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Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

timharford.com

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Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#111

Post by SilasX »

bargle0 wrote: post #2

I don’t buy the queue argument. It would devolve in to a bunch of churn inevitably resulting in thrown hands and black eyes.

Agreed. I have a comment from a while ago unpacking the idea where I note that it will probably a) devolve into meta-queues that reproduce the original queuing system, and b) encourage anti-social behavior because people no longer value their position in line and have nothing to lose by not playing nice.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182781

The whole article is embarrassingly bad, a bunch of stuff that sounds clever at first but wasn’t seriously researched or even pondered. Like the requirements to develop resources you buy or the incentive effects of paying off malicious behavior.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#112

Post by SilasX »

folli wrote: post #50
bargle0 wrote: post #2

I don’t buy the queue argument. It would devolve in to a bunch of churn inevitably resulting in thrown hands and black eyes.

I think I didn't really get the idea behind it. Wouldn't that be the same as just prohibiting of forming queues altogether? I.e. you're only allowed to order food of noone else is at the cashier?

I wonder where people will queue for the chance to pounce on that …

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687474

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#113

Post by gifnamething »

chrisseaton wrote: post #53
tw04 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes aren't interested in something with the performance of a geo metro. So, while on paper a PHEV solution might look better, in the real world it would result in those people just goin…

> The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes aren't interested in something with the performance of a geo metro. How many people take their cars to race tracks to be able to tell the difference in performance? If it can get to 70 mph in some reasonable time, which almost any production car can, then what more is there to ask…

Driving for fun on public roads is safe, legal, and popular. You won't wish it away.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#114

Post by rileyphone »

gpm wrote: post #46
FriedPickles wrote: post #38

To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most, the true bottleneck is batteries . So, the problem is to get batteries on the road in a way that they will displace the most gas miles as soon as possible. This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), then in a second stage, replace those with full EVs. For most city vehicles…

Plug in electric hybrids strike me as insanely complex machines compared to Ev's. It strikes me as highly unlikely that from an environmental standpoint our (societies) time is better spent building them, than it is spent increasing the rate at which we can build batteries.

Quality over quantity - and if prices indicate anything it’s a more efficient approach. Battery building is also limited to lithium availability, so there’s many more cars you can convert if you put 1/5 of the battery in each one. Fuel is much more energy dense than batteries so the removed weight is making the car more efficient as well. Ultimately I think it’s important to value flexibility and maximizing tradeoffs, which I feel plug in hybrids achieve.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#115

Post by alex_young »

FriedPickles wrote: post #38

To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most, the true bottleneck is batteries . So, the problem is to get batteries on the road in a way that they will displace the most gas miles as soon as possible. This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), then in a second stage, replace those with full EVs. For most city vehicles…

Do you know how to get more batteries on the road? Make more batteries and sell them for less.

This is Tesla’s business model and a huge reason Li batteries are so much less expensive today.

I’d say the inverted logic is more like buy electric cars now even though they don’t hold their resale value due to economies of scale catching up on you.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#116

Post by [deleted] »

gifnamething wrote: post #113
chrisseaton wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes aren't interested in something with the performance of a geo metro. How many people take their cars to race tracks to be able to tell the difference in performance? If it can get to 70 mph in some reasonable time, which almost any production car can, then what more is there to ask…

Driving for fun on public roads is safe, legal, and popular. You won't wish it away.

[deleted]

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#117

Post by zenexer »

Armisael16 wrote: post #110
chrisseaton wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes aren't interested in something with the performance of a geo metro. How many people take their cars to race tracks to be able to tell the difference in performance? If it can get to 70 mph in some reasonable time, which almost any production car can, then what more is there to ask…

There’s an extremely obvious difference in 0-60 times between a Prius and a Model 3, and that matters on an on-ramp. (Replace 0-60 with 5-60 or 25-60 or whatever you measure of acceleration you prefer). Is it necessary? No, obviously, people aren’t dying left and right trying to merge in Priuses. It is very noticeable, however.

I have been driving Priuses for a good chunk of my life now, and there’s really no way I could safely max out their acceleration while merging. Typically the right-lane traffic on highways here flows at 75 MPH when there isn’t much congestion. Why would you benefit from greater acceleration?

It makes very little sense from my perspective. What am I going to do, cut someone off? Floor it and merge with no consideration for the trajectories of other vehicles?

It’s not that difficult, and I live in an area with notoriously short on-ramps. You’ve still got plenty of road to match the speed of the cars on the highway and shift your position so you land between two cars. Accelerating as you’re about to merge just makes that more difficult, especially with a short on-ramp.

Yeah, sometimes people don’t know how to drive and stop or slow down on on-ramps. I don’t care how fast my car can accelerate; if the person in front of me isn’t reaching the same speed as the cars on the highway, I’m going to stop much farther back on the ramp, wait for them to do their thing, and resume proper merging once they’re out of the way. I don’t want to have to deal with flooring it and trying to time everything while accelerating.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#118

Post by mulmen »

natch wrote: post #103
willcipriano wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd expect EVs to be cheaper if they are actually simpler, last time I looked that wasn't really the case outside of cars produced in China that most western customers wouldn't buy.

You can get a Bolt for around $11k after incentives. OK the incentives part is a wrench in the equation to be sure, so it may be hard to answer my question… Are you saying hybrids cost less than that?

How do the EV incentives compare to fossil fuel subsidies?

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#119

Post by Gravityloss »

FriedPickles wrote: post #38

To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most, the true bottleneck is batteries . So, the problem is to get batteries on the road in a way that they will displace the most gas miles as soon as possible. This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), then in a second stage, replace those with full EVs. For most city vehicles…

Yes, exactly.

One can think of it this way also: if 85 kWh of battery modules is made, how should they be placed to reduce the most CO2.

You can put them into 8 plugin hybrid cars with 10 kWh battery in each, and it's used for commuting in each of them, replacing 80% of yearly kilometers with electric ones, that's maybe 10 x 20,000 x 0.8 = 160,000 km electric driving. Those cars still drive 10 x 20,000 x 0.2 = 40,000 km with gasoline (for long road trips etc).

Or you can put them all into one Tesla. If it's a regular private car, it drives 20,000 km per year and thus we have 20,000 km of electric driving.

So in this calculation, it would make more sense from environmental point of view to put the battery modules in hybrid cars.

Now, maybe the Tesla is a Taxi and is actually driven 100,000 km per year, then it's different.

Or maybe the luxury Teslas that sit on driveways as status symbols are changing how people think, or are driving innovation and have massive leverage that way.

But it's complicated.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#120

Post by philistine »

tshaddox wrote: post #78
gpm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plug in electric hybrids strike me as insanely complex machines compared to Ev's. It strikes me as highly unlikely that from an environmental standpoint our (societies) time is better spent building them, than it is spent increasing the rate at which we can build batteries.

PHEVs are more complex, but arguably not more complex than having both a BEV and an ICE vehicle. If a BEV covers 95% of my driving needs, that sounds great, but it still means I need two cars if one is a BEV.

5% of your drives sounds like a problem solved by a car rental, not by owning two vehicles.
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