyota, and Ford have all launched…

> There was intense demand for the Leaf in California. The waiting list was a year long through 2016, and in LA at least there was still a waiting list well into 2017. No there wasn't. Leaf sales dropped 43% from 2014 to 2015 and were even worse in 2016 for a number of reasons. The first was the Bolt was announced in early 2016 and the Model 3 in mid 2016 [1]. The second reason was the 2016 cost $5000 more than the 2…

Your citation leaves out the part that Nissan cut production of the Leaf in anticipation of the Bolt's arrival. They couldn't have sold more Leafs because they didn't have any more to sell...

If you had bothered to read your sources, you would have seen that the reason the used Leafs were so cheap was due to battery issues with the early generation Leafs, which is why demand was so high for new Leafs.

Re: Electric cars make up 54% of cars sold in Norway in 2020

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said... The problem was that they never made enough of them because they didn't believe the market existed. Note that Tesla is also losing money on the Model 3 (and indeed, all models of Teslas) when using the same accounting practices as other automakers. Tesla only has high margins when using non-standard accounting.

Even if they made a million of the Leaf, there was never demand. Now that everyone is point that out to you, you're trying to pivot to saying that Tesla is losing money on their EVs. Even if they are, so what? Tesla's stated goal was to shepherd in the mass adoption of EVs as quickly as possible. They only need to remain in business long enough for every major auto manufacturer to start selling EVs in mass quantities…

The BS about "shepharding" mass adoption was just marketing speak. It's what Toyota said with the Prius, GM with the Cruise, and Nissan with the Leaf. They all grew their respective markets; the difference is that Tesla was the only one to go all in on EVs and make it their only market (and Tesla owes Toyota, GM, and Nissan, for demonstrating the market for green cars and making them trendy with the wealthy segments of the auto-buying population).

Moreover, CA and the EU have far more to do with EV adoption that Tesla, by creating the market incentives for consumers to buy EVs and other green vehicles, and the clean car credits that have singlehandedly kept Tesla afloat the past 5 years while they lose money making cars.

Re: Electric cars make up 54% of cars sold in Norway in 2020

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article was written by Drilling Info and reads like a lobbying piece. Here's some info on that company: Drilling Info has more than 2,700 accounts globally with more than 20,000 users. Drilling Info members produce more than 90 percent of domestic oil and gas in the United States. They're in the oil and gas business -- of course they want to "debunk" any info about the subsidies given to that industry.

I'll take one point from that article as an example of BS: "Intangible Drilling Costs ($3.5 billion “subsidy” – low estimate is $780 million) - Intangible Drilling Costs are essentially the cost of drilling a new well that have no salvageable value. Currently, most exploration companies are allowed to deduct 100% of the costs in the year they are incurred with the majors able to deduct 70% of the costs immediately wi…

LOL - They don't get a refund. They get to deduct those as business costs exactly like R&D expenditures. The argument from the *those are subsidies" camp is that they should have to capitalize them as a purchased asset (and depreciate them on the usual schedule) and not be able to deduct them in the year of expenditure, which would be like treating R&D the same as purchasing a building. As the article says, that doesn't make any sense at all. And allowing a deduction of intangible drilling costs much like all other business deductions is in no way a "subsidy."

Re: Electric cars make up 54% of cars sold in Norway in 2020

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ICE cars rely on subsidies, why shouldn't EVs? The US federal government subsidizes $20B per year towards fossil fuels across oil, gas, and coal. The EU subsidizes €55B per year towards fossil fuels. https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subs...

Many of these are regular business expense deductions like depletion and foreign tax credits. They’re not specific to carbon energy industries and aren’t subsidies per se.

Exactly right. A consequence of the US tax code being so complicated is that regular people (even very highly educated regular people) do not understand even elementary tax concepts.

Re: Electric cars make up 54% of cars sold in Norway in 2020

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As awful as Tesla is, all the other car manufacturing companies are far far worse. Even with massive government incentives, even with their massive war chests, even with their massive production capacity, even with their access to capital markets for big investments, even then , they didn't make the smart move and had to be shown the path by an annoying megalomaniac who gets way too much attention. So yes, I regret g…

"is denying my ability to live a car-free daily life" Do they have police in place to watch if you own/use a car?

In nearly all of the US, it is only legal to build a city in ways that require a car for daily life. For example, it is illegal for a small grocery store to exist within a mile of my house. It is also illegal to build housing close to where jobs have been located. The design of cities has been centrally planned to manufacture car dependence, and exclude the possibility of biking or walking. It also eliminates the possibility of shared transit from private companies from being profitable. A century ago, light rail companies built entire little suburbs that allowed people to get to jobs without cars. That's not possible anymore because of legal structures that ban planning that is compatible with that lifestyle.

There is huge unmet demand for this, which is why cities are so much more expensive than far-based lifestyles these days.

Post reply on HN