Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

hannahritchie.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 413 posts

Re: Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

#281

Post by galaxyLogic »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #267
wpm wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- two cargo bikes, each ridden by each adult - layers, and canopies for aforementioned e-bikes - train Of course, speaking in the ideal. Just because the car has been the only option for so long doesn't mean it's replacement has to replace every trip either.

Trains are only useful within and between densely populated areas. The 200 km weekly trip might well be to a cabin in the mountains, definitely no train.

Going to a cabin in the mountains is a luxury few of us can afford. Even fewer of us can afford to buy such a cabin more likely you would rent it for a weekend or week. So if you're going to the mountains say twice a year we could assume that you also rent a car to get there, and back.

Re: Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

#282

Post by guzik »

hellweaver666 wrote: post #234
wpm wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- two cargo bikes, each ridden by each adult - layers, and canopies for aforementioned e-bikes - train Of course, speaking in the ideal. Just because the car has been the only option for so long doesn't mean it's replacement has to replace every trip either.

I'm a family of five, three kids and my wife and I and we commute around using this method all the time. I do on average 20-30km per day on week days and a little less on the weekend. My 12 year old son bikes along side me on his own bike. If it rains, we put on waterproof clothes. As the Dutch say "we're not made of sugar!". When we need to visit another city (or other parts of Europe) we jump on the train!

"We're not made of sugar" - seems it is a popular proverb around the world.

Re: Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

#283

Post by frickenhamster »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #246

I reject the premise of the question, because you don't need lithium for electric vehicles. We could get by with shitty low-range batteries the way other EVs have. We would just need to standardize battery-swapping at the equivalent of gas stations. Drive 100 miles, drive into a battery-swapping station, service technician swaps the battery, you're back on the road in less than 5 minutes. We did it 100 years ago, we…

This will never work. Components in cars are engineered to be organized as efficiently as possible. The overhead from having replaceable batteries will kill the amount of storage you can have. There is no way you can have generic attendants swap out batteries in 5 minutes. Working with EVs is a dangerous job that you can't just pay an uneducated minimum wage worker to change. The batteries are extremely heavy and are placed in locations that you need a car lift to get to. Plus theres all sort of liability and safety issues from potentially messing up a battery swap or getting a bad battery and blowing up your car.

Re: Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

#284

Post by galaxyLogic »

rangersanger wrote: post #128
CalRobert wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market is profoundly distorted by single use zoning, parking minimums, density maximums, wide (and high speed) stroads, and other urban design choices that force long journeys. It's also not safe to be on an ebike surrounded by electric Hummers, F-350 super duties, and your normal "whole kindergarten class in the blind spot" Escalades. Having just spent a week in Utrecht it's very clear that "the market" can cert…

The situation in Utrecht isn’t a function of “the [free] market” though. It’s distorted by significant taxation of cars and subsidization of biking. It’s legislation on both sides, and American legislation can change, especially locally. Look at bentonville Arkansas for an example.

But does "free market" mean you are free to pollute the air and cause a climate crisis? Is that the kind of freedom we want?

Re: Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

#285

Post by Wohlf »

samastur wrote: post #217
matsemann wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people shouldn't need to own a car. I don't mean that in a "self driving will save us" way. But that a personal car is parked 95% of the day. In a city huge areas are used for storing these blocks of metal not in use. More accessible car sharing could make less people feel the need to own a car.

I use my kitchen not more than 1.5 hours a day on average. Not to mention toilet and bathroom which I use even less. I guess we should all live in two room "apartments" and rest be communal ;) I actually agree with you about better support for car sharing, but low usage by itself is not a particularly strong argument.

That's called dorms, and should probably be a decent sized part of affordable housing solutions.

Re: Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

#286

Post by hcurtiss »

wpm wrote: post #245
hcurtiss wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call it a scam. The subsidy per rider is, in fact, a relevant number. As others have pointed out, commuting by rail in America largely sucks, particularly in an age of COVID and rampant crime in many metro areas. In Portland a dude literally had his face and ear bitten off the other day at a light rail station. People will pay more for cars because everything about the experience is better.

In Portland a guy had his ear bitten, and ~100 people died in their cars in crashes.

Not in one day, and there's been a lot more violence than that on Metro, including shootings and stabbings. I'm much more comfortable with the risk on the highway, which is in many ways contingent on my own behaviors. Rational or not, I suspect many, many people agree with me. Likewise, buses were hilarious during the pandemic. Nobody wanted anything to do with them, and that's increasingly true every cold and flu season. How many people do communicable viruses contracted by mass transit kill every year? These are not flip comments. I'm just making the case that there's a reason people prefer cars, and it's not just because of some failure to build sufficient mass transit.

Re: Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

#287

Post by gknoy »

wpm wrote: post #197
notahacker wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK. Lines interconnect all over. But that doesn't mean connections are possible when you want them and don't involve time padding and risk of not making them and sometimes completely illogical routes, and even with one of the world's highest densities of stations many places people want to go to don't have a station particularly nearby or a last mile solution that isn't a taxi. And no matter how good the end-to-e…

Please don't conflate British Rail mismanagement with "trains are bad". Your trains are bad. America's trains are bad. They don't have to be. There is a disconnect here with you replying to someone who was talking about the ideal, with your reality. No one is saying train systems in a lot of places, right now, are perfect. We can make them more perfect in addition to moving more freight onto rail, doing more last-mil…

> Your trains are bad. America's trains are bad. They don't have to be.

And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle. The odds of the US or Britain improving their rail systems in order for them to be more efficient/usable are vanishingly slim, to the point that we should likely bake their crappy nature into our assumptions of requirements.

We can't even figure out how (here in the US) to build subway tunnels as cheaply as ones in Europe, if I recall right. I am very skeptical that we will ever manage to approach the ideal here, for a variety of reasons (suburban / car-centric lifecycle being so deeply embedded here, etc) which I don't think can be addressed by science. It seems like an economic problem, where paying to rebuild everything is so expensive that no one will do it in the short term, even if the long term gains could be great.

Re: Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

#288

Post by mikem170 »

goatlover wrote: post #241
micromacrofoot wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cargo ebike is a game changer for all of this. I can bring 2 kids to school and do a full grocery trip without even breaking a sweat. I do 6 miles each way and since I avoid traffic it's just as fast as driving. Plenty of people bike all 4 seasons, the Netherlands is the go-to example... it rains a lot there. Driving to work under-dressed in a heated box is a luxury that's kind of harmed a lot of people's ability t…

You can't be serious. It's great it works for you. An ebike isn't a serious replacement for cars used by families in most of the world.

> An ebike isn't a serious replacement for cars used by families in most of the world.

"Most of the world" is a big place.

Are there more cars or mopeds in the world? I assume that the typical family in Asia has either a scooter or no vehicle, so an ebike would be an improvement for them. Probably the same for Africa and a lot of South America. I'm confident that numerically there are more families without cars in the world than with.

I mention this to demonstrate that most of the world doesn't have cars, and they get along ok. Such a thing is not impossible.

Re: Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

#289

Post by gnopgnip »

olivermarks wrote: post #275

We cannot afford to ransack places like Chile to extract lithium for 'electric vehicles', which plumb new depths of pollution and third world degredation. The extraction of rare earth minerals for our electronically surveilled and controlled future comes at a terrible cost, as Siddharth Kara's new book "Cobalt Red: How The Blood of The Congo Powers Our Lives" outlines in excruciating detail. https://read.macmillan.co…

Lithium isn't a rare earth mineral or metal, it is the 33rd most common element on earth.

There is a substantial cost to doing nothing and continuing the status quo

Re: Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

#290

Post by elefantastisch »

ok_dad wrote: post #279
olivermarks wrote: post #275

We cannot afford to ransack places like Chile to extract lithium for 'electric vehicles', which plumb new depths of pollution and third world degredation. The extraction of rare earth minerals for our electronically surveilled and controlled future comes at a terrible cost, as Siddharth Kara's new book "Cobalt Red: How The Blood of The Congo Powers Our Lives" outlines in excruciating detail. https://read.macmillan.co…

Oil ain't a picnic either, so what's the answer?

Grid-powered public transit replacing 80% of trips by personal vehicle.
Post reply on HN